Obama as Lincoln. Obama as FDR. The instantly classic image of Obama, sticking his jaw defiantly into the pouring rain in Chester, Pa., during a campaign rally, as if he had just come down from Mount Olympus. He was not even sworn into office, and yet all this hagiography cast him, already, as a god. Which standards will the news media… return to article
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Reader Comments (1)Page 1 of 1 pagesI think we must hold Obama to the FDR standard. Now is the time. The economic education Americans are getting, and will continue to get, must be framed so they understand why our economy is melting down, the greed of the parasite class.
There is a caveat though. While financial regulation is pretty straightforward and we need it, the average person experiences regulatory excess. Particularly in food and farming, agribusinesses cause all the problems yet are deregulated, while regulations are enforced with zeal against small farmers. We need many new small farmers, yet the biggest barrier to market entry is the huge morass of regulations that makes it impossible to sell food directly to your neighbors.
Many of the regulations faced by average citizens are useless, if not harmful. Our zoning codes have crated unliveable cities, our building codes have gone way beyond keeping us safe etc. When Bubba hears a Republican (or a neoliberal) rail against regulation, he doesn’t think of the SEC, he thinks of the clerk down at City Hall who gave him the runaround when he wanted to build a deck behind his house.
Whether all this is due to regulatory capture as discussed by Kolko and others, or just that bureaucrats haven’t changed much since Roman times doesn’t really matter. The goal is not to eliminate any possibility of risk, but to create a system that works.
Posted by Walter Kloefkorn on Feb 6, 2009 at 10:09 PM Page 1 of 1 pages -
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