How Neoliberalism Became a Pejorative

Posted on May 2, 2016 by camelotkidd

 

Neoliberal’s have gotten a touch defensive lately.

Recently, New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait tweeted, “What if every use of ‘neoliberal’ was replaced with, simply, ‘liberal’? Would any non-propagandistic meaning be lost?”

Neoliberalism is the generally accepted name for the socially atomizing, inequality-generating, environmentally destructive version of late capitalism practiced by the US and promoted throughout the world through the Washington Consensus.

Corey Robin’s new article at Jacobin, examines why neoliberal’s, like Chait, are so defensive, and for clues looks at the early history of American neoliberalism in the 1970’s.

American neoliberal’s came from the Democratic Party, but were hostile to earlier New Deal programs. Unlike the classical liberalism of the 18th century or libertarianism, “neoliberalism—though an anti-democracy project—nonetheless seeks to use the state rather than destroy it.” But despite its reliance on state power, it’s markedly different from Keynesianism, which sought to assure full employment and attempted to temper capitalism. Neoliberals don’t see corporate power or inequality as problems to be checked through state intervention.

According to Robin, what bothered neoliberal’s was unions. “The problems with unions were many: they protected their members’ interests (no mention of how important unions were to getting and protecting Social Security and Medicare); they drove up costs, both in the private and the public sector; they defended lazy, incompetent workers (“we want a government that can fire people who can’t or won’t do the job”).”

Robin says that neoliberal’s, by attacking unions, were employing divide and rule tactics for their wealthy donor class, and were essentially acting no different than Republicans in their defense of capital.

“In the hands of neoliberalism, it became fashionable to pit the interests of the poor not against the power of the wealthy but against the unionized working class. (We still see that kind of talk among today’s Democrats, particularly in debates around free trade, where it is always the unionized worker — never the well-paid journalist or economist or corporate CEO — who is expected to make sacrifices on behalf of the global poor. Or among Hillary Clinton supporters, who leverage the interests of African American voters against the interests of white working-class voters, but never against the interests of capital.)”

In my opinion, this antipathy towards unions clearly demonstrates the class bias held by neoliberal’s and Democrats. After all, what are unions except a means for working-class people to associate and protect their interests? In case you haven’t noticed, corporations allow the wealthy to associate and coordinate their activities and in the process amass prodigious amounts of wealth and power. Neoliberal’s don’t seem to have a problem with corporations.

What neoliberal’s desire, above all else, is competition in the sacred market. Neoliberal’s fervently believe in a free-market ideology, that views humans as Homo economicus, making “rational” decisions based on a narrow, relatively short-term cost/benefit analysis and pursuing their self-interests relentlessly at the near exclusion of all other factors. That they as a privileged class is protected from the savagery of this dystopian world seems to not bother them.

The presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders has shone a light on neoliberalism and exposed its key role in creating the savage inequality and economic malaise we can witness around us. For neoliberal’s, used to operating in the shadows, this attention is most unwelcome.

This defensiveness extends to the neoliberal-in-chief, Barak Obama, who in a recent interview, defended his economic record. “Engaging in those hard changes that we need to make to create a more nimble, dynamic economy doesn’t yield immediate benefits and can seem like a distraction or an effort to undermine a bygone era that doesn’t exist,” the president told Sorkin. “And that then feeds, both on the left and the right, a temptation to say, ‘If we could just go back to an era in which our borders were closed,’ or ‘If we could just go back to a time when everybody had a defined-benefit plan,’ or ‘We could just go back to a time when there wasn’t any immigrant that was taking my job, things would be OK.’”

This kind of talk by neoliberal’s infuriates me. Obama talks as if all these economic policies came out of thin air and there’s nothing we can do about it. That there’s no alternative.

I have to call bullshit.

The dirty little secret of neoliberalism is that unlike small-government conservatives, neoliberal’s see government as an essential  tool in creating the kind of savage market structure  we have today. Society and markets are constructed through regulation. They are not self-organizing and they do not occur without government intervention and some established rule of law.  As sociologist Loïc Wacquant puts it, the neo in neoliberalism is “the remaking and redeployment of the state as the core agency that actively fabricates the subjectivities, social relations and collective representations suited to making the fiction of markets real and consequential.”

