In two previous stories, I argued that “neoliberal” is a pretentious and misleading term that generally means nothing at all except to serve as invective and as a dubious claim of expertise. Many people disagreed, some offering definitions and pointers to articles in which the critique of neoliberalism supposedly illuminated the workings of the world.
Here’s one of those articles:
Beneath the marionette theater of American electoral and parliamentary democracy, policy is made by a “deep state” oligarchy of corporate and financial elites. The political actors atop the great quadrennial campaign carnivals speak in progressive-sounding terms of their commitment to equality, justice, peace, popular self-rule and the common good. Behind stage and screen, however, the contenders on both sides of the nation’s party duopoly—“two wings of the same bird of prey” (Upton Sinclair, 1904)—are captive to the nation’s unelected and interrelated dictatorships of money and empire.
If the election is just “marionette theater”, it makes no difference which puppet plays the role of leader. Apparently Trump, with his willingness to strip the euphemism from the racism of the Southern Strategy, his demands for religious police, his crowds of psychotic confederate flag waving supporters cheering torture, is totally the same as Hillary Clinton, the candidate who won primaries due primarily to enormous levels of support among black women and labor unions. Just “two wings of the same bird of prey”.
Obviously the two candidates do not say the same things, but the analysis here is that those words are just for the chumps.
After candidates who masqueraded as champions of the people get into office, voters and pundits who believed the politicians’ election season rhetoric and imagery express surprise and disappointment at the citizenry’s betrayal by those in whom they placed hope for change. But before the election, these disillusioned citizens had failed to notice numerous clues to the candidates’ plutocratic, imperial and authoritarian essences.
Take Barack Obama ….
So disappointing! And so false. The base constituencies of the Democratic party approve of Obama’s administration overwhelmingly. 82% of Democrats, 90% percent of black voters, 80% of voters who call themselves “liberal”, 90% of voters who call themselves “liberal Democrats”. The people who disapprove are Republican voters who call themselves Conservative — only 9% approval from that demographic.
Well, perhaps these are just “low information” voters, lacking the analytical machinery needed to be properly disappointed. Because, if we read this article more, it turns out that the Obama administration is, you knew it was coming: neoliberal.
One of the many early clues to the coming neoliberal nature of Obama’s presidency came when he affiliated himself from the start with The Hamilton Project (THP), a key neoliberal Washington, D.C., think tank. THP was founded with Goldman Sachs funding inside the venerable centrist and Democratic-leaning Brookings Institution in spring 2006. Its creator was no less august a figure in the country’s ruling class than Robert Rubin, the former Goldman Sachs CEO who served as Bill Clinton’s top senior economic policy adviser and treasury secretary.
I was delighted to have an opportunity of learning what this all meant — especially considering that 90% of Democratic voters apparently approve of a neoliberal administration affiliated with a neoliberal think tank. To be completely honest, I’d heard of the Hamilton Project before and didn’t have a super high opinion of it or Mr. Rubin, but now I’d been referred to definitions of neoliberalism so I could check it out, equipped with this highbrow analytical concept. People sent me to the Encyclopedia Brittanica definition a couple of times
Neoliberalism, ideology and policy model that emphasizes the value of free market competition. Although there is considerable debate as to the defining features of neoliberal thought and practice, it is most commonly associated with laissez-faire economics. In particular, neoliberalism is often characterized in terms of its belief in sustained economic growth as the means to achieve human progress, its confidence in free markets as the most-efficient allocation of resources, its emphasis on minimal state intervention in economic and social affairs, and its commitment to the freedom of trade and capital.
Looking through the Hamilton project web site, I immediately came upon a promising blog post: an article co-authored by the Evil Robert Rubin himself and published in the Wall St. Journal and about food aid. I was prepped to see the Oliver Twist level Social Darwinism of Laissez-faire minimal state intervention cold hearted neoliberals in a pure form.
The rate of food insecurity in the U.S. spiked during the Great Recession and it continues to remain unconscionably high in the world’s wealthiest nation. In 2014, according to the Agriculture Department, nearly one in five U.S. households with children—a total of 15.3 million children—were food insecure, which means at some point during the year they lacked adequate food. In nine states, one in four children lives in a food-insecure household.
Yet this month close to a million working-age adults will begin losing their access to an average of $5 a day in food assistance provided by the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), due to the reintroduction of a three-month time limit on benefits for some unemployed adults. While losing $5 a day might seem like a small amount to many Americans, for others it can be the difference between eating three meals and going to bed hungry.
The federal estimate of food insecurity is a mere snapshot that likely understates the extent of the problem. According to a recent report by one of the authors here, Ms. Schanzenbach, and her colleagues at the Hamilton Project, households cycle in and out of food insecurity with some frequency. Most families only need temporary help to get back on their feet. New SNAP entrants participate in the program for about 12 months on average.
