Capitalist Fools

By Joseph Stiglitz
Vanity Fair

Behind the debate over remaking U.S. financial policy will be a debate
over who’s to blame. It’s crucial to get the history right, writes a
Nobel-laureate economist, identifying five key mistakes—under Reagan,
Clinton, and Bush II—and one national delusion.

There will come a moment when the most urgent threats posed by the
credit crisis have eased and the larger task before us will be to
chart a direction for the economic steps ahead. This will be a
dangerous moment. Behind the debates over future policy is a debate
over history—a debate over the causes of our current situation. The
battle for the past will determine the battle for the present. So it’s
crucial to get the history straight.

What were the critical decisions that led to the crisis? Mistakes were
made at every fork in the road—we had what engineers call a “system
failure,” when not a single decision but a cascade of decisions
produce a tragic result. Let’s look at five key moments.
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Tags: Joseph Stiglitz, Neoliberalism

How Monica
Lewinsky Saved
Social Security

By Robin Blackburn

[This essay is excerpted from CounterPunch's hot new book, Dime's Worth of Difference.]

Had it not been for Monica’s captivating smile and first inviting snap of that famous thong, President Bill Clinton would have consummated the politics of triangulation, heeding the counsel of a secret White House team and deputy treasury secretary Larry Summers. Late in 1998 or in the State of the Union message of 1999 a solemn Clinton would have told Congress and the nation that, just like welfare, Social Security was near-broke, had to be “reformed” and its immense pool of capital tendered in part to the mutual funds industry. The itinerary mapped out for Clinton by the Democratic Leadership Committee would have been complete.

It was a desperately close run thing. On the account of members of Clinton’s secret White House team, mandated to map out the privatization path for Social Security, they had got as far down the road as fine-tuning the account numbers for Social Security accounts now released to the captious mercies of Wall Street. But in 1998 the Lewinsky scandal burst upon the President, and as the months sped by and impeachment swelled from a remote specter to a looming reality, Clinton’s polls told him that his only hope was to nourish the widespread popular dislike for the hoity-toity elites intoning Clinton’s death warrant.

In an instant Clinton spun on the dime and became Social Security’s mighty champion, coining the slogan “Save Social Security First”.

Let us now reconstruct the plot in greater detail. (more…)

Tags: Robin Blackburn, Social Security

Photo: Kyle Jones, Beaver Falls Obama Fan

AFL-CIO and the
Steelers Going
All Out for Obama

By Carl Davidson
Beaver County Blue

Organized labor has set its sights on winning Western Pennsylvania for Barack Obama. They see a victory in this battleground “swing state” as critical to the national election, and are pulling out all stops to “Git ‘er done.”

AFL-CIO chief John Sweeny came to the IBEW Local 712 Hall in Vanport, Pa on October 25. He was joined by United Steelworker union top officials as well as members of Pittsburgh Steelers football team who were scheduled to be at the afternoon rally. In between, the unions deployed over 2200 rank-and-file union members to knock on the doors of some 31,000 union family homes across the state in a single afternoon, an effort that will become even more earnest in the next ten days.

I arrived in the morning’s grey drizzle, unlike the sunny Fall days of the last month of Saturday ‘Labor Walks’. Media work was my task for the day, and I made sure a New York Times reporter quickly met all the local union officials and pro-union local candidates.
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Photo: Raccoon Fair Races

Tractors,
Tilt-a-Whirls
and Obama

By Carl Davidson
Progressives for Obama

Tractor pulls, tilt-a-whirls and dirt track motorcycle races aren’t the usual setting for a literature table featuring the Obama campaign. But the several thousand local residents who attend the annual Raccoon Township Fair here in Western Pennsylvania every June made it seem like a natural to us, especially after all the local turmoil over “white workers” in the recent Democratic Primary.

We set up our wares alongside others that featured local crafts by township women. The site was the Volunteer Fire Department Hall, next to the bingo games in the garage and the food concession in the kitchen, usually the site of the regular “Fish Fry” community fundraisers.

To the extent the township has a “village square,” the VFD buildings and grounds are it. Weddings, graduations and family reunions take place here, too. (more…)

Bobby
and
Barack

By Tom Hayden
Huffington Post

For one who has experienced both eras, the current movement for Barack Obama has achieved a living remembrance of Bobby Kennedy’s campaign in the week when RFK’s murder is painfully remembered.

