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Econwatch
January 20, 2010 4:26 PM

Scott Brown Massachusetts Victory Sends Wrong Signal To WH

By
Jill Schlesinger
Topics
Financial Decoder

This post by Jill Schlesinger originally appeared on CBS' MoneyWatch.com.

The results of the MA special election are in and it seems that everyone has an opinion as to why Scott Brown beat Martha Coakley for the Senate seat Ted Kennedy held for decades. Let's agree that there were lots of contributing factors that allowed Brown to prevail, though my favorite is the sports angle: it's not just that the MA voters were angry about the economy, health care, Martha's lackadaisical approach - nope, these people are still incensed that neither the Red Sox nor the Patriots could make it happen this year.
(Walt Disney)


I'm not going to comment on health care - that's obviously going to be a roller coaster from this moment forward. But I'm disturbed by this passage from today's New York Times:

Mr. Obama has signaled that he intends to take a more populist stance on financial regulation legislation in Congress, seeking to position Democrats as defenders of the people against Wall Street, and to cast Republicans as defenders of bonus-laden bankers.

So let me get this straight: the reaction to a stunning defeat is to find someone, anyone, who the voters hate and pile on? The notion of a "war on Wall Street" is absurd because it doesn't address the real issue: regulatory reform is dying a slow death. No amount of fat cat rhetoric or band-aid bank tax schemes can escape that truth.

Although my political friends on both sides of the aisle told me that the White House had to tackle health care immediately ("they might not ever get this opportunity again!"), I kept worrying that the window of opportunity to reform the US financial system would only be open for a short time. I also thought that the economy (not the stock market) would need lots of attention in 2009.

The take-away from the MA election should be that the economy and jobs trumps health care. Instead of playing into populist rage, President Obama should refocus his agenda and ensure that the previous system that allowed the US economy go to the brink of collapse is rewired and regulated appropriately.

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(CBS)
Jill Schlesinger is the Editor-at-Large for CBS MoneyWatch.com. Prior to the launch of MoneyWatch, she was the Chief Investment Officer for an independent investment advisory firm. In her infancy, she was an options trader on the Commodities Exchange of New York.

  • Jill Schlesinger

    >> View all articles

    Jill Schlesinger, CFP®, is the Editor-at-Large for CBS MoneyWatch. She covers the economy, markets, investing or anything else with a dollar sign. Prior to the launch of MoneyWatch in 2009, Jill was the chief investment officer for an independent investment advisory firm. In her infancy, she was an options trader on the Commodities Exchange of New York.

Add a Comment
by amacd385 January 20, 2010 11:35 PM EST
The MSM pundits merely blather about shifting ?priorities? from one ?symptom issue? to another ?symptom issue?, without ever addressing the single, signal, and seminal cause of all these symptom issues: the hidden cancerous tumor of EMPIRE.

The only real priority is to confront EMPIRE, drive a stake through its heart and get on with the American democratic experiment.

Patrick Martin, the insightful and principled left political analyst writes, "The inevitable political result of the Massachusetts vote will be a further shift to the right by Obama, the Democratic Party and bourgeois politics as a whole. The corporate-controlled media has already drawn the conclusion that the special election proves that Obama has been too left-wing and must ?moderate? his supposed big-spending liberalism."

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/jan2010/mass-j20.shtml

I had broadly posted this warning before the election, "Yes, this is a national political model (much as Brown is a model of a friendly-fascist 'Ken Doll') --- but beneath the surface, and beneath the 'Vichy' facade of polite 'center right' vs. 'center left' discussion and 'fair and balanced' coverage in the corporatist media --- lies an egregious strategic error by the Democratic Party of where the political center of America really lies, and a gutless misjudgment and appeasement born of that error which could well make Neville Chamberlain's appeasement and negotiation of a "lesser of two evils" pale in comparison."

I find myself in full agreement with Martin and most other principled progressives that the actual political 'center' of all average American's political-economic beliefs is far to the left of either wing of this disguised single party corporate R&D 'Vichy' facade. This truth was first recognized by Ralph Nader in 2000 when he correctly said, "the Green Party platform actually reflects the vast majoritarian view of all average Americans" (although Nader was a far better political strategist and 'democracy advocate' than a candidate).

This truth of the modern political center is also underscored by the fact that all surviving and sustainable democracies in our post-WWII and post-Empire world (in Europe and Japan) are 'social (qua socialist) democracies' --- it's just that the American people had not so directly experienced the visible wrath of Empire in their own country, and thus are a bit slower in comprehending what all other thinking people in developed democracies have long understood as the need to excise Empire. That will ultimately be the real lesson of this friendly-fascist Brown-shirt vote --- which will hopefully expose the weak half of the Empire?s R&D Party, and facilitate the growth of a real humanist ?social democratic? party in America.

Alan MacDonald
Sanford, Maine
Reply to this comment
by sjc_1 January 20, 2010 10:34 PM EST
This is a worthless "article" it says little and takes up space doing it.
Reply to this comment
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