Even Foreign Affairs apparently can't resist a bit of both-sides-do-it-ism when it comes to Trump's foreign policy. The latest issue (97:133; 2018) has a piece by political scientist Randall Schweller, "Three Cheers for Trump's Foreign Policy: What the Establishment Misses." It's about as enthusiastic a praise for Trump's policies as you're likely to find this side of Rudy Giulani.
And totally superficial. He writes that Trump's "worldview is fundamentally realist in nature." This about a guy who is a serial fabulist.
Schweller also seems to be completely clueless as to even the basics of how the US trade deficit works.
I guess it's useful in that its probably a more coherent statement of praise for Trump's foreign policy than we're likely to see out of the White House. Certainly not from Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
At least he doesn't talk about the Deep State. Instead he talks about "the Blob".
I think their standards at Foreign Affairs may be slipping a bit. Fun fact: Foreign Affairs first published 1910-1919 as The Journal of Race Development.
This tweet by Michael Toomey also works for me:
As soon as I thought about who would write something like this and get it published in Foreign Affairs, I clicked on the article and had my suspicions confirmed. Randall Schweller never fails to disappoint.
The issue also contains a piece by one-time End of History theorist Francis Fukayama, "Against Identity Politics: The New Tribalism and the Crisis of Democracy." It reads like it was phoned in. But it's a weighty piece compared to Schweller's Trumpist true-believer screed.
Fukayama's article is actually a highbrow piece of liberal concern trolling. With the requisite complaining about how Mean Libruls pushed all this here political correctness stuff and thereby created the Trump white nationalist movement. Also strangers-in-their-own-land sympathies for the white working-class voters who feel ignored by the Mean Libruls and it really hurts their feelings.
Until recently, activists on the left had little to say about the burgeoning opioid crisis or the fate of children growing up in impoverished single-parent families in the rural United States. And the Democrats have put forward no ambitious strategies to deal with the potentially immense job losses that will accompany advancing automation or the income disparities that technology may bring to all Americans.
Both of which can scarcely be addressed with Republican free-market extremism. But Fukayama spins it as a unique problem for the Democrats.
The Mean Libruls are to blame, you see.
Someone should really explain to poor Fukayama that white backlash against minorities, progress, and good manners has been going on since approximately the day of Marse Lee's surrender at Appomattox.
History may have resumed. But Fukayama doesn't seem to have lost his faith in the endless virtues of neoliberal economics.
The Argentine daily Página/12 picked a memorable image for a weekend story on the brewing financial crisis there that generated panicky reactions in the business press at the end of last week (Luis Bruschtein, La batalla mauricultural 05.05.2018):
A Forbes column by Kenneth Rapoza warns, "It is time to get out of Argentina and sali corriendo [get out quickly]." (It Might Be Time To Get Out Of Argentina 05/03/2018)
In another surprise move, the central bank on Friday raised the key interest rate by an additional 675 basis points to 40 percent - the highest among major economies -- as the Treasury Ministry committed to reducing spending on infrastructure, and to target the country’s primary fiscal deficit at 2.7 percent of GDP, down from 3.2 percent this year.
The peso rebounded following the announcement to close 5.5 percent higher at 21.8 per dollar. It posted its biggest one-day decline since December 2015 on Thursday even after two surprise rate hikes. The currency is still down 15 percent this year against the U.S. dollar and dropped more than 6 percent this week, the worst decline since June 2016.
Behind the peso weakness is growing concern that President Mauricio Macri is dragging his feet on taking the possibly painful steps needed to revamp the economy -- and that both inflation and government spending are spiraling dangerously high.
Argentine President Mauricio Macri took office in late 2015. He did all the things that the IMF and the Washington Consensus and conservative respectable economics said he should do: paid off the vulture fund profiteers, cutting public services, dropping capital controls, etc., etc. Now Forbes is warning investors that it might be time to pull the [bleep] out of Argentina.
