However, there's a chorus of astute political voices here, and i wonder if a commentary from the front page of HuffPo today isn't ripe for deconstruction.
Lawrence Lessig's Commentary
We have now entered the third of these cycles. The anger that has broken out across America is rightly targeted at the captured and incompetent institution that our government has become. That capture, most Americans believe, is a kind of corruption. But not the corruption of bribery, or brown paper bags of cash hidden and traded among congressmen. Instead the corruption of today is in plain sight. The mechanism of its reach is displayed to everyone. It is the simple and pervasive economy of influence that buys access and more through campaign cash. And then without explicit recognition, the actions of our government are guided by the understanding of how those acts will affect the opportunity to raise money.
Instead the corruption of today is in plain sight. The mechanism of its reach is displayed to everyone. It is the simple and pervasive economy of influence that buys access and more through campaign cash. And then without explicit recognition, the actions of our government are guided by the understanding of how those acts will affect the opportunity to raise money.
or
As with each of these cycles of reform, when the fever gets hot there arises a political movement to fight the infection. Sometimes that movement has a leader. Some of us thought Obama was our Jackson, a thought that feels embarrassingly naive today.
After a whole section of cheerleading for Arianna's campaign for the Anti-Palin, he finally gives us this wisdom?:
The Neo-Progressive Movement needs to encourage these Republicans. It needs to be willing to put aside part of the agenda of each within the movement, recognizing that no change, on the Right or the Left, will happen until the fever is broken, because the disease has been stopped. Mainstream parties have lost the credibility for reform. As in 1912, only a breakaway, trans-party movement, possibly with no single leader, could have an effect in 2012.
To me this reads as an advert for the HuffPo Party, a fairly simplistic overview of amurkan political history, and a middle of the road version of progressive stance... though might be the order of the day.
Is this a harbinger of 2012 US? Is this a positive view of what will come from Obama's shortcomings? I must say i'm uneasy trying to digest it. "Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin
He managed to airbrush out of existence the entire Single Tax'ers, key players in the Progressive Movement in general, as well as the Progressive Party.
He managed to overlook the failure of the Populist Movement when they allied with the Tea Baggers of the day, including their obnoxious racism, nativism, and anti-intellectuality.
Last - just because I have to end this quickly - he is espousing a Top/Down view of history, thus advocating a restrictive Top/Down strategy. My view, expressed elsewhere, is a Bottom/Up strategy and Top/Down tactics.
This coalition must agree on a series of minimum necessary steps to wrest control from the financial elites and to repudiate the noxious doctrines that have gained currency such as the idea that "fictitious legal entities have the same civil rights as individual citizens and that the conduct of all public affairs must comport with the needs of the most powerful business interests.
One thing we all should be able to agree is that much of the behavior in the financial sphere needs to be investigated and prosecuted as the facts indicate. Fortunately, just doing this would first paralyze and then largely destroy many of the largest current players. That is why Obama refuses to "look back"! But we also must agree that Too Big to Fail is Too Big to Exist and that Impossible to Regulate cannot be allowed to exist -- regardless of the economic consequences that economic incumbents threaten if they are moved against. We probably need a hard and fast rule on the allowable size in relationship to market size for any firm and my sense is that that limit should be 10% of market share. Finally, we need to agree on a workable, sustainable national monetary system based on reality, Modern Monetary Theory is a good place to start, and a workable means of international monetary exchanges such as Keynes proposed at Bretton Woods in 1944. This is the best hope that the USA and Europe have to prevent China and other emerging powers from doing to us what we have done to them via control of the monetary system.
Until we can put in place a sustainable means of national political and economic governance that serves the needs of the entire nation not much else matters - because not much else will survive in our society in their absence. As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
