Tag: democracy

Models of Economic Policymaking

By James Kwak

The evening that he won the Iowa caucus in January 2008, Barack Obama said this:

Hope is the bedrock of this nation. The belief that our destiny will not be written for us, but by us, by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is, who have the courage to remake the world as it should be… . [the belief that] brick by brick, block by block, callused hand by callused hand, … ordinary people can do extraordinary things.

That speech is at the opening of K. Sabeel Rahman’s new book, Democracy Against Domination. It invoked one of the central mobilizing themes of Obama’s 2008 campaign, which set him clearly apart from Hillary Clinton: the idea that the senator from Illinois would usher in a new kind of politics, a more democratic, more inclusive approach to government as opposed to business as usual inside the Beltway.

Well, that didn’t happen. Whatever you think of President Obama’s policy goals and accomplishments, he had little impact on how our political system works. Plenty of blame for that goes to the Republicans, who set out from Inauguration Day focused exclusively on making him a one-term president. But it’s also true that the new president did not make political reform a priority during those first two years when he had majorities in both houses of Congress.

Continue reading “Models of Economic Policymaking” →

Our Fate Is in Their Hands?

Last month, Representative John Shimkus spoke out against regulating carbon dioxide emissions on the grounds that carbon dioxide is plant food. “So if we decrease the use of carbon dioxide, are we not taking away plant food from the atmosphere?” Shimkus is on the House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment, which means he has a vote on these issues.

In the wake of a financial and economic crisis of at least generational magnitude, our government will be rewriting the rules of the financial industry. And “our government” includes not just the pedigreed scholars in the executive branch (Larry Summers, Christina Romer, Austan Goolsbee, etc.), but Congressional representatives like John Shimkus – “like” in the sense that they were selected for their jobs, and for their committee seats, in exactly the same way that Shimkus ended up discussing the crucial role of fossil fuels in sustaining plant life on this planet. And when it comes to legislation, Summers, Romer, and Goolsbee have exactly zero votes between them; Shimkus has one.

Continue reading “Our Fate Is in Their Hands?” →

The Economy and Popular Democracy

One of the central themes of the current economic crisis has been the cozy relationship between “Wall Street” and Washington that resulted from both ideological convergence and old-fashioned campaign contributions. Another theme, as Simon discussed yesterday, has been the absence of a simple left-right axis for opinions to coalesce around. If you think that fixing the banking sector requires a government conservatorship and forcible balance sheet cleanup – rather than periodically dribbling large amounts of cash into institutions and management teams that have already failed by any free-market measure – it’s not clear who your advocates in government are.

Tomorrow, however, you can stand up and be counted. A New Way Forward is organizing demonstrations all around the country, most at 2 PM Eastern Time. The basic message is simple: “If it’s too big to fail, it’s too big to exist. Dismantle the power of the financial elite and make policies that keep a new crop from springing up. We want our economy and politics restored for the public.”

And don’t forget your pitchfork. (Just kidding.)

Economics, Politics, Outrage, and the Media

Warning: This is a post about economics and politics; it is a reader response post; but (here’s the warning), it’s also one of those annoying self-referential posts you only see on the Internet discussing a debate among the commentariat.

Last week went something like this:

  1. We learned about the $165 million in retention bonuses at AIG Financial Products.
  2. A lot of people, up to and including President Obama, got mad.
  3. Various commentators, including Ian Bremmer (on Planet Money, around the 14-minute mark) and Joe Nocera, said, in Nocera’s words, “Can we all just calm down a little?”

Their argument is basically that $165 million is small change, the government should be working on bigger issues, and the demonization of AIG is making it harder to solve the real problems.

Continue reading “Economics, Politics, Outrage, and the Media” →

Nationalization and Democracy

More extra-credit reading while on spring break: Sanjiv Gupta has an article at The Huffington Post about the relationship between the financial crisis, our banking sector, and democracy. The central question, as I see it, is an old one: how to ensure that a democratic political system is not undermined by a non-democratic economic system. Gupta suggests, as one possible step, a national credit union to compete with private-sector banks. To think about this in detail, we’d have to think about why we (most of us, including me) instinctively think that the following the profit motive is generally the right way to allocate capital. That’s something I hope to devote more space to later.