In other words, rather than forces outside of their control, the policies we have today are the result of political decisions made by Obama and neoliberal Democrats.

The Democratic Party, presently, is the home for organized labor, social activists that struggle for racial and social equality, environmentalists, and anti-imperialists. Democrats can therefore do what the Republicans cannot–sell their liberal constituents out to their wealthy donor class–the 1%. This is what the Democrats are politically skillful at. Enacting genuine policies that aid the 99%, not so much.

Therefore, the Democratic party, run by neoliberal’s, is more dangerous than the Republicans.

This reality is why I’ve been so focused on neoliberalism, and why I believe that we need to work to destroy the Democratic party as it exists presently.

Update: Hillary is also a neoconservative, but that’s another story.

 

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Political-economy of despair

Posted on April 26, 2016 by camelotkidd

 

Ideology is powerful.

Neoliberal economist’s have internalized Margaret Thatcher’s maxim that there’s no alternative.  The market knows best. All the government can do is get out of the way and let the market do its thing. American’s must never think that there’s anything government can do to help them. They just need to keep their little heads down and slave away till they die.

Lambert at Naked Capitalism has a pretty good description of neoliberalism that sums-up this sentiment quite nicely. 1) because markets. 2) go-die. Essentially, if you can’t find a way to market yourself in this savage neoliberal milieu, it’s your own fault, and you should quietly succumb.

If you think that I’m just hyperbolic, check out the statistics from a recent study.

“Forty-year-old American women among our nation’s top 1 percent can now expect to live 10 years longer than women of the same age in America’s poorest 1 percent. For men, the gap has grown even wider — to 15 years.

All these stats come from a study just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. This new research combines IRS tax records with Social Security Administration mortality data to paint a deeply unnerving picture of 21st-century life and death. That poor Americans “have 10 or 15 fewer years of life,” notes Stepner, a co-author of the study, really demonstrates the level of inequality we’ve had in the United States.”

The presidential campaign of 2016 has provided an opening to question the fundamental economic policies of our country. In this context, economist Gerald Friedman reviewed Bernie Sander’s economic proposals and ran into a buzz saw of opposition.

“When I conducted an assessment of Senator Bernie Sanders’ economic proposals and found that they could produce robust growth, the negative reaction among powerful liberal economists was swift and vehement. How much, I wondered, did this reflect personal disappointment being rationalized into a political economy of despair? Professional economists tend to embrace an economic theory that government can do little more than fuss around the edges. From that stance, what do they have to offer ordinary people for whom the economy is not working? Not a whole lot.”

It seems that Friedman’s real sin was to challenge the neoliberal ideology that holds sway in the US economics profession. Like Sanders, Friedman sees the market as a construct of government, but goes further and questions who the market, as it’s presently constructed, works for? Here the ideological bias of the neoliberal’s is most apparent, with their penchant for financialization of the economy and support of wealthy rent-seekers and monopolists. To the neoliberal’s and their wealthy benefactors, the American economy, with its pervasive inequality, is working just as intended.

One of the best things about the presidential campaign of 2016 is that Bernie Sanders has shone a light on neoliberalism, and of capitalism in general. Most importantly, Sanders has challenged how and for who we organize the US economy.

“For the first time since the end of the Cold War — and perhaps since the beginning of the Cold War — large numbers of Americans have begun to ask questions about capitalism. Questions about whether it works, and how, and for whose benefit. Questions about whether capitalism is really the indispensable companion of democracy, as we have confidently been told for the last century or so, and about how those two things interact in the real world.”

Americans are starting to understand that the economy, as its presently configured, doesn’t work for them, providing an opening for a candidate or movement that can provide an alternative to neoliberalism. Win, lose or draw, this should be the Sanders mission going forward.

Update: Here’s Gaius Publius on how this all ends.

“As I’ve been writing almost from the start of doing this work, the whole game since the 1980s was to deprive the nation’s workers of good jobs; load the country with debt — so people could chase the “lifestyles of the rich and famous” with credit cards and mortgage-backed loans instead of real income — then make the government make sure no debt is forgiven.

