Government Beyond Obama? - The New York Review of Books
this is from the ny review of books and is an outline of a new thing by jeff madrick called "the case for big government"
even in this cliff-notes forms, the information and argument amounts to a demolition of neoliberal pieties concerning the evils of the state in relation to markets and all that.
there are a host of matters that could benefit from a basic rethinking of the existing order even within the sorry state of affairs that is post-neoliberal capitalism. i think you can find a little list of them in the review, and i won't spare you the trouble of reading it by repeating the list here.
there are two basic problems that run beyond this, though---one guyy raises just above about the types and directions state action can and should take in a deindustrialized context. to even begin to address that, the entertainment complex that is the major media would probably have to begin repeating to people that deindustrialization has happened so that they come to discover for themselves in that way that free americans seem to freely discover that they want to want what they are told they want in the way they are told to want it that perhaps it's a good idea to begin actually looking at reality as it is, and not as they want it to be. from there, the obvious questions are--what directions should be gone in and to what end?
the second question is the amount of time available before the existing house of cards lurches into another phase of implosion, and from that follows another, which is whether the obama administration has the stomach to undertake a fundamental change of organization and direction and whether they are going to get ahead of the question by driving the debate or remain as they currently are, which is in a largely reactive mode, attempting to appease the paleolithic right and retaining elements of their outmoded worldview as a price for playing in the same sandbox as they are.
personally, i think that the administration has to be much more radical than it has been and fast or it will find itself sucked into the giant vacuum that neoliberalism has spent 40 odd years putting into place.