And
then, Wall Street blew up the global economy. Empowered by bank
deregulation and regulatory capture, Wall Street enlisted those
tough-minded men of the media again to sell the world on the idea that
financial innovations were making the global economy more stable by the
minute. Central banks puffed an asset bubble like the world had never
seen before, even if every journalist worth his byline was obliged to
deny its existence until it was too late.
These episodes were
costly and even disastrous, and after each one had run its course and
duly exploded, I expected some sort of day of reckoning for their
promoters. And, indeed, the last two disasters combined to force the
Republican Party from its stranglehold on American government—for a
time.
But what rankles now is our failure, after each of these
disasters, to come to terms with how we were played. Each separate
catastrophe should have been followed by a wave of apologies and
resignations. Taken together—and given that a good percentage of the
pundit corps signed on to two or even three of these idiotic
storylines—they mandated mass firings in the newsrooms and op-ed pages
of the nation. Quicker than you could say “Ahmed Chalabi,” an entire
generation of newsroom fools should have lost their jobs.
But
that’s not what happened. Plenty of journalists have been pushed out of
late, but the ones responsible for deluding the public are not among
them. Standard & Poor’s first leads the parade of folly (triple-A’s
for everyone!), then decides to downgrade U.S. government debt, and is
taken seriously in both endeavors. And the prospect of Fox News or CNBC
apologizing for their role in puffing war bubbles and financial bubbles
is no better than a punch line: what they do is the opposite, launching
new movements that stamp their crumbled fables “true” by popular demand.
The
real mistake was my own. I believed that our public intelligentsia had
succumbed to an amazing series of cognitive failures; that time after
time they had gotten the facts wrong, ignored the clanging bullshit
detector, made the sort of mistakes that would disqualify them from
publishing in The Baffler, let alone the Washington Post.
What I
didn’t understand was that these weren’t cognitive failures at all; they
were moral failures, mistakes that were hard-wired into the belief
systems of the organizations and professions and social classes in
question. As such they were mistakes that— from the point of view of
those organizations or professions or classes—shed no discredit on the
individual chowderheads who made them. Holding them accountable was out
of the question, and it remains off the table today. These people
ignored every flashing red signal, refused to listen to the
whistleblowers, blew off the obvious screaming indicators that something
was going wrong in the boardrooms of the nation, even talked us into an
unnecessary war, for chrissake, and the bailout apparatus still stands
ready should they fuck things up again.
Keep on Dancing Till the World Ends
My aim here isn’t to take some
kind of victory lap or to get in the granite faces of our eternal
pundit corps one more time. Nor is it to blame Republicans for our
problems. It is true that, from the scandal of CEO pay to the scandal of
lobotomized regulators, each of the really monumental mistakes of our
time arose from the trademark doctrines of the political right. And,
yes, it was the Bush administration that muzzled government scientists
and declared war on organized intelligence in a hundred other ways.
But
the problem goes far beyond politics. We have become a society that
can’t self-correct, that can’t address its obvious problems, thatcan’t
pull out of its nosedive. And so to our list of disasters let us add
this fourth entry: we have entered an age of folly that—for all our
Facebooking and the twittling tweedle-dee-tweets of the twitterati—we
can’t wake up from.
Besides, the reign of corruption has taken
plenty of right-wing scalps, too. In fact, one of the most interesting
comments on the machinery that is making us stupid came from the
libertarian Doug Bandow of the Cato Institute, after he had temporarily
lost his job (he got it back a little while later, don’t worry) for
puffing clients of Jack Abramoff in exchange for the lobbyist’s
largesse. But what was the big deal? fumed Bandow in a 2006 cri de coeur
called “The Lesson Jack Abramoff Taught Me.” Living in Washington was
expensive; and besides, everyone was basically on the take:
Many
supposedly “objective” thinkers and “independent” scholar/experts these
days have blogs or consulting gigs, or they are starting nonprofit
Centers for the Study of… Who funds their books, speeches or other
endeavors? Often it’s those with an interest in the outcome of a related
debate. The number of folks underwriting the pursuit of pure knowledge
can be counted on one hand, if not one finger.
