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Third Way VP says it's time to tame capitalism
Via EJ Dionne who attended their meeting in SC last week:
...But what came later in Cowan’s speech may have been the larger and more important revelation: that the group is not offering “a warmed-over 1990s centrism.” Cowan’s critique of what were, after all, the years of Bill Clinton’s presidency was not hedged: “Back then,” he said, “we placed too much trust in the market’s ability to provide a reliable and realistic path to prosperity for most Americans. In the last 30 years, we have seen the impact of globalization and automation on our workers. And it is clear that a rising tide will not lift all boats.”
Those sentences speak to a quiet revolution in the thinking of Democrats across the board since the 2008?economic downturn and especially since Trump’s election. It can fairly be described as a leftward movement in the entire party. Sanders is often credited with moving the party left, and his proposals such as Medicare-for-all and free college (which came under sharp criticism here this week) have entered the mainstream conversation. But the language of “left” and “center” is imperfect in capturing the change. The new attitude toward the economy’s shortcomings is as much about the realities on the ground as it is about any ideological awakening.
“After 2016, it was imperative for everyone in the party to sit back and ask: What have we done wrong?” Matt Bennett, Third Way’s executive vice president for public affairs and a veteran of the Clinton administration, told me. He vigorously defended both the Clinton and Obama presidencies, dismissing as “preposterous” the idea that they were failures.
Nonetheless, he added: “We have to own some of the mistakes of the New Democrats” of the Clinton era. Among them, he said, was underestimating the effect of trade liberalization on a significant number of blue-collar workers and “the speed and ferocity with which technology would decimate certain sectors of the American workforce.” A particularly negative effect of this was the “concentration of opportunity” in certain regions as large parts of the country were left behind.
“We need to be working to tame capitalism at this moment, because it is not functioning well,” he concluded. “We need to do in this century what the progressives and New Dealers did in the last century.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/even-moderate-democrats-want-to-tame-capitalism/2019/06/19/11c9d5c4-92d0-11e9-b58a-a6a9afaa0e3e_story.html?utm_term=.b5d428a9d74b
Those sentences speak to a quiet revolution in the thinking of Democrats across the board since the 2008?economic downturn and especially since Trump’s election. It can fairly be described as a leftward movement in the entire party. Sanders is often credited with moving the party left, and his proposals such as Medicare-for-all and free college (which came under sharp criticism here this week) have entered the mainstream conversation. But the language of “left” and “center” is imperfect in capturing the change. The new attitude toward the economy’s shortcomings is as much about the realities on the ground as it is about any ideological awakening.
“After 2016, it was imperative for everyone in the party to sit back and ask: What have we done wrong?” Matt Bennett, Third Way’s executive vice president for public affairs and a veteran of the Clinton administration, told me. He vigorously defended both the Clinton and Obama presidencies, dismissing as “preposterous” the idea that they were failures.
Nonetheless, he added: “We have to own some of the mistakes of the New Democrats” of the Clinton era. Among them, he said, was underestimating the effect of trade liberalization on a significant number of blue-collar workers and “the speed and ferocity with which technology would decimate certain sectors of the American workforce.” A particularly negative effect of this was the “concentration of opportunity” in certain regions as large parts of the country were left behind.
“We need to be working to tame capitalism at this moment, because it is not functioning well,” he concluded. “We need to do in this century what the progressives and New Dealers did in the last century.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/even-moderate-democrats-want-to-tame-capitalism/2019/06/19/11c9d5c4-92d0-11e9-b58a-a6a9afaa0e3e_story.html?utm_term=.b5d428a9d74b
85 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
What few progressives are left on DU preached this for over a decade... Third Way finally sees the light? JFC. 
that defiantly claimed Third Way didn't even exist. Can't wait to see the contortions in replies to your OP, but my guess is that it's all too inconvenient and the thread will sink like a stone. I'll do my part to keep it afloat. 
Third Way even ventured into New Deal territory. Oh. My. God.
