The First 100 Days: Tell Us How Bad Our Economic Situation Really Is
The First 100 Days: Tell Us How Bad Our Economic Situation Really Is
The First 100 Days: Marcellus Andrews
The very first thing the Obama administration should do is make sure the public knows just how bad our economic situation really is and that our ever-deepening slide into recession—and maybe depression—is only our most pressing emergency matter, but not the worst problem we face. The housing and banking crises mark both the death of the Reagan-Thatcher program and the collapse of a finance-centered, reverse-Robin Hood regime that has so crippled the state that we cannot seem to respond to the slump in a coherent and intelligent fashion.
The recent string of bailout improvisations by the governments around the world—none larger or more slapdash than the bank rescues sponsored in the U.S.—reek of a governing strategy in the habit of tending to finance first to the complete neglect of the working majority. But the bailouts—despite our need to “do something”—spend precious resources that must be first used to dismantle the Big Three automakers and their company union and then to reassemble an American green transport and technology system out of its corpse.
Indeed, Obama’s plans to use the crisis to write a green social contract that transforms the U.S. into a smarter, freer, fairer, green-technology giant means that they must first overcome a host of opposition from the decayed centers of power–finance, the oil complex, the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries. One sign that the Obama government knows what it is up against is that so many of the business-centric liberals who labored on the Clinton capitulation to the Reagan-Thatcher program have been rehired to dismantle the dangerous machine they tended to and polished. Lawrence Summers, Timothy Geithner, Christina Romer, and many other members of the Obama brain trust are painfully aware of why and how the neo-liberal system has failed and are in a position to craft a new national and global economic architecture that is equitable, far-sighted, and informed by the demands of social justice.
Marcellus Andrews teaches economics at Barnard College. He last wrote for UpFront on new liberal economic agenda.
