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"The market will liberate us! Why do we buy these insane lies? Maybe because
both parties feed them to us."
Thomas Frank: Wall Street’s long, slow tease
The market will liberate us! Why do we buy these insane lies? Maybe because both political parties feed them to us
Thomas Frank 11/30/2014
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I wrote the following article for the Wall Street Journal as a disgusted look back at the decade of the oughts. In the years since then, a few things have changed. The disastrous stock market trends I report here are no longer in effect—yippee, the Dow is back!—and bank regulators no longer pose for the cameras holding chainsaws to rule books. But the market populism I describe seems to have nine lives. The myths that surrounded it when it was the ideology of governance have been smashed, and yet back the damned thing comes—as a protest movement this time. And the Democrats! It is more than a little dispiriting to remember how easy it was to predict what they would do (and fail to do) with their Congressional power—and how quickly that power would be undone. Oh well. Happy holidays.
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And it was supposed to have been such an awesome time, too! Back in the late ’90s, in the crescendo of the Internet boom, pundit and publicist alike assured us that the future was to be a democratized, prosperous place. Hierarchies would collapse, they told us; the individual was to be empowered; freed-up markets were to be the common man’s best buddy.
Such clever hopes they were. As a reasonable anticipation of what was to come they meant nothing, of course. But they did serve to unify the decade’s disasters, many of which came to us festooned with the flags of this bogus idealism.
Before “Enron” became synonymous with shattered 401Ks and man-made electrical shortages, for example, the public knew it as a champion of electricity deregulation — a freedom fighter! It was supposed to be that most exalted of corporate creatures, a “market maker”; its “capacity for revolution” was hymned by management theorists; and its TV commercials depicted its operations as an extension of humanity’s eternal quest for emancipation.
Similarly, both Bank of America and Citibank, before being recognized as “too big to fail,” had populist histories of which their admirers made much. Citibank’s decades-long struggle against the Glass-Steagall Act was once thought to be evidence of its hostility to banking’s aristocratic culture, an amusing image to recollect when reading about the $100 million payday reportedly enjoyed by one Citi trader in 2008.
The Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal showed us the same dynamics at work in Washington....
...Again and again, as he tells the story, leading Democratic pollsters found evidence that the American public distrusts corporate power; and yet just as regularly did they advise Democrats to steer in the opposite direction, to distance themselves from what one pollster called “outdated appeals to class grievances and attacks upon corporate perfidy.”
This was not a party that was well-prepared for the jobs of iconoclasm and reconstruction that have befallen them. And as the Obama team muddles onward — bailing out the large banks but (still) not subjecting them to new regulatory oversight, passing a healthcare reform that seems (among other, better things) to guarantee private insurers eternal profits — one fears they are merely presenting their own ample backsides to an embittered electorate for kicking.
http://www.salon.com/2014/11/30/thomas_frank_wall_streets_long_slow_tease/
The market will liberate us! Why do we buy these insane lies? Maybe because both political parties feed them to us
Thomas Frank 11/30/2014
-------
I wrote the following article for the Wall Street Journal as a disgusted look back at the decade of the oughts. In the years since then, a few things have changed. The disastrous stock market trends I report here are no longer in effect—yippee, the Dow is back!—and bank regulators no longer pose for the cameras holding chainsaws to rule books. But the market populism I describe seems to have nine lives. The myths that surrounded it when it was the ideology of governance have been smashed, and yet back the damned thing comes—as a protest movement this time. And the Democrats! It is more than a little dispiriting to remember how easy it was to predict what they would do (and fail to do) with their Congressional power—and how quickly that power would be undone. Oh well. Happy holidays.
-------
And it was supposed to have been such an awesome time, too! Back in the late ’90s, in the crescendo of the Internet boom, pundit and publicist alike assured us that the future was to be a democratized, prosperous place. Hierarchies would collapse, they told us; the individual was to be empowered; freed-up markets were to be the common man’s best buddy.
Such clever hopes they were. As a reasonable anticipation of what was to come they meant nothing, of course. But they did serve to unify the decade’s disasters, many of which came to us festooned with the flags of this bogus idealism.
Before “Enron” became synonymous with shattered 401Ks and man-made electrical shortages, for example, the public knew it as a champion of electricity deregulation — a freedom fighter! It was supposed to be that most exalted of corporate creatures, a “market maker”; its “capacity for revolution” was hymned by management theorists; and its TV commercials depicted its operations as an extension of humanity’s eternal quest for emancipation.
Similarly, both Bank of America and Citibank, before being recognized as “too big to fail,” had populist histories of which their admirers made much. Citibank’s decades-long struggle against the Glass-Steagall Act was once thought to be evidence of its hostility to banking’s aristocratic culture, an amusing image to recollect when reading about the $100 million payday reportedly enjoyed by one Citi trader in 2008.
The Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal showed us the same dynamics at work in Washington....
...Again and again, as he tells the story, leading Democratic pollsters found evidence that the American public distrusts corporate power; and yet just as regularly did they advise Democrats to steer in the opposite direction, to distance themselves from what one pollster called “outdated appeals to class grievances and attacks upon corporate perfidy.”
This was not a party that was well-prepared for the jobs of iconoclasm and reconstruction that have befallen them. And as the Obama team muddles onward — bailing out the large banks but (still) not subjecting them to new regulatory oversight, passing a healthcare reform that seems (among other, better things) to guarantee private insurers eternal profits — one fears they are merely presenting their own ample backsides to an embittered electorate for kicking.
http://www.salon.com/2014/11/30/thomas_frank_wall_streets_long_slow_tease/
6 replies
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