But that's the nice thing about Very Serious Respectable Economics. When it reduces the living standards of millions and takes things to the (possible) brink of a financial crisis, it can't be the that the policies were wrong. No, it's the wisdom of The Market and the best of all possible worlds. In early 2016 when the economy was limping, Macri promised that things would get better in the second half (segundo semestre) of the year. It's now 2018, and the Secundo Semestre seems to be further away than ever.
And, as we see in Forbes and Businessweek pieces cited above, if there's a financial crisis, Very Serious Economics has the perfect solution: cut government expenditures more, slam real wages and salaries down further, sell off public properties, drop even more of any remaining limits on foreign speculative capital, yadda, yaddda. Because the real problem according to them is that hasn't been enough austerity and privatization and so on. El Secundo Semetre is bound to arrive someday!
Luis Bruschtein writes:
La ideología del sálvese quien pueda o del “no me importa mientras a mí no me toque” se filtró por la grieta moral que ha producido este gobierno de empresarios que han hecho negocios muy productivos para sus empresas con el Estado, mientras llevaron a la economía del país al borde del precipicio.
[The ideology of everyone for themselves or of "I don't care if it doesn't affect me" has been spread by the moral crevice generated by this government of impresarios who have done very productive business for their companies with the state, while they have brought the country's economy to the brink of the precipice.]
Congress just passed a new bank deregulation bill with the usual propaganda name, Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief and Consumer Protection Act. A more descriptive one would have been the Financial Destabilization Act.
In this case, the bill had to have Democratic support in the Senate to prevent a filibuster from stopping it. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer opposed it. But 16 Senate Democrats voted for it, including Independent Angus King who caucuses with the Democrats, allowing it to pass. Here is the list from the Senate website:
Michael Bennet (D-CO)
Tom Carper (D-DE)
Chris Coons (D-DE)
Joe Donnelly (D-IN)
Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND)
Doug Jones (D-AL)
Tim Kaine (D-VA)
Angus King (I-ME)
Joe Manchin (D-WV)
Claire McCaskill (D-MO)
Ben Nelson (D-FL)
Gary Peters (D-MI)
Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH)
Debbie Stabenow (D-MI)
Jon Tester (D-MT)
Mark Warner (D-VA)
The list includes the Democratic Vice Presidential candidate for 2016, Tim Kaine and press favorites like Heidi Heitkamp, Joe Manchin, Debbie Stabenow, and Mark Warner. Heitkamp and Warner signed on as co-authors. It weakens regulations on mortgage lending for smaller banks and reduces reporting requirements aimed at detecting illegal discrimination in lending.
While the bill is a huge victory for bank lobbyists who have been working to curb Dodd-Frank since it was first drafted, the industry will keep pushing lawmakers and regulators for carve-outs in the years to come.
"This is a first step," American Bankers Association President and CEO Rob Nichols said.
A provision in the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act would exempt the large majority of mortgage lenders from key disclosure requirements that help the government identify racial discrimination and enforce fair housing laws. The provision would facilitate redlining, allowing lenders to deny loans to black homebuyers, while also giving lenders carte blanche to overcharge black homebuyers or steer them into the same predatory loans that exploded during the financial crisis, pushing countless families into foreclosure.
Yet this bill, which would widen the already staggering racial wealth gap, won support from more than a dozen Democratic senators, including members such as Tim Kaine, Mark Warner, Claire McCaskill, and Doug Jones who rely on black and Hispanic voters to win elections. (The bill is also backed by one independent, Angus King of Maine, who caucuses with Democrats.)
I hope progressive Democrats won't overlook this Republican vote by Doug Jones. Strong bank regulation should be a no-brainer for Democrats. But Jones got elected in a tough race by running as an unapologetic Democrat with a strong Democratic turnout and enthusiastic support from black voters.
And then he turns around and kicks his voters in the teeth with this vote. This is not a good thing.
It makes no sense. Blessed with a touch of momentum going into the 2018 midterms, Chuck Schumer and his colleagues have decided that the best way to “win” is to build up their fundraising apparatus, reach out across party lines, and pass legislation that serves banks more than it serves people… legislation friendly enough to conservative folk that Senators like Tester (Montana) and McCaskill (Missouri) can sell it to their red state constituents and not have them get too mad.
