Today's "robber barons" use race as a distraction from real economic problems.

In a recent column in the NYTimes, Charles Blow sounds like he has taken a page from FDR’s famous “economic royalist” speech. Talking about what he calls “the right’s flimsy fiscal argument," Blow claims that:

It all loses traction as more Americans begin to see the far right for what it truly is: a gang of bandits willing to sacrifice the poor and working classes to further extend the American aristocracy -- shadowy figures who creep through the night, shaking every sock for every nickel and scraping their silver spoons across the bottom of every pot.

At another low point in American economic history, during the 1936 Democratic National Convention, FDR decried the domination of a small economic elite:

For out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital -- all undreamed of by the fathers -- the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service…

It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property…

For too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people's property, other people's money, other people's labor, other people's lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness.

There is one big political difference between the world that Roosevelt faced and the one we are witnessing: the South has switched from being constrained by a bigger, and more progressive, Democratic Party, as it was in FDR’s day, to our situation now, in which the Southern conservatives are the dominant force in a Republican Party purged of its more moderate elements. The new economic royalists use this conservative base to pursue their agenda.

The American political party system has always been affected by the conservative political culture of the South. As we acknowledge the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, focus of a fascinating series in the NYTimes, it is useful to recall that what the South was attempting to establish when it seceded to form the confederacy was a state based on racism and the establishment of a permanent economic elite. The NYTimes series puts to rest any lingering doubt that the South was fighting for anything different. In a speech of March 12, 1861, the Vice President of the Confederacy, after describing Thomas Jefferson’s ideas concerning the evil of slavery, declared:

Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that Slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition. This, our new Government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical and moral truth.

Unfortunately, after this “republic” had been eliminated, there was no general land reform -- as occurred in a very beneficial way for the development of South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan after World War II -- and so the same political culture that had flourished before the Civil War remained, bruised but intact.

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Meanwhile, the Republican Party, which had been founded to stop the expansion of slavery outside of the South, had won the Civil War, and so the newly emerging industrial captains -- robber barons, as they were called, turning eventually into the economic royalists of FDR’s speech -- allied with the Republican Party, which eventually became the dominant political party of the economic elite. In a very peculiar turn of events, the party of the cities, the Democratic Party, also remained the party of the Southern “royalists." Thus the “middle party," the Republicans, were flanked to their right by the Southern wing of the Democratic Party and to their left by the Democrat’s Northern wing.

After World War II, the Republicans created their own far-right wing in the form of McCarthyism and anti-Communism. At the same time, the combination of the two contradictory wings in the Democratic Party became unsustainable, particularly since the Civil War was finally ended by the civil rights movement and the Voting Rights acts of the middle 1960s. Lyndon B. Johnson thought that this would lose the South for the Democrats -- and the Republicans complied by pursuing a “Southern Strategy” to capture it. But this may eventually lead to the Republican’s undoing if Charles Blow is correct that the “flimsy” arguments of the current incarnation of the Republican Party could be their self-destruction.

This progressive outcome may be the result of generational change, combined with overreaching against programs for seniors. The major theme of Blow’s piece was not simply the rapaciousness of our new economic royalty, but that race in America has been used to distract much of the white electorate from real issues of power and wealth. Exhibit A is the Trumped-up “debate” about Obama’s birth certificate (pun intended). It may be that younger Americans, less permeated with racist ideas, will reject these distractions. In addition, by alienating seniors, many of whom may have retained some old-time racist attitudes, the Republicans may have, thankfully, lost some of the advantages of their implicitly racist arguments.

According to my calculations, the 112th Congress has 94 Republicans in the House from the South out of 242 total Republicans in the House, and there are 16 Southern Senators out of 47 Republicans. This means that instead of being a large minority within a majority liberal party, the Southern conservatives are a large minority, indeed the backbone, of the conservative party -- and this pulls the entire Republican Party far to the right. It can no longer even hold on to its moderates.

Since, as Charles Blow points out, a rather large majority of the American public is center and center-left, and certainly not far right, then the far right is “losing traction," in Blow’s words. There are several implications:

First, the progressive potential of the Voting Rights Act, and of an undercurrent of progressive politics that has existed in the South since at least the Populist movement, must be encouraged, so that the conservative political culture of the South is challenged.