Alleviating food insecurity is not only a moral imperative; it also makes good economic sense.[...]
It is our belief that economic growth, broad participation in that growth, and individual economic security are mutually reinforcing, and that government has a critical role to play. Strengthening SNAP and reducing food insecurity in the more than 22 million U.S. households that receive nutritional assistance on a monthly basis is a smart public investment that will improve both public health and economic growth.
What a letdown — just some typical bleeding heart liberal stuff. Maybe I was missing the good stuff:
Over the last decade, THP has helped define “the philosophical core of Obamanomics” (Peck) by producing a small library of issue briefs and policy papers. These documents have matched Obama’s political persona by striving to be, in Orszag’s words, “warm-hearted but cool-headed.” There’s a useful translation for Orszag’s phrase: outwardly progressive and socially concerned but substantively neoliberal and Wall Street friendly.
Aha! These are cold hearted, mean spirited, puppy kicking neoliberals who pretend to be warm hearted nice guys! Thanks goodness people with deep analytical skills are there to help out us ignorant low information folks.
A consistent neoliberal formula holds across THP’s policy literature. Analysts tackle topics of concern to “warm-hearted” progressives—poverty, household expenditures, joblessness, automation, inequality, health care access, barriers to employment, declining social safety nets, over-incarceration, environmental hazards and more. These subjects are often examined with sophisticated empirical rigor but always in “cool-headed” (wealth- and power-serving) ways that stop short of any serious confrontation with underlying causes of unequal growth and regressive distribution rooted in the rule of the nation’s corporate and financial elite and the profit system that the reigning stratum sits atop.
Ok so they “tackle” issues like “poverty, household expenditures, joblessness, automation, inequality, health care access, barriers to employment, declining social safety nets, over-incarceration, environmental hazards and more” but in the wrong way! They “stop short of any serious confrontation with underlying causes of unequal growth”.
A typical THP brief from last June is titled “Where Does All the Money Go: Shifts in Household Spending Over the Past 30 Years” It shows that real consumption fell in lower-income households and that a rising share of those households’ expenditures shifted to meeting basic needs between 1984 and 2014. The study says nothing about the rising percentage of ordinary Americans’ budgets spent to meet the escalating costs of debt service payments to the nation’s leading financial institutions—to the creditor class headquartered on Wall Street. It does not mention how U.S. households’ outstanding debt rose from 83 percent of their disposable income in 1991 to a remarkable 130 percent on the eve of the Great Recession—this courtesy of the nation’s oversized financial sector. The authors conclude with milquetoast recommendations for the maintenance of minimal safety-net protections.
Woah! “Milquetoast recommendations for the maintenance of minimal safety-net protections”. I’m beginning to get the picture: they are not socialists but are just liberals! Centrist liberals at that. How fiendish. Well, now we know. All you have to do to be a neoliberal is to advocate the kinds of policies that Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Barack Obama advocated: liberal reformism that does not repudiate capitalism and markets or demand a revolution. By the way Household debt as a percentage of disposable income has dropped a lot under Obama’s neoliberal regime. Here’s the graph of the more interesting household debt service as a percentage of disposable income (because a debt at 5% is really different from the same debt at 2%)
Note that part where it skids down? That starts in 2009 when some interchangeable marionette named Obama became US President.
I have to note one more thing about this informative article we’ve been studying here as part of Reform Through Political study. In the course of noting the revolving door of Obama officials into Wall Street firms, the author points out that the budget director: “Orszag went on to become a Citigroup executive and a merger-and-acquisitions director at Lazard, an investment bank once used by the legendary junk-bond-wielding corporate raider Carl Icahn”. Fascinating. You could also say that Lazard is now run by the former chief finance advisor to the Steel Workers Union who guided the Obama administration rescue of the Auto Industry and the UAW. But that would hardly challenge the fundamental issues of capitalism, it would just be some more neoliberal puppetry, I guess.
Every four years, regular as clockwork, America’s Left rushes forward to tell us that Bush=Gore, that a Republican win will, at last, force those Democrats to embrace The Cause, and that anyone who balks at this analysis is a neoliberal shill or dupe or something.
When the election is over they get back to their regular work of:
Electing local officials like district attorneys who will enforce the law fairly
Electing city councils and mayors who will advocate for the working class and poor
Electing state officials who will push progressive policies in their states
Building workers cooperatives and unions
Creating giant public movements that force changes in public action
- If the Dems win anyways, sneering about how disappointed they are
- If the Republicans win, taking a well deserved break.
But, you know, neoliberalism and stuff.