All Thoughts Being Equal

It might be damning with faint praise, but Elizabeth Warren could be the most lucid legislator in D.C. Even if a new Glass-Steagal doesn't end up being a panacea , I think it could have an effect akin to (but not identical to) the Civil Rights Act. That bill didn't end racism, but it did fundamentally change the cultural conversation. Now it's just not okay to be (openly) racist. Glass-Steagal makes it not okay to mash up speculative investments with routine banking. I think it's an important but underlooked principle that while a market may be wild and free to allocate resources as it will, the foundations and fundamentals supporting that market need to be robust. Otherwise there's a greater risk that the whole thing will just go off the rails and collapse.

Sort of grimly foreboding if you substitute "War on Terror" for "Cold War": We are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence--on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations. Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed. It conducts the Cold War, in short, with a war-time discipline no democracy would ever hope or wish to match. -- John F. Kennedy, speech to the American Pu...