This is the DNC's game plan, and it blows.
It’s an enraging time to be an American, and one of the most frustrating things about it is that the opposition party - the only one with the money and infrastructure to take on a Republican party that is now a de facto criminal enterprise - still leads and acts as if everything is Fine, and that we are not in a state of absolute crisis. I know Barack Obama is venerated for the speech he made at the DNC in 2004 that unofficially introduced him as a presidential contender, but he vastly overrated the value of bipartisanship that night. That Pollyanna mindset would continue haunt him through a great deal of his presidency, as Republicans openly schemed to destroy him at every turn. And, as a final insult, they’ve spent the past year feverishly, and hatefully, working to dismantle his legacy. Time and again, Democrats think the only way to win elections is to NOT fully be Democrats, and this bill is the toxic runoff of that discredited philosophy. Too many Democratic leaders and thinkers are beholden to a bullshit fever dream of civility that has led to staggering electoral losses and Republicans gleefully stripping lower income Americans of their rights and bodies.
Italy's election of March 4 left three parties that in one form or another are seen as populist parties. In Europe, notably Austria and Germany, "populist" is often used as more-or-less-synonymous with rightwing politics and demagoguery. It's too narrow a definition, which would exclude some of the most significant populist movements in history, including the Populist Party itself once led by William Jennings Bryan. That spin on what "populist" means is worth keeping in mind when reading commentaries on Italian politics of the moment.
The leading vote getter in March was the left populist Five Star Movement. Although they have in the past talked about anti-austerity economic policies in line with his own, Yanis Varoufakis is very cautious about finding hopeful results in their first place win. (LA STAMPA interview on the Italian election result (the original answers in English)yanisvaroufakis.eu 03/09/2018). Varoufakis describes himself and the DIEM25 group of which he is a leader as progressive Europeanist, i.e., pro-EU but anti-austerity.
"The Italian election yielded a sad impasse," he writes. "The only real beneficiaries are those who invested in xenophobia and fear." And he emphasizes the role of bad economic policies in the result: "Like every other European country in which the establishment pressed on with failed, austerity-based policies, pretending that they were the solution to our continent’s systemic crisis, the ballot box reinforced the forces of European disintegration."
He doesn't present Five Star in a very appealing light:
What’s your view of the Five Star? Do you categorise them as a populist movement or as a new left?
No party that invests in fear of the migrant, of the ‘other’, the refugee can pose as left-wing. The term ‘populist’, in my mind, has been widely abused of recent. In terms of domestic economic policies, Five Star is clearly trying to re-position itself as a centrist party that can be trusted by the establishment. It tries to maintain its perceived radicalism by targeting the old political class and it corrupt ways while refraining from challenging the ‘system’ itself. Of course, when a system is failing as obviously as Europe’s and Italy’s, the attempt to embrace the system while criticising its functionaries seems to me ill-fated.
What do you think of M5S’s proposal for a basic income? Is it radical? Is it progressive?
M5S are proposing a Guaranteed Minimum Income. This must not be confused with the Universal Basic Income, which would be paid to every citizen with no conditions attached. M5S’s proposal is for a minimum means-tested payment that is conditional also on registering at a job centre, demonstrating that you are looking for work, and not turning down job offers – even if they are low grade and demeaning. In essence, M5S is proposing a welfare net that is standard in most central and northern European countries. Many Italians need this payment and see it as a glimpse of hope – so we should not be quick to criticize it. Whether it will, in the end, be good for poorer Italians or not will depend on the implementation, and in particular what other benefits (e.g. disability or child benefits) are cut.
The big question is with whom would the party ally in order to reach the 40% share of the vote required to govern Italy. Experts speculate that it could exploit the dismal performance of the Democratic party and attempt to split that party, or try to team up with the small leftwing group Free and Equal. Another scenario is a tie-up with the League, formerly known as the Northern League, a far-right party with whom it is more closely allied on issues such as immigration and Russia.
Di Maio has said he would stop sending the rescue boats that save migrants in the Mediterranean, which he has called a “sea taxi service”, while Matteo Salvini, the League’s leader, has pledged to deport thousands of illegal immigrants.
