Wall Street Is Dodge City

You probably never thought Wall Street as a frontier town, but that is just what it is in the minds who occupy it. It is the last great place where you can make a fortune without fear of regulation and rules. You can mine for whatever you want and even make up products that never existed before you invented them. It is the last frontier where the sharp guys from the East finally outsmart the cowboys and end up owning the ranch. The Western has been replaced by the Eastern.
No sheriff need apply. As soon as there is any mention of a sheriff, the Wall Street gun-slingers try to stonewall the suggestion, insisting that they have things under control, or if they don’t, the Market (God) will provide the correction necessary to bring justice sooner or later. Trust in the Market, they say.
There is no other money moving institution left on earth that does not have some sort of regulation or accountability imposed on the players. That’s what makes Wall Street the last frontier, the Dodge City of the 21st Century.
For example, even in one of the most rough and tumble worlds in existence, the NFL, the players are not left to merely say “my bad” when they make a mistake such as hitting someone out of bounds or grabbing a face mask. They are penalized by referees who manage the game and impose regulations agreed upon by the owners to protect their investments, keep the game sustainable, and exercise justice.
In the recent Wall Street catastrophe, by contrast, there was not only no accountability for error, there was not even an apology forthcoming from any Wall Street banker, other than from Bernie Madoff after he had been caught with his hand in the biggest cookie jar ever. Deregulation clearly had led to chaos.
We as Americans love Westerns. We love the idea of being able to do whatever we want whenever we want to do it. However, we have generally agreed on rules and constraints in almost every sphere of life except on Wall Street. We may not like the specifics of some rules, but we are not disobeying those rules in large numbers. We tend to be law-abiding citizens. Besides, in most Westerns there is a sheriff who sooner or later exercises justice.
In the traditional Western, the good guys wore the white hats, the bad guys the black with slightly shorter brims, and the nerds wore Eastern clothes with a derby. Occasionally the derby was a bad guy, but most of the time he needed the defense of the white hats against the black. The white hats always won in the end, and the derby was either saved or marginalized.
How is it, then, that we have allowed the American Western narrative to be taken over by the Eastern where the nerdy investment banker “gets the girl”? It is an appalling metamorphosis and probably explains why the second amendment is so popular with the Western-minded “cowboys” who drive their pick-ups to their militia gatherings on weekends. They are trying to hang on to the last vestige of the narrative they were taught to believe but have been emasculated by the Easterner who has made Wall Street the “false” last frontier.
The increase in gun purchase of late has more to do with this transformation in the American narrative than any other single factor. Much has been said about it being the result of the election of a black President. That’s true for some but for most it is a deflection or scape-goat for the resentment of the more invisible or amorphous Wall Street nerd who, like the Wizard of Oz, is hidden from sight, unexposed, and therefore hard to scope as a visible target. Obama’s inaction to date keeps him firmly linked to the Eastern narrative in the minds of many.
Until the government makes clear that it will regulate this last and essentially un-Western frontier, the Western narrative will remain resurrected and just as dangerous in its own way as the Eastern narrative of wild Wall Street as Dodge City.

And the Capons Keep Scratching Around*

I have a new, more fitting symbol for the Republican Party. The elephant never was an appropriate mascot for the GOP because the beast is not native to America. You might argue that it is appropriate because the elephant belongs in a zoo or a circus and should not be allowed to run wild in America. I, in turn, would argue that now that the elephant is “in the room” or “on the table,” he is no longer something anyone wants to recognize or discuss. Although the elephant may never forget, what he remembers is some kind of good old days that never existed. His past is a foreign country, not America.
The donkey is a good fit for Democrats. He’s a steady worker, doesn’t lose its cool in adversity, and goes where no mere horse would dare. He helped settle the West. He may be stubborn, but he is able to tackle any terrain with confidence. He sometimes makes an ass of himself, but generally he is dependably dedicated to whatever work needs to be done.
The new symbol I would suggest for the GOP is the capon, a rooster without reproductive capacity. The capon gets fatter and tastier than a rooster, and projects an image of power and stature, but is essentially sterile and impotent. It’s a sort of Baby Huey: large and soft, mostly in the head.
Like the elephant, the capon in sufficient numbers can serve as a roadblock. These are chickens that do not cross the road to get to the other side but make certain nobody gets down the road to progress no matter what. They just sit in the middle of the road to somewhere better and squawk about how the Democrats are on the road to damnation when, in fact, the road is clearly one to real progress.
These capons are a cross between Chicken Little and Foghorn Leghorn: they cackle about socialism or whatever ism other than capitalism lurks in their nightmares, but are too paralyzed by the dead weight of their own convictions to move. They stay their course to nowhere, never offering any direction that does not loop back to where it started or put resources where they are least needed.
The capon is also fitting because it is almost entirely white meat. As an example, just look at Mitch McConnell. Doesn’t he look like a capon? And doesn’t Mitch kind of talk like one would talk if it could? Yes, I know, Rush Limbaugh looks much more like a capon than does Mitch McConnell. Still, can’t you envision the whole Republican caucus with their hands in their pockets scratching around some barnyard looking for a grain of truth among the scattered kernels of their philosophy? Mostly their philosophy is only so much cracked corn.
Let’s go with the capon. It is a new face on an old image, but a more appropriate one for these modern times.
* not to be confused with: "And the Caissons Keep Marching Along"

A Tale of Three Movies

Every Christmas I go to the movies more than I do at any other time of the year. I prefer to read good books if I can, but during the time around Christmas there are usually enough good reviews of movies to help me overcome some inertia, get off the reading couch, and get to the theatre.
This Christmas season I have seen three movies so far: two “feel good” flicks and one “feel bad” couched as a comedy. I happened to see the “feel bad” one first, and it turned out to be the best film of the three, partly because it portrayed most successfully and deeply one of the shallowest characters ever brought to life on page or film. That film is Up in the Air starring George Clooney as the cliché-ridden corporate downsizing surrogate who flies around the country firing employees so that cowardly managers can float above the discomfort that might arise from doing it themselves. His secret goal in life is to attain 10 million miles on American Airlines and thus achieve a status only a few frequent fliers have ever reached. If that isn’t shallow enough, he has a fling with a female fellow traveler, only to end up the victim of the very false sincerity and life compartmentalization he peddles.
The second movie I saw was Invictus, Clint Eastwood’s adaptation of the story by John Carlin of the developing relationship between Nelson Mandela and Francois Pienaar, the captain of the Springbok Rugby team and prominent symbol of the apartheid regime Mandela had just replaced by his election as President of South Africa. The book is titled Playing the Enemy, a title Eastwood dropped in favor of the title of the Victorian poem Mandela had memorized in captivity and used as his inspiration to keep himself from ever losing hope during his nearly three decades of imprisonment on Robben Island. Mandela is played by Morgan Freeman, who creates an image of Mandela as someone positioned between, say, Abraham Lincoln and God. Of course, playing God is old hat to Freeman who actually did so in the movie Bruce Almighty. Therefore, it is no wonder Freeman is able to infuse savior-like qualities into Mandela’s character. By the end of the movie whatever racial tension had been simmering in the country is resolved for a triumphant moment: South Africa wins the World Cup on its home turf and brings together in celebration the new nation without having to arise out of the ashes of civil war.
The third movie was The Blind Side, also based on a true story. This is a modern version of a Horatio Alger Jr. story in which an abandoned, gigantic, educationally malnourished and traumatized young African-American is taken in by an upscale white family. He had been recruited by a football coach at a Memphis Christian private day school that the white family’s kids attend. The person who takes the lead in both the movie and family is the mother, played by Sandra Bullock. The black youth is young Michael Oher, who, thanks primarily to the mother’s love and inspiration, becomes a star lineman for the school and eventually for Ole Miss.
A turning point occurs toward the end of the movie as Michael is trying to make the 2.5 grade point average necessary to qualify for a Division I college scholarship. It all hinges on a final essay, whose topic his adoptive “father”(Tim McGraw) suggests. It is a poem by Tennyson, “The Charge of the Light Brigade” that Michael identifies with, thanks to his “father’s” football allegory interpretation. Michael is able to analyze the poem successfully, finally pleasing his heretofore cynical English teacher to earn the scholarship.
Conspiracy theorists would insist that Hollywood’s turning to Victorian poetry for inspiration means they are up to some kind of bizarre leverage or subliminal messaging, but these two “feel good” films could not be philosophically further from each other. They are meant to move whole different species of human sensibilities. The movie Invictus is about the successful, bloodless revolution of South Africa in which the black majority gains representative power over the white minority that has ruled for centuries. It is about justice on a grand scale, not a personal one. It is about a hero who brings peace and hope to a whole country, not to just one individual or to one sector.
The Blind Side, on the other hand, is a personal “feel good” movie if there ever was one. It shows the individual actions of white individuals, identified as Republicans at one point when they hire a tutor (Kathy Bates), who happens to be a Democrat, to support their new “black son.” They gloat the irony of having a black son before they have ever even met a Democrat. They courageously reach out to a lost young man with lots of hidden potential and help him become a success on his own terms. He chooses his destiny, as the film painstakingly elaborates and insists. The family only helps him get there. The implied conclusion is: See? If Michael can do it, any one of those other guys back in the ghetto could have too, but they turned their backs on their opportunities and sank back down into the sucking morass of drugs, gangs, and violence. In short, it shows that it does not take a village to raise a child; it takes strong individuals who reach out from their stronghold of financial security and individual courage to do the right thing. It’s the few, the tough, the marines, the 600 (Light Brigade). “Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die.”
It is manifold irony that two very different films involving race cite two Victorian poems written at the height of the British Empire, the ultimate manifestation of colonialism One poem is passed along from black leader to white; the other from white father to black son. The words of “Invictus” (meaning unconquerable), the poem by Henley, inspire hope for eventual justice for a whole country but are essentially about trusting yourself as the sole source of inspiration (I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul). In contrast, “The Charge of the Light Brigade” says, even if our leaders (the adults in our lives) are wrong, we must do our duty, uphold our honor, and show our courage no matter what. We must do it for the team! Both are incredibly individualistic inspirations that find application in such different ways: one to a whole country, one to a young man.
For Mandela, who is alienated from his family as he takes hold of the Presidency, sees the whole country as his family. He takes the time to learn the names of each of the Springbok players and as much personal information as he can about each. The movie shows Peinaar (Matt Damon) as the primary figure on the team, but we get to meet other individuals, including the black member of the otherwise white squad.
In The Blind Side, Michael’s football team members are nameless and faceless. His “team” is the Tuohy family that adopts him. Their uniqueness and goodness as a family serves as the base from which Michael will launch himself as a unique individual. He has his team, and it is the nuclear family. Mandela’s envisions his team as a whole country.
Is it just the difference between wholesale and retail? I think not. It is the difference between two completely different notions of freedom and justice: one is individual, self-contained, small scale. The other involves finding freedom and justice in belonging to something larger than the self; the larger, the better. One is libertarian; the other liberal. Both are valid, just as the microscope and wide-angle lens have their respective purposes. The question is: can we make room for both in our lives?
I wonder how long it would take for redemption or reconciliation to take hold if we rely solely on the goodness of individuals like the Tuohy family? On the other hand, there are still destitute townships in South Africa where poverty is alive and well. The provision of basic housing and sanitation is long in coming. Mandela’s rainbow coalition is still a dream, held back by a populace still slow to change, both black and white.
So far in America, we keep arguing about which is better: structural or individual justice. Maybe it is time to quit trying to dismiss one in favor of the other. Maybe both are the answer.

