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President Obama’s Defeats May Turn Out to Be More Important Than His Likely Victory Over Republicans
(The Full Article is Positive about Democrats and Obama and Left Dems will find it a Good Read)-------------------------
Looking past the shutdown and budget battle, the big picture is that America's four decade-long drift to the right is decisively over
by Mark Weisbrot
My own view is that 2006 and 2008 marked the end of nearly four decades of rightward drift in the United States. This includes the Clinton administration, which abandoned its campaign promises and instead delivered Nafta, "welfare reform", and the WTO. Clinton's counter-reforms were masked by the longest-running economic expansion in US history, thanks to a stock market bubble and Alan Greenspan's change of policy that allowed the growth to continue after 1996. But Clinton did as much as a Republican administration could have done to continue the record-breaking upward redistribution of wealth and income (pdf) that has transformed America into a vastly more unjust society.
In a way, Obama's election in 2008 was similar to the election of left-of-center governments that has swept across Latin America, and especially South America, over the past 15 years. Those elections were driven primarily by the failure of neoliberal (conservative) economic policies. In Latin America, the failure manifested itself in an unprecedented collapse of economic growth (pdf) for more than 20 years; in the United States, there was growth, but the gains went mostly to the richest households, and culminated in the disaster of the Great Recession. But in both parts of the western hemisphere, the voters rejected these long-term neoliberal economic failures and wanted something different.
While the Latin American voters got a lot of what they voted for, including a vastly better foreign policy, we in the United States have been less successful. But that is beginning to change.
The Occupy Wall Street movement succeeded as no pundits or politicians had in the past, in placing inequality on the media and political agenda. And now, Bill de Blasio's success in the New York mayoral race, which he is leading by a large margin, is another indicator that social justice will be a serious electoral issue in the years to come.
Obama's defeats in the last month may well turn out to be a more important part of future political changes in this country than his likely victory over the Republicans in the current confrontation.
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Mark Weisbrot is Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), in Washington, DC. He is also president of Just Foreign Policy. He is co-author, with Dean Baker, of Social Security: The Phony Crisis. E-mail Mark: weisbrot@cepr.net[i/]
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/10/04-10
23 replies
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Eeyore
http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=
&imgrefurl=http://thetangential.com/2011/03/16/pros-and-cons-of-the-winnie-the-pooh-characters-wed-like-to-fuck/&h=400&w=400&sz=129&tbnid=60kHU9WfOQEBhM:&tbnh=90&tbnw=90&zoom=1&usg=__7z9A3_ms5g-14Xmr5WWO2dHhx9Y=&docid=SEthvMbNY8eN_M&sa=X&ei=OCNQUuypNoHViwKYk4HwAg&ved=0CD0Q9QEwAg
Pooh's ever-glum, slow-talking, sarcastic and pessimistic donkey friend who has trouble keeping his tail attached to his bottom. Eeyore has a house made of sticks, which falls apart many times and has to be rebuilt.
