The real New Deal

Paul Krugman today in the NYT: "Suddenly, everything old is New Deal again. Reagan is out; F.D.R. is in. Still, how much guidance does the Roosevelt era really offer for today’s world?"

Krugman argues that contrary to Neoliberal orthodoxy FDR underspent:

Now, there’s a whole intellectual industry, mainly operating out of right-wing think tanks, devoted to propagating the idea that F.D.R. actually made the Depression worse. So it’s important to know that most of what you hear along those lines is based on deliberate misrepresentation of the facts. The New Deal brought real relief to most Americans.

That said, F.D.R. did not, in fact, manage to engineer a full economic recovery during his first two terms. This failure is often cited as evidence against Keynesian economics, which says that increased public spending can get a stalled economy moving. But the definitive study of fiscal policy in the ’30s, by the M.I.T. economist E. Cary Brown, reached a very different conclusion: fiscal stimulus was unsuccessful “not because it does not work, but because it was not tried.”

Yes! I love this line of argument. It completely inverts the Austrian economics orthodoxy which rejects the need for social-liberal regulatory politics in the face of the finance capital convulsions because, they argue, it was government intervention that fostered the sub-prime mess in the first place. Krugman, instead, argues that the New Deal was never as interventionist as it has been painted by the Neoliberals. The US is yet to try the real New Deal.

Falling in love with democracy again?

IN TWO pointer posts below Mike Davis and Guy Rundle respond to Obama's election with, on the one hand, an almost cynical pre-emptive Left mourning and, on the other, with a star-burst of Left falling-in-love. These politics of affect comprise a tricky subject for some, especially Australians who like to think of politics as pragmatic and never symbolic; driven by costed and measurable policies and never by emotions; hard, tactile and masculine -- doing something -- and never rhetorical, verbal and temporally complex. But in the elevation of Obama there is a danger, for the Left, of oscillating in huge arcs between a pre-emptive mourning and falling-in-love.

Can our political attachments -- and many Australians are heavily invested in US politics -- move beyond this binary of a pragmatic, because intelligently reflective, despair and romantic, mindlessly ephemeral, overinvestment in political leaders and projects? Can we oscillate in a more sustainably rhythmic cycle: more like a clock pendulum than a wrecking ball?

Supervalent Thought asks whether political optimism necessary leads to mindlessness; whether political happiness must be equated

with shallowness and emotional darkness with truth and profundity.

Oh yes, about Obama, the neoliberal, gay-marriage compromised, “market guy…” Here’s what makes me politically happy about the event of Obama. He is the first mainstream politician in decades who loves the political process. He does not confuse “Washington” with politics. His organization’s practice of training other organizers demonstrates his commitment to producing skills for political world-building beyond his campaign.

In this way the event of Obama has already massively advanced the skills for democracy in the United States. In other ways he seems committed to constraining and even undermining what that might entail concretely. Protesting and appreciating, though, are some of what we do to maintain the optimism of any attachment. They keep you bound to the (political) scene, to the cognitive and affective difficulties of remaining critically present to desire.

crow at the factory - video treats

Reformed late 80s and 90s Sydney post-punk band Crow have been doing a few shows, and are even recording sparkling new material. Even though I spent a few years playing keyboards ('keyboards' still sounds wrong, don't it? But it's preferable to 'piano and organ sampler', I think) with them, this is the classic & best Crow line-up with the incredible John Fenton on drums and the muscular guitar-playing of Peter Archer providing the foil to P. Fenton's scratchier axe-sound and amazing songs.

One of their recent performances -- at the Factory: 29th August, 2008 - - was videotaped, and uploaded here. Peter F is in fine voice and me ol' mucker James D Woff keeps the whole thing anchored and the engine-room humming. [check out the 'crow bar' which is cheekily situated on the left of the stage. Manned by inner-west legend Lobster.]

Link provided via The Lost and Found Music Library. Well Worth visiting.