According to the Bertelsmann Stiftung’s 2017 Sustainable Governance Indicators (SGI) on Italy the economic recovery started to take off under the Democratic Party-based governments of Matteo Renzi and Paolo Gentiloni, but people’s perceptions didn’t change much and are still dominated by the effects of the deep recession of the past years – fear of unemployment, experiences of business failures, and the tightening of living conditions. Naturally, the main governing parties suffer under such conditions, whereas opposition parties that are perceived as being far distant from the government enjoy voters’ goodwill. Thus, first and foremost the Five Star Movement and the League grew rather than Forza Italia which had headed the government three times between 1994 and 2008.
A second reason for the success of these two parties is the growing resentment in large strata of the population against the policies of the EU. Many people feel damaged by economic austerity on the one hand and resent the scant solidarity shown to Italy’s problems with immigration on the other. The Five Star Movement and the League have both shown very critical attitudes towards the EU – to the point of even suggesting a referendum on the Euro.
The centrist parties in the European Parliament treated the growth of the far right as a fringe phenomenon requiring no amendment to their “ever closer union” agenda. The British vote to leave brought no more than a momentary shock. Shrugging off Brexit as a uniquely British phenomenon and no threat to the continent, the centre-right (European Peoples’ Party) and centre-left (Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats) pursued their top-down strategy of deepening through compromise.
Ten years of severe economic and social crisis are the background to all these developments. Italy’s per capita income is now back to the levels of twenty years ago; behind this average there is a collapse – of about 30% – of the income of the 25% poorest Italians, living in the South or in the declining peripheries of the Center-North. Twenty years of stagnation and decline mean a generation with ever-lower expectations in terms of income, work and life. Impoverishment has become a reality for a very large swathe of Italians. The Five Star vote reflects the poverty of the South – their call for a general minimum income has been attractive in this regard. The vote for the League expresses the fear of impoverishment in the North. Only in the centres of major cities – where the richest and the highly educated live, and the economy is better – has the vote taken different directions, going to Forza Italia and the Democratic Party.
The particulars are different from country to country, of course. But people trying to understand this moment in politics in EU countries have to wrestle with the complex overlaps between economic situations and xeophobic sentiment:
Poverty is coupled with fear. The fear of worsening economic conditions and social status; the fear of having immigrants next door, other poor people competing for fewer low-skilled jobs and scarcer public services. In the elections the most prevalent fear was that of immigrants – the landings in Lampedusa, the inability to integrate them, the killing and shootings in Macerata. Salvini turned anti-immigration attitudes into his most effective political tool; Five Star expressed the same hostility – calling NGOs saving immigrants in the Mediterranean ‘water taxis’ for illegal aliens and refusing to vote for a bill granting citizenship to second generation Italians with migrant origins. [my emphasis]
So the left-leaning populist in Five Star did embrace the anti-immigrant rhetoric that rightly disgusts Yanis Varoufakis.
All over Europe, the phenomenon of the center-right Social Democratic parties collapsing after years of embracing Angela Merkel-style neoliberal economics is a major factor in the political picture.
Since the Democratic Party's remarkable cave-in during the January government shutdown crisis, I've been thinking a lot about important turning points for the Democratic Party that created such a strong sense among the party's Congressional representatives that they have to continually surrender to Republicans on important matters of policy. Even as the Republicans have become more and more aggressive in jamming their their preferred policies through, even when it means altering the rules of the game, both formal and informal.
One of the main programs identified with the Clinton Administration, even its "signature legislative achievement," (Jordan Weissmann) was called welfare reform. Not only was it substantively important. It also was a major concession in which the Democratic Party accepted the long-time conservative and Republican framing of a critical social and economic issue.
"Welfare" is one of those words that are benign in its routine daily usages but can take on negative political connotations in a polemical context. If someone says, "Parents have to take care for the welfare of their children," that has a straightforward meaning, a benign one of well-being. But "welfare" as applied to any kind of social program has a very negative connotation for conservatives, e.g. "loafers," "lazy black people."
