Tag Archives: neoliberalism

Political Rants

About casting lead upon the waters

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You have heard this from me before, but I’ll say it again – in broad strokes, Biden’s foreign policy is kind of awful. We knew this was coming back during the 2020 presidential campaign, when Biden’s web site had near-zero entries for foreign affairs. What I should have included in my ad-hoc assessment is his tendency to create policy off-the-cuff. This may be the only trait he shares with Trump – leading with his mouth.

Sure, I’m deeply concerned about Biden’s foot-dragging on reestablishing the Iran nuclear deal, his disinclination to revisit Obama’s Cuba policy, and his refusal to bury the hatchet with Afghanistan in some respect. But Biden’s tendency to speak personally about public policy is bringing us close to the brink of global war, and that’s not a good place to be. No, he’s not as nuts as Trump was. I think, though, that the world takes what Biden says a bit more seriously.

Pivot to aggression

You probably heard about Biden’s comments regarding Taiwan. I have to think that he raised this issue intentionally, as many both inside and outside the administration have elevated the China/Taiwan issue since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Roughly speaking, the feeling early on was that Russian success might encourage Beijing to move against the island. Most of what I heard on this score was a lot of hand waving, but the fact that that story has been out there says something about our Asia policy.

The Democratic party foreign policy establishment has been anxious to make their “pivot to Asia” since the mid Obama years. That characterization always struck me as odd and belligerent, summoning the image of a corpsman turning on his heel to point his weapon eastward (once again). I have to think that Asians were about as excited over this as Africans were over Bush’s announcement of the “Africa Command” back in the 2000s (or as Martians were over Trump’s announcement of the “Space Force”). But the focus, as always, is ascending China, and not so much the self-determination of Taiwan.

Countering what, exactly?

There’s plenty that China does that should be criticized, but is it a budding military hegemon? Not likely. The press’s hair was on fire over the story that China has more military vessels than we do. Numerically true, but (a) they are predominately smaller ships than the U.S. has, and (b) the calculation doesn’t take into account forces allied to the U.S. military. (See this article in The Diplomat.) The United States has an enormous presence in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, maintaining hundreds of bases and fleets of vessels many thousands of miles from its national territory. Can China make that claim?

Last year Biden announced a joint plan with the British to sell nuclear submarines to Australia. Again, this is more about China than Australia. The United States is trying to head off regional consolidation in the Asia Pacific region under the leadership of China. Obama tried to pull China’s neighbors into the Trans Pacific Partnership, another neoliberal multilateral investment agreement along the lines of NAFTA, the MAI, and others. Now Biden is trying an opt-in, a la carte type of pact that is explicitly not neoliberal (this is what his administration claims). Their hope is to get more people behind the pact, of course. (TPP went down in flames.)

Block v. block

The core of this dispute is not democracy; it’s economics. Washington’s nightmare scenario has long been the rise of China as an economic power to the point of displacing us as the center of the global economy. That they are willing to flirt with military conflict is obvious, and it speaks volumes about our leaders’ priorities.

World War II rose from a world divided into competing trading blocks – the dollar block, the sterling block, etc. We should learn from that bitter experience.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Putting power back in its place

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Labor has been on the back foot for decades now. I am old enough to remember the Reagan turn – even the Carter and Nixon administrations, frankly. The serious move towards neoliberal economics got rolling under Carter, who was fond of deregulation and austerity. He also started a steady increase in military spending towards the end of his term – a trend that Reagan accelerated in the years that followed.

Those were not good years for workers. Firing the PATCO air traffic controllers was just a start. The union movement in the United States continued to lose ground throughout the 1980s and 1990s, when Clinton took the baton from Reagan/Bush and more fully implemented the vision of corporatism and a general attack on the rights of working people. There were a few glimmers of light in the darkness – the UPS strike in 1997, the anti globalization movement around the same time. But Thatcher’s contention that there was no alternative to capitalism continued to prevail. Until it didn’t.

Learning from teachers

We are now in the midst of a resurgence of labor organizing the likes of which we haven’t seen for decades. You could see evidence of it in some of the activism rooted in Occupy Wall Street, as well as the movement around Bernie Sanders’ campaigns. But what’s happening today is the product of a lot of hard work on the part of organizers across the country. One of the first and most dramatic examples of this was the start of the teacher’s strikes in 2018.

Now, I don’t think there are many professions in the United States that are more roundly abused than teachers. In most public school districts, they are given inadequate resources, paid poorly, and expected to compensate for all of society’s failings. When teachers rose up in 2018, including in districts that were not unionized, it put the neoliberals on notice. Even now, with the pitched attack against teaching children about race, sexual orientation, or anything salient in American history, teachers are still successfully challenging their bosses. There’s a lesson in that for all of us.

