The unleft conservative Obama administration's challenge right now is to soothe popular anger in the face of his profound accommodation of Wall Street. The meaning of his recurrent calm-down rhetoric ("we can't govern out of anger") and of related pacifying messages in the dominant media is clear: "Populist Rage" (corporate news magazine Newsweek's cover story this week [12]) is dangerous and dysfunctional. If you are (quite reasonably) mad about inequality and corporate corruption, if you follow in accord with majority progressive public opinion by wanting elementarily democratic policies like national health insurance, union organizing rights, public control of the financial system, the discharge and expropriation of criminal Wall Street perpetrators, the prosecution of war crimes, the reduction of the bloated Pentagon budget, and a real peace dividend to go along with it...if you want all these things and are ready to fight for them beyond the plutocratic supervision of the Obama-Summers-Geithner team then you are a suitable case for psychiatric treatment . You are threat to civilized decency. You are too "emotional" and "angry." You don't believe in "unity" and "progress" and "hope." You are an "ideologue" and too "cynical" ("The power of accurate observation," as George Bernard Shaw wrote, "is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it"). You are not being "helpful." You are not staying properly quiet and respectful so that the new (supposedly non-ideological system) coordinators can "get things done."
Opposing the deliberate destruction of the middle class, wanting the U.S. to get out of Iraq, insuring the uninsured, and returning to the basic Democratic principles as outlined in the New Deal are hardly radical ideas, and Obama needs to do this instead of listening to the Wall Street types who have ruined this country.
Neoliberalism is a failure the same way the GOP's adherence to Friedmanomics is a failure, for both are two sides of the same coin.
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