Claire McCaskillsays it’s absolutely essential that old and sick people don’t ruin everything:
Just came from bipartisan meeting on fiscal discipline. We must deal with entitlement reform. Very hard, but absolutely essential. 20 minutes ago from web Entitlemnt reform is making sure Medicare & Soc Sec don’t devour every penny of our budget leaving nothing for education or other services. 12 minutes ago from web
Apparently, they didn’t receive the memo that Peter Orszag has transformed the argument from “entitlement reform” to health care reform. Somebody ought to get Claire a copy.
I was just reading this interesting piece about narcissistic personality disorder and musing about the mindset that believes it’s ok to take down the world economy and then dictate the rules by which it is fixed.(Not to mention turn a profit at it!) And then I read this:
In recent days, in spite of public furor over huge bonuses paid at American International Group Inc., the administration has concluded that it needs the private sector to play a central role in fixing the economy. So over the weekend, the White House worked to tone down its Wall Street bashing and to win support from top bankers for the bailout plan announced Monday, which will rely on public-private investments to soak up toxic assets.
But weeks of searing criticism by politicians and the public had left bankers leery of working with the government. After brainstorming about what to do about that problem, the White House resolved to try to take control of the debate, according to several administration officials. In weekend television appearances, President Barack Obama and other administration officials tempered their criticisms of the financial sector.
President Obama met with members of the National Conference of State Legislature at the White House speaking adamantly about how his $787 billion dollar bailout must be used wisely and that wasteful spending will be avoided. Video courtesy of Fox News.
Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and his colleagues worked the phones to try to line up support on Wall Street for the plan announced Monday. They told executives they don’t favor using the tax code to retroactively penalize specific individuals who had received bonuses, according to people familiar with the calls. They asked officials to sign on “in pencil, not ink,” and to “validate” or “express support” for the plan, these people say.
Some bankers say they turned the conversations into complaints about the antibonus crusade consuming Capitol Hill. Some have begun “slow-walking” the information previously sought by Treasury for stress-testing financial institutions, three bankers say, and considered seeking capital from hedge funds and private-equity funds so they could return federal bailout money, thereby escaping federal restrictions.
“It’s almost like they’ve got — they’ve got a bomb strapped to them and they’ve got their hand on the trigger,” President Obama said on Thursday of the banks he’s chosen to bail out. “You don’t want them to blow up. But you’ve got to kind of talk [to] them, ease that finger off the trigger.”
No kidding. Reading that WSJ article, I can’t help but be reminded of another president who was shown in no uncertain terms who was really running the show:
Clinton’s experience shows what such pressure can do to a president’s agenda. Promises of spending on education, public works and a middle-class tax cut fell by the wayside as advisers led by Robert Rubin, who later became Treasury secretary, convinced the new president the best thing he could do for the economy was to show investors his resolve on fiscal discipline.
“You mean to tell me that the success of the economic program and my re-election hinges on the Federal Reserve and a bunch of fucking bond traders?” Clinton raged at aides, according to journalist Bob Woodward’s book, “The Agenda.”
As it was then, so it is now. (And you can bet that the fucking bond traders are getting ready to strap on the IED over health care and energy…) The owners of America will be appeased or they will destroy everything in their wake. In another world, they would call this economic terrorism.
I am not averse to Wall Street making money. It’s capitalism and god bless them for it. But this is a crisis. But these people is so arrogantly grasping that it defies reason. But then this isn’t a rational situation. They are telling the US Government to sit down and shut up — and getting away with it:
Despite the public outcry over $165 million in bonuses awarded at troubled insurer AIG, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) showed little inclination Monday to bring the explosive issue to the floor this week or next. Instead, Reid is likely to delay action on executive compensation until late April, after the Senate returns from a two-week recess starting April 4.
The lack of enthusiasm to expedite the bonus legislation comes after Obama said over the weekend that he didn’t think it was a good idea for Congress to target individuals with tax proposals.
“As a general proposition, I think you certainly don’t want to use the tax code … to punish people,” Obama said in the interview with “60 Minutes” that aired Sunday.
