financial collapse

Originally published 2009-01-08 14:14:40 -1000 - promoted by Roxy

In contrast to the mainstream media, there were many warnings in the progressive blogosphere over the past two years about the dangers of economic imbalances – most particularly the gap in incomes resulting from the 28-year old war Ronald Reagan initiated on the working and middle classes  – leading to a financial crisis. There is one primary and very important reason for this blindness of the mainstream media and prescience of the progressive blogosphere – the mainstream media is infested with the reigning economic paradigm of monetarism and financial economics which places emphasis on financial and monetary capital, while the progressive blogosphere throbs with populist economics focused on how well the least in society are uplifted and supported - the hoary old idea of developing human capital.

Who Obama picks as a Treasury Secretary is going to tell us just about all we need to know about how far Obama is willing to break with the unfortunately named “neo-liberal” economic policies of free markets and free trade that have dominated U.S. economic policy since Ronald Reagan – including even under Bill Clinton. Through most of today, there was a diary on the recommended list on DailyKos, Summers' call for poisoning Developing World?, on the news today that Summers was at the top of Obama’s list for filling the cabinet post of Secretary of the Treasury. The resulting Dailykos thread quickly turned into a discussion of who might be an acceptable Treasury Secretary. Unfortunately, scanning that thread, it appears to me not many people understand that this is the most important fight Obama can undertake right now.

The key question is this: the American tax payers just bought the banking system. We are going to pay, with interest, upwards of three trillion dollars for it. A relative bargain actually. The question is what we are going to do with it now that we own it.