Alan Greenspan admits the failure of his pure free market ideology:
I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms
[digg-reddit-me]Like a lot of people, I’ve been struggling to understand this financial crisis over the past few weeks. I don’t pretend to be an economic expert – I’ve always been more interested in foreign policy, politics and history – but the issue of this crisis is obviously so important, it seems that it is everyone’s responsibility to find out what went on, what caused this.
I also feel that this is an issue which is confusing our politics, our partisan impulses. Both the right and the left have many reasons to hate the bailout – yet the pragmatists on both sides agree that something must be done. Everyone is angry. Very few predicted this. I only came across a few who prominently warned about a crisis such as this – subscribers to the Austrian school of economics such as Ron Paul; liberal capitalists such as Warren Buffet and George Soros; and economists like Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
This crisis has succeeded in confusing ideological categories – which is probably part of the reason it has spwarned so many interesting and non-ideological takes, as people struggle to understand these momentous events in terms they are familiar with. (Here’s one ingenious example.) On the whole, Republican politicians instinctively trusted the market and although some attempted to reign in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, they saw no imminent threat to the financial system. A few Democrats saw the need for more oversight to prevent excessive risk-taking that might endanger the financial system; many more Democrats (especially as the party in Washington is dominated by neo-liberals), didn’t see the profit in warning of an unknowable future catastrophe. Those financial firms whose main purpose was to minimize risk and maximize profit accomplished this by reducing the risk of any individual transaction while placing greater and greater stress on the system – trading many small risks for a giant catastrophic risk. But theyse firms didn’t know this because the entire system was opaque and oversight was minimal. As long as things were going well, there was no reason to figure out what was going on.
Now, here we are today.
I don’t pretend to understand the cause or the cure of this crisis. But here are 10 things I’ve learned, 10 things worth sharing, in my attempts to figure out what’s going on:
(0.99) x ($100) + (0.01) x (catastrophic outcome) = 0
In other words, playing for $100, there is a 99% chance that you will make at least $100 dollars playing this game. But there is a 1% chance of a catastrophic outcome. If you never stop betting, the catastrophic outcome is inevitable.
No, our economy is not a shining example of pure unfettered market forces. It never has been. In his farewell address back in 1796, 20 years after the publication of Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations,” George Washington defined the new republic’s own distinctive national economic sensibility: “Our commercial policy should hold an equal and impartial hand; neither seeking nor granting exclusive favors or preferences; consulting the natural course of things; diffusing and diversifying by gentle means the streams of commerce, but forcing nothing.” From the outset, Washington envisioned some government involvement in the commercial system, even as he recognized that commerce should belong to the people.
Capitalism is not really the best word to describe this arrangement. (The term was coined in the late 19th century as a way to describe the ideological opposite of communism.) Some decades later, people began to use a better term, “the American system,” in which the government involved itself in the economy primarily to develop what we would now call infrastructure — highways, canals, railroads — but otherwise let economic liberty prevail. I prefer to call this spectacularly successful arrangement “financial democracy” — a largely free system in which the U.S. government’s role is to help citizens achieve their best potential, using all the economic weapons that our financial arsenal can provide.
Americans may assume that the basics of capitalism have been firmly established here since time immemorial, but historical cataclysms such as the Great Depression strongly suggest otherwise. Simply put, capitalism evolves. And we need to understand its trajectory if we are to bring our economic system into greater accord with the other great source of American strength: the best principles of our democracy.
People tend to overweight recent events in considering the probability of future events. In 2001, I would have rated the risk of another big terrorist attack on the US in the next two years as pretty high. Now I rate it as much lower. Yet the probability of a major terrorist attack is not really very dependent on whether there has been a recent successful one; it’s much more dependent on things like the availability of suicidal terrorists, and their ability to formulate a clever plan. My current assessment is not necessarily any more accurate than my 2001 assessment, but I nonetheless worry much less about terrorism than I did then.
No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion.
This fundamental unknowability of the world must inform our actions, and perhaps points to some solutions. We must attempt to resolve this crisis by tinkering with different solutions, and seeing what works, while being mindful that our actions will inevitably have consequences we do not imagine. And remember – at any point – a black swan could come around and reshape our world suddenly – as 9/11 did, as the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand to start World War I, as did the invention of the personal computer, as has this financial crisis. The solution will not come from our determined application of fixed ideas, but by our openness to the possibility that we may be wrong, even as we are determined to act. We must see the shades of gray and acknowledge that we do not fully understand the world, yet still act – tinker, if you will.
