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i think part of this is not a "failure of communication"--it's more that folk who take a casual interest in economic matters seem to have assimilated aspects of neoliberalism as if they were descriptions of the economy and not ideological statements that generate a particular image of it. so the edito can be seen as a guy who's assumptions are basically monetarist making a straight monetarist critique of a sort of keynesian approach---things that matter in the former, like deficit spending, don't in the latter in anything like the say way because the logic that situates the idea of state deficits is basically different in each of the two frameworks.
and i think it's symptomatic that the dude who wrote that piece above doesn't situate his viewpoint---he doesn't identify his own assumptions as assumptions--rather he acts as though his assumptions are somehow not assumptions at all, and proceeds from there to apply these assumptions in a mechanical way with predictable results.
thing is that i don't think this guy is isolated--i think that alot of the problems people are having with what obama is doing stem from the same thing. it's hard not to get pavlovian about the explanation for it---folk with no particular interest in or understanding of economics or political economy have been subjected to a regime of sustained repetition for many years and like the good spectators that we are. replicate what they've been effectively conditioned by---without even recognizing that this process has taken place.
and if you think about it, there isn't and hasn't been and likely will not be a coherent debate anywhere in the american press about the overall direction that was cowboy capitalism, what it caused, where we are, where we should be heading and what approaches might be the best way to get there. you'd think if the united states was even a shadow of a democracy that this debate would be happening---but it isn't. why is that?
another way: this disconnect is a direct result of the fact that we in the united states live inside an authoritarian media climate which we pretend is other than it is because there's some goofball separation of public and private ownership and another that authoritarian regimes have to originate with a state.
and very little is being done to alter the effects of this regime.
and the regime itself is still in place.
i don't mean to sound paranoid about this---i talk about regime in the singular because of the astonishing consensus that has run across television and print media that neoliberalism is a coherent view of the world, to the exclusion of alternatives. so there's a sense in which the singular is appropriate. one result is that i think americans are in the main terrified of uncertainty, in part because they're afraid of the political.
if that's right, then this is a **problem**--one that's way deeper than whether obama is or is not selling his approach to an audience conditioned largely along lines that cannot process that approach.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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