Greek Mythology, American Reality

Once upon a time, but not that long ago, a country was founded by some folks who wanted to throw off the yoke of monarchy and see if they could create a democracy or at least a republic of the people, by the people, and for the people.
It grew steadily for two centuries until it became the world’s leading country and leader of the free world. At the time it assumed this lofty status, it also declared that a thing called a corporation could be considered a person and would acquire some of the same rights and privileges that a real person in that society already had. These special “persons,” who had been mere corporations before they were blessed with personhood, began to grow and grow to such gigantic proportions that they began to assume positions in that culture that rivaled the powers of mythological gods of Ancient Greece, had those ancient gods been real.
Unlike those great titans of old, these new “gods” who claimed the status of persons but who were often faceless, unless they were called before Congress, grew in real power to such a great degree that they began to rule not only the country that spawned them but the world itself. Politicians around the world and especially in the homeland of these neo-titans began to serve the titans rather than the people. Eventually the former world nations acquired new names such as, Wells Fargo, Microsoft, Exxon-Mobil, Pfizer, Halliburton, Health One, and even General Motors.
Some real people feared these titans and believed that they were conspiring to take over the world, but the reality was they were simply doing what they were born to do: make lots of money for their handlers and followers and eliminate the competition, usually by swallowing them whole.
The real people continued to worship their ancestral gods and prayed that these new “gods” would stop the warring or collapse of their own weight but they were too big to fail. Or they worshipped the products these new gods offered instead of praying to the old gods. Enough privileged real people kept betting on them and reaped great dividends until there were no more resources that the gods could extract.
Finally, these titans fouled their planet to the extent that it was no longer habitable to human kind and the planet died. All that was left was a vast wasteland of boiling water and desert without any sign of life.

Ozymandias (by Shelley, 1818)
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.

And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Pashtun Follies

Obama promised to shift our war efforts from Iraq to Afghanistan as a campaign pledge. This is one pledge I wish he had not made; but given the fact that it’s impossible, it seems, for a Democratic Presidential candidate to win by simply opposing war, he had to pick a battle somewhere. Democrats are constantly badgered by Republicans about being soft on the ism of the day. For the past decade it has been terrorism, until the recent health care debate unfolded when the Republicans also resurrected attacks about being soft on socialism. Therefore, it was not surprising that Obama chose Afghanistan, the unfinished business, the battleground country never mastered by East or West. Of course the idea of winning in Afghanistan is delusional, given its make-up, its history, and its arbitrary construct.
We can partly blame the British for the problem on two counts. The first is they partitioned what is now Pakistan and Afghanistan in 1893 with the Durand Line, which they drew when the British Empire was at its peak in the region. It defined the northern frontier for British India but in the process managed to cut in half a people who would much rather have had a country of their own out of the deal but ended up on either side of a politically arbitrary and geographically challenging border. These people are the Pashtuns.
The other count is also historical: the Brits successfully brought the clans of Scotland together as a model of clan-nation transformation, albeit they did it mostly by serving as Scotland’s arch enemy and eventual conqueror for a considerable stretch. This success has served to feed the notion that such nation-building can be done elsewhere, even in impossibly difficult terrain in remote locations, not just next door. However, the actual means of that nation-building has been forgotten or ignored.
The very word Pashtun gets a red line under it on my Microsoft Word program, which means that it is not even an official word in the Microsoft dictionary. That’s no wonder, because Pashtuns haven’t gotten much recognition or respect from the West up to this point. We hear a lot about Afghanistan and Pakistan but only occasionally hear about Pashtun regions, which have no Karzai or Zardari to hold accountable for their actions. What the Pashtuns want, of course, if they have to belong to a country in the first place, is a Pashtunistan, not serve as second class subjects of two different foreign nations. If there was any place where “we don’t need no stinking badges” applies, it is Pashtun territory. The Pashtun regions make troublesome areas in Iraq look like Amish settlements in Indiana.
Don’t expect to be ordering Pashtun equivalent of tartan clothing or bedspreads from LLBean any time soon. Bringing them under control will make herding cats look like synchronized swimming. I downloaded the Wikipedia information on Pashtun tribes and found that there were twelve pages of named tribes, clans, sub-clans, fractions, and sub-fractions that encompass the 40 plus million Pashtun people in the region. The idea that General McChrystal and company will make a lasting impression on that population has as much chance as a stone thrown into a mill pond. It will ripple for a bit and then disappear. This war is sheer folly and the result of a continual misunderstanding of the needs and hopes of the region as well as how to prevent terrorism in the U.S. Chasing Al Queda operatives back and forth between Pakistan and Afghanistan isn’t the solution.
The region is not primarily about the Taliban or Al-Queda but more about Pashtun sovereignty. If we chase Al-Queda out of Afghanistan, it will set up shop in Pakistan; if we do the reverse, they will too. At best we’ll cobble together an exit strategy that gets us out “with dignity” but we should not look for any real success in the region. The Pashtuns have to deal with all three adversaries: the Taliban, Al Queda, and us. We will not win the hearts and minds of a people who have been promised, ignored, and meddled with for centuries. And we surely won’t be waiting around to meet Karzai’s timetable of five years for developing his security force capacity and fifteen years for financial self-sustainability.
I guess if the new surge had a remote chance of succeeding, McChrystal would be an appropriate choice to lead. After all, his Scottish heritage contains some elements in common with the Pashtuns, but I don’t think the Pashtuns will be hosting a golf tournament let alone paying homage to or willingly joining an alien government, namely Karzai’s, any time soon.

