Comments on: Global Crisis And Reform: Starting A Long Journey

By: Peter Fox-Penner

Peter Fox-Penner — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 18:11:07 +0000

Simon & James –

1) Does the Financial Times front page story 6/8 suggest that the Fed and FDIC are now simply refusing to cooperate with the TARP, saying that it won’t work? Does this reflect a change of mind of longstanding view?

2) The weekend FT claims that Angela Merkel’s criticism of the central banks was not politically motivated, and she’s angry that they are loosening credit rather that implementing regulation suggested by Germany during the last G8. True? Was the regulation proposed a useful model?

Krishna Guha, Edward Luce and Saskia Scholtes, “Bank clean-up in jeopardy,” Financial Times, June 8, 2009.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/1d2419da-53c4-11de-be08-00144feabdc0,Authorised=false.html?_i_location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcms%2Fs%2F0%2F1d2419da-53c4-11de-be08-00144feabdc0.html%3Fnclick_check%3D1&_i_referer=&nclick_check=1

Bertrand Benoit, “Merkel makes a mark,” Financial Times, June 6/June 7, 2009.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/182fbf0a-5203-11de-b986-00144feabdc0,Authorised=false.html?_i_location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcms%2Fs%2F0%2F182fbf0a-5203-11de-b986-00144feabdc0.html&_i_referer=

By: David

David — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 07:18:35 +0000

Why do you hate America so much?

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Top Posts « WordPress.com — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 00:21:11 +0000

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By: Richard Hogesteger

Richard Hogesteger — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 00:16:48 +0000

I like this post, you should try to get it published in a more detailed form somewhere. I would add a fourth reformer, Lincoln, who tried to get the money power under control with the national banking system.

Regarding American politics I think much of the problem does go back to the founding fathers, particularily Hamilton. His version of Federalism was designed to create a British style upper class based in Finance and the defence industry. Sadly even though the Federalist party died his vision of the U.S. is the one that is closed to our current reality. We need reform again desperately.

By: Richard Hogesteger

Richard Hogesteger — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 00:04:44 +0000

Anne-Obama raised the seed money for his campaign from Wall Street, taking over twice as much money from Wall Street PACs as John McCain. Rahm Immanuel, while in Congress, took more money from Wall Street PACs than any other member. People have deceived themselves into believing that a change of skin color is the same as a chnge in the power structure.

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Mon, 08 Jun 2009 23:58:06 +0000

[...] Posted: 07 Jun 2009 05:26 AM PDT [...]

By: CrashX

CrashX — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 22:20:18 +0000

The people like games!

Hopefully with HDTV, we can all just get our own channel – I think that would work. Nobody expected Twitter to succeed either… dot dot dot – see that makes you think “ah, a salient point indeed… I must think more on this…”

Also, we like games. Torture us all you want but keep us entertained, damn it. The major networks and studios aren’t cutting it – so maybe Obama can give us free cable?

Gotta go, my public access gig starts in 15. I am so setting the curve. uhm… dot dot dot…

By: CrashX

CrashX — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 22:10:10 +0000

must be a different anne… hrmmm… no dot dot dot either…

By: CrashX

CrashX — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 22:05:36 +0000

Well I’m a cynic – but rather than labeling you a stupid stooge, your eloquence has warmed my cold, cold heart, moving me to embrace you as a fellow American in the hope and love that connects us all as fellow human beings… Yes We Can! Yes We Can! Yes We Can! YES WE CAN!
And while you’re all worked up into a hot lathered frenzy, I’m just gonna keep sticking it to you… you like it like that, don’t you? You KNOW you do! Yes you do! Yes you do! YES YOU DO!!!
Never underestimate the stupidity of the general public. They’ll turn out to cheer you on in droves.
And oh – just because it throws a wrench in the water works of national pride you’ve got running there, I’ll just toss it out there for ya –
Have you ever seen the tapes of the crowds in Germany gathering to embrace der Führer? If there’s anyone who knows how to pin the tail on the oligarchy, it’s Hitler.
Personally, I just think it sucks that Obama hasn’t even bothered to produce a golden calf for me to worship. Seriously, I’m really starting to feel ripped off.
But hey – call your friends up and get them back to Chicago for some more fervent hope-raising. Melt my cold, cold cynic’s heart once again… dot dot dot… ahhhhhh dot dot dot…

By: PaulH

PaulH — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 21:57:25 +0000

Indeed, it is looking increasingly likely as each month passes by that the only way to produce real change is as a result of significant social unrest. That’s very scary and I truly hope that I am wrong!

By: PaulH

PaulH — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 21:45:43 +0000

Here’s the link to the piece mentioned by Chubbco.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/opinion/07cohanWEB.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Sandy%20Lewis%20&%20William%20Cohan&st=cse

Don’t hold your breath waiting for answers!

