Getting Creative After the Great Disaster

The end of the world is upon us. Democrats now have, horror of horrors, only an 18-vote majority in the Senate. I think Jon Stewart said on Monday all that needed to be said about that:

Except that, even though the world has ended and Democrats are in a minority of 58 Senate votes out of 100, perhaps it's time to take a page from Republicans, who are in a 41-seat majority (but still technically out of power) in the Senate and have lost a majority of state legislatures, but are still trying to get their priorities through.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) is still trying to prevent the EPA from enforcing the Clean Air Act in concert with both a Supreme Court ruling and an endangerment finding by agency scientists. She was going to offer an amendment to proposed debt ceiling legislation to do this, but will try instead to get a "resolution of disapproval" passed through the Senate to register her extreme pique over the agency's endangerment finding.

Scrappy! The only thing nearly that interesting that progressives in Congress have gotten through was the $10 billion Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) added for public health centers to the Senate bill. More like that.

In Washington State, minority Republicans in the state legislature are introducing guano-level Teabagger bills that propose everything from the elimination of paper money to the repeal of the 17th amendment and the direct election of Senators. This is pretty crazy stuff indeed, and it's giving some progressives fits--of laughter maybe, but still--though where are the progressive bills that are giving the conservatives fits?

Who can say. I have an idea though, and it goes back to something Dave Johnson said yesterday about how banks aren't lending money to small businesses and there's no one but the government to be that lender of last resort.

So why not a series of bills at the local and federal level that will get government lending (not granting, but loaning, at reasonable interest rates) to member-owned cooperative businesses so that we can start breaking up the corporate hold on everyone's lives and start focusing on building the resilience of our communities. (links via)

Because it's all about the money, when you come down to it.

There are two political parties in this country; one for the aristocracy, one for the aristocracy with a side of bread and circuses for everyone else. The only way to make lasting, foundational change, the only way to make people's lives better and create a sustained expansion of opportunity for the poor and middle class, is to shift money and power away from the aristocracy. What better way than by encouraging the government to help its citizens break free of their bonds to unaccountable banks and corporations?

It's classic liberal economics in the Keynesian tradition. The government must make up the difference if there isn't enough demand for investment to create enough jobs, and enough good jobs, to sustain a healthy level of employment. There's no one else to do it, because the free market, as Moshe Adler says in the book, Economics for the Rest Of Us, isn't self-regulating and "does not have a mechanism that always pulls it out of a recession."

In the US, where our crony capitalist finance industry made 41 percent of domestic corporate profits this last decade and still can't find any money to invest on Main Street, this is where the big fight has to be. And if these money issues sound dull, that's only because it's usually left to Larry Kudlow to talk about them.

Though I guarantee you, at the bottom of every effort to roll back EPA's authority to protect the air we breathe, every effort to repeal the direct election of Senators or any advance in public health access, there's some aristocratic bastich who sees a private yacht in the deal. So we'd better believe they are fascinating, and important, and get looking for some more creative ways to put the ultimate earthly power back in the hands of the people: the power of the purse.

Views expressed on this page are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Campaign for America's Future or Institute for America's Future