David Brooks has apparently had enough of the Republican party as most of us know it:
…let us recognize above all the 228 who voted no — the authors of this revolt of the nihilists. They showed the world how much they detest their own leaders and the collected expertise of the Treasury and Fed. They did the momentarily popular thing, and if the country slides into a deep recession, they will have the time and leisure to watch public opinion shift against them.
House Republicans led the way and will get most of the blame. It has been interesting to watch them on their single-minded mission to destroy the Republican Party. Not long ago, they led an anti-immigration crusade that drove away Hispanic support. Then, too, they listened to the loudest and angriest voices in their party, oblivious to the complicated anxieties that lurk in most American minds.
Now they have once again confused talk radio with reality.
The frustrating thing about David Brooks is that, as reasonable as he may seem on occasion, he refuses to leave the Republican party because of what he imagines it could be – a national greatness party that balances individualism and collectivism, that has a relatively big government, that promotes good behavior.
I find it difficult at times to see what keeps Brooks in the Republican party except brand loyalty.
[digg-reddit-me]
I read the other day that Sen. McCain likes to gamble. He likes to roll those dice. And that’s OK. I enjoy a little friendly game of poker myself every now and then. But one thing I know is this – we can’t afford to gamble on four more years of the same disastrous economic policies we’ve had for the last eight.
Obama seems to have read this article in the New York Times:
Senator John McCain was on a roll. In a room reserved for high-stakes gamblers at the Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut, he tossed $100 chips around a hot craps table. When the marathon session ended around 2:30 a.m., the Arizona senator and his entourage emerged with thousands of dollars in winnings.
A lifelong gambler, Mr. McCain takes risks, both on and off the craps table. He was throwing dice that night not long after his failed 2000 presidential bid, in which he was skewered by the Republican Party’s evangelical base, opponents of gambling. Mr. McCain was betting at a casino he oversaw as a member of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, and he was doing so with the lobbyist who represents that casino, according to three associates of Mr. McCain.
The visit had been arranged by the lobbyist, Scott Reed, who works for the Mashantucket Pequot, a tribe that has contributed heavily to Mr. McCain’s campaigns and built Foxwoods into the world’s second-largest casino. Joining them was Rick Davis, Mr. McCain’s current campaign manager. Their night of good fortune epitomized not just Mr. McCain’s affection for gambling, but also the close relationship he has built with the gambling industry and its lobbyists during his 25-year career in Congress.
The article also could have mentioned that McCain’s recent moves – from suspending his campaign to picking Palin could also be included among his “gambles”.
Of course, his decision to blame Pelosi for the bill’s failure isn’t a gamble – it’s just ridiculous, a desperate attempt to distract the country from this latest incident in which his party has place ideology above country. Combine this with McCain’s apparent propensity of over-personalize conflicts and crises, and you get an idea of what a disaster a McCain administration would be.
This guy wasn’t even able – after he put himself on the line and went to Washington and acknowledged something had to be done – to get a significant minority of his party to support any sort of compromise on this issue. The Republicans demonstrated today that they are not willing to make the difficult choices needed to lead.
But better days are coming:
The skies look cloudy and it’s dark. And you think the rains will never pass. But these too will pass: a brighter day will come.
President Bartlet speaks to presidential candidate Obama:
Four weeks ago you had the best week of your campaign, followed — granted, inexplicably — by the worst week of your campaign. And you’re still in a statistical dead heat. You’re a 47-year-old black man with a foreign-sounding name who went to Harvard and thinks devotion to your country and lapel pins aren’t the same thing and you’re in a statistical tie with a war hero and a Cinemax heroine. To these aged eyes, Senator, that’s what progress looks like. You guys got four debates. Get out of my house and go back to work.
The New York Times had two useful columns this morning – one by Paul Krugman explaining how McCain’s lies about Obama are even worse than Bush’s lies about Kerry or Gore:
[T]he muck being hurled by the McCain campaign is preventing a debate on real issues — on whether the country really wants, for example, to continue the economic policies of the last eight years.
