I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
The Bush Bailout of the financial sector to forestall a Bush Depression seems to have momentarily stopped a run on depositor confidence from unraveling completely. With compliance from a rattled Congress, the Bush Treasury Department gave billions away to banks with no oversight whatsoever. It’s like handing over your life savings to your spendthrift, ne’er-do-well uncle, trusting him to use it wisely.
That’s anti-government Republicanism at its nadir. Give public money to private business, and trust them to do the right thing.
Nothing could be more irresponsible, more doctrinaire than that.
It fact, the Bush Bailout is a textbook study in incoherent, impractical, faith-based market economics, trying vainly to make the world conform to its false notions. But those ideas don’t work. They’re not pragmatic. They are reflexive, idealistic and aristocratic. And they have lead directly to the mess we’re in.
And I hope they went out the door when President Obama took office. Nearing the end of his inauguration address, Obama said “the question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works.” This raised the hackles on government-hating, simple-minded ideologues across the country.
Obama’s pragmatic message seemed politically sacrilegious to them. Reducing government as much as possible is a matter of faith. They believe it is heretical and un-American to think otherwise.
And yet pragmatism is a uniquely American idea, one that distinguishes us from European and Asian thinkers.
Doing “what works” was at the heart of America’s former economic and technological superiority.
Insisting on an ideological program that pays no attention to anything but the idea of small government and the wisdom of “market forces,” disrespects reality, doctors facts to fit theory, ignores truth-as-actually-lived in favor of a faith in a philosophical opinion, one that is so fragile it relies on marketing propaganda to sustain itself, not on open investigation to prove it right or wrong.
Small government and free market politics is pursued with all the zeal and blindness of any dogma, and is rather more like rigid Marxism than Adam Smith’s and Thomas Jefferson’s open faith in the marketplace of ideas and fair-minded small business competition for customers.
In fact, small government ideology may well be the overwhelming cause of the economic crisis that’s befallen us, a crisis of a deregulated, immature, fanatical, and often criminal, emphasis on compiling wealth for the few at the expense of everyone else.
Small government, in reality, is not an antidote to the crippling malfeasance of planned economies. It’s like comparing apples and oranges. Small government ideologues are just financial aristocrats who want complete freedom to amass wealth and power. Small government does not mean less government, it means less government services to those who do not belong to the aristocracy of wealth.
This clearly does not work for society as a whole. It is not pragmatic, and it is not based on empirical principles, whereby every idea, and every action, is submitted to open analysis based on experience, where facts and consequences trump ideology.
The alternative to empirical financial analysis is fraud. All honest financiers and bankers are scrupulously transparent. Those who aren’t really do have something to hide. And fraud on a massive public scale is pragmatic only for the cheater, not for the society in which he lives.
Pragmatism, based on empirical evidence, was developed and popularized by the American philosopher and psychologist William James at the turn of the 20th century. It’s been the dominant impulse in American politics, industry, and finance for more than 100 years. When we stray from pragmatism, we get into terrible trouble. We trick people into buying gigantic cars when the world is running out of gas. We trick people in to taking loans they can’t pay back, to buy goods they do not need and cannot afford.
President Obama told the nation on inauguration day that it wasn’t the size of government that mattered, it was whether programs worked or not. And he said as much for his own agenda. Will the American people have the unvarnished information they need to make clear decisions about what’s working and what is not? At first blush, it seems they will. The Briefing Room on the Obama White House website is a transparent daily disclosure of agenda, memoranda, and executive orders. Experience will teach us how useful it really is.
Will openness in government work? Is it pragmatic, in the sense of engaging more Americans in political discourse and building a solid national consensus, an agreement that motivates the massive changes and employment stimulus we need?
But what is pragmatism in the first place? Pragmatism is concerned not with dogma, nor with revealed truth, not with theories held as articles of faith. It looks at the practical consequences, the social impacts, of actions and ideas. Do they work? Or do they not?
In politics, the question is more complex, however, than that. The question is not does it work, but who does it work for.
Free market, corporate, anti-government Republican ideology works for sure, but it is pragmatic for a tiny minority of Americans, the top 5 percent, the plutocracy. It does not work for the rest of us. Trickle down economics is a fraud, and has proven to be for decades, as American workers earn less and less relative to the growth of executive compensation, and as the economy runs not on wage-based consumerism but on debt based over consumption stimulated by an endless barrage of advertising propaganda.
The plutocracy, and its retainers in Congress and in the Bush White House, understood that less government, in other words less public service and less regulation, meant more money for them, and more debt and fewer jobs for the rest of us.
And when their ideas proved not to work, even for them, their retainers insisted on giving them free money, vast amounts of free money, almost as much as what it’s cost to run the Iraq war, with all its graft and corruption in high places.
The same financial institutions that got all that free bailout money are still balking at oversight. They’re lobbying ferociously in Congress to oppose the idea of allowing financially distressed homeowners to file for bankruptcy so a court can help them renegotiate their mortgages. Banks don’t want to be interfered with by the courts. They want the American people, and the federal government to trust them to negotiate the end to the nation’s mortgage and foreclosure crisis. And they probably want us to give them more free money do it.
That works for them, but not for us. It’s like trusting that old uncle again to finally do what’s right after decades of financial mismanagement. That’s just not pragmatic.
It’s a good sign that the Obama administration stopped bailout rich Citibank from buying its $50 million luxury jet with public money. If that’s what Obama means by doing what works, then there’s a chance for us yet.
