I've never believed that we, as a community, should only focus on one or a few issues at a time, or that there's any single issue that so important it should preclude discussion of others issues.
That said, there are certain issues of such political and substantive importance that they demand our attention and engagement. The banking crisis is such an issue, yet reading the rec'd diaries and front page posts, I can't help that but believe that many progressives are, like the Obama administration, in denial.
Obama's lingering failure to address the banking crisis threatens, well, everything. It threatens the economy: the economy won't recover until the crisis is resolved. Because it becomes more expensive the longer it goes on, and because it will cost Obama political capital, it threatens his entire agenda. Because Obama's presidency will be seen, fairly or not, as a stand-in for activist government, it threatens liberalism itself.
Yet checking back several days, I couldn't find a single front page post about the banking crisis. Nothing about the repeated calls from nationalization from progressive economists. (There was one quote of a Stiglitz piece.) Nothing about the political problem named Tim Geithner. Nothing about Obama's plan to entice vulture investors to buy up toxic assets by using taxpayer money to protect them from risk. Nothing about the planned "stress tests," which, by all accounts, won't be stressful enough.
This morning Tom Friedman (yes, the problem is so massive that even he gets it) wrote a screaming from the mountain tops column in which he stated quite correctly:
Our country has congestive heart failure. Our heart, our banking system that pumps blood to our industrial muscles, is clogged and functioning far below capacity. Nothing else remotely compares in importance to the urgent need to heal our banks.
(By the way, it seems to be Obama's plan to heal the banking crisis by improving the health of the rest of the economy, which is like trying to heal a heart by trying to improve the health of the rest of the body.)
So what was the passage of Friedman's column that DemfromCt chose to lift in the pundit round-up?
Meanwhile, the Republican Party behaves as if it would rather see the country fail than Barack Obama succeed. Rush Limbaugh, the de facto G.O.P. boss, said so explicitly, prompting John McCain to declare about President Obama to Politico: “I don’t want him to fail in his mission of restoring our economy.” The G.O.P. is actually debating whether it wants our president to fail. Rather than help the president make the hard calls, the G.O.P. has opted for cat calls. It would be as if on the morning after 9/11, Democrats said they wanted no part of any war against Al Qaeda — “George Bush, you’re on your own.”
Teehee, those stupid Republicans! Feels good, blasting them? Much easier than facing up to the Obama's abysmal response to the crisis.
The rec list has been only marginally better. For the last few days, it's been cluttered with well-meaning but ultimately empty pieces about violent right-wing rhetoric. (Disturbing, yeah, rhetoric is a marginal cause of violence, there are right-watch groups who monitor this stuff full-time, and until shown otherwise, I'll assume that federal law authorities, seldom lacking for power or vigilance, are on the case. All we need is for them to overstep and fuel the wack-job's paranoia and sense of victimization....)
But I digress. This banking crisis is big, people, that's what I'm saying. Huge. And there's no reason to believe that Obama has a good handle on it. I'll leave you with two things, one related to the substantive problem, the other to the political problem.
Krugman:
As long as capital injections are seen as a way to bail out the people who got us into this mess (which they are as long as the banks haven’t been put into receivership), the political system won’t, repeat, won’t be willing to come up with enough money to make the system healthy again. At most we’ll get a slow intravenous drip that’s enough to keep the banks shambling along.
More and more, it looks as if we’re headed for the decade of the living dead.
Saturday Night Lives spoofs Tim Geithner.
Wake the fuck up.