Another example: Leonhardt writes that Obama did not mention all the factors of the decline of working class wages, but provides a list of his own: “new technologies that have made some blue-collar work obsolete; a slowing in the nation’s educational attainment; the shriveling of labor unions; the increase in one-parent families, which are far less economically secure; and the rise of other countries that have huge low-wage work forces.” Other than education, where has Obama taken a stance on any of these issues. To two easiest policies to address this issue would be to remove the Reagan era obstacles to labor unions and let unions go on a tear of organizing, and to abandon the failed notion of free trade. Yet, there are no labor leaders among Obama’s economic advisers (with the possible exception of Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who was a labor organizer), and Obama has publicly backed away from his questioning of the benefits of free trade earlier during the campaign.

(There will probably be those who indignantly respond that free trade has worked; they obviously have not bothered to read, or are deliberately ignoring, the work of Ha-Joon Chang and others who show clearly that only a very small elite in developing countries have benefited from the GATT and WTO regime of the past three decades, while the vast majority of people have actually see no gains, or have even slipped deeper into poverty and misery.)

Marriner S. Eccles, who served as Franklin D. Roosevelt's Chairman of the Federal Reserve from November 1934 to February 1948, detailed what he believed caused the Depression in his memoirs, Beckoning Frontiers (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1951)[24]:

As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption, mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth -- not of existing wealth, but of wealth as it is currently produced -- to provide men with buying power equal to the amount of goods and services offered by the nation's economic machinery. [Emphasis in original.]

Instead of achieving that kind of distribution, a giant suction pump had by 1929-30 drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of currently produced wealth. This served them as capital accumulations. But by taking purchasing power out of the hands of mass consumers, the savers denied to themselves the kind of effective demand for their products that would justify a reinvestment of their capital accumulations in new plants. In consequence, as in a poker game where the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit ran out, the game stopped.

That is what happened to us in the twenties. We sustained high levels of employment in that period with the aid of an exceptional expansion of debt outside of the banking system. This debt was provided by the large growth of business savings as well as savings by individuals, particularly in the upper-income groups where taxes were relatively low. Private debt outside of the banking system increased about fifty per cent. This debt, which was at high interest rates, largely took the form of mortgage debt on housing, office, and hotel structures, consumer installment debt, brokers' loans, and foreign debt. The stimulation to spend by debt-creation of this sort was short-lived and could not be counted on to sustain high levels of employment for long periods of time. Had there been a better distribution of the current income from the national product -- in other words, had there been less savings by business and the higher-income groups and more income in the lower groups -- we should have had far greater stability in our economy. Had the six billion dollars, for instance, that were loaned by corporations and wealthy individuals for stock-market speculation been distributed to the public as lower prices or higher wages and with less profits to the corporations and the well-to-do, it would have prevented or greatly moderated the economic collapse that began at the end of 1929.

The time came when there were no more poker chips to be loaned on credit. Debtors thereupon were forced to curtail their consumption in an effort to create a margin that could be applied to the reduction of outstanding debts. This naturally reduced the demand for goods of all kinds and brought on what seemed to be overproduction, but was in reality underconsumption when judged in terms of the real world instead of the money world. This, in turn, brought about a fall in prices and employment.

Unemployment further decreased the consumption of goods, which further increased unemployment, thus closing the circle in a continuing decline of prices. Earnings began to disappear, requiring economies of all kinds in the wages, salaries, and time of those employed. And thus again the vicious circle of deflation was closed until one third of the entire working population was unemployed, with our national income reduced by fifty per cent, and with the aggregate debt burden greater than ever before, not in dollars, but measured by current values and income that represented the ability to pay. Fixed charges, such as taxes, railroad and other utility rates, insurance and interest charges, clung close to the 1929 level and required such a portion of the national income to meet them that the amount left for consumption of goods was not sufficient to support the population.

This then, was my reading of what brought on the depression.

Compared to what this country needs in terms of building infrastructure that will begin transitioning us away from a fossil-fuel based economy, even the stupendous sum of $700 billion is actually paltry. Yes, paltry. No where near enough. Just like after World War Two, we are sitting on top of a powder keg of pent-up demand. But this time the pent-up demand is for a green economy. Just think of what needs to be built:

Every single car and truck in the United States needs to be replaced with hybrids or super fuel-efficient vehicles.

