I mean no offense to our fellow compatriots dealing with serious mental health issues. One of the key reasons, in my opinion, to embrace healthcare as a fundamental human right is to eliminate the disparities between our artificial divisions of 'physical' and 'mental' healthcare, as if the body can possibly be separated from the mind.
What's funny to me is our ongoing resistance to dealing with our collective mental health challenges, the disorders of our body politic. We just have to laugh sometimes because it's the only way not to fall into a whole abyss of rather serious psychological issues. Google Health defines Schizophrenia as
a mental disorder that makes it difficult to tell the difference between real and unreal experiences, to think logically, to have normal emotional responses, and to behave normally in social situations.
The concept of 'perfect information' is one of the key aspects of an efficient market that intrigues me the most. In order to make good decisions, we have to have information. Powerful people know this, which is why they scheme all sorts of excuses to withhold information, to employ secrecy instead of transparency. This happens in everything from the fine print in credit card agreements to government objections to Freedom of Information Act requests. I've been mulling over this recently, trying to think up another image to use for the foundational nature of transparency to the health of our system of political economy. I find schizophrenia a useful diagnosis. This piece is a little long, but I hope you find it useful.
In some areas, we claim massive tearing of the social fabric will occur if we do not collect and disseminate huge amounts of personal information about ordinary citizens, while in other areas, we will go along with cover-ups of the most central kinds of information necessary to a functioning democracy. I can't think of too many better descriptions for this state of affairs than things like delusions, hallucinations, disordered thinking, catatonic behavior, and the flat affect. Or to reference another section on Psychosis:
Psychosis is a severe mental condition in which there is a loss of contact with reality.
That's pretty sweeping and abstract. Let's get concrete.
For the past three years, give or take, there has been a concerted effort to withhold information about government subsidies of the financial services and housing industries. These are public dollars committed by public officials. Even if the information were 'dangerous', we as citizens still possess the right to possess it. That information belongs to us, not the secretive agencies and organizations that make up our present system of corporate welfare, from the Fed to Treasury to HUD to the GSEs. Bloomberg News, for example, has encountered widespread opposition to basic FOIA requests trying to obtain information about the bailouts involving the Fed, AIG, Goldman, SocGen, and others. And of course, this situation exists in other areas, too, like military matters such as illegal treatment of detainees and contracting fraud. In fact, some of the ties between national security excuses and financial security excuses are rather interesting.
(And don't give me some line about the FRBNY being 'private' or Lloyd Blankfein being 'savvy'. The Federal Reserve System was created by an Act of Congress. Same for Freddie and Fannie. Goldman Sachs petitioned to become a bank holding company for the specific purpose of gaining access to special government giveaways. AIG and lots of other companies booked boatloads of fictitious profits on the alphabet soup of financial 'innovation' that existed for one very simple reason: to skirt laws on insurance and gambling, two of the most heavily regulated economic activities in the country. The FDIC is not only guaranteeing commercial bank deposits, but it has now been forced into the position of backing corporate debt. And more generally, all publicly traded companies owe their existence to the government. That's what the process of incorporation is - it's a process created by government. Were the major financial firms private partnerships, rather than publicly incorporated businesses, the situation would be very different. It's the public shield of limited liability that allows failed managers to keep their personal wealth. And the development of our public methods of accounting and reporting information is one of the key aspects of the strength of the American system, of why our country has been looked at as a haven for investors and model for countries all over the world.)
We're told by the highest officials in the land that transparency itself is dangerous, that it's better for information not to be public, that secrecy itself is an unfortunate, but necessary, precaution. Is our society really so precarious, so weak, that knowing what our leaders are doing is going to destroy our economy? Did we upend centuries of western thought on political economy and discover that, whoops, just kidding, individual actors performing the actions of citizenry and consumption actually aren't rational, efficient, welfare-maximizing actions after all? Were the Soviets right; should we have embraced central planning and the politburo concept instead?
And then, we go and do things that make people expose intimate details about themselves even when the disclosure offers little to no public benefit.
