NYT: Here Come the Economic Populists

[DeepModem Mom]

Here Come the Economic Populists
By LOUIS UCHITELLE
Published: November 26, 2006


(Robert Grossman)

FOR years, the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party, exercising a lock on the party’s economic policies, argued that the economy could achieve sustained growth only if markets were allowed to operate unfettered and globally.

Overcoming protests from labor unions, a traditional constituency, the Clinton administration vigorously supported free trade agreements like Nafta and agreed to China’s admission into the World Trade Organization. If there was damage to workers, then the Clinton camp proposed dealing with it after it occurred — through wage insurance, for example, or worker retraining and other safety-net measures.

This approach coincided with a period of economic prosperity, low unemployment and falling deficits. Over time, this combination — called Rubinomics after the Clinton administration’s Treasury secretary, Robert E. Rubin — became the Democratic establishment’s accepted model for the future.

Not anymore. With the Democrats now a majority in Congress, and disquiet over globalization growing, a party faction that has been powerless — the economic populists — is emerging and strongly promoting an alternative to Rubinomics.

The populists argue that the national income has flowed disproportionately into corporate coffers and the nation’s wealthiest households, and that the imbalance has grown worse in recent years. They want to rethink America’s role in the global economy. They would intervene in markets and regulate them much more than the Rubinites would. For a start, they would declare a moratorium on new trade agreements until clauses were included that would, for example, restrict layoffs and protect incomes....

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/weekinreview/26uchitelle.html

[Fovea]

1. K&R for kicking Rubin to the curb.

Now we are to the point where the sacred cows of the DLC are starting to flame out like Carville, or be discredited like Rubin.

Maybe this needs to be the time for Robt. Reich to re-assert his pro labor economic stance for the new, center left Dem party.


Like I have been saying, our economic paradigm is broken and staggering. Now is the time to choose whether we want to be like China, or the EU. But the era of the investor class paradise is over.

[Double T]

2. Show me a Democrat with brass balls BIG ENOUGH to take-on .......

and DO SOMETHING with the corrupt wall street and corporate america neocons, and I'll show YOU a true leader and a champion for MOST of the AMERICAN People.. Still waiting to see WHO emerges.

[omega minimo]

4. Balls got us in this mess. A more holistic approach is needed

"Balls" tend to be short-sighted. A more holistic approach would take into account the interpendence of social and environmental costs, not just focus on immediate gratification via crude economic gain.

[Warpy]

3. The dogma of free trade didn't originate with either Clinton

or Repugs. Free trade proponents go back all the way to Roosevelt, and probably before then. The Democrats have bought into it, thinking that it would mean US companies building plants abroad for sales overseas, while keeping their plants here for domestic consumption.

Oops.

This is one reason populist economics got taken off the table when Johnson went out. The party mistook a lot of resentment against the war as resentment against populism. There was resentment over his "coddling of (immoral) welfare recipients," but it paled in comparison with the growing unpopularity of the war. Remember Nixon's promise of a secret plan to end that war?

Taking populist economics off the table and Clinton's stupid ideas that a safety net would magically appear to help discarded workers and that retraining for jobs that wouldn't be there once the training was completed has lost the party all three branches of government as the working class base has stayed home on election day.

I don't know how those Wall Street Democrats thought they were going to get elected without their base. I suppose they didn't mind being out of power as long as the cash flow stayed positive from reckless tax cuts.

The business as usual policy of party conservatives is killing the party and it's killing us. It is also killing the country, as whole industries have disappeared overseas, leaving this country incredibly vulnerable in the next big war.

Things have got to change. Those dogmas of free trade unregulated markets have been proven once again to harm the bottom 90% of the population as the top 10% starts to fatten into an aristocracy based on permanent wealth. We can't go on like this, the system has become unsustainable as debt is incurred to achieve subsistence.

It's time to revisit demand side economics. It's time to remember who this country is supposed to belong to.