A replacement for the entire system of gasoline delivery and distribution.

Almost the entirety of the U.S. housing stock needs to be replaced or retrofitted with green technology.

Same with commercial buildings, especially skyscrapers built in the 1950s to 1990s, which is almost all the core downtowns. Tear `em down and start over again, make them user friendly and environmentally neutral.

Urban mass transit rail systems. New York City has the most dense network, and it is only half as dense as what you find in Tokyo, London. Paris, Moscow. Cities like Miami and Phoenix, which are now in the top ten urban areas in the U.S. don't have ANY mass transit rail, or have a single line with one or two dozen stations.

Passenger rail with its own rights of way. How many people know Amtrak has to run on rails owned and maintained by the freight railroads? In the northeast corridor, from Washington DC to Boston, we really should build this entirely underground. One long tunnel from DC to Boston.
The entire grid for electricity generation and distribution needs to be almost entirely replaced.

Just to give you some numbers to think about: Just to build rail transit systems in the 39 largest urban areas in America (all with over 1.5 million in population) to the same density as rail transit in New York City is going to require, by my estimate, $3.5 trillion, and two and one half years of total steel production in the U.S.

That’s just one program, folks - $3.5 trillion.

The Dept of Energy in May released its report on achieving 20 percent windpower by 2030 (warning – PDF). That is actually an extremely modest goal - and the price tag for it was over $1 trillion. Ramp it up to something like 50% windpower by 2020, and you're easily looking at a $3 or $4 trillion program.

Are "golf course memberships" really what Nomura uses to measure asset prices in Japan?

Many thanks !

The insipid and delayed response to the liquidity problems of Japan's banks - the Japanese government did not begin to directly address all the bad loans the banks held until 1999! -- essentially destroyed consumer confidence, which still hasn't recovered nearly two decades later. Rather interesting, given the quote up-thread, of the Summers - Volcker CFR press conference.

And if you want to continue with the arsonist analogy, I would suggest that people like Volcker, Rubin, Greenspan, and Summers were the ones that created the mess in the warehouse with open vats of highly flammable liquids all around. Cox threw a lit cigarette in the warehouse door.

"3) authorize and fund a national infrastructure program of trillions, not billions, of dollars" I wrote with the probably incorrect assumption that people would see and remember my comment up-thread about building rail transit systems in the 39 largest urban areas in the U.S. would require $3.5 trillion.

I completely agree with you that "Infrastructure as "make work" in a social system which has probably peaked, sounds like a quick way to borrow ourselves closer to hyperinflation and total chaos."

But there's so much that can be built that would be useful. The Dept of Energy in May released its report on achieving 20 percent windpower by 2030. That is actually an extremely modest goal - and the price tag for it was over $1 trillion. Ramp it up to something like 50% windpower by 2020, and you're looking at, I guess, a $3 or $4 trillion program. The fact that such an ambitious goal was not even mentioned or studied shows how stuck in the rut we as a society are.

So, there's two programs alone which we can spend $6 trillion or more on. Guys like Summers or Volcker will faint if and when they hear numbers like that. But it's what we need to do if we're going to get serious about the environmental and economic challenges we face.

For example, you write that Summers "did favor a clearinghouse notion for derivatives (a small regulatory step,"

Ummm, my point is that derivatives by their nature do nothing to assist the real economy. Hence, there should be no derivatives. And, therefore, there is no need for a clearinghouse for derivatives.

Greatly oversimplified, but I hope it gets the point across.

Or let me go at it this way - the reigning economic paradigm of the past nearly half century needs to be overturned. Thomas Palley - one of the few economists who warned - back in 2006! - about what was coming, explained it well back in February of this year:

QUOTE

the US economy relies upon asset price inflation and rising indebtedness to fuel growth.

Therein lies a profound contradiction. On one hand, policy must fuel asset bubbles to keep the economy growing. On the other hand, such bubbles inevitably create financial crises when they eventually implode.

This is a contradiction with global implications. Many countries have relied for growth on US consumer spending and investments in outsourcing to supply those consumers. If America’s bubble economy is now tapped out, global growth will slow sharply. It is not clear that other countries have the will or capacity to develop alternative engines of growth.

