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…
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.
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.
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.
Here on the eve of Obama’s speech on health care before Congress, I just caught up with a Frontline special from 2008 on how five industrialized nations around the world handle their own health care.
It’s compelling viewing. I felt somewhat ashamed of how poorly America has done when it comes to this most basic of needs for sustaining a society. The countries examined are Britain, Japan, Germany, Taiwan and Switzerland. We could take lessons from any of them.
I loved to read this about Nancy Pelosi, especially in a time of people gunning for her, thinking she makes for helpless prey. Chickenhearts themselves, they don’t understand true toughness. I didn’t realize Pelosi had been so principled all this time, one of the very few people who decried the US’s delinking of human rights from its other considerations of relations with China.
I say bless her for her courage – far beyond all of the gutless cowards in their high office and the greedheads in business who turned their backs on both the Tibetan and the Chinese people. Pelosi, love you we do … read the full post from the International Campaign for Tibet:
Pelosi, we love you!
So read one of the slogans painted by a group of Chinese on the main gate of Beijing’s propaganda office directed at the Speaker during her China trip this week. It is a sentiment shared by those of us in Washington who advocate for human rights in China and Tibet.
A sustainable economy is one in which all business models rigorously internalize all costs into themselves. This is the opposite of the way capitalism and industrialism have developed, where the object is to externalize the greatest number of costs onto others, often unwitting stakeholders. Sustainability demands a true accounting of costs, and this has to mean the end of corruption in politics.
The Washington Postreported recently on a new study that finds the return on political corruption – lobbying, to use the airbrushed word – can yield as much as a 22,000 percent rate of return on the investment of companies who are successful. The newspaper makes this crucial point: “The study by researchers at the University of Kansas underscores the central reason that lobbying has become a $3 billion-a-year industry in Washington: It pays.”
I had always guessed the formula would go like this: buy a politician for $3 million, and reap a return of $300 million, by creating an unnecessary process that costs the commonwealth $3 billion. I always thought that it would be much more efficient to pay the politician $5 million, in return for rigorous transparency and scrutiny, and make corruption an offense very close to treason: after all, sovereign money is at stake.
During these times of economic crisis we are afforded a rare opportunity to observe the interplay between the various forces that influence the actions of our country and our money. The major banks of the nation have brought the economy to its knees – to put it in plain terms – and yet they, rather than the government, largely seem to be in charge of how the nation will bail them out, and restore the working of the productive economy.
The politics that we take for granted in the “banana republic” dramas on the world stage seem to be the exact politics we are witnessing in America today. Here we have a new President of great apparent integrity, and unquestioned political skill, forced to deal with an inherited economic crisis, and revealing by his actions the limits of presidential power, and the compromises that must be made, in creating desired outcomes. Obama, as a consummately skilled politician, seems to recognize these ground rules, and is offering us a textbook case study of where the power lies, and how to deal with it.
I’ve been gone, and coming back I notice that everybody is still debating the meaning and merits of nationalizing the bad banks.
Obama’s speech to the Congress on February 24 was the last thing I posted here. By that point, having watched him closely since the election, I felt quite assured that he is the man we think he is. I especially liked this part:
Finally, I want to be very clear at the outset that while everyone has a right to take part in this discussion, no one has the right to take it over. The status quo is the one option that is not on the table. And those who seek to block any reform at any cost will not prevail this time around.
I took a break, concluding that his skill as a politician is consummate. I decided that all the grains of minuscule media speculation about how the political day is going every minute only reflect a neurotic impatience, which is mandated to these poor reporters and bloggers by an economy that ruthlessly demands constant production and consumption, even of view.
Obama struck a profound note in his inaugural address, in reaching for a Biblical scale of exhortation to “set aside childish things.”
When America demonstrates the virtue and vibrancy of its youth, nothing issuing from any other nation can quite compare. But few things to me are sadder than when we demonstrate the failed promise that proceeds from the immaturity of our knowledge, the childish naivety of our ignorance.
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 […]
Ezra Klein – The upside of reconciliation tags: policy I really can’t believe this. I have been following the health care debate every day since May, and I can’t believe the Democrats wussed out at this point when they could have still got it passed. What does this leave? If the Democrats aren’t [...] […]
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.
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.
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.
I loved to read this about Nancy Pelosi, especially in a time of people gunning for her, thinking she makes for helpless prey. Chickenhearts themselves, they don’t understand true toughness. I didn’t realize Pelosi had been so principled all this time, one of the very few people who decried the US’s delinking of human rights from its other considerations of relations with China.
A sustainable economy is one in which all business models rigorously internalize all costs into themselves. This is the opposite of the way capitalism and industrialism have developed, where the object is to externalize the greatest number of costs onto others, often unwitting stakeholders. Sustainability demands a true accounting of costs, and this has to mean the end of corruption in politics.
During these times of economic crisis we are afforded a rare opportunity to observe the interplay between the various forces that influence the actions of our country and our money. The major banks of the nation have brought the economy to its knees – to put it in plain terms – and yet they, rather than the government, largely seem to be in charge of how the nation will bail them out, and restore the working of the productive economy.
