here's a useful comment on a major current liberal foible, from the review by Steve Fraser of Thomas Frank's book: >Even if they aren’t an anachronism, Tea Partiers are diagnosed by Frank as >living in denial. After all, they want to deregulate almost everything in >sight. But Frank knows better: it is precisely deregulation that got us into >this mess; that, and greed. Pity the Billionaire points to the “tacky >souvenirs” of bankers “as the reason for the whole mortgage catastrophe.” >After all, bankers’ voracious appetites for vulgar high living allowed them, >with the help of sleepy regulators and corrupt lobbyists, to “cut corners and >break rules,” until the whole system came tumbling down.
>Toward the end of Pity the Billionaire, Frank indulges in what has become an >obligatory celebration of the New Deal and FDR. Before the recent financial >cataclysm, the story goes, Wall Street was properly regulated and the system >functioned well enough so long as the watchful eye and guiding hand of the >government were allowed to do their work. Surely this view is preferable to >the free-market flights of fancy and embittered dreams of vengeance that have >sustained the Tea Party. Still, it is a stance infected with the irony of a >“progressive” yearning to restore the past, something that in its own way the >Tea Party also desires. >Frank’s wistful evocation of the New Deal legacy leads him to exclude some >crucial factors from his story of what caused the current mess. Long before >deregulation commanded the scene in the Reagan and Clinton eras, the American >economy was in serious, systemic trouble. New Deal liberalism still dominated >government policy, but the country’s industrial core was rotting away. >Keynesian ideas were no longer able to stabilize an economy ravaged >simultaneously by unemployment and inflation. In the 1970s the standard of >living of many Americans began a decline that has endured for more than a >generation. The shift to finance was driven not by greed—always a feature of >capitalism, no doubt more so now than at other times—but rather by a quest for >high rates of return on capital no longer available in the domestic industrial >economy. Deindustrialization and all that followed in its wake—including the >financial sector’s rise to economic pre-eminence—were not caused by >deregulation. On the contrary, deregulation was a response to the crisis of >capital accumulation. Reinstalling the New Deal regulatory apparatus, enhanced >to bring within its purview the global flows of speculative capital, would >certainly strengthen the economy [at least in finance -- JD], but not nearly >enough. Today we are stuck in a deepening hole, trapped in an economy that has >survived for decades, long before bankers invented credit default swaps, by >eating itself alive. < -- Jim Devine / "When truth is nothing but the truth, it's unnatural, it's an abstraction that resembles nothing in the real world. In nature there are always so many other irrelevant things mixed up with the essential truth." -- Aldous Huxley _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
