Thank you Mr. Solomon for clearly expressing that the so-called "non-ideological" positions actually represent a "hidden in plain sight" ideology. That campaign of disinformation was beginning to seriously irritate me and it helps a little to see others are similary aware and irritated.

Naomi Klein, Michael Hudson, and Robert Kuttner were on www.democracynow.org today. Naomi's opening response to Amy Goodman's question about the appointments of Geithner and Summers, a "profound disappointment", echoed similarly by Hudson and Kuttner.

So please, someone explain to me as one of those annoying Nader supporters, how in the hell so many people of the progressive left, including Norman Soloman, didn't see this coming??

Meanwhile, the end of ideology among policymakers is about as imminent as the end of history.

Don't tell that to former Neocon majordomo Frances Fukuyama. He wrote a bullshit tome called The End of History in which he claimed liberal values had triumphed around the world and we could all go on cruise control. Guess he never heard of Iraq or The Great Texas Worm.

Government arose among people to enforce terms of contracts upon victims. Religion arose to subvert the spiritual inclinations of individuals into support of the government by means of a cosmology. In industrial society, cosmology has been replaced by ideology, but its ideas are no more susceptible to inspection or to reason than the boat of Ra.
“Economics” is a ideology-ridden pseudo-science that should be moved to the occult section of the library alongside its close relative “alchemy.” Whereas alchemy sought to turn base metals into gold, economics claims to turn paper into gold.
Because, as Adam Smith pointed out, labor is the source of value in an economy and labor is governed by the laws of thermodynamics, it must follow that the economy is also bound by the laws of thermodynamics. The second law prohibits the interpretation of transactions that produce more labor, that is more value, than was input. Such surpluses cannot exist in reality and must therefore come from victims.
In providing bailouts, our government has made itself into the all-purpose victim and imposed a universal subservience upon America’s taxpayers. Clearly the sensible thing to do with any organization that demands a bailout is for the government to nationalize it. The way out of the crisis is to do what governments throughout history have done, since centuries before the term “socialism” was invented: nationalize the retail banking and residential mortgage industries.

nice article.

I'm glad this was written. I saw a flurry of this "pragmatist, non-ideologue talk" on the news yesterday.

Pragmatism, while it does reject a prior assumptions is not the complete absence of ideology. I consider myself a socialist and a pragmatist. I'm interested in the plight of the working class, but don't hold hard and fast to any particular prescripition for the emancipation of the working class. A centrist or center right pragmatist would have corporations and monied interests in mind, but would not hold hard and fast to any particular method of helping the monied classes. What's the difference between a left-wing pragmatist and a right-wing pragmatist? The INTERESTS which they serve. What's the real difference between interest and ideology?

Change? We have a Corporate Police State! The only 'change' we are likely to see is when
the Likud Puppet Master has either the Left or the Right hand sock puppet doing the talking.

Actually, it's the ideology of total bullshit. That's what the Dems have learned from Cheney/Rove/Bush - that We The People will believe anything our "leaders" say, no matter how painfully their actions screw us.

Today's example? The Fed is giving banks another f**king $800 billion of our money at 5-8% interest so they can loan our money back to us at 30% - and we're told it's to HELP US, because that is exactly what we want and need - more debt piled on top of the debt we can't afford. Total bullshit.

Solomon says what needs to be said nearly every time.

We are now being sold the usual bill of goods, and uncounted thousands will remain unconvinced of this, and reluctant to be so disappointed because Obama has not even been sworn in yet.

I've had eight years of ideology. I don't want any more. Anyone can see what governing by ideology will produce.

I'm beginning to think that some people wouldn't be happy no matter who was elected or who they picked.

Aside from that we have enormously more important problems to solve than a bit of ideological disappointment.

AIPAC is clearly showing it's power and influence in Obama's cabinet which is sad for Americans. Instead of choosing more peace minded leaders more hawkish dual nationalists are chosen.

I don't see this as pragmatical at all. Is this Israel's government or the people of America's?

These people create (by deregulation and other measures) the crisis and then they come back as part of the solution. The US is so mired in corruption only the corrupt seem to be running the show. The taxpayers and american public pay and pay - there is no bailout for them.

I'm not certain why this seems such a revelation to Mr. Solomon. It has been clear as day since Obama emerged on the national scene that he is a mainstream politician, fully steeped in the postmodern political construct, which is one in which everything outside of mainstream discourse is tagged an "ideology". Anyone who listened to Obama's broadcast speech at the Democratic convention in 2004 could see he was being groomed for the role which he has indeed played. In fact, when some of we who post at Black Agenda Report predicted his nomination and election two years ago, we were greeted with the usual "are you kidding? He'd never live through the primaries". To which we used to respond that it's in the interest of the ruling elite to have someone with Obama's eloquence and magnetism out in front of the empire, a sort of JFK in sepia.

In August of 2006, a very interesting article on Obama's political alliances was published by Harper's Magazine called "Barack Obama Incorporated". I don't remember the author's name, but it documents Obama's ties to Archer Daniels Midland. And earlier that same summer, Obama gave an interview to the Chicago Tribune in which he projected the need for a missile strike on Iran, should it continue with its nuclear program. But these things are all ancient history, the sort of thing that gets swept under the carpet and denied during the emotions of an election year. The real factionalists, who Norman Solomon defines here as the ideologues of non-ideology, have helped obscure the actual political past of the President Elect.