Second, probably the best way to expunge the last traces of the old extremist Southern political culture is to put forward a political agenda that can excite and unify progressive forces -- for example, by advocating a jobs-centered program.

Third, we need to understand that race has always been used to divide Americans, and that now is the time to unite them around the job of rebuilding the country.

Finally, by pursuing these goals, we can create a political culture and program that will cut the base of support for the economic royalists, both inside and outside of the South.

We should bear in mind Roosevelt’s words from 1936:

Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference. There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.

Jon Rynn is the author of the book Manufacturing Green Prosperity: The power to rebuild the American middle class, available from Praeger Press. He holds a Ph.D. in political science and is a Visiting Scholar at the CUNY Institute for Urban Systems.

Progressives need a unified set of principles when reclaiming the politics of freedom.

America's founders baptized her in the rhetoric of personal liberty. Jefferson, when listing the rights of all people in the Declaration of Independence, put liberty second only to life. Nathan Hale and the state of New Hampshire declared that liberty was actually worth more than life. And ever since, freedom and liberty have been central concerns in American public discourse.

That might help explain why, as Professor Corey Robin writes in the most recent issue of The Nation, "conservative ideas have dominated American politics for thirty years." The right has virtually monopolized the rhetoric of freedom, and the left has failed to offer up a single competing vision.

Robin's article, called "Reclaiming the Politics of Freedom," is a proposal on how best to correct this. And the left-wing schematic of liberty he offers up isn't a bad start. He writes:

We must develop an argument that the market is a source of constraint and government an instrument of freedom. Without a strong government hand in the economy, men and women are at the mercy of their employer, who has the power to determine not only their wages, benefits and hours but also their lives and those of their families, on and off the job.

It is, as I said, a start. The challenge for left-leaning political philosophers and theorists is to convert Robin's rhetoric into a fully fleshed out theory of freedom and governance. On the face of it, this would seem to be a daunting task, because Robin's conception of freedom represents a clean break from the tradition of classical liberalism that looms so large in modern philosophy.

Classical liberalism, a distinct entity from American political liberalism, most often defines liberty as non-intervention, which would seem to make its closest political ally libertarianism. (The Republican Party, and especially those Republicans who identity as members of the Tea Party, tend to talk about freedom in a way that makes them sound superficially like classical liberals. But on social issues in particular they apply the classical liberal's standard of freedom as non-intervention inconsistently at best.) Not even the forms of classical liberalism more closely associated with the left, like Rawlsianism, truly satisfy Robin's demands. Whereas Rawlsian liberalism conditions freedom as non-intervention with certain restraints, Robin insists that government intervention can actually promote freedom.

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Lucky for us, there is a philosophical tradition -- less fashionable than classical liberalism -- that supports Robin's claims. It is called republicanism. (No relation to the philosophy of the modern Republican Party.)

The best introduction to modern republicanism is likely "Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government" by the Australian philosopher Philip Pettit. The book largely consists of the sort of academic philosophizing that laypeople might find hopelessly esoteric, but it also contains some thoughts on the intellectual history of republicanism that help explain most of the key concepts. Pettit writes that the fundamental principle of over two millennia of republican thought is this: no citizen is a slave, either of the state or any other entity. (Of course, many republics have had slaves. But they were not considered citizens in the formal sense.) Putting this principle in modern analytic terms, he describes it as the conviction that freedom constitutes non-domination, not non-intervention. A slave is still a slave, even if his master is benevolent and does not interfere with him. The point is that the master still has the right to reverse his policy without warning and arbitrarily project his own interests onto the slave. This, Pettit says, is domination: the ability to arbitrarily interfere in the affairs of others without being constrained by their interests or stated preferences.

Already we can see how closely this idea of freedom as non-domination tracks with the vision of freedom laid out by Robin. When he argues that a "strong government hand" is needed to ensure that employees are not put "at the mercy" of their employers, he is actually saying that the state must promote freedom by encouraging non-domination. This is, in fact, the sole aim of the ideal republican state, and Pettit strenuously encourages a "strong government hand" when he thinks it will serve that end. Whereas, in strictly classical liberal terms, any sort of government interference represents a constraint on liberty, Robin and Pettit both agree with the republican notion that, in Pettit's words, "the properly constituted law is constitutive of liberty." He takes that logic further than even many orthodox republicans, arguing that the state must "seek to reduce the influence of factors like handicap and poverty and ignorance," which condition freedom.

