Steve Burns: Starting from “No!” A citizen's guide to crisis response

It's been encouraging to see how many commentators – from Democracy Now's Amy Goodman to the Daily Show's Jon Stewart – have made the connection between the scare tactics used by the Bush administration to sell its Wall Street bailout plan and the scare tactics used by the same administration to sell the war on Iraq. In these dark times, I take this as a small ray of hope, an indication that Naomi Klein may be right when she suggests that crises - or “shocks” - are an effective tool for powerholders* who wish to work their will on a reluctant public, but that societies subjected to repeated shocks can become more “shock-resistant” as the public learns to see through and work around the shock tactics of their leaders.

In the end, Bush's Wall Street bailout has gone through with some modifications (like giving the public equity shares in the companies that are bailed out). Economist Nouriel Roubini, who accurately predicted the crisis when others were claiming the “fundamentals of our economy are sound”, describes the bailout as "a disgrace" and "a bailout of reckless bankers, lenders and investors that provides little direct debt relief to borrowers and financially stressed households and that will come at a very high cost to the US taxpayer.”

So we can't say that the American people's shock-resistance has reached the point where we can actually thwart - or even significantly alter - the plans of the powerholders. Nevertheless, eight years of the Bush administration have provided us all with a useful (if expensive) course in government shock tactics and how best to resist them. We should be codifying these lessons, so we have them handy in the next crisis. In that spirit, I offer a short list of rules:

1) Watch out for power grabs
The first reponse by powerholders to any crisis will be to act to increase their own power (for the good of the nation, of course). You saw the 9/11 attacks as an unprecedented tragedy, but Dick Cheney saw them as an unprecedented opportunity to accumulate more power in his own office and the Executive branch – power that he felt had been illegitimately taken by Congress in the preceding thirty years. In the same way, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson saw the mortgage crisis as an opportunity to gain powers that no Treasury Secretary has ever had, including the right to spend hundreds of billions of dollars of public money with no oversight and no possibility of legal review afterwards.
All powerholders have plans for increasing their own power in a desk drawer waiting for the "right” moment. For this reason, the best response to the first plan that comes out the door is always “no.”

2) You will be lied to
In the first days of a crisis, the government will hold a monopoly on information, as the mass media rush to “respected” authority figures for their take on the crisis. Most of these people will be the same people who participated in the creation of the crisis, either through action or inaction. Dissident voices will be absent from the “debate.” Trust nothing you hear in the first weeks, and be especially wary if there appears to be a “consensus” about what to do.

3) Don't defer to the “experts”
In any real crisis, their will be disagreement among the experts about what to do. This disagreement will be hidden from you in the early days, so powerholders will be able to claim that they are merely acting on expert advice, when they have, in fact, been engaged in a sophisticated process of “expert-shopping” to find the experts who will back them up while discarding experts with alternative views or plans. When asked, “Shouldn't we listen to the experts?” it's best to respond, “Which experts?”

4) Stall for time
Powerholders will want to precipitate a rush to judgement in the early days while they still hold a monopoly on information and proposals. Delaying the “solution” will help to create a space for alternative experts and solutions to come forward. Every additional day is a victory for the citizenry, because it allows more time for power grabs to be exposed and for self-interested proposals to be rejected. More time also increases the number of people who will be asking these questions: “How have others dealt with similar crises? What worked and what didn't?”

5) Refuse to be silenced by “What's your alternative?”
In a crisis, citizens often hesitate to reject the proposals put forward by powerholders because they don't know what to do themselves. Aren't we being unreasonable if we oppose the powerholders plans without offering a plan of our own? And since I lack the necessary expertise to create such a plan – or even to know which plan might be best – isn't it best for me to just stay out of the matter entirely?
But this approach misunderstands our role as citizens of a flawed quasi-democracy. Our primary role is not to spend our days roaming the internet, conducting research in an attempt to craft the best “solution.” In a crisis, the most useful thing the non-expert citizen can do is to slow the decision-making process down, so that the powerholders proposals can be subjected to the necessary scrutiny and people who really do know more about the problem than the rest of us can come forward with alternative proposals. Waiting until you yourself know what to do simply removes you from the game in the most critical early days, and having the best plan in the world won't help if the decision has already been made.

For these reasons, the most important demands that citizens can make in a crisis are not demands for specfic policies (which the powerholders will always ignore anyway) but demands for time, transparency and democracy. Time allows popular opposition to be marshalled and alternative solutions to be brought forward, transparency allows the self-interested proposals of the powerholders to be exposed and defeated, and democracy corrects the imbalance of power that makes crises so attractive to powerholders in the first place.

Focusing on these three demands rather than specific policy demands places the citizens on firmer ground, where they can assert their demands with confidence. One doesn't have to be an economist to know that a deal rushed through in a few days in a closed-door process by the same people who caused the crisis is going to be a bad deal. Many Americans recognized this basic fact in the first days of the recent crisis. If they weren't joined by enough of their fellow citizens to create the kind of popular uprising that could reassert the public interest over the self-interest of Wall Street insiders, we shouldn't be surprised. One phrase we've heard repeatedly over the last week is "crisis of confidence", in reference to the loss of trust in investment banks and the pieces of paper that they had gotten so rich promoting. But there's another "crisis of confidence" we should be addressing: the loss of confidence among "ordinary" citizens that they can play any meaningful role in decision-making when they are confronted with policy "debates" featuring derivatives of mortgaged-back securities or shipments of Uranium ore from Niger. I offer the five rules above in an attempt to address this more fundamental crisis of confidence, confident that we will have many opportunities in the near future to test them out.

*For the sake of brevity, I'm following the terminology of social-movement theorist Bill Moyer, who used the term "powerholders" rather than the clunkier "those in power". Marxists might want to substitute the term "ruling class."

UPDATE:
Here's economist Dean Baker talking about the bailout: