I'm posting this since the article talked about financial regulation, which reminds me of what happened when there wasn't any oversight in dialysis: just the facts. But now on to the article:Published on Friday, August 20, 2010 by the San Francisco Chronicle
Insanity Is Deja Vu All Over Again
by David Sirota
Out of all the famous quotations, few better describe this eerily familiar time than those attributed to George Santayana and Yogi Berra. The former, a philosopher, warned that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." The latter, a baseball player, stumbled into prophecy by declaring, "It's deja vu all over again."
Vietnam showed us the perils of occupation, then the war in Iraq showed us the same thing - and yet now, we are somehow doing it all over again in Afghanistan. The Great Depression underscored the downsides of laissez-faire economics, the Great Recession highlighted the same danger - and yet the new financial "reform" bill leaves that laissez-faire attitude largely intact. Ronald Reagan proved the failure of trickle-down tax cuts to spread prosperity before George W. Bush proved the same thing - and yet now, in a recession, Congress is considering more tax cuts all over again.
These are but a few examples of mistakes being repeated ad infinitum. Why have we become so dismissive of history's lessons and therefore so willing to repeat history's mistakes?
Some of it is the modern information miasma. Though the Internet makes eons of history instantly available, the 24-7, moment-to-moment typhoon of cable screamfests, blogs, tweets, e-mail alerts and "breaking news" graphics makes last week's news seem old and last month's news seem positively paleolithic. Add to this reportage that is increasingly presented with zero context, and it's clear that journalism is sowing mass senility.
Politicians also make significant contributions to the problem. With the age of the permanent campaign intensifying and the era of the long-term electoral majority ending, both parties deliberately focus only on the very recent past - and obscure the larger historical record. From the national debt to poverty to the downsides of American empire, Republicans tell us it's all the fault of Democrats' 2-year-old reign, while Democrats blame it on Bush's eight-year presidency. This, even though these emergencies developed over decades.
With the present so radically departing from our past, history has become a damning package of inconvenient truths - and those truths are often shunned because they threaten today's most powerful ideological interests.
This is why in the debates over war, economics and taxes, we aren't urged to consider past conflicts; we aren't encouraged to remember that America experienced its most storied growth under the New Deal's aggressive financial regulation; and we aren't told that wages and job growth expanded in the mid-20th century with a top income tax bracket above 70 percent. We aren't reminded of these facts because they threaten the defense industry, Wall Street and high-income taxpayers, respectively - and those forces exert enormous influence over our political discourse, whether through media sponsorship, political campaign contributions or lobbying.
No matter the issue, this axiom is the same: When money has a vested interest in burying history, history is inevitably buried, ultimately leading us from Santayana and Berra's aphorisms to Albert Einstein's definition of insanity: doing the same things over and over again and somehow expecting different results.
