Good Morning 99%'ers! Today marks the sixth edition in my series on neo-liberalism. To be honest, I never thought this series of essays would go on this long, but it seems to be a never ending wealth of information out there on the black hole ideology that is neo-liberalism.

Just when we thought it could not get any worse, Hillary Clinton announced while campaigning in Kentucky that when she is elected that she intends to put her husband, former President Bill Clinton in charge of revitalizing the economy.

Campaigning in Kentucky recently, she promised that, should she be elected, she would task former president Bill Clinton with “revitalizing the economy, because he knows how to do it”. A few minutes before, she had recited her husband’s qualifications for this job: “In the 90s, everybody’s income went up, not just people at the top. We lifted more people out of poverty than at any time in our recent history.” And so on.

If you can bear to watch, here is the video of that speech. I will be honest that I have not watched it because I cannot stand to listen to her for more than about five seconds. Part of it is her voice, but mostly it is because I know she is just self serving and corrupt and not a single word out of her mouth should be believed. However, I will accept numerous written reports that this is what she said in that video.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJgJfE40ZrU]

The idea of having Bill Clinton in charge of revitalization of the economy presents a horrifying scenario to those who know just how destructive the policies enacted under his administration have proven over the long term. On Monday, May 23, Bob Swern posted two diaries over at the other place based upon columns written by Thomas Frank and Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism. Both writers were adamant that Bill Clinton should not be allowed anywhere near the economy after all the damage he did during his own administration. Yves Smith did a nice summary of exactly why Bill Clinton's policies were so destructive to our economy in the long term.

In an article, written nearly one year ago, the staff of the Alternet listed fifteen ways Bill Clinton failed the United States and the world. I suggest you follow the link in this paragraph to read what the Alternet staff had to say.

In my May 18, 2015 essay last week, I referenced a May 15, 2016 interview between Truthout and Thomas Frank on Bill Clinton's legacy. I am going to post a quote from that article again this week because, in light of Hillary Clinton's announcement, it serves as another reminder of the danger of having Bill Clinton in charge of the economy again, should Hillary Clinton become elected President.

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.

Each of these five major achievements of the Clinton administration was not only a long standing Republican objective, but also each one represents one of the characteristics of neo-liberalism which was the focus of my May 11, 2016 essay. These characteristics were defined in an article written by Elizabeth Martinez and Arnoldo Garcia for Corporate Watch.

Here is a brief summary of those five characteristics of neo-liberalism, in light of which I will review Bill Clinton's five major achievements during his administration.

THE RULE OF THE MARKET.
CUTTING PUBLIC EXPENDITURE FOR SOCIAL SERVICES and REDUCING THE SAFETY-NET FOR THE POOR.
DEREGULATION.
PRIVATIZATION.
ELIMINATING THE CONCEPT OF "THE PUBLIC GOOD" or "COMMUNITY."

So let's look at the five of Bill Clinton's major achievements and how they relate to the neo-liberal agenda based upon the characteristics of neo-liberalism.

1. NAFTA

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.

It has been over twenty years since NAFTA was enacted so we have a very good picture of how much harm the lifting of trade barriers has done. The goal of NAFTA was to eliminate trade barriers, such as tariffs between the United States, Canada, and Mexico. NAFTA was sold to the American people as a way to increase jobs and benefits for US workers. Bill Clinton specifically promised that NAFTA would create 200,000 new living wage jobs each year. In fact, the opposite happened almost immediately as corporations began shedding jobs in the US for lower wage jobs in Mexico and depressing wages and benefits thus increasing income and wealth inequality.

In an article in the Huffington Post dated March, 2014, the author lists the long term impacts of NAFTA. These impacts include the loss of over one million US jobs, mostly in manufacturing and a $181 billion trade deficit with Canada and Mexico. In addition, NAFTA has led to an escalation in income inequality and the displacement of over one million Mexican campesino farmers.

The study makes for a blood-boiling read. For instance, we track the specific promises made by U.S. corporations like GE, Chrysler and Caterpillar to create specific numbers of American jobs if NAFTA was approved, and reveal government data showing that instead, they fired U.S. workers and moved operations to Mexico.

The data also show how post-NAFTA trade and investment trends have contributed to middle-class pay cuts, which in turn contributed to growing income inequality; how since NAFTA, U.S. trade deficit growth with Mexico and Canada has been 45 percent higher than with countries not party to a U.S. Free Trade Agreement, and how U.S. manufacturing exports to Canada and Mexico have grown at less than half the pre-NAFTA rate.

2. Crime Bill of 1994

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."

The 1994 Crime Bill provided for increased policing, tougher sentencing laws, and more money to build prisons. The result of the 1994 has been mass incarceration, with minority communities suffering greatly. It has come with a huge human cost. With tougher sentencing laws and the criminalization of what once were minor offenses, the net effect of the 1994 Crime Bill has been to create a huge under class of people in this country with no hope of ever getting a second chance.