I'm thinking specifically here of how we treat criminals. (Natural persons who commit crimes, of course; legal persons with billions of dollars in annual revenues always manage to get a special deal where they never admit wrongdoing, serve jail time, or face the death penalty - all options that can be imposed against corporate entities who owe their very existence to the state).
For those not among the rich and well-connected, we've created a different kind of transparency. Not a secrecy to hide actual information, like the rich need to hide their plundering, but instead, a fear-mongering to disseminate misleading information, to distract attention from the real action. For example, we're supposed to be very afraid of our children being kidnapped. But guess what? Most child abductions are carried out by someone who knows the child, most frequently, a parent. Remember Elian Gonzalez? He wasn't kidnapped by some stranger with a different skin color or socioeconomic status. His mother took him from his father to stay with other US relatives. The mother sadly didn't survive, so naturally, the child should be returned to his biological father. That is such an obvious statement it shouldn't even need explaining. At any given time, there are many American parents trying to get their children back who have been taken to another city, state, or country.
Except, the US relatives wanted the US government to forcibly prevent a father from raising his own son. Those iconic images of armed government agents pointing a gun at a man holding Elian? That's what 'tough on crime' legislators have been legislating: funding armed government agents to point guns at people breaking the law. Returning children to their parents? That's what 'family values' pundits have been punditing. Where's the fear on the nightly news about mothers abducting children, or in-laws trying to override the wishes of parents? Where are heavily marketed drama shows about the most common reason that children vanish without a trace? Where's the outrage about American values, about the family, about the role of fathers? Well, for those of us of a certain persuasion, the answer actually is pretty simple. The blabbering about family values and immigration and whatnot is about power through demonization of the other, plain and simple.
Or take another example. We're supposed to be very afraid that our children (or ourselves) are going to be sexually violated by some strange, shady character, again probably from another economic or social class. And again, most sexual abuse is committed by someone the victim knows, not by a stranger. Whether it's child molestation, or an adult who is raped, the vast majority of sexual abuse is not committed by a random party.
Sex crimes get even more complicated because in our desire for arbitrary, inconsistent puritanism, we criminalize several kinds of behavior that don't involve a 'victim' and a 'perpetrator' so much as they involve two people engaging in an activity that a third party decided to decree to be immoral. For example, statutory rape of someone who has not achieved the age of majority is, by definition, consensual, because absent the statute definitionally removing consent, consent existed. The state literally invented a victim out of thin air. Or take another situation, prostitution. Or anal sex. Or oral sex. Or premarital sex. Or...?
Reasonable people can have an exchange of ideas regarding whether these creations of the law are good or bad. But the point is, even if you agree that every kind of illegal sex act should remain illegal and every kind of legal sex act should remain legal (never mind that, interestingly, our laws vary from place to place), there's the matter that across sex crimes, even the most horrific and invasive ones, the perpetrator is more likely than not to know the victim. Most sex crimes are the opposite of random violence.
Yet what do we make sex offenders do? We make them register themselves.
Publicly.
And we impose all sorts of restrictions on their movements, associations, and related activities. This publicly available information has significant consequences that materially affect the wellbeing of offenders even after they've been released back into society. In fact, many sex-offenders are so dangerous - that the courts don't even sentence them to jail.
I use sex offenders because they are perhaps the most outcast and vilified group in society today, what Jews or Irish or Blacks or Lepers might have been in other contexts in other times. They are perhaps the clearest case where 'transparency' of what these evil, scary, dangerous, horrible, no-good people are up to is arguably beneficial to the public good.
It is the fear of an unknown criminal doing something to your child - abducting them, sexually abusing them, etc - that is manipulated in the name of power. And the proposed answer is to make vast quantities of information available publicly about these people, even long after they've served their sentences. Why, then, are we collectively so schizophrenic about our fear of offenders relative to our fear of corporate fraudsters? Why do we have delusions that exaggerate the danger posed by most offenders, while we've lost touch with the reality of the danger posed by those who make decisions about our country in secret? And where does this lead?