The term has generally been applied to income-support payments for the poor. But the Republicans are trying now to expand the (for them) pejorative term to unemployment insurance, Medicaid, Medicare and even Social Security. The term "entitlement programs" also has a similar connotation for them. The latter term was a conscious propaganda innovation of conservatives. Both "welfare" and "entitlement programs" are used to promote an unfavorable attitude toward any kind of program that provides some kind of solidarity or economic support in hard times for ordinary working people.
And, like so much in American politics, criticism of "welfare" was highly racialized, with white conservatives (and some liberals) portraying it a program used and abused by black people. Even though a majority of "welfare" recipients were always white.
The Clinton reform, signed into law in 1996 and taking effect in 1997, replaced an income-support program for parents of minor children called Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). The replacement program was known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). One of the features of the bill that achieved an important conservative goal is that it gave states much more discretion of the amounts and qualifications for receiving TANF assistance.
The 2016 "Retro" video from The New York Times recounts the history of the 1996 reform from the perspective of its 20th anniversary, Welfare and the Politics of Poverty 06/07/2016. Unfortunately, YouTube is not allowing the video to be embedded at this writing. The video provides numerous examples of the kind of polemical rhetoric used at the time. And the narrator's script appears to be sympathetic to it, despite it's being associated with the "liberal" New York Times. And, of course, there's some Both Sides Do It thrown in.
It quotes St. Reagan declaring, "Welfare has proliferated and grown into a Leviathan of unsupportable dimensions." And it shows Bill Clinton adopting a similar framing, if less hysterically expressed: "Welfare should be a second chance, not a way of life." It was also the case that Clinton emphasized the importance of work opportunities for welfare recipients. In theory, that was a position that liberals and progressives could share. But in practice, any kind of active job programs were not a serious part of the policy mix.
It's important in the context of its effects on Democrats to note that Clinton twice vetoed Republican-backed welfare reform bills on the grounds they were too punitive. But in 1996, he signed one that was quite draconian in its terms and effects. The video quotes Ron Haskins, who was one of the drafters of the Republican bill that Clinton signed, still praising Bill Clinton two decades later for signing it (after 4:00). "Think of a Democratic President that would sign a welfare reform bill like that. President Gore wouldn'a done it. Kennedys would never have done it. There are many Republicans that wouldn'a done a bill as tough as the one that was passed in 1996."
Notice that the narrator in this 2016 film refers to the pre-1996 AFDC as a "once sacred entitlement." Who had considered it sacred is not clear. Conservatives were never among them.
Jared Bernstein recalled the various themes in the welfare reform debate in Reforming Welfare ReformThe American Prospect 12/19/2001:
What was Congress trying to achieve? Different people had different goals, and the law reflects these differing views. For some the 1996 law was largely about cutting welfare caseloads or reducing spending; for some it was about promoting work; for some it was about broadening state flexibility, reducing federal authority, and curtailing individual rights; and for some it was about reducing out-of-wedlock births. For much of the public, though, the goal was that people who were able to work should do so. Many in the progressive community shared this goal but feared that the law's approach--freezing federal spending, ending individual rights, imposing time limits, creating strong incentives to cut caseloads--would mean that instead of helping parents enter and progress in the labor force, states would simply restrict assistance for families that needed help. And many progressives feared the consequences if public assistance was denied to families with the weakest labor market prospects in a low-wage labor market that was already failing many of its participants.
Throughout the 1996 debates, discussion of one goal was conspicuously lacking: There was much talk about the need to promote work and reduce welfare, but little discussion of the need to reduce poverty and promote the well-being of low-income families. Instead, both conservatives and, to a great extent, the Clinton administration, created a picture in which the principal problem was seen as too many families on welfare for too long. The obvious solution was to cut caseloads by getting families to leave welfare. [my emphasis]
Apart from any considerations of social solidarity or humanitarian concern, one of the benefits of such income-support programs is that they have "countercyclical" effects. When the economy is expanding, as it was doing in the mid-1990 with the tech bubble and further in the 2000s with the real estate bubble, more people can get jobs and the payments on income-support programs act as a restraint on what economists and the business press like to call "overheating" of the economy. During recessions, the payments expand and provide a stimulative effect to the economy, helping to prevent deflation and shortening the length of the recession. The human and economic-policy cost of the TANF reform became very evident during the Great Recession.