"We now know with the fullness of time that we made some terrible mistakes," Travis said. "And those mistakes were to ramp up the use of prison. And that big mistake is the one that we now, 20 years later, come to grips with. We have to look in the mirror and say, 'look what we have done.'"

Nick Turner of Vera put the human costs even more starkly.

"If you're a black baby born today, you have a 1 in 3 chance of spending some time in prison or jail," Turner said. "If you're Latino, it's a 1 in 6 chance. And if you're white, it's 1 in 17. And so coming to terms with these disparities and reversing them, I would argue, is not only a matter of fairness and justice but it's, I would argue, a matter of national security."

3. Welfare Reform

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.

In keeping with the neo-liberal ideology that everyone should be able to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, Clinton's welfare reform ignored the structural issues that reinforce the cycle of poverty. In addition, the effect of Clinton's Welfare reform was to penalize poverty. Welfare reform worked hand in hand with the crime bill by taking money away from the social safety net and funneling it into more policing and prisons.

His primary goal in dismantling AFDC, as he put it, was to end the “cycle of dependence” and “achieve a national welfare reform bill that will make work and responsibility the law of the land.”

Clinton did not offer a departure from either earlier liberal policies that blamed the poor for their poverty or neoliberal economics. Instead, he turned what had been a few piecemeal reforms into a systematic overhaul of federal policy that led to the criminalization of the welfare poor. He redirected state resources away from financial support for the needy and toward surveillance and criminalization.

4. Deregulation of banks and telecoms

DEREGULATION. Reduce government regulation of everything that could diminsh profits, including protecting the environmentand safety on the job.

While we all are familiar with the repeal of Glass-Steagall, many people are not aware of the impact of deregulation of the telecoms. Clinton hailed the deregulation of the telecoms as something that would foster competition by removing barriers to ownership. So what happened? Here is just one example. Let this sink in for a moment. And it continues across all forms of the telecommunications industry.

By 2001, there were 10,000 radio station transactions worth approximately $100 billion. As a result, 1,100 fewer station owners were in the business, down nearly 30 percent since 1996. Two companies -- Clear Channel and Viacom's Infinity Broadcasting -- controlled one-third of all radio advertising revenue; in some individual markets their stations commanded nearly 90 percent of the ad dollars. Clear Channel alone owned nearly 1,200 stations, the result of buying up 70 separate broadcast companies.

As far as the repeal of Glass/Steagall, which had previously separated commercial banking from investment banking, both Hillary and Bill Clinton have argued that its repeal was not the cause of the banking crisis and the great recession of 2008. But here is an interesting quote from an article by Charles Pierce in Esquire magazine.

Greider goes on to quote a former Citigroup CEO named John Reed, who makes an interesting point about what happened within the culture of banking after the walls of Glass-Steagall were removed.

"Mixing incompatible cultures is a problem all by itself," Reed wrote. "It makes the entire finance industry more fragile…. As is now clear, traditional banking attracts one kind of talent, which is entirely different from the kinds drawn towards investment banking and trading. Traditional bankers tend to be extroverts, sociable people who are focused on longer term relationships. They are, in many important respects, risk averse. Investment bankers and their traders are more short termist. They are comfortable with, and many even seek out, risk and are more focused on immediate reward." Reed concludes, "As I have reflected about the years since 1999, I think the lessons of Glass-Steagall and its repeal suggest that the universal banking model is inherently unstable and unworkable. No amount of restructuring, management change or regulation is ever likely to change that."

5. Balanced budget.

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.

For this one, I return to Thomas Frank who has such a wonderful way of articulating issues in a language that we all can understand. In his recent article in the Guardian, Thomas Frank explains the myriad of reasons why Bill Clinton should not be allowed near the economy. When it comes to a balanced budget, he begins with a quote from Hillary Clinton herself and then takes it from there.

It seems that Hillary, too, longs to make America great again, and she reminded the audience in Kentucky of the specific elements of our lost golden age. First among those gauzy memories: “A budget that is balanced and in surplus” – like the budget Bill Clinton built in the good old days before the spendthrift George W Bush administration came in.

So what does a balanced budget do to a nation in recession? Frank explains that too in very simple terms.

Take her apparent belief that balancing the federal budget is a good way to “revitalize” an economy stuck in persistent hard times. Nostalgia might indeed suggest such a course, because that’s what Bill Clinton did in the golden 90s, and those were happy days. But more recent events have taught us a different lesson. Europe’s turn toward budget-balancing austerity after the financial crisis is what made their recession so much worse than ours. President Obama’s own quest for a budget-balancing “grand bargain” is what destroyed his presidency’s transformative potential. There is no plainer lesson from the events of recent years than the folly of austerity and the non-urgency of budget-balancing.

So do we really want a staunch neo-liberal like Bill Clinton in charge of our economy? I think not. Heck, I know not. Neo-liberalism is the ideology that has destroyed our economy for the average person and funnels wealth upwards.

As always, this is an open thread so feel free to post whatever is on your mind this morning.