"War was not enough, raducal ineqyality is what they want ???"

["John Gelles" <indexed-savings@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

"Most people, even most liberals, are complacent. They
  don't realize how dire the fiscal outlook really is, and
  they don't read what the ideologues write."

Thus speaks Krugman below -- and he echoes, in this
narrow matter, perhaps-- most of my friends on and away
from PKT.  Let us pray they are all wrong.

I have been re-watching "The Commanding Heights -- the
battle for the world economy", WGBH / PBS' monumental
account of the years between 1910 and today's protest
movement against globalization by its discontents.

When I studied advanced problems in corporations under
Professor Adolph Berle, (a Roosevelt brains trust member,)
his favorite metaphor was of the pendulum that swung --
pointing at one extreme of its arc to Wall Street and at
the other to the US Government.  Economic power was
what it pointed to.  And that power would shift -- as markets
made Main Street rich and then made Main Street poor.

The idea that steel, energy, transportation, armaments, banks,
and other giant industries were at the "commanding heights"
of a nation's economy, was Lenin's.  When he tried to free,
to some degree, the lesser economy, Lenin assured his party
that they would control the commanding heights and the
revolution to destroy capitalism would succeed on this
account.

The PBS series does not pit Lenin against J.P. Morgan.  It
pits Keynes and Galbraith (senior) against Hayek and Milton
Friedman (and impliedly George Bush -- now President ? )

Last night with Disk No.1, I puked, as Carter, Volker,
Reagan, Thatcher and Friedman, destroyed lives left and right
to fight stagflation with sledgehammer blows against strikers
and ordinary businessmen who went under, as governments
were unable to apply Keynesian wartime rules to global
economic struggles -- against whom or what, they did not
know.

Are we now about to repeat the early eighty's?  Will we
see unemployment in double digits?  Will we prove just
how little  the experts know?  Krugman is worried that,
that is our future.

Yesterday and recently, Henry Liu has proposed Keynesian
steps to retake the commanding heights from market funda-
mentalists and return it to society's responsible lawmakers.
He too is sure Bush is not on our side.

I remain unconvinced.  Bush has an MBA.  He has a chance
to eclipse Reagan and Thatcher in history.  Why would he
throw it away?

There is no possible way for Bush to succeed if Main Street
fails.  He must spend our way to prosperity -- not by relief
and make-work programs that mend the safety net.  But by bold
new deficit (or debt-free money) financing of American and
allied power, prosperity and democracy.

        He must demand of his team an effective approach
        to endless clean energy;  endless water, food, housing
        and public health provision;  endless well-managed
        liquidity and savings (with minimum, often zero,
        taxes);  and smart ways to win friends and influence
        people by striking the right balance between economic,
        political and military strategies.

John Gelles   www.tiea.us

======Extract from Paul Krugman's Op Ed, today ===

"[The Bush tax cut just passed will in time] require deep
  cuts where the money is:  that is, in Medicaid, Medicare
  and Social Security.

"The pain of these benefit cuts will fall on the middle class
  and the poor, while the tax cuts overwhelmingly favor the
  rich.  For example, the tax cut passed last week will raise
  the after-tax income of most people by less than 1 percent--
  not nearly enough to compensate them for the loss of bene-
  fits.  But people with incomes over $1 million per year will,
  on average, see their after-tax income rise 4.4 percent.

"The Financial Times [London] suggests this is deliberate
  (and I agree):  'For them,' it says of those extreme Republi-
  cans, 'undermining the multilateral international order is
  not enough; long-held views on income distribution also
  require radical revision.'

"How can this be happening?

      "Most people, even most liberals, are complacent. They
        don't realize how dire the fiscal outlook really is, and
        they don't read what the ideologues write.

      "They imagine that the Bush administration, like the
        Reagan administration, will modify our system only
        at the edges, that it won't destroy the social safety net
        built up over the past 70 years.

"But the people now running America aren't conservatives:
  they're radicals who want to do away with the social and
  economic system we have, and the fiscal crisis they are
  concocting may give them the excuse they need.

      "The Financial Times, it seems, now understands
        what's going on, but when will the public wake up?

                   -- Paul Krugman, 27 May 2003, Op Ed,
            Copyright 2003, The New York Times Company