Retarding the Spark

What is “retarding the spark” you may ask? Mechanically, it is asking the engine spark plug to fire after the piston has reached full compression, not before. Retarding the spark was something you did manually to get a Ford Model A started. Also, backing off on spark advance under conditions of severe load was standard practice - e.g., climbing a steep hill with a heavy load. Today’s modern combustion engine runs most efficiently when the spark is advanced or preemptive (ignites before the engine piston has reached full compression) resulting in greater power, better fuel economy, and less pollution.
My hypothesis in this essay is this: if we backed off a bit in how we operate our cultural and human engines and “fired our plugs” in a way that took into account the steep ascents we often encounter, we would not have to run so hot all the time to be efficient and fire our human cylinders in a surge-like fashion.* In firearms terms, the advance (preemptive) ignition sequence is FIRE-AIM-READY. If we retard the spark, we have the more deliberate READY-AIM-FIRE. I am not suggesting that we go back to the Model A as a means of transportation. I am merely suggesting that as human beings we have something to learn from the model A as a saner approach to life when things get heavy. Today, we tend to surge when we ought to be more mindful of timing. We have been conditioned to believe that nearly everything in life has to be done as a preemptive strike.
The day after Thanksgiving is now called Black Friday, the most glaring evidence yet that we have elevated consumerism to a god-like status. Its ritualistic aspect and participation numbers easily eclipse those of Good Friday, a Christian sacred holiday associated with Easter, a time of reflection for Christians. The whole thrust of Black Friday is to get consumers out buying Christmas presents at bargain prices so that they get into the mind set of shopping for holiday gifts until December 25th. That kick-off of the holiday shopping season produces a full month of activity characterized by greater than normal buying frenzy. Black Friday is so named because merchants hope they will end the year “in the black” or, profitably. The stores open well before dawn to ensure consumers that they are participating in something special, almost sacred, like a sunrise Easter service, but more active, like, say, the running of the bulls at Pamplona. Black Friday is turbocharged by the faith in the laws of supply and demand. If everyone wants a particular item, it must be good. That’s the operating value in a culture that ostensibly values values.
In Colorado we finally have a law outlawing texting while driving. What precipitated the law was a form of multi-tasking that produced carnage on the highway. While we like to see ourselves as a nation of multi-taskers, we have finally met a situation where multi-tasking needs to be strategically thwarted. The researched truth about multi-tasking is that nothing ever gets done as well as if it had been done as a single-focused task, but don’t tell that to Americans who believe first and never mind the facts that conflict with those beliefs. We Americans as a culture are in a hurry to get somewhere, go to the next level, climb the ladder, eat, exercise, achieve, acquire, all because we operate with the illusion that standard of living is synonymous with quality of life. If we have more, we somehow are more. ”He who dies with the most toys wins” served as the mantra of the ME generation. The ME generation has now blossomed into the ME culture.
Our politicians need to get something done because they must have some achievements under their belt or they will be turned out in the next election. Obama has not been in office for a single year and yet for months he has been criticized by the right and left for not accomplishing anything substantial yet. His trips abroad, the economy, the wars, health care, all have signaled no tangible results so far. The public wants results the way it collects purchases on Black Friday. It wants them, and it wants them now. We have become a data-driven society that is more interested in what we have to show for ourselves rather than how we live.
American culture needs to retard the spark. It needs to slow down and take another look at what quality of life really means. It is not solely based on GDP or interest rates or granite counter tops. Quality of Life is not even a derivative of Standard of Living. It is the measure of happiness and meaning a people has from its day-to-day existence on this earth, and it assumes not only personal budgets are in balance but that actual lives are. Research has demonstrated that Americans don’t become any happier when they rise above middle class status. A large portion of America has surged in spending without the actual income to pay for the surge. A focus on quality of life would suggest the only debt people should live with indefinitely is their debt of gratitude for that quality life.
What I am suggesting is heretical to ACM or American Cultural Momentum. Our collective ethos has been bigger and more is better, sooner is better than later except when it comes to paying for it, and surges are good for everything except computers and other small appliances. We can surge in Afghanistan, surge on the gridiron, surge at the fast-food drive thru, and surge in the polls. We can put on a surge and win at NASCAR, and we can surge out of the pack and win a golf tournament. Some of us can even surge our way into a White House state dinner if we have the appearance of surge power. Or we can surge out our driveway and into a fire hydrant and a neighbor’s tree, if things get too hot on the home front. Surging has become our mode of accomplishment, just as surfing (the internet) has become our preeminent pastime.
I urge us as a nation to slow down a bit and retard the spark. We could do without the surges and sloughs of Wall Street and their derivatives; we can avoid being trampled like runners in Pamplona by staying home on Black Fridays and shopping with greater deliberation rather than speed; we can be more than less by doing more with less. We have been on a power surge as a country since the 1960’s, and we are tired and worn out by the extraordinary energy our ACM has demanded and extracted from us.
Will the surge in Afghanistan be the surge that breaks our cultural back? I do not know. I look back on Vietnam and in the midst of its throes how wrong our leaders were about the long-term outcome and how close we came to our own cultural meltdown. It seems the lessons of history are never learned until the long view back is available, and even then our theories are subject to continual revision. The surge might work or it might not. As a concept it is more acceptable to the American psyche than simply going to war because our whole culture thinks in terms of surges and splurges. Right now it seems we are about to splurge on a surge that may turn into our scourge.
Perhaps it is time for our culture to take at least a small dose of Thoreauvian philosophy and begin to live a little bit more deliberately by retarding our cultural spark, and living consciously, less impulsively, and a little cooler in the process. It’s all right to drive a highly tuned machine: It’s not all right to become one. The end does not warrant the means. As Socrates so wisely offered thousands of years ago: “Contentment is natural wealth; luxury is artificial poverty.”

Vitality

Earlier this week David Brooks, a moderate conservative columnist for the New York Times, wrote how the health care debate is about values, namely two specific ones: security versus vitality. He presented those values as mutually exclusive at worst and like a soft balloon at best when it comes to health care specifically and the country in general. I’ll take the soft balloon analogy just to give him the benefit of the doubt. In that analogy, if you squeeze one end, you enhance the other. In any case, he sets up the classic false dichotomy or dialectic between two goods when there truly isn’t any at all. The country does not face a choice between security and vitality.
The premises he operates from are conservative: people are essentially lazy and are motivated by fear or need; necessity is the mother of invention; providing security undermines vitality in the individual and in the country. The philosophy borrows from the first Newtonian law of physics: objects stay at rest unless a force acts upon them to overcome their inertia.
What conservatives seem to forget, including David Brooks, is that an awful lot of accomplishment that occurs is motivated by desire to accomplish, the satisfaction of accomplishment, and the need to create. All of those are best nurtured from a place of security where the essentials of life are provided for. In the world of conservatives, the starving artist always produces the best art.
For example, kids learn better when they have been provided breakfast. That’s been established as a fact, not a theory. Athletes perform better when the coach has made a decision that they are the starters. Entrepreneurs are more successful when they are fully capitalized, not when they are scrambling around looking for money.
I spent a part of my professional life coaching. The sport I loved most was rowing. What I observed over the nearly three decades I coached was that all boats went faster once I had determined the line-ups. In other words, once the oarsmen knew what seat they were occupying, the boat settled down and got faster. They became a team, pulling for each other and themselves, and the whole nearly always became greater than the sum of its parts. If I kept seat-racing well into the racing season (pitting one oarsman against another by having them switch seats from boat to boat and race over a fixed distance for time) both boats more often than not got slower rather than faster. The team psyche and commitment to each other was more important to outcome than whether or not I had actually assembled the individually strongest oarsmen in one boat. Chemistry seemed to transcend logic, and the chemistry came out of and produced the trust and commitment which teamwork becomes and is in a beautiful example of micro- evolution.
I would contend that providing health care for all Americans would produce a more vital and vibrant work force, a more focused managerial workforce, and a more vital, dynamic economy. Taking that one ball (health care) out of the juggling act for everyone would allow all of us to focus more on the love of work for the sake of accomplishment rather than choosing a company for employment because it has good health benefits. How many disgruntled workers are doing a job they hate only because it offers a good health care program? Is that any way to manage or motivate a work force? Talk about productivity. Have you ever seem a winning team that hates what it does but does it anyway for the money? I think not. If they don’t love the sport first and the money second, they don’t win.
Most of whatever has been accomplished or invented has been done so out of love, not need. If necessity is the mother of invention, the father is love of inventing (What a role reversal that is!). A certain amount of security is necessary for productivity to occur. Encouraging teamwork in the workplace can only enhance productivity, not detract from it. And people can feel a part of a team only if there is a certain amount of security in place: sinecure, no; but security, yes. The guy who invented Microsoft did so out of his parents’ garage; the guys who invented Google did so out of their dorm rooms at Stanford. They didn’t have to scrounge for their own health benefits or put food on their tables; they came from families with means. They had more than a basic sense of security.
And that brings me to dispel the still existent myth of the self-made man, the myth that conservatives will seemingly believe in as long as the last one is standing. Guess what: there is no such thing. Every man who ever made it big has a lot of folks to thank, like it or not. The myth of the self-made man is easily dismissed by John Donne’s famous line, “No man is an island” no matter how hard conservatives work to leave you “on your own.”
Security is the basis for vitality, and security is a social concept, not an individual one. We can only be secure in relation to others. Once that is established, we can then be full of vitality and energy because we have nothing vital to lose. We can go on offense rather than remain stuck in a defensive mode of thinking. In short, security provides the defense from which we can launch our offense. The Japanese figured that out a long time ago, and their factories are the model of efficiency, vitality, teamwork, and security. A new idea or improvement can come from anywhere in the workforce, not just from the top down.
Conservatives would do well to begin looking at what actually works, rather than rely on old aphorisms that have been handed down from generation to generation like the neighbor in Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” who won’t go behind the saying, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

Honor and Honesty

I once taught in the South at an old fashioned, southern gentleman’s prep school located just below the Mason-Dixon Line. The culture of the school was fiercely southern, I imagine, because it was located so close to “Yankeedom.” It was a long time ago, but as I watch the Republican remnants and their fellow travelers like Joe Liebermann rant and rave about the need to preserve free market capitalism in all its purity, I am reminded of some of my students from the southern landed gentry stock who challenged me whenever I confronted them about looking over on Beauregard’s or Hampton’s paper for an answer to a quiz question. Their response was inevitably, “Are you questioning my honor, sir?”
I would answer with, “I don’t know exactly what you mean by honor, but I am certainly questioning your honesty.” What I saw was a complete disconnect between honesty and honor. The latter was some abstract notion of reputation that must be defended at all costs, while the whole concept of actual honesty seemed lost on these young men. Fortunately I was never challenged to a duel during my three years of exile in that disturbing land, and finally I escaped back to New England.
I see the same disconnect in the southern Republican defense of free enterprise. They insist it should be defended at all costs no matter what. There is in them the same false chivalry I witnessed as a young teacher. Their notion of integrity is to defend principles no matter what, even if they have proven themselves to be worthy of questioning, as evidenced by the latest bubble and bust scenario acted out on Wall Street. Their sense of absolute integrity in defense of pure market economies as the only way to conduct business falls right in line with the history of the South as a whole: they were adamant about maintaining the institution of slavery in the face of its obvious immorality and growing economic disadvantages for the region; they were adamant about preserving Jim Crow; they were adamant about the idealization and paradoxical subservience of their white women; and now they are adamant about maintaining the deregulation of free markets at any cost. Everything becomes a last stand against the undermining of principle by Yankee liberalism and pragmatism.
Even The Economist, probably the best weekly news magazine in the world and a defender of market economies, sees the need for some kind of regulation by governments in the wake of the unregulated market debacle, but the southern Republicans will stick to principle and frame issues in terms of Thomas Paine-like absolutes, although they would not cite Paine because he was a nominal Yankee.*
The southern Republican is not the last vestige of a culture that simply will not die. NASCAR is another. Born of whiskey-running, revenuer escaping outlaws, Today’s NASCAR is the epitome of the institutionalization of red-neck southern values, and it has grown to the point that it has become mainstream American entertainment. The vast majority of its contestants are white as are most of its viewers. It celebrates a modern version of the single combat warrior of old who lives outside the law, risks his life, and maneuvers through obstacles (other drivers) to attain victory. Although there are rules and regulations governing among other aspects the size of engines and the horsepower, the spirit of single combat in that individual contestants duel it out for huge cash prizes is preserved. Fatalities do occur from time to time, so the liberties they take can result in death. The illusion, at least, of unregulated, all-out-aggression and individually heroic life-risk is preserved.
The reality, however, is that NASCAR is regulated. It is not a place where anyone can bring any kind of car to the track and do anything he wants. There are rules, restrictions, and constant revisions as technology and safety issues evolve. If the quintessential modern southern sport has rules, why can’t Wall Street? Is it just another disconnect that sport should have rules but real life should not? Maybe it’s just confusion between freedom and license that the South never sorted out except in NASCAR. Real freedom is not doing whatever you want until you get caught and then retreating into self-righteous indignation when confronted or blowing blue smoke out your exhaust pipe to escape the revenuers.
One of the definitions of integrity, in fact the first, is honesty. But then again, the southern mind has always been able to compartmentalize in ways that astound, such as the disconnect I witnessed long ago, between honor and honesty. It appears that the modern southern Republican mind’s focus on principle is so strong that it is blinded from honesty in any real sense.
*Actually, he lived in Philadelphia for a rather short period of time and then New Rochelle, New York, although he spent a good deal of his life abroad and was born in England.

