Meteor Blades posted excerpts from and a link to a recent CommonDreams analysis by Jon Queally of the damage that neoliberalism has done to the planet. What the CommonDreams article neglects is the American political dynamic that makes neoliberalism dominant. Writing in Counterpunch, Rob Urie does just that. In his essay, The Neo-liberal (Fascist) Coup: Trade Deals and Democrat Delusions, Urie writes:
Democrats have been the more effective proponents of neo-liberal trade policies since Bill Clinton passed NAFTA in 1993. With Republicans regaining control of Congress the Democrat establishment is scrambling to claim ‘political’ differences while President Obama and Congressional Republicans promote nearly identical economic agendas through trade agreements. This ‘works’ by giving civil decision-making authority to supranational agencies through economic leverage, the right to be compensated for not destroying the world. Countries with the weakest labor protections, environmental regulations, banking restrictions and public interest legislation are being made the new ‘politics,’ the direction of ‘public’ policy via economic policy, by design.
For the large residual that retains the mythology of political and economic divide, Democrats have for forty years postured ‘politically’ while acting through economic policies. Jimmy Carter deregulated the railroads and airlines and appointed Paul Volcker Chairman of the Federal Reserve to protect bank assets from the ravages of inflation by engineering a major recession. Bill Clinton eliminated Glass-Steagall, de-regulated the banks, implemented austerity policies and attempted to privatize Social Security. And from his early days singing the praises of neo-liberalism at the Hamilton Project to his unconditional revival of the major economic force promoting neo-liberal policies— Wall Street and trust-fund ‘capitalists,’ Mr. Obama has repeatedly contradicted his pseudo-populist rhetoric with economic programs straight from the neo-liberal playbook.
Responding directly to Mr. Queally's essay, Urie writes:
The light bulbs are finally, forty years late, beginning to flicker on amongst ‘progressive’ Democrats as to how radical the neo-liberal program has become. The effort at present is to parse ‘good’ from ‘bad’ neo-liberal programs without addressing that they all subvert the public interest by design. Jimmy Carter’s deregulation of the airlines and railroads shifted them from serving a quasi-public purpose— that of national transportation infrastructure, to serving ‘private’ interests alone. And his subtext was to break the airline and railroad unions. When Bill Clinton signed NAFTA it was well understood that capital is mobile but that labor isn’t. If capital can go where labor is cheap, the goal isn’t profit seeking, it is rent seeking (because labor’s product in theory is unchanged). And with the TPP and TTIP Mr. Obama is trying to complete the circle— a specific purpose of the agreements is to replace civil governance in the public interest with supranational governance in the ‘private’ interest.
FDR (Franklin Delano Roosevelt), whose legacy Democrats continue to milk for populist credibility, straightforwardly called state capture by corporate interests fascism (top link). The missing piece linking these modern trade deals to traditional fascism is nationalism. But why would supranational governance need nationalism to inspire when engineered economic dependence— immiseration, can accomplish the same outcome? Lest this seem unduly conspiratorial, the same policies that have put low and middle wage workers in the U.S. in competition with low-wage workers overseas could put doctors, lawyers and corporate executives in similar competition. That no such effort has even been entertained in forty years of neo-liberal ‘reforms’ points to the class interests that neo-liberal policies serve.
The light bulbs may finally be going on, but the neoliberal death march continues apace anyway. The Democratic Party is on tbe verge of nominating yet another neoliberal presidential candidate, and in fact appears quite eager to do so. Moreover, the leadership of this ultra-partisan Democratic site is fully on board with that nomination.
Anyone else see a problem here? I certainly do. When it's Oink Clinton II v. Oink Bush III and national turnout is 20% who do you think will win? Worse, even if Clinton DOES win, all we get is more "neoliberalism [breaking] the planet." That's not winning: it is losing in an especially humiliating manner.