By: Tippy Golden

Tippy Golden — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 15:12:58 +0000

In his link, Kafka writes:

“Then again, I may just be assuming that any government descending into oligarchy would inevitably provoke revolutionary insurrection. Is anyone else ready to grab a picket and chant — Regulation not revolution!?” — LOL.

A picket for hatching insurgents?

By: anne

anne — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 14:54:30 +0000

Bond Girl – do you think that the only reason people came out to vote in 2008 was for the spectacle/entertainment value? I have to disagree with you. I think perhaps there are politicians and campaign strategists who may agree with you, but most people I know are sick of the scandals, the hypocrisy and the endless attack ads.

What I saw in the last campaign – what I think people voted for was hope. Obama should never have won that race. I really believe that election showed we don’t want to be the advocates for torture. We want a fair shot for the middle class. We don’t want to start wars for no reason. Most of us don’t believe black people are different than white people.

We want to believe the American dream can be achieved by most people in America (however improbable it may be).

And the man who is president is from a solidly working class family – of mixed heritage – a true American mutt. Scandal didn’t drive people to the polls last fall. Hope did.

On election night in November 2008, a massive crowd gathered in Grant Park, Chicago – not far from where the massive crowds went mad in ’68 at the Democratic Convention, where the police beat the protesters and Dick Daley issued his “shoot to kill” order. It’s a city that’s been called “Beirut on the lake” because of its racial divisiveness.

It’s the city that Martin Luther King, Jr. once pointed to as more hatefully racist than Mississipi, that southern state where in the 1950s, a Chicago boy named Emmett Till was murdered because he grinned at a white girl. Chicago was worse than that, King thought.

And in November 2008, we witnessed a racially diverse crowd come together in peace in Chicago to cheer the new president of the United States, a black man who calls Chicago his home.

Cynics can say that people like me are a bunch of stooges and stupid and nothing matters anyway – but I don’t believe them. I believe people can and do make a difference. Think global – act local. It works.

Obama won an improbable victory last fall because his message of hope and change resonated with Americans who long to live up to the lofty ideals established for us long ago. We haven’t reached that ideal yet – but we yearn for it anyway.

In terms of reform today – I truly hope we don’t waste a good crisis, to quote Rahm (my old Congressman.) On the bubble about that – but I hope none-the-less….

