Recycled Clintonism is recycled neo-liberalism. This is change only the brainiacs from Hyde Park and Harvard Square could believe in. Only the experts could get hot under the collar about the slight differences between "behavioral economics" (the latest academic fad that fascinates some high level Obama-ites) and straight-up neo-liberal deference to the market. And here's the sobering thing: despite the grotesque extremism of the Bush years, neo-liberalism also served as its ideological magnetic north.

Let us hope the Obama Administration can "recycle" the economic accomplishments of "Clintonism" - 22 million new jobs, significant reductions in the number of people living in poverty, significant reductions in income inequality. More . . .

The post continues:

[Donald] Richberg and [Hugh] Johnson helped design and run the National Recovery Administration (the New Deal's first and failed attempt at industrial recovery). [They] were partial to the interests of the country's peak corporations. [They] wanted them released from the strictures of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act so that they could collaborate in setting prices and wages to arrest the killing deflation that gripped the economy. But they also wanted these corporate behemoths and the codes of competition they promulgated subjected to government oversight and restraints.

Actually, the National Recovery Administration was intended to impose government control on industrial activity - not unshackle corporations. Indeed, the opposition to the NRA was extreme among "corporatists" (the label affixed to Johnson and Richburg in the post.) The NRA was clearly the part of the New Deal which most resembled socialism.

The post continues:

Meanwhile, Felix Frankfurter (another confidant of FDR's and a future Supreme Court justice), aided by the behind-the-scenes efforts of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, fiercely contested the influence of the corporatists within the new administration, favoring anti-trust and then-new Keynesian approaches to economic recovery.

This is true, but hardly a fight against "corporatists." It was more of a fight against deficit hawks like FDR Treasury Secretary Henry Morganthau. In my previous post, I provided Keynes' own critique of the NIRA (National Industrial Recovery Act), which created the NRA.

In terms of recovery policies, one of the most interesting debates were between Harry Hopkins, whose focus was on job creation, and Harold Ickes, Sr., whose focus was on government investment in infrastructure. One could creditably argue that Ickes was the better Keynesian. I would love to read Krugman and others on that debate.

The most interesting and insightful part of the post to me was this:

The question for our "new era" -- not one our New Deal ancestors would have thought to ask -- has become: How do we get beyond the bailout state? This is one crucial realm where genuinely new thinking and new ideas are badly needed.

At the moment, as best we can make out, the bailout state is being managed in secret and apparently in the interests, above all, of those who run the financial institutions being "rescued." Often, we don't actually know who is getting what from the Federal Reserve and the Treasury, or on what terms, or even which institutions are being helped and which aren't, or often what our public monies are actually being used for.

. . . Are we, then, witnessing the birth of some warped, exceedingly partial version of state capitalism -- partial, that is, to the resuscitation of the old order? If so, lurking within this string of bum deals might there not be a great opportunity? Putting the economy and country back together will require massive resources directed toward common purposes. There is no more suitable means of mobilizing and steering those resources than the institutions of democratic government.

Under the present dispensation, the bailout state makes the government the handmaiden of the financial sector. Under a new one, the tables might be turned. But who will speak for that option within the limited councils of the Obama team?

A real democratic nationalization of the banks -- good value for our money rather than good money to add to their value -- should be part of the policy agenda up for discussion in the Obama era. As things now stand, the public supplies the loans and the investment capital, but the key decisions about how they are to be deployed remain in private hands. A democratic version of nationalizing the financial system would transfer these critical decisions to new institutions created by the Congress and designed to pursue public, not private, objectives. How to subject the flow of credit and investment capital to public control ought to be on the drawing boards if we are to look beyond the old New Deal to a new one.

Or, for instance, if we are to bail out the auto industry, which we should -- millions of jobs, businesses, communities, and what's left of once powerful and proud unions are at stake -- then why not talk about its nationalization, too? Why not create a representative body of workers, consumers, environmentalists, suppliers, and other interested parties to supervise the industry's reorganization and retooling to produce, just as the president-elect says he wants, new green means of transportation -- and not just cars?

Why not apply the same model to the rehabilitation of the nation's infrastructure; indeed, why not to the reindustrialization of the country as a whole? If, as so many commentators are now claiming, what lies ahead is the kind of massive, crippling deflation characteristic of such crises, then why not consider creating democratic mechanisms to impose an incomes policy on wages and prices that works against that deflation?

This is radical, and welcome, thinking. I am almost sure I disagree with most of it. But it is worthy of being discussed. Should it be discussed in the Obama Administration? Perhaps. But nothing prevents discussion of it in academia, among the public and on the blogs. What would mar the discussion, in my view, is to see it as another excuse for further Clinton bashing, as opposed to a real discussion about the policies we will need for our country.

Speaking for me only