On Paradise, John Prine sings. “And Daddy, won’t you take me back to Muhlenberg County? Down by the Green River where Paradise lay. Well, I’m sorry my son, but you’re too late in asking. Mister Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away.”
The song well describes the effect that neoliberalism has had, with its emphasis on privatization of the commons. Neoliberalism promised us prosperity, security and freedom through markets. Instead it has delivered precarity.
I always thought that neoliberalism was simply dressed up justification for looting and every day provides more evidence. A modern day version of the “enclosure laws”–policies that forced peasants off their land and into wage labor, resulting in the “primitive accumulation” beginnings of capitalism. And presently we have the modern version where the wealthy and well connected haul away the wealth of our country.
The US economy has been financialized, where the privatization of the commons has been accompanied by deindustrialization and off-shoring of manufacturing jobs. This shift has conveniently hollowed out the unionization of the American workforce. It’s been a 50 year class war where capital has decimated labor, because neoliberalism treats satisfying financial markets as more important than meeting human needs. Since the late 1970’s manufacturing has been surpassed by financialization. This was a deliberate policy made in large part to reassert capital’s power at the expense of workers. It has been a grand success from the point of view of America’s billionaire class.
This financial class operate as a shadow-government behind elected politicians. I’ve come to think of Wall Street as the beating heart of the deep state. Which is ironic because the looting has reached a stage where it’s imperiling the American empire. From the lack of high-tech munitions due to the offshoring of manufacturing expertise and processing of critical minerals to placing a hedge-fund honcho in charge of the Pentagon, neoliberalism has seriously weakened the US military. Emblematic of the milieu is Stephan Feinberg, the private-equity billionaire owner of the Cerberus Capital Management hedge-fund, who was recently profiled in the Wall Street Journal: “A Private Equity Billionaire Mounts His Biggest Takeover Yet: the Pentagon.”
The lack of any sort of strategy except short term enrichment is alarming, but don’t expect our soi-disant elite to change course. After all, there’s next quarters bonuses to be concerned about. Ian Welsh well describes them–“Truly, American elites, while vicious and cunning are some of the worst long term strategists I’ve ever seen.”
I guess the moral of this story is that they might have hauled it away but they disregarded railroad maintenance and the train is fixing to run off the tracks.