Believe you me, any person who grew up Black in this country was initially excited at the prospects generated by Obama when his name started coming into national prominence four years ago. But a lot of us also know enough about the "democratic" party through decades of bitter experience and a steady feed of corporate Black figureheads in other areas of government to take anyone they bring forward not just with a grain, but the entire keg of salt. And that's why some of us, myself included, were so fiery all through this election year when the cult around Obama reached the levels of ridiculousness it reached with children's choirs and all else that nauseates.

A steady tip of the hat should go to Brother Adolph Reed, who peeped Obama back in 1996. He is the politician who Reed alludes to at the end of his essay about the corporatization of Black community politics called "Democrats I do hate" which appears in his book Class Notes.

Good article, but it is not really a matter of "ideology of no ideology". It's more "ideology posing as no ideology" (implicit in the article, no doubt.)

Ideology is the glue that holds the economic machine together (globalization, "market", unending economic growth, wealth manipulation). Pragmatism in the context "fixes" problems and keeps the engine running.

The root of the dilemma, in my opinion, is that the engine has proven itself to be deadly to the earth, communities, cultures, the soul; so, the pragmatic thing to do would be to figure out how to dismantle (and transform) the corporate machine with as little harm to individual lives as possible.

Is that ideological? To me, it seems that Summers and so on are the people saying to someone with cancer that with more chemo, another transfusion, more drugs we'll be able to drag it on a bit longer; whereas, what's really needed is a surgeon.

So, it is always a good idea to see assumptions clearly. We are still in the never-never land where only certain assumptions are acceptable and the way everything else is dealt with is to ignore it and pretend there *isn't* any other way of seeing things. (It's at the root of "we are pragmatists, not ideologues.") Are Obama and crew "deep" pragmatists? Not likely.

I am inclined to say that obviously seeing things as they 'really' are is such a slippery reality. From person to person and expert to expert that vast sliding scale is engaged and geared up to satisfy some ends to some means. Who has the pragmatic and real view of the world among us, moderate and thoughtful, who? We all do.

That is the value of real democracy, the view to be realized, must encompass the whole, and the few at the top, that vapor thin layer, will never give us anything but their vain and narrow truth spouted from their lofty and disconnected realm that is founded on nothing but vain and faulty ideals.

When those who align themselves as left, feel wanting of what is espoused to be the best of the center right, and so fill that want with what they imagine is the pragmatic representative of that want, we have nothing but what is imagined is wanting. Imagine the wanting we will soon have.

What happened to Obama's promise to the people? So quickly forsaken for fear of reaching for ideals and so settling quickly instead for last centuries slippery pragmatism at clearinghouse prices on ebay.gov.

Some non-ideological facts about Lawrence (aka Larry) Summers, Obama's newly appointed director of the National Economic Council:

1991-93: Chief economist of the World Bank

July 2, 1999: Appointed U.S. Treasury Secretary; served through the remainder of the Clinton Admistration.

2001: Named president of Harvard University. Resigned from that post in Februray 2006, after a relatively brief and turbulent tenure of five years, nudged by Harvard's governing corporation and facing a vote of no confidence from the influential Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Eventually alienated professors with a personal style that many saw as bullying and arrogant. His well-known desire to change Harvard's culture, which he saw as complacent, was accompanied by slights to some faculty members and missteps like his statement in 2005 that women might lack an intrinsic aptitude for mathematics and science.

November 2008: named to Barack Obama's Transition Economic Advisory Board.

The following memo was issued by Summers while he was working at the World Bank.

DATE: December 12, 1991
TO: Distribution
FR: Lawrence H. Summers
Subject: GEP

'Dirty' Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Less Developed Countries]? I can think of three reasons:

1) The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of view a given amount of health impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.

2) The costs of pollution are likely to be non-linear as the initial increments of pollution probably have very low cost. I've always though that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste.

3) The demand for a clean environment for aesthetic and health reasons is likely to have very high income elasticity. The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostrate cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostrate cancer than in a country where under 5 mortality is is 200 per thousand. Also, much of the concern over industrial atmosphere discharge is about visibility impairing particulates. These discharges may have very little direct health impact. Clearly trade in goods that embody aesthetic pollution concerns could be welfare enhancing. While production is mobile the consumption of pretty air is a non-tradable.

The problem with the arguments against all of these proposals for more pollution in LDCs (intrinsic rights to certain goods, moral reasons, social concerns, lack of adequate markets, etc.) could be turned around and used more or less effectively against every Bank proposal for liberalization.

Postscript
After the memo became public in February 1992, Brazil's then-Secretary of the Environment Jose Lutzenburger wrote back to Summers: "Your reasoning is perfectly logical but totally insane... Your thoughts [provide] a concrete example of the unbelievable alienation, reductionist thinking, social ruthlessness and the arrogant ignorance of many conventional 'economists' concerning the nature of the world we live in... If the World Bank keeps you as vice president it will lose all credibility. To me it would confirm what I often said... the best thing that could happen would be for the Bank to disappear." Sadly, Mr. Lutzenburger was fired shortly after writing this letter.