Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss

Since the mid-90's I've been concerned about a tendency on the left to sanitize and sanctify Bill Clinton's reign as something to be valued and emulated. This tendency doesn't come from any inherent worthiness in his policies. It was at the time primarily a reaction to the attempt by a runaway, arrogant GOP to destroy him and his presidency by any means necessary, and is now a somewhat nostalgic reaction to the Good Old Days pre-Bush before America became a greedy, hated nation of torturers, crooks, and con artists.

But in cold hard fact, Clinton was little more than a moderate Republican who managed to do a great deal of the damage that set the stage for George W's abdication of the presidency to Wall Street and Corporate America. One of the most depressing, disappointing and disastrous of Clinton's "successes" was his acceptance and support of Welfare Reform and "free trade". Within the first was the tacit assumption that poor people were poor because they were lazy and if the govt would just force them to go back to work, everything would be dandy, Andy. Within the second was the assumption that corporations who had never played fair before would do so now.

It didn't work out that way, of course, but it appeared to for awhile until the bubble broke and W tore the social compact and the safety net into tiny pieces he then flushed down the loo while handing the keys to the nation's bank vault over to the richest of the rich.

But even below that level was the much more dangerous, Reagan-esque assumption that what was good for Wall Street was good for America. With Robert Rubin convincing Clinton to give Wall Street everything it wanted, our govt evolved several steps further from Main Street, the reality that defined our days and lives, evolved so far that all Bush had to do was open the doors of the Treasury and let in the looters. We had been conditioned not only to expect it but to welcome it. After all, the money was going back to the people who actually earned it, and if even the Democratic president had said that anyone who was poor was a bum and deserved to be abandoned, why should the rest of us worry about them?

The problem is that a kinder, gentler lie is still a lie and basing policy on it is bound to snap back and slap everybody upside de haid. We are now looking at that contusion writ large on the fabric of our economy with a big, sloppy, badly bruised brush, and it's going to take a lot longer than anybody thinks to get out of it.

[I]t can take years for a worker’s earnings to bounce back after a layoff, and that it can take even longer for a layoff during a recession. Economists, in fact, say income losses for workers who are let go in a recession can persist for as long as two decades, a depressing prognosis for the several-million people who have lost their jobs in the current recession.

“On average, most workers do not recover their old annual earnings,” said Till von Wachter, an economics professor at Columbia University, who recently completed a working paper with two other economists that examined the long-term earnings of workers who lost their jobs in the recession of the early 1980s.

Mr. Wachter studied workers who had been with their companies at least three years, then lost their jobs when their employers reduced their work forces by at least 30 percent. He found that even 15 to 20 years later, most on average had not returned to their old wage levels. He also concluded that their earnings were about 15 percent to 20 percent less than they would have been had they not been laid off.

IOW, the old assumptions on which Rubin's and therefore Clinton's policy projections were pinned turned out to be bogus, made so by the corporate piracy Reagan and Bush I made priorities in the 80's. The fantasy of "responsible corporations", virtually an oxymoron, was the core of the Clinton proposals while the reality was a predatory corporate machine chewing up workers, citizens, the political landscape, and even the global economy, a machine that recognized no responsibility except profit by an means necessary, more and more, larger and larger. When the predators are in charge, nobody gets a break.

But they're not any more, right? It's time for a real change, change you can believe in?

Uh-huh, and there are unicorns ridden by fairy princesses gamboling in the Wal-mart parking lot every morning.

Meanwhile, the same old prejudices, lies, and canards that made the theft of our economy and even our law possible are raising their ugly heads again. The poor are to blame for the moprtgage crisis.

THE financial crisis has given rise to all sorts of wrongheaded ideas, among which is the notion that we should not subsidize the “losers” who can’t make their mortgage payments. In fact, the solution to our troubles is not to restrict homeownership, but to expand it.

***

This “blame the victim” mentality is hardly new. It goes back to the 1960s, when the anthropologist Oscar Lewis wrote an article whose title took root in the American public consciousness: “The Culture of Poverty.” His basic argument was that poor people adopt certain practices that differ from those of “mainstream” society in order to survive. These might include illegal work, multifamily households or serial relationships in place of marriage. Once these survival strategies are in place, the argument goes, they take on a life of their own and lead to missed opportunities.

***

Lewis’s theories seem to have gained new life in the notion that a certain stratum of Americans just aren’t capable of homeownership, and that the increase in homeownership rates contributed to the real estate bust. The “natural” rate should be around 60 percent of American households, some analysts say, not the 70 percent it reached in 2004. That’s an unfortunate argument, because owning a home can be one of the best ways for a poor family to save and accumulate assets: recent history aside, the value of a house does typically rise, and its owner avoids paying rent and gets a tax break.

Whether or not that's a fortunate or unfortunate argument depends largely on where you're sitting. I'm not really concerned here about Conley's attempt to rehabilitate the logic behind the FM's, which did after all work beautifully for decades before Bush put a crook in charge and Wall Street stuck its unwelcome nose under a public tent, as I am about the continuing deceptions used to cage the underclass like wild animals. Obama has done nothing to dent any of this unconscionable propaganda and all too much to feed it.

