Davos Newbies

Glenn Greenwald:

The profound importance of the blogosphere is grounded in the fact that the other institutions and safeguards which are supposed to exist as a check on abuses and excesses by the government are rotted and broken. Congress is co-opted, corrupt, and under the control of the Bush Administration; the national Democratic Party is paralyzed by fear, indecision, and a suffocated, or missing, soul; and the role which the media plays is so far removed from what it is intended to be — and from what it has to be in order for us to maintain a healthy and functioning democracy — that one can literally spend every day documenting its gross failures and abuses.

To me, the blogosphere is, at its core, an instrument that is being used by citizens to congregate and figure out ways to create new weapons and competing systems to rectify those failures. For that reason, most people who read and participate in blogs believe that blogs now play an irreplaceably important role in trying to force some measure of change. I certainly believe that.

Apparently, John Snow may be leaving the Treasury. As Dorothy Parker said when told Calvin Coolidge had died, “How do they know?”

Somehow, Brad DeLong remains an optimist about the economic outlook. In a talk in Washington, he enumerates the numerous policy failings of the Bush administration, but reckons: “As my grandfather used to say, the Lord protects dogs, children, fools, and the United States of America. We all mourn at the opportunities that have been wasted by the George W. Bush administration, but — so far at least–they are opportunities wasted, nothing much worse.”

Still, Brad has valuable advice for what a government should be doing:

1. We’re in the up-phase of the business cycle, so we should be running a budget surplus in any event, considerations only reinforced by the unsustainable current-account deficit.
2. We should be making it very clear that as a deficit country we value foreigners who want to invest in us–that we are grateful rather than xenophobic when we think about foreign capital.
3. The Federal Reserve should be making it clear that it is more interested in stabilizing measures of domestic prices than of measures that have a high weight on import prices.
4. International consensus on what to do should market prices move, and should demand for the products of 40 million Asian workers in export industries and 10 million American workers in construction and consumer service industries disappear.

Are any of these things happening?

Still, we’re probably going to be OK. Opportunities, not crises.