Safe Harbor on Way to Globalism

(Click title above)


Seeking Safe Harbor on Way to Globalism:
(World not yet ready for sharing same harbor among Free Thinkers, Communists, and Religious Fascists)

Progressive Corporatism: Between Capitalism and Socialism

Snippets from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/23/opinion/23brooks.html?th&emc=th:
The Establishment Lives!
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: September 22, 2008

....

In the 1980s, the old power structures frayed, even on Wall Street. Corporate raiders took on the old business elite. Math geeks created complicated financial instruments that the top executives couldn’t control or understand. (The market for credit-default swaps alone has exploded to $45.5 trillion, up from $900 billion in 2001.)
Year followed year, and the idea of a cohesive financial establishment seemed increasingly like a thing of the past.
No more. Over the past week, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner of the New York Fed have nearly revived it. At its base, the turmoil wracking the world financial markets is a crisis of confidence. What Paulson, et al. have tried to do is reassert authority — the sort that used to be wielded by the Mellons and Rockefellers and other rich men in private clubs.
Inspired in part by Paul Volcker, Nicholas Brady and Eugene Ludwig, and announced last week, the Paulson plan is a pure establishment play. It would assign nearly unlimited authority to a small coterie of policy makers. It does not rely on any system of checks and balances, but on the wisdom and public spiritedness of those in charge. It offers succor to the investment banks that contributed to this mess and will burn through large piles of taxpayer money. But in exchange, it promises to restore confidence. Somebody, amid all the turmoil, will occupy the commanding heights. Somebody will have the power to absorb debt and establish stability.
Liberals and conservatives generally dislike the plan. William Greider of The Nation writes: “If Wall Street gets away with this, it will represent an historic swindle of the American public — all sugar for the villains, lasting pain and damage for the victims.”

....

So we have arrived at one of those moments. The global financial turmoil has pulled nearly everybody out of their normal ideological categories. The pressure of reality has compelled new thinking about the relationship between government and the economy. And lo and behold, a new center and a new establishment is emerging.

....

The country will not turn to free-market supply-siders. Nor will it turn to left-wing populists. It will turn to the safe heads from the investment banks. For Republicans, people like Paulson. For Democrats, the guiding lights will be those establishment figures who advised Barack Obama last week — including Volcker, Robert Rubin and Warren Buffett.

....

The government will be much more active in economic management (pleasing a certain sort of establishment Democrat). Government activism will provide support to corporations, banks and business and will be used to shore up the stable conditions they need to thrive (pleasing a certain sort of establishment Republican). Tax revenues from business activities will pay for progressive but business-friendly causes — investments in green technology, health care reform, infrastructure spending, education reform and scientific research.

If you wanted to devise a name for this approach, you might pick the phrase economist Arnold Kling has used: Progressive Corporatism. We’re not entering a phase in which government stands back and lets the chips fall. We’re not entering an era when the government pounds the powerful on behalf of the people. We’re entering an era of the educated establishment, in which government acts to create a stable — and often oligarchic — framework for capitalist endeavor.


http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/23/business/23skeptics.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&th&adxnnl=1&emc=th&adxnnlx=1222181253-rM17dVk4Tj52eHnt22MtvQ:

....

Others argue that any bailout must pinch the people who have run the companies now needing rescue, along with their shareholders, addressing the unseemly reality that executives have amassed beach houses and fat bank accounts while taxpayers are now stuck with the bill for their reckless ways.

“It absolutely has to be punitive,” Mr. Baker said. “If they sell us the junk, then we own the company. This isn’t a way to make these companies and their executives rich. This should be about keeping them in business so the financial system doesn’t collapse.”

....

“I’d like a clearer statement of what we were afraid was going to happen that requires $700 billion,” Mr. Baily said. “Maybe they don’t want to talk about it because it would scare everybody, but it’s a bit much to ask.”

****

UNSAFE HARBOR:

See http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/09/andrew_cuomo_and_john_mccain.html:

Why in heaven's name did Senator McCain tell 60 Minutes that he thinks that Cuomo would make a good SEC Chairman in a McCain Administration?

....

Who was the person leading this "home ownership for all" program at the behest of the Democrats? No other than the head of Bill Clinton's Department of Housing and Urban Development, Andrew Cuomo. A non-banker, by the way. And apparently a favorite of John McCain.