http://www.newdeal20.org/?p=3476 ---------------------------------------------snip We have seen the financial sector, with its massive resources and access to the best minds of public relations, work to create what Stuart Ewen calls “spin.” The sector has busied itself with presenting new financial techniques, gilded as glories of 21st century innovation. In the deregulatory era of finance, we have been ever-so-persistently encouraged to draw the comparison between developments in financial products and the great leap forward in social uses of computers and the Internet, or advances in biomedical research. Former mathematicians, physicists, and computer scientists redirected their energies and Ph.D. tenacity to the domain of finance. Financial innovation was presented to us in a way that suggested that great things were happening for mankind. The presentations were usually vague. To understand them, we had only the power of our own imaginations, or perhaps, failing that, our awe in the face of this powerful expertise, confidently propelling us to a greater future.
Skeptical questioning–”Where are the benefits to be found?”–was frowned upon or ignored. ”Just doesn’t get it,” the whisperers would say. The skeptic was discredited with the insinuation that he or she was either 1) jealous of those who were making money and progress at the same time, or 2) had fallen down like a tired horse and just could not keep up with the new breed of thoroughbreds on Wall Street. After all, what kind of human spirit would get in the way of progress? -- "It's not the principle of the thing, it's the money!" _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
