Published on Tuesday, January 30, 2007 by CommonDreams.org
Note to Nancy Pelosi: Challenge Market Fundamentalism
by Ruth Rosen
Allison Stevens, a contributor to Women’s enews, a news service which too few good men bother to read, has just reported that the hugely expanded bipartisan Congressional Caucus for Women's Issues now has the power to put women’s issues on the national agenda. The caucus, which Stevens says may end up outnumbering the so-called “Blue Dog Coalition, a caucus of 44 fiscally conservative Democrats, and the New Democrat Coalition, a group of 63 pro-business Democrats,” also has access to, and probably the support of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was a member of the caucus, which was founded in 1977.
Among the issues on their “wish list” 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 they 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. .....(more)
The rest is at:
http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0130-22.htm
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