Wall Street and Washington Are Failing Spectacularly — Where Do We Go?
By Joe Costello, AlterNet.
Posted April 15, 2008.

The U.S. political and economic systems are not equipped to deal with the looming problems of the 21st century.

I was 19 in October 1979, when I first stepped into a campaign office. It was the Draft Kennedy (Teddy) for President office, located directly east across the Daley Plaza from Chicago’s City Hall. I would work on that campaign across the country for ten months, and it would instill in me an interest in politics, more accurately an interest in the politics of self-government that has lasted 30 years. It was a time when economics dominated political discourse from the nightly news to the kitchen table. Unfortunately, little did I understand, two months before I walked into that campaign office in 1979, President Jimmy Carter had appointed Paul Volcker head of the Federal Reserve, an event that would change American politics for the next three decades. Almost everything I learned on the Kennedy campaign about how American politics worked collapsed over the course of the next ten years. A new political regime, people, institutions, thinking, and culture replaced what had been the dominance of New Deal politics. Monetarism, Reaganomics or Neoliberlism, call it what you may, would totally dominate the American political landscape until today.

—- snip

Read the whole post here.

In this essay, Joe Costello identifies some of the key changes we are facing. These changes, driven by the end of the greed powered fantasy of infinite and unlimited growth, are, however, not being addressed by any of the major candidates for President. Given that our candidates can not bear to admit that tomorrow simply can never again be like yesterday, much less that, Neoliberalism dogma to the contrary not withstanding, infinite growth is impossible, why am I not surprised?

For other sources on the changes we are facing, see J. H. Kunstler’s The Long Emergency.

Another excellent read is Tom Wessel’s The Myth of Progress.

Lastly, I blogged on our need for a new economics here on Greater Democracy.

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