Public Employee Press

Book Review
The logic of bold action in America’s economic crisis

President-elect Barack Obama’s victory speech was still fresh in our minds when pundits and politicians, many of whom came late to the cause or backed the Republican right, started pitching their prescriptions for slowing change and “governing from the middle.”

Robert Kuttner, economist and founding co-editor of the American Prospect magazine, refuted their advice months before the election with “Obama’s Challenge,” a short book that shows the logic of bold action.

Kuttner points out that if President Lyndon Baines Johnson had ruled from the middle there would have been no civil rights legislation, and if Franklin D. Roosevelt had done so there would have been no New Deal — jobs for the unemployed building roads and schools, support for unions, Social Security — to get the economy moving after the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Great presidents take bold action with progressive policies that transform public opinion and move the center to the left. While Kuttner unfortunately downplays the role of mass movements in such transformation, he says the economic crisis makes now the right time for audacious leadership.

Failure of deregulation
This country needs not just re-regulation of the financial sector but a massive $600 billion fiscal stimulus package — a national investment in jobs, infrastructure, health care, education, a green economy and aid to the cities and states and those hurt most by the recession. While ending the Iraq war and Bush’s tax giveaways to business and the rich would partly finance this program, Kuttner explains that we need not fear deficit spending in a recession to stimulate the economy and restore consumers’ ability to buy the products of U.S. labor.

For decades, constant attacks on the public sector by Republicans and flight from the necessary role of government in the economy by Democrats like Clinton and Carter helped to create the problems we face now. Liberalism became a dirty word and socialism left our vocabulary until McCain and Palin used it as a smear. Real wages shrunk, the safety net was shredded and income was redistributed upward from the working class to a wealthy few.

The current crisis has discredited the power of the “free” (unregulated) market to produce a working economy and government’s vital role is again understood. But it will take a strong president — supported and pressed by an active social movement and a strong labor movement — to create meaningful change and repair our damaged economy.

Many say Obama is wisely choosing advisers with diverse points of view. Others criticize him for surrounding himself with too many Washington and Wall Street insiders. I hope one of the people he will listen to is Robert Kuttner, whose book provides a blueprint for change.

“Obama’s Challenge: America’s Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency” is $14.95 in bookstores. Members can borrow it free from the DC 37 Education Fund Library, Room 211 at union headquarters.

— Ken Nash