New Year's Wish -- Rejection of Mindless Right-Wing Platitudes As a Substitute for Thought
For New Year's, a friend forwarded to me a column purportedly by constitutional scholar Linda Monk, but actually written by Pat Buchanan. See http://buchanan.org/... Buchanan has created an incoherent compilation of platitudes (of various political views) which the right-wing is now circulating all over the internet in the name of someone else.
Buchanan's column, and its misuse, illustrate the dual right-wing tactics of substituting platitudes for real thought and simply lying about the facts.
Using these tactics, right-wing propagandists successfully obtained repeal of New Deal regulatory protections, freeing a few "malefactors of great wealth" to use financial fraud to further enhance their positions of wealth and power. The media accepted the right-wing platitudes to distract from the early evidence of the failures of deregulation.
New Year's Wish -- Rejection of the Right-Wing Use of Mindless Platitudes As a Substitute for Thought
For New Year's, a friend forwarded to me a column purportedly by constitutional scholar Linda Monk, but actually written by Pat Buchanan. See http://buchanan.org/... Buchanan has created an incoherent compilation of platitudes (of various political views) which the right-wing is now circulating all over the internet in the name of someone else.
Buchanan's column, and its misuse, illustrate the right-wing tactic of substituting platitudes for real thought.
Many of the problems which our country faces are due to this substitution of platitudes for thinking. "America -- love it or leave it." "Support our troops." "No new taxes." “Get the government off our backs!” Or -- let's get back to the good old days (before WWII) of Hamiltonian economics, when we lived within our means and avoided global entanglements.
Good public policy is not based on platitudes; it is based on a realistic understanding of current problems and a pragmatic but principled approach to attacking the problems. It is not the sole prerogative of either Democratic or Republican (or liberal or conservative) administrations. Both Roosevelts, Truman and Eisenhower were all practitioners of practical public policy.
The greatest failures of the Bush Administration have resulted from its reliance on the thought processes of a right-wing movement which has hijacked true conservatism and replaced it with an ideology in which "entrepreneurs" practicing "free market" "capitalism" were considered to be heroes who will do no wrong so long as they are liberated from government regulation. This was the thinking before 1929; it led directly to repeated financial panics and, ultimately, the Great Depression. The FDR administration created a new regulatory environment in which modern (for that time) regulations outlawed numerous fraudulent practices and attempted to place financial and corporate operations on a transparent and sustainable basis.
Recognition of the need for government regulation to protect the public against financial fraud is at least as old as the Code of Hammurabi. In that ancient document, the government proscribed specified conduct as fraudulent and prescribed punishment. Over thousands of years, as new financial instruments have been created, new laws have defined and outlawed new forms of fraud. FDR created new regulations adapted to the new conditions of developing financial markets and corporate oreganization. Adjustments to financial regulation and monetary systems were made over the years to accommodate expansion of international trade, and the New Deal system worked reasonably well for about 50 years.
However, the deregulation mania of the last 25 years gradually dismantled the protections against various financial frauds. The deregulation ideology ignores the established truth (as true liberal democracy does not) that mankind is imperfect, requiring governmental systems which include checks, balances and legal restrictions to protect against greed or ambition run rampant. Deregulation ideology ignores the need for laws to enforce and assure honesty in financial markets as part of assuring honest markets and an orderly business environment.
Deregulation was not the result of happenstance. It was part of a planned and executed program to amass further wealth for the already rich and powerful. Right-wing foundations funded ideological "education," in which the platitudinous fallacies of pre-1929 ideology were presented as accepted truth. Corporate interests funded right-wing political campaigns and lobbying efforts. The "deregulation war" has been fought by the right-wing on many fronts for many years. It has included the drives to:
* shift the tax burden to the middle class
* abolish legal accountability for securities fraud
* repeal financial regulation
* render regulatory enforcement agencies ineffective by
* starving them to staff and funding
* appointing anti-regulators to top positions
There were early failures of "deregulation." The savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s wiped out the S&L industry. George Bush's brother Neal was one of those implicated; the Office of Thrift Supervision found that his actions involved “multiple conflicts of interest.” John McCain's financial angel, Charles Keating, was convicted and sent to prison. The California electrical energy crisis of 2000-2001 bankrupted Pacific Gas & Electric, required the bailout of Southern California Edison and revealed how deregulated markets could be manipulated by irresponsible companies such as Enron.
Yet, well-funded ideologues, using platitudes to substitute for thought, misdirected attention away from the true cause of these failures. The Cato Institute blamed the S&L debacle on the economy; the Heritage Institute denies that financial services were de-regulated. They continue their campaigns for public policies to make the country safe for further accumulation of wealth by the super-rich who fund the conservative think tanks.
Ultimately, deregulation removed enough barriers to fraud that, inevitably, foolish and/or dishonest operators from Enron to Lehman to AIG to Madoff created financial houses of cards which have crashed just as did the Insull holding companies in 1929. The ineffectiveness of bank examination regulations has led to a rash of bank failures and the endangerment of banks as large as Citigroup and Bank of America.
(The same substitution of ideological platitudes for real thought led to the Iraq War. There, ideological arguments led the government to ignore the realistic notions that war should be the true last resort when national interest is threatened and, when necessary, war calls for the use of overwhelming force to avoid unexpected consequences. The hypocrisy of the right-wing was revealed as they used the occasion to shovel government money into the coffers of Halliburton and Blackwater while starving Iraq War veterans of medical care.)
Our country faces many challenges as we seek to restore economic stability, as other countries seek to catch up to our lead in economic development, and as religious fanatics seek to destabilize Western (in their minds Judeo-Christian) civilization. We all hope that the Obama Administration can right the ship and surmount the challenges.
Yet, we need to recognize that one of those challenges is our homegrown propensity to allow a greedy few of the most wealthy to use their financial resources and our credulous susceptibility to platitudes to control and disrupt public policy. Effective, well-considered public policy is hard enough to achieve under the best of circumstances. We will see the continued use of well-funded right-wing platitudes and other political and intellectual dirty tricks in the effort to maintain special privileges (such as tax breaks) for the wealthy.
We need to make a concerted effort to educate the media and the public to reject the platitudes and to demand real thought and real facts on the crucial issues facing our country today. We need to work to expose the media reporting on platitudes as fact or revealed truth. And we need to seek changes in the laws to stop the wealthy from using public funds to propagate their disinformation.