Obama Must Dare To Be Revolutionary

[Better Believe It]

Obama Must Dare To Be Revolutionary
By David Sirota
AlterNet
June 22, 2009

Most of the great advances we remember involve reimagination and dreams, not merely tweaks and tinkers. The Wright Brothers’ plane wasn’t a newfangled horse and buggy, Einstein’s theories weren’t a simple update of old physics, and Edison’s creations didn’t aspire to make a brighter-burning wax candle. It’s been the same thing in politics. The Founding Fathers’ Constitution didn’t replicate monarchy, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal wasn’t just tinkering with Hooverism, and Ronald Reagan’s revolution didn’t merely dismantle the welfare state.

All of these inventors envisaged machines, theories or societies that never before existed. And that’s why for all the positive, even admirable steps Obama’s America seems poised to take, the aspirations still seem too small, too unimaginative, too confined by old parameters and old conceptions of how things must work.

Consider the Wall Street bailouts. By simply giving banks trillions of dollars with no strings attached, our government theorizes that the problem is not the financial system, but a momentary cash drought that can be solved by temporary recapitalization. These bailouts do not aspire to change the whole industry into one dominated by many small institutions rather than a few big ones. They also don’t reach for “a tightly regulated banking system, which made finance a staid, even boring business,” as Paul Krugman said we once had -- they envision the same get-rich-quick casino that generated huge profits and huge losses.

On health care, even as the Obama administration pushes to create a public health care option for consumers to buy into, most of the proposals for universal health care being debated in Washington still imagine a health care system integrally involving private insurance companies. In fact, the one proposal that sees a new health care system without those companies -- a single-payer system -- has been shoved to the side by both parties as too radical.

I could go on, but you get the point. We are suffering from a lack of imagination -- a failure of “the vision thing,” as George H. W. Bush once called it.

http://www.alternet.org/story/140804/obama_must_dare_to_be_revolutionary/

[styersc]

1. We are suffering from a lack of leadership.

I agree with those who think we need change. We were promised change and we got GW Bush's third term.

[xiamiam]

2. it would be revolutionary to have a govt which actually represents us...the majority

rather than the lobbyists bankers and special interests taking center stage...