EXIT STRATEGY: How to fix a post-Bush nation

"I asked former President Jimmy Carter what he thinks the next US president might have to do in his first 100 days. He said it would take 10 minutes, not 100 days. I can do no better than paraphrase his reply: 'My country will never again torture a prisoner. We will never again attack another country unless our security is directly threatened. Human rights will be the foundation of our foreign policy. We will act on global warming. We will honor international agreements. We will bring security and peace to Israel and all its neighbors and treat them all on an equal basis.'"

"Allowing the private sector to be so heavily involved in the intelligence business is counterproductive for several reasons. It fosters an atmosphere of cronyism and patronage that's unhealthy in a functioning bureaucracy. Unbalanced reliance on contractors erodes institutional knowledge and quality. And there's the ideological question of how much of our national security collection functions we believe it prudent to outsource. To whom are the contractors ultimately loyal—their government or their corporation? Our national security depends upon that loyalty."

As an alternative to the timid, complicated, and inefficient insurance-based proposals that currently prevail in the Democratic Party—most of which envision a government-run plan to compete in the marketplace with private ones—a new administration would do well to turn to the nation's only existing single-payer plan for a wide range of citizens: Medicare. The program, which is widely accepted and liked, could provide the framework for a gradually expanding system that would not only provide coverage for the mushrooming senior population, but extend to include people over 60 (and later 55) and children up to age 18 (or 21 if enrolled in higher education), with the aim of someday meeting in the middle. At the same time, Medicare could be made immediately accessible to all disabled people—who currently have to wait two years to qualify—and to all veterans, as John McCain has proposed.

"Identify the individuals who don't understand what it means to be a part of the Department of Justice—to have as the principal goal every day to do what is right as opposed to doing what is politic. It shouldn't be very hard. And that kind of leadership has its impact all the way down to the prosecutor in the courtroom in San Diego, Phoenix, and Bismarck. It's the kind of leadership that career prosecutors want."

"We have been borrowing massively abroad—some $850 billion in 2006 alone. With the government spending massively, and with American households saving zero, there was nowhere else to turn. We used to lecture other countries about what good economic policy meant; now they are laughing behind our backs—and occasionally lecturing us. While we seem traumatized by the idea of our government running a bank, we seem to accept the notion that a foreign government might have a major share in iconic American financial institutions—banks so important to our economy that they are too big to fail. Economists who have calculated the exchange rate required to end our trade deficit provide horrific numbers, suggesting that the decline in the dollar may have only just begun. Americans will no longer be able to even buy a cup of coffee in Paris. We can avoid these adjustments, which will be painful to us and our trading partners, but only by increasing our savings rate."

"The hardest thing to fix will be the result of Bush reneging on his campaign promise to declare CO2 from power plants as a pollutant. It is practically impossible to retrieve CO2 once it has been emitted. Much of it stays in the air more than 1,000 years. Because of his broken promise many coal-fired power plants were built that would not otherwise have been built. Very hard to fix—there's a strong reluctance to bulldoze a new power plant that cost more than a billion dollars. Our great-grandchildren will suffer because of his broken promise."

"Many journalists today have a keen appreciation of the national press' failure in the run-up to the war in Iraq, and they are determined not to let it happen again. The real test, though, will come when we once again have a strong president operating in a time of national crisis. I can easily imagine a situation in which the American people feel under attack, and the government takes advantage of such a climate to grossly manipulate and distort the truth, and the press dutifully goes along. But if such a situation does again arise, we will at least have people out there warning how journalists are in danger of repeating the press' failure prior to the Iraq War, and perhaps that will serve as an effective tonic."

Judith Curry, chair of Georgia Tech's School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences:
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"A big fiscal stimulus focusing on infrastructure, especially public transportation, might be one aspect of the solution. I say public transportation because with gas at $4 a gallon, we now know what the tipping point is for getting people out of their cars—millions of Americans are switching to public transportation, yet ironically, public transit is shrinking because there's not enough money for it. So this would pay triple dividends: It would help stimulate the economy, it would help get people back to work, and there'd be the energy and environmental savings."

"NCLB was bound to have bad outcomes. It appealed to people who think the quick fix for education is to threaten people. But the state of education today is a long-term legacy starting with 'A Nation at Risk' in 1983, which revolved around our problems with Japan, lower sat scores, and the feeling that teachers were sabotaging America. There's nothing short-range you can do to fix education directly. It's labor intensive. You have to change the way people act. You have to convince people, and change people.

"And the president can play a psychological role. When the president is a dummy, putting down smart people, it makes it harder for kids to know he is serious. Bush was a dumbing-down model of what it means to be an educated person. The president can play a role in education by modeling it, by not telling lies and not making up history."

Ted Gup, investigative reporter and author of Nation Of Secrets:
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Paul Pillar, former senior CIA intelligence officer:
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David Simon, writer/creator of The Wire:
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"Bush poured enormous amounts of federal money into abstinence-only sex education, so-called 'crisis pregnancy centers' that propagandize women against abortion, and so on. The next president can defund much of this pretty quickly and sweep out of office the right-wing Christians, family-values fanatics, and incompetent cronies with whom Bush has stocked federal agencies—people who have done a great deal of harm, especially to women's health and equality."

James Ridgeway:
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Robert Reich, labor secretary under President Clinton:
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Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security adviser:
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Rep. Charles Rangel, D-NY:
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James Ridgeway:
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James Bamford, author, Body Of Secrets:
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While other nations have government-run central banks, the US financial system is managed by a quasi-governmental institution effectively owned and operated by the private banking industry. Often described in oxymorons—as a "public-private" system or a "decentralized central bank"—the Federal Reserve is overseen by a board of governors appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. But it's the banks making up its membership that have called the shots, especially under two decades of leadership by the notorious anti-regulator Alan Greenspan.

The Fed's role in the current economic crisis traces back to at least 1999, when the Clinton administration backed legislation—fiercely promoted by Wall Street and sponsored by then-Sen. Phil Gramm—collapsing the long-standing fire wall between traditional commercial banks (which did things like provide checking accounts) and investment banks. The Fed was designated the "umbrella supervisor" of the newly consolidated industry, but with regulatory powers so limited that they were referred to on Wall Street as "Fed lite."

For nearly a decade, Greenspan rebuffed direct warnings about the looming credit crisis. Jane D'Arista, director of programs for the Financial Markets Center, a think tank on monetary policy, says it was the Fed's "ideological commitment to deregulation" that made it fail to impose limits on mortgage lenders until the subprime crisis had exploded—"the proverbial closing of the barn door after the horses were out."

"There's a great new generation coming along that cares about the world. Maybe that's one of the few good things that happened as a result of September 11. And maybe that's the easiest thing to take advantage of, this interest in politics. But we've done tremendous damage to our stature, and that's just not going to be easy to repair."