But there’s another answer, which may be even more important: how a politician campaigns tells you a lot about how he or she would govern…
I’m talking…about the relationship between the character of a campaign and that of the administration that follows. Thus, the deceptive and dishonest 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign provided an all-too-revealing preview of things to come. In fact, my early suspicion that we were being misled about the threat from Iraq came from the way the political tactics being used to sell the war resembled the tactics that had earlier been used to sell the Bush tax cuts.
I give Krugman a lot of grief for his attacks on Obama – which resemble small-minded tantrums. But despite these frustrations with Krugman, I have always acknowledged he can be quite effective. He is simply a polemicist – and he will force the facts to fit into his pre-conceived arguments (except perhaps on economics where he is more subtle.) But when the facts happen to fit his pre-conceived arguments well – then his columns are a thing of beauty, like this past one, making a very important point.
David Brooks, conservative, writes the other column worth reading today. He attempts to explain the next steps the Republican party has to take in order to seriously address the major issues facing the nation:
If there’s a thread running through the gravest current concerns, it is that people lack a secure environment in which they can lead their lives. Wild swings in global capital and energy markets buffet family budgets. Nobody is sure the health care system will be there when they need it. National productivity gains don’t seem to alleviate economic anxiety. Inequality strains national cohesion. In many communities, social norms do not encourage academic achievement, decent values or family stability. These problems straining the social fabric aren’t directly addressed by maximizing individual freedom.
And yet locked in the old framework, the Republican Party [has a] knee-jerk response…
The irony, of course, is that, in pre-Goldwater days, conservatives were incredibly sophisticated about the value of networks, institutions and invisible social bonds. You don’t have to go back to Edmund Burke and Adam Smith (though it helps) to find conservatives who understood that people are socially embedded creatures and that government has a role (though not a dominant one) in nurturing the institutions in which they are embedded.
Brooks is describing here Barack Obama’s economic plans. Although I think he still is prejudiced enough against liberals and Democrats – assuming they will act irresponsibly if they are in power – that he cannot support Obama. And he seems to have a very positive feeling towards McCain that will lead him to hope that McCain will adopt Obama’s economic plan with a slightly more conservative tilt – despite what McCain is promising now – rather than to back the man with the plan he agrees with.
But despite this, it is because he writes columns like this that I truly look to David Brooks as an almost independent-minded thinker – even if he still remains tethered to the Republican party.
[Photo by World Economic Forum licensed under Creative Commons.]
[digg-reddit-me]Steven Lee Myers of the New York Times reported yesterday on Cheney’s visits to former Soviet states:
Mr. Cheney, who visited Azerbaijan, Georgia and Ukraine this week to express American support, offered no new proposals either, but he described the conflict as a new test for NATO that required a unified response.
This has been the baffling and fundamental flaw of the neoconservative approach to foreign policy. How America responded to 9/11, how America endured the occupation of Iraq, how America responded to the Iranian’s development of nuclear weapons, how America responded to Russian aggression in Georgia – each of these represented – in the words of Bush, Cheney, McCain, and other neoconservatives – a “test” of America’s and our allies’ resolve.
Yet – the neoconservatives only offer a single way for America to pass each of these tests: Escalate matters until America can plausibly threaten to use military force.
That was America’s justifiable response to 9/11. It was the Bush administration’s strategy with Saddam Hussein. It has been Cheney’s strategy for containing Iran. It is McCain’s strategy for confronting Russia. The reason neoconservatives are so eager to use military force – instead of diplomacy, containment, alliances, creating and living by systems of rules for international affairs, or economic pressure – is that they believe America’s military might can solve any problem. They are correct that our military superiority ensures that we can defeat any other military on the planet. But what they do not acknowledge is that the military is a blunt weapon and that without a draft, it can only be deployed under limited circumstances and for limited periods. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq demonstrate these lessons – yet McCain, Bush, Cheney, and company do not seem to have noticed.
Thus, McCain invoked Kennedy’s defense of Berlin when Russia invaded Georgia – saying, “We are all Georgians!” Kennedy had proclaimed, “Eich bin ein Berlinier” to demonstrate our resolve to the Soviet Union – that if they tried to take Berlin, we would protect it as if it were our own home. McCain, by saying that we are all Georgians, was committing the United States to take military action against Russia. Yet, if that is his plan, he has not admitted it. If it is not his plan, then he has not been following the advice given by his hero, Teddy Roosevelt:
Speak softly, and carry a big stick.
