The morning light.
Another fresh fight.
Another row, right, right, right, right.
And I’m Totally Wired. Just Totally Wired
– The Fall
Greider has a good piece on Larry Summers. The best part he admits to yelling at the TV, which is why I neither watch much TV or listen to Larry Summers. But it certainly would have been a good thing to have taped the cracking of Greider’s wizened elder demeanor to see he can curse and bellow like like a sailor in the middle of a three day binge. After all, he was a real newspaper man for many years. Lord knows we could use plenty more of that from people who actually have things to say. Larry Summers is the personification of the American political disease of failing-up, unaccountable power, an increasingly dangerous malignancy coursing through our body politic. Greider takes Summers to task for several prevarications, notably his babbling in favor of “too big to fail“, which of course Larry’s going to support, he’s been working for the mega-corporations his whole career.
Quashing too big to fail is one of the most important concepts in American politics today, but it has little organized political constituency. Recently, it’s been floating around the margins of debate, such that is, on financial reform, given new life by Joe Biden’s Senate replacement Ted Kaufman. There’s some irony there, as a post-New Deal Liberal, Old Joe never was and is no anti-too big to fail guy — cheers to Mr. Kaufman. Breaking up the big banks is completely in the American tradition of anti-trust, which grew as a reaction to the burgeoning power of our industrial and financial corporations at the turn of 19th and 20th centuries. Anti-trust was a solution in the American tradition, its roots in Jefferson’s seminal understanding that democracy is necessarily decentralized. Unfortunately, anti-trust fell by the wayside during the New Deal. The European import of Bismarkian welfare statism came to the forefront. An attempt was made to balance the centralized power of industrial corporatism by growing the power of the federal government. It failed, the corporations took over the government.
A genuine and solid critique of some aspects of the New Deal, grounded in the American tradition against centralized power, was propagated by both some genuine conservatives and a few liberals. But for the most part, this critique disappeared a long time ago. What is called conservatism today is some sort of rotten mutation, offering no critique of corporatism, its leadership for the most part mega-corporate shills. On the other side are the liberals, and I’ll say over the years, I’ve met few who were small “d” democrats, Bismarkian statism had become the liberals’ North star. By the mid 20th century, the doctrines of industrialism such as economies of scale replaced republicanism, proliferating the politics of oligarchy.
Anti-too big to fail offers an excellent opportunity for reform politics today. Not just as another campaign to call your DC mega-corporate shill, but as the foundation for a real effort to organize republican reform. A place to begin a political dialog that cuts across the dysfunctional, effete, and increasingly empty categories promoted by the political class and the corporate media. A conversation asking how do we evolve self-government in the 21st century by restoring some of the principles of its 18th century founding combined with the knowledge and technologies of today.
Cross-posted from Too Big to Fail
Archein