Human destiny will be what we make of it.
--President Barack Obama in Prague
Former Vice President Gore articulated well the phenomenon that people tend to jump straight from apathy to despair in his work An Inconvenient Truth. The challenge is getting people to care about a problem, and then getting them to believe they can do something about it. Otherwise, people just despair that nothing can be done, there are no alternatives.
For the entrenched interests that want people to despair, confusion and obfuscation and complexity and jargon are tools of the trade, indispensable for spreading the notion that we just accept whatever the Conventional Wisdom decrees, nevermind that the purveyors of such conventions are precisely the people who created the financial and economic structure we confront today. They would have us believe that because the details are complex, average citizens, lay folks, can't possibly understand concepts, and surely don't have any solutions to offer.
But that's the opposite of what a healthy democracy requires. We the People are responsible for the decisions about the guiding principles, no matter how complicated the underlying details. Technocrats exist to advise and execute decisions, not to supplant our ultimate responsibility for those decisions.
The recent troubles in our financial system have opened up discussion to larger, systemic problems our economy has faced for many years. As many people have observed, these kinds of opportunities shouldn't be wasted. So in the interest of delivering a concise, action-packed listing, and inspired by talking to some people yesterday at the New Way Forward gatherings, I made up a little flyer emphasizing 10 core principles for creating a stronger, more prosperous economy. For a more detailed perspective from me exploring these thoughts, click here. For perspectives from people who weren't selected to head the Fed, Treasury, or National Economic Council, try googling Dean Baker, William Black, Simon Johnson, Matt Taibbi, Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, Robert Kuttner, Robert Reich, and many others. Check out websites like Naked Capitalism. Read the reports from government investigators like Elizabeth Warren.
This summary is designed to bring together opinions from a variety of disciplines and professionals. But of course, if you're interested in a specific topic, say expanding freight rail or implementing single payer health insurance, don't take my word for it. Read about it yourself from the experts in the field who would love for people to listen to them. One of the fantastic developments of the internet is that the costs of finding information from knowledgeable sources has dropped to little more than the time it takes to decide the research is important.
There’s a lot of concern about the current status of our economy. It leads to natural questions like:
What, exactly, should we do about it?
Don’t we have to bail out these companies?
What alternatives do we really have?
Doesn't it undermine President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, and Majority Leader Reid to disagree with their staff?
These steps can be taken immediately to address our present situation:
- Take over failed firms that are 'too big to fail'.
- Break up non-failed firms that are 'too big to fail'.
- Provide direct assistance to stimulate the economy.
- Make the jump from a minimum wage to a living wage.
- Use our public policy to save communities, not companies.
After these initial coping mechanisms, we can start addressing some of the broader challenges we face:
- Re-connect wages and productivity.
- Re-regulate industries like financial services.
- Re-invest in our public commons.
- Re-write our tax code.
- Re-think our social and military policies.
Call your Senators and Representative to see what they think about bailing out people instead of companies. If you want me to email you a PDF of the flier I made, leave your email address in a comment.
Right now, the public is nearly unified in its disgust for where we are and in placing the bulk of that blame with the Republicans. Two election cycles in a row, Democrats have been elected to change our system. Now is not the time to shy away from that for fear of undermining our elected officials. Precisely the opposite, this is the time to demand policy be guided by what works. For that would be wonderful change indeed, and it would cement the Democratic majority for a generation.