By: D. Christopher Leonard

D. Christopher Leonard — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 13:00:01 +0000

Perhaps we should enquire as to which institutions have been central to the general pattern of growth and political stability in U.S. history. The popular view and endorsed by many historians is that the central political institutions of the Republic are most central. These were developed in reaction to the perceived centralization of power in the crown and the un-representative character of parliament in the mid-18th century. Hence, political power was to be divided to inhibit the growth of either a too-powerful executive (the imperial president) or of political factions. The framers, as self-made ‘aristocrats’ were deeply suspicious of popular power and did their best to insulate the higher echelons of power from the will of ‘masses’ who could be swayed by inflamed rhetoric. Jefferson was concerned about the concentration of economic power (that being fungible ) translates into political power, hence is vision of a citizenry of yeoman farmers – property holders beholden to no one else and therefor capable of independent political judgment. Madison and Hamilton,amongst other, had different concerns.
The ‘aristocratic republic’ (modeled on the supposed nobility and virtue of the Roman Senate) didn’t even outlast Jefferson’s life (he admits in one of his last letters to Adams that they were now irrelevant to the world they had made). Finally, it should be noted that Jefferson’s famous phrase, ‘life, liberty,and the pursuit of happiness’ is a significant modification of the Scots Enlightenment, ‘….,and the pursuit of property.’ Why this turn of phrase? In part because they had to fudge the central question of the ‘sanctity of property rights’. If property rights were central and inviolable, then human chattel were vouchsafed forever. The issue of the political economy of slavery figures in the failure of the Articles of confederation, its central to understanding the ‘balance’ between state and federal power in the new Republic (think of the 3/5 rule, the electoral college) and the ramifications of the ducking of this issue play out in the early history of the Republic.
What happens around the time of Jefferson’s death is the ‘Jacksonian revolution’ – a move towards popular government with a concomitant resentment of (Eastern, wealthy) elites. I would guess that SJ is referring to the revocation of the charter of the national bank as the first crisis between financial elites and the potential for dispersed economic power. But didn’t this reflect as much the interest of other regional elite with banks that issued scrip (currency) and were notoriously unstable? One also needs to remember that the Jacksonian era also was responsible for government sanctioned ‘removal’ of indigenous people, the growth of serious political cronyism (i.e. ‘corruption’ in the language of the Framers).
So if that’s the first great crisis – and reform, I’m in doubt. The second great crisis goes unmentioned – the civil war which was not just a ‘political’ crisis, it was also a struggle over the political economy of slavery and the fundamental weaknesses in federal power instituted to vouchsafe chattel slavery. We are still dealing with the consequences today.
The other great perspective, one more congenial to economists, is that a stable system of property rights is all that really matters. In this sense, it hardly matters the form of government as long property rights are ensured and there is third party enforcement of contract (one of the few roles of government in the minimalist ‘night watchmen’ conception of the state). The problem with oligarchy is not the concentration of power in a few hands, it’s that with concentrated political-economic power, elites don’t abide by the rules. But one needs to remember how many political scientists and development economists used to sing the praises of ‘authoritarian democracy’ such as late-Franco Spain or the city state of Singapore. Indeed, it was often proposed that too much democracy was a bad thing because popular sentiment would lead governments to appease the masses, and abandon the appropriate growth oriented policies. Robert Dahl went so far as to assert that low voter turn-out in the U.S. was a sign of citizen contentment. Indeed a god many have assumed that a significant degree of political mobilization in a citizenry is dangerous to both political and economic stability.
As to the second and third crises, both the Progressive era and the New Deal were elite responses to the likelihood of popular mobilization, which in the U.S. as Statsguy noted, is typically in the language of populism. In passing, it’s worth noting that classic populism (in the U.S.) is a largely agrarian phenomenon. In T. Roosevelt’s era, the response was to the repeated collapse of agricultural commodity prices from the 1870s on. While TR is remembered for “trust-busting”, that’s not the core of populism. Progressives, in the name of reforming government were often anti-democratic (and anti-immigrant). Municipal government reform sought to end machine politics like Tammeny Hall in NYC. But the move from ward-based to at-large aldermanic systems disenfranchised immigrant (ethnic) voters concentrated in inner cities – and ensured their political domination.
So much has been written about the New Deal that it’s barely worth repeating. While the response to the collapse of agriculture was in part, populist, the emptying-out of the countryside (i.e. the family farm) and the rationalization of agriculture has been at best a mixed blessing. The recognition of collective bargaining and other labor law reforms was not a response to populism but to the very real fear that American workers would turn to Communism (as a good many did) although for many, Fascism may have been just as appealing (indeed Hoover accused Roosevelt of being a Fascist). Of course, Ne Deal legislation did much else in terms of stabilizing the economy and in other areas of social reform.
Finally, the fourth (or by my count fifth) great crisis was the so-called Regan Revolution that launched the country on its path to the current crisis. Thirty years of anti-government rhetoric while simultaneously inhabiting the state for the interests of political cronies, the whole sale attack on new deal social legislation, financial regulation, the masterful use of the politics of resentiment (right-wing populism), and the exploitation of racism as a political strategy.
In sum, I think SJ’s historical interpretation has some merit but I am concerned with cherry-picking the aspects of history that appeal to our arguments at the expense of recognizing the complexity of that past. I also think we should acknowledge the tension between Republican constitutionalism and Lockean contract theory as the play out in our history.

By: Art

Art — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 12:43:37 +0000

For anyone who’s interested, here are some campaign finance reform bills pending in Congress:

The Fair Elections Now Act bills, 2009 S. 752 and 2009 H.R., would establish a system of public matching funds for candidates who limited their contributions to not more than $100 per donor. This limit applies separately as well to contributions to the candidate’s leadership PACs. Participants would also be limited to expending in a campaign not more than the qualifying contributions they received plus the matching funds. For comments of the sponsors, and commentary on the bill, see Durbin, Specter, Larson, Jones Introduce Bills to Reform Financing of Congressional Elections, Cong. Doc. and Pub., Mar. 31, 2009; Should Taxpayers Subsidize Pols? Politico.com Apr. 3, 2009.

The Let the People Decide Clean Campaign Act, 2009 H.R. 158, seeks to amend the FECA to provide for expenditure limitations and public financing for House general elections. In addition to expenditure limitations on a candidate, § 301 of the bill would ban any person from making any “independent expenditure” with respect to a House election. See Obey Kicks Off 111th Congress with Call for Fundamental Campaign Finance Reform, US Fed News, Jan. 6, 2009.

The Clean Money, Clean Elections Act of 2009, 2009 H.R. 2056, proposes to reform financing of House elections. It presents another voluntary, contribution limit-public financing scheme. See Rep. Tierney Introduces Clean Money, Clean Elections Act of 2009, US Fed News, Apr. 28, 2009.

The Clean Law for Earmark Accountability Reform (CLEAR) Act, 2009 H.R. 2038, 2009 Bill Tracking H.R. 2038, would amend the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 to prohibit an authorized committee of a candidate who is a Member of Congress from accepting contributions from any entity for which the candidate sought a Congressional earmark. See Reps. Hodes, Giffords Introduce Legislation To Ban Campaign Contributions Linked To Earmarks, US Fed News Apr. 23, 2009; Giffords Seeks To Break Lobby-Lawmaker Tie, Ariz. Daily Star, Apr. 23, 2009; Giffords’ Earmark Bill A Good 1st Step, Ariz. Daily Star, Apr. 24, 2009.