Manifest Destiny 2009

The shooting at Fort Hood is beginning to look like another story in the long history of manifest destiny narratives. What they all have in common is that some kind of god told a person (or a people) that he should listen to the voice in his head (presumably the voice of God) and do what it says. Whether it is a voice telling Israelis to keep building their houses on occupied Palestinian lands, or Christian settlers usurping Indian lands in the settling of the American West, or Islamic Jihadists detonating suicide bombs, or right-wing Christians killing abortion doctors, they all have the voice of God as their navigator or inspiration.
Most of the time throughout history the voice of God has been benign. Most believers in God have used that voice to tell them to be good or to do good works. The problem is, as soon as a person decides that voice in his head is the voice of God, all bets are off as to what head voice messages are assigned to God and what are not. God’s voice is hard to distinguish from whatever other voices exist in the head. You can assign God to the deep voices or to the little bird-type voices. The problem remains: how can you tell for certain which messages are God’s and which are not?
The safer course is to assume that all voices in your head are of your own making, not anyone else’s, especially a god’s, and to question every voice you hear no matter what. Relinquishing authority to someone else, especially an invisible voice, is kind of dangerous. It leaves you open to the possibility of believing a message to kill someone is a good thing.
That’s why we would be a whole lot better off if we question authority, especially if that authority comes to us in the form of a voice or in the form of an authority who is telling us to do something our reason or the law tells us is quite wrong.
Therefore, it is probably better to listen to the narratives that are life-affirming and respectful of others rather than those that are not. That way, we won’t end up thinking God told us to do something or start believing homicide is better than suicide because at least we are thinking of others when we kill them.
As soon as we turn our lives over to the care of God, we have relinquished some responsibility for governing our own lives. That is why I have a hard time understanding why conservatives advocate taking more responsibility for ourselves and yet also stand behind the notion of a God whose voice can surely be mistaken or invented as an excuse to take the law into ones’ own hands.
I would rather leave out trying to tell which voices in my head are God’s or someone else’s and assume they are all just voices in my head. That way, I will not empower some voices more than others and will remain skeptical of them all.
However, in American culture we have the triple-edged sword of freedom of religion, the right to bear arms, and freedom of speech. In other words, we are free to believe anything we think and free to purchase a gun to act on those beliefs without regard to consequences until after the action has occurred, unless we have previously sent enough verbal signals in advance to call attention to our intentions. Unless those verbal signals are confronted, it is often too late to prevent the consequences. Such is the dilemma of freedom of speech, of religion, of the right to bear arms.
In the case of the Fort Hood shooter, the verbal signals were there. Apparently the supply of Army counselors was so small in relation to the demand that the screening process was made loose enough to keep the supply of counselors greater than was safely advisable. Sending a devout Muslim with extremist sympathies to Afghanistan was the straw that broke the back of what was left of the shooter’s sanity because it put him in a psychological double bind: he was going to have to hear the confessions of American soldiers who would be apparently killing his own religious brethren. He could not imagine withstanding that personal torture. Belief in absolutes trumps mundane duty to one’s profession when the two conflict.
The respect America gives to freedom of religion, the right to bear arms, and freedom of speech will continue to be ingredients readily available to produce a “bomb” ready to go off almost anywhere in America, even at a military installation. That’s the price we pay for those freedoms, and this Fort Hood narrative is just one more in the pantheon of sad narratives that are a part of the on-going American story. And we hear them in one form or another when the body count is large or valued enough or the perpetrators initially seem unlikely (an American soldier shooting other soldiers on an Army base).
Maybe we need more counselors for all of us, especially those of us who are prone to view the world in terms of absolutes and those of us who have trouble identifying the voices in our heads. But that would mean universal mental health care coverage, and we can’t even get to universal physical health care without diluting compromise. You’re still on your own there, but you can have all the guns you want without a prescription.

Grace

The word grace has had religious connotations for centuries. Religion has presented it essentially in two forms: something earned from or something freely given by a god. In either case, the human being on the receiving end of supposed divine grace was better off than those who were not. Grace was seen as a blessing, an advantage, or a desirable elite status.
I would contend that we would be a lot better off if we simply recognized the concept of grace as a desirable human characteristic and sought to maximize its existence among us. After all, it is we who gave our gods the capacity to bestow it in the first place so why not own it ourselves to produce as much of it as we can. Of all the shortages we can see around us today (jobs, money, happiness, civility) grace is the least present of all.
But just what is this humanistic grace of which I speak? And what is it not? When we think of it at all, it is usually in the form of an adjective: graceful. The dancers who appear on So You Think You Can Dance are often viewed as graceful in their movement even when they are dancing a very rigorous tango or salsa. But the program itself is not at all graceful in that it emphasizes judgment and competition as the measure of success, thus producing a pair of winners and a host of losers. There is little grace in the outcome. There is also no grace in the name of the program which throws down a gauntlet-like challenge and dares you to prove that you can do what you think you can. It’s no encouraging set of words like The Little Engine That Could.
When I was coming of age in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, American Bandstand captivated a whole generation of teenagers who admired the dancing skills of the cast members who were never put in the position of becoming winners or losers. They were all winners much the same way the Mouseketeers were on the Mickey Mouse Club created by Walt Disney. The viewing audiences in both cases were given a variety of personalities to admire and even emulate. The dancing was good, but as a viewer I never felt the need to see a showdown in order to determine who the best dancer was on either program. Must everything be reduced to winners and losers? Was not the grace of it the fact that they were dancing?
Discourse has suffered the same fate of late as dance. Diatribe has replaced dialogue as the means of communication. The win-at-all-cost monologue championed by self-appointed and self-righteous talk show hosts whose might- (following) makes-right attitude has replaced the measured, nuanced rhetoric of well-mannered and thoughtful pursuers of truth like Walter Lippmann and William F. Buckley. Blind certitude is asserted in the face of complexity with a vehemence that precludes any humility or doubt. It is about winning, the truth already having been established. The idea of being graceful is brushed aside as a sign of weakness.
A friend once remarked that if we, as human beings, were completely uninhibited, we would sing to each other rather than talk. Life would be a combination of opera and ballet. It would be about the grace of it all, not the meanness. It would be about bringing out the best in each other in everyday life, which would mean bringing out the grace each of us has inherent in us as human beings. Grace, by my definition, goes beyond mere civility or generosity or art. It is the combination of all human qualities that produce goodness in all its forms and facets. It is the combination of qualities that help us harmonize with our habitats and sing the song of life. It is about singing rather than bickering; dancing rather than trudging; skipping rather than plodding. It is about painting ourselves out of corners rather than into them, and being the am and drinking the tea in team.
The Puritans thought they knew what grace was and believed that you either had it or you didn’t. They had located it in their god, personified it (he) and then doled it out to the select few whose crops did not fail or ships did not sink. We’re still seeing the remnants of that legacy in those who tell us that because they are materially successful or know (for certain) how that happens, that they are the elect who must convey their wisdom to their hopeful followers. Ultimately it is self-serving rationalization, not true grace.
The question is not “So you think you can dance?” The question is will you.

Who Are the “Best People”?