[yurbud]

5. DLC types thought they could win as business party WITHOUT religious nuts & racists

so our choice was always Almond Joy or Mounds.

[omega minimo]

6. From what little information was available in the media at the time

of passage of NAFTA, it seemed clear that there were no guarantees that the American corporate profits produced by offshoring and outsourcing would ever benefit American people. Kissinger was on the tube saying as much, pretending that "trickle down" would happen but saying when asked directly, "Well, of course there are no guarantees."

Suckers.

"The Democrats have bought into it, thinking that it would mean US companies building plants abroad for sales overseas, while keeping their plants here for domestic consumption."

It was clear that without built-in protections for workers and environment, they wouldn't happen.

"The dogma of free trade didn't originate with either Clinton or Repugs. Free trade proponents go back all the way to Roosevelt, and probably before then."

Thom Hartmann often covers the historic cycles of Corporatists vs. Populists.

"I don't know how those Wall Street Democrats thought they were going to get elected without their base. I suppose they didn't mind being out of power as long as the cash flow stayed positive from reckless tax cuts."

By using the same techniques and tactics as the Repukes? By playing the Big $$$ game and ignoring the base? "Out of power" is relative, if $illionaires on both sides of the aisle profit from the "reckless tax cuts" and globalization.

"We can't go on like this, the system has become unsustainable as debt is incurred to achieve subsistence. It's time to revisit demand side economics. It's time to remember who this country is supposed to belong to."

This needs to be the focus of Congress and the 2008 election-- not party lines, but reclaiming a nation that is currently Of the Corporations, By the Corporations and For the Corporations.

:patriot:

[Fovea]

7. The Democratic Party

needs to treat the punditocracy to a cram course in STFU.
They need to get strongly on the progressive, populist,
and green messages and make a new economy to replace the pre-kyoto one.

Gore needs to be given the party nod that some seem to believe is Clinton's.
A bit of common cause is what is needed now. The third way is dead, it is now Dubya's strategy, that should tell you something.
What we need now, is to commit to a course of action to create a 21st century America that does not need to be imperial, totalitarian, theocratic...

We need a big ass keynesian jolt that may indeed require the world to grant us some economic forbearance. So what we propose must be worthy of the effort.
We must rebuild American society as productive, more green, less militarist. We need to start making products in America that the world needs. Perhaps the decay of the auto industry is an opportunity to try jump starting transportation with an eye to energy efficiency over speed.

We can commit to shifting our transportation dollars away from creating more miles of highway and creating a national rail system specifically for Amtrak, with high speed track that does not share with heavy freight haulers. We can spend the money of the uber rich to build local transportation systems that really work, and attach them to the larger infrastructure.

We can provide universal healthcare. We can start to re-deploy our military with an eye to eventually having the smallest standing army with a large national service corps that includes national guard duty, peace corps, Americorps, Red Cross and the development of a serious FEMA. We can educate all Americans to the 16th grade level free of charge.

Being energy efficient is going to be of paramount importance. Local agriculture will have to be re-created as the model of mega monoculture with GM and Petro farming becomes unsustainable. We should encourage small family farms in every urban periphery, and check sprawl with a deliberate focus on re-ruralizing exurbia. Why? Because transportation costs will continue to rise, and intensive agriculture will return to profitablity. Organic farming takes labor. That labor can commute, but farming in the exurbanity of the city allows easy access to farmimg laborers.

Extensive farming may find itself growing fuel stock crops by 2020. By 2050, Hadley suggests a very different looking America, climate wise.
We can be part of the 21st century and help solve the upcoming problems, or we can have a flag waiving slide into beligerent oblivion.
We would be far better served by getting down to the business of rebuilding an America that has been contracting structurally since the Carter years.

We need an agenda this bold, and we need the whole party to put their minds and shoulders to it. America is so frightfully behind the curve, and so little time remains to catch up.