On 2010-09-18, at 3:26 PM, Gar Lipow wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 18, 2010 at 11:46 AM, Michael Pollak <mpollak at panix.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> One huge difference between Warren and Volcker is that
>> she has shown herself to be a veritable genius at the bully pulpit. We have
>> to remember that her earlier role as TARP overseer was also a fob-off
>> position. But she made something out of nothing through her constant and
>> constantly great TV interviews. From an obscure post she became the most
>> important left face of the adminstration, and its most popular figure. It's
>> in large part due to her that we got this agency which many of us thought
>> was DOA.
>>
>> So it's quite possible she could do the same here, no matter what the
>> administration intends. Time will tell.
> But. But. That almost suggests that who holds office within capitalism
> can make a difference .. Heretic! Hang the witch! Hang the witch!
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Gar is mamaguying (look it up), but it's true that an individual can make a difference at decisive moments in a social crisis - not in Warren's position perhaps, but at the highest level.
Obama was never going to transcend the limitations imposed by his office, but the road lay wide open to him as President to build on the popular anger his campaign had tapped into and further stimulated. Instead, he let that anger dissipate or flow explosively to the right. It seems to me he could have, as a minimum, established an independent commission with wide power to investigate and prosecute the the Wall Street financiers who had contributed to the crisis; taken over insolvent banks and restructured the financial system; directed the bank bailout money at infrastructure, alternative energy, community service and other job creation projects; and introduced medicare for all or, at the very least, a public insurance option.
The Roosevelt administration, which the incoming adminstration was widely expected to emulate, did not undertake healthcare reform, but it embarked on these other measures very shortly after taking office. Obama never pretended to be a radical, as CB reminds us, and was confronted by powerful entrenched interests, but no more so than the New Deal, nor arguably was the mass sentiment for change more powerful in 1933 than in 2008. There was then, as there no longer is, the spectre of Communism embodied by the USSR, but the Roosevelt administration in 1933 was driven less by fear of the weak and moribund socialist and trade union movement than by the overpowering need to resuscitate American capitalism. The current crisis has never plumbed the depths of the Depression, but even when measured in terms of the system's contemporary imperatives, the Obama administration has not "made a difference", which is why the liberal intelligensia and beyond has lost all confidence in it, and disaster looms for the Democrats in the midterms.