Bandow
had been caught, yes, but he wasn’t the only culprit, he insisted—with
some accuracy. All opinions are paid for. Everything written in this
city—everything in this land that is thought and tweeted and toasted
with a hip hip hooray . . . is Abramoffed. We are all slaves to the
market; there is no way to stand outside that condition.
I can
remember the contempt I felt when I read Bandow’s essay, back in 2006.
Of course there was a place where ideas weren’t simply for sale, I
thought: the professions. Ethical standards kept professionals
independent of their clients’ gross pecuniary interests.
These
days, though, I’m not so sure. Money has transformed every watchdog,
every independent authority. Medical doctors are increasingly gulled by
the lobbying of pharmaceutical salesmen. Accountants were no match for
Enron. Corporate boards are rubber stamps. Hospitals break unions, and,
with an eye toward future donations, electronically single out rich
patients for more luxurious treatment.
And consider the
university, the mothership of the professions. For-profit higher
education is today a booming industry, feeding on the student loans
handed out to the desperate. Even the traditional academy, where free
inquiry nominally lives, has become a profit center, a place where
exorbitant tuition somehow bypasses the adjuncts who do the teaching but
makes for lavish executive salaries; where economists pull in fantastic
sums for “consulting”; and where the prospect of launching the next hot
Internet startup is a gamble that it is worth bending any rule to take.
Another
thing Doug Bandow got right was one of the basic reasons for all this:
for most Americans, the building blocks of middle-class life—four years
at a good college, for example—are growing ever more expensive and out
of reach. For other people and other entities, though, they grow
relatively cheaper; they are baubles to be handed out as necessity
requires. The result is exactly what our nineteenth-century ancestors
would have expected. Think of Jack Grubman, the superstar stock analyst
of the nineties, who famously upgraded AT&T’s shares in exchange for
getting his children into a ferociously competitive
preschool. Or
the congressional aides on Capitol Hill, surrounded by the inaccessible
luxuries of Washington, D.C., who would do nearly anything for a
lobbyist in exchange for a shot at a future job on said lobbyist’s
staff. Or the actual members of Congress who sold their votes in
exchange for little bits of sushi or a blowout party in Hawaii or good
seats at sporting events.
And as we serve money, we find that
money wants the same thing from us: to push everyone it beguiles in the
same direction. Money never seems to be interested in strengthening
regulatory agencies, for example, but always in subverting them, in
making them miss the danger signs in coal mines and in derivatives
trading and in deep-sea oil wells. You can have a shot at being part of
the 1 percent, money tells us, only if you are first committed to making
the 1 percent stronger, to defending their piles in some new and
imaginative way, to rationalizing and burnishing their glory, to
exempting them from regulation or taxation, to bowing down as they pass,
and to believing in your heart that their touch will heal scrofula.
So
money gives us not only the bond-rating scandal of 2008, in which trash
investments were labeled super-wholesome so that the rating agency in
question could win more business from the manufacturers of said trash;
and not only the Enron scandal of 2001, in which head-spinning conflicts
of interest were over- looked by Enron’s accountants in order to
preserve the nice ka-ching those conflicts delivered to everyone
involved; but also the analyst scandal of 2002, in which Wall Street
insiders pushed certain corporate securities on their sappy
middle-American clients in order to win those corporations’ business—and
then while it is corrupting all the watchmen, money also dashes off an
enormous body of literature assuring those sappy middle Americans that
they are in fact financial geniuses who can outsmart any possible
combination of Wall Street insiders, because together the saps reflect
the wisdom of markets or some other such reassuring bullshit. And all of
it— the airy populism of the market and its simultaneous complete
negation by reality—is as determined by the current distribution of
wealth as gravity is by the mass of the planet. Both of them will
continue indefinitely regardless of the constant violence the one does
to the other simply because that’s the way money wants it, and every
dollar in the nation will strain at its leash to ensure that financial
naïveté persists on into infinity in complete ignorance of financial
fraud.
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