5 thoughts on “Structural Change”

  1. “…and (b) Obama just doesn’t care that much and wants to save his political capital (and his support from the financial sector) for other issues, like (hopefully) jobs and climate change.”
    Says pretty much everything. Especially the “(hopefully)”.

  5. I see Obama as someone who does want change, but changes to the right, in the St. Ronnie mode and philosophy. I don’t even know if he’s reasoned this through, has been given the vocabulary by his Chicago School economic advisers, or just emotionally feels this is the right thing to do.

    I don’t think he has the capacity to imagine how to create, enact real change. And I think that growing up in the Reagan era has ruined him in terms of progressive change.

    Plus I got this gut feeling when I first began learning about him and his early life: I think he connects his mother, who could not keep his father in his life and then went off to do her research work without him (that’s Obama’s point of view as the left behind child, first by his father, then by his mother), with the Boomers and hippies and great societal changes of the mid-20th Century. He does not like Boomers, especially those who were of age to take part in the changes of the 60’s and 70’s.

    I also think the Reagan influence is evident in his desire to placate, please, and ensure profitability for Big Bidness. Hence, his health insurance “reform” which ensures profitability and viability for the private for-profit insurance companies and his protection of the big banksters. His deficit commission, and the recommendation to make cuts to SocSec, plus probable requirements for earners to “save” a required amount of income as investments in the stock market or other investments managed (with management charges enriching the investment bankers) by banksters. Who will be too big to fail.

    I would argue that we are undergoing very dramatic change — it’s just not being announced. But when eononomists almost blithely state that the economy is getting better, but we’ll just have this long term, years to decades, high unemployment, I think we should hear a computer voice saying, “You’ve got change.”

    Will he do some small things in the progressive direction to try to rescue his presidency? Possibly. Will they be very effective? Probably not, unless the end result will move the society rightward.

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