The estimable Steve Fraser has a piece worthy of note up at Tomdispatch. Not the part that grumbles indiscriminately about Obama's prospects for good deeds on the basis of nothing but the fact that his looming appointments have experience in the government. I too am disturbed that no one directly representing labor is included among the councils of economic advisers, but December is a bit early, I think, to haul out the big guns and declare that, in foreign policy, for example, we confront what he calls "an "Obama-Clinton-Bush (the father) foreign policy establishment." Give the guy a few weeks in office, for Chrissake, before consigning him to the selloutocracy.

But to the subject of Fraser's more constructive side:

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?

This is a provocation, of course, in an era when Everybody, just Everybody knows that nationalization is the devil's work. But it is not idle provocation; it's necessary and timely provocation. When public funds are plugging the holes in sinking ships, boats, ferries, and skerries, and GM officials must abase themselves by driving automobilesto Washington, isn't it incumbent upon a Change administration to consider seriously that the public stake in improvident companies ought to extend beyond subsidy to participation in decision-making?

Isn't the rationale for private ownership that it knows its markets better than anyone else does, or can? When this is demonstrably proved false, isn't the careful, pragmatic thing to do to reopen the theory of corporate governance?