Well I'm finally back here at work after another recent series of personal adventures; in the middle of all the fun I've been finding time to get down to my local "Occupy" event, and for those of you who have not been keeping up I thought we'd take a moment today to compare a bit of Fox-driven perception to the reality I've been seeing.
What I've been told to expect, at least in certain quarters of the public space, are dirty filthy hippies with no jobs or ambitions hoping to destroy America while having deviant public couplings fueled by the free distribution of dangerous psychotropic drugs.
Sadly, I've found that there's not really much truth in that description, even as tiny bits of it do ring true; but with a manifesto in hand and a few conversations under my belt we'll see what we can do to create a picture that will surprise a lot of the 99% who already support Occupy Wall Street, even if they don't know it yet.
This past week, Naomi Klein bravely stepped into the lion's den this week and addressed the University of Chicago, protesting their bid to name an economic research center after Milton Friedman. It was a bravura speech where she made the argument that the current financial crisis is the final repudiation of Friedman's twisted theories of unregulated capitalism.
More than that, what we are seeing with the crash on Wall Street, I believe, should be for Friedmanism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for authoritarian communism: an indictment of ideology. It cannot simply be written off as corruption or greed, because what we have been living, since Reagan, is a policy of liberating the forces of greed to discard the idea of the government as regulator, of protecting citizens and consumers from the detrimental impact of greed, ideas that, of course, gained great currency after the market crash of 1929, but that really what we have been living is a liberation movement, indeed the most successful liberation movement of our time, which is the movement by capital to liberate itself from all constraints on its accumulation.
So, as we say that this ideology is failing, I beg to differ. I actually believe it has been enormously successful, enormously successful, just not on the terms that we learn about in University of Chicago textbooks, that I don't think the project actually has been the development of the world and the elimination of poverty. I think this has been a class war waged by the rich against the poor, and I think that they won. And I think the poor are fighting back. This should be an indictment of an ideology. Ideas have consequences.
Now, people are enormously loyal to Milton Friedman, for a variety of reasons and from a variety of sectors. You know, in my cynical moments, I say Milton Friedman had a knack for thinking profitable thoughts. He did. His thoughts were enormously profitable. And he was rewarded. His work was rewarded. I don't mean personally greedy. I mean that his work was supported at the university, at think tanks, in the production of a ten-part documentary series called Freedom to Choose, sponsored by FedEx and Pepsi; that the corporate world has been good to Milton Friedman, because his ideas were good for them.
But he also was clearly a tremendously inspiring teacher, and he had a gift, like all great teachers do, to help his students fall in love with the material. But he also had a gift that many ideologues have, many staunch ideologues have-and I would even use the word "fundamentalists" have-which is the ability to help people fall in love with a perfect imagined system, a system that seems perfect, utopian, in the classroom, in the basement workshop, when all the numbers work out. And he was, of course, a brilliant mathematician, which made that all the more seductive, which made those models all the more seductive, this perfect, elegant, all-encompassing system, the dream of the perfect utopian market.
Klein mentions the Free To Choose series, and later on she highlights something I forgot - the man who introduced one of those series on PBS:
"Being free to choose means being free to make your own decisions. Free to live your own life, pursue your own goals, chase your own rainbow without the government breathing down your neck or standing on your shoes. For me it meant coming to America, because I came from a socialistic country where the government controls the economy."
That was Arnold Schwarzenegger in 1990, spouting free market fundamentalism in a corporate-sponsored documentary which mainstreamed ideas that today have brought us to the brink of economic failure. It's important to know what altar at which Schwarzenegger worships. It's important to know how he was, for a long time, the glitzy front man for Friedmanism, the showy snake oil salesman that got Joe Six-Pack to think that corporate behemoths eliminating rules for themselves was in the best interests of the common man. If Friedman was P.T. Barnum, then Arnold was the star attraction in the center ring of the circus. And he clearly believes, or at least is willing to front, that these ideas, about "free enterprise and free people," are immutable, hard science, incapable of being wrong.
Except we are now at a moment when, as governor, Schwarzenegger is bearing the brunt of the worst effects of unbridled capitalism. His state is caught up in the credit market freeze, with no money to pay the bills. He is begging the state's citizens to buy bonds and bail the government out, an approach taken so clumsily that he got Wall Street shaken at the precise time when he has to go into the market to borrow money. The state's public infrastructure is crumbling on his watch and even that won't be enough to make up the revenue shortfall.
A lot of people would let Schwarzenegger off the hook for this. The national economy went bad, and the financial markets failed as a result of the housing bubble bursting, and surely the governor of California can't be held responsible for that. Except he is such a devotee of Friedmanism, and in fact one of its key pitchmen, that of course he is guilty. Guilty of the same faith in capitalists not to be driven by greed. Guilty of stripping regulation and empowering corporate America to live in a tax-free and restraint-free bubble. And as the current cesspool of deregulation, where market forces run wild and greed becomes virtue, gets a reckoning due to the carnage it has caused, so too must the man who introduced Free To Choose all those years ago. He was wrong then, and he's doubly wrong now. To quote Naomi Klein:
Ideas have consequences. And when you leave the safety of academia and start actually issuing policy prescriptions, which was Milton Friedman's other life-he wasn't just an academic. He was a popular writer. He met with world leaders around the world-China, Chile, everywhere, the United States. His memoirs are a "who's who." So, when you leave that safety and you start issuing policy prescriptions, when you start advising heads of state, you no longer have the luxury of only being judged on how you think your ideas will affect the world. You begin having to contend with how they actually affect the world, even when that reality contradicts all of your utopian theories. So, to quote Friedman's great intellectual nemesis, John Kenneth Galbraith, "Milton Friedman's misfortune is that his policies have been tried."
It's the ideological blinders that caused this crisis that must be taken off if we're ever going to get out. Schwarzenegger is somehow seen as the "good cop" Republican in the mix of California, wanting ever so to do the right thing. But the one area of jurisdiction, the one part of this crisis where the California governor could have had a hand in stopping the bleeding, when he could have imposed regulations to help stop predatory lending and rein in the runaway mortgage market in one of the biggest bubble states in the country, Arnold not only decided to do nothing then, but has continued to do so. Laissez-faire remains his core philosophy, the failed philosophy of conservative economics.
I guess the banks and the lenders need to be free to choose.
It would be irresponsible for state Democrats not to remind the public that the pain and anxiety they are seeing today is a cause of the insane embrace of Friedmanism, and that the man at least in large part responsible is the muscle-bound Governator who was willing to put a smiley face on the shock doctrine.
In America today, families are working harder to get by.
Half of American families say they are living paycheck to paycheck,
and 3 out of 10 American workers have not been able to save a dime for their retirement.
