In a review of a new book by Robert Kuttner, editor of American Prospect

[WCGreen]

Noam Ssheiber, editor of the New Republic asks this question about Obama...

Still, given the influence of wealthy investors on the Clinton and Obama campaigns in particular, Kuttner is right to be worried. In May, the legendary hedge fund manager Paul Tudor Jones II held a 300-person fund-raiser for Barack Obama at his Greenwich, Conn., mansion. If a future Obama administration were to consider, say, reining in derivatives, could the president resist pressure from the likes of Jones? It’s possible. But, like Kuttner, I’m skeptical.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/16/books/review/Scheiber-t.html?ref=books


It's worth reading the review of THE SQUANDERING OF AMERICA How the Failure of Our Politics Undermines Our Prosperity By Robert Kuttner to see how the Democratic Party seems to have established a liberalism that has no heart for the truly needy and is willing to accept the fiscal lean toward the rich just to grab a bit of the power in American politics...

Still, we must realize that Kuttner has long been a critic of the Clinton shift of the Democratic party to one more centrist in ideology if not in composition...

It begs the question as we hurl toward the caucus and the primaries is there any chance of getting a fair shake from the party of Roosevelt and Johnson...

Myself, I am cautiously optimistic now that the war has left center stage and domestic priorities seem to be taking more of the talking points of the candidates...

Don't get me wrong, I want the war to come to a swift end but we all must realize that as long as the war dominated the national agenda, there was no room at all for sustain talk of the issues that traditionally bind the various coalitions of the party together...

[Nay]

1. Sadly, I can't see enough change taking place in time to turn the

ship of state around. Entrenched interests are just that -- entrenched -- and they have weaseled in there for a reason. Like Kuttner, I am skeptical because the people in power like it just the way it is, and the only way to change that is for the citizen to -- to what? Stop participating in the country he grew up in? Eat roots and berries in the woods? (The woods that don't exist anymore?) Recognize and refuse to respond to the millions upon millions of promptings and ads to act just as we have been acting? Not only do the elites have the money and power, they also govern what we see, hear, watch on TV, and read. To expect the average person to grow up and then totally reject everything his culture inculcates in him from his very first breath on the planet -- well, that's a lot to ask, and if we're waiting for that to happen, we'll be waiting forever.

I just don't see a way around the inevitability of a huge crash of our consumerist society into its social/environmental wall. Then, if we have leaders like the Founding Fathers, we can start again. If we don't have those leaders, we have feudalism and warlords.