In a recent interview from prison, Bernard Madoff, has made some interesting declarations which led me to ask what is wrong with us. In this interview Madoff "…asserted that unidentified banks and hedge funds were somehow 'complicit' in his elaborate fraud, an about – face from earlier claims that he was the only person involved… (NY Times February 15, 2011)."
I am not surprised and probably a lot of us are not surprised either. Diana Henriques' article goes to tell us that Madoff spoke with great intensity and fluency about his dealings with various banks and hedge funds, pointing to their “willful blindness” and their failure to examine discrepancies between his regulatory filings and other information available to them. “They had to know,” Mr. Madoff said. “But the attitude was sort of, ‘If you’re doing something wrong, we don’t want to know.’”
For sixteen years Madoff took advantage of the system, played its game and for sixteen years he won. However, Madoff is not the problem, and portraying him as the criminal who nearly made the system break down is another maneuver to deviate us from the real issue: that there is something rotten in the system. It is not the wrongdoing of a greedy man, but the way society is organized, people's values and vices that have to be fought.
Neoliberalism is a concept which is complex, diverse, contested and open to interpretation. It has become so amorphous that is difficult to recognize and define for what neoliberalism stands. Rather than concentrating in the practical elements of neoliberalism I would like to share some ideas of the subtle nature of the system.
Foucault contends that neoliberalism is not the end but a transformation of politics that restructures the power relations in society. The system is so pervasive that it extends not only to regulate economic relations but to establish the way society is organized, establishing new values and way of thinking. In Larner's words "… [n]eoliberalism is both a political discourse about the nature of rule and a set of practices that facilitate the governing of individuals from a distance… (Larner, 2000, p. 6) ." Following Dean's analysis on Foucault's concept of governmentality, we observe how government rationalities entail an attempt to affect and shape in some way who and what individuals and collectives are and should be (Dean, 2010) . The system permeated its values into the different societal spaces creating this new order.
Returning to Madoff and his fraud; I contend that his actions were a consequence of this new order and rather than being the cause of the illness, Madoff is the symptom of it. He took advantage of the greed that prevails in our world as well as the value structure in which rich and famous are the central values, a world in which Mammon rules.
In a world ruled by young, brash brokers, who in general have no idea of real economy or politics, live in fancy houses, drive fancy cars, and play roulette with our money; no wonder Madoff was able to swindle so many people for so many years. Being in his investors list was the big prize, it meant that you were really someone, and he took advantage of it. And it was easy.
When any fool, for participating in any idiotic reality show from Big Brother to Survivor, becomes a star and earns more than fifteen seconds of fame, then we know that something is rotten in the system. When teenagers dream of becoming celebrities and the latest debate is if the Tiger or Western mother is the best model for success instead of discussing who the best model for happiness is, then something is rotten in the system.
When a broker earns ten times (at least) more than a teacher, though we do not stop complaining about the quality of education, then something is rotten in the system. When a doctor has to work three, four or more twenty four hour shifts to earn an honorable salary, or social workers have to work in three jobs to pay the bills, then something is rotten in the system.
The problem is not only the salaries the different professions earn. The real problem is the social value we give to people and professions. We may appreciate teachers or social workers or doctors; but when society determines success through the amount of zeros in your bank account and despite our critics we kneel at the financial gurus who promise us quick money we have a real problem.
When people are dying of hunger or diseases as diarrhea which can be cure by a less than a fifty cent pill, while others are earning amounts we cannot even count, then the system is rotten and is not humane. You can argue that the alternatives are worst, let me tell you that the worst alternative is to believe there is no alternative.
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