It has been an event few weeks since I offered this post on Faction after the 100 day mark in the Obama Administration. I had hoped to complete this second longer-form piece of analysis shortly after that one, while my thoughts on Faction were still fresh, but I think the pile up of centralizing decisions in the Obama White House, the Iran revolt, and the death of Michael Jackson help establish the relevance of this post.
There is a distinct gap between what we know as citizens and what we need to know to be effective checks against our representative government.
And this gap would only exacerbate any Obamacasting that is going on, enabling the President to purposely using his popularity to entrance the public with his attractive persona while he and his Democrat colleagues in Congress make decisions supporting a farther-left-than-the-nation agenda.
As I have said, I am not ready to make a final conclusion on what does or does not motivate the President actions–that is a knowledge gap I cannot traverse (and the political commentariat on the right should take this into account). But with the available information in the open source (on the Internet, in the news, etc.), we can certainly take strong steps to shrink our knowledge gap about what our representatives are actually doing, and thus increase our ability to be a credible check on further overreaches by our government.
At a minimum, suspending our own conclusions and instead iniating more self-evaluation in light of a full range of perspectives and assumptions (not just those in agreement with ours), each of us can establish a bridge for more effective communication with a broader range of people, even one’s most militant opponents. For in engaging those with alternative or confrontational perspectives, we learn much about ourselves and whether we really believe what we believe, and why.
THE FINANCIAL KNOWLEDGE GAP
All this sounds very abstract. So let’s look back at the onset of the financial downturn, and the vulnerabilities produced by our knowledge gap as citizens about the financial intricacies involved. Matt Taibi in his outstanding article “The Big Takeover” at Rolling Stone offers this crucial observation:
As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren’t hard to follow. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power. In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates. By making an already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system — transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below.
In other words, the popular lack of understanding of our own mortgages produces this gap:
What happened here? A reasonable risk analysis conducted on behalf of the mortgage holders would not have been as likely to produce the unaccountable institutional culture of the banking community. See the list of findings identified by the UK Commons Treasury Committee in its report Banking Crisis: dealing with the failure of the UK banks:
- A culture of easy reward, illustrated by risky lending of credit and capital, has been underpinned by an assumption of continuous expansion in banking accompanied by an expectation of ever bigger bankers’ rewards.
- The origins of the banking crisis were many and varied, including low real interest rates, a search for yield, apparent excess liquidity and a misplaced faith in financial innovation. These ingredients combined to create an environment rich in overconfidence, over-optimism and the stifling of contrary opinions.
- Some of the banks have been the principal authors of their own demise. The culture within parts of British banking has increasingly been one of risk taking leading to the meltdown that we have witnessed. Bankers have made an astonishing mess of the financial system.
- This was a failure not only within individual banks but also of the supervisory system designed to protect the public from systemic risk.
- There were major failures in the modelling, procedures and structures for risk management.
Click here to read the full report (PDF format).
I have yet to see a similar report on U.S. banks and their shortcomings, though I may have missed it.
THE GOVERNMENT KNOWLEDGE GAP
I am concerned now that the Federal Government is proceeding along the same lines, as evident in the passing of the massive 1,100 page stimulus bill a day after it was published, as well as yesterday’s passage of 1,200 page Cap-and-Trade energy legislation.
Knowing how Washington works–that votes are procured for these nation-changing bills by promised earmarks to fellow legislators–there is no way that Obama’s promised transparency in government can be occurring in this environment. There is too much information and too many implications to process carefully and wisely, as a normal person, family, or business would proceed in making any major decision.
To make matters worse, not only we the people, but even our representatives in Congress seem to be on the wrong side of the knowledge gap in these decisions. According to Hugh Hewitt:
A 300 page amendment to a bill that greatly impacts every American and greatly burdens every American business was introduced at 3:00 AM Friday and passed 16 hours later.
The spectacle of the House voting for a massive tax increase and a 300 page amendment they could not have read is a low point for post-segregationist Congresses. Never have so few read so little about so important a proposal, and yet brazen forward oblivious to the the deeply embarrassing charade it presents to the world. Banana republics make a better show of governing themselves than did the U.S. House of Representatives today.
See a pattern here? Now let’s assume the best and believe our elected politicians and their staffs really considered and debated all the necessary elements and implications of this legislation. We the citizens are then left with this:
And upcoming we have health care legislation to prepare for, the biggest fish in the domestic policy ocean, the whale of the present Congress.
All this brings to mind the words of Coldplay’s Chris Martin:
Can anybody fly this thing?
Before my head explodes,
Or my head starts to ring.We’ve been living life inside a bubble,
We’ve been living life inside a bubble.Confidence in you,
Is confidence in me,
Is confidence in high speed.Can anybody stop this thing?
Before my head explodes,
Or my head starts to ring.We’ve been living life inside a bubble,
We’ve been living life inside a bubble.
I don’t yet have a lot of hard conclusions to draw. Do we expect as citizens to do what our representatives must? No, or better, not yet. But that could change sooner than we may think,
For now, I will only conclude that effective communication across all perspectives among our fellow citizens is crucial. Crucial! We cannot let Faction and any underlying ideological differences blind us from seeing the present knowledge gap. Too much is at stake.
So maybe the best remaining question to ask is if each of us who lack confidence in the direction of things are studying up and doing all we can to encourage others to narrow our collective knowledge gaps as citizens on these things? The information and tools for bridging the gap are freely available. Ignorance is no excuse.