Most of you probably aren't familiar with the financial blogger who goes by "Rortybomb" - I'm not a frequent reader myself, but I undestand him to fall pretty squarely in the technocratic Left (see his "About" page). He gets links from larger sites like the Financial Times' blog every so often; that's how I came upon this post.
I was heartened to see folks on the Left looking at the Fed audit issue in a sober, non-partisan way.
One of the tropes of the Left - which I recall directly from my youth, when I was more or less part of it - was that the people in power play up arbitrary divisions between people to prevent them from coming together and reclaiming the power that really belongs to them.
Like all tropes, its purchase on reality is contingent, volatile, and incomplete - at best. Yet in these times, it does ring true for me.
I don't know "Rortybomb's" (Mike Konczal's) political views well enough to represent them, and I won't attempt to represent them.
But it strikes me that in this country right now, there are groups of people muttering about hicks in fly-over country and damned racist tea-baggers - who nonetheless feel ripped off by the financial class, feel the existing parties, political leaders and institutions are hopelessly captured by these interests, and would like to do something about it.
And of course there are folks (lewy raises hand) who mutter bitterly about power-grabbing socialist transnational progressive scum. And they too of course want to do something about the entrenched power of the financial class.
And so it turns out that these people have much in common.
Now I'm not about to start a round of Kumbaya at the Karaoke bar here - I can't f**king sing, anyway.
But I am saying that a real upheaval of the financial order will be necessary in order to reclaim the finances of this country, and in order to do this, some strange and unlikely bedfellows will have to come together in the mother of all big-tent slumber parties.
We don't have to respect them in the morning.
Congress auditing the Fed is like the fox auditing the chicken coop.
ReplyDeleteThe auditing should be done by the states' attorneys general, IMHO. Of course, all hell would break loose. Heads would roll. Criminal charges would be filed. Our troubled financial system would shaken to it's rotten core.
As people wake up from their one-night stand with Obama (and realize with horror that they've been sleeping with a triple-bagger) all kinds of strange coalitions are likely to form.
And that's okay. Let's do what it takes, then we'll go back to our petty bickering AFTER our country is back on a solid footing.