On Tue, 5 Aug 2008, Doug Henwood wrote:
>> Obama: I'd guarantee $4 billion to retool auto industry
>
> That's very nice of him, but GM has lost $47 billion over the last year;
> Ford, $12 billion. So $4 billion would cover about three and a half
> weeks of their losses.
This reminds me of something Louis Menand said in the NYRB in 1997 about Clinton (and Washington politics in general):
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1107
In a speech in San Francisco last month, President Clinton announced three new urban initiatives. First, the Department of Housing and Urban Development will offer a 50 percent discount to police officers who buy homes owned by the department in neighborhoods they patrol. The program is designed to reach one thousand police officers. It will last one year. The second is a reduction in the points on Federal Housing Administration mortgages, from 1.75 percent to 1.5 percent, for first-time home buyers in inner cities. This program is expected to save twenty thousand eligible buyers about $200 each in closing costs. The third initiative is a demonstration program that will allow up to two thousand families to use federal rent subsidy money to buy their own homes.
This is the style of governance that has been adopted by a country that has the strongest economy in the world, has enjoyed five years of sustained growth, confronts no immediate threat to its security, and has almost completely lost its faith in public works. This style is not neoliberalism or neoconservatism, whatever those terms mean. It is something different, a kind of Government Lite. We want to improve conditions in depressed urban areas, so we show our good intentions by sprinkling a handful of federal fairy dust over them.
It is a style that enjoys strong bipartisan support. We think people should feel patriotic, so we pass a constitutional amendment making it a crime to burn the flag. We want to encourage the arts, so we give $99 million to the National Endowment for the Arts as a token of our esteem. (It is often pointed out that, at $99 million per year, each American is contributing only the cost of a postage stamp annually to the arts. It is less often pointed out that each American is therefore receiving a postage stamp's worth of arts programming in return.) Our children are our future! We award a $500 tax credit for each child. Slavery was wrong! We pass a resolution apologizing for it. The appointment of a presidential commission certifies our acknowledgment that racism continues to be a problem of serious concern. School uniforms, tobacco-free All-Star games, television ratings: the country is in love with gestures.
<end except>
Michael