SERENE JONES: I think one of the reasons that it happens is that we are living in a very overwhelming time. And it's always going to be the case that a conservative familiar neo liberal agenda sounds safer.
Because it's what we know. But the truth of the matter is what we know is what got us in trouble in the first place. So it's one of those moments that everybody faces in their own life. We happen to be facing it structurally right now. Is everything collapses, what do we do? In the midst of that fear, do we grasp for what's most familiar? That's what's happening. But the very thing you're grasping for is the thing that got you there in the first place.
Is alcoholism. In the very depth of the problems that alcohol creates, as the alcoholic's world is crashing down around him, the defining question is, does the alcoholic reach for more booze? Or does he find the courage and resolve to pour it out and reach for something different? And how far down the alcoholic goes before making that decision determines whether he'll even live to make it to the other side, and how much of his life will still be there when he gets there.
The American economy is addicted to finance, and modern civilization is addicted to carbon. The sooner these habits are broken, the more life there will be left for us on the other side. The longer we wait, the more we will have destroyed, the more opportunities we will have missed, and the poorer we shall be.
That conveys the real costs of Obama's failure to depart from the status quo....
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