New economy, new tactics

Like many people, I first heard about Christian Smalls during the first months of COVID, when Amazon fired him for demanding that they take action to protect their workers. Over the almost two years that followed, he and his colleagues organized independently of any major unions and won. What they’ve done should serve as a blueprint for organizers across the country. That behemoth of a company drastically underestimated Smalls and his co-workers – not surprising. One of the oldest stories in the world.

Then there are the Starbucks workers. I heard some of these young people interviewed on Michael Moore’s Rumble podcast, and I was impressed not only with their energy and enthusiasm but by their deep understanding of the power relationship between workers and owners. This is more than inspiring, though. This movement is a promising sign of things to come, driven by a generation that has seen a lot of financial hardship over the last two decades.

Shake them upside-down

So what can we do? Support labor organizing in your area and nationwide, in whatever way you can. Push for a more favorable legal and regulatory environment in which people can exercise their fundamental rights as workers. And, last but not least, compel a reluctant Democratic party to change the tax laws so that billionaires cannot even exist. Call it the “shake them upside-down” law.

Finally … something to feel good about. Let’s build on it.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.

Political Rants

Making The case for Postal banking.

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The end of the eviction moratorium this past week and the response by the Squad says a lot about the limitations of the administrative state. Mass evictions should not be a problem. The large COVID relief package passed last year included something like $40 billion in rental assistance, distributed to the states. As of now, only about $3 billion has been allocated to the people who need the help. That’s maybe 8%.

What the fuck? Why is it that when we go through the ridiculously baroque process of applying federal funds to a problem like this, the money often doesn’t get spent? David Dayen talked about this a bit on the Majority Report on Monday. Put simply, after decades of neoliberal attack on the administrative state, the means of getting government aid to people are sclerotic and dysfunctional.

Loudest voice in the room

There’s a reason why we have such an atomized, ineffective system for helping poor and working people. Ordinary people don’t have armies of lobbyists at their disposal. The eviction moratorium is a good illustration of this. The 7 to 11 million people who were at risk of homelessness as a result of the moratorium’s end are underrepresented. Their landlords, by and large, are anything but.

The difference this time around was that a formerly un-housed person became a member of the House of Representatives. Cory Bush, along with some of her allies, became, in effect, lobbyists for renters. And, amazingly, they were successful. Though I know the thought of it is intensely painful to many armchair leftists on Twitter, we should celebrate this small victory, because it is significant. In so doing, however, we must bear in mind that money still talks very, very loudly.

Why we need postal banking

What do we do about a system that easily transfers billions to corporate bankers but can’t seem to manage rent relief for people in trouble? Well, we need some method for delivering direct payments to Americans in a reliable, low-friction way. In my humble opinion, that method is setting up postal banking.

As many of you may know, postal banking is not a new idea. In fact, the Postal Service offered banking services back when I was a little shaver. The idea I prefer is one that is a bit broader than the old version. My preferred version is this: Every American – and I mean every one – gets a postal banking account. Just like getting a Social Security number, they open an account for you when you are born and you have it all your life. It would be a free, interest bearing account that allows for savings, electronic transfers, etc.

My personal preference would be that the Federal Government deposit some amount, say fifty bucks, as a little birthday gift for every newborn. But whether or not that comes to pass, your postal bank account would serve as the deposit account for any federal benefit payments. Now, if you prefer to use a private bank account, you can always transfer your funds to that bank, even set up auto transfers. But no matter what, that account would be there for you.

Put some bank in the reconciliation bill

I think this is an idea whose time has come. It would make the transfer of that $40 billion in rental assistance dead simple. It would give poor and working people access to banking services. It would, in short, make an enormous difference, and help float our beloved Postal Service as well.

Let’s put it in the reconciliation package, people! Call your reps!

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

To the rescue.

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Congress approved the 1.9 trillion-dollar COVID rescue package this week, and while the final version didn’t include everything I would liked to have seen in the bill, there’s some decent stuff in there. What’s more, it is generally on a scale that approaches that of the problems we face. This is a departure, and one would hope a trend, away from the post-Reagan neoliberal consensus and towards a broader notion of what government may be called upon to accomplish on behalf of ordinary people. We have often heard pundits spin a false dichotomy between “big government liberalism” and “small government conservatism” – the fact is, conservatives and the right more generally are all in favor of big government, so long as it serves the interests of the powerful. The fact that the rescue package turns this on its head is an indication of how far we’ve come in recent years, despite all the resistance.

We’re overdue for that sort of turn, frankly. We’ve been living in the Reagan economic universe for forty years – essentially my entire adult life – with labor under siege, bloated military budgets, corporate-friendly multilateral investor rights agreements (popularly known as “free trade agreements”), and imperial swagger on the world stage. Obviously one bill is not going to change all of that, but it’s a step in the right direction, and a relatively bold one at that, compared to what we’re used to. Sure, the COBRA subsidies are kind of stupid and a massively inefficient way to extend health insurance to unemployed people. Sure, the checks should have been $2000 because that’s what everyone – including Trump – was calling for just after the election. Sure, they should have kept the $15 minimum wage because it was a solid provision that would have pegged the rate to inflation instead of giving employers a gradually increasing discount on the cost of labor. But what’s there is mostly good.