That’s the whole game in a nutshell. A debt strike is an assault on that game, just as the Sanders candidacy is an assault on it. Neither assault can be allowed by the money-serving Establishment, but one form of assault is infinitely preferable to the other. Most sensible people do and will prefer electoral solutions.

My point again — if Sanders is not nominated, there will be no electoral solution (unless Clinton reverses a lifetime of pro-money policies), and the conflict will move into the next, non-electoral arena.”

 

 

 

 

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Managing the Decline

Posted on April 19, 2016 by camelotkidd

 

We are witnessing the first presidential campaign since the Great Depression that directly challenges the essential features of the US economy. All the controversy over social issues and immigration is just so much distraction from the bi-partisan economic policies that have made inequality the story of the 2016 presidential election. Presently, both parties serve the 1%, who’ve been using the ideological cover of neoliberalism to engage in an orgy of looting.

Neoliberalism is set of economic theories and policies that replaced New Deal economic policies during the crisis of stagflation in the 1970s. Neoliberal’s argue that prosperity will occur only if we cut taxes on the wealthy, cut government regulations, and cut or privatize government social programs that aid average Americans. This combination of policies, they argue, maximizes economic efficiency and increases economic incentives which together will super-charge our economy.

40 years on now and the results are in. Neoliberalism has failed the vast majority of Americans. We live in a nation whose infrastructure is falling apart. Where the quality of life for the non-wealthy deteriorates year in and year out. As the recent leak of the Panama Papers reveals, the wealthy and the corporations they control, have decided, like Leona Helmsley famously declared, that, taxes are for the little people, and have been stashing their money in secret offshore bank accounts to avoid contributing to our welfare.

Americans may not understand the specifics but they get the outline of the neoliberal economic policies that have resulted in the raging inequality that now plagues our country.  For instance, in 1970 the gap between the top 100 CEOs and the average worker was $45 to $1. Today it is an incomprehensible $844 to $1. Neoliberalism has been horrible for average Americans, yet stunningly successful for the 1% and the corporations they control.

Maybe that was the plan all along.

With the wild and wacky presidential election of 2016 drawing attention to this pernicious state of affairs, it’s probably time to ask the million-dollar question. Do you think that our elite intend to fix these problems, or manage them and muddle along?

Writer Gaius Publius says that the goal of the neo-liberal consensus is to “manage the decline, and manage your acceptance of it. And that’s what this election is about — on both sides. Acceptance or resistance.”

Indeed.

The establishment candidates, like Hillary Clinton and Ted Cruz, intend to manage the decline and not fundamentally change the US economic system of neoliberalism. Donald Trump has issued some blunt challenges, but I suspect that he’ll fall in line with the ruling consensus. After all, he’s a businessman who negotiates.

That leaves Bernie Sanders as the only candidate to challenge neoliberalism, and the resulting inequality. Everyone is talking about is income inequality but the fundamental cause of income inequality is almost always how power is distributed in society. That’s what Bernie is challenging.

No wonder he’s getting such shitty press.

I’ll let professor Corey Robin have the last word. “The American ruling class has been trying to figure out for years, if not decades, how to manage decline, how to get Americans to get used to diminished expectations, how to adapt to the notion that life for the next generation will be worse than for the previous generation, and now, how to accept low to zero growth rates as the new economic normal. Clinton’s campaign message isn’t just for Bernie voters; it’s for everyone. Expect little, deserve less, ask for nothing. When the leading candidate of the more left of the two parties is saying that — and getting the majority of its voters to embrace that message — the work of the American ruling class is done.”

 

 

 

 

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Superfluous

Posted on April 12, 2016 by camelotkidd

 

I believe that the crisis of legitimacy gripping the American political system has been brought about because a large cohort of US citizens have belatedly come to realize that they’re superfluous.

Many of these superfluous Americans are also recognizing that neoliberalism, the economic system that both Republicans and Democrats have embraced for 40 years, is responsible for this sorry state of affairs. They may not get the specifics, but they sense the grand outlines of this economic betrayal by both parties.

Hence the campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.

At Emptywheel, Ed Walker, examines some key points from Hannah Arendt’s, Origin’s of Totalitarianism, and demonstrates how the economic conditions that led to totalitarianism in Germany, are becoming present in modern day America.