On June 4, 1968, I watched from a New York townhouse the murder of a second Kennedy in five years. Martin Luther King already was gone, Vietnam and our cities were burning. I was in the midst of chaotic planning for anti-war demonstrations at the Democratic Convention coming in August.

I drifted off with friends to St. Patrick’s Cathedral where Kennedy staffers let us through the doors late at night. After sitting a while in silence, I found myself as a member of a makeshift honor guard standing next to his simple coffin. I was wearing a green Cuban hat and weeping. (more…)

Make No Mistake,
McCain Is a Neocon

By Robert Parry
Consortium News

June 12, 2008 - Since clinching the Republican presidential nomination, John McCain has sought to hide the forest of his neoconservative alignment with George W. Bush amid the trees of details, such as stressing differences over military tactics used in Iraq.

But the larger reality should be clear: McCain is a hard-line neoconservative who buys into Bush’s “preemptive war” theories abroad and his concept of an all-powerful “unitary executive” at home.

From McCain’s pre-Iraq invasion speeches to his campaign’s recent embrace of Bush’s imperial presidency, American voters should realize that if they choose John McCain, they will be locking in at least four more years of war with much of the Islamic world while selling out the Founders’ vision of a democratic Republic where no one is above the law. (more…)

Hillary’s Gift
to Women

By Barbara Ehrenreich

In Friday’s New York Times, Susan Faludi rejoiced over Hillary Clinton’s destruction of the myth of female prissiness and innate moral superiority, hailing Clinton’s “no-holds-barred pugnacity” and her media reputation as “nasty” and “ruthless.” Future female presidential candidates will owe a lot to the race of 2008, Faludi wrote, “when Hillary Clinton broke through the glass floor and got down with the boys.”

I share Faludi’s glee – up to a point. Surely no one will ever dare argue that women lack the temperament for political combat. But by running a racially-tinged campaign, lying about her foreign policy experience, and repeatedly seeming to favor McCain over her Democratic opponent, Clinton didn’t just break through the “glass floor,” she set a new low for floors in general, and would, if she could have got within arm’s reach, have rubbed the broken glass into Obama’s face. (more…)

Photo: Alice Walker

Obama is the
change America
Has Tried to Hide

By Alice Walker

I have come home from a long stay in Mexico to find - because of the presidential campaign, and especially because of the Obama-Clinton race for the Democratic nomination - a new country existing alongside the old. On any given day we, collectively, become the goddess of the three directions and can look back into the past, look at ourselves just where we are, and take a glance, as well, into the future. It is a space with which I am familiar.

When I joined the freedom movement in Mississippi in my early 20s, it was to come to the aid of sharecroppers, like my parents, who had been thrown off the land they’d always known - the plantations - because they attempted to exercise their “democratic” right to vote. I wish I could say white women treated me and other black people a lot better than the men did, but I cannot. (more…)

Photo: The Key - Registering New Voters

Obama’s Path
to Victory
in November

By Robert Creamer
Huffington Post

With Obama inching ever closer to clinching the Democratic nomination, some of his opponents have resorted to a campaign aimed at convincing superdelegates that, no matter how much they like him, “Obama just can’t win.”

In fact, the odds are good that Obama will win the Presidency. And if Democrats execute with precision during the campaign, the odds are good that he will win with a healthy margin. Here’s why:

If the election were held today - before the campaign begins - polling shows that he would have very high odds of winning states with 273 electoral votes, more than the 270 needed to win election. More importantly, he would win this victory without needing the states of Ohio, New Hampshire, Nevada, Virginia or Florida. (more…)

Why Obama’s
‘Race’ Speech
Was Historic

By Robert Creamer
Huffington Post

Barack Obama’s March 18th speech on race in America was game-changing, and very likely will be remembered as historic. Here’s why.

In electoral politics — particularly presidential politics — people don’t vote based on the issues or positions of the candidates. They vote based on their assessment of the qualities of the candidate. Their votes have much more to do with their assessment of candidate character than on 10 point programs.

The videos of the sermons delivered by Barack Obama’s former pastor, Reverend Wright, presented problems for his candidacy because they caused voters to question three key candidate qualities that are central to Obama’s narrative as to why he should be president. (more…)