America’s economic contradictions are part of a new business cycle that has emerged since 1980. The business cycles of Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush share strong similarities and are different from pre-1980 cycles. The similarities are large trade deficits, manufacturing job loss, asset price inflation, rising debt-to-income ratios, and detachment of wages from productivity growth.

The new cycle rests on financial booms and cheap imports. Financial booms provide collateral that supports debt-financed spending. Borrowing is also supported by an easing of credit standards and new financial products that increase leverage and widen the range of assets that can be borrowed against. Cheap imports ameliorate the effects of wage stagnation.

This structure contrasts with the pre-1980 business cycle, which rested on wage growth tied to productivity growth and full employment. Wage growth, rather than borrowing and financial booms, fuelled demand growth. That encouraged investment spending, which in turn drove productivity gains and output growth.

END QUOTE

from http://www.thomaspalley.com/?p=99

Umm, besides what Dean lists above? I mean, helping stop the CFTC from regulating credit default steps seems more like affixing a piece of plywood to Summers' butt with a nail gun, not just pinning a tail on the donkey.

But, well, OK, how about this:

QUOTE

1) The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of view a given amount of health impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.

END QUOTE

That's from the memo Summer wrote in December 1991, when he was chief economist at the World Bank. (Thanks to Max Blumenthal for pulling that one out of the files this past Thursday. http://www.thenation.com/blogs/state_of_change/381035/a_lawrence_summers_flashback_africa_is_under_polluted_#text-large

My answer: YES.

The three pillars of what used to be known in the 1800s as "The American System" of political economy were 1) protectionism, 2) national banking, and 3) internal improvements.

Not only were those the policies that actually developed the U.S. industrial economy, but they were also applied by Frederick List in Germany, and E. Peshine Smith in Japan, again by MacArther's occupation administration in Japan, and in Korea beginning soon after the cease-fire, then by the Asian tigers in the 1970s and 80s. So, the policies obviously worked. The various Asian crises erupted after the various countries acceded to U.S. and British pressure to "open" their financial system and adopt "neo-liberal" economic policies. Similarly, if Japan had flat-out rejected "neo-liberal" nostrums and imposed punitive sanctions to stop capital flight, the carry trade would never have developed and the Japanese would not have suffered a lost decade.

Today, following the outlines of the long-forgotten "American System," we need to
1) dump free trade, and impose punitive tariffs on any country with lax environmental and safety regulations. And reform GATT and WTO so that economic trade is re-oriented away from producing and trading consumer goods to producing the heavy capital goods needed for actual national development.

2) force the financial system back into subservience to the needs of the real economy, by discarding the shadow banking system including hedge funds, and regulating speculation nearly to death. The Federal Reserve must be "democratized" as Barney Frank has talked about, and creation of money and quasi-money needs to placed back under national sovereign political authorities.

3) authorize and fund a national infrastructure program of trillions, not billions, of dollars.

Can you resist financial globalization?
http://rodrik.typepad.com/dani_rodriks_weblog/2008/11/can-you-resist-financial-globalization.html

Yes you can, and Asia has been doing it. I am in Bangkok for a Bank of Thailand conference, and among other interesting contributions (by Jose Antonio Ocampo, Raghu Rajan, and Arvind Subramanian) is a nice paper by the BIS's Robert McCauley and Guonan Ma called "Resisting financial globalization in Asia." The paper documents how fours countries (China, India, South Korea, and Thailand) have thrown "sand in the wheels of finance" to varying extents. Interestingly, those countries that have done the most resisting are the ones that are the least affected by the crisis.
The paper makes the following points in particular:
• Asian-style resistance to financial globalization has taken the form of limiting the role of foreign banks in the domestic banking system and of restricting cross-border arbitrage in foreign currency, money, bond and equity markets.
• Evidence from prices and quantities shows the most limited globalization in China, followed at a distance by India, followed in turn by Thailand and then Korea.
• The extent to which countries have been hit by the recent crisis follows this ranking (in reverse order) almost exactly. In particular, Korea has been the country hardest hit despite many other preventive policies (including large reserve build-up) before the onset of the turmoil.