Reacting to a frenzy of media coverage, the House last week passed a measure that would levy a 90 percent tax on bonuses received this year by executives at AIG and other companies collecting more than $5 billion in federal aid.
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) last week introduced a less stringent proposal that would impose a 35 percent tax on bonuses. Both employers giving bonuses and executives who receive them would pay.
But even this modified proposal is being placed on the backburner.
Reid told colleagues that they would spend this week instead debating legislation to promote national service and volunteering, a process that could last well into the weekend.
“Nice little country you have here, be a shame if anything happened to it.”
Because 15 year old boys fighting is a mortal threat to police everywhere, it’s a good thing that they now have a non-lethal weapon to use so they don’t have to kill them.
BAY CITY, Mich. – Police in Michigan say a 15-year-old boy has died after being Tasered by officers who were trying to break up a fight.
Police didn’t release his name and say state police are investigating.
A Bay City police news release says officers answered a report of an early morning fight on Sunday. The statement says two males were arguing in an apartment, and one of them “attempted to fight the officers.”
Police say officers Tasered him, and his reaction led them to immediately call for emergency medical help. He was pronounced dead at Bay Regional Medical Center.
Deputy Chief Thomas Pletzke tells WNEM-TV police placed one officer on administrative leave.
I don’t know why. It is pretty much accepted these days that police have a right to taser children at will. A few gay commies disagree:
The United Nations Committee Against Torture declares that electronic stun guns — or Tasers — are a form of torture that can kill.
Luckily for us wiser heads have prevailed in the land of the free and the home of the brave:
“It felt like I couldn’t breathe, they did mess up, obviously they did, because I’m underage and all I did was skip school, which is something everyone has done, and I know that for a fact.”—12-year-old taser victim
“If there’s three officers, it’s nothing to tell a 6-year-old holding a glass, if you feel threatened, ‘Hey, here’s a piece of candy, hey, here’s a toy. Let the glass go.'”—Mother of six-year-old taser victim
According to knowledgeable sources, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has hired John Kiriakou, the former CIA official who supervised the 2002 interrogation of al-Qaeda detainee Abu Zubaydah, as an investigator. Kiriakou, who served in Pakistan from 1998 to 2004, will start work this week, focusing on the Middle East and South Asia for the committee. In late 2007, Kiriakou became the first CIA official to publicly acknowledge participating in an abusive interrogation. He was part of a team that interrogated Abu Zubaydah, a member of al-Qaeda whom author Ron Suskind claims is mentally challenged, after the operative’s capture in Pakistan in 2002. CIA officials waterboarded Abu Zubaydah, and while Kiriakou told ABC News and The Washington Post that he was not present for that abusive technique — he had left the interrogation team by that time — he has said he considers the waterboarding to be both necessary but immoral. He told The Post:
“Maybe that’s inconsistent, but that’s how I feel,” he said. “It was an ugly little episode that was perhaps necessary at that time. But we’ve moved beyond that.”
I sure hope he didn’t forget to pay his nanny’s payroll taxes 15 years ago or got an extramarital blowjob from a consenting party. They take a hard line on that kind of immorality and lack of ethics in the US Senate.
My assumption about the favorable market reaction to Tim Geithner’s plan to buy up Big Shitpile is that the Big Money Boyz got the answer they wanted to this question:
But some executives at private equity firms and hedge funds, who were briefed on the plan Sunday afternoon, are anxious about the recent uproar over millions of dollars in bonus payments made to executives of the American International Group.
Some of them have told administration officials that they would participate only if the government guaranteed that it would not set compensation limits on the firms, according to people briefed on the conversations. The executives also expressed worries about whether disclosure and governance rules could be added retroactively to the program by Congress, these people said.
CNBC’s latest Howard Beale for the overclass, Mark Haines, echoed these fears, as a paid echo is wont to do, despairing over how “scary” things are getting, what with Americans paying attention to the massive ripoff being undertaken at their expense and all.
HAINES: There were some scary stories in the paper over the weekend.
BURNETT: Mmm-hmm.
HAINES: About this kind of thing, regulating or somehow impacting executive pay, even among financial companies that didn’t take government money. It’s getting scary.
