Reviving Ghosts of a 'Free-Market' Past

[marmar]

from Consortium News:




Reviving Ghosts of a 'Free-Market' Past

By Lawrence Davidson
April 12, 2011


Editor’s Note: If the “free-market” extremists get their way, the American people might be in for a visit to the bleak “Christmas pasts” of the 19th Century, a time that Charles Dickens defined in his novels about the plight of average people before the social reforms of the 20th Century.

It is as if the lessons of that now-distant time have been forgotten as U.S. politics now invites its revival – with the help of Republican ideologues who seem determined to turn back the pages of time and relive the mistakes of the past, as Lawrence Davidson notes in this guest essay:


In Charles Dickens’s 1848 story, A Christmas Carol, the ghost of Jacob Marley roams the earth weighted down by chains symbolizing the wrongs he committed in life.

He appears to Ebenezer Scrooge, his still living former business partner, to warn him that he must mend his ways: he must transform his greed into generosity and his disdain for the poor into the practice of community responsibility. He must do so or suffer eternal damnation.

In our own time, in our own story, the ghost of Marley has been replaced by that of Joe McCarthy. McCarthy’s ghost roams America at will and is particularly hyperactive in his former home state of Wisconsin. But his influence is not felt in the same manner as was Marley’s spirit.

Our contemporary apparition seeks not to warn and save others but to replicate itself, to regain substance through the corruption of others, such as Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, and the thoroughly suspect Waukesha Wisconsin County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.consortiumnews.com/2011/041211b.html