Showing posts with label neo-liberalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label neo-liberalism. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 5, 2019

AOC: Backlash from the Middle While Dem Neo-liberal Makes Case for Left

The policies [DeLong] supports depend on a responsible center-right partner to succeed. They’re premised on the understanding that at least a faction of the Republican Party would be willing to support market-friendly ideas like Obamacare or a cap-and-trade system for climate change. This is no longer the case, if it ever were.
“Barack Obama rolls into office with Mitt Romney’s health care policy, with John McCain’s climate policy, with Bill Clinton’s tax policy, and George H.W. Bush’s foreign policy,” DeLong notes. “And did George H.W. Bush, did Mitt Romney, did John McCain say a single good word about anything Barack Obama ever did over the course of eight solid years? No, they fucking did not.”
The result, he argues, is the nature of the Democratic Party needs to shift..... Bernie Sanders news: a Clinton-era Democrat makes the case for the left - VOX
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/3/4/18246381/democrats-clinton-sanders-left-brad-delong

When a politician -- or, really, anyone -- becomes a star overnight, there's an inevitable backlash that grows in opposition to the rise. And less than three months into her first term in Congress, the AOC backlash has begun in earnest.
The spark came last week when, in a closed-door meeting of House Democrats, Ocasio-Cortez warned colleagues that if they continued to vote with Republicans on procedural motions in the chamber they could wind up "on a list" of incumbents ripe for a liberal primary challenge.....The AOC backlash begins - CNNPolitics
https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/04/politics/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-democratic-party-ideology/index.html
Two interesting and contrasting articles.

I get so many great articles on the listserves. (By the way, MORE has killed most of its listserves or is moderating them to keep evil thoughts out of the hands of its members.) Abby, my buddy from Newark sends a great trove of stuff. Here are two articles from counter points of view.

First a neo-liberal, market-based Democrat makes some interesting points about why the left needs to take over the main theme of the party. Why? Because Dem neo-liberals like Obama and Clinton require some level of cooperation from the liberal wing of the other party - and that wing of the Republicans has been decimated.

And then the backlash from Democrats against AOC. And though I like a lot about her, I am finding it a bit too much at times. A long-time leftist friend of mine is convinced she is flying too close to the sun and ego will triumph and lead to crash and burn which will ultimately harm the movement. I can see it in some of the comments from liberal and left friends -- older women in many cases who are annoyed at what they see a level of arrogance.

People compare AOC and Bernie - Bernie doesn't attack people. He tries to win them over. The threats to primary people who are in areas where they are hanging by a thread is a threat to getting rid of Republicans. Even if the party tacks left, if it becomes a tea party type of party and pushes out center Dems, we will see a possible center new party -- neo-liberal with social justice themes -- sort of like the rise of the Republican Party in the 1850s -- anti-slavery, pro-business.

I see a major difference between AOC and Bernie in their approach. Lumping them together is missing some level of differentiation.

Read both articles.


Monday, September 5, 2016

Jacobin: Labor’s Neoliberal Caucus Capitulation - Randi and Crew Are Charter Members

Service Employees International Union (SEIU), both major teachers’ unions — the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) — and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) decided to caucus separately [from the other unions at the DNC].

At this year’s DNC, four major unions solidified some of the most concessionary tendencies within the labor movement... The caucus break represents the culmination of a long, steady trend in American trade unionism toward neoliberal unionism — a unionism that espouses collaboration with corporations instead of conflict and upholds free-market capitalism as reconcilable with labor’s interests..... Jacobin
Mike Schirtzer found this article which delves into the capitulation of our union on so much of the neo-liberal ed deform movement, among other issues.
...the breakaway caucus unions represent a new way of dealing with these types of politicians, shifting from strategic alliances to sycophantic servitude. In pledging allegiance to Clinton so immediately and so fervently, the four breakaway unions appear to have lost the ability to identify labor’s own interests and enemies.
The NEA and AFT, for their part, have also continued to donate profusely to Democrats (over $30 million in the 2012 election cycle alone) while much of the party leads the charge of anti-union and anti-public-education “reform.”
The proliferation of this model of unionism would spell disaster for the American labor movement. Our movement’s success depends on how widely and how militantly we can organize workers to fight corporate power and the 1 percent, not embrace them.
What I find funny about this piece is that it tries to make a case that this is a new thing when those of us in education know that our AFT/NYSUT/UFT capitulated to neo-liberalism a long time ago. Our union was founded almost 60 years ago on the basis of defending the essentials of capitalism even as it devolved into the essentials of free-market, non-regulatory, privatization of government services based neo-liberalism  - as opposed to the FDR New Deal model neo-liberalism aims to destroy.