For the record, the bad asset (I’m sorry, “legacy asset”. Bad framer!) plan could very plausibly fix the near-term problem while doing absolutely nothing for the long-term one. If the credit markets loosen and economic activity restarts as a result of this proposal (and I’m dubious), that would be wonderful. But if it restarts in the exact same fashion as the recent past, by allowing a small band of financial sector elites to make absurd profits, literally stolen from the taxpayer, and to keep their share of the overall economy unsustainably and unaccountably large, the long-term forecast on a host of fronts will be grim. Not only would it simply reinflate a bubble that could just as easily pop, but it would cement the viewpoint that corporate behemoths own government and took it over in a bloodless coup.
The government feels that it cannot take over large banks, there is no bankruptcy-type procedure that would work, and only deference to the CEOs of major financial institutions can get us out of this mess. This is a conscious strategy decision from the very highest levels.
I’d like to say: OK, but this is absolutely the last time we will try for a solution to our banking problems involving a private sector-led approach. Of course this would not be credible and bank CEOs know this. Instead, I propose the following.
If Secretary Geithner’s scheme works, we draw the lesson that our banks became too big and we aim to make them smaller relative to the economy moving forward. The regulatory agenda currently in progress – including for discussion at the G20 next week – would do essentially nothing to reduce the political power of big banks. We need simple caps on bank size, leverage relative to the economy and – this is harder – measures of interconnected tail risk (i.e., is everyone making the same kind of crazy loans?). Design a system with this in mind: regulators get captured and super-regulators get super-captured.
If the scheme doesn’t work, we draw the exact same lesson. And, of course, we should expect Chairman Bernanke to move forward with his Plan B (or is it Plan Z?): inflation.
In any case, our top political leadership needs to really sell some version of the following message. We let the banks get out of control and the cost will be enormous; our debt/GDP ratio will in all likelihood rise from around 40% to over 80%. We cannot afford to have the same problem again. We must break the power of banks before they break us all. And if you don’t think banks can do that much damage to economies, just look around outside the United States – the world is full of countries where growth is slowed or distorted by a financial system that becomes too powerful. This is not about tweaking the existing U.S. regulatory system; it is about complete change and – in many senses – turning back the clock to a financial system that was simpler, smaller, and much less dangerous.
This is the point missing from all the back and forth about the raw details of the Geithner plan. Under not even the rosiest of scenarios would it scale back the power and size of the financial sector relative to the economy, which in the end must be the ultimate solution for now and the future. The public fumes at scenarios that maintain a status quo that failed them and caused them undue pain, especially when they can conceive of a new way forward, where banks perform their core function under a regulatory microscope, and they never grow so large that they can possibly take down the entire economy.
Digby has been asking about the need for the left to assert itself. A group of very sharp organizers are putting together a mass series of demonstrations on April 11, calling itself A New Way Forward. Rallies are already being planned for 20 cities, and beyond just showing up in the streets, there is a careful effort to tie this into a greater movement, with a mission statement and a vision for a post-bailout, post-bubble economy.
NATIONALIZE: Experts agree on the means — Insolvent banks that are too big to fail must incur a temporary FDIC intervention – no more blank check taxpayer handouts. (see Krugman on nationalization)
REORGANIZE: Current CEOs and board members must be removed and bonuses wiped out. The financial elite must share in the cost of what they have caused. (see Simon Johnson on reorganizing)
DECENTRALIZE: Banks must be broken up and sold back to the private market with new antitrust rules in place– new banks, managed by new people. Any bank that’s “too big to fail” means that it’s too big for a free market to function. (see Mike Lux on decentralization)
Big bankers ruined our economy and now they are gaming the political system so they can profit even more off the crisis they caused. They must be stopped […]
At the personal level, we know that the smart thing to do with our money right now is generally the less flashy thing. Paying off our debts and saving for the future protects us from the risks we can’t afford to take in the current market. The same rules apply to the banks. This is a time for a level-headed government to step in and steer unhealthy banks away from more risky bets, and to help them stabilize in the name of economic security for America.
