Obama Needs a National Alternative Economic Council

My latest HuffingtonPost blog: http://bit.ly/9rbYd

President Obama has been, on so many levels, a great boon for America's confidence, psychology, and relations with other countries. I feel proud of the dignified and focused way he has engaged the enormous challenges our nation faces.

His main Achilles heel so far is that he has not created an "economic team of rivals," as pointed out by Arianna Huffington's column on April 11th, but rather assembled an economic brain trust that agrees upon a bank-centric approach to solving our economic problems.

This group may be well intentioned but they are denizens of Wall Street and that is where they seek their solutions. Alternative economists instead point to the power of distributed systems of credit and local living economies to create enduring wealth. They note that America's millions of small businesses are a more powerful engine for growth than those on the S & P 500. Large, centralized banks will not be the engine that grows a healthy new green economy, which is instead powered by green investors and millions of small-scale entrepreneurs. Finally, many deeply needed reforms of our entire financial system --such as eliminating damaging forms of speculation or taking back the government's right to create money -- will never be proposed by Wall Street or central bankers since they have learned to accumulate massive profits from the game as it is played.

True reform always arises first from outside a system and is only gradually accepted by beneficiaries of the old ways. Wall Street has caused some of the most fundamental problems, so we cannot turn to Wall Street to create the solutions.

That is why I believe that President Obama needs a National Alternative Economic Council that operates with fundamentally different assumptions than the current group.

Read full article: http://bit.ly/9rbYd