Almighty dollar shouldn’t dominate our democracy — or our lives

Weren’t the tea parties refreshing?

A continuation of Republican John McCain’s Presidential campaign, financed by corporate front groups and promoted by the GOP’s television network, the media event sought to channel populist anger into condemnation of President Obama’s spending to attenuate the economic crisis.

Judging from the modest turnout, however, most Americans identified these “grassroots” as plastic. The best sleight–of-hand sometimes fails to pull our eyes off what the magician is hiding.

Specifically, it‘s becoming obvious that the financial sector oligarchy overpowered the U.S. government beginning some 25 years ago.

Oligarchs then “played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sort of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive.”

That’s Simon Johnson, whose bold analysis, “The Quiet Coup”, is in the May Atlantic. He teaches at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

Crucially, however, Johnson was chief economist at the International Monetary Fund in 2007-8, where he put the screws to debtor governments whose financial elites had overreached, leading to crises that he says resemble what we Americans face now.

Johnson recounts how the U.S. financial industry soared on rocket boosters of deregulation (a bipartisan gift), securitization, arcane financial instruments and a flood of IRA and 401k plan dollars.

“The great wealth that the financial sector created and concentrated,” he writes, “gave bankers enormous political weight — a weight not seen in the U.S. since the era of J.P. Morgan (the man).” Johnson says the American financial oligarchy created a belief system: “What was good for Wall Street was good for the country.”

And Wall Street’s “seductive power” extended to professors of economics who gave academic legitimacy to the illusion that managers “knew what they were doing.”

That last one gave me pause — was Johnson describing the experts upon whom the Albuquerque Journal relies to educate readers? The daily publishes economists ranging from Establishment advocates (like Robert J. Samuelson)) to libertarians (from the Rio Grande Foundation often) as well as retired UNM economics faculty.

Despite ideological differences between the Journal’s corporatists and lovers of laissez-faire, they eventually reach consensus — the economically powerful should be. As for dissenting economists, the Journal publishes not one regularly. None. Nada. Zilch.

Returning to Johnson’s argument, he says the U.S. economy won’t recover so long as the banking system is “desperately ill” but the same system holds a political veto over public policy. And he urges breaking the financial oligarchy.

Johnson may be right but he’s not reached the deeper, core issue – values. What’s the country for? Forgive me for pulling age, but the America I knew as a kid was not dedicated to the pursuit of individual wealth. It is today.

For decades, we were not fascinated with Wall Street — except as a crime scene in the aftermath of the Crash. We envied, admired but didn’t lionize the rich. And whereas the MBA (born in the U.S.A., circa 1900) existed, it wasn’t all the rage.

Today, the best and brightest target the big bucks. The Harvard Crimson reported almost half the Harvard class of 2007 went into finance and consulting. They “might otherwise have been scientists, teachers, doctors, entrepreneurs, artists or inventors,” mused Frank Rich in last Sunday’s New York Times.

Yes, but Americans have come to believe life’s goal is great wealth.

Gosh, we are shrinking.