After all, if you think this is only about sex offenders, you might want to learn more about the public nature of information about ordinary citizens in this country. These days, you can look up just about anything in our criminal justice system, from misdemeanors to the details of that divorce you filed. We have cameras everywhere; there's a whole cottage industry of dirt diggers who look through red-light photos of famous people trying to find something embarrassing (like a passenger who shouldn't be there).
In my home state, we even have two separate state-wide systems that are accessible via the internet, nevermind all the information available at the county level and through private companies. One, Missouri Case Net, is a joint effort by several different Missouri courts to put information online, and the other, Missouri Offender Search, is run by the state Department of Corrections to let you search for offenders. What's particularly notable as it relates to transparency is that this information is more or less permanent. Ex-offenders are still included in the systems because it's a historical record, not a listing of current offenders. Years after the fact, you can look up not just information from criminal courts, but also appellate, civil, probate, and traffic courts. These are public information, and the value of transparency is deemed so highly that much of the information is not just available upon request, but is being digitalized and made available over the internet.
At the end of the day, it's not so much that someone who punched a girlfriend or had sex with a 15 year old or used crack or whatever is more or less evil than Tim Geithner or Ben Bernanke or Lloyd Blankfein or Hank Paulson or George Bush or Alan Greenspan or Jamie Dimon or Rahm Emanuel or Stephen Friedman or anyone else making decisions about our financial bailouts. The question is why do we as a society value transparency so highly when it comes to offenders who, generally speaking, are poor and don't pose much threat to the rest of us, while we tolerate secrecy by the rich and powerful who make decisions that materially affect our wellbeing? If transparency is valuable for low-risk situations, it's that much more critical in fundamental areas of governance.
In particular, I'm interested why Democrats go along with the charade? I can accept quite readily that there's a minority of Americans who have thrown in their lot together in some wingnut quest for money and power and influence and who-knows-what. What makes me chuckle is when those of us in the 'reality-based' world seem to latch on so easy to the explanations that, quite frankly, sound more like the symptoms of psychosis.
* Abnormal displays of emotion
* Confusion
* Depression and sometimes suicidal thoughts
* Disorganized thought and speech
* Extreme excitement (mania)
* False beliefs (delusions)
* Loss of touch with reality
* Mistaken perceptions (illusions)
* Seeing, hearing, feeling, or perceiving things that are not there (hallucinations)
* Unfounded fear/suspicion
These are things that describe excuse after excuse for why secrecy is needed in this or that government affair. Why don't we collectively deride these assertions as the psychotic reasoning they are?
We can't make a politician do something. 'Bloggers' or 'activists' or 'the Netroots' aren't powerful like that. But we can do something productive: we can laugh when the reasoning given to us by our leaders is funny. We can chuckle at the idea that our economy, our democracy, our society, is made in any way better by withholding information that belongs to us. In a country where so much information is tracked, recorded, and disseminated about the lives of average citizens, it really is humorous that a politician, regulator, or business leader would even propose that secrecy is all of a sudden in the public's best interest when it comes to the rich and powerful.
One final note. I feel the need to say this increasingly recently, but this is not a screed against Obama in particular, or the Administration and Congressional Democrats more generally. The call for transparency is premised upon the fundamental belief that unlike our previous Administration, we now have an Executive Branch that is potentially swayed by our opinions and ideas, by our claims to the rights and privileges granted every American citizen. I was an early and strong advocate for impeaching Bush and Cheney; they simply were unmovable from their trajectory (and to their credit, be that as it may, they almost always told you exactly where they intended to go). I'm not particularly surprised or disappointed with what the Obama Administration has done, and not done, in its first year. I simply feel that our challenge is to not accept the voices advocating secrecy. It's our obligation to demand our rights. Otherwise, we're simply leaving governance up to those who have a different opinion.
We don't undermine Democrats by speaking out. We protect them by providing a dissonant voice to the constant barrage of blather from the people who really are interested in undermining the American experiment.
You can read these words all over again at The Seminal at FDL.