But republicanism, at least as articulated by Pettit, is also a relatively conservative doctrine. After all, he argues, America was founded on republican principles. And indeed, Pettit ends up building on those republican principles to advocate for a lot of things we already have: separation of powers, for example. Thus do we find that republicanism has exactly that "deep immersion in a wellspring of American political thought" that Robin wishes for.

I've only had the room here to give a crude schematic of republicanism, but hopefully it's enough to pique the interest of some fellow lefties. For too long now, the American left has had very little in the way of an articulated set of unifying first principles. Republicanism could be what we have been missing; not only does it satisfy the policy intuitions of most liberals, but it integrates them into a system that is logical, humane, and deeply American.

Ned Resnikoff is a researcher at Media Matters and a freelance writer. The above piece is not intended to represent the views of his employers.

Ryan's budget doesn't fix the problem. Obama's budget is somewhat better. Who will take on the real problems?

So now we have a clear bond rating warning from S&P. I know that almost everyone in our current political system will flip this off. But let's be clear: Chief Financial Officers of companies are often fired if this happens, markets have become unhappy, and if you looked at the situation in which the U.S. has enmeshed itself and did not know the country was the U.S., you would agree completely with the S&P warning.

Meanwhile, let's also be clear about another thing: the budget dance the two parties are performing is not about different, even extremely different, maybe even unbridgeable views of the same impending debt/deficit crisis. This is about different views of the structure of different universes.

The Republican view of the universe (Congressman Ryan's view) is like that shortstop who can't hit but on the other hand can't field: it is completely improbable, but on the other hand it is mean spirited and crabbed. Its Medicare "cure" is deeply unfair to those who will be on Medicare in 10 years but, conveniently, avoids actually affecting anyone now on Medicare. And if we actually put this solution in place, the odds are very, very high it would cost us more, not less.

The rest of Congressman Ryan's actual budget cuts come from reducing all of the rest of government -- without specifying anything. In my blog two weeks ago, I argued that a 10 year freeze -- which everyone, including President Obama, seems to think is a fine thing -- reduced public sector investment to 5% of the federal budget. I thought this was disastrous. Congressman Ryan reduces all of my numbers by half. I don't know what is harder to believe: that Congressman Ryan or anyone else would regard these numbers as real, or that Congressman Ryan would be willing to live in the society his budget would produce.

The "savings" from Congressman Ryan's Medicare proposal and his unspecified cuts in everything else are then almost completely "invested" in tax cuts whose benefits flow hugely and disproportionately to upper income earners. As Alan Blinder showed in the Wall Street Journal Monday, a true count of the results of Congressman Ryan's efforts is as follows: $4.2 trillion in tax cuts and $4.3 trillion in spending cuts. So Congressman Ryan seems willing to wreck the safety net, our society, and maybe the economy for a net $100 billion in deficit reduction. Moreover, Congressman Ryan's own forecast of the results of his proposal has government declining as a percent of GDP to below where it was in 1950.

Where do they get these guys who either believe this stuff, or don't believe it but can say it with a straight face? I'm a proud deficit hawk, but I think Congressman Ryan's "solution" is worse for the country than the deficit problem itself.

Actually, it's pretty clear what happened. Congressman Ryan was mugged by the far right on his way to a deficit plan. By all accounts he is a decent, smart man; it is impossible for me to believe that he really believes a trivial deficit reduction is worth the damage he wreaks. Rather, in this political environment a conservative cannot put forward any new ideas.

Moving on to the Democrats. President Obama's vision for the country is vastly preferable and his budget approach more straightforward and plausible. It's just not close to being good enough. He moves tax rates for upper income families back up and he proposes to control Medicare cost increases through a series of advisory boards and regulations. He has already announced a 10-year freeze on all non-entitlement spending. So why do I have a problem with this approach? First, the tax increases will not happen; second, the Medicare cost controls by themselves won't work; third, the 10-year freeze is a bad idea; fourth, there are better choices. But his numbers actually add up and he does make a large dent in the problem. Clearly, if I only have this choice, then I would swallow my objections, which are substantial, and choose President Obama's direction.

So where does all of this take me?

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To begin with, it is impossible to imagine a budget negotiation process getting anywhere with these two competing approaches as starting points. Just what, exactly, do you trade? These are all-or-nothing proposals that are designed to not be traded. There is no sensible middle ground between these approaches; they are almost mutually exclusive.

