Administrations are invariably criticized for things they do right, for things they do wrong, and for things they fail to do at all. They are invariably criticized for doing too much and criticized for doing too little. Conservative critics of the current Administration tend to do the former. Liberal, by contrast, would do well to focus on the latter. For thus far, this Administration’s failures – in domestic policy at least – are more the product of doing too little too late, than of doing too much too soon. Nowhere is that failure clearer than in the Administration’s inept handling of the home foreclosure crisis.[1]

The Obama Administration did not invent or create the foreclosure crisis. It inherited it, just as it inherited a major financial crisis and a looming recession. But unlike the financial meltdown, the home foreclosure problem inherited by the Obama Administration was in its infancy as the new president took office. The housing crisis then played itself out predominantly on Obama’s own watch; with the numbers of foreclosures soaring as they did only because the Administration failed to act with a speed and an effectiveness appropriate to the occasion. It is a failure that may yet bring a heavy electoral price.

The Olympics loom. American eyes will turn to London, hoping for Olympic gold. As they do so, it will be worth remembering that this will be London’s second post-World War II Olympic Games, not the first, and that there are also medals to be won by comparing the condition of the U.K. on the last time the Games were held in London with its condition now.

In 1948, when London hosted the first post-war games, the U.K. was still one of the global Big Three. For all the immediate rationing with which Londoners then struggled, the government there still presided over an enormous empire, still oversaw its own sterling area in which the U.K. currency remained as acceptable as gold, and still managed what in 1948 remained the free world’s second strongest major economy. In the more than six decades since, absolute living standards in London have been transformed, as they have everywhere in the advanced industrial world; but in relative terms the U.K. has definitely slipped. Per capita living standards in London are lower now than in at least 9 other EU countries.[1] U.K. productivity per hour is currently 18 percent lower than in Germany and 16 percent lower than in France.[2] An empire that at its peak covered 12 million square miles and took in a quarter of the world’s population is now entirely gone.

The Obama Administration has unfinished business: lots of it, actually. The President will no doubt seek re-election in November by emphasizing policy successes. He would do well, however, to seek re-election by also recognizing policy failures: recognizing them and committing his Administration to do better. To win re-election, that recognition will need to be honest and the commitment will need to be genuine.

            There is a long list of issue areas in which the Obama Administration has – to put it politely – so far under-performed. Housing policy is one.[1] Holding bankers accountable is another.[2] Extracting us from unnecessary wars is definitely a third.[3] But the big domestic issue on which the Administration’s impact has been weakest is surely poverty and unemployment. The Administration might justifiably claim that things would have been even more awful, had a Republican president been in charge – and that anyway, so much of what they have tried to do has been blocked by Republicans; but that can be of little comfort to the literally millions of Americans who currently remain trapped in poverty, excluded from paid work, or forced to survive on temporary and part-time contracts that no longer pay a living wage. For them, the Administration could have done more, should have done more, and better start doing more – and doing more now – if a President elected with such grand promises in 2008 isn’t to find himself out of work come January.

The Republican Party likes to pretend (even to itself) that it doesn’t have an industrial policy. It also likes to pretend that the U.S. economy is currently in such deep trouble because the Democratic Party does.

Not so. Both parties have industrial policies whether they acknowledge them or not.

The American economy is in trouble now primarily because the industrial policy to which the Republican Party currently subscribes remains hugely influential and entirely inadequate.

     As we await the verdict of nine Supreme Court Justices on the constitutionality of all or part of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), it is worth asking what the remaining Republican Presidential nominees would create in its place. We know that they would have to create something, because each is committed to the rapid abolition of what they insist on calling “Obamacare”. Mitt Romney’s Plan for Jobs and Economic Growth is quite clear: “An Order to Pave the Way to End Obamacare,” it tells us, will be the first of “five executive orders for Day One” of a Romney presidency.[1] Newt Gingrich would be similarly engaged on the first day of his presidency. So too would Rick Santorum and Ron Paul. All four remaining Republican presidential candidates are enthusiastic First Day Abolitionists!

Ask any of the  Republican presidential hopefuls in this long and drawn out primary season what in general is wrong with the economic policies of the Obama Administration, and they will each tell you that the economy is under-performing now because the current Administration intervenes in its workings too frequently and too heavily. They will each tell you that the private sector has not yet rebounded with sufficient vigor from the recession of 2008-9 because the footprint of the federal government is everywhere – everywhere too present and everywhere too controlling.

That standard Republican litany has one particularly unfortunate consequence – at least for potential Republican voters. It prevents any of the Party’s would-be presidential nominees from pointing to areas of American economic and social life in which current under-performance is caused by the lack of adequate federal intervention. Yet there are such areas, and they are areas of genuine Obama weakness. Two in particular spring to mind: inadequate intervention in the U.S. housing market,[1] and inadequate prosecution of banking folly and corruption.[2] Indeed the two are linked: the inability or unwillingness of the Obama Administration to adequately prosecute and control the economy’s major financial institutions is now one further cause of its inability to rapidly and effectively resolve the U.S. housing crisis.

