Politics & Power Quote by William Greider

Greider frames the argument as if the nation has accidentally stumbled into a moral crossroads, when the real provocation is that we have been living at that crossroads for decades. The line “suddenly on the table” is a quiet indictment: it suggests an emergency has finally made visible what was long treated as “just how the system works.” His intent is to strip market ideology of its invisibility cloak and force it to answer for itself in plain ethical terms.

The wording does a lot of ideological unmasking. “Give precedence” is bureaucratic language for a brutal hierarchy: some things get protected; others get priced. Pairing “private financial gain” with “market determinism” isn’t redundant, it’s strategic. Greider targets both the motive (profit) and the alibi (the claim that outcomes are inevitable because “the market” demanded them). “Determinism” turns economics into fate, a way to dodge responsibility while still collecting dividends.

Then comes the rhetorical pivot: “over human lives and broad public values.” He’s not merely contrasting money with life; he’s insisting that public values are real, collective assets, not sentimental extras. The subtext is that policy debates are routinely staged as technical disputes about efficiency, while the stakes are existential and civic: who gets to be safe, who gets to be cared for, who gets to count.

Contextually, Greider is writing in the long shadow of deregulation, austerity politics, and corporate power, when crises (financial crashes, wars, pandemics, climate disasters) reveal the limits of market-first governance. The question isn’t whether the market is useful; it’s whether we’ll keep treating it as sovereign.