McCain talks a good game – but if he means half of what he says, we’ll have more than one new war on our hands by the time he’s through. Either way, he’s not the president I’m hoping for.
Stephen Kotkin reviews Thomas Friedman’s new book, Hot Flat, and Crowded, for the business section of the New York Times today. Friedman himself has a bi-weekly column in the opinion section of the Times, which makes Kotkin’s review all the more pleasurable. Kotkin captures the formula Friedman inevitably uses to write his columns – and his books:
The content and method will be familiar to Mr. Friedman’s legions of readers: source, anecdote, pop metaphor. Repeat point. In italics. The unfamiliar reader should prepare for hyperbole, neologisms and aphorisms. “Affluenza.” “Code Green.” “The new Energy Climate Era (E.C.E.).” “We’ve already hit the iceberg.” We’re “the proverbial frog in the pail on the stove” (boiled to death after failing to jump out because the temperature rose only incrementally). “We are the flood, we are the asteroid. We had better learn how to be the ark.”
I have to admit that I have a bit of a soft spot for Friedman. I generally read his column and have read several of his books. I read them with the same attention I give to reading a Grisham thriller – as both authors take big ideas and make them entertaining. (Grisham is a far superior entertainer however.) I find that reading Friedman forces me to think – because he describes great changes that are going on and then attempts to explain and solve them by using simple, salesmen’s terms: “The World Is Flat!” or “Obama-Cheny 08!” He takes interesting ideas and then trivializes them before their gravity sinks in. The New Republic, in an article written in 2004 or 2005, criticized Friedman for being a salesman for globalization rather than an analyst of it’s effects. And while Friedman certainly is enamored with globalization, I think the real issue with Friedman’s work is how he so crassly simplies every issue. However, it is probably this skill that has made his work so palatable and popular to those who shy away from serious writing on economic and foreign policy issues.
For all my criticism of him, I have to give Friedman credit for having been consistently pushing – for the past dozen years – what has become the obvious next step to achieve a greater measure of national security, to drain the funding of our strategic adversaries around the world, to stop climate change, and to establish America as a leader in a new worldwide industry. Again, from Kotkin’s review:
Mr. Friedman has an unabashedly American-centric solution: the United States can regain its national purpose and save the world via green innovation. This can happen, he says, if Americans recognize — in the words of John Gardner, founder of Common Cause — “a series of great opportunities disguised as insoluble problems.”
Friedman told the story on Meet the Press this morning of what he says to young Chinese who justify China’s increasing pollution:
Friedman: You know, I was just in China a week or 10 days ago, Tom, and you know, young Chinese, you know, whenever I go here, they say to me, you know, “Mr. Friedman, you guys got to grow dirty for 150 years, now it’s our turn.” To which I always say to them, “You know what, you’re right. It is your turn. Take your time. Grow as dirty as you want. Because I think we just need five years to invent all the clean power technologies you’re going to need before you choke to death and then we’re going to come over and we’re going to sell them to you and we’re going to clean your clock in the next great global industry.” That’s when I see the headsets of the translators adjusting, “What is he saying?”
Clearly, Friedman has become a salesmen for green technology. He’s not analyzing – he’s advocating. Even if his presentation rankles, it’s worth listening to – and hopefully, he’s changing some minds.
[digg-reddit-me]Many pundits and both campaigns have declared this the year of the independent voter ((It’s also the year of the Hillary voter, Reagan Democrats, and the libertarian voter.)) – and both presidential campaigns are making serious attempts to reach out to these unaffiliated voters. It is often noted that not all of these independent voters are created equal. They can be divided into three roughly described camps:
The character independents (hereinafter, just “independents”) supported McCain over Bush in 2000; and Obama over Clinton in 2008. In this election season, independents supported Obama over Clinton and his opponents and McCain over all of his Republican opponents, and in the polls so far, the independents are breaking evenly between Obama and McCain.
How is it that this group can be so evenly split – see-sawing this way and that – when the differences between the two candidates they are viewing are so stark?
