Can anyone name anyone who is seriously engaged in creating an alternative to the neoconservative worldview that encompasses university graduate departments, think tanks and government policy initiatives?
If you look around, you see angry people on the right and angry people on the left, some even calling for violent revolution or sputtering in incoherence because they are just frustrated with whatever they can name.
A basic problem is that politics is not a place where the truth of what is going on really can be debated. All of our communications about real issues are dumbed down to cartoons that have to be short. If what is really going on that we ought to be serious about is something that is complex, international and has taken decades to develop, it is beyond the debate - even if it is the most important thing in the world that affects us all.
That is what has people so upset. Though, most of those who are responding emotionally really do not get it. There is such a tremendous lack of awareness of what makes the world work and what can be done about it anywhere, that we are rather like horses in a corral that sense danger but might kick you if you come near to help.
If you had the perspective of sitting on a satellite, looking down at the entire American Hemisphere and thinking about history, you would begin to realize this:
The prime cause of immigration and the prime cause of the economic crisis of the past couple of years, as well as general decline on the middle class over the past thirty years are all of a piece. They are not separate issues. They arise from the same general reasons that the US multinationals pushed for government takeovers throughout the southern hemisphere and in other parts of the world, leading to where we are today.
What created NAFTA in the first place, an agreement between Canada, Mexico and the US that Clinton rammed through against howls of protests from his own political base, was a powerful economic force that has created economic catastrophe for hundreds of millions of people and should be scrutinized more intensely.
One word encapsulates this meta trend: Neoliberalism, the international version of free trade fundamentalism that comes with the push to get away from social compacts that companies are bound by as members of communities or nations. That means that labor and environmental interests are at a distinct disadvanage and even sovereignty for nations such as our own.
Progressives need to quit whining about neoconservatism and develop an explanation for how the world works in the twenty first century in a way that offers more effective solutions for creating and maintaining a sustainable economy for the world. Where is a progressive Milton Friedman, where is a progressive equivalent and answer to the Project for a New American Century?
I would call on anyone who might be able to, to consider this a career option because it will take a number of people getting seriously and eminently qualified to address this over a long period of time before things can begin to really turn around. I mean, a person who is reading this who is still in college needs to develop the intellectual heft, the eminence and the influence of a Milton Friedman. If you don't know who he is, read up.
I would recommend Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine.
I was please to discover in my local library, "The Global Class War" by Jeff Faux. Despite the title, it is a deeply serious analysis of what got us into this mess and is a basis for the progressive economic policy that we desperately need. It goes much deeper than Klein's work. They make good companion volumes.
Faux is a founder of a think tank and a scholar whose job is to write books and lecture on the subject of a progressive alternative to neoliberalism. A name that should be better known. The name of the think tank ought to also be more familiar, despite its incredibly bland name. Bookmark Economic Policy Institute.
At first his prescription for an alternative world order sounds like something that will never happen. But the consideration is worth processing through your brain. The reason we have what labor protections we have and other terms of a national social compact is because we have an ability to debate and vote for policies and representatives who will construct them. When we get outside of national borders, multinationals have always been able to skip out on having to even debate the social compact. There is no superceding authority beyond the national border, currently that can really be credibly regarded as democratic.
Given that world government is a head-exploding futuristic concept that is centuries off in the future at least, the next thing to actually consider possible is an association of states that can afford more traction for democratically oriented, social compact concerns.
There is some basis for this. The Organization of American States, though heavily influenced by oligarchies and multinationals at this time, does have a capacity for evolutionary growth. The election of Evo Morales and the other presidents of countries that were formerly under the thrall of Friedmanite free market fundamentalism or neoliberalism, are now moving more in the direction of a European sort of social democracy. We should join them, rather than the US worrying about how to get them back under the control of the same people that brought on the Wall Street crisis.
The reason that there are hundreds of thousands of people a year who are uprooted from ancient home communities and are footloose across the hemisphere, crossing into the US, is that they are effectively being pushed out as investment seeks higher profits than come from indigenous subsistence farming. When they wind up in the US, the same investors hope they lower labor costs.
From a high rise financial district office in New York, San Francisco or Los Angeles, this is a win-win.
Those people don't have to come downstairs and put on counter-demonstrations. They have the abiity to direct trillions of dollars in investments.
There is only the powerless fighting the powerless over minor and irrelevant issues, or there is mounting a sustained effort to replace a global policy that effectively writes whole populations out of economic advantage and creates an increased outlook for increasing wealth disparity.
The trend over the past thirty years for reduced income relative to higher costs which has undermined the middle class, along with the amazing exodus of jobs out of the US, has to be seen as connected to the other effects that are produced by the bankers of Wall Street, and financial districts in San Francisco, Seattle and Los Angeles.
If you are really concerned about any of this, then we all need to work on how to open our eyes to the reality of this work and to finding out who might join in so that there can really be more progress towards a future we all would rather live in.
The problem is that there does not seem to be a serious discussion that people participate in through being serious about working on learning enough to really get somewhere. All the suggestions I have seen in blog discussion so far have really been pretty inadequate. The first problem would be to gather insight.
But where is it? Why is such an important dynamic, powerful enough to shape our world, so out of range of intelligent discussion?