So far as I see, everyone surrounding Obama believe, axiomatically, in the efficacy and legitimacy of globalization, free trade, financial markets, and "neo-liberal" economics in general. They are not going to be able to think outside the box. None of these policies are what built the United States, contrary to the myths promulgated by movement conservatism and market fundamentalists, and the overwhelming majority of economics professors in the world today. See "Classic Senate Speeches, Henry Clay, In Defense of the American System, February 2, 3, and 6, 1832" at http://liuzhao.info/artandhistory/history/common/generic/Speeches_ClayAmericanSystem.htm

I very worried this might be exactly the case. Because that would mean Wall Street continues its dominance of the economy, and millions more of Americans lose their jobs, homes, pensions, savings, and hopes.

Obama is listening to people, supposedly the best economic minds in the U.S. on our side, and they're talking about another $150 billion in stimulus.

But, we need to be thinking in terms of trillions. Just to build rail transit systems in the 39 largest urban areas in America (all with over 1.5 million in population) to the same density as rail transit in New York City is going to require, by my estimate, $3.5 trillion. That's just ONE program that would need $3.5 trillion.

When I see those kinds of numbers and projects being seriously discussed, then Ill know we're on the road to real change.

eds, I'm sure you're well intentioned, but you just don't know the history of the past 30 years. I was in some of the hearings where these ideas were debated in the Congress, in the SEC and CFTC and in some of the think tanks back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I saw how Wall Street got its way over and over and over again.

Breeden is a good example of what's wrong with the financial system. He was a practicing lawyer at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, and Willkie Farr & Gallagher - both firms heavily involved in the LBOs and other bs of the Michael Milkin / Drexel Burnham Lambert years -- and Baker Botts, the law firm tied so closely to Bush and Cheney. And guess what Breeden is now? A fracking hedge fund manager.

The financial catastrophe that has occurred under George W. Bush is only the logical result of the "post industrial" policy trends of the past three decades. People warned about the eventual outcome for over thirty years, but "success speaks for itself" and after a while they were treated as Cassandras and completely marginlized, while Wall Street led the country on a tear of false prosperity that we now see was nothing but debt, debt, debt, piled on more debt.

Sorry, eds, but I have to call you out here. Yes, the "ownership society" was part of the problem. But, actually, it was only a symptom of the bigger, underlying problem, "neo-liberal" economic policies, or the Anglo-Disease (see "The Anglo Disease (3) - an introduction for non-economists" at at http://www.eurotrib.com/story/2007/6/24/171939/548.

At the very beginning of the DailyKos diary is a link to a Bloomberg report that includes a short list of people Obama is considering for Treasury Secretary and other economic policy positions. If the list reported by Bloomberg is accurate, then we are in for a huge disappointment, as Obama will have crippled his administration at the very beginning, and will be unable to respond effectively because he is simply unwilling to think outside the box of “neo-liberalism.”

Let’s run down the list name by name.

Larry Summers is pretty well critiqued in the original DailyKos diary, though failing to completely and adequately outline the fundamental details of “neo-liberal” economic ideas and Summers’s loyalty to them

Timothy Geithner is president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank and is a career bureaucrat. As noted in comments on the DailyKos diary, he also worked for Kissinger & Associates – the shady but powerful influence-peddling firm run by Henry Kissinger. Geithner has been one of the three most important people, besides Paulson and Bernanke, in shaping the response to the financial crisis so far. If you therefore don’t see immediately that the naming of Geithner would be a disaster, then you don’t understand the true dynamics of the mess we are in. What Paulson, Bernanke, and Geithner have been trying to do is save the financial system as it existed before the crises began. In other words, they are trying to preserve the bubble economics that “neo-liberal” economic policies inevitably creates.

Robert Rubin, Clinton’s Treasury Secretary you should know by now, is one of the key people who steered the deregulation of the 1980s and 1990s, which is what created the mess. (if you don’t you need to read the New York Times and Washington Post articles from about two weeks ago that recounted some of the history, and also discussed the role of Summers). Before serving under Clinton, he was co-chairman of Goldman Sachs. He now serves as chairman of Citibank. Unfortunately, Jared Bernstein, an economist at the EPI, recently co-authored a New York Times editorial with Rubin, which to my thinking helps “rehabilitate” Rubin. My reading of it was that it was almost entirely Rubin, with very little of Bernstein in it. Why Bernstein agreed to it is beyond my understanding at this time.

