Hi. As I write I'm listening to Amy Goodman interviewing analysts from around the world in deep discussion of what they expect and what they feel the world needs from an Obama regime. Highly recommended. Ed
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20081021_the_battle_for_obamas_economic_soul/ The Battle for Obama's Economic Soul by Robert Scheer Truthdig (October 21 2008) The battle for Barack Obama's economic soul is on in earnest, and it has nothing to do with the "European socialism" that John McCain attempted to use as an epithet against him. The Republican quickly dropped that line of attack, perhaps because the European Union's brand of democratic socialism has proved more effective in regulating the rapacious financial markets at the heart of the economic meltdown. Besides, the socialist British Labor Party has been President Bush's most loyal supporter of the Iraq occupation that McCain has made the test of true patriotism. It would be encouraging if the Democratic presidential candidate did indeed attempt to learn something from Europe's democratic, and barely socialist, governing left concerning the welfare of those who are not super-rich, that is, how to provide quality health care and education for all - but that is not what is happening. Instead, Obama has turned to the same American "free market" elite that views government as merely a corporate subsidiary. Even within that crowd, however, there are serious splits, and the more enlightened side seems to be winning. Key among the good guys is former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, who consistently challenged the radical anti-regulatory crusade of Alan Greenspan, his immediate successor at the Fed. Greenspan's all-too-successful effort to give the banking lobby everything it had ever dreamed of was abetted by two Clinton-era secretaries of the treasury, Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers. Unfortunately, the two, who should have mustered the grace to depart public life in deep contrition over their failed policies, are prominent in the Obama campaign. Rubin, who pocketed tens of millions running Goldman Sachs before becoming treasury secretary, is the man who got President Clinton to back legislation by then-Senator Phil Gramm, Republican of Texas, to unleash banking greed on an unprecedented scale. What followed, thanks to a rare display of bipartisan teamwork, was a total dismantling of the regulatory regime that President Franklin D Roosevelt had put in place during the New Deal, thus undermining the finest legacy of the Democratic Party. Under the guidance of Rubin and Summers, Clinton signed off on the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, Gramm's two key pieces of legislation, during his final two years in the White House. The first beneficiary of that legislation was Citigroup, which was allowed to merge with Travelers Insurance, where Rubin became a director after leaving the government. In his position on the executive committee of a floundering Citigroup, Rubin insisted as late as January of this year that a serious crisis was not forming. In a January 31 article in Fortune headlined "Robert Rubin: What meltdown?" the subheading states: "In a talk on Wednesday [January 30], the Citigroup director said the current financial upheaval is just cyclical. And none of the blame that there was to assign went to Wall Street." The writer of the article, Katie Benner, quoted Rubin as saying that the problems were "all part of a cycle of periodic excess leading to periodic disruption", neatly exonerating his own bank of any responsibility, even though Citigroup had already written down over $24 billion in bad mortgage losses. At that time, Rubin was advising Hillary Rodham Clinton, while Obama, listening to Volcker, took the opposite tack, issuing a warning in a major address two months after Rubin's talk that the United States was experiencing the most profound economic crisis since the Great Depression. Obama specifically cited the legislation that Rubin had supported and cautioned, "Our free market was never meant to be a free license to take whatever you can get, however you can get it". Although Rubin came over to the Obama campaign after Hillary Clinton's defeat in the primaries, it does seem that Volcker and legendary investor Warren Buffett, another fierce critic of Clinton-era deregulation, are holding the floor for the time being. Buffett has been increasingly visible in the Obama campaign. More than five years ago, Buffett charged that the new investment devices, the "hybrid instruments" and "credit swaps" with which taxpayers are now stuck, were "financial weapons of mass destruction". Let's hope that a President Obama will keep Buffett and Volcker close. They are certainly not the European socialists conjured up in yet another mean-spirited and irrational outburst of the McCain campaign, and their vision for the country seems to extend beyond their own bank accounts. Robert Scheer is the editor in chief of Truthdig and author of a new book, The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America. A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer. Publisher, Zuade