The burst of the speculative financial bubble,
that has long lost it's link with the productive
economy, will teach the new investor citizens
much faster than any book...
Eva
>
> Bill Clinton's "It's the Economy, Stupid!" strategy followed the same one used
> very successfully by Ronald Reagan in 1980. In Reagan's case, he asked
> U.S. citizens directly, "Are YOU better off than you were four years ago?"
> Not only does that slogan situate all important matters in the economic
> sphere (or the market, as typically conceived today) but also it reduces
> politics to a matter of simply calculating
> one's own immediate financial best interest. Additionally, such a tack
> effectively
> "dehumanizes" the market and the economy, divorcing economic indicators from
> their social, political and moral contexts--except as they relate to the
> individual who's
> in a strong enough respurce position to be thinking about raises, taxes,
> and stocks.
> As a strategy of political expediency, it's brilliant. In terms of deeper
> and longer-term implications for politics and ethics, it's disastrous. As
> Jacob Weisberg described so eloquently in the _New York Times Magazine_,
> Jan. 25, 1998, the U.S. has become a "community of investors," who
> understand politics largely by looking at their own pocketbooks at a
> particular moment.
>
> Fortunately, a number of important critiques of this perspective on human
> affairs have been advanced in just the past few years--see, e.g., Richard
> Sennett's _The Corrosion of Character_.
>
> --George Cheney
>
>
> George Cheney
> Professor and Director of Graduate Studies
> Department of Communication Studies
> The University of Montana-Missoula
> Missoula, MT 59812
> USA
> tel.: 406-243-4426
> fax: 406-243-6136
> e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
