I and millions of other supporters of this Obama moment in history have been puzzling over the strange events of the last few months. We’ve seen health care reform abandoned by a party and president both elected with a clear mandate to pass it.
As I wrote last time, William Greider explained early in the game that Democrats were probably too bought, with too much money, for them to embrace their classical values.
Now Glenn Greenwald takes this to its obvious conclusion, and nails the Democrats – both party and president – as playing a deliberate game of deception.
A year ago William Greider spelled out very clearly the dilemma faced by the Democrats, namely: can they return to their historic values against the corruption of money that has saturated them in the last three decades?
Reversing climate damage and restoring the biosphere will not happen from the greatness of governments, but from the persistence of people.
I think this excerpt from Leonardo Di Capricio’s 2007 film The 11th Hour says more eloquently than I could ever write what’s wrong with our nation’s great institutions, and the direction we must point our efforts in now.
The 11th Hour: The forces blocking change
And since I hate it when people provide links and don’t say what’s in them, let me throw a bit of transcript your way…
Two compelling stories from Simon Johnson in two days.
(1) He says the Republicans eagerly await the next round of election money from Wall Street players ready to take revenge on politicians who have tried to reform them.
(2) Then he says the crisis in Europe will be too much for U.S. banks – credit will tighten, forget recovery.
Today is a good day to ask, what would be so bad with voting green? I think the only reason a lot of people placed their climate anxiety on hold was to join the swell that supplied a Democrat majority. Now one has to wonder if this was worth foregoing the green message.
If the Democrats can’t use the majority that a number of different interests joined together to give them – if they can’t even pass desirable legislation at the national level – then what good are they to the environmental cause?
There’s more good commentary on the old America, the one that’s broken and needs to fix itself.
Two commentators, both of whom have spent time in China recently, have come back to worry on the bone that everyone seems to be chewing now, asking: is America in permanent decline, or can it be fixed?
I noted recently that the political process is broken, and it’s a theme we’ll see more of as the country comes to terms with what Obama’s first year has shown us. I think in 2009 we saw a great president get weighted down to a crawl because Congress and his own administration was captured by lobbyists.
We’ve seen obstruction to change, and a lack of will to change, that serve at least to show us how paralyzed the systems of government have become.
I’m trying to stay away from working with the old economy, especially since I declared for the new economy, but good commentary deserves mention. Kevin Drum has a beautifully written article explaining in completely clear terms how Wall Street managed to walk away unscathed from the global disaster it left the rest of us buried under.
It’s the kind of piece you can send to any of your friends and they will see a light breaking as they read it. The article, Capital City, has this to say: “A year after the biggest bailout in US history, Wall Street lobbyists don’t just have influence in Washington. They own it lock, stock, and barrel.”
But Drum’s story is not about economics, it’s about politics, and more precisely about political lobbying. The finance lobby has quite simply captured the entire U.S. government, and to a large extent it’s taken over the media and popular culture as well.
Here’s a simple story told well, about a tiny piece of the new economy. Laid-off steelworkers find good jobs making windwills for renewable energy.
I sometimes wonder what’s so hard to grasp about the trillions of dollars in revenues waiting for the smart entrepreneurs in our new, sustainable economy.
It’s really pretty simple: there is great bounty given to us in our original world. We only need to learn how to spend creatively, contributing back to the bounty, and we can live here forever.
I’ve studied a broad spectrum of commentary on the passage of the health care bill, and I side squarely with Jonathan Chait in calling it a triumph. Not for what it comprises in its messy compromises today, but for the strategic gateway it opens to the future. History will smile on it.
Chait best explains all the reasons why the bill constitutes what he calls “the most significant American legislative triumph in at least four decades.” Read the piece in the New Republic: And the Rest Is Just Noise.
The uncaring way we treat the place, do we humans even really belong here, on this Earth?
I recall another good point Ray Anderson made in his book, Mid-Course Correction. He cited the case of the Fraser firs of eastern Tennessee, heritage forests from the last ice age, ravaged and reduced to almost nothing now by a species of insect accidentally introduced from Europe, against which the trees have no defense.
Anderson’s chilling point quotes the Forest Service report that as an exotic species, the parasite has no natural balance developed for its new ecological niche, and thus will kill its own host, and then die.
To me this sounds a lot like us, here.
Maybe those theories are correct: we ARE descended from aliens after all. If so, they were probably fleeing a ruined home planet.
Ray Anderson reflects on the 15 years passed in his effort to transform a billion-dollar carpet manufacturing operation, from a petro-intensive resource “plunderer” into a zero-footprint, eternally sustainable company.
It’s looking good – he’s 60 percent of the way up that mountain he talks about, and he and his people can now see the top. They know they’re going to get there.
With “only” 11,000 workers fired last month, the job-loss slide may be easing, or it may be a seasonal stall in shedding employees. The new year will tell.
Much may depend on fiscal policy. Economists agree that most of the 2.8% growth in the third quarter is a result of the stimulus. As I’ve said before, more stimulus would work wonders right now.
Meanwhile, where is reasonable security of tenure, and strategic job-holding for willing workers? Only in sustainability – that third economy I mentioned the other day.
Others agree that green job creation is a miracle profit center waiting to explode.
Nouriel Roubini paints a stark picture of our economic prospects and tells a tale of two economies, one rich, one poor. Personally, I’m heading for the third economy, the one being newly created right now all around us as a sustainable economy.
We’re losing jobs, credit is unavailable, small businesses and householders are being forced to bankruptcy, and this will continue for some time yet.
On the basis that the old economy was wrongly constructed to begin with, what’s actually to preserve here? The old jobs are never coming back. Time for new jobs.
