Should a Car Company be an Instrument and Guarantor of Social Welfare?

Steve Fraser, a visiting professor at New York University and the author of Wall Street: America's Dream Palace is unimpressed with Obama's council of advisers. He contrasts them with FDR's cabinet and can't find a Frances Perkins for the 21st Century. Fraser is critical of the timidity that characterizes Obama's political style and suggests that we should be thinking seriously about socializing the world economy- Henry Ford's idea of making an auto-company responsible for social welfare seems to have been a tragic mistake (I'm personally not all that enamoured with the idea of robbing Peter to pay Paul (the Big 3) so that Paul can continue producing crap that nobody wants or needs. What we have here is a crisis of over-accumulation par excellence. The answer is not increased consumption- its cold hard deflation. The problem is not (contra the advice of corporatists posing as neo-Keynesians) that there are not a enough car buyers, the problem is that there are simply too many cars. The answer is not propping up the corrupt pillars of Corporate America- how to get out of a recession? TAX THE RICH. Those who got rich pumping all that hot air into the economy should now be "asked" (the gun to the head is just a sweetener) to bailout the workers and the environment that they've gotten rich off degrading.

A ray of light? The LA Times suggests that perhaps Fraser spoke too soon, and that Rep Hilda Solis may be that 21st Century Perkins. If the LAT are to be trusted Obama may have appointed his first Cabinet Secretary that could be considered a friend to Labor and the Environment (I don't think that a CommSec that made his name by selling NAFTA to House Dems should be considered a friend of Labor or the Environment - regardless of how much election year pandering he might have done in 2008). The question now becomes what role will Solis and her bureaucracy play within the Matrix of the Master Bureaucracy?