Moreover, you have to understand how these negotiation processes work. The principals are all busy and have profoundly different levels of understanding of the substance. But all of the principals also have an acute understanding of the politics and know that in our current political environment they have very short leashes. The actual work is all done by staffs, who have little to no freedom to maneuver. There will be no new ideas introduced or creative policy breakthroughs. The result of any deal will be exactly what you might expect: a short-term fix with large amounts of imaginative fakery.

But my more fundamental concern is about leadership, government, and the phrase I used above, "if I only have this choice." Why do I only have this choice when there are better choices available?

Let me start at a different place. I think the country is in trouble. The debt/deficit issues obsessing us today are very big and very real. They have to be solved. But inequality, growth, and jobs are also going to become even greater problems over the next 20 years. If you think the country's mood is sour today, project it out after 20 years of slower economic growth and more inequality and ask yourself, how you will like it then? And remember that even under President Obama's budget directions -- by far the better of the two out there -- the U.S. government will be less and less able to do anything. And, I forgot, there is the small set of issues called environment, climate, and energy, which we have collectively decided to ignore. These issues aren't part of the left's current rant and they are either simply dismissed as a set of tree hugger myths by the right or used as an excuse to trash the environment even more.

This cannot be good enough. We have to have a more complete vision of a future America. We have to walk and chew gum at the same time. We have to solve a set of problems simultaneously. What is absolutely maddening is that there are plausible, moderate, centrist, non-extreme, affordable policies we could consider which we are either not thinking about or not thinking about seriously. Here in brief are several:

(1) Reform the income tax system for human beings and companies. Make the existing deductions more progressive by converting them into credits. Lower all rates. Introduce a "super rate" of around 30% for incomes above $1 million. (The left will hate it; the rich will pay more.) Lower corporate rates to 25%, but clean out all of the exemptions and subsidies.

(2) Raise more revenue. Introduce a progressive VAT (yes, it is easily designed) or a luxury consumption tax (about the same thing). Reduce payroll taxes a bit. Use the rest to finance a large-scale public investment program.

(3) Make entitlements more progressive and more efficient. There is no reason why there cannot be some means testing in Medicare or a moderate increase in the retirement age for Social Security. Adjust President Obama's health care plan so that there is a broader use of the exchanges -- the only chance I can see to slow the rise of health care costs is through a mix of controls of the kind President Obama has already proposed, and much greater reliance on personal choice.

(4) Trim defense. There is a huge amount we can do and still be the most powerful nation by far in the world.

(5) Commit to a 10-year program of significantly increased public investment. Spend 1% to 2% of GDP per year through a National Infrastructure Bank.

Obviously, these specifics are not my point. I already know the left and right will hate all of them. I already know that it is easy to find polls saying Americans support none of these. My points are different. None of these directions are radical, none of them would alter civilization as we know it. And none of them will be raised in any set of budget negotiations even remotely imaginable today.

The reason is simple. Our two parties have moved to the ends of the political spectrum, they have abandoned the center, their agendas have little to do with each other, and both despise compromise. And the parties' agendas also have remarkably little to do with the nation's problems. So the nation's problems are not being dealt with. Ask yourself what earthly good the budget shutdown debate over -- in the end -- about 1/39th of 1% of the budget did for anyone?

Moreover in actual elections, where an idealist -- not me -- would think ideas could be fought out, more and more only the primaries matter. On the left and right you pretty much have the true believers choosing the truest believers. At the same time, the two parties take up all of the air in the debate. No idea that is not part of the left or right canon can really ever be raised because there is no source of institutional support.

We need two things: A president who truly wants to be transformative and a centrist political force. What if President Obama -- who is going to win reelection in 2012, and will win bigger the more he takes real risks to solve real problems -- said that he was willing to negotiate without qualifications and to put everything on the table, but only with those who made the same statement? What if a centrist force led by Alice Rivlin, Peter Domenici, Erskine Bowles, and Alan Simpson also emerged that demanded these negotiations and acted as referees while they were occurring? As an American citizen, I don't want some set of completely constrained discussions to be held at some airport with an agreement to do precisely nothing emerging at the end. I want an actual deal and I want it to emerge before the 2012 elections. Why? Because if a debt/deficit deal does not happen by then, the next chance is 2017. And we do not have 5 years.

