Bill Clinton's Unreality: Tinkering With Unpassable Ideas, when Transformation is What We Need

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/story/153191/bill_clinton%27s_unreality%3A_tinkering_with_unpassable_ideas%2C_when_transformation_is_what_we_need_?akid=7910.277129.v7nufb&rd=1&t=5


Former President Bill Clinton’s new book, Back to Work: Why We Need Smart Government for a Strong Economy, is a book for policy wonks and politics junkies. Progressives will love his defense of government. They will be outraged by his buying in to conservative/Wall Street arguments about Social Security. We will roll our eyes at the long, detailed, brilliant arguments for and against a wide range of policy ideas. We will hate his support of trade agreements without mentioning what they have done to manufacturing jobs. And we will be sad that this book didn’t come out just a month later, so you could see if the Occupy movement changes the way he sees things.

This book is timely and full of good ideas for helping grow the economy and create jobs. But its timeliness is also disappointing, because our political system is so dysfunctional that none of these ideas will be implemented. And while the ideas are good, they are also incremental just when we are coming to see the need for transformation.

Right Time, Wrong Time

Back to Work arrives right on time with ideas to help the economy just as Washington “pivots to jobs” from a mistimed, destructive obsession with deficits. In fact, the book was completed so recently that it references the Republican debate audience cheering the “let him die” comment. But the book was completed just as the Occupy movement was beginning, and reading it in the prism of that movement makes it seem as if Clinton is just about ready to reach conclusions similar to those of the movement. Just about … but not quite.

[DCBob]

1. there is nothing wrong with incremental change as long as the increments keep coming.

We are in difficult period now due to the Republicans refusal to go along with anything.. but that may change when they realize that tactic is going to cost them at the ballot box.

[fasttense]

2. You can NOT clean up a corrupted government with minor policy changes and

austerity.

The graft, cronyism, crimes and theft must be flushed out completely before the system will ever work again.

That is what Clinton does NOT understand. The system is broken, totally, completely. When torturers and war criminals with money and power are ignored, while speeding, drugs, protests and petty thefts are used as an excuse for constant surveillance and intrusion on the average citizen, the society is broken.

When banksters rack up billion dollar cons while the Fed foots the bill and the average citizen is kicked out of their home through fraud and nothing is done, the society is broken.

When a supreme court justice can ignore the Constitution and pick US presidents or give money the power of speech, while dinning out with the winners of his decision, the society is broken.

Every level of our government has been corrupted by psychopaths, criminals and idiots. Tinkering around the edges is NOT going to fix the problems we face today. Baby steps are fine for babies but adults need to walk like grown ups.

[xchrom]

3. ...

:thumbsup:

[marmar]

4. Yep.

:applause:

[KoKo]

5. What's mind-boggling is that after what the Starr Commission and Repugs/Think Tanks put him through

...and Hillary during his Presidency, he still thinks working with these people is positive.

How can this be? I believe he was paid off and is kept on a leash after he lied about Monica. The "Dogs" were called off and his payback was that he'd be allowed to run his "Clinton Initiative" while palling around with Poppy Bush and Globalists. A smart guy like Clinton should know better after seeing what happened to him, the stolen election of 2000 and what Bush did for eight years in wrecking the country and our foreign policy. It doesn't add up that he would be so clueless about the RW and the Think Tanks that run our country.

This snip from the review of the book:

"Back to Work is a policy prescription full of ideas that could help the economy, but at its heart it has a flaw: it misunderstands the nature of the conservative movement’s decades-long attack on our very system of self-government. This leaves Clinton offering helpful policy ideas at a time when conservatives are blocking everything in the Congress that might do the country some good. And now, finally, the Occupy movement has come along, focusing attention on the real need for transformational rather than incremental change."