A couple of walks on Sunday listening to “The Edge of Chaos,” by Dambisa Moyo — walking to Safeway to get cereal and milk earlier in the morning, and then around the lake in the afternoon. I haven’t quite gotten to the gist of the book, the arguments for changes that go against the grain of the commonplace, yet, but Moyo summarizes the issues of the day in a way that at least requires me to think about them, and question their solubility within the limits of what’s currently available in the political process.
That said, I do believe some candidates, especially Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown right now, are putting forward substantial proposals for change and redress that could appeal to more than just the liberal-progressive axis of the Democratic Party — earned income and child tax credits should be winners for anyone in the majority of relatively low wage people in the country, unless they’re being completely bamboozled by their preachers. And Warren’s proposals to put restraints on corporate and financial behavior are consistent at once with Bernie Sanders’ and Trump’s rhetorics and the thinking of moderate Democratic groups like Third Way.
I can only hope that these ideas, combined with genuine empathy and outrage at the state of unbalanced advantage to the extremely wealthy and to corporations run by hedge funds (and hence indifferent to any standard of value other than short-term stock price), might make them as candidates more formidable than the less experienced candidates running on diversity issues and tacking the larger problems on only after attaching to their demographics.
Jay Inslee’s interesting too, but is running entirely on the issue of climate change, which taken by itself is more likely to be taken as one more progressive left coast boutique issue by the heartland, or worse, combined with Green New Deal proposals that throw cost-benefit analysis out along with free market economics as having any role in addressing climate change.
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