Bank of America and Citigroup, two of the large Wall Street firms that received TARP money are balking at Compensation Czar Kenneth Feinberg’s policy announcement that halves the compensation packages for the top twenty-five executives in each company. AIG is another that faces the same scheme. In fact, there are seven companies that fall under the new compensation limits. These seven are protesting that they will lose their “best people” to competitors who are not held to the same new standards because the competition have either paid back the TARP money or never required any in the first place and therefore are free to pay whatever compensation they like.
This raises an important set of questions: Does the market place set compensation in any sensible way? What is meant by “best people”? Were the exorbitant pay packages that the so-called “best people” received last year justifiable even though their decisions brought the world economy to its knees? Are the present “best people” the same kind of “best people” who ruined the economy or are they a new kind of “best people”? Does the compensation structure these companies want to retain set the world economy up for another disaster?
If the average CEO makes astronomically more than the janitor who cleans his office, is that sensible or is it simply greedy? What makes that CEO that much more valuable than the janitor? If the CEO steers the corporation to greater profit and long-term stability, then perhaps his high pay package is justifiable. However, when he steers the corporation into bankruptcy and affects the economy far beyond his corporate realm, should he not receive at least a substantial pay cut until he brings the corporation back on course? I would think so.
I spent my career as an educator. Many former students of mine went on to work on Wall Street, and they did very well, but they were not the brightest students I ever taught. They were good people with strong ethics and a powerful sense of responsibility. They learned sportsmanship on the playing fields. They went to good colleges, earned B’s and C’s, played a good game of golf or tennis, and kept their integrity safe. They were not MIT whiz kids or star Harvard Business School grads: they were just “good people,” but not the kind of “good people” these TARP-takers are fearful of losing. No, those whiz kids know how to make money at any cost, faster than you can sneeze. And the amounts they are able to compile are nothing to sneeze at, in the short run.
So to answer the first and second questions, I would have to say that the market place will never set sensible compensation. The compensation on Wall Street is based on pure greed, not any rational criteria. The so-called “good people” who demand the exorbitant salaries and bonuses are completely self-serving, unlike educators and other public servants who are truly better people because they are willing to sacrifice a high salary for a greater good. Would a higher salary attract a better caliber of teacher? Maybe it would. However, I doubt offering a six-figure salary would attract the kind of caring good people who are effective, in part, because they care about their students. The same could be said of police, fire-fighters, etc. They are not attracted to the job solely because of the money. A six-figure salary the Masters of the Universe on Wall Street consider pocket change. To argue that Wall Street demands are rational or reasonable is ludicrous. It is another example that the market place is not a place where reason resides. These exorbitant salaries are completely irrational and unjustifiable in any real sense. In the realm of imagined demand in relation to a spurious notion of limited supply of so called “good people” is the realm of nonsense. Wall Street has lost its moral compass completely when it comes to defining “goodness.” If what they mean as “good” are the knuckle-heads who got us into this mess to begin with, then they need a course in basic logic and another in basic ethics. Good at making short-term money at the expense of long-term financial well-being on Main Street is not a very good “good.”
When financial institutions are interested in making money without any concern for the greater good, they do not serve the economy. They are not really investment banks except in a completely self-serving sense, and a short term self-serving sense at that. To argue that they’ll lose “good people” if their compensation is reduced suggests that regulation has a long way to go before Wall Street begins to serve Main Street, a principle which would benefit our nation as a whole. I would argue that investment that creates jobs and produces goods that can be sold abroad would be a noble goal of Wall Street. But it seems that most of the so-called “good people” on Wall Street are only interested in concocting the next scheme to dupe investors into investing in that next “too-good-to-be-true” financial smoke and mirrors product.
Basing Wall Street compensation on reduction in domestic unemployment rates would be a good trigger and incentive for Wall Street to invest in America. It just might get them to lend money again. Let’s start by setting the trigger at 6 percent. When unemployment drops to 6 percent, the Masters of the Universe get their cookies.
As David Brooks points out in one of his NYT columns, the Obama administration is creating incentives for governors to compete for federal grants by showing real reform, not just lip-service. Why not make those who created the economic disaster reform as well and be made to compete for their bonuses based on indices other than pure, short-term profit. One index would be unemployment rates which are directly tied to how well Main Street is doing. Main Street’s success is dependent on Wall Street’s investment in real productivity, not in shell games.
The larger question is whether or not Wall Street is capable of doing good as well as doing well. And are they capable of thinking long-term or are they merely focused on short-term profit and to hell with the long run. If the quintessence of capitalism remains that selfish and shortsighted, the whole system is in dire jeopardy. Whatever happened to the “good people” I used to teach who maintain their integrity at any cost? Were they left behind by the whiz kids, the “rabbits”? I hope Aesop is still right and that the tortoise will again cross the finish line first, and the ants will survive the winter while the grasshoppers die. In short, Wall Street has to stop thinking its only purpose is to make quick money. If we all thought that way, there would be no common good. There would be no good, period. It’s long past the time that Wall Street take on its proportional share of looking after the common good. After all, it is the purse strings of the economy and has a major responsibility to actually care about the society it exists to serve. When it started thinking that society existed to serve it, that’s when it got into trouble.
Meanwhile, will someone please explain to me the difference between these so-called “good people” on Wall Street and Ponzi schemers? We need to reincarnate William James to write a new book called The Varieties of Ponzi Experience. Or maybe we simply come up with categories like “soft Ponzi” and “hard-core Ponzi” parallel to the concepts of soft porn and hard-core porn. Or we could have Wall Street and Stonewall Street. Whatever the case, let’s replace the so-called “Good People” with the real thing.

Greed Your Creed or Good for the Hood?

The debate between the left and the right is boiling down to the usual suspects: greed versus the common good. Does a person’s right to get rich take precedence over another person’s right to survive? That’s the question about rights that all debates between liberals and conservatives ultimately boil down to. It is the maple syrup that’s left from all the sap that comes oozing from the trunks of both conservative and liberal family trees.
Folks bent on becoming rich seldom notice or care about the poor or even the middle class. They are too busy buying companies and hedging their bets to bother with society’s losers. And the losers are society’s losers, not theirs. There is no ownership among the masters of the universe concerning the unintended consequences of their wealth. Their ownership is about stuff. They are not their brother’s keeper. No time for that until perhaps they have arrived in their own mind at the point of satiety when they can then join the noblesse oblige, if they so choose.
The rationale for laissez-faire greed has always been the trickle-down theory or the bubble up one as in “a rising tide lifts all boats.” Never mind that your rowboat leaks and his yacht’s wake could swamp you any second. In theory, both trickle-down and bubble-up are logical. The trouble is they don’t take into account the reality most folks face, especially when the economy goes south but even when it is booming, according to the usual tools of measurement like GDP. Trickle- down, in particular, reminds me of rain over a high desert: most of it never hits the ground. There is plenty of rain falling, but most of it evaporates. Therefore, trickles and bubbles end up being mere blind rationales for continued greed.
The liberals, on the other hand, are all about the common good, in theory. However, there seem to be as many rich folks among the liberals as among conservatives these days. These so called “limo- liberals” talk a good game about the common good but they benefit as much from their investments in good times as do the cutthroat Wall Street conservatives. Theirs is a consumer-oriented philosophy that sees an LED TV in every living room, the updated version of “a chicken in every pot.” Their measure of economic success is the employment rate and the differential between rich and poor, not GDP. In theory they look at how the middle class and the poor are faring and judge the economy on the basis of unemployment rate, size of the middle class, and rate of improvement in standard of living for the average American. Instead of trusting trickle-down or bubble-up, liberals try to assess the actual well-being of the average person and judge the economy accordingly.
What neither liberal nor conservative seems to get about our economy is that we no longer make things in America. Our economy is based on the service industry, particularly on financial services, not manufacturing. If we are to ever restore low unemployment rates in America, we need to retool our industry and redirect our financial institutions toward investment in domestic industry. In short, we need to become a producer of goods and not merely a consumer culture. We also need to replace corporate America as we now know it with real competition among smaller scale companies that actually improve energy efficiency, foster sustainable living, and promote health and well-being.
One way to accomplish this is to tie Wall Street bonuses to the lowering of the unemployment rate. That way, investors will be encouraged to invest in companies that need a domestic labor force, that actually make things and contribute to the growth of GDP.
Another is for the federal government to create incentives for industries that we actually need and to remove subsidies for those we don’t. A pure market economy is directed by appetite, not need. That kind of economy will always go to the candy or fast food drive-thru before it eats its vegetables. It is unhealthy for the country and for the individual citizen. We have heard the stories from GM about how they listened to consumers and decided to build more big pick-ups and SUVs because “that’s what the American consumer wanted.” That’s nonsense. The American consumer has little capacity for long-term thinking, as evidenced by the consumer credit debt it has amassed of late and the size of the houses it has purchased but could ill afford. The government has to set the country’s priorities the way it has done so in time of world war using the tool of incentives directed toward the common good, not common taste.
Finally, conservatives and liberals alike need to put aside their theories and measurements and face facts. Our country is going to die a slow death at best if we don’t stop bickering over philosophy and start getting very pragmatic about how to generate a renewed and vibrant economy. Going back to the same old ways will not work. Otherwise, the directed economy of China will blow past us like a NASCAR champion while we continue to lose speed around the world economic track in our gas-guzzling, cumbersome pick-up or SUV.

What If There Were No Republicans?

