Another Day, Another Buck Two-Fifty

What passes for smarts these days is the ability to look at the past with 20/20 vision. Apparently the economists and their analysts were unable to see the the dark clouds on the horizons that have turned into what the former Fed Chairman and golden boy Alan Greenspan termed as the coming...credit tsunami.

The warning signs were either ignored completely or pooh-poohed by those who were the "smartest guys' in the room and those who disagreed were dismissed as nervous nellies who had no faith in the markets ability to correct itself.

During the recent hearings of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Greenspan admitted that the ideology guiding his policies were proved wrong by the reality on the ground.

This apparent inability to see past this ideology is one of the reasons the country finds it self in the condition that it is in. This belief that the market is some sort of entity that exists irrespective of greed and self interest is truly pie-in-the-sky at best, and delusional at worst.

One would think that history is the greatest teacher, however, the more we examine our present condition, the clearer it is that we ignore our lessons and continue traipsing trough the tulips expecting different results. The excesses of the mid eighteenth century gave rise to beginnings of the labor movement, and the excesses of the early twentieth century gave rise to much needed social safety nets.

The past thirty years have seen a deliberate attempt to unravel the labor movement and to undo the programs that have provided hope to many people. The current financial crisis is just the latest result of wishful thinking on the part of the 'smartest' guys in the room.

There you have it.

Where Are We Now?

It's about 17 days until the next election, an election that will do one of two things; either the country remains on the same track, or it could begin to change in a way that will begin to unravel the last thirty or so years of conservative and neoliberal governing. Greater minds than mine have analyzed the undoing of the New Deal and Great Society programs, programs that were put in place at different times for very similar reasons.

The New Deal sought to reverse the laissez-faire economic and social ideology that permeated the first third of the twentieth century. The Great Society programs of the latter part of the century attempted to give a leg up, so to speak, to those systematically excluded from the American Dream.

The New Deal gave us Social Security, the WPA, and other programs that helped in one way or another to end the nightmare that was the Great Depression. The Great Society Programs gave us, among other things, Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), The Federal Food Stamp Program administered by the Department of Agriculture, and the beginnings of what would ultimately be called an Affirmative Action program; designed to help those who suffered from an historical roadblock to higher education and access to higher paying jobs.

Those are, in a nutshell, the programs that many Americans used as bootstraps, in order to gain better opportunities and, with any luck pass those opportunities on to their children and so on. Unfortunately, the road to hell is paved with good intentions; as with every other thing, there was progress and there was abuse. Welfare and AFDC was rife with fraud, double and triple dipping was not as rare as some would have us believe. There was lax oversight, which resulted in generations of families on the dole, just as in Great Britain at the time. Some believed that the assistance provided became the goal as opposed to a means. Affirmative Action was viewed by the some in the majority as easing the path to higher education for unqualified individuals over so-called qualified applicants. It is my humble opinion that while it may have been true in isolated cases, the evidence was and still is anecdotal. I believe that also applies to Affirmative Action in the job market; one hears at all times that so and so was promoted or landed a position over a supposedly higher qualified member of the majority population, in other words, like a legacy admission into university or promotion.

The coming election is important for many reasons; it is time to cede to government those functions that only a government can do. Government is not a business and should not be run with the same eye on the bottom that some businesses claim to have. The common good is the role of government, good roads, a healthy and educated population, a proper defense, and watching out for the least of us as many of the worlds' religions claim.

This election can be the sea change that will affect the future of this country, or it could be more of the same hatreds and divisions.

The onus is upon us.