Also read in the DN: Richard Greenwald: How labor unions lost their way

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/richard-greenwald-labor-unions-lost-article-1.2776359



Labor’s Neoliberal Caucus

Wednesday, June 29, 2016

Explaining the Democratic Party and the UFT: Liberals and Neo-liberalism

https://youtu.be/GD5wa7duofo


There's something underlying the so-called populist reaction to impact of globalization, free markets, open borders, the loss of - or the movement of - jobs from industrialized nations to 3rd world. So we need to explore the concepts of liberalism and how it morphs into today's version, neo-liberalism.

The Clinton/Bernie battle can be boiled down into pro and anti neo-liberalism. 

I'm posting this as a way to dig down on some of the issues that tie our union to the Democratic Party even though it has morphed into the left flank of the Republican Party - so-called Rockefeller Republicans -- but even beyond. Obama and the Clintons and most Democrats today are examples as they have abandoned FDR''s New Deal piece by piece. Bernie on the other hand is a classic New Deal Democrat. Our own union while giving lip-service to New Deal ideals has gone along.

It is no accident that Richard Kahlenberg's "Albert Shanker, Tough Liberal" bio was backed by the union AND Deformer in chief Eli Broad. In our review of the book, Vera Pavone and I rebranded Shanker for what he was - Albert Shanker: Ruthless Neo-Con | New Politics

The bio was aiming to square the union's going along with ed deform as a positive classical liberal idea based on the 1960s concept of liberalism when in reality they were justifying neo-liberalism - the book emphasized Shanker's ties to both Reagan and the Clintons where the basics of ed deform were laid.
One of the tenets of NL: Reagan's "Government not the solution, but the problem." That private can do anything better than government.

Ed deform is the perfect example of neo-liberalism. Get rid of the public schools. Ed deform actually oozes out of every pore. Some elements of neo-liberlism - see if you recognize any in ed deform:
The main points of neo-liberalism include:

Thursday, August 15, 2013

Neo-liberalism and Ed Deform and Krugman on Rand Paul's "Better Dead than Fed"

Ed Deform's connection to neo-liberalism can be defined in one dirty word: CHOICE
CORE in Chicago began with 8 people reading Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine" to try to make sense of what was being done to the schools because so much of it didn't make sense educationally or even rationally, the idea of a grander privatization conspiracy began to make sense. In fact, the only thing that made sense.
Paul Krugman nailed Rand Paul and others of his ilk to the wall in Monday's column, Milton Friedman, Unperson. Some people connect Friedman to the emergence of neoliberalism (see Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine - movie is here) and thus, ed deform which is based on NL.

Krugman doesn't use the term "neoliberal" but has referred to the concept of "shock doctrine" in a 2011 column on Wisconsin's assault on unions where he does give Klein her dibs:
The story of the privatization-obsessed Coalition Provisional Authority [in Iraq] was the centerpiece of Naomi Klein’s best-selling book “The Shock Doctrine,” which argued that it was part of a broader pattern. From Chile in the 1970s onward, she suggested, right-wing ideologues have exploited crises to push through an agenda that has nothing to do with resolving those crises, and everything to do with imposing their vision of a harsher, more unequal, less democratic society. Which brings us to Wisconsin 2011, where the shock doctrine is on full display.
Remember, CORE in Chicago began with 8 people reading Klein's book to try to make sense of what was being done to the schools because so much of it didn't make any sense educationally, the idea of a grander privatization conspiracy began to make sense. In fact, the only thing that made sense.

