Mother Jones is devoting its whole Jan-Feb issue to banksters and how they got that way. "Too Big To Fail" includes articles by economist Joe Stiglitz, the guy who would have replaced Bernanke if Obama wasn't such a sell-out, Kevin Drum on the bankster's outright ownership of Congress, and The Nation's David Corn on the bail-out. He wants to know why we're not pissed.
LAST JANUARY, shortly before President Obama took office, veteran Democratic pollster John Marttila conducted a series of focus groups on a range of issues in the Philadelphia and Baltimore areas. When the conversations turned to the economy, Marttila was shocked. In the middle of the financial collapse, these people—men and women of different ages, incomes, races, and political affiliations—were predictably ticked off. But, he recalls, the "dominant emotional dynamic was self-criticism. They really felt that they had failed. They had spent too much on things they didn't need." The pollster had expected rage at Wall Street and George W. Bush, but the people in the groups barely mentioned Bush. And though they were upset by the shady and incomprehensible machinations of big banks, they were not revved up for revenge. "Their intellectual criticism was directed at the financial world," Marttila says, "but their emotional criticism was directed at themselves." Bottom line: They were not reaching for the pitchforks.
A year later, as Congress struggles with financial reform, populist fury aimed at the one-time masters of the universe has yet to materialize in any targeted manner; there's no mass movement demanding fundamental change. Sure, outrage over executive compensation caught the attention of regulators and lawmakers, and President Barack Obama and the Federal Reserve have taken limited steps to curb pay. But lawmakers have apparently not been fretting too much about public sentiment as they followed the urgings of finance lobbyists and weakened legislation to rein in Wall Street.
We're mad at us for what they did? WTF?
Actually, this may confuse Corn (and the answers he gets from "experts" aren't terribly convincing) and sound counter-intuitive but the answer is quite simple: we're getting mad at ourselves for failing because we've been trained by 3 decades of conservative propaganda in Social Darwinism: "You don't have to feel badly about tripping off the poor because if they can't make it, it could only be because they're lazy bums who'd rather get drunk than work."
IOW, they taught us to reject humanity and normal human values as a sop for our potential guilt about how one-sided and narrow success has been in the country since Reagan, what with the top 1% taking everything they could beg, borrow, or steal. Mostly steal. We bought it and looked down our noses rather than question our own shrinking piece of the pie. "It could be worse" was the subliminal message, and it was necessary to convince ourselves that it would, could, never happen to us.
Except, of course, that it did. But we've internalized the propaganda to such an extent that we're even applying it to ourselves, beating ourselves over the head with the same stick the rich gave us to beat the poor with: If it failed it must somehow be our fault.
And to a degree, it is. The selfishness they demanded from us took hold, we let our greed rule, and the tighter things got, the harder we clung to the pie-in-the-sky fantasy. In the process, as Stiglitz explains, we created a Molochian hellhole, without either morality or ethics.
We allowed markets to blindly shape our economy, but in doing so, they also shaped our society. We should take this opportunity to ask: Are we sure that the way that they have been molding us is what we want?
We have created a society in which materialism overwhelms moral commitment, in which the rapid growth that we have achieved is not sustainable environmentally or socially, in which we do not act together to address our common needs. Market fundamentalism has eroded any sense of community and has led to rampant exploitation of unwary and unprotected individuals. There has been an erosion of trust—and not just in our financial institutions. It is not too late to close these fissures.
Maybe not but if not, only barely. It has gone so far that turning it aound is going to require a lot of re-thinking about what we've believed under conservative blowhards for 30 years, and a lot more taking of responsibility for that mistake. From what I see and hear around me and read online and elsewhere, this is very unlikely to happen.
For we have been taught that, too: Never admit a mistake. Bluff it through and you'll win. The Pubs took the majority in the 90's doing that, and the Democrat party is currently following closely in their footsteps. Witness Obama's carefully parsed SOTU speech in which he took "responsibility" for not moving fast enough and ducked completely the obvious - and growing obviouser - fact that the direction he chose to move in -saving the banks - is the opposite of the one he should have chosen and thusly ain't working all that well, you know?
I expect that to continue and I expect us to follow, ducking our responsibility and refusing to acknowledge our role in allowing the destruction to happen by turning a blind eye and concentrating on ourselves and our immediate circle of friends. Fuck all those homeless people who seem to be everywhere all of a sudden. Have the cops keep them out of sight so I don't have to think I might have something to do with them being there.
But you did. If you voted for conservatives and sneered at "the losers", you helped make this happen. I'm not asking you to apologize. I don't care if you do or not as long as you acknowledge the mistake, pull yourself out of denial, and stop voting for people who preach hatred of "losers" and a gospel of properity. "God loves a winner"? Where in the NT does Christ say anything whatever like that?
You may deserve to feel a little guilty for going along but you're just an accessory - and very often an unwitting, unknowing one at that. They're the perps and they got you into this mess. They're the ones you oughta be mad at.
(Go read the rest of these and the other articles. It'll make you feel better about what's been done to you, and help you understand how they did it so you can avoid the onslaught in future. Forewarned is foreamed, all that.)
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