If you read mainstream corporate print journalism, you quickly learn that everyone that is anyone is chiefly preoccupied at the moment with the prospect of the Democrats ‘moving to the left’. To a very small degree, this concern relates to government spending on things like health care and education. To a much larger degree it concerns anything that might infringe on Free Trade or help Labor Unions. In almost cultlike fashion, one corporate journalist after another intones on the damage the Left will do to the economy if they strengthen Labor or weaken unfettered free trade. Have any of these journalists looked at the economy? It’s been a while since the Treasury Department was in the hands of people that might ‘move to the left’.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
But… What is the Leftist policy that will provide us with a solution? It’s easy enough to realize that fundamentalist free market policy leads to colossal failure. So right wing economics has failed. Does this mean that whatever the left concocts will necessarily improve things? If so, how? The Dems have to publicity answer that question to lead on economic policy.
They live in a center-right Beltway.
This will be the game for now, unfortunately. They will cling to this meme like a Titanic passenger to a piece of driftwood.
This is exactly the way it was in the campaign. Most of the corporate media refused to change their storyline until it became obvious to everyone that they had to change it in order to keep from looking like absolute fools who can’t see what is actually happening right in front of them. Until it got to the point that the public was faced with believing the corporate media or their lying eyes, the narrative remained the same. The damn facts just ended up getting in the way. At that point their credibility became visibly vulnerable and they had to change.
So they will keep hammering this at least until an actual left-of-center Obama policy begins to have positive results that no one, even the prisoners to conventional wisdom in the media, will be able to refute as successful for the vast majority of the middle and lower class. Then, of course, they will still act like it really is a “centrist policy with a few liberal nuggets to appease the base” and the Broder’s will wax poetic about “how good it is that Obama didn’t follow the loony left over the cliff”.
It is often portrayed like this whole mentality in the media has become totally involuntary. That they just can’t help it. That it’s just a continued re-balancing after years of a distinctively liberal bent. But I don’t think so. It is a conscious decision that is made in the ivory towers of our corporate elite. And it has damned an entire generation to suffer at the hands of the greedy masters who are pulling the levers. They have too vested an interest in the center-right story to give it up without a very serious fight. It’s the only bastion of refuge they have left to keep from reporting the obvious.
Wow, Mike. Back to back articles from INFT’s.
Center right, center left, humbug. What I want to know is how much are these toxic assets worth that the banks are putting up for collateral on their loans from the Federal Reserve System. I know it’s in the trillions; I just wonder how many of those trillion things. I think the following article from Counter Punch ought to be required reading for all citizens of the left, right and center.
http://www.counterpunch.org/martens11132008.html
Kinda scary to contemplate the things in the Counterpunch article. But I fear there is probably a lot truth to what she says.
Eliot Spitzer’s piece in Washington Post – could it be that’s why he was brought down?
and so far the Feds have been in QE:
Financial Crisis Tab Already In The Trillions-CNBC
Given the speed at which the federal government is throwing money at the financial crisis, the average taxpayer, never mind member of Congress, might not be faulted for losing track.Try $4.28 trillion dollars.
That’s $4,284,500,000,000 and more than what was spent on WW II, if adjusted for inflation, based on our computations from a variety of estimates and sources*.
That’s one of the best op-eds (as opposed to something in a financial blog) about the financial crisis I’ve seen.
Spitzer concludes: “I very much hope and expect that President Obama and his new administration will have the strength and wisdom to do again what FDR did.”
Unfortunately, I see few signs that that will be the case. Obama has surrounded himself with free marketeers; I haven’t heard of him having a single economic adviser who fully appreciates the importance of regulation. And yesterday on 60 Minutes, Obama was repeating the “We have a free market economy” mantra, saying the “free market” is good because it leads to “innovation”.
We do not have a free market economy. We have a mixed economy. And it was the Defense Department’s ARPA that created the Internet: not the “free market”. I really don’t know if Obama believes what he says when he spouts nonsense like that. Another example is his frequent employment of the Bushist expression “war on terror”.
It is like the only reality Obama knows is that of inside the Beltway. That’s remarkable, given how recently he got there.
expect nothing from Obama. NOTHING..but a Clinton III…just a different side of the same GOP coin.
Notice who Obama sent as his envoys to the G20 summit. Madeliene Albright and Jim Leach. — the Jim Leach of the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley FSMA legislation – Financial Services Modernization Act tells us Obama embraces the Washington Wall-Street consensus – Financial Deregulation.
Read the body language. Obama has not yet taken the oath and his demeanor is sad, shaken and tired. He has lost the sparkle after reading all those presidential briefings. Looking so sorry he won.
The country is screwed and will be drowned in hyper-inflation.
Why hyperinflation? Because of all the money that is being injected into the financial sector? According to James Galbraith, the monetarist idea that the money supply drives the price level has been discredited.
I don’t think the country is screwed yet. As Galbraith argues in his recent The Predator State, which I highly recommend, the US has one big thing going for it: since the dollar is the international reserve currency, the US can run unlimited budget and trade deficits, so long as the rest of the world still “believes” in it.
But it is getting to look like Obama will not decisively take the necessary measures, and then the country will be screwed.
Eliot Spitzer lives!
And so .. who’s the corporate media ‘in the hands of’?
From Bill Moyers’ speech to the National Conference For Media Reform.
Follow the money……there we will find the answer.
you ARE the center. So, Obama should do what he promised and tell the critics to meet him at the ballot box.
In answer to your question, Fuck yeah, in spades. There will be a great deal of resistence to substantive change.
The simple truth, though, is that the change has already happened. We live in a post-post Fordist reality now. The cost of the upward redistribution has gotten too high. The only way to put things back together now is by paying people more, and using the government to give people jobs.
Not only that, but union-stalwart Joe Biden is VP and Chicago Democrat Barack Obama is President. I think that we have a real good chance of seeing some union growth really soon.
The much dreaded “move to the left” is upon us, and the absurdly orthodox American establishment is quite likely going to flip out, even as we the collective political “left” in this country save the American economy. So what else is new?
If the question is: just how smart are Barack Obama and Joe Biden? Well, I know where my money’s going. The political class in this country is going to have to get reacquainted with a little thing called Keynesian Economics.
Another thought–This is the “beltway” and “media” elite! Unable to really see the well-being of people who have any common kind of financial want.