Wall Street and Washington Are Failing Spectacularly -- Where Do We Go?

By Joe Costello, AlterNet
Posted on April 15, 2008, Printed on April 15, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/82339/

I was 19 in October 1979, when I first stepped into a campaign office. It was the Draft Kennedy (Teddy) for President office, located directly east across the Daley Plaza from Chicago's City Hall. I would work on that campaign across the country for ten months, and it would instill in me an interest in politics, more accurately an interest in the politics of self-government that has lasted 30 years. It was a time when economics dominated political discourse from the nightly news to the kitchen table. Unfortunately, little did I understand, two months before I walked into that campaign office in 1979, President Jimmy Carter had appointed Paul Volcker head of the Federal Reserve, an event that would change American politics for the next three decades. Almost everything I learned on the Kennedy campaign about how American politics worked collapsed over the course of the next ten years. A new political regime, people, institutions, thinking, and culture replaced what had been the dominance of New Deal politics. Monetarism, Reaganomics or Neoliberlism, call it what you may, would totally dominate the American political landscape until today.