Biden and others have said that provisions in this bill will cut child poverty in half. I think that’s great, but it’s kind of like dividing the baby. If we can cut it in half, how about spending more and eliminating it entirely? So much of what’s in the legislation addresses inequality in a substantive way, but the solutions are almost all temporary ones. It’s incumbent on progressives to push the administration and Congress to build these initiatives out into more permanent benefits. We will see what kind of an effect this bill will have on families and individuals. If it’s dramatic enough, that could create the kind of popular momentum needed to push a broader agenda forward. We know what some of that will look like – the minimum wage, labor reforms, etc. We need a wealth tax, not so much to generate revenue (it will do that) but to reduce inequality and lessen the power and influence of the ultra wealthy. I’m talking about an upper limit on assets – something well south of a billion dollars. That’s the kind of tax system we need.

This could have come out much worse, and I think a lot of credit is due progressives like Bernie Sanders and some of the great people in the House. Their fingerprints are all over the more progressive pieces of this, and that’s cause for celebration.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Child’s play.

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Experiencing the miracle of America’s largely employer-based health care system, so revered by the likes of Joe Biden and others. The bills from my visit to the hospital two weeks ago have started rolling in. The price tag on an ambulance ride provided by our taxpayer-supported fire department? Close to $800. (First time I’ve ever used the service, by the way.) Based on the billing, this service appears to be at least partially outsourced – the bill was accompanied by a form that I had seven days to return if I wanted them to bill my insurance company. Glad I’m fully recovered and able to respond to my mail!

Meanwhile, I’m watching in horror as our child-president noodles around with this pandemic as if it were an H.O. scale train set. His recent advocacy for ingesting disinfectants is illustrative of almost everything that is wrong with this particular chief executive. Despite his lame gaslighting attempt at claiming that his comments were meant sarcastically, Trump was obviously proud of his idea, looking for validation from his medical specialists, and basically pathetically showboating like a five year old. He is owlishly grasping for imaginary miracle cures that will extract him from the tremendous mess he and his administration have created through a breathtaking combination of incompetence and an ideological commitment to the deconstruction of the administrative state.

I want to be clear about Trump – he is all of our worst tendencies, rolled up into a big, fat, greasy ball of slime. He is Little Lord Fauntleroy, born into privilege and yet always feeling slighted and resentful. And all you workers who voted for this shit bag, be advised: he’s never worked an honest day in his life. All that said, he’s just the hood ornament on the Cadillac of destruction that is the Republican party and the neoliberal tendency in American politics more generally. As the Majority Report’s Sam Seder recently pointed out, Trump didn’t just wake up in the middle of the night and insist that we have to disband the pandemic response team in the National Security Council. That idea was served up to him by John Bolton and others, the intellectual architects of the current crisis. Recall Mick Mulvaney’s critique of Meals on Wheels – the program is a failure because there are still hungry old people out there. Destruction of the pandemic response (really, anticipation) infrastructure is part of that same logic. Who wants a bunch of scientists hanging around waiting for something to do?

We need to get rid of Trump. But we also need to get rid of the party that created him. And we need to defeat the neoliberal governance movement that will survive Trump when he’s finally gone. As bad as our child clown fascist president may be, they are worse than him … and they, my friends, have got to go.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Song of Roland.

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ISIS has lost its leader. So … that’s that? When are the leaders of my country going to work this decentralized model of resistance out? It’s not that these are leaderless movements per se. Al-Baghdadi was a founder and a leader of his grisly movement. But the relationship between his organization and the broader base of jihadists across the region and around the globe is loose at best. As Ted Rall once put it, it’s a bit like the relationship between a Rolling Stones tribute band and the Rolling Stones themselves. And like Warren Zevon’s Roland, cutting off the head won’t kill it:

The eternal Thompson gunner still wanders through the night
Now it’s ten years later, but he still puts up a fight
In Ireland, in Lebanon, in Palestine and Berkeley …

Had enough in Iraq ... and Chile, and Lebanon, and ...

I feel somewhat the same way about the Trump presidency. Getting Trump out of office is not going to be some kind of magic bullet. I keep hearing pundits talk about people wanting to return to normal, go back to brunch with the gang, and have a few mimosas. All that means is a return to what they consider normal, which is the slow decline into destitution, destruction, and environmental degradation. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to suppose that we will be right back here, with a different proto-fascist president, in another four years if we don’t take the bold steps that are needed to support workers, promote peace, and save the planet from total ruin.

