On today's Huffington Post Robert Reich says what needs to be said The Real Scandal of AIG:
This sordid story of government helplessness in the face of massive taxpayer commitments illustrates better than anything to date why the government should take over any institution that's "too big to fail" and which has cost taxpayers dearly. Such institutions are no longer within the capitalist system because they are no longer accountable to the market. So to whom should they be accountable? When taxpayers have put up, and essentially own, a large portion of their assets, AIG and other behemoths should be accountable to taxpayers. When our very own Secretary of the Treasury cannot make stick his decision that AIG's bonuses should not be paid, only one conclusion can be drawn: AIG is accountable to no one. Our democracy is seriously broken.
We can quibble about the language, but he hits the nail on the head! Look below the break to see why this needed to be said and said strongly.
There is language in Reich's statement worth examining. He says that the reason that this action needs to be taken is
Such institutions are no longer within the capitalist system because they are no longer accountable to the market.
Well, many of us have been saying this for a long long time. Once again we are up against right wing framing and its power to create situations that never should have been allowed to exist in the name of fantasies like "the free market", "the invisible hand", "free trade" and others like it. We see now what the result of removing government from "our backs" really is. Power is taken from the people and put into the hands of the power elite in the name of democratic processes. The people have lost their ability to have any say in these matters. We heard it all over the press today. Anger and outrage spewing forth from a powerless government. How could we have ever let this come to be?
It is like selling yourself into slavery. We the people listened to these con artists and gave them the keys to our home and other things. Now they reward themselves with money that was intended to fix some of the things they broke! You can not condemn socialism and hope to get these thieves to protect you. I can't begin to wonder why Robert Reich is still hedging on that one. His message today rings somewhat hollow when you see him carefully walk the tightrope. Only those Capitalists who have ventured beyond some imaginary boundary are to be dealt with. No Mr. Reich. It is a system. The entire system is corrupt.
There is a concept about systems that needs to be understood. If you intervene in a system by removing an agent without preventing that agent's role from being filled by someone else, you have done nothing. My warnings here about the attacks on Rush are of this nature as well, but that is a digression.
Why do we not stop drug traffic by locking up dealers, etc.? The answer id obvious, because people are waiting in line to take their place. Most organized crime persists for similar reasons. The actions of AIG are not very different are they? Today they thumbed their nose at us and said that we can't touch them!
Democratic Socialism has called for structural changes in the system that would prevent such things from being possible. We are attacked wrongly again and again because they are afraid that someday we will be heard. When we are heard there will be a rational alternative to this kind of deception of our people. Can socialist systems become corrupt. Of course they can. The key idea in Democratic Socialism is that the power remains always in the people and it can only be exercised through democratic processes. How does that differ from the so called democratic processes we have now? It differs in a fundamental way. There is no room in such a system for the duplicity we have just experienced. There is no way a system could be created within the context of true democratic processes where the handing over of the people's power to protect them from exploitation is handed over to the exploiters as some sort of benevolent act. The crusade against "big government" was never anything but transparent. The question had to be asked every time someone advocated giving away the government's people's power to "private enterprise". How could the confusion go so far? The idea that a private business is subject to laws and regulations is certainly not that different from the restrictions law places on individuals so they are not free to do harm to others.
I have studied George Lakoff's theories and have been impressed with how far he has gone to making a model of the process that allowed this to happen. He does not, however, answer the question about why it was possible at all. I have been troubled by this for a long time. I really have a burning desire to understand why we could buy into a "morality" that led to the events of today. Many times here the scoundrels have been cast as "immoral" yet Lakoff's theory makes it very plausible that there is a pseudo=moral system that enabled the framing that has victimized us all. We have questions here that need answers. There will never be a time like right now to pose those questions properly and to answer them. We have much work to do.