Analyses on the destructive economic effects of the Clinton welfare reforms are in no shortage.
Despite being home to one of the nation’s most crushing child poverty rates, the state [of Arizona] has all but stopped giving cash assistance to its needy. During 2014, for every 100 poor families with children in Arizona, just 8 families received aid. And even that tiny fraction is likely to shrink. Last year, while trying to chip away at a $1 billion budget deficit, lawmakers lowered the maximum amount of time Arizonans could receive welfare payments before being kicked off the rolls permanently — it’s now just 12 months. ...
The death of welfare in Arizona isn’t an exception; the program has shriveled just as badly in many other states, especially across the Deep South and West. Even in most of the states that are more generous than Arizona about giving benefits to the poor, welfare has still dwindled during the postrecession era. That’s because its funding was never designed to grow along with inflation—or with the U.S. population. For all intents and purposes, welfare is becoming a zombie system rather than the bridge from poverty to work that its reformers envisioned.
And, of course, it was the signature legislative achievement of Bill Clinton’s presidency. [my emphasis]
After 10:35 in the video, we hear Bill Clinton express the vain hope by which he justified signing the bill to Democrats: "After I sign my name this bill [TANF], welfare will no longer be a political issue." Which was true in the sense that the Democratic President had stopped fighting for Democratic priorities and Democratic constituents on "welfare," instead surrendering to the Republican side. A segment from 2014 shows Clinton in 2014 saying that he couldn't have foreseen that there would be a Tea Party movement that would try to scapegoat poor people, i.e., "that would believe, one more time, that poor people are the problem in America."
Which I would have to say if laughably unconvincing. Especially since there were plenty of Democrats in 1996 who did foresee such a thing. It didn't require any special visionary talent to do so. And in the real world, it did nothing of consequence to slow down the radicalization of the Republican Party. If anything, such a consequential surrender on Clinton's part only encouraged it.
But Clinton in that same segment still insisted in 2014 that TANF "did far more good than harm."
The 1996 welfare "reform" was a major step in the neoliberal neutering of the Democratic Party. That was one of the most significant steps on the road that led the Democrats to the historic losses at all levels in 2016. Including Hillary Clinton losing the Electoral College vote to the Orange Clown.
Almost everywhere in Europe, social democratic and socialist parties are losing support: last year, the German SPD saw a historic bad result in the parliamentary elections. Its sister parties in France, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic have even sunk to single digit shares of the vote. European social democracy is fighting for its political survival: since the new millennium, its vote share has fallen in 15 of the 17 countries we examined – sometimes dramatically. ...
In every country there are of course differing, individual reasons for this development. But there are also common roots that can explain the crisis faced by socialists and social democrats in many countries. First, parties have lost many of their core voters. European social democracy, born out of the labour movement of the nineteenth century, had a large support base upon which it could rely for votes: the workers, above all people engaged in manual labour. It is now an ever shrinking demography: the working class is fragmented, the conditions that supported the social democrats for decades across Europe have disappeared.
I have some reservations about his demographic analysis in that he doesn't seem to have a particularly clear version of who and what the "working class" is. That's pretty common in analysis of American politics as well. A big part of that is that political polls don't consistently collect economic data on voters being surveyed. But the stats on educational attainment are more commonly gathered. So American pundits and journalists tend to use not having a four-year college degree as a proxy for "working class." It's certainly not an ideal measure.
This article doesn't deal with the programmatic aspects that affected this process, i.e., the center-left parties adopting neoliberal economic programs: reduction of public services, privatization, deregulation, financialization, reduction of wages, salaries and pensions; weakening of unions; corporate-deregulation "trade" treaties.
The article was originally published as Tot oder lebendig?Spiegel Online 26.12.2017, though the Social Europe version has an additional chart. An English version, Social democrats are having a hard time, also appeared at the European Data Journalism Network 01/10/2018.