Before I go on with Krugman's discussion of Milton Friedman, who called for the end of a public school system, I want to point to a thought I've been having: that basically we are seeing that many Republicans and Democrats are ideologically neo-liberals. Obama, the Clintons and so are in many ways are our union leaders, with Randi Weingarten leading the pack. In other words, you won't see UFT/AFT leaders placing the blame where it is due but instead putting it on individuals: Joel Klein, Bloomberg etc instead of educating the membership as what is really happening so they can be better equipped to defend themselves.

[By the way - look at handing principals unfettered power over the staff and Tweed's often non-intervention no matter how abusive the principal is, as the mini form of neo-liberalism.]

Here is some more info on neo-liberalism, a different animal from what is viewed as "left" leaning liberals in this country.
In the U.S. political liberalism has been a strategy to prevent social conflict. It is presented to poor and working people as progressive compared to conservative or Rightwing. Economic liberalism is different. Conservative politicians who say they hate "liberals" -- meaning the political type -- have no real problem with economic liberalism, including neoliberalism.
"Neo" means we are talking about a new kind of liberalism. So what was the old kind? The liberal school of economics became famous in Europe when Adam Smith, an Scottish economist, published a book in 1776 called THE WEALTH OF NATIONS. He and others advocated the abolition of government intervention in economic matters. No restrictions on manufacturing, no barriers to commerce, no tariffs, he said; free trade was the best way for a nation's economy to develop. Such ideas were "liberal" in the sense of no controls. This application of individualism encouraged "free" enterprise," "free" competition -- which came to mean, free for the capitalists to make huge profits as they wished.
See Afterburn for more tenets of neoliberalism and you will recognize so much of ed deform policy.

Now, back to Krugman's piece where he contrasts the libertarianism of Rand Paul with Milton Friedman, actually making Friedman look rational.
August 11, 2013

Milton Friedman, Unperson

Recently Senator Rand Paul, potential presidential candidate and self-proclaimed expert on monetary issues, sat down for an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek. It didn’t go too well. For example, Mr. Paul talked about America running “a trillion-dollar deficit every year”; actually, the deficit is projected to be only $642 billion in 2013, and it’s falling fast.
But the most interesting moment may have been when Mr. Paul was asked whom he would choose, ideally, to head the Federal Reserve and he suggested Milton Friedman — “he’s not an Austrian, but he would be better than what we have.” The interviewer then gently informed him that Friedman — who would have been 101 years old if he were still alive — is, in fact, dead. O.K., said Mr. Paul, “Let’s just go with dead, because then you probably really wouldn’t have much of a functioning Federal Reserve.” 
OK, we've established Rand Paul is an idiot. But Krugman does some interesting analysis of where the right wing Republican nut jobs have gone:
What ever happened to Friedman’s role as a free-market icon? The answer to that question says a lot about what has happened to modern conservatism. For Friedman, who used to be the ultimate avatar of conservative economics, has essentially disappeared from right-wing discourse. Oh, he gets name-checked now and then — but only for his political polemics, never for his monetary theories. Instead, Rand Paul turns to the “Austrian” view of thinkers like Friedrich Hayek — a view Friedman once described as an “atrophied and rigid caricature” — while Paul Ryan, the G.O.P.’s de facto intellectual leader, gets his monetary economics from Ayn Rand, or more precisely from fictional characters in “Atlas Shrugged.”
How did that happen? Friedman, it turns out, was too nuanced and realist a figure for the modern right, which doesn’t do nuance and rejects reality, which has a well-known liberal bias.One way to think about Friedman is that he was the man who tried to save free-market ideology from itself, by offering an answer to the obvious question: “If free markets are so great, how come we have depressions?”

Until he came along, the answer of most conservative economists was basically that depressions served a necessary function and should simply be endured. Hayek, for example, argued that “we may perhaps prevent a crisis by checking expansion in time,” but “we can do nothing to get out of it before its natural end, once it has come.” Such dismal answers drove many economists into the arms of John Maynard Keynes.