Imagine if we woke up tomorrow and there were no Republicans. I am not suggesting that they be rounded up and eliminated or put on boats and sent back to Europe, where most of their ancestors came from. I mean that tomorrow the whole concept of conservatism and Republicanism just disappeared, just for the next few years, just for the remainder of Obama’s first term.
What would Democrats do? What would Obama do? My guess is that the first thing that would happen is we would withdraw from Afghanistan and stop trying to look tough in the eyes of conservatives who would not be around to condemn the Democrats for being soft on terrorism. I believe we are in Afghanistan because the Democrats felt shamed into being somewhere other than in Iraq in order to keep in check Republican and independent hawks who see the active demonstration of military strength as a litmus test for the presence of political testosterone or toughness.
The second thing that would happen is the tip-toeing through the minefield of private option preservation in health care insurance would stop, and an actual single-payer program would be developed that would serve to cut health care costs astronomically and boost economic recovery substantially in the long run. American companies would finally be able to compete with their foreign counterparts and would be encouraged to stay home and hire Americans rather than seek cheaper off-shore manufacturing sites.
The third thing to occur would be the re-establishment of anti-trust laws and the break- up of large “too big to fail” corporations and banks. No longer would the Democrats have to fear the loss of Wall Street support for their candidates. Caveats would be put on bonuses for bankers and CEOs that would tie any bonuses not only to actual value creation but to unemployment figures. Bonuses would not be granted until national unemployment dropped below say five percent. That way, investors would keep in mind that their investments had to create jobs or they would not be getting big bonuses.
The fourth thing that would happen in spite of some Democrats from coal-digging states is the country would shift from coal and oil as the primary energy sources to wind, sun and natural gas, assuming that the latter can be carefully extracted without harming water and air. No longer would the current oil and coal lobbies have enough power to control congress by playing one party against the other.
The fifth event would be the complete overhaul of American education. No longer would the Democrats have to bow to the will of teachers unions. They could embark on real educational reform including a longer school year, smaller schools, better teacher-student ratios, more rigorous standards, and more freedom to get it right.
The last benefit I will mention is the Democrats would have to take responsibility for balancing the budget starting now. They could no longer blame the past administration or the current obstructionists for preventing them from doing what is right for their grandchildren’s sake. After all, it is Republicans who often say about future generations: “They’ll figure it out. Meanwhile, let’s make some money, lower taxes, and cut programs” (that Republicans never benefit from or don’t need because they are rich). The bleeding heart liberals, of course, actually care about others and don’t want to leave a legacy of burdensome debt for their grandchildren to go “figure out.” Liberals by definition are other-directed, not “you’re on your own” rugged individualists. At the same time, they will be solely responsible for their programs and budgets, knowing they will be held solely accountable and that the Republicans would be available again in 2012 if the Democrats don’t follow through.
These are among the many benefits of not having any Republicans around for the next few years. I am not suggesting that they disappear permanently, as the Whig party did in the nineteenth century, although I am sorely tempted to conjure up a bumper sticker to that effect. In fact, I can see the bumper sticker now: REPUBLICAN: Gone with the WHIG!

It's Tough to Separate the Truth from the Horse Manure

It’s a tough life. Just think of it. Imagine having to convince yourself that what is best for the country is to continue compromising the long-term well-being of the planet. That’s what congress folks who support continued coal mining and oil drilling as the best means of solving our energy needs and for bringing about the recovery of our economy seem to have convinced themselves in spite of all the actual evidence to the contrary. They will stick their heads in the oil sands before they recognize the overwhelming evidence of global warming and the pending global disasters associated with it. It’s amazing how powerful faith in the status quo actually is for some coal-tunnel-vision folks who still manage to get elected in this 21st Century.
Of course the reason they keep faith in coal and oil is money and influence. Some of the most powerful lobbies in congress are coal and oil. What else would explain their indifference to or even denial of the actual scientific truth? They hold on to the myth that a shift to renewable energy or even natural gas as part of the transition to renewable energy would bring economic disaster.
I would like to think it is simply a matter of a lack of imagination or vision. Unfortunately, it isn’t. It’s about who funds their campaigns or whom they will fear if they switch allegiance to more sensible and beneficial energy sources. They are simply owned by the existing, powerful corporations that want to maintain their power and influence. There is no other credible explanation.
The same is true for health care reform. Most of the same obstructionists to combating global warming are the same folks who oppose real health care reform. They want to make certain that the existing insurance companies and health care providers remain as the primary players in and beneficiaries of any so-called reform. The preservation of the corporation comes first ahead of the public welfare. Somehow, in their belief, if the corporation is profitable, the benefits will trickle down to the public at large. That’s the theory that has had a long time to prove itself but has never fulfilled its promise. And yet the “true believers” hold on to those beliefs in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Health care and health insurance companies have had their very lengthy chance to prove their worthiness to the American people and they have failed miserably. Without government intervention in some major ways, they will continue to seek profits at the expense of the public good.
America is a country of believers. We like to believe that all people have access to the American Dream, to their choice of religious beliefs, to the notion that “all men are created equal.” However, when our faith is put in the corporation rather than in the original concept of free enterprise or the market economy, we have lost our way. The purpose of the corporation is to reduce competition in order to maximize profit. It is not to compete for the benefit of the consumer. From the time the corporation was deemed a “person” legally, we started down the slippery slope toward the destruction of the American Dream for actual everyday people. Once the corporation became a person, “all men are created equal” lost all validity. As long as the current crop of obstructionists in the House and the Senate continue to pretend to believe that the large corporation is the answer to America’s needs and a sizeable portion of the American populace sees government as the enemy and the corporation as the symbol of free enterprise, then we are stuck in swamp of overweening corporate power and influence, and the American Dream will continue to sink into the bog.
No matter what Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh tries to tell you, question authority: theirs, your elected officials’, and the corporation’s. Question the authenticity of the ads you see on television. Question whether or not the truth you perceive actually holds up in the face of real evidence. Don’t let your theories get in the way of the truth. Belief is a powerful tool that can be used against you more easily than it can rise to your benefit.
Finally, imagine those folks who were nay-saying the petroleum advocates at the turn of the 20th Century. Those naysayers were “haysayers” or hay-burning advocates. Imagine how life would be today if they had continued to rule their day. Imagine the piles of horse manure. If you feel you have to watch your step now, just imagine if “haysayers” had won. Yes, there have been unintended consequences of our oil-burning, but we now can see our way clear to make changes that can reverse the damage in the long run. Don’t let the 21st Century equivalent of the “haysayers” stop what needs to happen now. Change may be unnerving, but failure to change will be disastrous. That’s a certainty you can count on.

Is Bill Cosby a Conservative?

A recent column entry by Matt Lewis in Politics Daily calls Bill Cosby a conservative because he has joined forces with the IWF, a forum organized by so-called conservative women. Their mission is as follows:
"Rebuild civil society by advancing economic liberty, personal responsibility, and political freedom." The site goes on to state that "IWF builds support for a greater respect for limited government, equality under the law, property rights, free markets, strong families, and a powerful and effective national defense and foreign policy."
As a flaming liberal, I have little issue with any of these values. In fact, I embrace them wholeheartedly.
I would love to have limited government if only the corporate giants would dismantle into human-scale entities so that we could afford limited government. As it is, the only voices congress seems to listen to are the voices of Big Business such as oil and coal, instead of the still small voices of natural gas, a much cleaner, earth-friendly, plentiful transition fuel that will bridge us into the age of renewable energy. If only the little guys and the Big Bullies had equality under the law.
If by property rights they mean surface owners as opposed to the Big Bullies who own subsurface rights that currently and historically have trumped the little surface owners, I am for property rights.
If by free markets they actually mean the preservation of real competition and the protection against the monopoly and oligarchy of Big Business, I am all for real free markets.
If by strong families they mean the kind of families my two sons are raising and committed to that foster good manners, rigorous education, respect for nature, and high achievement, then I am certainly in support of strong families.
And if by strong national defense and foreign policy they don’t mean a go-it-alone strategy without first asking the rest of the world to join us in positive endeavors, as The Little Red Hen did, as opposed to the Bush administration, then I support a strong national defense and foreign policy based on cooperation rather than isolation.
So, if Bill Cosby is about getting parents to take responsibility for their children, I am all for it. No government program will do it for them. However, access to good schools can help, and good government can provide incentives that will help good schools flourish in underserved areas.
And sometimes it is a matter of saving the kids FROM the parents.

Principle andPrejudice

“The real American day hasn’t begun yet. Or at least, not yet sunrise. So far it has been the false dawn. That is, in the progressive American consciousness, there has been the one dominant desire, to do away with the old thing. Do away with masters, exalt the will of the people. The will of the people being nothing but a figment, the exalting doesn’t count for much. So, in the name of the people, get rid of masters. When you have got rid of masters, you are left with this mere phrase of the will of the people. Then you pause and bethink yourself, and try to recover your wholeness.” From “The Spirit of Place” by D. H. Lawrence (1923).
How true Lawrence speaks to the state of America in the first decade of the 21st Century even though he wrote his “Studies in Classic American Literature” in the second decade of the 20th Century. We are still throwing off old masters, even those whom we have elected only recently. The more our current leader looks like a master, the more some of us want to overthrow him.
What sticks in the craw of the fearful whites who hold “tea parties” and protests is that the current master, duly elected by the majority, has exercised power, and that power, no matter how it is derived or on what knowledge it is based, is black. Furthermore, no matter what the topic (health care, economy, Wall Street regulation, or missile defense) the issue is the power held by a master who is black, and that very fact subconsciously or overtly, threatens any white who fears the coming extinction of white privilege disguised as “the will of the people” – my people. They see a black man in power and fear either deep-seated ancestral-guilt-based reprisal is in store or at the very least the “traditional” racial hierarchy has been deeply eroded. For some extremists, the “natural” racial hierarchy has been irrevocably compromised.
What may start out as principle-based disagreement devolves into personal attack. When race or religion is available as a distinction, it becomes the currency for personal attack, particularly when the principle perceived to be under attack evokes indefensible privilege, indefensible selfishness, or irrationality under close scrutiny. It becomes more convenient and emotionally satisfying to demonize race or religion, thereby declaring the person in question a lesser being, a lower order. Seeing him as an equal leaves his principles and argument on the same field of play, thus giving it equal value in principle. Therefore, the best way to avoid facing the opponent’s arguments head on, point to point, is to render them inferior categorically by labeling the person whose views you disagree with a socialist, a fascist, a communist, or racially inferior.
The astounding fact is that the proponents of private enterprise and free markets would rather demonize a black president than look at the inherent contradiction in their support of both corporations and free markets, when it is the mission of corporations to assure themselves a lion’s share of any market they enter. They don’t want competition; they want monopoly or as close to it as they can get. These ‘tea partiers” would rather continue suffering at the hands of private monopolies or domestic cartels than trust their elected government to provide a mechanism for keeping corporations honest. Big Government is bad; Big Business is good. Keep it simple. Keep it about good guys and bad guys. Keep it like…well, like football: Broncos good; Raiders bad.
D. H. Lawrence was right then (1923) and right now (2009). Populist demagogues hiding behind their perception of “the will of THEIR people” would rather bring down a master who is trying to make things better for the greater good than allow him to succeed. His success would prove them wrong, and then they would have to face the error of their beliefs, both principled and personal, and that would be worse than muddling along with the unsustainable status quo.