After early pledges by President Obama that he would moderate the Bush administration’s tough policy on immigration enforcement, his administration is pursuing an aggressive strategy for an illegal-immigration crackdown that relies significantly on programs started by his predecessor.

A recent blitz of measures has antagonized immigrant groups and many of Mr. Obama’s Hispanic supporters, who have opened a national campaign against them, including small street protests in New York and Los Angeles last week.

The administration recently undertook audits of employee paperwork at hundreds of businesses, expanded a program to verify worker immigration status that has been widely criticized as flawed, bolstered a program of cooperation between federal and local law enforcement agencies, and rejected proposals for legally binding rules governing conditions in immigration detention centers.

***

Ms. Napolitano [Janet Napolitano, Homeland Security Sec] and other administration officials argue that no-nonsense immigration enforcement is necessary to persuade American voters to accept legislation that would give legal status to millions of illegal immigrants, a measure they say Mr. Obama still hopes to advance late this year or early next.

That approach brings Mr. Obama around to the position that his Republican rival, Senator John McCain of Arizona, espoused during last year’s presidential campaign, a stance Mr. Obama rejected then as too hard on Latino and immigrant communities.

(emphasis added)

How many times does Obama have to be caught out doing the exact opposite of what he promised to do before doubts surface among the faithful? At the very least, we need to acknowledge all these 180 degree about-faces, this consistent determination to uphold Bush policies even unto their very worst, and acknowledge likewise the disparity between Obama's pleasant, high-flying rhetoric and his Wall-Street-friendly, war-on-the-poor actions.

• His Admin can't float the money to create the jobs that would bring back the economy a la FDR but it can float $Billions$ in giveaways to banks who then use sizable chinks of it for executive bonuses.
• His Admin can't float the money for single-payer health insurance because it might endanger the profits of sleezy, lying, crooked, health insurance companies.
• His Admin can't obey the courts and release innocent Gitmo prisoners but it can afford the personnel to hound immigrants - often legal immigrants - with high-handed tactics and police-state bullying.

And so on. If Obama isn't a liar, why is he Bushing everything he touches? Salon's Michael Lind thinks Obama has been captured and brainwashed by a neoliberal cabal. He may have a point.

By neoliberalism I mean the ideology that replaced New Deal liberalism as the dominant force in the Democratic Party between the Carter and Clinton presidencies. In the Clinton years, this was called the "Third Way." The term was misleading, because New Deal liberalism between 1932 and 1968 and its equivalents in social democratic Europe were considered the original "third way" between democratic socialism and libertarian capitalism, whose failure had caused the Depression. According to New Deal liberals, the United States was not a "capitalist society" or a "market democracy" but rather a democratic republic with a "mixed economy," in which the state provided both social insurance and infrastructure like electric grids, hydropower and highways, while the private sector engaged in mass production.

***

By the time Barack Obama was inaugurated, the neoliberal capture of the presidential branch of the Democratic Party was complete. Instead of presiding over an administration with diverse economic views, Obama froze out progressives, except for Jared Bernstein in the vice-president's office, and surrounded himself with neoliberal protégés of Robert Rubin like Larry Summers and Tim Geithner. The fact that Robert Rubin's son James helped select Obama's economic team may not be irrelevant.

Instead of the updated Rooseveltonomics that America needs, Obama's team offers warmed-over Rubinomics from the 1990s. Consider the priorities of the Obama administration: the environment, healthcare and education. Why these priorities, as opposed to others, like employment, high wages and manufacturing? The answer is that these three goals co-opt the activist left while fitting neatly into a neoliberal narrative that could as easily have been told in 1999 as in 2009. The story is this: New Dealers and Keynesians are wrong to think that industrial capitalism is permanently and inherently prone to self-destruction, if left to itself. Except in hundred-year disasters, the market economy is basically sound and self-correcting. Government can, however, help the market indirectly, by providing these three public goods, which, thanks to "market failures," the private sector will not provide.

We are being played for suckers, iow, and since George W has lost his lustre, the PTB have found a new shill to work through. Lind thinks Obama needs to be deprogrammed, his assumption being apparently that if Obama hadn't been locked in a room with Timmy Geithner and Larry Summers he would have done some things differently. I doubt it. Obama has been playing with two faces for a long time, the one that talks populist to the people and sings a song full of poetry and humanism while making promises of redemption and correction, and the one that meets with power brokers in back rooms and speaks in the language of subservience to money, the one that breaks all the promises the first one makes and gives the Power what it wants.

The only thing that's different from the last one is the public face of this enabler is liberal instead of conservative. In private, the two faces are identical. Nothing has changed. Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, Obama - they are/were all tools of the corporations and the rich who own the election system. We haven't switched owners, we've just got a new supervisor who isn't as dumb as the old one and doesn't yell as much but puts everybody on report, cuts our pay and eliminates our benefits, lengthens our hours and shortens our breaks, and then smiles and tells us it's all for our own good. But upstairs, the same old management is still dumping toxic waste in the school playground, burgling the bank downtown, and re-writing land records so it owns our homes instead of us.

SO/SO. Nothing new here. Move along and don't make trouble.

Comments

[OSR]

I could have written this post. Why is it so difficult for the public to fathom the fact that the democracy has been sold out from under them, one campaign contribution at a time?

[eRobin]

Have you read this post by Stirling Newberry?