“Emergency Bailout of $700bn” Yeah right. There is nothing emergency about it.

My thought is that Carter caved into the orthodox economics of his advisors at the time, which had not had to deal with stagflation and did so poorly by raising interest rates, when in fact you had energy prices driving inflation when government spending on the war had ceased raising unemployment and stagnating wages. We are currently seeing the same thing which is flumoxing Bernake. The profiteers want the rate lowered to rescue them with even more debt, and while “core inflation” is steady, the non-core items of food and energy have greatly increased impacting those below the 60th percentile in income who spend a bigger portion if not all of their income on necessities. The folks who have lost their pensions, have scant healthcare coverage and steadily lost real income since 1970.

Carter’s biggest mistake was coming to washington with his own people and having little support even in his own party among congressional and senate establishment powers.

Reagan made the biggest shift AS POLICY to supply side and away from Keynesian economic policies. Clinton while a supporter of “free trade” policies and loved by wall street did raise taxes on the rich and was able to stem the loss of economic ground by the middle class and working folks. While it may be just as a matter of overall prosperity that those gains occurred, wealth disparity shrunk during his tenure.

While you can argue that both Democrats and Republicans are part of the investor/political class problem (I would agree), It was Reagan, George Bush Sr. and W who have been responsible for purposeful policies that allow corporate and investment power to dominate economic decision making. These policies of holding down wages, dumping pensions, offshoring jobs and production, predatory lending, diminishing stockholder power, and rewarding investment more then labor have promoted the speculative economy that has since 1970 have brought us to this point.

Absolutely dead on! Cutbacks in social spending for programs such as AFDC began in the latter half of the Carter Administration, with increased spending on “defense”. From a social spending perspective, Richard Nixon was probably America’s last liberal president. Indeed, far too many liberal and progressive writers gloss over the economic records of Clinton and Carter, putting all blame for our current state on Reagan-Bush I-Bush II. The best book on the topic of the US economy in the 1990s is Robert Pollin’s must-read book, The Contours of Descent.

Two of the best related articles I’ve read over the past year were published in the indispensable New Left Review just after the 2006 election: “Structure vs. Conjucture: The 2006 Elections and the Rightward Shift,” by Robert Brenner and “The Democrats After November,” by Mike Davis. In my view, one of the best outlines of the economic and political terrain we’re heading in is “New Imperialism or New Capitalism?” by Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler. Dense, but well worth the effort.

What causes high inflation is inequality. Having large numbers of unemployed workers and high prices is due to the concentration of power and wealth and this small and powerful minority — monopoly power.

This will continue until there some sort of revolution and redistribution of wealth and power. The Democrat, Jimmy Carter, chose to concentrated power when he capitulated to the Fed’s policy of high interest to create a recession in order to place the burden of the oil shock onto workers sparing the rich. So once again one has to question Kelley’s analysis as it seems to obscure rather than to enlighten.

You have to wonder about quality of someone’s solution when they mis-describe the issue and worst yet in a partisan manner. Both the Democrats & Republican are culpable. Let’s not forget that the Democrats was in control of the Congress during the Reagan years and provided Reagan with his margin of victory. And lets us not forget the racist “Reagan Democrats” who voted hand and foot for Reaganism and Reaganabominomics.