The German SPD has made an initial agreement in exploratory talks for a new coalition government with Angela Merkel's CDU and the CSU. Such a new coalition would continue the current one, which resulted from the 2013 elections. The 2017 parliamentary elections were in October, but a new government has not yet been formed.
A continuation of the Grand Coalition (GroKo, as it's called for short) has been very controversial within the SPD. A party convention on Sunday approved the concept by a substantial but not overwhelming vote, 56% of the delegates supporting it. Although the convention also demanded further negotiations on the coalition pact. According to the analysis of Max Ferstl und Jasmin Siebert in the Süddeutsche Zeitung (Wie es nach dem Ja der Genossen weitergeht 21.01.2018), negotiating the new agreement will take at least another four weeks. And it has to be approved by an SPD convention again.
The party base has very good reasons to worry about the future of the SPD in a new edition of the GroKo. After the 2013 election, the three parties SPD, the Greens and the Left Party had enough parliamentary seats to form a majority for a red-red-green coalition. Merekel's CDU/CSU had the largest vote, so they got the first shot at trying to form a government. The SPD didn't even make a weak attempt to hold out for red-red-green. They were almost pathetically eager to become a junior partner in another GroKo headed by Merkel.
In 2017, the three parties didn't win enough seats together to even have a possibility of forming a red-red-green government. Merkel tried but failed to reach an agreement for a "Jamaica" coalition (CDU-CSU-Greens-FDP). So even after party leader and Chancellor candidate Martin Schultz initial rejection of any consideration of a new GroKo, he soon came around and reached an agreement which he and his supporters attempt to sell to the party base as including big improvements in the social-democratic direction. But the claim isn't entirely credible to voters. As ORF reports (Klare Haltung von Schulz 21.01.2018)
In den Umfragen rutschen die Sozialdemokraten unterdessen ab. So sieht etwa die überwiegende Mehrheit der Deutschen die SPD als Verliererin der Sondierungsgespräche mit der Union. Eine Umfrage des Meinungsforschungsinstituts YouGov im Auftrag der dpa ergab, dass nur neun Prozent der Auffassung sind, die SPD hätte sich durchgesetzt. 29 Prozent meinen dagegen: die CDU.
[Meanwhile, the Social Democrats have been slumping in the polls. So, for example, the overwhelming majority of the Germans see the SPD as the loser in the exploratory talks with the Union {CDU and CSU}. A poll by the opinion research institute YouGov for the dpa {news agency} showed that only 9% were of the opinion that the SPD had succeeded. 29% thought the opposite: the CDU.]
The low numbers on both sides in that poll are probably a reflection of that fact that the details of the initial agreement are "inside baseball," as American political commentators say. More seriously, the poll also found that in a new election, which would be the most likely result of a new failure to form a coalition over the next month, the SPD would get 3% less than they did in October.
The SPD is experiencing its own version of the crisis of social-democracy in Europe. The center-left was at a high point at the end of the 1990s. But at the same time, the European social-democrats started embracing the neoliberal gospel of reduction of government, deregulation, weaker unions and lower wages, and support for corporate-deregulation treaties staged as "trade" treaties. Once the center-left parties took major economic questions off the table for the neoliberal TINA (There Is No Alternative) position and the 2008 economic crisis hit, followed by the malfunction of the eurozone in the subsequent debt crises, a political crisis followed for social-democratic parties from Greece to Italy to France to Britain to elsewhere and, increasingly so now, in Germany.
Currently, that crisis for the SPD is manifesting itself in the low poll numbers, the deep divisions in the party over a new GroKo, and a new proposal from Left Party leaders Sahra Wagenknecht and Oskar Lafontaine for a Sammlungsbewegung (collective movement) on the left aimed at a new kind of unity movement or party for the left factions of the SPD and the Greens and (most of) the Left Party. ("Links Unten" Der Spiegel 4/2018 20.01.2018)
Albrecht von Lucke makes the case for the SPD agreeing to new GroKo in Die gärige RepublikBlätter 1/2018. Essentially, he argues that being in government would give an SPD that was focused on building its image a chance to prove itself as a center-left party again by fighting for left ideas, programs, and positions. It's telling, though, that even in an article advocating for SPD participation in a GroKo, Von Lucke displays some pragmatic doubts about whether the SPD can actually pull that off. For instance, he notes that Martin Schultz has been blaming their participation in the current GroKo for the decline in the SPD's vote since 2013. Which raises the obvious question: what can voters expect different from the SPD in a new one?