Nothing tells the bankers to keep on doing what they’re doing more than an endless stream of free taxpayer money. The banks know that the government considers them too big to fail; if nationalization is off the table, what incentive do they have to act in the public interest?
In a basic sense, this is a fight against corruption. Not in the sense of a quid-pro-quo (though that may be there too), but in the sense of a corrupt ideology. For the most part, the world of economists, politicians and financiers is one elite web of influence. At some point, private profit took over as the only value to consider in building an economy, and it has never subsided. This is true of the thinking from both major parties.
Forget short-term thinking. We need a long-term rejection of the Masters of the Universe mentality and a full reorganization of the economy. I think A New Way Forward is on to something.
This is awful. If O’Reilly actually runs this footage you will see that his paid stalker is harrassing a young woman on the street in a threatening manner. Considering that the whole “controversy” is about O’Reilly’s comments that women “ask for it” I’m not sure it will come across quite the way O’Reilly and his thug mean it to. Of course, considering O’Reilly’s audience, perhaps it will — they love him for his misogyny. Makes ’em feel like men.
Advice from Crooks and Liars to anyone who ever finds him or herself in the cross hairs of the O’Reilly Hit Squad: say the word Makris as often as possible. They’ll never show the footage.
Tamron Hall: Paul Krugman, he says that the plan “fills me with a sense of despair.” Is he alone in that criticism? The Dow is up 313 points.
Chuck Todd: There are a lot of reformers on the left who want to see massive reform of the financial system, who don’t like this plan, who believe it’s too worried about making sure Wall Street is just as comfortable with this whole idea as it pertains to Main Street.
But a little context to Paul Krugman. He rarely has liked anything that Obama has done, when he was a presidential candidate and now as president. So I think the White House doesn’t take his criticism as seriously simply because he has been so critical on pretty much every single initiative, both as a candidate and now as president. But they’re mindful of the criticism and it is a growing chorus on the left, that’s for sure.
John Harwood: Well Chuck, I was going to say, if the White House to choose between praise from Paul Krugman or plus 300 points on the Dow, I suspect that they would happily take the latter.
Krugman has not been critical of every single thing Obama has done. That’s ridiculous. But he was critical of his campaign health care proposal which refused to endorse a mandate (now abandoned, btw, and conceded to have been a political ploy rather than a matter of principle) and his current economic policy, believing it to be too timid. He is hardly alone, but he does have the biggest perch from which to voice that view and so gets the attention. Krugman has an exceptional track record over the past decade, however, and it is a mistake for the anyone to dismiss his criticisms out of hand because of a perception that he has some personal animus.
More important than that however, is this idea that criticisms of Obama’s economic policies are coming from sort of leftist fringe when the fact is that it’s coming from mainstream economists. I don’t know if he’s parroting the White House but it’s concerning. John Harwood’s silly rejoinder about Wall Street being more important than an economist is a typically insular way of reporting on this issue (and to Todd’s credit he did respond that the administration is loathe to use the Dow as a yardstick.) It’s great that the Dow is rallying so crisply this past couple of weeks, but it operates on its own logic that doesn’t really mean anything when you are talking about these fundamental, economic issues as Krugman is. Honestly, if Todd and Harwood are indicative of the political establishment’s view that systemic reform of the financial system is some kind of silly leftwing joke then we are in deeper shit than I thought.
The arguments aren’t about right vs left, they are about insider vs outsider, wall street vs main street, what works vs what doesn’t work. Trying to use the old DFH line and saying Krugman is shrill is no more correct now than it was when the Bush administration did it. It’s a lazy, outmoded paradigm.
Update: And if you want to see bankrupt thinking, check out the man who would have been Obama’s commerce secretary on the budget.
Norah O’Donnell: Ok Senator, you’re going to criticize it. You won’t propose or put together and alternative.
Judd Gregg: No actually …
O’Donnell: If you had a line item pen andcould go through the president’s budget, name the top three things that you would excise.
Gregg: Well, basically I would limit his attempt to dramatically expand the cost of health care. We already pay 17 percent of our GDP in health care. we do not need to increase that number. Significantly, the fact is that we spend more on health care than any other industrialized nation. So there is enough money in the system for health care, you don’t have to dramatically expand it because … he wants to expand it because he wants to quasi – nationalize it.