Will it happen? Are you kidding me? Of course not. We are most likely to keep kicking this issue down the road until the road dead-ends. Leadership in the country seems to consist mostly of hoping the wreck doesn't happen on their watch, not trying to stop the wreck. As I said sometime ago, "I'm gonna find my brother Mort, because he ain't never seen a train wreck."

Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow Bo Cutter is formerly a managing partner of Warburg Pincus, a major global private equity firm. Recently, he served as the leader of President Obama’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) transition team.

There's something rotten on Sesame Street. And it ain't Oscar's garbage can.

"One of the best things about being around preschool-age children," gushes Ron Lieber in the NYT, "is that they are a blank slate awaiting your imprint."

Or perhaps the imprint of Visa, HSBC, and Wells Fargo.

In an article archly titled, "Too Young for Finance? Think Again", we are informed by Lieber that it's time for America's toddlers to "think hard about money." And why? Well, because irresponsible little people are likely to grow up into spendthrift adults. Bite-sized lessons, outlined in cute storybooks and videos, sound straightforward and wholesome enough: Save. Spend. Earn. All together now!

But who exactly will be teaching Little Jimmy the joys of fiscal responsibility? The very people who brought you the financial crisis.

That's right. The campaign to teach economics to tots comes courtesy of a group called the JumpStart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy, which describes itself as a D.C.-based "non-profit organization of organizations that share an interest in advancing financial literacy among students in pre-kindergarten through college." Peruse the website, and you will find that the folks behind JumpStart share a very significant interest: Nearly everyone listed is either directly or indirectly involved with Big Finance. We're talking giant banks, mortgage financiers, and credit card companies.

What you will not find on JumpStart's board or list of partners is even the usual ceremonial window dressing of representatives from labor or consumer advocates. There is one person listed associated with the Consumer Federation of America, but this pathetic nod is hardly a counterweight to the entire banking industry. Where is Elizabeth Warren, for example? Not here. Nor is anyone identified with criticism of the banks and financial firms that have bilked consumers, raised fees, and nearly tanked the global economy. Are  preschoolers really supposed to learn about financial responsibility from the Mortgage Federation of America? Obviously, the logic is to start 'em young before they have had any real contact with these paragons of fiscal virtue. And before their brains are properly functioning.

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Lieber begins his article with the #1  lesson that the financial sector has been pushing ever since the meltdown. The crisis really wasn't their fault. It was ours. And that means you, Little Sally, with your greedy, ice-cream coveting ways.  "In the wake of the financial crisis," writes Lieber, must come a "realization that individuals share at least some of the blame for the bubble." What's needed, says Lieber, are "better habits from an earlier age" that will help kids grow up responsibly.

"For Me, For You, For Later" is the title of Sesame Street's package of videos -- offered free at banks around the country! -- that will encourage anklebiters to forgo that ice cream and donate cat food to a local shelter instead.  Very nice. But coming from this gang, perhaps a more appropriate title would be"For Me, For Now, Forever." It could include lessons on How to Indenture Young People Through Student Debt. Or How to Make Families Homeless Through Predatory Mortgage Lending. And the biggest lesson of all, How to Defraud Your Neighbor and Not Go To Jail.

In its crusade for fiscal values, JumpStart Coalition has enlisted Sesame Street to use the popular character Elmo to urge children to create three special jars labeled "Spending", "Saving", and "Sharing" into which they drop their pennies. But it forgot a very important jar. "Stealing". Because that's how many of the firms represented by JumpStart have made much of their money.

So how does Sesame Street, beloved of educated parents everywhere, get into the game of pushing the financial sector's fiscal ABCs? It just so happens that Joan Ganz Cooney, one of the founders of Sesame Street, is married to Blackstone Group billionaire Pete Peterson, the former investment banker and conservative who has been spending quite a lot of his own money to push the destruction of Social Security and Medicare through his Peterson Foundation and convince us all to forget the lessons of Macroeconomics 101 on deficits. Being married, of course, is not a crime. But here's the smoking gun: Muckety.com reveals that Cooney also serves on the board of the Peterson Foundation.

Frankly, this whole thing reeks worse that Oscar's garbage can.

Lynn Parramore is the editor of New Deal 2.0, Media Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute fellow, co-founder of Recessionwire, and the author of Reading the Sphinx.

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