The relatively stable decades from Roosevelt’s financial regulation in the 30s through the 1970s set the stage for the deregulation of Wall Street in the Reagan 80′s and Clinton 90s. Predictably (in hindsight at least) decades of unstable and risky growth followed. The rich got richer, the poor got poorer and middle class income stagnated. Detailed, documented, and persuasive, Fox makes a compelling case for a return to stability, a return to a productive balance between Wall Street’s notion of a free market and the public’s right to intervene effectively when Wall Street greed overcomes its sense of civic responsibility and common sense.

Our change president seems desperate to enact change in little bits and pieces after the USA electorate gave him a mandate for unambiguous change. So far…we have a stimulus package (now failing to stimulate) that is half the size needed. We have health care legislation working its way steadily through congress that addresses expanded coverage, but ignores (or even sabotages) critically important cost reduction. We’ve bailed out the banks, but are reluctant to enact meaningful banking reform. We say we need to investigate allegations of torture, but won’t pursue prosecution of lawbreakers.

When, President Barack, when will the other shoe drop? I’ve thought from the beginning that President Obama would tread carefully at first, saving more aggressive steps until after he shows some initial progress. But it’s becoming clear that the initial progress may be too little and too late to provide the momentum for movement on a growing list of Step 2s. Democrats show little taste for success, choosing to squander their majorities in congress on watered down legislation that still gets slammed by the do-nothing party on the right.

Now is the time, Mr. President. Do you want to be a transformative leader? Push Step 2s now, while you can. Push your party to reach for the brass ring. Take the hits. Your nation needs the other shoes to drop.

In many ways we descended as a society into a fantasyland, trying to leave the limits and consequences and obligations of the real world behind.

Politicians stopped talking about the poor. We built up staggering amounts of debt and called it an economic boom…We let New Orleans drown.

Jackson was the perfect star for the era, the embodiment of fantasy gone wild…Reality is unforgiving. There is no escape. Behind the Jackson facade was the horror of child abuse. Court records and reams of well-documented media accounts contain a stream of serious allegations of child sex abuse… Jackson, a multimillionaire megastar, was excused as an eccentric…

One case of alleged pedophilia against Jackson, the details of which would make your hair stand on end, was settled for a reported $25 million. He beat another case in court.

The Michael-mania that has erupted since Jackson’s death…is yet another spasm of the culture opting for fantasy over reality. We don’t want to look under the rock that was Jackson’s real life.

Or under the rock of our own society’s real life.  Read the full column here:

Op-Ed Columnist – Behind the Facade – NYTimes.com.

…then came the moment approximately 50 million Americans– who identify themselves with terms like agnostic, atheist, materialist, humanist, nontheist, skeptic, bright, freethinker, agnostic, naturalist, or non-believer — will never forget. In his inauguration speech, Obama said, “…Our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and non-believers.” Two weeks later he talked about “non-believers” and “humanists” at the National Prayer Breakfast.

Read more about us in The Nation.

Rediscovering Secular America.

Which brings us back to the latest herd of rampaging, testosterone-poisoned pols. I don’t particularly care if these men (and so far, all are men, at least those caught with their libidos exposed) lose their positions for their stupidities. I don’t care if they suffer much or not.  I do care that these little flurries of reality serve to stifle the growth of self-righteousness in Washington and perhaps among our media friends.

Perhaps if the percentage of public figures caught with their pants down and their hands in the nookie jar rises, the volume of the sanctimonious moralists (many of whom, I’m sure, fall in the not-yet-caught category) will fall. It makes this old sinner want to pray for the silence we all, as fragile humans, deserve when our unsteady private lives come tumbling down.

ADDENDUM: Follow the link to read an especially thoughtful post on the Sanford affair.

Samples:

Conservatives have legitimate ideological beefs with Obama, rightly expressed in sharp language. But the invective in some quarters has unmistakably amped up. The writer Camille Paglia, a political independent and confessed talk-radio fan, detected a shift toward paranoia in the air waves by mid-May. When “the tone darkens toward a rhetoric of purgation and annihilation,” she observed in Salon, “there is reason for alarm.”…

This homicide-saturated vituperation is endemic among mini-Limbaughs. Glenn Beck has dipped into O’Reilly’s Holocaust analogies to liken Obama’s policy on stem-cell research to the eugenics that led to “the final solution” and the quest for “a master race.” After James von Brunn’s rampage at the Holocaust museum, Beck rushed onto Fox News to describe the Obama-hating killer as a “lone gunman nutjob.” Yet in the same show Beck also said von Brunn was a symptom that “the pot in America is boiling,” as if Beck himself were not the boiling pot cheering the kettle on…

Hard-core haters resolutely dismiss any “mainstream media” debunking of their conspiracy theories. The only voices that might penetrate their alternative reality — I emphasize might — belong to conservative leaders with the guts and clout to step up as McCain did last fall. Where are they?…

A coincidence…that’s all. But…The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane is about witchcraft. I’m jus’ sayin’…

Read of one person’s experiences with a government supported system.  And let’s all stop being scared.

Nicholas D. Kristof – This Time, We Won’t Scare – NYTimes.com.