I would also limit his attempt to nationalise the education loan program. that’s not an effective or efficient way to deliver education loans. that’s a big mistake.
I would also freeze discretionary spending which would save around 900 billion dollars over ten years.
In addition I would step into the entitlement accounts and say listen it’s time for us to rein in the growth of the entitlement accounts and aggressively promote fiscal responsibility there.
O’Donnell then went on to quote Judd saying that using the budget reconciliation is a “Chicago style” strongarm tactic.
I can’t help but find it a little bit ironic that the man who said that was invited to come into Obama’s cabinet, but Krugman is dismissed as a crank.
Update II: From the Krugman is a shrill leftist file, here’s the Wall Street mouthpiece Erin Burnett:
This is essentially a sophisticated plan that treasury Secretary Hank Paulson tried to do last fall. It took quite a while to get it up and running. Timothy Geithner, the Treasury Secretary, was the man who was working on it ever since then.
Barack Obama says all the right things in this riposte to Dick Cheney about Guantanamo, right up until the point where he makes a distinction between terrorist suspects and suspects of any other criminal stripe:
PRESIDENT OBAMA: I fundamentally disagree with Dick Cheney. Not surprisingly. You know, I think that– Vice President Cheney has been– at the head of a– movement whose notion is somehow that we can’t reconcile our core values, our Constitution, our belief that we don’t torture, with our national security interests. I think he’s drawing the l– wrong lesson from history.
The facts don’t bear him out. I think he is– that attitude, that philosophy has done incredible damage– to our image and position in the world. I mean, the fact of the matter is after all these years how many convictions actually came out of Guantanamo? How many– how many terrorists have actually been brought to justice under the philosophy that is being promoted by Vice President Cheney? It hasn’t made us safer. What it has been is a great advertisement for anti-American sentiment. Which means that there is constant effective recruitment of– Arab fighters and Muslim fighters against U.S. interests all around the world.
STEVE KROFT: Some of it being organized by a few people who were released from Guantanamo.
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well there is no doubt that– we have not done a particularly effective job in sorting through who are truly dangerous individuals that we’ve got to– make sure are not a threat to us, who are folks that we just swept up. The whole premise of Guantanamo promoted by Vice President Cheney was that somehow the American system of justice was not up to the task of dealing with these terrorists.
I fundamentally disagree with that. Now– do these folks deserve Miranda rights? Do they deserve to be treated like a shoplifter– down the block? Of course not.
STEVE KROFT: What do you do with those people?
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, I think we’re going to have to figure out a mechanism to make sure that they not released and do us harm. But– do so in a way that is consistent with both our traditions, sense of due process, international law. But this is– this is the legacy that’s been left behind. And, you know, I’m surprised that– the Vice President is eager– to defend– a legacy that was unsustainable. Let’s assume that we didn’t change these practices. How– how long are we going to go? Are we going to just keep on going until– you know, the entire Muslim world and Arab world– despises us? Do we think that’s really going to make us safer? I– I don’t know– a lot of thoughtful thinkers, liberal or conservative– who think that that was the right approach.
If Obama could spend every day reacting to Dick Cheney quotes, I imagine it would please him and his staff greatly. But he could have ended with the fundamental disagreement that the American justice system is not up to the task of dealing with terrorists. But I guess politics intruded, or some knee-jerk reaction toward moderation, and Obama makes a truly puzzling hedge, that terrorist don’t deserve to be treated like shoplifters. On the grounds of their post-conviction sentence, that makes perhaps some sense, and maybe on bail being set, but not at all on the grounds of anything else. You cannot set up parallel justice systems, that’s the entire point of disagreeing that it’s insufficient to deal with terrorists. A process of indefinite detention with good intentions remains a flawed process.
