It’s no longer a political calculation — it’s called governance. “Just do it,” says the slogan. But I never expected much from this guy in any case, and only voted for him because I was so scared of Sarah Palin.

My offer still stands. Send me your email address and I will send you a complimentary copy of our book. It usually is appropriate to know what you are talking about before you start yelling. Read the book and feel free to give us your comments, good, bad, indifferent.

The problem is what the corporate media will roll out as its talking points.

The Obama administration is almost certainly correct in in taking this as a delicate political task. They are carefully crafting the Republican intransigence into a story that the corporate media can hardly avoid (although mostly they still do). I wish them good luck.

DWN

the article is not meant to be an objective view of economic matters

the factoids listed were listed to help advance the premise of the article : “we are in danger of big government”

this is an emerging news theme

editors are testing “big government ” as a story line

Did you bother to read the “cheap” book before you started yelling? If $4.95 is beyond your budget, sent me your email address and I will send you a complimentary copy. Then we will welcome your critique.

I do understand that the administration has come under fire from both sides of the argument but I believe they’re doing the best they can coz the results show!

No, till we get back to the idea that wealth only comes from productivity, not from shifting money from one pocket to the other or marketeering gamesmanship, nothing will get fixed.

1. This kind of sheen is problematic in itself. It’s alot easier to keep selling out the people and conveying the loot when your rhetoric is all about “free markets” and “entrepreneuers” than when in theory you have to stick up for the disadvantaged.

2. Therefore a “liberal” corporatist has to overcome a greater dissonance between rhetoric and action than does a Republican. Therefore he must be a very skilled politician. Clinton was good at it. Obama doesn’t seem to be up to the challenge.

3. Both of these are exacerbated in crisis times. Bush could bolster his corporatism with his war-on-terror diversion tactic and with demonizing any dissenter including on economic policy as an unpatriotic traitor who wants more 9/11s etc.

That kind of rightist jingoism is not as readily accessible to the corporatist-in-liberal-clothing like Obama. (Though with tons of help from the MSM he has tried to set up moral equivalences between birthers and nazis on the one hand and public option supporters on the other.)

The most important crisis point is that Clinton had the luxury of conducting all his looting during boom times (though I’ve been hearing the argument that NAFTA doesn’t get enough credit for the 1994 electoral debacle, that commentators overemphasize the failure of Hillarycare). People weren’t as vigilant. Today the people are furious, and the more intelligent among them are hypervigilant and are doing all they can to raise every alarm. So that only radically increases the level of political skill Obama would need to deploy.

(Does Summers understand the difference between the political challenges facing these two admins he’s been part of? As we know, he’s always been bad at public politics.)

Obama just doesn’t seem to be that competent at all this. Everyone who’s paying attention is saying with sarcasm and bitterness, “Heckuva job.”

There is a long-standing, and politically necessary, sham belief in the ineffectuality of government.–Philip H

And this:

A brief review of the actual concerns motivating our Founding Fathers should make clear to a mature reader that our present government has not ever, since its establishment, had “the interest of the people it is _supposed_ to represent” as a core motive. However, our government always has been for and by the people whom it truly represents.–law student

And (provided that the phrase “two-headed dictatorship” is intended to colorfully describe the way the two parties flock to work with corporations–the most authoritarian institutions we have in this country–rather than a literal, iron-fisted dictatorship) this:

[the government] is simply a blackhole into which public outrage is funnelled. In this way one grasps best the brownshirt anger over health care and spending. Not for a minute is this outrage aimed at the system but merely at one of its components. The only authentic anti-system discontent today exists on the left and it is weak and poorly organized.–Lavrenti Beria

I think this makes up the crux of the problem. The question is, is it possible to get ourselves out of this mess–and to keep from descending back into something similar or worse each time a bubble bursts? Or are businesses so entrenched, the profit seekers so amoral, and the population so thoroughly indoctrinated against the state (including the segment of the population running the state) that there’s nothing that can be done?

No, he’s just the President of the United States. “the most powerful man in the world”. Our great hope! The change we believe in!

Or something like that.

in general, just think about how traveling entertainment used to work. a talented guy who knew his lines would be up there on the stage in the darkened tent, doing his act. the rubes be sittin down in the low seats. and the operators be stalkin through there takin the wallets offen the rubes. we got the operators up on Wall Street, we got the stage performer down in D.C. … close enough.