This article is an interesting take on the current administration’s economic policies from the always interesting New Geography.
An excerpt.
“Race may be the thing that most obviously distinguishes President Barack Obama from his predecessors, but his biggest impact may be in transforming the nature of class relations — and economic life — in the United States.
“In basic terms, the president is overseeing a profound shift from cowboy to what may be best described as collusive capitalism. This form of capitalism rejects the essential free-market theology embraced by the cowboys, supplanting it with a more managed, highly centralized form of cohabitation between the government apparat and the economic elite.
“Never as pure as its promoters suggested, cowboy capitalism always depended on subsidies to businesses such as corporate farming, suburban development, pharmaceuticals, energy and aerospace. George W. Bush and the Republican majorities of the early 2000s simply drove this essential hypocrisy to a disastrous extreme by increasing deficits and allowing deregulated financial markets to run wild. In the process, they helped drive the world economy off the cliff.
“Not surprisingly, Obama and his backers see their mission to reverse the course. However, the path they are taking may prove no friendlier — and perhaps less so — to the interests of American democracy and the middle class than those of the now-deposed cowboy posse.
“The Obama policy of collusive capitalism is most evident in the financial bailout. He has placed his economic program in the hands of a man — Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner — who can best be called, as analyst Susanne Trimbath puts it, a “lap dog of Wall Street.” A protégé of former Treasury Secretary and Citicorp board member Robert Rubin, Geithner played a pivotal role in the original Bush bailout of the Wall Street elite.
“Most recently, he proposed selling toxic assets to hedge funds and other financiers, a plan widely denounced by a host of liberal commentators, notably Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz. The Geithner plan, Stiglitz noted this week in a New York Times op-ed, represents “the kind of Rube Goldberg device that Wall Street loves: clever, complex and nontransparent, allowing huge transfers of wealth to the financial markets.”
“The winners in the plan are the top guns of the financial industry, who would welcome further government-sponsored financial consolidation. For them, this would be vastly preferable to the more democratic alternative of selling the remaining assets of the failed large firms to dispersed, healthy, usually smaller, regional institutions.
“Largely missing from even these critiques is precisely why Obama has adopted this collusive approach while mostly avoiding anything smacking of populist anger. Perhaps one has to start with the very obvious fact that the president — despite occasional attacks on the greed of Wall Street — did not run against the financial markets but, rather, with their strong support. As early as the 2008 Democratic primaries, noted New York Times Wall Street maven Andrew Ross Sorkin, Obama had “nailed [down] the hedge fund vote.”