And they're here with this year's change in the sheet metal: "See! We're not that bad! We're . . . . not as bad as . . . Trump!!"
Comforting, eh?
, indeed.
number one, is was HAMP, not HARP, that was the most problematic programme and it was not 4 million helped by HARP in any regard
see here:
Obama’s Foreclosure Relief Program Was Designed to Help Bankers, Not Homeowners
https://billmoyers.com/2015/02/14/needless-default/
snip
Politicians, economists and commentators are debating the causes of the rise in inequality of income and wealth. But one primary cause is beyond debate: the housing collapse, and the government’s failure to remedy the aftermath. According to economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, the bottom 90 percent of Americans saw one-third of their wealth wiped out between 2007 and 2009, and there has been no recovery since. This makes sense, as a great deal of the wealth held by the middle and working classes, particularly among African-Americans and Hispanics, is in home equity, much of which evaporated after the bubble popped. The effects have been most severe in poor and working-class neighborhoods, where waves of foreclosure drove down property values, even on sound, well-financed homes. Absent a change in policy, Saez and Zucman warn, “all the gains in wealth democratization achieved during the New Deal and the postwar decades could be lost.”
President Obama will carry several legacies into his final two years in office: a long-sought health care reform, a fiscal stimulus that limited the impact of the Great Recession, a rapid civil rights advance for gay and lesbian Americans. But if Obama owns those triumphs, he must also own this tragedy: the dispossession of at least 5.2 million US homeowner families, the explosion of inequality, and the largest ruination of middle-class wealth in nearly a century. Though some policy failures can be blamed on Republican obstruction, it was within Obama’s power to remedy this one — to ensure that a foreclosure crisis now in its eighth year would actually end, with relief for homeowners to rebuild wealth, and to preserve Americans’ faith that their government will aid them in times of economic struggle.
Faced with numerous options to limit the foreclosure damage, the administration settled on a policy called HAMP, the Home Affordable Modification Program, which was entirely voluntary. Under HAMP, mortgage companies were given financial inducements to modify loans for at-risk borrowers, but the companies alone, not the government, made the decisions on whom to aid and whom to cast off.
In the end, HAMP helped only about one million homeowners in five years, when 10 million were at risk. The program arguably created more foreclosures than it stopped, as it put homeowners through a maze of deception designed mainly to maximize mortgage industry profits. More about how HAMP worked, or didn’t, in a moment.
HAMP cannot be justified by the usual Obama-era logic, that it represented the best possible outcome in a captured Washington with Republican obstruction and supermajority hurdles. Before Obama’s election, Congress specifically authorized the executive branch, through the $700 billion bank bailout known as TARP, to “prevent avoidable foreclosures.” And Congress pointedly left the details up to the next president. Swing senators like Olympia Snowe (Maine), Ben Nelson (Nebraska) and Susan Collins (Maine) played no role in HAMP’s design. It was entirely a product of the administration’s economic team, working with the financial industry, so it represents the purest indication of how they prioritized the health of financial institutions over the lives of homeowners.
snip
also you said
The Clinton economy was vibrant and even resulted in a federal surplus.
the 'surplus' was a mirage, it resulted from a change in the national accounting ledgers
https://treasurydirect.gov/NP/debt/current
Here is a table of the national debt and the claimed surpluses for the last 4 Clinton fiscal years:
Notice that while the public debt went down in each of those four years, the intragovernmental holdings went up each year by a far greater amount.....and, in turn, the total national debt (which is public debt + intragovernmental holdings) went up.
That is how a 'surplus' was claimed.
The national debt went up every single year. What the government did do was pay down the public debt (the claimed 'surplus' is fairly close to the decrease in the public debt for those years). But it paid down the public debt by borrowing far more money in the form of intragovernmental holdings (mostly from Social Security).
AND this whole thing started out with YOU positing a what has been a 'GOP talking point',by trying to intimate that progressives oppose capitalism as your way of defending the vastly discredited 3rd-way schema
that is pure RW tosh