Friedman, however, gave a different answer. He was willing to give a little ground, and admit that government action was indeed necessary to prevent depressions. But the required government action, he insisted, was of a very narrow kind: all you needed was an appropriately active Federal Reserve. In particular, he argued that the Fed could have prevented the Great Depression — with no need for new government programs — if only it had acted to save failing banks and pumped enough reserves into the banking system to prevent a sharp decline in the money supply.

This was, as I said, a move toward realism (although it looks wrong in the light of recent experience). But realism has no place in today’s Republican Party: both Mr. Paul and Mr. Ryan have furiously attacked Ben Bernanke for responding to the 2008 financial crisis by doing exactly what Friedman said the Fed should have done in the 1930s — advice he repeated to the Bank of Japan in 2000. “There is nothing more insidious that a country can do to its citizens,” Mr. Ryan lectured Mr. Bernanke, “than debase its currency.”

Oh, and while we’re on the subject of debasing currencies: one of Friedman’s most enduring pieces of straight economic analysis was his 1953 argument in favor of flexible exchange rates, in which he argued that countries finding themselves with excessively high wages and prices relative to their trading partners — like the nations of southern Europe today — would be better served by devaluing their currencies than by enduring years of high unemployment “until the deflation has run its sorry course.” Again, there’s no room for that kind of pragmatism in a party in which many members hanker for a return to the gold standard.

Now, I don’t want to put Friedman on a pedestal. In fact, I’d argue that the experience of the past 15 years, first in Japan and now across the Western world, shows that Keynes was right and Friedman was wrong about the ability of unaided monetary policy to fight depressions. The truth is that we need a more activist government than Friedman was willing to countenance.

The point, however, is that modern conservatism has moved so far to the right that it no longer has room for even small concessions to reality. Friedman tried to save free-market conservatism from itself — but the ideologues who now dominate the G.O.P. are beyond saving.
When Krugman says, "The truth is that we need a more activist government than Friedman was willing to countenance," he is talking about economic intervention. The education community has seen the disaster capitalism of an activist federal, state and local government and I wish Krugman would one day give his attention to that. The common core has put both the anti-ed deform real reformers and the ultra-right anti-government wing-nuts (Glenn Beck) on the same side.

If Krugman could untangle that know he should get another Nobel Prize.

AFTERBURN 
Note how the merger mania in the airlines leads to LESS choice, higher prices and worse service. Whatever works for profits.

Some tenets of neo-liberalism as described by Elizabeth Martinez and Arnoldo Garcia at CORP WATCH:

The main points of neo-liberalism include:
  1. THE RULE OF THE MARKET. Liberating "free" enterprise or private enterprise from any bonds imposed by the government (the state) no matter how much social damage this causes. Greater openness to international trade and investment, as in NAFTA. Reduce wages by de-unionizing workers and eliminating workers' rights that had been won over many years of struggle. No more price controls. All in all, total freedom of movement for capital, goods and services. To convince us this is good for us, they say "an unregulated market is the best way to increase economic growth, which will ultimately benefit everyone." It's like Reagan's "supply-side" and "trickle-down" economics -- but somehow the wealth didn't trickle down very much.
  2. CUTTING PUBLIC EXPENDITURE FOR SOCIAL SERVICES like education and health care. REDUCING THE SAFETY-NET FOR THE POOR, and even maintenance of roads, bridges, water supply -- again in the name of reducing government's role. Of course, they don't oppose government subsidies and tax benefits for business.
  3. DEREGULATION. Reduce government regulation of everything that could diminsh profits, including protecting the environment and safety on the job.
  4. PRIVATIZATION. Sell state-owned enterprises, goods and services to private investors. This includes banks, key industries, railroads, toll highways, electricity, schools, hospitals and even fresh water. Although usually done in the name of greater efficiency, which is often needed, privatization has mainly had the effect of concentrating wealth even more in a few hands and making the public pay even more for its needs.
  5. ELIMINATING THE CONCEPT OF "THE PUBLIC GOOD" or "COMMUNITY" and replacing it with "individual responsibility." Pressuring the poorest people in a society to find solutions to their lack of health care, education and social security all by themselves -- then blaming them, if they fail, as "lazy."