I have a suspicion as to what’s going on here – as I am in many ways a character independent myself. My central idea is this: These independents are media creations – not media creations in the way that soccer moms and security moms were – stereotypes created to give flavor to election coverage – but creations of the media environment itself. Independent voters are individuals who have internalized the media’s approach to issues.
A while ago, I wrote a piece about a fundamental flaw in the mainstream media coverage of virtually every issue, every event, and every policy. While opinion columnists and the partisan press often take a side in reporting these issues – for example, “Global warming is real;” or “Obama is not a Muslim;” or “As far as we can tell, the Swift Boaters are just making stuff up” – the mainstream media will report both sides of each issue or policy or accusation. Within their piece, they might give slightly more credence to one point of view than another – and end the piece on a high note for one side or another – but they are generally careful to avoid taking sides, even when the facts support one side overwhelmingly.
The problem is that the mainstream media has adopted an understanding of fairness that treats competing claims as equally valid, irrespective of the opinion of the reporter, or even of the facts. ((This is demonstrated rather clearly in this piece in the Washington Post from 2004 that asserts that both Kerry’s account and the Swift Boaters’ accounts “contain significant flaws and factual errors” while only providing evidence to back up the flaws and errors in the Swift Boaters’ allegations. The main flaw in Kerry’s information is that he did not provide enough evidence to disprove the Swift Boaters, while the Swift Boaters also provided no evidence to prove their case. Thus, overall the piece portrays it as a wash.))
The mainstream press attempts to adapt every story into their he-said, she-said paradigm – rather than fulfilling their journalistic responsibility to attempt to write the first rough draft of history, however flawed it may be. They avoid the facts at hand and instead merely transcribe the competing allegations, careful not to let their own reporting interfere. This leads – for example – to 53% of stories in the mainstream press about global warming to question the basic premises of this theory, while within peer-reviewed scientific journals, 0% of stories call into question the basic premises. This disconnect between reality as understood by science and the reporting on the science is what has lead to a 15 year interim between the scientific consensus on global warming and the finally emerging political consensus. If the reporters covering this story had done their work properly, they could have called the global warming skeptics what they were – oil industry shills – instead of reporting on their work as independent and nearly as credible as the vast majority of scientists.
Most voters’ only contact with any presidential candidate is through the media – so it is only natural that the media substantially affects their choices. ((This goes for those whose main sources are partisan media as well.)) An independent-minded person viewing or reading media that presents every issue as he-said, she-said has to develop a method of resolving this conflict between the he’s and she’s. While a partisan will pick a team, and strongly tend to come down on the side of that team, an independent takes pride in seeing both sides of every issue – just as the media does. But while the media can avoid taking a side, an independent must – every two years or so – vote and make a choice. ((I don’t mean to suggest that independents don’t have strong opinions and preferences; rather, once they have resolved how to deal with the media’s framing, they often have very strong opinions.))
While the media is always able to find opposing sets of competing allegations, reality is not so simple. The media shouldn’t give equal time to claims by McCain that offshore drilling will reduce oil prices significantly and by Obama that it will not. They know one side is wrong and the other right. The media shouldn’t give equal time to scientists and skeptics about global warming. One side has evidence – the other side only has money. Since the right learned to manipulate the media by directly contradicting their opponents’ positions, no matter the facts, they have won election after election.
By distorting the news to fit into their paradigm, the media has created a class of voters who see both sides of every issue – even when the facts clearly favor one side. For the past ten years, as the media has been manipulated, so have they. And obvious policy choices and elections suddenly become competitive. This same pattern is emerging this year as the media treats Obama’s policies and McCain’s policies equally – even when one is reality-based and the other defined by political expediency. And so, independents are split equally so far in a year that should favor the Democrats.
But you can see that the Republicans are getting nervous – as the media finally began to cover the McCain campaign with the same intensity it has been using to cover Obama’s because of the Palin pick. Yesterday – all night – the Republicans attacked the media. They want to raise doubts in the minds of independents in case the media finally turns on them. In the end, it’s clear how the media will cover these attacks. They will get McCain operatives to give quotes bashing their reporting, and then they will get some reporters to comment on how they’re trying to be fair. And independents will see both sides.