When things are bad it’s easy to look for people to blame, but for my money there’s a lot more simple incompetence at work than there is downright conspiracy. Looking for secret schemers as an explanation for the hidden dynamics of life, we often overlook dullness and underachievement as forces in play.
Part of the reason we overlook the incompetence larded throughout our national activity is the mediocrity of reporting itself. For illustration, nothing serves better than the abysmal job of reporting on Obama’s trip to China done by the mainstream media that feeds us our news and analysis. In one big blue pencil slash, the media shows that incompetence needs no controlling hand, it runs itself quite well.
Even as the political process grinds forward on health care reform and financial regulation, the capitulations made along the way by Congress and the administration have puzzled countless supporters of these reforms. The larger story behind these frustrations is that the political process is broken.
Amy Goodman at Democracy Nowtalked this week with Robert Johnson, a global expert on finance and international monetary reform, to find out why his testimony was silenced when he spoke before Congress advocating more regulation of derivatives. His simple explanation is that business very completely owns our representatives through the campaign finance system. This structural dysfunction, says Johnson, is what prevents much of the reform from getting passed.
Click through to see the clip and more commentary by others.
The Speech For Which We Have Been Waiting « The Baseline Scenario tags: economics The problem with fixing the economy is a lot like the problem with fixing global warming. Things have reached the point of no return. It’s too late to turn the Titanic around, the iceberg is in our path and we are about to [...] […]
Way Too Big To Save « The Baseline Scenario tags: economics The biggest banks in some European countries today are already too big to save. Unless we take immediate and real action to reduce the power – and size – of our largest banks, we are heading in exactly the same direction. The great failure of the Obama [...] […]
Robert Reich (The Enthusiasm Gap) tags: policy Anyone with an ounce of sanity understands government is the only effective countervailing force against the forces that got us into this mess If there was ever a time to connect the dots and make the case for government as the singular means of protecting the public from these forces it [...] […]
Going to hell #5 – James Fallows tags: policy “The subversive influence of money on the political process is the underlying cause of most of that which ails our country. It has led to social, political, economic and international disaster for our country. It has led to unnecessary wars, the near collapse of our economy, staggering public debt, little hope […]
Greenwald – The Democratic Party’s deceitful game tags: policy The primary tactic in this game is Villain Rotation. They always have a handful of Democratic Senators announce that they will be the ones to deviate this time from the ostensible party position and impede success, but the designated Villain constantly shifts, so the Party itself can claim it […]
Banking Industry: Sicker, More Concentrated « The Baseline Scenario tags: economics Get rid of the Fed. Open 50 State Banks. North Dakota, the only state with a state bank (opened in 1919) does not have a failed bank on the FDIC list that started in Oct. 2000. It also has a budget surplus of around $1 billion. ND [...] […]
Op-Ed Columnist – The Bankruptcy Boys – NYTimes.com tags: economics In fact, conservatives have backed away from spending cuts they themselves proposed in the past. In the 1990s, for example, Republicans in Congress tried to force through sharp cuts in Medicare. But now they have made opposition to any effort to spend Medicare funds more wisely the [...] […]
Economist’s View: Tax Cuts and Government Investment tags: economics Invisible Hand, first note that Adam Smith, despite the myth, even in 1776 understood that the invisible hand did not work well in many cases without a government role. As Cornell economist Robert H. Frank notes in his New York Times Economic Scene article of May 25, 2008: ADAM [...] […]
Ezra Klein – Commented: The center cannot hold tags: policy And there’s another wrench: we’re interactive. Wonkish internetting improves the civil discourse, and looks at serious policy analysis, and faster than any politician can muster. Speedy facts plus interactive discussion. Overall, what is happening is a change in the relationship of observant […]
Elizabeth Warren Calls Out Wall Street « The Baseline Scenario tags: economics But last month, Republican political consultant Frank Luntz wrote a memo laying out how Republicans could kill financial regulatory reform. “Ordinarily, calling for a new government program ‘to protect consumers’ would be extraordinary popular,” he wrote. “But these are not ord […]
I and millions of other supporters of this Obama moment in history have been puzzling over the strange events of the last few months. We’ve seen health care reform abandoned by a party and president both elected with a clear mandate to pass it.
Two compelling stories from Simon Johnson in two days.
Today is a good day to ask, what would be so bad with voting green? I think the only reason a lot of people placed their climate anxiety on hold was to join the swell that supplied a Democrat majority. Now one has to wonder if this was worth foregoing the green message.
There’s more good commentary on the old America, the one that’s broken and needs to fix itself.
I’m trying to stay away from working with the 
I’ve studied a broad spectrum of commentary on the passage of the health care bill, and I side squarely with Jonathan Chait in calling it a triumph. Not for what it comprises in its messy compromises today, but for the strategic gateway it opens to the future. History will smile on it.
The uncaring way we treat the place, do we humans even really belong here, on this Earth?
With “only” 11,000 workers fired last month, the job-loss slide may be easing, or it may be a seasonal stall in shedding employees. The new year will tell.
Nouriel Roubini paints a stark picture of our economic prospects and tells a tale of two economies, one rich, one poor. Personally, I’m heading for the third economy, the one being newly created right now all around us as a sustainable economy.
When things are bad it’s easy to look for people to blame, but for my money there’s a lot more simple incompetence at work than there is downright conspiracy. Looking for secret schemers as an explanation for the hidden dynamics of life, we often overlook dullness and underachievement as forces in play.
Even as the political process grinds forward on health care reform and financial regulation, the capitulations made along the way by Congress and the administration have puzzled countless supporters of these reforms. The larger story behind these frustrations is that the political process is broken.