Kaufman. Copyright (c) 2008 Truthdig, L.L.C. All rights reserved. *** http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/04/opinion/04herbert.html?th&emc=th Beyond Election Day By BOB HERBERT NY Times Op-Ed: November 3, 2008 Conservative commentators had a lot of fun mocking Barack Obama's use of the phrase, "the fierce urgency of now." Noting that it had originated with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Senator Obama made it a cornerstone of his early campaign speeches. Conservatives kicked the phrase around like a soccer ball. "The fierce urgency of now," they would say, giggling. What does it mean? Well, if your house is on fire and your family is still inside, that's an example of the fierce urgency of now. Something like that is the case in the United States right now as Americans go to the polls in what is probably the most important presidential election since World War II. A mind-boggling series of crises is threatening not just the short-term future but the very viability of the nation. The economy is sinking into quicksand. The financial sector, guardian of the nation's wealth, is leaning on the crutch of a trillion-dollar taxpayer bailout. The giant auto companies - for decades the high-powered, gas-guzzling, exhaust-spewing pride of American industry - are on life support. As the holiday shopping season approaches, the nation is hemorrhaging jobs, the value of the family home has plunged, retirement plans are shrinking like ice cubes on a hot stove and economists are telling us the recession has only just begun. It's in that atmosphere that voters today will be choosing between the crisis-management skills of Senator Obama, who has enlisted Joe Biden as aide-de-camp, and those of Senator John McCain, who is riding to the rescue with Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber in tow. As important as this choice has become, the election is just a small first step. What Americans really have to decide is what kind of country they want. Right now the United States is a country in which wealth is funneled, absurdly, from the bottom to the top. The richest 1 percent of Americans now holds close to 40 percent of all the wealth in the nation and maintains an iron grip on the levers of government power. This is not only unfair, but self-defeating. The U.S. cannot thrive with its fabulous wealth concentrated at the top and the middle class on its knees. (No one even bothers to talk about the poor anymore.) How to correct this imbalance is one of the biggest questions facing the country. The U.S. is also a country in which blissful ignorance is celebrated, and intellectual excellence (the key to 21st century advancement) is not just given short shrift, but is ridiculed. Paris Hilton and Britney Spears are cultural icons. The average American watches television a mind-numbing 4 1/2 hours a day. At the same time, our public school system is plagued with some of the highest dropout rates in the industrialized world. Math and science? Forget about it. Too tough for these TV watchers, or too boring, or whatever. "When I compare our high schools with what I see when I'm traveling abroad," said Bill Gates, "I am terrified for our work force of tomorrow." The point here is that as we approach the end of the first decade of the 21st century, the United States is in deep, deep trouble. Yet instead of looking for creative, 21st-century solutions to these enormous problems, too many of our so-called leaders are behaving like clowns, or worse - spouting garbage in the public sphere that hearkens back to the 1940s and '50s. Thoughtful, well-educated men and women are denounced as elites, and thus the enemies of ordinary Americans. Attempts to restore a semblance of fiscal sanity to a government that has been looted with an efficiency that would have been envied by the mob, are derided as subversive - the work of socialists, Marxists, Communists. In 2008! In North Carolina, Senator Elizabeth Dole, a conservative Republican, is in a tough fight for re-election against a Democratic state senator, Kay Hagan. So Ms. Dole ran a television ad that showed a close-up of Ms. Hagan's face while the voice of a different woman asserts, "There is no God!" Americans have to decide if they want a country that tolerates this kind of debased, backward behavior. Or if they want a country that aspires to true greatness - a country that stands for more than the mere rhetoric of equality, freedom, opportunity and justice. That decision will require more than casting a vote in one presidential election. It will require a great deal of reflective thought and hard work by a committed citizenry. The great promise of America hinges on a government that works, openly and honestly, for the broad interests of the American people, as opposed to the narrow benefit of the favored, wealthy few. By all means, vote today. But that is just the first step toward meaningful change. ------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! 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