[vapausfoorumi] The Great Consolidation

[Toni Heinonen]

NY Times osuu välillä oikeaan:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/17/opinion/17douthat.html?hp

The Great Consolidation
By ROSS DOUTHAT
This feels like a populist moment. Americans are Tea Partying. Greeks
are rioting. Incumbents are being thrown out; the Federal Reserve is
facing an audit; Goldman Sachs is facing prosecution. In Kentucky, Ron
Paul’s son might be about to win a Republican Senate primary.

But look through these anti-establishment theatrics to the deep
structures of political and economic power, and suddenly the surge of
populism feels like so much sound and fury, obscuring the real story
of our time. From Washington to Athens, the economic crisis is
producing consolidation rather than revolution, the entrenchment of
authority rather than its diffusion, and the concentration of power in
the hands of the same elite that presided over the disasters in the
first place.

Consider the European situation. For a week after Greece’s fiscal
meltdown began, all the talk was about the weakness of the European
Union, the folly of its too-rapid expansion, and the failure of the
Continent’s governing class to anticipate the crisis.

But then the E.U. acted, bailing out Greece to the tune of nearly a
trillion dollars, and dictating economic terms to Athens that resemble
“the kind of thing a surrendering field marshal signs in a railway car
in the forest at the end of a bloody war,” in the words of the
Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum. If the bailout succeeds, the
E.U.’s authority over its member states will be dramatically enhanced
— and a crisis created by hasty, elite-driven integration will have
led, inexorably, to further integration and a more powerful elite.

This trajectory should be familiar to Americans. The panic of 2008
happened, in part, because the public interest had become too
intertwined with private interests for the latter to be allowed to
fail. But everything we did to halt the panic, and all the legislation
we’ve passed, has only strengthened the symbiosis.

From the Troubled Asset Relief Program to the stimulus bill, from the
auto bailout to health care reform, we’ve created a vast new array of
public-private partnerships — empowering insiders at the expense of
outsiders, large institutions at the expense of small ones, and
Washington at the expense of state and local governments. Eighteen
months after the financial crisis, the interests of our financiers,
C.E.O.’s, bureaucrats and politicians are yoked together as never
before.

A similar, quieter consolidation has taken place in the realm of
national security. After campaigning against the Bush administration’s
foreign-policy overreach, President Obama has retained nearly all of
the war powers that George Bush took up in the wake of 9/11.

Yes, some of the previous administration’s more sweeping claims have
been repudiated. But the basic post-9/11 architecture of executive
power — expansive powers to detain, interrogate and assassinate,
claimed for the duration of an open-ended war — looks destined to
endure for presidencies to come.

Taken case by case, many of these policy choices are perfectly
defensible. Taken as a whole, they suggest a system that only knows
how to move in one direction. If consolidation creates a crisis, the
answer is further consolidation. If economic centralization has
unintended consequences, then you need political centralization to
clean up the mess. If a government conspicuously fails to prevent a
terrorist attack or a real estate bubble, then obviously it needs to
be given more powers to prevent the next one, or the one after that.

The C.I.A. and F.B.I. didn’t stop 9/11, so now we have the Department
of Homeland Security. Decades of government subsidies for homebuyers
helped create the housing crash, so now the government is subsidizing
the auto industry, the green-energy industry, the health care sector
...

The pattern applies to personnel as well as policy. If Robert Rubin’s
mistakes helped create an out-of-control financial sector, then
naturally you need Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers — Rubin’s
protégés — to set things right. After all, who else are you going to
trust with all that consolidated power? Ron Paul? Dennis Kucinich?
Sarah Palin?

This is the perverse logic of meritocracy. Once a system grows
sufficiently complex, it doesn’t matter how badly our best and
brightest foul things up. Every crisis increases their authority,
because they seem to be the only ones who understand the system well
enough to fix it.

But their fixes tend to make the system even more complex and
centralized, and more vulnerable to the next national-security
surprise, the next natural disaster, the next economic crisis. Which
is why, despite all the populist backlash and all the promises from
Washington, this isn’t the end of the “too big to fail” era. It’s the
beginning.

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Listan kotisivu: http://groups.google.com/group/vapausfoorumi

[Jussi Räsänen]

Kiitos vinkistä, hyva kirjoitus.

Lähetetty iPhonesta

[mikko sandt]

Siinä Naomi Kleinille vähän pureskeltavaa. Ehkä kriisit avaavat tietä taloudelliselle liberalismille vasta kun ollaan käyty todella pohjalla, jos silloinkaan.


-Mikko

2010/5/18 Toni Heinonen <toni.h...@gmail.com>

--
"Her life changed overnight when the Bolsheviks broke into her father’s pharmacy and declared his livelihood the property of the state."

Sounds like a plank from the Democratic platform for '08! -Jeff

[Jussi Räsänen]

Kyllä evoluutio ja netti hoitaa pitkällä aikavälillä homman mut välivaiheessa saattaa rytistä.  

Lähetetty iPhonesta