Louis writes:
What drivel.
_______________
Awww, c'mon Lou! Don't be so critical! Obama's ending two wars, releasing
the unjustly imprisoned, instituting a rational health care finance
system, and finally doing something about carbon emissions. Isn't he?
Doug
=============================
Moore is trying to encourage opposition to administration policy retreats,
using the American political vernacular which can sound cloying to
sophisticated left-wingers. Should he instead be encouraging his disaffected
but still loyal Democratic party admirers to forego putting any pressure,
even polite pressure, on the administration because it is just a waste of
time?
I can anticipate the answer: Moore should be instead calling on them to
break with the Democrats and form a third party. That would be wonderful,
but no third party of any consequence has ever emerged without dissidents
first making strenuous efforts to reform their existing one, and we are not
there yet. If such were to happen, the mounting criticism by Moore and
others within the party will have certainly done more to contribute to that
development than outside criticism of the administration perceived as coming
from it's enemies.
The recent piece below by Robert Reich, Clinton's former labour secretary,
besides being a very good catalogue of the retreat on all major fronts, is
another measure of how deep internal discontent with the administration and
congress is running. These criticisms by Moore, Reich, Krugman, Rich, et al
may not lead to much - history has not been kind to the left either inside
or outside pf mass liberal and social democratic parties - but unlike Doug,
Louis, Dan, and perhaps others, I'm still more inclined to welcome rather
than scorn them.
*`*`*
Robert Reich's blog
Thursday, October 08, 2009
So Much Happening in Washington and So Little To Show for It, So Far
The Senate Finance Committee is set to vote Tuesday on a healthcare bill
that just got a seal of approval from the Congressional Budget Office and is
very likely to garner the vote of Republican Senator Olympia Snowe -- a
twofer that gives the bill preeminence over four other healthcare bills that
have emerged from House and Senate committees over these long months. Unlike
those bills, though, the Senate Finance bill won't it have a public
insurance option to compete with private insurers. Nor does it allow
Medicare to use its bargaining power to negotiate lower drug prices, or
adequately subsidize millions of middle-class families who will be required
to buy health insurance that will be hard for them to afford. In short, it's
a great deal for private insurers and Big Pharma but not such a great deal
for middle-class Americans.
Meanwhile, the House Banking Committee is quietly circulating a draft set of
reforms of financial markets likely to become the basis for whatever
legislation emerges to fix the Street. Barney Frank, who heads the
Committee, is a thoughtful progressive. But the draft has gaping loopholes
that will let most financial firms escape -- such as one that exempts
corporations that deal in financial derivatives from any requirements for
capital, business conduct, record-keeping, and reporting if they use
derivatives for the purpose of "risk management," which is the very thing
they all claim they're doing. Neither the draft bill, nor the Committee, nor
anyone on the Hill having anything to do with financial regulation, is
raising what I consider to be the two key reforms necessary for avoiding
another financial meltdown -- resurrecting the Glass-Steagall Act that once
separated commercial from investment banking, and applying antitrust laws to
the remaining five biggest Wall Street banks so none is "too big to fail."
At the same time, environmental legislation is now slinking its way through
Congress. The Waxman-Markey climate bill was passed by the House in June;
John Kerry and Barbara Boxer have now released a Senate version. All four
legislators claim to be progressives concerned about the environment, but
the bills are, frankly, far short of what's needed. Waxman-Markey gives away
85 percent of pollution permits to the nation's biggest polluters, and the
"cap" it proposes on overall carbon emissions would cut greenhouse gas
emissions only by an estimated 2 to 4 percent by 2020 compared to the UN
reference year of 1990. (If America was to play its appropriate role in a
global climate deal, the reduction would be more like 40 percent, and the
U.S. would also provide financing and technology so developing countries
could reduce their emissions by a comparable amount.) The Kerry-Boxer bill
has a stronger cap on emissions but it's still far short of what's
necessary -- and it leaves out the hardest part, which is the actual
cap-and-trade mechanism. Kerry and Boxer are leaving that to the Senate
Finance Committee, of all places.
And what's happening on the job's front? Nothing except a blip of interest
in tax credits to small businesses that create new jobs. That's not a bad
move (I suggested it myself), but it's rather like bailing out the ocean
with a teacup. If that's all there is, we're headed toward two years of
double-digit unemployment. No one on the Hill or in the Administration is
yet willing to say openly and clearly that the stimulus plan must be larger,
and continued through 2010 and 2011.
My friends in the Administration and on the Hill repeatedly tell me "don't
make the perfect the enemy of the better," or words to that effect. Politics
is the art of the possible, blah blah blah. True. But in each of these
areas -- healthcare, financial regulation, environment, and jobs -- the
"better" is really not that much better. Forget perfect; anything that
offered real reform would suffice for now. But in every case, what should be
the centerpieces of reform are being left out.
Why? Congress is overwhelmed with corporate and Wall Street lobbyists (far
too many of whom are former Democratic office holders). The White House is
trying best it can to push and prod in the right direction but there's too
much going on, too many arenas where private interests are framing the
debate and stifling major reform, and too many friends of friends and
relations of relations who are making tons of money working for the other
side. The public doesn't know what's going on because the national media
would rather report on the sexual escapades of famous people or social
trends or high finance (a recent Pew study of economic reporting shows the
vast majority of stories about the Great Recession have focused on Wall
Street rather than Main Street). And progressives -- that is, progressive
organizations in our nation's capital -- have been remarkably and
consistently outgunned, outmaneuvered, or just plain ineffectual. This is
largely due to the fact that they're sitting in Washington rather than
organizing and mobilizing the rest of the country.
And I haven't even brought up Afghanistan.
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