Obamanomics

Down below at the end of this I pasted something I sent out a while ago, but it very relevant right now. As the financial crisis comes to a head, we see that neither of the leading candidates has any real critique of the systemic problems that we face. McCain is, by his own admission, completely ignorant of these things. Although, he does know all about how to make war. So that is his contribution to the economy. Obama does not offer any real solutions either. Yesterday he said

"Today, I fully support the effort of Secretary Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke to work in a bipartisan spirit with Congress to find this kind of solution.
What we’re looking at right now is to provide the Treasury and the Federal Reserve with as broad authority as necessary to stabilize markets and maintain credit. We need a more institutional response to create a system that can manage some of the underlying problems with bad mortgages, help homeowners stay in their homes, protect the retirement and savings of working Americans."

He basically agrees with what the administration is doing to address the financial crisis. He agrees with Bush, Paulson, Bernanke, etc.. all Republicans. All people of the party that is supposed to be so different than the party that he represents. How strange. I don't know how it could be made clearer that they are all beholden to the same financial institutions, i.e. corporate america, i.e. the elite class, i.e. the capitalist class. This is a major problem and a major reason why Obama is not about real change. This is tied to a number of concerns including why we are fighting wars in the Middle East and why we are the only industrialized nation without a national healthcare system, why wages have stagnated for working americans, and why many of us are in so much debt.

The comments about home owners and working Americans is lip service. Ask yourself, who does this bailout stuff help? It helps the working class only in that we are stuck. Stuck trying to make ends meet in a system stacked against us. It surely helps the credit industry and huge finance corporations (think Golman-Sachs Paulson's old pals). McCain has been using the same jargon for political reasons, making them appear as populists. Partisan politics hears what it wants from its own side, and sadly buy this ridiculous rhetoric. But the the fact is that middle class people will be feeling the pain from this fall out for a long time to come.


Below are some quotes from an article about Obama from the NY Times, entitled Obamanomics.
The sub-title is " A Free-Market-Loving, Big-Spending, Fiscally-Conservative Wealth Redistributionist"

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/24/magazine/24Obamanomics-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=magazine&pagewanted=print

Keeping it short, I think these two excerpts sum it up:

Compared with many other Democrats, Obama simply is more comfortable with the apparent successes of laissez-faire economics.
Sunstein, now on the faculty at Harvard, has a name for this approach: “I like to think of him as a ‘University of Chicago’ Democrat.”

...
He [Obama] paused for a few seconds and then said this:

“I think I can tell a pretty simple story. Ronald Reagan ushered in an era that reasserted the marketplace and freedom. He made people aware of the cost involved of government regulation or at least a command-and-control-style regulation regime. Bill Clinton to some extent continued that pattern, although he may have smoothed out the edges of it. And George Bush took Ronald Reagan’s insight and ran it over a cliff. And so I think the simple way of telling the story is that when Bill Clinton said the era of big government is over, he wasn’t arguing for an era of no government. So what we need to bring about is the end of the era of unresponsive and inefficient government and short-term thinking in government, so that the government is laying the groundwork, the framework, the foundation for the market to operate effectively and for every single individual to be able to be connected with that market and to succeed in that market. And it’s now a global marketplace."

The market will save us... Why didn't I think of that?! Put the liberal back in neoliberal!

This is not hope, but a hopeless situation unless we work towards addressing the roots of the problems.