“People aren’t stupid. They know that they are superfluous. They know they have no power, no security and no real hope of either. They hate it. When they see people fired from long-term jobs and told they only get severance if they train foreign replacements to do their jobs, it makes them sick inside. When they are told that their jobs are going to Mexico, and it’s “strictly a business decision” but 1400 people are going to be fired, they are angry and hostile. They know that they mean nothing to their employers, and nothing to politicians. And mostly they know they mean nothing to the elites who dominate the political process and the economy, and who set the system up to screw everyone else. They know the elites despise them as the the NRO’s Kevin Williamson and David French loudly say. They know the elites and specifically the tribe of economists, knew that they would be screwed by NAFTA and other trade deals, and didn’t lift a finger to stop that from happening on the grounds that it all works out for the beset on average. So what if the rich elites took all the gains? The liberal elites will come up with incremental tweaks to fix everything, and the conservatives will resist and nothing will change, and they don’t worry because it isn’t them or their families.”

Right now, there’s an ugly, anti-establishment mood brewing. There’s a palpable sense of desperation among a growing number of Americans because the economy no longer works for them. These surplus citizens have also made the calculation, with their support of Tramp or Sanders, that if we elect more of the same neoliberal politicians and continue on the path we’re on things are not going to get any better.

Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve long thought that an economic system that creates a large number of superfluous citizens is fucked up. Especially an economic system that cloaks itself in moralistic depictions and pious proclamations about freedom.

Brings to mind the quote by Anatole France: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets or steal bread.”

 

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The Grand Old Hunger Games

Posted on April 4, 2016 by camelotkidd

 

An online petition to allow delegates to pack heat at the Republican convention in Cleveland this summer is exposing the insanity of Republican, NRA and the Right’s decades long effort to ensure that there are guns everywhere in America.

42,000 people have signed the petition, asking Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, the R.N.C.’s convention venue, to override its no-gun policies and allow attendees to open-carry approved weapons. Ohio allows open-carry of firearms, but the Quicken Loans stadium does not. To no ones surprise, the U.S. Secret Service stated that no firearms will be allowed at the Republican convention in Cleveland this July.

Gun rights groups and individuals denounced the ban, and instead claimed that it would be dangerous not to allow guns inside the venue. Indeed, the NRA believes that that gun-free zones are “the worst and most dangerous of all lies.”  There are also arguments out there on the gun-zealot fringe saying that Republican delegates will be especially vulnerable to a terrorist attack without their guns. ISIS, and all.

Like I’ve said before and will say again–you can’t make this shit up!

Imagine, if you will, all the mayhem at the GOP convention if guns were allowed into the stadium. The idea of a floor fight would take on a whole new meaning, as would the term “smoke filled room.” In the battle for delegates, various factions could provide covering fire as their members advanced. It would be a sort of GOP Hunger Games.

May the odds be ever in your favor, indeed.

As fun as it is to point and snicker at the dilemma of the GOP being hoist on their own guns-guns-guns petard, it’s worth asking, as this Salon columnist does–Where does all the White Rage Go if Trump Loses?

“Where will all that anger, which has been slowly building among America’s white working class for half a century, go once it is left without a viable political outlet?”

What happens to these angry Trump supporters with guns if Trump loses, or is denied the Republican nomination by party insiders. Do these people then take matters into their own hands?

It has kinda felt like a low-level civil war is going on in America, certainly since Obama was elected President, and the concomitant rise of the Tea Party.

Could this summer be the opening salvo in the real thing?

Stay tuned.

 

 

 

 

 

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The Invisible Government

Posted on March 28, 2016 by camelotkidd

 

I welcome the political awakening I see among friends and co-workers, caused in great part by the rise of Donald Trump as the leading Republican candidate, and Bernie Sanders as a challenger to the Democratic establishment candidate, Hillary Clinton. It has pained me to observe my fellow Americans sleepwalk through the last decades in an apolitical stupor.

It’s worth asking why American’s have been so apolitical, so docile in the face of mounting inequality and worsening living standards.