Regulatory Arbitrage Is an Outrage

The idea that congress could streamline anything is as likely as an ice age coming to your neighborhood soon. Once in power, politicians are all about holding on to power or even increasing it, not sacrificing it for the common good. That’s why Blumberg and Davidson of NPR on a recent “Morning Edition” discussion are pessimistic about any effective changes in how congress might better regulate the markets. Trying to merge the SEC and the CFTC would be more difficult than trying to cross an elephant with a donkey: it just won’t happen. There is too much influence and money at stake among congressmen who supposedly supervise these overlapping agencies to risk merging the two. Lobby largesse would go missing from the coffers of congressional election campaigns.
Both Barney Frank (D) and former Representative Mike Oxley (R), the current and past chairs of the House Financial Services Committee respectively, agree that trying to merge the SEC and CFTC, both of whom supposedly oversee financial services, would be impossible now and in the future. Somebody would have to give up some power, and that simply doesn’t happen in congress when campaign contributions are at stake. It appears that you can add regulation more easily than you can make it more efficient. And adding regulation is like adding cooks to the kitchen: nothing gets cooked because each cook thinks another will do the cooking.
It’s all a great dodge. America is Dodge City, the perpetuation of the Wild West where anything goes and laissez-faire capitalism still rules, thanks to congress’s approach to regulation. Simply write enough laws and create enough overseeing agencies, and real responsibility will fall through the cracks, over and over again while the lobby money keeps rolling in.
There is an ad currently appearing on television that shows what justice would be like if loggers ruled the world. They are portrayed as even-handed in doling out justice by sawing everything in half including houses and cars but stopping short of King Solomon in sawing a couple’s pet in half, implying that joint custody will serve in limited instances. There is something appealing about that simple justice in the face of the dithering lip-service congress pays to justice in matters such as securities regulation and health care where the stakes for the country are so high. And yet their self-interest apparently transcends any thought of common goodness or justice.
Is it democracy itself that brings out the worst in our politicians, or is it our cultural narcissism that grew and flourished amidst previously unheard of materialistic wealth during the last fifty years mutating into a malignant form of hubris incapable of either humility or humanity? Where is public service when we truly need it? Did it die with Ted Kennedy who, despite his shortcomings, appears to be the last of the great public servants in congress?
If the only safeguard or producer of goodness left to us is competition, what a commentary on our sad state of affairs. Maybe Coolidge was right: “The business of America is business.” And it is business as usual in all facets of our culture in spite of the serious flaws we all have witnessed in the last year. If congress won’t do anything to make things better, who will? The President can’t do it alone.
Meanwhile, the very banks that brought the world economy to its knees have been temporarily saved by federal transfusions of cash but little of that cash has trickled down to the economy of Main Street. The banks apparently are living off the transfusion while they organize the next campaign to dupe investors with glossy financial products that have no more relation to the actual manufacture of goods than the most recent bungle of derivatives. But they are the largest source of lobby money (your tax dollars), so don’t count on your congressman to do anything to threaten that pipeline.
We keep hearing about the “green shoots” as if just around the corner is the actual economic recovery. With unemployment projected to crest above 10 percent before the year is out, there aren’t many “green shoots” to comfort the unemployed. In Bhutan, where the culture measures itself by GNH (Gross National Happiness) rather than GDP, there are real green shoots growing, thanks to the intervention of the government that recognized a growing deforestation problem. Bhutanese like to honor their dead by placing prayer flags on poles, which were being harvested from the country’s existing forests. The government decided to act and began planting fast-growing bamboo to provide its inhabitants with adequate poles without continuing to compromise the existing forests. It was a simple solution to a simple problem. And they don’t need loggers to harvest it for them. Ah, if only we could do the same.
I fear our economic system is so convoluted and complex that it has become a monster we no longer can control. Even before we elect our politicians they are “purchased” by corporate lobbies and owned by corporations for the duration of their careers. Even self-proclaimed “mavericks” are owned and manipulated by corporate wealth. There is no power to govern these monsters, and so we are defenseless against their best laid plans.
Maybe we could save our own forests by electing loggers to congress. They would appreciate the pay and would probably not tolerate a lot of dithering among their colleagues. And perhaps they would put an end to derivatives on Wall Street by chain-sawing through the red tape and complexity that Wall Street hides behind. They also might just cut a few opening to allow the bailout money to flow to Main Street. Yes, I can see the bumper sticker now: “Break the log-jamb in congress: Elect a logger as your congressman”!

The Truth Ain’t Nothin’ but a Big Mac

America hates the truth about itself as much as any other country, but the truth it hates to admit the most is the truth about free speech: free speech and real truth seldom find each other because the angry mob never wants to hear the truth, especially about itself. The angry mob shouts of freedom, the freedom to lynch somebody rather than have to face the truth.
This past weekend the angry mob gathered in Washington, D.C. to vent its anger at the “injustice” of the imagined tax burden they would shoulder under the leadership of” that black man” Obama. Never mind what he said in a gloriously intelligent speech last Wednesday about “not one dime.” No, the angry mob knows he lies. Just ask Joe Wilson, probably not the last of the great baton twirlers for the old Confederacy. If you’re angry enough, you must be right. That’s how truth is forged: with the heat of burning belief. Don’t let the facts interfere. “Creationism” is alive and well because ignoring facts is practically a religion in America.
Free speech is never free. If it is free, it falls on deaf ears. If it has any power, it has money behind it. It is not the freedom but the money that gives speech value. If there is enough money, the so-called “free speech” gets delivered over and over until it becomes “truth.” In other words, in America you have the freedom to finance your “free speech” to such an extent that the sheer volume of its presence in the culture makes it the truth. Just look at the effect of advertizing on the American public and you can see how Big Food, Big Drugs, and Big Health Insurance all work symbiotically to trap the American public in their vicious cycle of obesity, poor health, poor virility, and prescription drug use. Watch a football game or the evening news and you’ll see the cycle in action about 30-to 40 percent of the time you watch.
Thanks to the law that makes the corporation a “person” in America, the Supreme Court is about to improve the free speech rights of that so-called “person” by no longer limiting the amount of money a corporation can throw at the character-assassination of politicians they want to destroy or the image-building of politicians they want to promote. We may technically still have one-person-one-vote democracy in America, but the notion of free speech is a joke. Effective speech is not free and is, in fact, becoming more expensive all the time. It is becoming so expensive that only large corporations have enough money to manufacture the “truth” as they want us to see it.
The corporate dupes like Joe Wilson and many other Republicans whose elections depend on generous corporate sponsorship and “true believers” in the unchallengeable freedom of corporations to brainwash us continue to protect the status quo at the expense of the health and well-being of the nation. They may not be aware of this fact, but they continue to be a major part of the problem out of adherence to a belief in the principle of free enterprise without being able to see that the state of free enterprise in America is about as free as speech is. Existing corporations do everything they can to make certain that actual free enterprise does not exist. They view competition the same way John D. Rockefeller did: “a sin.”
I fear Big Corporations more than I fear Big Government and with good reason. Until Big Government restores real free enterprise through effective law to protect and promote real competition, we will continue to need Big Government as the last defense against complete corporate take-over of this country. Perhaps it is already too late, given the evidence of the brainwashing corporate America has exercised over the waddling masses yearning for more Big Macs and Viagra. If Big Government is somehow successful in dismantling the stranglehold Big Business has on the American psyche and culture, then it can shrink back to a human scale as well. But let’s downsize the corporation before we downsize the only defense the people have against the continued ravages and waste the corporate Gorgons perpetrate.

The Blue Coats Keep Coming!

