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.

Amerca's House of Lords

The public health care option appears to be losing ground, thanks to effective strategies of health insurance companies and other lobbyists that, through fear-mongering advertisements, have convinced enough of the American public that health care security is not desirable. It’s another coup pulled off under the direction of America’s House of Lords.
Huh? You say. America has no House of Lords. We have two chambers: the Senate and the House of Representatives. By all means, according to the Constitution, that’s all we have. But de facto, we actually have a House of Lords in the form of large corporations who, depending on the issue at hand, send their lobbyists to Congress and their marketing gurus to Madison Avenue to make sure their corporate interests are protected and preserved. Their sheer wealth and influence make Lords of old England pale in comparison. The latest efforts by the big four health insurance companies (UnitedHealth, WellPoint, Aetna, and Cigna) have sent the Obama administration into retreat from a so-called public option to less threatening and less secure health cooperatives.
It appears that we can have Homeland Security and armed forces run by the government, because they do not compete with industry. In fact, they sustain and even give rise to industrial might, thanks to the contracts they dole out to security and military-based corporations respectively. But let government compete with industry for the benefit of American citizens, and there is all out war to re-capture the hearts and minds of the American public and instill fear in them that their health, their incomes, their right to live will be compromised by government involvement. How stupid can America be? Pretty stupid, I guess.
America’s House of Lords, like England’s of old, is not elected. It has no term limits. It is accountable only to other Lords who control shares in their companies. Like the landed nobility and clergy of old who composed the traditional English House of Lords, American corporations and their chief stockholders have control of the majority of America’s wealth. Instead of being based in land, the American corporate gentry’s wealth is more portable and useful, is able to be placed in coffers that generate decisions and influence people, namely Congress and Madison Avenue.
America’s clergy in the form of televangelists and local fundamentalist bible-thumpers are an unwitting tool of America’s House of Lords. They teach people how to fall in line behind the existence of increasingly incredible discrepancies in wealth by promising their flocks heaven if they only believe and do what they are told. The clergy, then, perpetuate the notion that the kingdom of heaven is worth the wait even if their brothers in freedom reap huge profits from their docile submission to the status quo. They may also hate government for bailing out the banks and American automotive industry, because they remember government took God out of the public schools but ignore the fact that American agriculture has been bailed out with substantial subsidies since 1933, and those subsidies produce the cheap, harmful food that makes them fat and sick.
Unlike the old English House of Lords, the American version does not actually meet as a body. In fact, the only time they come to Washington is to be investigated or interrogated or to look for a bailout. They generally stay out of the limelight and use their minions (lobbyists and marketers) to make their influence felt.
If only the American public knew how it is being manipulated, not only by so-called health care insurance companies, but by the American House of Lords as a whole. The cars we drive, the food we eat, the obesity levels we have attained, the products we have purchased that we really don’t need, all are the product of corporate power. Caveat Emptor (Let the buyer beware) has been the governing laissez-faire principle of our economy since its inception. You’re on your own so that corporations can exploit your weaknesses, for that is how they view the average citizen: a host of weaknesses, appetites, and exploitable manipulations.
For example, the American has been taught to need a full-sized pick-up or SUV as a symbol of the full expression of his masculinity on four wheels. He eventually “needs” the large vehicle to hold his increasingly obese family that has been taught to eat huge burgers and fries and drink beer whose label tells you it is properly cold, as if you couldn’t actually feel the temperature of the bottle. The health care companies want to have control over your health care dollars so that they can take your premiums and then exclude you from service when you don’t measure up to the image of the models romping in the beer and fast-food adds. The Lords’ health care scheme is all part of a larger plan, however diverse but pervasive, to get you to waste or spend unwisely your net income, all the while getting you to focus on how your tax dollar is misspent.
Another example is drug companies, who don’t want you to actually get well by eating right or living a better lifestyle; they just want you to solve your cholesterol problem with one of their drugs. Keep eating the burgers and fries: just take some Lipitor and you’ll be all right. Or if you are upset and anxious about life, just take a mood-altering or sleep-inducing drug such as Zoloft or Ambien. Whatever you do, don’t take a hard look at the source of your condition.
Wake up, America, and see yourselves for what you are: the greatest dupes since Adam took the apple. Of course Caveat Emptor was apparently in full swing even then. Furthermore, take a look at corporate America and recognize it for what it really is: a profit-making manipulator that has more power over your lives than any government can ever dream of having.

Fear and Loathing in America

The Luddites of the early 19th Century went about smashing machines in protest against the coming revolution: that revolution was the industrial revolution that brought the western world fully out of the middle ages and into modernity. The Luddites won a few battles but ultimately lost the war. Ironically, the Luddites were operating in England, of all places, the same country that today has both socialized medicine and a monarch. Go figure.
In America and throughout the world, the current global recession that was brought about by the biggest poker game ever played, namely a version of Blind Man’s Bluff with derivatives, mortgage-backed securities, and variable rate mortgages as the currency. Wall Street turned into a casino for young Turks who played this game night and day until the bluff was called and the operating delusion was finally debunked: real estate values, it turns out, do not always go up.
Today a large portion of America is fearful, not hopeful. When people are fearful, they hang on to what they have rather than risk trying something new. They grasp at straws rather than try to grab the brass ring. If their government offers them something new, they are skeptical and fearful that it will go bad.
America has been conditioned to believe in private enterprise through advertizing. People wear hats and t-shirts sporting everything from cereal brands to motor oil. Americans are taught, even by their currency to trust in God, but they are most rigorously taught to trust in Lipitor, Viagra, Budweiser, and Celebrex. No one runs around with a U.S. Government t-shirt or Federal Reserve baseball cap. Private enterprise has taught us to believe in corporate name brands above all else.
It is no wonder, then, that the little guy or small businessman sees himself on the side of huge insurance companies and believes that free enterprise, no matter how un-free it might be, is better than any government intervention even in the face of the recent failures of GM, Chrysler, Lehman Brothers, and Merrill Lynch. America has been so brainwashed by corporate America that it actually believes that big business and they are on the same side. It does not occur to many Americans that it is the size, power, and influence of corporate America that has brought us to the economic crisis as a whole and the health care crisis as a specific manifestation of the larger problem.
America has to wake up to the fact that corporate America is the enemy of small business and the little guy, not the model of success or the solution to our woes. The fact is there is not enough competition in the market place to allow the little guy to compete. The bulk of every segment of our economy is controlled by an oligarchy of companies. The only obvious exception is the auto industry where Japanese and German firms have been able to out-market American companies to the point that two of the three American brands (GM and Chrysler) came crawling to Congress for a bailout.
Another factor in the current fear-mongering is the legacy of the Cold War. As the paranoid victors in that battle, we remain skeptical of anything that has the word “social” in it or anything that gets labeled ‘socialized.” If it is “socialized,” it can’t possibly contain anything good. We’ll throw that baby out with the bathwater no matter what. Critics point to the coming crises facing Social Security and Medicare and insist that any government option for health care is doomed to bankrupt the country. I would remind America that its military is a government agency and stands far above any other military organization in the world. You can’t say all government agencies don’t’ work. It’s a matter of priorities and financing. Where we put our tax dollars tells us who we are, and we can certainly afford to take care of ourselves AND keep the world safe for democracy.
If America wants to continue to concentrate its wealth in the hands of the few at the expense of the many, then we should stay the current course. If, on the other hand, it wants to do the greatest good for the greatest number, a hybrid health care program just might be a good start. After all, even the car companies have seen the wisdom of the hybrid as a bridge toward greater economy and a reduction in carbon emissions, thanks to government legislation that has encouraged that evolution.