This is a troubling pattern. I mean, continued airstrikes against Al Qaeda suspects in Pakistan may be legally justifiable. They may be consistent with international norms. They may even be effective in the short term. But they inspire the exact same passions among the citizenry being bombed, especially when those bombs are errant and hit things like wedding parties and peaceful villages, that Obama condemned Dick Cheney for inspiring with his indefinite detention and torture process at Guantanamo. Since entering office Obama has stepped up the unmanned Predator drone attacks dramatically, in a continuum with the Bush Administration’s practice after Pervez Musharraf left office. The strategic consequences are not only immense but PRECISELY AS OBAMA OUTLINED with respect to Guantanamo. Obama seems mindful of the long-term strategic impact of engaging the Muslim world and winning the battle of public opinion, and yet there are very legitimate consequences to airstrikes that can kill civilians, anger populations, and disrupt political dynamics in an unstable country. In fact, that’s supposed to be WHY we’re sending more troops to Afghanistan.
While these strikes may bear some meaningful short- and medium-term successes, as a long-term strategy their value is less clear. Research from the RAND Corporation into the case histories of 648 terrorist organizations that carried out attacks between 1968 and 2006 found that only 7 percent were successfully eliminated through direct military force. This is in contrast to 43 percent who dropped their violent activities after some form of political accommodation and 40 percent who were broken up successfully through some combination of local policing, infiltration, and prosecution.
I imagine that the President has weighed the costs and benefits and decided that short-term disruptions in Al Qaeda leadership are worth the price. And there’s the time-honored Democratic practice of “looking tough” in the White House. But the dissonance between the stated vision and reality is a little bit hard to swallow.
All American Common Senseby digby Here’s Perlstein in Newsweek:
Our pundits worry that a populist rage is loose in the land—pitchforks everywhere! My first reaction upon hearing that was to dismiss the word “populist” as a distraction, an epithet meant to recall episodes in which mass rage made sound policy deliberation impossible. Think of dispossessed 19th-century farmers letting their righteous rage at bankers tumble easily into free-floating anger at “Jewish bankers” and then simply at Jews; of 1970s white South Boston parents stabbing busing advocates with American flags. My second reaction was to dismiss the word as inaccurate. What makes this rage “populist”? This is ordinary rage, rational and focused. The lead pitchfork bearers, after all, are people like New York Times business columnist Joe Nocera, who wrote that AIG’s Financial Practices Group was guilty of a “scam” at which “we should be furious.” You might more accurately call that common sense. Casting my eye over the broader sweep of history, though, I no longer fear populism. The habit of messily dividing the world into “the people” and “the elite”—whether it’s left calling out right, or right calling out left—is distinctively, ineluctably American. It’s not going away. And there’s much more to it than the name-calling of angry political factions. It is the governing folk wisdom of a nation without an inherited aristocracy, distrustful of privilege that is not “earned.” It is our American common sense. read on.
This is where the right took its big wrong turn in recent years with its Randian insistence that wealthy dealmakers are the smartest, most productive people in the world. I don’t suppose people care much during good times, but in bad times that’s the kind of talk that makes a working person start to see pitchforks dancing in their heads. I think I am still most bemused by the fact that these MOUs are so out of touch that they think they can actually convince people that they are not only indispensible but that they deserve to be rewarded for their failure by average working people. They are proving, once again, that they aren’t nearly as good as they think they are. .
This crisis is reawakening the left in some ways it hasn’t been tested in some time. It’s been a long series of bubbles and political setbacks over decades and there aren’t a whole lot of people who have been engaged in these issues on a philosophical basis for quite some time. The argument among us took place between the economic neoliberalism of the DLC and lukewarm, leftover Great Society articles of faith. But there is more on the left spectrum than that (or full throated Marxism.) It’s necessary to expand the conversation in a time of crisis.
On the main point, I totally agree. We really need to hear leftwing voices in the mainstream media. Where we may disagree is, to some extent, on a labeling or definition refinement, which will probably strike youngsters and newcomers to American politics as merely semantic:: liberals are not leftists. Or, ito be more precise, most liberals are smack in the center of American politics. For example, most people would agree that Nobel laureate Paul Krugman is a liberal (by the way, read his column and weep). But few, other than the kind of rightwing nuts who argue – still! – that FDR was as Marxist as Stalin, would argue that Krugman, who worked for Ronald Reagan, is in any way, shape, or form a leftist. LIkewise, while it is quite clear that the great Rachel Maddow is to the left of center, her liberalism is not cut from the same cloth as the kind of socialism Mike Davis espouses in the Moyers interview that Digby discusses.
