Pandemic and the myth of the market

By
Max J. Castro                                              

                      Read Spanish Version

majcastro@gmail.com

Government
is back.

The
right-wing activist Grover Norquist once said his intention was to
shrink government to the size where it could be drowned in a bathtub.
Since Ronald Reagan, and especially during the eight-year reign of
George W. Bush, conservatives had a free reign dismembering and
demonizing government — with the exception of defense.

Hurricane
Katrina, the failure to reconstruct Iraq, the financial meltdown, and
the swine flu (H1N1) pandemic have dealt some devastating blows to
the strategy of “starving the beast” (government). Katrina showed
the disastrous consequences of government fecklessness and
ineptitude. It was a demonstration that those who disparage
government don’t do a very good job of governing. Minimalist
government may sound good in Washington circles but not when you are
up to your neck in water.

A
similar lesson about the foibles of cronyism and incompetence can be
gleaned from the catastrophic failure and waste in the reconstruction
of Iraq. The practice of placing ideologues and political hacks in
jobs overseeing the rebuilding of Iraq has redounded in financial
scandals and diminished welfare for the people of Iraq, further
fueling discontent over the American occupation.

The
financial meltdown, for its part, further exposed the fallacy of
laissez-faire capitalism. It showed the importance of the government
as a fail safe mechanism for those instances when the market loses
its supposed magic and is revealed as a flawed and fragile
contraption vulnerable to wild fluctuations and dirty manipulations.
The behemoths of American capital, General Motors, Citibank Goldman
Sachs, and myriad others were shown to have feet of clay. Ultimately,
it was only Uncle Sam — that despised interloper — and the American
taxpayer that might save them.

But
perhaps nothing can expose the fallacy of discrediting and disarming
government as much as a pandemic. No one — rich or poor, American,
Mexican or European, young and old — is immune from the virus that
is spreading throughout the world. This is a time when such
right-wing proclivities as disparaging international organizations
and attacking science fall by the wayside and are exposed for what
they are: demagoguery. How fortunate is it now that we have a Center
for Disease Control (CDC) and a World Health organization to monitor
and contain the spread of the disease.

The
crises discussed above compel us to discard the myth of the Market
god and rethink the relationship between the corporation, the
citizen, the nation, and the international organizations. Many
questions need to be asked, among them why not a fraction of the
trillions of dollars that have now been found to prop up the bastards
that enriched themselves obscenely in the process of wrecking the
economy could not be found ever be found to pay for AIDS treatment in
Africa or a decent medical system for this country.

The
H1N1 virus may or may not take a frightful toll on all of humanity
but it does remind us that we are all here together on one Earth.
There is no escape, not even for the very rich in their secluded
enclaves and gated communities serviced by Latino gardeners and
maids.

Now
that the “invisible hand” of the market has struck the whole
world with a dastardly blow, the worshipers of this false god have
been left bereft of a deity. Nothing is more pathetic than to watch
the befuddled members of the shrunken Republican Party grasping at
straws trying to come up with a vision and a message. As it turns
out, all they can conjure up are the old formulas which have been
tried with the disastrous result we are seeing. It is a wonder that
the Republicans have not yet come up with a tax cut to fight the
swine flu.