It’s time to put Wall Street in its place. They just don’t get it. After all the deriving, bundling, and Madoffing, they are up to another scheme: this time they hope to profit from your death, or so Peter Cohan, a Babson professor and author of You Can’t Order Change reports. It’s time for another “tea party” and the chanting of a revised slogan: “No securitization without representation!” Actually, it would be better if we held out for “No securitization” at all.
Here is how it works according to Cohan:
Wall Street's idea is that the thousands of securities in these bundles -- which will consist of life settlements from people with a diversity of diseases -- such as breast cancer, Alzheimer's, Leukemia, and heart disease -- will reward investors by paying them the difference between the amount that the policyholders get paid while they're alive and the size of their death benefit.
In simple terms, Wall Street will be setting up a casino so pension funds and other institutional investors can place a bet on your date of death. Wall Street will extract fees for running the casino -- just as it did with mortgage-backed securities (MBS).
And investors will rely on a new class of ratings agencies -- such as DBRS, co-founded by a nuclear engineering PhD -- which will measure the risk of these life settlement-backed securities (LSBS). And the risks are considerable. First among them is fraud -- unless a very ethical person takes the time to examine the medical records of each policyholder, there is enormous potential to simply make up fake policies -- just like the liar loans that brought down the MBS market.
Then there are the risks of people living longer than the actuarial tables predict -- which could cause LSBS investors to end up making very little money or even losing it. Or -- heaven forbid -- scientists discover a cure for the disease that threatens some of the policyholders and instead of dying an early and profitable death, those policyholders get healthy and live a long life.
Back in Boston around the time of the original revolution, bundling occurred when young couples, often teenagers, would be “bundled” in bed with each other, sometimes separated by a bundling board to keep them from having intercourse. The intention was to let them be intimate without the parents worrying about consequences of ultimate intimacy. Given the number of out-of- wedlock pregnancies that resulted during the colonial period, neither bundling nor bundling boards worked very well.
Today the same can be said for the bundling of loans into a trust and selling the product as a derivative. I doubt a bundling board would be any more effective than the original piece of timber. Therefore, securitization with representation would be about as futile. An all out ban on securitization is probably a better solution.
I discovered this summer that there are many different forms of the classic board game Monopoly. I learned this when I purchased the Deep Sea Fishing edition for a fishing-frenzied friend whose house I was occupying on Martha’s Vineyard for a couple of weeks. Art may imitate life, but when the cherished board game of our childhood imitates Wall Street in spinning off theme derivatives the way Ben and Jerry develops ice cream flavors, they don’t feel as right or good as say, Brahms’ Variations on a Theme by Haydn. It seems one can “monopolize” anything and what Wall Street is now proposing is just another monopoly game paid with not only your real money but your life. Let’s call them DDT’s (Disease-Death-Trades) before Wall Street comes up with a more euphemistic label.
I wonder if a board game can be made of this new Wall Street ploy. Perhaps a theme board game will lend legitimacy to the deal and assuage the fears of another, even more insidious bubble and bust already churning in the pit of my stomach.

The Fast-Food-Health Care-Insurance Complex

Eisenhower waited until the end of his presidency to give the famous military-industrial complex speech and look what good it did: America went on to immerse itself in Vietnam, Iraq, and now Afghanistan. The fast-food-health-care-health insurance complex is just as real, more threatening to American lives, and even more complex. It's one of the best examples of the trees obscuring the forest except when I start to ponder the derivation of derivatives. No one, not even Obama, can make a speech that can effectively explain the nuances of this insidious complex in a way that will convince the American people that they have been had, hoodwinked, and huddled by another deceptive complex.
However, the difference between a conspiracy and a complex is that a conspiracy is intentionally designed by conspirators while a complex grows organically. A complex becomes so pervasive you can't trace its evolution to a single starting point. Much the way an ecosystem evolves, a complex develops by companies or even whole industries finding niches in the complex and protecting those niches even at the expense of the whole. Of course a complex has an insatiable appetite that is ultimately unsustainable. In contrast ecosystems, if left on their own, sustain themselves.
The fast-food-health-care-insurance complex has brought America to its knees. It started about the time Eisenhower gave his last speech (1960). Its casualties are so pervasive we can barely see them. They are the overweight, artery-clogged, American children and adults who have bought their fool’s gold piece of the American Dream piecemeal in the form of Big Macs, KFC chicken, Whoppers, Baconators, and fries. They have been “educated” by TV commercials to satisfy their voracious appetites and shrinking wallets with the greatest life-threatening diet known to western civilization, thanks to the dollar menu and the drive thru.
Meanwhile, health care and insurance companies have been able to cherry-pick their clients and eventually exclude the high risk ones, all of whom pay increasingly higher insurance rates over time. The excluded are often dropped when their employers switch health insurers, a neat trick to lower the risk to insurance companies. The retained find themselves paying higher and higher premiums each year because of the exorbitant interventions practiced by the health care providers in order to compete for investment dollars from shareholders by showing greater profits. Thanks to the premiums insurers are able to charge and the deductibles they are able to set, insurers make a fine profit whether you need an intervention or not. The rates and deductibles always favor the insurance company stockholders at the expense of the insured.
America has always been about freedom. The most dubious freedom we have acquired, over the years, is the freedom to be simple-minded. That characteristic requires that life remain simple and that politicians explain things in simple terms. No complex answers to complex problems, thank you. Just make things right or better without changing anything. Change is scary, especially coming from a black man who happens to be President. America is also about faith. Just have faith in free markets, God, or your talk show host, and things will turn out for the best. Just don’t listen to anyone talking real change. That’s too scary. And keep that black man from talking to my kids at school.
We need to address America’s health before we address its health care, or at least make it a large part of what we do first. If the government would stop subsidizing the beef industry, for example, the price of burger would go up, the dollar menu would disappear, and folks would be forced to eat more vegetables, thus making people healthier. However, this would hurt the beef industry, the health care industry, and the insurance companies just as failing to go to war would hurt our arms-producing strategic industries such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, etc. The artery-clogged, obese bodies would disappear, thus creating less demand for expensive interventions, and thereby reducing the profits of stockholders in health care and health insurance companies.
Putting all of that in simple terms will require an oratorical skill far beyond anything any president has ever demonstrated. Eisenhower offered his vision but too late to do anything about it himself. When Obama offers his own health care plan, he will have time to act. I wish Obama the best of luck spelling out in plain English the nature of the problem so that his solution makes sense. However, this health complex is a multi-headed dragon that needs a multi-nuanced strategy to overcome it. But the right wing fear mongers have labeled Obama a socialist “dragon” and that dragon is easier to focus on and believe exists than one with many heads.
How anyone can have absolute faith in a free market system today in the wake of the most recent debacle is truly astounding. The market system needs a referee with teeth. Government is the only logical choice in that regard. But let’s start with subsidizing spinach, tomatoes, and peppers instead of beef and corn. That move alone would do more for America’s health than all the fixes we can make to health care and insurance. The agri-business lobby as it exists today does more to harm American health than any other single factor.
A way government can help educate America about its role in their lives and what it is trying to accomplish is to offer health and civics classes taught by AmeriCorps teachers to retiring citizens much the way driver’s education classes help reduce auto insurance premiums. If you want to get a bonus benefit from Social Security or Medicare, take a class and you’ll receive a one- time small bonus. That way, people will be able to have access to facts rather than be manipulated by pure irrational fear. If nothing else, they’ll realize that Medicare and Social Security are both “socialized” programs.

Thinking Outside of the Bubble

Purists think they have the answer. Pragmatists don’t. Pragmatists play well with others. Purists don’t.
The ultimate purist I ever encountered was a character named Richard Digby in a Nathaniel Hawthorne short story called “The Man of Adamant.” Digby was such a purist that his final solution to the problem of corruption within the Puritan flock, as he saw it, was to isolate himself in a cave where he could commune with his god apart from all others. He developed a religion of one, so pure and unadulterated, that it turned him into a stalagmite. Of course, Hawthorne had Richard drink the limestone-laced drippings from the ceiling of the cave, so he had some pseudo-scientific explanation for the result. In a sense, he became a pure libertarian, a self-contained rock of ages.
Stalagmites are what the market purists have become. Just a little fine tuning and all will be glorious. A little self-discipline is all it takes to cure whatever ails us. Just believe in the market system and all will be well. Just leave us on our own.
The unreformed alcoholic has a similar argument. Today he will discipline himself not to drink too much. By five o’clock, he is off to the bar or the liquor store, unable to quench his thirst. The gambling addict is much the same. Today he will wager only a reasonable amount of money. By the end of the night, he has lost everything.
The latest economic bubble and bust was the product of belief and thinking analogous to that of the alcoholic and compulsive gambler. The scale of the scandal is the chief difference. When thousands of people get hooked on the game and the stakes continue to rise astronomically, a delusion of grandeur mixed with a magnitude of scale so grand it is god-like in its proportions, enraptures and insulates a person’s thinking from reality. He adopts the belief that a thing this big could never fail. As a result, some companies, in the eyes of even the government, became too big to fail once the bubble burst. And their sheer size convinces the purist that the pure market system is good, because we can see what huge constructs (companies) result from it. That’s the circular reasoning that mirrors the bubble and bust reality of market economies. As Antonio says of Gonzalo’s vision for Prospero’s island, “The latter end of his commonwealth forgets the beginning.” So does the market purist have a short memory in that, like the alcoholic or compulsive gambler who forgets his last hangover or bankruptcy respectively, gets back in the game as if this coming bubble will last forever this time.

Purists have blind faith in something. Digby had the blind faith that he should trust only his own instincts and commune with god from the isolation of a cave. That is a pure expression of Protestantism and ultimately serves as the basis for the development of the pure expression of the market economy. The chief difference is that the market purists, even in the wake of the current market collapse, still think that the market system is rational, not blindly faith-based. That is the ultimate delusion to which they continue to hold fast, like doomed captains going down with their ships. In both Digby’s world and the market world, you are on your own, and you should be. Using your own resources, you compete for your share of the worldly kingdom or the kingdom of god. Just have faith in yourself and you’ll make it.
Referees need not apply. They just interfere in the natural flow of the game. That’s why market-faithful love the game of golf, for in that game alone the individual ultimately plays against his own self and calls his own game on his own honor. However, what is strange is that affirmative action is very much a part of the golf game, something one would think to be anathema to market purists. In golf, handicapping enables lesser players to compete with greater ones in any given game. No one is too small or too large to be excluded from the system of handicapping. Someone let a pragmatist in under that tent. Of course, at the professional level, you’re on your own. No handicapping when it comes to big purses. Apparently when money is at stake, the leveling of fields of play is discarded.
Pragmatists should stop trying to negotiate with purists. Nothing will ever get done to improve the human lot let alone the economy if pragmatists persist in trying to draw purists into their fold. It will never happen. Leave the purists to withdraw into their caves to howl at change. Sooner or later, they will howl their way into extinction, like the saber-toothed tiger who grew too long in the tooth to survive, or like Richard Digby, who succumbed to the pursuit of purity itself.