Good Morning, 99%'ers!

Just when you thought it could not get any more depressing, we're back again this morning with more discussion on neo-liberalism, featuring Barack Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton.

For those who may be interested in how this series has progressed, here are some links. Part one, titled the Curse of Neo-liberalism, was based in large part upon an article by George Monbiot. Part two expanded upon the first essay and included a definition of neo-liberalism. Part three titled, the Neo-liberal Myth of Meritocracy, examined the basic foundational belief behind the neo-liberal ideology. Part four, the Characteristics of Neo-liberalism, lists the five main characteristics of the neo-liberal ideology.

After last week's essay, I noticed several people stated that they had a problem with the term "neo-liberalism." This term was the one adopted by the early neo-liberals here in the United States. First, I want to thank Crone Wit who sent me a link to an article written by Corey Robin. Professor Robin explains the history behind the neo-liberal ideology in the United States. I am sure that most of us will recognize most, if not all of these names.

Now, neoliberalism, of course, can mean a great many things, many of them associated with the right. But one of its meanings—arguably, in the United States, the most historically accurate—is the name that a small group of journalists, intellectuals, and politicians on the left gave to themselves in the late 1970s in order to register their distance from the traditional liberalism of the New Deal and the Great Society. The original neoliberals included, among others, Michael Kinsley, Charles Peters, James Fallows, Nicholas Lemann, Bill Bradley, Bruce Babbitt, Gary Hart, and Paul Tsongas. Sometimes called “Atari Democrats,” these were the men—and they were almost all men—who helped to remake American liberalism into neoliberalism, culminating in the election of Bill Clinton in 1992.

Understanding the neo-liberal ideology explains why Hillary Clinton and most of the current political establishment seem hell bent on jettisoning the New Deal and continuing to pursue the destructive policies of the neo-liberalism. And there really is not much difference between neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism. Neo-liberalism is capitalism on steroids and it is not very liberal in the way those of us on the left define "liberal." Neo-consevatism is American exceptionalism on steroids. The two ideologies exist in a symbiotic relationship with one another. Over the years, they have become simply two sides to the same coin.

The “neocons” believe American greatness is measured by our willingness to be a great power—through vast and virtually unlimited global military involvement. Other nations’ problems invariably become our own because history and fate have designated America the world’s top authority.

This is why it was not at all shocking to hear Charles Koch say that he was open to supporting Hillary Clinton and thought she would make a better President than Donald Trump.

Mr. Koch spoke somewhat fondly of former President Bill Clinton, suggesting he held down government spending and regulation compared with his successor, President George W. Bush. He called Mr. Bush “a fine person, and tried to do the right thing but was misguided.”

Nor is it shocking that Hillary Clinton has no use for Sanders supporters, but is instead courting the Bush donors. There is very little differentiation between the Clintons, Obama, and the Bushes. Once we understand neo-liberalism, we can understand exactly why Clinton will never give anything more than cursory lip service to the policies that Bernie Sanders is promoting.

In the comments during last week's essay, lotlizard posted a link to an article by the always excellent, Robert Parry. From that article, here is what Parry wrote.

Today, the dangerous “dead ideas” are neoconservatism and its close ally, neoliberalism. These are concepts that have organized American foreign policy and economics, respectively, over the past several decades – and they have failed miserably, at least from the perspective of average Americans and people of the nations on the receiving end of these ideologies.

Neither approach has benefited mankind; both have led to untold death and destruction; yet the twin “neos” have built such a powerful propaganda and political apparatus, especially in Official Washington, that they will surely continue to wreak havoc for years to come. They are zombie ideas and they kill.

On a social level, neo-liberalism has been marketed to the masses as a system that will provide more individual freedom and control of one's own destiny. In my own personal experience with the training we received in the 1990's in local government, it was called a new paradigm of the way we would be operating in the work place and that would be based upon competition. What resulted was not more individual freedom, but something that systematically destroyed personal security for large numbers of people.

