Note to Progressives: Challenge Market Fundamentalism

Note to Progressives: Challenge Market Fundamentalism

By Ruth Rosen

AlterNet, Posted on February 1, 2007

http://www.alternet.org/story/47466/

Women have gained the potential of enormous power in DC with Nancy Pelosi
elected as Speaker of the House. The Congressional Caucus for Women's Issues
will grow to be perhaps the largest in Congress, but the question remains:
how will these newly empowered women use their power?

Among the issues on the wish list of newly elected women, according to
Women's eNews, are women's health, educational equity and sex trafficking,
women in prison, and international domestic violence.

All are important but will go nowhere if women leaders don't challenge
Market Fundamentalism, the exaggerated and quite irrational belief in the
ability of markets to solve all problems, an economic fundamentalism that
has dominated our national political debate for a generation. Without
directly challenging Market Fundamentalism, they will ultimately fail to
improve the lives of ordinary American women and their families.

Put it this way: What do catastrophic climate change, the widening gulf
between the wealthy and the poor, America's obesity epidemic, and our
society's lack of care for the young and the elderly have in common? Each
has powerful special interests who insist that we need to let the market
work its private magic and that government action would create more problems
than it would solve.

These interest groups also block any effort to enlist the government by
invoking the arguments of Market Fundamentalism: privatize everything, rely
on yourself and expect nothing from your government.

Market fundamentalism has become like the air we breathe; we hardly notice
it. Every time George W. Bush argues for more tax cuts, he relies on the
unquestioned assumption that we all embrace Market Fundamentalism. Like
religious fundamentalism, it is based more on faith than on reason. Through
constant repetition, however, the American public has been bullied into
believing that private spending is rational and efficient while public
spending is always wasteful and unproductive. (Tell that to people in New
Orleans.)

Progressives and liberals have assumed that Americans would eventually turn
against these ideas, much as they become disillusioned with the Iraq War.
But the truth is, neither the women in Congress nor progressives outside of
D.C challenge Market Fundamentalism directly. Two decades of the reign of
Market Fundamentalism have impoverished both the language and aspirations of
progressive Democrats.

Instead, they dance around Market Fundamentalism; they try to gain support
for their cause without directly attacking the 800 pound gorilla that sits
in Congress, in our deteriorating schools, and at the bottom of the gulf
between those who hold stocks and those who wait for their next minimum-wage
paycheck.

Ideas that are not challenged or questioned become even more deeply
entrenched. We have private "security guards" who are doing the work of
soldiers in Iraq, but who are not accountable to the military. When
Hurricane Katrina tore through New Orleans, many of us imagined that the
Bush Administration's callous and incompetent failure to rescue the people
of New Orleans and to provide the leadership to rebuild the city would lead
to massive disillusionment with the Administration's market-oriented
rhetoric.

But has it? I'm not sure. Many people saw Bush's incompetence, but they also
viewed it as one more example of the government's incapacity to solve
problems.

This is a huge problem for liberals and progressives. Even if a decent
Democrat wins the White House in 2008, his or her ability to offer
compelling leadership and to propose new progressive solutions will be
limited if Market Fundamentalist ideas remain unquestioned. Ditto for the
women in Congress who think they will push women's issues on to the national
agenda.

So, it's necessary -no,urgent -that we immediately challenge Market
Fundamentalism every chance we get. Between now and the 2008 election, we
need to take every opportunity -on blogs, among political progressives -to
explain to others why this exaggerated faith in markets is so dangerous and
misplaced.

Fortunately, there is now a resource to help us make these arguments. The
Longview Institute, a progressive think tank with which I am affiliated, has
just launched a Market Fundamentalism resource page, designed to help people
recognize and refute these arguments. Longview's Fred Block, a sociologist
at the University of California at Davis, has long been articulating the
dangers of Market Fundamentalism. The plan is to steadily add new arguments
and new material, but what is already there provides plenty of fodder for a
collective assault on the irrational ideas that support Market
Fundamentalism.

Market Fundamentalism is what prevents us from having universal health care,
mass transit, affordable housing, trains that cross the nation, subsidized
care for the young and elderly, and government efforts to reduce carbon
emissions. The list, of course, is endless.

Aside from ending the war in Iraq, there is nothing more important we can do
to improve our domestic future. Ending the reign of Market Fundamentalism is
a precondition for every kind of progressive cause.

For a quarter of a century, Conservatives have tried to convince us that we,
rather than the government, should be responsible for what is known in other
industrialized nations as the "common good." If we don't attack the effort
to privatize every public service that belongs to this common good, we will
ultimately fail to move this nation in any progressive direction.

Ruth Rosen is a historian and journalist who teaches public policy at UC
Berkeley. She is a senior fellow at the Longview Institute.

Posted by Sylvie K.