Stirling Newberry summarized the editorial thus:

We need stimulus now, real wages need to rise in line with productivity, the benefits of trade must be used to offset the costs of trade - particularly to workers. But most importantly, and something that should have been obvious earlier: that the Wall Street and Main Street wings of the Democratic Party have the same interests. Wall Street provides liquidity and scale to Main Street, but ultimately Wall Street exists only if Main Street is better off with it than without it.

Newberry, I believe, has made a nice living working on or for Wall Street, so I think he is a good bit softer than I am. But then, Newberry is “successful,” and I am not (i.e., I am constantly worrying about paying my bills and where the next dollar is going to come from; I suspect that Newberry is mostly free of these concerns). Personally, I would Let Wall Street Burn.

On the other hand, my own recommendation for Treasury Secretary would be -- Stirling Newberry.

Paul Volcker has emerged as a wise old man, and has gotten good mention in many of Hale Stewart’s “Bonddad” diaries on DailyKos – all of which I vehemently disagree with as I quite unpopularly explained here:

By the late 1970s, the U.S. economy was beset with stagflation, a condition which mainstream economics had never thought possible. Probably because mainstream economics was still thinking in terms of a functioning industrial economy. So, when Volcker became Fed chairman in August 1979, a number of basic U.S. industries were in bad shape, particularly the bedrock industries: automobiles, steel, and machine tools. One of the Big Three car makers, Chrysler, was near bankruptcy. At the same time, the Hunt brothers had attempt to corner the market for silver, but had failed and were failing to meet margin calls. What Grieder details in his book [The Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country] is how Volcker confirmed the fundamental shift in Federal Reserve policy of Burns, by choosing to help the Hunt brothers, while letting Chrysler twist slowly in the wind. (Congress soon afterwards arranged an emergency loan for Chrysler). . . Volcker had fundamentally altered the rules of the game: it was now "What's good for Wall Street is good for the country." And the real, physical economy could go to hell -- and it has, taking millions of decent paying jobs and much of American prosperity with it.

So, again, I don’t think Volcker is a person that will help lead us to an alternative to “neo-liberal” economics.

The situation as I see it is that Obama has that all-important first year to get real change enacted and signed into law. But if he names as Treasury Secretary someone who truly rejects “neo-liberal” economics, the financial markets are going to react extremely negatively, hundreds of millions of dollars will flood into conservative think tanks like American Enterprise Institute, and all sorts of lying and misleading crap about “socialism” and “communism” is going to be created and flung by the wrong-wing screech monkeys – all in the service of preventing a move from “neo-liberal” economics, which will severely limit the freedom, influence, power, and more importantly, the profits, of Wall Street and the financial markets.

On the other hand, I believe that the wrong-wing campaign of lying and misleading crap about “socialism” and “communism” is going to occur no matter what Obama does, so I think he should just make the break with “neo-liberal” economics from the beginning, and incur the wrath and fury of Wall Street immediately by naming someone who clearly is not part of or sympathetic to Wall Street.

. . . there is a fundamental difference between a manufacturing company and a financial company. No matter what it produces, a manufacturing company is a depository of physical machine assets, and labor, technical, and engineering skills, that can, and must, be used to begin producing our way out of this new economic depression.

Think of the industrial mobilization for World War II. Factories that made toasters or Victrolas - arguably consumer goods that did not serve a vital purpose - were converted to producing vital war material such as radio tubes or radios or radar sets or whatever. What bank or financial company could be converted to produce vital war material? Therein lies the essential difference between a manufacturing company and a financial company, and why, no matter how wrong-headed the recent management history of a manufacturing company may be (and I absolutely agree that the past few decades U.S. automakers were very, very wrong-headed), we cannot afford to allow any of our manufacturing companies to fail and their valuable physical machine assets, and labor, technical, and engineering skills dispersed.

