Bankster CEOs in orange jumpsuits doing the perp walk on the teebee
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What we need, says Jamie Galbraith:
To restore the rule of law means first a rigorous audit of the banks and of the Federal Reserve. This means investigations—Representative Marcy Kaptur has proposed adding a thousand FBI agents to this task. It means criminal referrals from the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, from the regulators, from Congress, and from the new management of troubled banks as they clean house. It means indictments, prosecutions, convictions, and imprisonments. The model must be the clean-up of the Savings and Loans, less than 20 years ago, when a thousand industry insiders went to prison. Bankers must be made to feel the power of the law in their bones.
How will this help the economy? The first step toward health is realism. We must first stop pretending that bad assets can be made good, that bad loans will someday be repaid, and that bad people can run good banks. Debt crises are resolved when debts are written down and gotten rid of, when the institutions that peddled bad debts are restructured and reformed, and when the people who ran the great scams have been removed. Only then will private credit start to come back, but even then the result of bank reform is more prudent banks, by definition more conservative than what we've had.
Well, this was off the table by October 2008, when Obama whipped for TARP.
If anybody can explain to me how to achieve any of this in the legacy party system, I'm all ears. I'd say that we've tried remaking the Ds from 2004 (Dean/Kerry) to 2008 (Clinton/Obama) and to this day, and if anything, they're no better than before. In fact, I'd say they're worse. Six years of unavailing effort to reform them is long enough, unless you want to make a career of billing for FAIL.
Sometimes, all that we can do is let go, and trust that better will come from the energy that's released when we open our hands and stop grasping for what we cannot have. I think this is one of those times.
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Worse, yes
The leftish efforts from 2000 onwards were remarkable for the sacrifice and energy poured into them. And as you say, they were unavailing.
There's a long history of the legacy parties treating that kind of heroic support as a threat. They want it, but only up to a point and they rally together to make sure the support from the true meliorists is demobilized. It's the social pathology of the corporate culture. The legacy party apparatchiks are cut from the same cloth as the feral corporate managers; always backstabbing and undercutting each other, except when there's a threat to their games.
Am I wrong to think that enough is enough?
2000 - 2010 is not a long time by historical standards. It could be I'm too doomstruck -- though I'm hard pressed to see any difference, at least, for the better, between the Ds of 2000 and the Ds of 2010.
Not wrong by any means
The term "legacy party" is particularly apt. I personally enjoy it too.
Even as cretinous looters they're miserable, feckless hacks. They don't have the touch they used to. There was time when they could manage "honest graft", but that time is long gone. They're constantly, childishly offended that their schtick provokes immediate resentment, and they don't appear to have any idea why that happens. Institutional solipsism has swallowed them.
So absolutely, enough is enough. The productive energy has much better uses -- the Leninist gardening insurrection, for example. I joke a little, but that has real potential. New social orders emerge when marginalized and betrayed reformers have the means to become full scale refuseniks.
Examples?
Sounds good:
Examples?
The Montgomery Bus Boycott
is a pretty good example. The boycotters brought a lot of pain to local business.
A tactic
Of the unemployed in Argentina was to cause huge traffic jams during rush hour. They would get in their cars and block all lanes of the freeway and stop. Can you imagine the impact of that done on the beltway, right in the heart of the village?