Ruth Rosen: Note to Progressives ... Challenge Market Fundamentalism
[Ruth Rosen is a historian and journalist who teaches public policy at UC Berkeley. She is a senior fellow at the Longview Institute.]
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....
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 [the arguments made by conservatives]....
Read entire article at AlterNet
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....
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 [the arguments made by conservatives]....