the refashioning of the American urban landscape such as James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere.

A mall can be razed to the ground, like the Belle Promenade on the west bank of the Mississippi in New Orleans. Eureka's too poor a town to do that. But a mall can be refashioned into a more congenial quartier, and one blessed with easier parking.

In the same way that coastal cities like Boston finally realised the asset of nineteenth-century quaysides with their warehouses and customs depots, today's failed or failing malls can be redeveloped, converted to mixed use, with residential housing, public spaces and constructive social uses.

In the Bayshore even now I see groups of the mentally ill being brought along for an outing in a place that's sheltered, still physically safe, and equipped with bathrooms, and plenty of space with chairs or benches where they can relax. In many towns one can imagine that energetic councils and resourceful financing could offer the reeling mall operators terms and take the properties off their hands, reconfiguring the malls as social assets.

Opportunity can be seized from the jaws of capitalism’s shattering reverses

On the larger economic front, similar reconstructive engineering for the public good is vital, however adamantly Wall Street, Timothy Geithner, Larry Summers and President Obama may proclaim earnestly that the architecture of 'free enterprise' capitalism must be preserved.

We're at that stage that Thurman Arnold captured so wittily in his 1937 book, The Folklore of Capitalism. Arnold, from Laramie, Wyoming, was installed as head of the Justice Department's Anti-Trust Division when FDR swerved to the left amid the slump of 1937. No greater foe of the corporate cartel than Arnold ever worked in government service in Washington.

In an early chapter, 'The Folklore of 1937' Arnold describes with vivid humor the tenacity with which supporters of untrammeled "private enterprise" held to beliefs whose operating principles had engendered the Great Depression. He likened it to the University of Paris insisting in the 1600s that bleeding was still the cure for malaria, even though quinine, promoted by the Jesuits in Peru, seemed to offer a more effective remedy.

But, Arnold wrote, "The medieval physician could see no profit in saving a man's body if thereby he lost his soul. Nor did he think that any temporary physical relief could ever be worth the violation of the fundamental principles of medicine. The remedy for fever was the art of bleeding to rid the body of those noxious vapors and humors in the blood which were the root of illness. Of course, patients sickened and died in the process, but they were dying for a medical principle..."

Is there a better description for the Republicans opposing the stimulus plan on principle, or Geithner stoutly proclaiming his zeal to preserve the banking system as presently constituted?

Opportunity is there, to be seized from the jaws of capitalism’s shattering reverses. This is a chance richer than the opportunity offered and annulled in the mid-70s. Circumstances will in all likelihood push Obama's government to the left, just as they did FDR when orthodoxy failed. The Left should not be shy about pressing the challenge out of some misguided notion of preserving a polite progressive consensus.

From the malls to the commanding heights of the economy, let the reconquest begin.