Reading Alex Carey’s, Taking the Risk Out of Democracy, I’ve been reminded that the American people are apolitical and docile because they live in the most propagandized country in the world.

As Carey sees it, “The twentieth century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy”.

Propaganda in the US should be understood as advertising and public relations, something that most of us are familiar with. Corporations spend billions every year to ensure a pro-business attitude among Americans.

The goal of this vast and ongoing corporate propaganda system is to “associate corporate values with the American way of life”. Essentially, American propagandists have successfully conflated capitalism with democracy. The psychological power of this association cannot be discounted and it has proved to be an enduring feature of American power relations.

Carey makes the crucial (and often forgotten) point that in a democracy, “the maintenance of the existing power and privileges are vulnerable to popular opinion” in a way that is not true in authoritarian societies. Therefore elite propaganda must assume a “more covert and sophisticated role”. Domestic propaganda in the US is not directed outward at some foreign enemy but inwards, “to control and deflect the purposes of the domestic electorate in a democratic country in the interests of the privileged segments of that society”.

In the US, corporate propaganda has played upon the high level of religious beliefs of its citizens, where they’re predisposed to see the world in Manichean terms. This outlook leads towards a preference for action over reflection that is “perfectly suited to the corporate aim of identifying positive symbols with business, while assigning negative values to those that oppose them, such as labour unions and welfare provisions.” Carey says that US propaganda has been so successful because it has succeeded via the mass media in identifying “free enterprise” with democracy and in portraying any challenge to corporate elites as either “subversive” or “extremist”.

Carey argues passionately for a society that encourages people to become genuine citizens able to participate in meaningful ways in their immediate environment. To achieve this a diversity of views must be promoted.

The reality of America today, is that we’re ruled by a plutocracy, and the idea that the US is a representative republic is a quaint relic. Public exposure to views other than corporate is greatly feared by elites, who rightly believe that their power and privileges would increasingly come into question.

To obscure this grim reality we have the world-class propaganda system that Carey describes.

The founder of modern propaganda, Edward Bernays, described propaganda as “the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the habits and opinions” of democratic societies. He called it an “invisible government”.

The invisible government in America is all about ensuring control by elites and the corporations they control. To glimpse this invisible government it’s only necessary to examine the policies pursued by these elites.

Take trade, for example. Before this election, where anti-establishment candidates Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders forcefully challenged globalization, elites in both parties assured Americans that trade policies like NAFTA and the proposed TPP were the best thing for them since sliced bread. Of course, they lied. So-called free trade has been detrimental to the vast majority of Americans, a fact that quite a few of them have come to appreciate.

Today the intellectual case for so-called free trade lies in tatters. Even long time booster Paul Krugman admits that trade policies have precious little to do with trade and are essentially about control.

A lot of the things that we need to do in America are not that hard. The key stumbling block is the control of our system by the plutocracy, kept in place by the corporate propaganda system that Carey describes.

Ian Welsh nails it when he says that, “our current political-economic organization does not want to implement policy that helps the majority of people if doing so will upset current concentrations of money and power.”

What’s that JFK quote about peaceful change again?

Oh yeah.

 

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The Whig Party

Posted on March 22, 2016 by camelotkidd

 

Conventional wisdom says that the Republicans will go the way of the Whig party if Donald Trump is the Republican candidate for president.

The Whig party was formed in “opposition to the policies of President Andrew Jackson (in office 1829–37) and his Democratic Party.”  They fell apart a short time after as tensions over the expansion of slavery tore the party apart.

I believe that the party that needs to go the way of the Whig party is the Democratic party.

I know, hear me out.

The Republicans represent capital, wealth and power. They’re the business party.

Traditionally, the Democrats represented the people–small farmers and laborers. The New Deal, and Great Society.

What has changed in this political equation? It’s the Democrats. They no longer represent the people–small farmers or laborers. The Democrats have become the other business party. Hillary Clinton is the ultimate business candidate. She represents capital, wealth and power.

2016 is the most anti-establishment election of my lifetime, and a large part of that is the large segment of Americans who’ve become disenfranchised by this abdication by the Democrats.

There will always be a party that represents capital, wealth and power–a business party. However, there also needs to be a party that represents labor, small farmers and small business owners. The other 85 or 90 percent of the population.

