In the February 6 issue of In these times Senator Bernie Sanders gives us his view of the failure of Milton Friedman's legacy: The Failed Prophet. For those of you who still do not know Bernie, here's a Wikipidea snapshot:
Bernard "Bernie" Sanders (born September 8, 1941) is the junior United States Senator from Vermont, elected on November 7, 2006. Before becoming Senator, Sanders represented Vermont's at-large district in the United States House of Representatives for 16 years.
Sanders is a self-described democratic socialist, but because he does not belong to a formal political party he appears as an independent on the ballot. Sanders caucuses with the Democratic Party and is counted as a Democrat for the purposes of committee assignments. Sanders is the first self-described democratic socialist to be elected to the U.S. Senate.Sanders left the House in order to run in the 2006 election for the Senate seat being vacated by the retiring Jim Jeffords and won the election with 65% of the vote.
His description of the failed legacy is below the break.
I have been trying very hard to open up the dialog among those of us who make up this diverse body called the democratic party. We in DSA are a very active and vocal part of the party. We do not run candidates against democrats and when Bernie ran in Vermont he had our support, but he was not "our" candidate. I hope that as time goes on we will have more and more conversation about the ideas Democratic Socialism has to offer. Having worked 3-4 hours a day for months for Obama, and having worked hard for democratic candidates here in Virginia over the years I believe we need this conversation. Bernie's essay about the Wall Street collapse is a good way to continue that conversation. He starts out by saying:
The late Milton Friedman was a provocative teacher at my Alma mater, the University of Chicago. He got his students involved with their studies. He was a gifted writer and communicator. And he received a Nobel Prize for his contributions to economics.
But Friedman was more than an academic. He was an advocate for, and popularizer of, a radical right-wing economic ideology.
In today’s political and social reality, the University of Chicago’s establishment of a $200 million Milton Friedman Institute (in the building that has long housed the renowned Chicago Theological Seminary) will not be perceived as simply a sign of appreciation for a prominent former faculty member. Instead, by founding such an institution, the university signals that it is aligning itself with a reactionary political program supported by the wealthiest, greediest and most powerful people and institutions in this country. Friedman’s ideology caused enormous damage to the American middle class and to working families here and around the world. It is not an ideology that a great institution like the University of Chicago should be seeking to advance.
This is really close to home for me. I was born, raised, and educated in Chicago and I obtained my doctorate at that very same University. ironically, we were often characterized as a hotbed of leftist ideas. Which, in fact, we were as well. But this situation that Bernie describes goes far beyond that. The students of Leo Strauss who became the founders of the neoconservative movement are also products of Bernie and my Alma matter. Bernie goes on to describe the special nature of this Institute and you need to go to the link and read about this. I have other fish to fry here. Bernie points out that:
The timing of this project is a little ironic. Friedman earned his bread by denouncing government at virtually every turn. He, like his acolyte, former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan, believed that a largely unregulated free market constituted the most superior form of economic organization imaginable. Well, the tune of the right-wing free marketeers has changed a bit in the last few months.
My colleagues in the Senate and I are now picking up the pieces of a banking system brought to the edge of collapse by this theory of deregulation and by the insatiable greed of a small number of wealthy financiers playing in the market and engaging in incredibly risky—if not illegal—behavior.
In the rush to bail out Wall Street, we saw President Bush, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, the people in U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable—folks who loved Friedman’s ideas and who, no doubt, would be prepared to financially support a Milton Friedman Institute—reverse their longstanding rhetorical opposition to government intervention.
Instead, they demanded that we come to the rescue of the financial firms that had lined up in front of Congress for their emergency welfare checks.
For years, all of these people, including the president of the United States, have been telling us that government should not be involved in ensuring healthcare for all Americans as a right of citizenship. (‘What a terrible idea!’)
They have been telling us that the government should not be involved in making quality education affordable to all people, that the government should not be empowered to ensure that we reverse greenhouse gas emissions, that government should not regulate pollution that contaminates our air and water and land, and that the government should not provide a strong safety net for our children, for our seniors or for the disabled.
Well, it turns out that when the shoe is pinching their foot, they have become the strongest believers in government intervention—especially if working people and the middle class are bailing them out.
Is anyone surprised? Somehow it has always been clear to me that these people believe they own the government and that this is their country. They will only tolerate the rest of us when we recognize that this is as it should be. That's Bernie's point actually. We like to sanitize these arguments and deny the real class war that spawns them. We do not want to deal with the issue that is raised when it becomes so clear that there is no hint of democratic reciprocity in the dealings between these sectors of our society.
But the issue here is not just economic policy. It goes deeper than that. It touches on the core of who we are as a society and as a people. Are we as human beings supposed to turn around and not see the suffering that so many of our brothers and sisters are experiencing? Are we content to be living in a nation where, thanks in part to the Friedmanite ideology, the richest 1 percent owns more than the bottom 90 percent and the top one-tenth percent owns more than the bottom 50 percent?
How can we repeat these statistics over and over again and fail to see what they mean? How could we possibly believe that this is some natural consequence of the way a fair economic/social system works? Our news media, our educational system, and our religious leaders all have colluded in making us accept these consequences as something "natural". I say "colluded" and mean it. Collusion is not always conscious. It is what we have become used to doing and we go on doing without question. Collusion needs to end and we need to wake up. Bernie tells us:
Our role as progressives is to remind our country that alternatives are possible, that social democratic movements in Northern Europe and elsewhere have secured universal access to quality healthcare and have effectively abolished the kinds of poverty and homelessness we see in our society. This will not happen on its own: it will require popular engagement and organization. But the changing political landscape has provided us with an opportunity to advance the cause of social and economic justice.
That's what our conversation must be about. The election of Barack Obama is an oportunity for something, not an accomplishment. The struggle and hard work begin now. With the fall of the legacy of Friedman and many other myths that made us accept the domination of most of us by a greedy few, comes a new era. What that era will bring is up to us. We Democratic Socialists want to work with all progressives to awaken those who have thought they could never rise above the limits set by the system imposed by the greedy few. We want to have an ongoing conversation about where we see the country going. For without that conversation, we too become the possible victims of our own ideas gone stale for lack of conversation.