Why? Think of almost all the recent commentary about the financial crises that is now dragging the real economy into depression. "The U.S., and U.S. consumers, have been living beyond their means. They have been consuming more than they produce." The standard prescription to this observed problem is that Americans have to be forced to stop consuming so much. Which is going to cause an even worse depression. The reason for why this apparently obvious solution – the curtailment of consumption – leads inexorably to this abysmal outcome, were ably explained by Marriner S. Eccles, who served as Franklin D. Roosevelt's Chairman of the Federal Reserve from November 1934 to February 1948, in his memoirs, Beckoning Frontiers (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1951):

"As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption, mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth -- not of existing wealth, but of wealth as it is currently produced -- to provide men with buying power equal to the amount of goods and services offered by the nation's economic machinery." [Emphasis in original.]

The full quote from Eccles, which explains how the income inequality created by the financial speculation of the 1920s led to the disastrous weakening of mass consumption, can be read on the Wikipedia page Great Depression
http://en.wikipedia.org/... - scroll down about one third of the page to the section, "Inequality of wealth and income."

Many of the commenters above evince a hostility toward the idea of manufacturing industries, and many probably share the unfortunately common belief that "mass consumption" is an unsustainable model of economic organization. There are two problems that need to be addressed here.

First, is what I call the idea of the flying monkey butt economy - these people must think that all the things they take for granted in their everyday life: the computer monitor in front of them, the wood paneling and plasterboard on the walls surrounding them, the concrete and re-bar in the sidewalks and streets they walk and drive on, the simple ceramic cup they sip their coffee or tea from -- they must think that all these things come from some flying monkey that squats in front of their abode and shits these things out just for their own personal use. Or maybe they think these things are made in the back rooms of the stores they buy these things at. It really is a massive mental disconnect to think that we can get along without industry. You want wind power generation? You want urban rail mass transit? Fine. But just where do you think the steel and the aluminum and the plastic and so on for the windmills and the rails and the passenger rail cars is going to come from? the butt of a flying monkey?

Look, we need manufacturing. It’s as simple as that. We’ve allowed much of our manufacturing base to be moved overseas to take advantage of cheap labor and lax environmental and safety regulations. That was not just immoral, but now we see that it has fatally weakened our national financial position as well. Thirty years ago, the U.S. was the leading manufacturing nation in the world, and the largest creditor nation as well. Now that we’ve allowed so much of our manufacturing to slip away, we’ve become the largest debtor nation, and China, whence much of our manufacturing base was relocated, has become our largest creditor. Don’t you see a connection there?

Second is the bias against a mass consumption economy. Now, this is tricky, because I do not wish to deny that much of the U.S. economy today is based on useless and dangerous consumption which imposes an unacceptable burden on the environment and on finite natural resources. Perhaps the best way to make the point that needs to be made is to remind you of the point often made, in commentaries on the Wall Street collapse, about "robbing the future." What exactly does that term, "robbing the future," mean? It has to do with investment, or, to be accurate, the misdirection of investment these past few decades. For example, an obvious one in the context of a discussion over whether or not to "save" the auto industry is that our society has invested way too much in the development of a transport system based on the personal automobile, while nearly starving for investment alternatives such as urban rail transit and passenger rail between urban areas. That misdirection of investment is the real problem – not the fact that the U.S. auto industry did not create and market more fuel efficient cars.

So, you can punish the auto industry by letting it fail – but would you have accomplished? The real problem would still remain – the misdirection of investment into a transport system based on the personal automobile, rather than urban rail transit and passenger rail between urban areas, and you will have destroyed part of the nation’s physical capacity for meeting the challenge of building a future alternative to a transport system based on the personal automobile.

Yes, the auto companies were stupid. But if you don’t see that we need the manufacturing capacity those companies have, then you are just as stupid.

I want to make a final point here, that I fear may divert your focus on these important questions. If you look at the boards of directors of the auto companies, you will notice that very few of the directors actually come from an industrial background. The overwhelming majority, something like 90 percent, of the directors are affiliated with financial institutions of one sort or another – banks, investment funds, money management companies, or so on. This is a problem you will find in every industrial sector of the U.S., and it is largely the result of the corporate raiding and mergers and acquisitions of the past that began in the 1970s. Think Michael Milkin, Kohlberg Kravis and Roberts, and T. Boone Pickens. Getting the U.S. auto industry, and the rest of U.S. industry, back on track to begin meeting the need for changing our future for the better, is going to require removing these financiers and usurers from the control of manufacturing companies.