Sam Tanenhaus, an historian and editor of the New York Times Book Review, had a piece in Saturday’s Week in Review discussing vision and compromise in politics. The byline was: “Vision has its limits. Compromise has its opportunities.” While I agreed with the overall thrust of the piece – that a mediocre man’s compromise is often more effective a great man’s vision – Tannenhaus is setting up a false dichotomy:
Visionary leaders are inclined to create or imagine their own goals and then try to propel others toward them. Sometimes these leaders achieve greatness. Lincoln is the salient example. But he was also a canny and calculating politician, attuned to the nation’s mood, whereas another visionary president, Woodrow Wilson, was stymied precisely because of his imperious disregard of the public will.
I don’t see how an historian who had studied Lincoln can believe that vision and compromise can be mutually exclusive. The genius of Lincoln was that he first saw the world for what it was, saw what was possible and what was not, identified the core challenges ahead, and took what steps were necessary to achieve his objectives. Lincoln did have a vision – but it was a vision anchored in reality, and one that changed as realities changed. For Lincoln, his vision was not an independent idealistic end, but a goal that was based on the best he could do at that moment. He was willing to allow slavery to preserve the Union; he was willing to fight a brutal war to prevent secession; he was willing to let Britain commit acts of agression without retribution in order to keep the nation’s focus; he was willing to contravene the Constitution in order to preserve it. Lincoln cast a cold eye on war and peace and did what he believed was needed. Lincoln was neither an idealist nor a flip-flopper. He did not act as if there was something irreconcilable about having a vision of a better nation and actually accomplishing something. Lincoln believed that through powerful words and determined action, and most important, an understanding of the world and the possible – an individual must strive to do whatever they could, and to make the world a better place. Wilson failed because he was a stubborn idiot (whose stubbornness was exacerbated by medical issues) – not because he was a visionary.
Tanenhaus tries in his piece to treat John McCain and Barack Obama evenhandedly. But clearly, he favors Obama. He treats Obama’s flip-flip on public financing and change in tactics regarding telecom immunity (which Tannenhaus grossly mischaracterizes or misunderstands as a change in position on FISA) with McCain’s radical changes of position on tax cuts and on whether or not to run an honorable campaign. (He doesn’t mention McCain’s other flip-flops on offshore drilling and torture.) In attempting to treat them equally, he does a disservive to both men. But most importantly, by setting up an inherent conflict between being a visionary and a statesmen, he ignores the clear lessons of history. (And by equating partisan politicians with visionaries, his argument verges on the ridiculous.) Statesmen have propped up some of the worst regimes on the planet and protected the worst practices – all in the name of reasonableness and compromise. Visionaries have wreaked the worst violence on the history of the planet, attempting to remake the world to match their visions.
If all we can do is choose to compromise or choose to see a better world, then there are no good choices. But history shows us a better path – one which Lincoln demonstrates above all. Radicals are visionaries who seek to remake the world to match their visions; apologists are statesmen who compromise to protect the status quo at all costs. Lincoln was a pragmatic politician who had a few ideas about how to approach the challenges our country faced, who was willing to compromise to get something done, who saw the world as it was and not as he wished or feared it to be, but who most of all attempted to push – to nudge – the country in a better direction.
As Sam Tanenhaus knows, and as I know – John McCain is not that type of politician. He has a set view of the world – and he believes that America can demand everything it wants and get it. He does not realize that we live in a nonpolar world in which states have great power, but not all power. He does not realize that if we kick Russia out of the G-8 as he was threatening to do before their invasion of Georgia – then we will pay a price in less cooperation on other fronts. He has accepted the failed orthodoxy of the far right-wing on economic policy – an orthodoxy that has led us to Enron, to a shrinking and less stable middle class, to a destabilizing dependence on oil, to an ossification of American society into classes, ((Except that those in the middle have no safety net to prevent them from falling into poverty while those as the top have various safety nets to prevent them from becoming middle class.)) and to the perfect storm of crises we are in the midst of now.
As Sam Tanenhaus knows, and as I know – Barack Obama could be that politician. He might fail – but there is no doubting that he is a pragmatist who sees that we are the single most powerful force in in a nonpolar world; but who also sees that unless we invest in our infrastructure, in new industries, and take steps to prevent us from becoming a stratified society, we will not be able to maintain our power. He has a vision of a better America, still unseen, around the corner – and his policies are all attempts to nudge our society in the right direction.