At the individual-level, neoliberalism insists that rationality, individuality, and self-interest guide all actions (Peters 2001). In fact, neoliberalism often views itself as a global social science capable of explaining all human behavior since all behavior is thought to be directed by logical, individualistic, and selfish goals. Neoliberalism’s focus on the individual means that ideas related to things such as “the public good” and “the community” are now being discarded as unnecessary components of a welfare state (Martinez and García 2000). Unsurprisingly, then, unemployment, inequality, and poverty have become increasingly blamed on individuals rather than on structural constraints (Passas 2000). Because we are turning away from the role of the community and instead focusing solely on individuals, Bourdieu (1999a) contends that social problems like suicide, alcoholism, depression, and domestic violence will consequently become increasingly prominent. Still, the outward attractiveness of individual freedom, prosperity, and growth makes it challenging for the public to realize that neoliberalism is designed to benefit only a very small class of people (Harvey 2005). Such a worldview also makes it easier to justify the thought that some people are deserving of much more than others because, after all, it is a common refrain that we are all responsible for our own destinies.

This past Sunday, May15, Truthout had a wonderful interview with Thomas Frank, author of Listen, Liberal, in which he describes the current Democratic party establishment as thoroughly neo-liberal and how they have transformed the Democratic party into the party of the wealthy.

Obama thinks such people should be in charge because they came up through the same system as him. "Because he himself was a product of the great American postwar meritocracy," his biographer Jonathan Alter writes, "he could never fully escape seeing the world from the status ladder he had ascended."

Most of our other Democratic leaders (the Clintons, for example) came up the same way and believe the same thing. Indeed, what Alter describes is standard-issue stuff for Democrats these days. The Democrats are a class party in the fullest sense of the phrase, and the class whose perspective they reflect and whose interests they serve is the highly educated, white-collar professional class. Theirs is a liberalism of the rich.

I distinctly remember when Obama appointed the Cat Food Commission and being naive as I was back then, I asked myself why would a Democratic President appoint a special commission to reduce the deficit when so many people were suffering from the great recession? It should have been obvious that since Obama is a neo-liberal, he really did not care to address the rapidly growing ranks of the poor in this nation.

President Obama’s Deficit Commission is all smoke and mirrors. Its members are making a big show of laboring over "painful" choices and considering all options in their quest to bring down the deficit. But inside the Beltway everyone knows what’s going to happen: The commission will reduce the deficit on the backs of the old and the poor, through cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Some opponents have taken to calling it the Cat Food Commission, since that’s what its victims will be forced to eat once the commission gets done slashing away at their modest entitlements.

In his interview, Thomas Frank discussed what he called the "Hillary Doctrine" in which she promoted "microlending" to help build female entrepreneurship as a way to solve the world's economic problems. Such a belief is an extension of pulling oneself up by one's own bootstraps and ignores the structural problems that heavily promote economic inequality.

You can see the appeal of this movement: It's telling you that the solution to poverty is not unions or government or anything like that, but for everyone to work hard and start their own businesses -- and, incidentally, to extend the reach of Western financial institutions to every village on the planet. A pure win-win. Everyone feels good. Everyone feels virtuous.

Except for the people who live in those countries, of course, because they know it doesn't work.

When asked about Bill Clinton, Frank clearly assesses Clinton's five major achievements of his administration. Each one of these is clearly in line with the neo-liberal ideology and has had a lasting negative impact upon the people of the United States.

Truthout:This is a little off message regarding the book, but can you speculate why the Republicans were so obsessed with removing Clinton from office when he was fulfilling so much of the GOP agenda, including negotiating with Newt Gingrich about cutting Medicare and Social Security?

Frank: "Fulfilling so much of the GOP agenda": That is a point worth reiterating. Clinton had five major achievements as president: NAFTA, the Crime Bill of 1994, welfare reform, the deregulation of banks and telecoms, and the balanced budget. All of them -- every single one -- were longstanding Republican objectives. His smaller achievements were more traditionally Democratic (he raised the earned-income tax credit and the minimum wage), but his big accomplishments all enacted conservative wishes, and then all of them ended in disaster.

While Ronald Reagan set the stage for neo-liberalism with his trickle down economics, it was a Democrat, Bill Clinton, who pushed through the neo-liberal agenda that continues to do much harm to people in the United States. George W Bush continued that agenda with his neo-con regime change wars. Obama has furthered the Bush wars, failed to rein in Wall Street, installed the Affordable Care Act, pushed huge trade deals, and placed the social safety net on the bargaining table when negotiating with the Republicans over the budget. If Hillary Clinton becomes elected, she will continue the disastrous combination of her husband's, Geroge W. Bush's, and Barack Obama's neo-liberal policies with a healthy dash of neo-conservative war making and regime change. No wonder PNAC founder and full throated neo-con, Robert Kagan is a major supporter of hers.