And there still is a major U.S. housing crisis.

The current front-runners in the fight for the Republican presidential nomination vary far more in their personalities and leadership styles than they do in their problem analysis and policy prescription. Ron Paul apart, their explanation of what is going wrong in contemporary America, and what therefore needs to be done to put things right, is in all its essentials both simple and similar. Taxes are too high. Business regulations are too intrusive. Government programs are too generous. The federal deficit is too large. Their solution is similarly simple and shared: elect a Republican President willing to cut taxes, remove regulations, reduce government spending and bring down the federal debt – do that, and the revival of the American economy awaits us all, just around the corner.

Oh that it was that simple. But it is not. The claims being made, and the policies being offered, are not just similar: they are also profoundly misguided.

          In the standard trilogy of core commitments currently being made by Republican presidential candidates, the cutting of taxes and the pruning of government is invariably accompanied by the promise to deregulate business – and indeed to re-regulate labor. The Obama administration stands condemned, not simply for its tax-and-spend propensities, but also for its subordination to organized labor[1] and its associated over-regulation of private enterprise. Setting America free, restoring American prosperity, and defending the American way, is said by all four major Republican presidential candidates to require the same basic policy moves: the lifting of intrusive government controls on American businesses, the exclusion of the federal government from corporate bailouts, and support for right-to-work legislation in one state after another. We have already found weaknesses in the claims about tax cutting.[2] It is time now to examine the validity of the argument that American business will create growth and jobs just as soon as the heavy hand of federal regulation and intervention is lifted from its shoulders.

          One consequence of the Republican Party’s current propensity to select its presidential nominee by the political equivalent of American Idol is that we are regularly exposed to sound-bite answers designed to differentiate one candidate from another. Both the brevity of the answers, and the enthusiasm for differentiation, come however at a cost. They obscure the degree to which the candidates share common positions; and they obscure the extent to which each candidate already has a well-developed policy package to offer to the American electorate.

In any wars of words in an election season, truth is often an early casualty. The war of words between Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich is no exception. The two Republican front-runners are currently telling each other carefully fabricated stories about their own pasts that cover tracks and reinvent reputations.[1] But in the end that is less damaging to the entire democratic process than the accidental and less contrived stories that, in passing, they are also telling us. Right now, as they attack each other with increasing venom, the four remaining Republican presidential candidates are collectively rewriting a critical part of our immediate past – and in the process are seriously misleading us as they battle with each other.

 In Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the world discovered by Alice was one in which every aspect of reality was inverted. Big things were small. Small things grew big. The Cheshire cat faded into a grin. One side of a mushroom made you grow. The other made you shrink. It was also a world in which the Queen of Hearts had a simple solution to everything. “Off with his head!” Likewise in the world currently being created by the incessant chatter of Republican presidential wannabes, small characters want to be large, grinning is a substitute for substance, and all solutions are simple.  In the inverted world of Republican primaries, our present scale of unemployment is entirely Obama’s fault. Through the looking glass on offer from Romney and company, there was no unemployment before Obama shrank the economy by excessive spending, burdensome taxation and intrusive business regulation. Down the rabbit hole into which they would have us fall, a Republican Queen of Hearts can end unemployment at a stroke by taking those three evils away.

It is likely that 2012 will be long remembered as a watershed year in America politics. It certainly needs to be. Neither the country nor the world can afford much longer the gridlock that is presently immobilizing Washington. We all know that. Here we are, beset with a string of fundamental problems and bumping along the bottom of the most serious recession since the 1930s, frustratingly becalmed in a stalemate between political opposites, with the federal government unable to address the structural reforms that this economy and society so visibly requires.

“At many stages in the advance of humanity, this conflict between men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess is the central condition of progress” (Theodore Roosevelt, 1910)[1]

Economists are the new public intellectuals of the age. In more prosperous times, they rarely enjoy that status or play that role. Economics is, after all, a dismal science. In good times, issues linked to the production of new wealth invariably take a back seat to those triggered by the consumption of wealth already in existence. Prosperity brings into view the expertise of the more hedonistic social sciences: psychology, sociology, marketing and the like. It pushes economics aside.  But in the immediate wake of the Great Recession, with unemployment unacceptably high and the welfare state now under serious assault on both sides of the Atlantic, the views of economists are currently everywhere – particularly the views of conservative economists prepared to link unemployment to welfare itself. These are troubled times and we are in danger, if we are not careful, of slipping into a mindset that gives those conservative views a credibility that the nature of economics as a discipline ought properly to preclude.

