By Jake T. Snake
Albert Einstein is famously purported to have said that "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." This is one of many reasons why the current 700 billion dollar bailout process scares the hell out of me. We have not in any meaning ful way changed the cast of characters we are asking to fix the mess from those who were in charge when the mess was created. Does it strike anyone else as odd that we are entrusting the same insular group of people to remedy the problem they helped to create? These are people who were and remain true disciples of free market ideology. Now that that approach has spectacularly failed, we ask them to turn 180 degrees and find another approach. It's a bit like asking a catholic priest to take over running your local Planned Parenthood, don't you think? He wouldn't know where to begin, his heart would not be in it and the odds are good that he would revert in short order to using the approaches he was comfortable with. Actually, now that I think of it the situation is actually even worse than that. It is actually more like asking your local priest and your local right wing evangelical church to provide comprehensive sex education to youth. You see the government free market demagogues will be working with bankers...are you scared yet?
I am student of human behavior. Truth be told, it is my stock and trade. This is not to imply that I understand it, but it is a large part of what I do day to day. Those we have entrusted to clean up the clusterfuck we now refer to as our economy studied the radical free market approach all through school (most of them were probably steeped in it growing up as brats of privilege), practiced it in their long careers and fought for the one true free market religion at every turn. I submit to you that they have no other tools at their disposal than that same free market ideology, they long ago allowed the parts of their brains that might have understood a different approach to atrophy. The best that can be hoped for is the bemused head scratching best personified by Alan Greenspan when he testified before Congress in October. He reminded me for all the world of the Wizard of Oz after Toto had swept aside the curtain. What do zealots do when their god has been proven false? I can tell you what I have seen in 20 years of working with people and that is this, those used to being certain do not do well with ambivalence, especially those taught to confuse certainty with good leadership. This often leads people to make hasty, ill considered decisions and to quickly grab onto and apply another sytem of thought that can provide a framework through which decisions can be made and the world's uncertainties minimalized, at least in their own heads.
The other truth that has been proven in spades by the current economic decline is that we are all interdependant. My behavior has an effect on my fellow human beings and theirs impacts me. Put more succinctly, when I fuck other people over at some point the screwing will come round and I will get my turn. I would gloat and speak of Karma, but there is no victory in watching the asses at the top tumble, because they take millions of us "little people" with them. We all rise or fall together. The economy cannot run well with nothing but Horatio Algers at the helm, it belongs for better or worse to all of us.
I consider all of this as I wander through a car lot where I appear to be the only customer and feel like a pork chop tossed into a wolf pack. I ponder that my purchase would spread money to my credit union, the dealership, the saleperson, the car's manufacturer, the people who actually built the car, people who make parts and sell them and spreads from them out in an even larger web. I will not buy that new car today. Like many other americans I will wait and see how far the disease spreads. I will nurse along my 10 year old vehicle with 120,000+ miles on it. I cannot be assured that my job will exist this time next year and if it does how much higher will my health insurance premiums and heating bills be. I seem to be having my own crisis of faith.
