A conspiracy of bears?
My economics blog in liberal Seattle has lately attracted a crowd of commenters that would make Phoenix proud. The stock market's decline has nothing to do with the collapse of housing and banking bubbles, with historic levels of debt and all the unwinding of contracts based on leverage, nothing to do with a nation groping against fundamental discontinuity. No, it's Obama's fault. Sure enough, this has become a growing point of attack by the reactionaries, who offer no solutions beyond the failed policies that caused this mess.
But it caused me to think…we have Tim Geitner at Treasury, rather than, say, Joe Stiglitz. We have Larry Summers, and hovering in the background, Bob Rubin, as chief White House economic advisers. Not Robert Reich. Kathleen Sebelius at Health and Human Services, instead of Dr. Howard Dean. Obama insiders rushed to reassure the idiot David Brooks that "they do not see themselves as a group of liberal crusaders. They see
themselves as pragmatists who inherited a government and an economy
that have been thrown out of whack. They’re not engaged in an
ideological project to overturn the Reagan Revolution…"
This may be smart centrist politics. It will be completely inadequate to address the crises before us. Yet it may also mean that Obama realizes that the government was long ago taken over by, let's say a community of interests, that is fundamentally opposed to reform. Does this group have the capacity to bring him into line by collapsing the stock market — naked short-selling it — until he yells "uncle"?
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