Julio Huato wrote:
Obama cannot be another Clinton just like an apple cannot be an
orange.
I don't know about apples and oranges but it seems excluded that he will
operate as some kind of "progressive".
Is Obama fit to advance the interest of working people in the U.S. in
our times? You have decided that he is the immediate obstacle. But
who the hell knows for sure. All we can do is keep pushing.
What kind of pushing can the people in Park Slope possibly exert on
Obama? Even with the threat of proletarian revolution, FDR tried to
balance the budget in 1937 thus leading to a renewal of mass unemployment.
Obama is not a complete blank slate. Like everybody else, he is
susceptible to change one way or another, under the pressure of
circumstances. But he starts off with something. He is black, with
all that the experience of being a male black in the U.S. entails. He
has been very open about his agenda and his moves. His two books, his
speeches, his public (and a few private) pronouncements are out there.
His agenda is not socialist by any stretch of the imagination, but it
is *progressive* in many ways.
That reminds me. I wanted to post this item about one of Obama's
economic honchos earlier:
NY Times, November 14, 2008
Books of The Times
The Overlooked Economic Crisis, Influential Still
By BARRY GEWEN
THE GREAT INFLATION AND ITS AFTERMATH
The Past and Future of American Affluence
By Robert J. Samuelson
309 pages. Random House. $26.
Robert J. Samuelson, an economics columnist for Newsweek and The
Washington Post, says historians have not understood the significance of
the “Great Inflation” that raged through the economy in the late 1970s
and early ’80s. It was, he argues in “The Great Inflation and Its
Aftermath,” one of those watershed moments in American history, not at
the level of the Civil War or the Great Depression, to be sure, but
perhaps the major turning point of the postwar era.
(clip)
At this point Mr. Samuelson’s story enters its heroic phase: Ronald
Reagan and Paul Volcker stepped onto the stage and seized control of
history. As chairman of the Federal Reserve, Mr. Volcker proceeded to
fight inflation with stern determination, tightening money and credit
and dragging the economy into what Mr. Samuelson calls “the most
punishing slump since the 1930s.” Unemployment climbed to 10.8 percent
(still a postwar high), and everyone screamed. Senator Howard Baker, the
Republican majority leader, called for the Fed to “get its boot off the
neck of the economy”; others demanded Mr. Volcker’s head, or at least
his resignation. But his medicine broke the inflationary fever by the
mid-1980s, and prices stabilized. Reagan’s role in all this was to
provide Mr. Volcker with crucial political cover. Unlike the presidents
before him, Reagan insisted that inflation be brought under control,
even if the cost was high unemployment. Unsurprisingly, his own
popularity plummeted. In early 1982 Newsweek ran a cover story headlined
“Reagan’s America: And the Poor Get Poorer.” But in an act of genuine
political courage Reagan persevered, and Mr. Samuelson concludes, “Of
all Reagan’s economic achievements,” his successful battle against
inflation “was the most definitive. The rest of his economic record was
mixed.”
full: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/14/books/14book.html
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