Let’s face it – we’re coming up against the first-world version of what we see people around the world resisting in the millions, in Chile, Lebanon, Iraq, Sudan, Haiti, and elsewhere. As happened in the wake of the 2007-8 financial crisis, the neoliberal capitalist house of cards is falling in on itself again, failing an increasing number of people in profound and deeply unjust ways, particularly in these developing nations that have been subjected to structural adjustment policies for decades on end. The Lebanese have simply had it, as have the Iraqis, the Chileans, etc. When people can no longer afford to live day to day, there is nothing left but to link arms and demand change.

We need more than a little bit of that here. We can’t wait until people here feel the level of pain that’s being felt in Beirut. We need to get out and march like the Chicago teachers, carry Bernie to victory, and push a progressive agenda hard as hell. A million mutinies now!

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Walls and bridges.

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Another new year, but still the same bullshit: Trump wants to make one of his rhetorical flourishes a reality because he’s afraid of losing his base, and he wants us to pay for it. Welcome to sunny Mexico, my friends. The various pundits and politicians go back and forth on whether Trump’s wall is actually a wall (as the president has said many times) or a metaphor for something called “border security”, which everyone seems to agree with but no one can define. I think they’re missing the obvious answer – Trump is talking about a real “wall”, but the fact that he talks about it is itself a metaphor. He wants to build a big wall that will represent the separation barrier between white and brown people.

On the white side of historyThis is the program Trump inherited from other Republicans like Tom Tancredo, Mitt Romney, and many more.  Obama’s first term, in particular, was an extreme accommodation to it as well. That’s likely because the big lie about invading armies of dark people is an effective distraction for disaffected workers. The bipartisan neoliberal economic experiment that’s been underway for the last forty years is a total failure for working people in this country; Trump is working to deepen that failure, and the only way a politician can maintain some measure of popularity while conducting these deeply unpopular policies is by encouraging working-class white people to blame brown people for all their troubles.

Of course, the lie needs to grow more elaborate with every passing year, reaching remarkable levels of implausibility and ridiculousness and yet they still draw on the old, familiar themes: criminality, disease, uncleanliness. Trump doesn’t dog whistle this stuff – he just says it right out loud. Dog whistles are too subtle to work these days, I suspect. You need a bull horn to drown out the din of an economy that enriches only the rich, despite their claims of full employment. Many millions are out of the workforce and no longer counted; millions more have taken poorly paid jobs or are driving Uber. Wages are stagnant. Trump needs his wall to keep you from noticing how badly this system sucks. If you’re suffering, it’s because of those bad hombres.

We need bridges, not walls. We need to make common cause with workers and families on both sides of our borders. And we need to hold our politicians (of either party) to account when they try to drive us apart.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Big week.

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This has been one of those weeks, to be sure. A lot has happened and very quickly, so let me take these one at a time.

Cuba.  President Obama announced a reset of relations with Cuba this past Wednesday, an initiative that includes establishment of an American embassy in Havana and the release of the remaining members of the Cuban Five, as well as the return of Alan Gross. This somewhat surprising announcement was, of course, met with flaming hair by the conservative majority in Congress and by other longtime critics of the Cuban revolution. Marco Rubio, for instance, bemoaned the fact that the maximalist goals of conservatives were not realized on the first day of the new relationship.

Patience, Marco! The cause of neoliberalism is not yet lost. To listen to Obama’s defense of his decision, you would think the prime motivation for improved ties between the two countries is for the joys of capitalism to rain down on the hapless Cubans. God help them. Still, a pretty momentous day, to be sure.

What North Koreans find hard to forgetNorth Korea.  When you produce a movie that makes a joke out of the assassination of the leader of a garrison state, its back against the wall for decades, you should respect a negative reaction. Agents purportedly working for North Korea have threatened violence against theaters running “The Interview”, promising 9/11 type attacks, somewhat incredibly. SONY Pictures pulled the film, generating a mountain of criticism. An AP article suggested that SONY feared hostilities against Japan by a nuclear-armed North Korea.

This is pretty overblown. Rhetoric is one thing; credible threats are something else entirely. Pyongyang’s rants against the United States and its allies are delivered in the absence of any capability to act upon them. On the other hand, when our government states that “all options are on the table” with regard to North Korea, and when we conduct massive joint maneuvers with South Korea (including mock invasions of the North), we do so in the context of overwhelming power that has been exercised against the North Koreans in the past. Best to remember that their section of the peninsula was utterly destroyed by our military in 1950-53; not a single standing structure remaining by the time we were done, and deaths in the millions. That leaves a lasting impression.

Our media-driven culture emphasizes the crazy when it focuses on North Korea. And sure, they seem particularly crazy when you ignore the history. History doesn’t excuse malevolent behavior, but it does render it more comprehensible. At the very least, it enables you to understand why a comedy about assassinating their leader might, well, make them angry.

luv u,

jp