Thanks, Bravo

No need to highlight our culinary traditions or anything.

hell no

Oh, the humanity.

Obama and free market fetishism

Ok, this concerns me. A lot.

Obama's centrism, specifically his tendency to triangulate and compromise, have always been my least favorite of his attributes. I voted for him in 2004 (when I was still an Illinois resident) and expected that with his political capital, he would immediately become a voice of reason, speaking truth to power, and work on immediately ending the war and fixing the many, many ills of our social safety net.

Say it with me now: "Na Ga Ha Pan"

Yes, I was disillusioned. Apparently, in the Senate, they have this thing called "seniority." And newly elected Senators are loathe to upset the senior Senators, lest they lose committee seats, or somesuch.

I thought that when you win an election with 70% of the vote, you receive this tricky thing called a mandate from the voters, where you can do exactly what you said you would do in the campaign without pissing anyone off, except for the people that the voters wanted to piss off. Sadly, no.

For a man who says his favorite show is The Wire, he's acting an awfully lot like the New-Day-promising, seat-jumping asshole Tommy Carcetti. I know I can't be the first one to make that comparison, but this run-to-the-middle economics is not only bad politics, it's bad economics. Don't believe me? Let's ask Paul Krugman:

Look, Obama didn’t pose as a Nation-type progressive, then turn on his allies after the race was won. Throughout the campaign he was slightly less progressive than Hillary Clinton on domestic issues — and more than slightly on health care. If people like Ms. Klein are shocked, shocked that he isn’t the candidate of their fantasies, they have nobody but themselves to blame.

I think Krugman is tacking too hard here - no one is shocked, shocked that Obama isn't perfect. Besides, Krugman himself took a drink of the Hillary Crazy during the primary and hasn't quite recovered. But his point on policy is correct. Hillary's policies are, in fact, more progressive. (The gulf between Clinton/Obama and McCain's policies is bigger, of course.) Many people nonetheless voted against her for other reasons: to avoid dynastic politics, to break cleanly from the nineties, to escape the DLC-Clinton centrist party politics of failure, to elect a new promising young leader, to avoid having Dean removed as DNC chairman. Those are excellent reasons.

Another reason for Obama's success is his ability to rebrand centrism itself. Obama stakes out solidly progressive positions on many issues: choice, the environment, and ethics come immediately to mind. However, his rhetoric is always focused on bringing diametrically opposed groups together, promoting dialogue, finding commonalities rather than using wedges to divide. Again, all good things.

But there is a time when, if the voting population grants you a bully pulpit, you use it. Economic issues tie in to every single policy issue of our time. Neoliberalism is so woven into our mindset that we have managed to build the single most expensive, complicated, unequal medical care system in history, and it leaves out at the very least 47 million people. Neoliberalism is what brought about Katrina. Neoliberalism dictates that we divest from public infrastructure and give it away to private companies. Neoliberalism means voting against a GI Bill while private security companies, aka mercenary fuckmooks, get paid three times as much, live outside the rule of law, and incite violence that kills our troops. Neoliberalism is "I got mine, and oh by the way, I've got yours too, and your grandkids, and the fact that I have it is proof that I deserve it." Americans managed to turn Calvinist predestination theology into the economics of greed. I mean, it's just stunning. I'm barely scratching the surface. For more, you need to read Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine. It is a hugely important work, one that should be required reading for all US citizens.

All of this leads me back to Naomi Klein's recent piece on Obama and economics, which I linked to up top.

Obama's top economic adviser is Austan Goolsbee, and the head of his economic policy team is Jason Furman. Both of these guys are Chicago School neoliberal economists. Furman is even a staunch Wal-Mart defender and promoter. Klein does us the favor of reminding us that, uh, actually, the world is not so fond of Milton Friedman and his policies.

The movement launched by Friedman, introduced by Ronald Reagan and entrenched under Clinton, faces a profound legitimacy crisis around the world. Nowhere is this more evident than at the University of Chicago itself. In mid-May, when university president Robert Zimmer announced the creation of a $200 million Milton Friedman Institute, an economic research center devoted to continuing and augmenting the Friedman legacy, a controversy erupted. More than 100 faculty members signed a letter of protest. "The effects of the neoliberal global order that has been put in place in recent decades, strongly buttressed by the Chicago School of Economics, have by no means been unequivocally positive," the letter states. "Many would argue that they have been negative for much of the world's population."

When Friedman died in 2006, such bold critiques of his legacy were largely absent. The adoring memorials spoke only of grand achievement, with one of the more prominent appreciations appearing in the New York Times--written by Austan Goolsbee.

Thank god the U of C faculty has come to their senses. Better late than never.

Here's the upshot of all this. At a time when we need more market intervention, more government regulation, more monopoly-busting, more federally-directed investments, more government-funded jobs programs, better educated engineers, more research into technologies that can save us from the coming environmental clusterfuck that will be weaning off oil and carbon, what we DO NOT NEED is a president who talks a big game, but walks just the same as the rest of them.

It was in the two and a half months between winning the 1992 election and being sworn into office that Bill Clinton did a U-turn on the economy. He had campaigned promising to revise NAFTA, adding labor and environmental provisions and to invest in social programs. But two weeks before his inauguration, he met with then-Goldman Sachs chief Robert Rubin, who convinced him of the urgency of embracing austerity and more liberalization. Rubin told PBS, "President Clinton actually made the decision before he stepped into the Oval Office, during the transition, on what was a dramatic change in economic policy."

Furman, a leading disciple of Rubin, was chosen to head the Brookings Institution's Hamilton Project, the think tank Rubin helped found to argue for reforming, rather than abandoning, the free-trade agenda. Add to that Goolsbee's February meeting with Canadian consulate officials, who left with the distinct impression that they had been instructed not to take Obama's anti-NAFTA campaigning seriously, and there is every reason for concern about a replay of 1993.

If Obama screws me like this, I'm moving to Holland. You can take that to the bank.

gross

Today I found out what happens when you buy onions and forget they're in your kitchen. For six months.

I've never claimed to be a fastidious housekeeper...