In a strange turn of events, Trump’s nomination as the ultimate anti-establishment candidate could start the process that leads to the destruction of the Republican party, while Clinton’s nomination as the ultimate establishment candidate could lead to the break-up of the Democratic party.

Maybe, if we’re lucky, this election will result in the destruction of both political parties and we can start over.

One can only dream.

 

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We Live in a Political World

Posted on March 15, 2016 by camelotkidd

 

Economic insecurity does strange things to a society.

When both political parties pursue economic policies that benefit the 1% at the expense of the rest of the population those who are left behind turn to an alternative.

Welcome Donald Trump.

Republican politicians and pundits wonder how their party went awry. The idea that they’ve failed to notice the changes occurring in the grand old party is ludicrous. As writer Charles Pierce rightfully notes— “the GOP is suffering from the prion disease that has afflicted the Republican party since it first ate all the monkey-brains in the mid-1970’s.”

But gleeful liberals who celebrate the destruction of the Republican party should look in the mirror. Their champion Barak Obama is as responsible for the rise of a demagogue like Trump, as are Republicans.

What was Obama’s response to the Wall Street crash? He and treasury secretary, Little Timmy, made sure to “foam the runway” for the banks at the expense of millions of Americans who lost their homes. Presently, Obama’s overriding concern is passage of the (TPP) Trans-Pacific Partnership, the so-called trade pact that’s like NAFTA on steroids.

You remember NAFTA don’t you? Another so-called trade pact that wasn’t about trade as much as about global labor arbitrage. NAFTA let US corporations move their operations to Mexico, employ labor for pennies, evade environmental restrictions, then import the finished products back to the US without a tariff. At the time Ross Perot made the obvious point that NAFTA would produce a giant sucking sound as millions of American jobs disappeared. He has been proven absolutely correct.

Thomas Frank, author of One Market Under God and What’s a Matter With Kansas?,  has a new story in the Guardian, where he examines the appeal of Donald Trump. Frank starts by reading Trump’s speeches, and notes something that many liberals miss in the eagerness to tut-tut Trump over his blatant racism.

“When he isn’t spewing insults, the Republican frontrunner is hammering home a powerful message about free trade and its victims…Trade seems to obsess him: the destructive free-trade deals our leaders have made, the many companies that have moved their production facilities to other lands, the phone calls he will make to those companies’ CEOs in order to threaten them with steep tariffs unless they move back to the US.”

Liberal pundits seem to think that Trump supporters are only motivated by racism but they’re missing the larger economic message. A lot of Trump supporters are racists, but these voters also look around and notice that the American economy isn’t working for them and a chief reason is the so-called free-trade policies pushed by both parties. Trump supporters have learned to hate free-trade because it’s been used to push down wages so corporations can make greater profits.

Frank really zeros in on the responsibility of Democrats in creating a politician like Trump, and notes something that I’ve discussed before at length–Democratic politicians have been failing to offer an alternative to Republican economic policies for quite some time now.

“Trump’s words articulate the populist backlash against liberalism that has been building slowly for decades … Yet still we cannot bring ourselves to look the thing in the eyes. We cannot admit that we liberals bear some [or most] of the blame for its emergence, for the frustration of the working-class millions, for their blighted cities and their downward spiraling lives. So much easier to scold them for their twisted racist souls, to close our eyes to the obvious reality of which Trumpism is just a crude and ugly expression: that neoliberalism has well and truly failed.”

Readers have castigated me for celebrating the rise of Trump.

I’m not celebrating. I find Trump despicable.

I do, however, appreciate Trump’s challenge to the neoliberal economic orthodoxy, embraced by elites of both parties.

I also appreciate the political awakening I see among friends and co-workers, caused in great part by the rise of Trump as the leading Republican candidate. It has pained me to observe my fellow Americans sleepwalk through the last decades in an apolitical stupor while the kindling for this conflagration was laid.

Americans are slowly coming to realize that we live in a political world.

Update: Anyone who wants to understand Trump’s appeal needs to watch this video of workers at the Carrier air conditioner plant in Indiana being informed by the HR guy that their jobs are moving to Mexico.