What we need in the mainstream media are not only more people as liberal (and as intelligent) as Paul Krugman and Rachel Maddow – and less people as incoherently right-centrist (and stupid) as Tom Friedman – but also genuinely leftwing voices. As a liberal in rough agreement with Maddow on most issues, I am talking about the necessity of hearing more from people to my political left, people who, in the Sixties, reviled liberals as enthusiastically as they did Nixon and Agnew. What a pleasure it would be to turn on cnn and vehemently disagree with someone because they were too far to the left! I’m not talking about just Amy Goodman who, while surely left, is still close enough to the mainstream to invite Krugman on her show (even if she is never invited on Press The Meat), or even the much=reviled Noam Chomsky (who by the way, enjoys a tremendous reputation nearly everywhere but here). I’m talking about… and there’s the problem.
the structural crisis of capitalism as a world system, which is facing, in my opinion, its certain demise in the next twenty to forty years.
Uh, huh. Riiiiiiiiiiight.
And that’s the problem, at least from this liberal’s perspective. There are a lot of crappy writers on the left who, like Mr. Wallerstein, just can’t resist the apocalyptic mode. Yes, we need genuinely leftwing voices in the mainstream media, but not just any leftwing voices. The last thing American public discourse needs, after countless decades of giving rightwing nuts predicting Armageddon a free pass, are lefttwing nuts predicting Armageddon.
Of course, there are more thoughtful leftists out there. In their lead article to The Nation issue, Barbara Ehrenreich and Bill Fletcher, Jr. are, to some extent, those kinds of voices we need to hear more of, even if they first appear to caution against precisely the hyperbole Wallerstein indulges, and then indulge in it themselves:
If you haven’t heard socialists doing much crowing over the fall of capitalism, it isn’t just because there aren’t enough of us to make an audible crowing sound. We, as much as anyone on Wall Street in, say, 2006, appreciate the resilience of American capitalism–its ability to regroup and find fresh avenues for growth, as it did after the depressions of 1877, 1893 and the 1930s. In fact, The Communist Manifesto can be read not only as an indictment of capitalism but as a breathless paean to its dynamism. And we all know the joke about the Marxist economist who successfully predicted eleven out of the last three recessions.
But this time the patient may not get up from the table, no matter how many times the electroshock paddles of “stimulus” are applied. We seem to have entered the death spiral
Barbara, Bill, trust me on this: we haven’t. Oh, it’s gonna be awful, the next few years, but no. No death spiral.
Fortunately, Ehrenreich and Fletcher have something quite constructive to add: They identify a serious, contemporary economic condition that all but requires leftists to fashion entirely different critiques and proposals than those of the past, even the recent past of the 60’s and 70’s:
What is most galling, from a socialist perspective, is the dawning notion that capitalism may be leaving us with less than it found on this planet, about 400 years ago, when the capitalist mode of production began to take off. Marx imagined that industrial capitalism had potentially solved the age-old problem of scarcity and that there was plenty to go around if only it was equitably distributed. But industrial capitalism–with some help from industrial communism–has brought about a level of environmental destruction that threatens our species along with countless others. The climate is warming, the oil supply is peaking, the deserts are advancing and the seas are rising and contain fewer and fewer fish for us to eat..
As Ehrenreich and Fletcher admit, the left doesn’t yet have a coherent plan to meet this lack of abundance. But – and I agree it is to the left’s credit – they recognize they must develop one. That is a vast improvement over the magical laissez-faire delusion of the right, the assertion that no plan is the best plan.
I’ll never be anything close to a socialist (you’re welcome to try to convince me, but you won’t) and I’ll always be a liberal. What that means, among other things, is that I can recognize a smart idea when I hear it. Ehrenreich and Fletcher are genuinely on to something and I look forward not only to more left voices in the media but to pondering the left’s answers to the questions and problems these two writers pose.
[Revised slightly after the original post, to clarify my sense of Amy Goodman’s position in the media.]