A Hostage Situation?

It appears that, around the time I was laboring over my "Confidence We Can Believe In?" post about moves by both the current and future Administrations towards economic recovery, Robert Scheer came out with a far more aggressive column entitled "Obama Chooses Wall Street Over Main Street." True to the precepts of good journalism, Scheer has his cards (both logical and rhetorical) on the table within his first two paragraphs:

Maybe Ralph Nader was right in predicting that the same Wall Street hustlers would have a lock on our government no matter which major party won the election. I hate to admit it, since it wasn’t that long ago that I heatedly challenged Nader in a debate on this very point.

But how else is one to respond to Barack Obama’s picking the very folks who helped get us into this financial mess to now lead us out of it? Watching the president-elect’s Monday introduction of his economic team, my brother-in-law Pete said, “You can see the feathers coming out of their mouths” as the foxes were once again put in charge of the henhouse. He didn’t have time to expound on his point, having to get ready to go sort mail in his job at the post office. But he showed me a statement from Citigroup showing that the interest rate on Pete the Postal Worker’s credit card was 28.9 percent, an amount that all major religions would justly condemn as usurious.

I was not surprised to see this column trigger a flood of comments on Truthdig, most of which seemed to be generating far more heat than light. Still, the heat was a necessary part of the process. How else can people vent their frustration with a system that has created such an untenable situation?

Reading through all of this frustration, I was reminded of Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek's recent observation that we no longer have an adequate socio-political narrative to address questions as fundamental as our justification for being or how we choose what to do. Where this economic crisis is concerned, however, the quest for a narrative (such as has been explored by the economist Deirdre McCloskey) may be too ambitious. Perhaps we just need to home in on a good solid metaphor.

In a grim sort of way, I may have found that metaphor in Mumbai. Wall Street has put the world in a hostage situation whose conditions are not that different from that of the people in those five-star hotels in Mumbai that were attacked yesterday; and Barack Obama is trying to assemble a team of skilled hostage negotiators. "Success," such as it is, involves averting total economic collapse (which would be devastating to Main Street) and the restoration of the "monetary confidence game" to a degree that folks on Main Street are back in a position to provide food, clothing, and shelter without having to prioritize one over the others. To the extent that we value self-sufficiency over welfare, that position will have to involve the restoration of viable income, most likely through properly-compensated jobs.

In the context of this metaphor, has Obama provided us with a skilled hostage negotiation team? Most of us probably lack the knowledge to make an assessment; but that assessment will involve more than the sort of elementary-school-level arithmetic that Rachel Maddow has been flogging on MSNBC. I am more inclined to go with the opinion of someone like Paul Krugman, whose mathematics resides more in the complexity of non-linear equations. On the other hand I would be even more comfortable with an opinion from someone like Robert Solow or Joseph Stiglitz, both of whom are very good at translating numbers into readable text and both of whom, curiously enough, have been off the radar recently.