 

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Kindness is a Revolutionary Act

Posted on March 8, 2016 by camelotkidd

 

The Frankenstein candidacy of Donald Trump has been brought to life by neoliberal economic policies pursued by Republicans and Democrats alike. To be sure, Trump’s rise is predicated on his appeal to racial resentments and xenophobia. Normally this racism and xenophobia would not resonate but these bi-partisan neoliberal policies have resulted in widespread suffering among middle and working-class Americans, pushing these voters towards Trump, who has promised to overturn the neoliberal status quo.

During the Great Depression, America was lucky to get President Roosevelt and his New Deal reforms, when it could have easily gotten a Mussolini or Hitler. Economic insecurity does strange things to a society.

The neoliberal value system was on display last night at the Democratic debate in Flint, Michigan, where Republican governor Rick Snyder cut costs by switching to a polluted water source, in an effort to run government like a business. A good question for the Democratic contenders would have been–where was Obama’s EPA while this poisoning was going on? It’s not like poisoning of Flint was unknown. The dirty little secret of stories like Flint, is that neoliberal Democrats like Obama and Clinton agree with the Republicans that the government should be run like a business, citizens be damned.

The neoliberal economic system that both parties ascribe to values profit over citizens. It values the rich and powerful over those most vulnerable. It stirs up hatred through appeals to race, class and xenophobia. Divide and rule.

Writer and political philosopher Ian Welsh describes this as the culture of meanness. “One of the most striking things about much of American culture is the simple meanness of it. The cruelty. Most of this seems to come down to three feelings:

  • My life sucks. I have to work a terrible job I hate in order to survive. I have to bow and scrape and do shit I don’t want to do. You should have to as well.
  • Anyone who doesn’t make it must not be willing to suffer as I do, therefore anyone who doesn’t make it deserves to be homeless, go without food, and so on.
  • Anybody who is against us needs to be hurt and humiliated, because that’s how I see my superiors deal with people who go against them.”

This culture of meanness helps explain the appeal of Trump.

In this milieu where Americans are pitted against each other in a savage race to the bottom, kindness is a revolutionary act of resistance.

The New Deal reforms initiated by FDR created a much more egalitarian country, where the gains of capitalism were shared broadly. A single wage earner could support a family leaving the other spouse to raise and care for children, volunteer for Scouts, Little League, and church groups, thus maintaining a much more caring and vibrant community.

Today, both husband and wife are required to work long hours, in a desperate effort to maintain a middle-class lifestyle, leaving no time to properly raise and nurture their children, volunteer, or do all those little things that maintain a sense of community. While at work, employees are pitted against each other, and warned against unionizing.

This atomization of American society is by design. The savagely unequal world the neoliberal’s have created requires every American to be on their own. Neoliberal principles state that only the market confers value, and there can be no community. Community and concern for our fellow Americans is threatening to this market based system. Instead you’re encouraged to blame yourself for you own failures rather than realizing that the problems are systemic.

Neoliberalism was the cover story that enabled the American elite to finally drive a stake through New Deal reforms. The problem for the ruling elite was that the reforms threatened their hierarchical system of control. If American citizens were given enough to eat and security, with time for study and leisure, they might learn to think for themselves, and come to the realization that the privileged elite had no real function. The reality is that a hierarchical society is only possible when the average citizens are poor, divided and uneducated.

As they say–mission accomplished.

If we want a different society where monsters like Trump have limited appeal we must reject the values of neoliberalism that encourage selfishness and cruelty.

Kindness is a revolutionary act.

Likewise, creating and sustaining community is a revolutionary act.

Let’s start a revolution.

 

 

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Queen of the Neocons

Posted on March 2, 2016 by camelotkidd

 

Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton has a neocon problem.

Clinton has just been endorsed for president by neoconservative intellectual, Robert Kagan, a longtime Republican who recognizes that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, the presumptive favorite, would be hostile to neoconservative foreign policies.

Investigative reporter, Robert Parry, explores the fallout from Kagan’s endorsement. “…the fact that a leading neocon, a co-founder of the infamous Project for the New American Century, has endorsed Clinton raises questions for Democrats who have so far given the former New York senator and Secretary of State mostly a pass on her pro-interventionist policies.

