From: Jim Devine
To be fair, the crucial time when the financial fat cats could have been successfully forced to take their medicine (i.e., to be nationalized) was in 2008. It was Dubya's Hank Paulson who missed the opportunity. (Given his background, of course, how could he do anything different?) Obama just continued this trend, which was hard to reverse once Paulson _et al_ started it. With a weak political base outside of Wall Street, he appointed WS insiders such as Summers, Geithner, and Volcker. The key thing is that Obama isn't a leftish version of Dubya. The latter's warriors rode into town with a a clear agenda for change. They were well-organized, almost a Leninist Party within the GOP, appointing their ideologues to every open position and figuring out how to get around the laws (especially after 911). Obama is more of a coalition-builder, with a vague agenda (a standard DP problem). His main militancy involves clever ways to raise campaign funds, not ways of forcing an election in his direction (unlike the Bush League in Florida in 2000) or pushing through a non-Dubya agenda. His main thing is that he's rationalizing Bush's program, sanding off the rough edges. >From the perspective of New Deal liberals, and also from that of the working class and other dominated groups, the last 30 years have involved a pattern of "two steps back" (Reagan, Dubya) followed by "one (weak) step forward" (G.W.H. Bush, Clinton, Obama). The "steps back" were parts of the neoliberal policy revolution (with assists from the "social conservatives" and militarists), while the "steps forward" were more a matter of technocratic corrections that did not reverse the trend significantly. Of course, we shouldn't emphasize the role of individuals this much. BHO would be better if there were leftish mass movements pressuring him. Currently, he's giving into suburban middle-class white "tea-bagger" hotheads, which suggests that if the political winds were blowing in a different direction, BHO would float in that direction ^^^^^^^^ CB: Hear, hear. And it ain't over til it's over , especially not in the first year. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