We live in troubled and ironic times. The times are certainly troubled. The IMF’s Managing Director has recently spoken with some justification of a looming “lost decade” for the global economy – warning of “dark clouds” blocking the capacity of the world’s leading economies to deliver a renewed bout of economic growth and generalized prosperity.[1] The times are also deeply ironic: since the governing solution to those dark clouds – in countries as substantial as Italy and Greece, and in institutions as powerful as the IMF – would currently appear to be the replacement of elected leaders by appointed technocrats. The solution favored by the powerful is the transfer of state authority from democratically chosen leaders to governors drawn predominantly from the ranks of the very bankers whose inadequate supervision of their own industry darkened the skies in the first place. In this manner, a global financial crisis that initially discredited bankers has incrementally morphed into one to be settled on terms directly specified by bankers themselves.[2] A crisis of economics has been turned into a crisis of democracy. It is an outrage.

The only thing challenging that morphing is the explosion of popular protest which has accompanied it. In key cities in Europe now, the battle lines are being drawn between the technocrats in the ministries and the protesters on the streets. In key cities in the United States, similar lines exist between those who control Wall Street and those who occupy it. If the next decade is not to be lost, it is absolutely vital that, in the clash between money and the people, the people win.

But will they? Only if, inspired by the occupation of Wall Street, a wider political constituency in the United States comes to recognize the force of four truths that the conservative media work endlessly to deny.

The current wave of mass protest against Wall Street excess has completely reframed the public conversation in the United States.  The “deficit problem” with which Washington was consumed in the first half of 2011 has not vanished from the political agenda, but its resolution will now have to be achieved against the background of a growing understanding of the sheer scale of current income and wealth inequality. If the Republicans in Congress have their way, the politicians may yet cut entitlements programs for the poor while declining to raise taxes on the rich. But if that is how the deficit problem is eventually resolved, that resolution will be more extensively recognized as class-biased in its character and impact than would have been the case before the OWS protests began. The super-rich are invisible no more, and are now being held to account.

Bi-partisanship in Washington is rare these days, but it does occasionally surface. It did this week, when the Senate passed the “Currency Exchange Rate Oversight Reform Act”(S.1619) – the one sponsored by Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown and co-sponsored by 22 other Senators, including five Republicans.[1] If ever passed by the House – the Senate vote in favor was 65 to 35, with 16 Republicans in support – the Act would allow affected American companies and workers to petition the Department of Commerce for countervailing import duties, to offset injury caused to them by the undervalued currency of a trading partner. It would also ease the criteria that the Treasury Department uses when adjudicating such petitions, with plaintiffs no longer obliged to demonstrate that any currency misalignment was the product of deliberate exchange rate manipulation.

Thus far 2011 has not been a good year for progressives. The daily sight of the White House seeking elusive accommodations with Tea Party-inspired Congressional Republicans has not been an edifying one. Prior to and during the debt ceiling crisis, all the drive, all the issue framing, all the assertiveness in the pursuit of solutions, seemed to come from just one side of the aisle. In the process the stature of the White House (and that of its occupant) visibly wilted. A President full of confidence prior to the mid-term elections seemed to have entirely lost his footing.

So it was a huge relief to see Barack Obama feisty in defense of his Jobs Bill when addressing a joint session of Congress on September 8. It was an even greater relief to see him throwing down the gauntlet to John Boehner when introducing his deficit package later; and there was more reassurance last weekend when the President campaigned vigorously in California in the manner of the old Obama. It was good to see him openly condemning those who booed a gay soldier from the floor of the Florida debate as “not reflective of who we are.” It was good to see him insisting that the Republican vision of government would “fundamentally cripple America in meeting the challenges of the 21^st century;” and it was good to see him treating the 2012 election as “a contest of values.” The California Obama was more like the Obama for whom many of us campaigned so enthusiastically in 2008: so maybe, at long last and not a day too soon, the President is beginning to get back his progressive groove. Let us hope so.

Maybe it’s because of what I see every morning from my kitchen window– the view over coffee of my former neighbor’s foreclosed and rapidly deteriorating home – that the Obama Administration’s housing policy so depresses me. Or maybe what depresses me is the housing policy itself. 

The house is visibly rotting before my eyes. The weeds are now growing through the middle of the air-conditioning units. The gutter no longer links directly to the downspout. The fascia boards are succumbing to the carpenter bees. Like any house unoccupied and unloved, what I see each morning is a rapidly deteriorating building that once physically embodied the hopes of everyone who lived inside it – owned now, no doubt, by a bank that is apparently too busy or too casual even to maintain its upkeep. What I see each morning stands as a daily reminder of the scale and character of the recession that still besets us. What I see each morning reminds me that we are currently suffering not just a jobs crisis but also a crisis of homes. People have lost more than paid work in this recession, though many of them have certainly lost that. They have also lost dreams.

Labor Day looms, and with it the official end of summer.[1] Labor Day – the day we celebrate the strength and importance of American labor. But in truth, on this Labor Day what will there be to celebrate – certainly not the strength and importance of American labor.

Things, after all, are not good for labor in America these days.