Kagan’s endorsement of Hillary Clinton is not surprising. Clinton’s bellicose behavior as US senator and Secretary of State demonstrate her willingness to use any means to maintain the US empire. Clinton has never met a weapons system or regime change scheme that she didn’t whole hardily approve of. She voted for the invasion of Iraq, chortled with glee at the death of Libyan president, Gaddafi, and has repeatedly called for the overthrow of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and establishment of a no-fly zone there. Hillary also backed the coups in Honduras and Ukraine. Clinton’s decisions have been disastrous for America, but for the neocons, who favor continuation of the US’s world-wide empire, these actions are held in high regard.

Kagan explains his decision. “I feel comfortable with her on foreign policy. …  If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue … it’s something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else.”

The coronation is complete. Hillary Clinton is now officially the neocon candidate. The queen of the neocons.

Bernie had better get busy. So far his campaign has focused laser-like on domestic issues, but he needs to define a different foreign policy.

Parry says that to have any hope to win the Democratic nomination, Sanders needs to make Hillary’s neoconservative foreign policy an issue. “Obviously, many anti-war Democrats would prefer that Sanders step forward as their champion and offer a cogent explanation about how the neocons and liberal hawks have harmed U.S. and world interests by spreading chaos across the Middle East and now into North Africa and Europe. But that would require Sanders embracing the word “realist” and asking whether his rival is a neocon.”

To halt America’s glide path into deep state plutocracy it’s imperative to expose the danger the neocons pose for America’s constitutional form of government.

Luckily, there are political and media insiders who are starting to speak out.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. reemerged with an important article in Politico, decrying the neocon inspired US foreign policy. “America’s founding fathers warned Americans against standing armies, foreign entanglements and, in John Quincy Adams’ words, “going abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” Those wise men understood that imperialism abroad is incompatible with democracy and civil rights at home.”

Longtime reporter, Steven Kinzer, writes in the Boston Globe about how “The Media Are Misleading the Public on Syria”  In this age of mealy-mouthed reporting, Kinser is refreshingly direct. “Coverage of the Syrian war will be remembered as one of the most shameful episodes in the history of the American press.”

In Congress, Hawaiian Representative Tulsi Gabbard (D) has been bravely speaking out against US policies of regime change in Syria.

Recently, in a stunning move, Gabbard, resigned from the Democratic National Committee to support Bernie Sanders for president. “There is a clear contrast between our two candidates with regard to my strong belief that we must end the interventionist, regime change policies that have cost us so much.” She added, “This is not just another ‘issue.’ This is the issue, and it’s deeply personal to me. This is why I’ve decided to resign as Vice Chair of the DNC so that I can support Bernie Sanders in his efforts to earn the Democratic nomination in the 2016 presidential race.”

The endorsement of Representative Gabbard is momentous. Bernie now has a chance to articulate a clear alternative to Hillary’s neocon influenced foreign policy.

Dave Lindorff, at Counterpunch argues that Sanders should make Gabbard his vice-president to give him credibility and respectability on foreign policy. “Gabbard, while only a second-term member of the House, is no lightweight when it comes to US foreign and military policy. A major in the Hawaii National Guard who volunteered for two tours of duty in Iraq, she is one of only two female members of Congress to have served in a war zone…Sanders, who has been avoiding talking about the country’s military budget and its imperialist foreign policy, should use the opportunity of Gabbard’s defection from the DNC to announce that if elected he would immediately slash military spending by 25%, that he would begin pulling US forces back from most of the 800 or more bases they occupy around the world, and that he would end a decades-long foreign policy of overthrowing elected leaders around the globe.”

The 2016 election is exposing some amazing fissures in our two party system, where the neocons are fleeing from Republican-Trump and the danger he poses to their dreams of empire and retreating to the Democratic-Clinton redoubt. Of course, the neocons started with the Democrats, so it’s only fitting for them to return to their native habitat.

Still, the idea of the neocons endorsing Hillary has got to sting for liberal Clinton supporters. Maybe neocon intellectual Kagan screwed up with his endorsement of Clinton and should have just kept it on the down low? It certainly wouldn’t be the first time a neocon screwed up.

 

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