He mentions that in the context of what even the Spiegel "Links Unten" piece flags as a critical turning point, the decision of Gerhard Schröder's red-green coalition to adopt his "Agenda 2010" program which included the now-infamous Hartz IV reforms, which have become a synonym for low wages, loss of union protection, and precious employment ("McJobs"). The Spiegel article gives it the obligatory praise for neoliberal dogma, saying that the "economic data" increased and "the number of unemployed sank." But:
... zugleich führten die Reformen zu einer massiven Ausweitung der Leiharbeit und erhöhten die Zahl der prekären Beschäftigungsverhältnisse.
Für Millionen Menschen, die sich einst von der Arbeiterpartei SPD beschützt gefühlt hatten, waren die Sozialdemokraten zu Verrätern geworden.
[... at the same time, the reforms led to a massive spread of temporary work and boosted the number of precarious employment situations. For millions of people who had once felt protected by the workers' party SPD, the Social Democrats had become traitors.]
This has been a widespread pattern for the center-left parties in Europe and in the United States, as well. Their traditional base was working class and "middle class," although that term is defining in various ways. When the center-left parties started adapting economic policies fundamentally similar to those of conservatives that resulted in increasing hardship and decreasing security for their traditional base voters. And they got hurt badly.
Nelson Lichtenstein gives an insightful description of how that process played out during the Clinton Administration in the US (A Fabulous Failure: Clinton's 1990s and the Origins of Our Times The American Prospect Winter 2018, currently behind subscription):
Many recall the 1990s as a moment of economic triumph with increasingly low unemployment, 4 percent annual economic growth, a booming stock market, even a balanced federal budget by the end of the millennium. Economists Alan Blinder and Janet Yellen called those years the "Fabulous Decade" in 2001, while a 2015 opinion piece in The New York Times bore the title "The Best Decade Ever? The 1990s, Obviously." Although the Republicans had seized control of Congress in 1994, it is worth remembering that Ronald Reagan's vice president, George H.W. Bush, took only 37 percent of the vote in 1992 while that stalwart Republican, Robert Dole, won just 40 percent in 1996. Politics were clearly in flux. The Clintons therefore had the historical moment to recast not just trade, investment, and health-care policies, but the regulations, norms, and expectations that would govern a post-Cold War version of U.S. capitalism.
Their failure to take advantage of these fortuitous circumstances doomed any effort to build a more equitable economy or a political order powerful enough to sustain a dominant liberalism, a failure Donald Trump would one day seize. [my emphasis]
The SPD currently faces a dilemma in which their previous base voters and many of the current ones was lost confidence in the party's willing to fight for their interests.
So, on the one hand, participating in another GroKo would give the SPD a chance to have direct effect on government policy and give them public prominence in the form of ministerial positions. On the other, in this political moment, the election results and opinion polls seem to indicate that the SPD needs reframe its image. Not only in terms of policy but in showing their willingness to fight. The latter didn't happen very much when the SPD headed the opposition to Merkel's government of 2009-2013. They had served as the junior partner in a Merkel-headed GroKo 2005-2009. During the interim, their leadership was apparently focused on a new opportunity to become Merkel's junior partner in government again. Thus, the lack of any pretense in 2013 that they were even interested in a possible red-red-green government.
Albrecht Müller discusses both the current GroKo dilemma and the idea of a left Sammlungsbewegung in Linke Sammlungsbewegung – eine Schnapsidee oder die richtige Konsequenz aus der erkennbaren Ausweglosigkeit?Nachdenkseiten 15.01.2018. He argues that in the former case, it would be a bad idea. But he thinks the latter is a good idea. Because, in his judgment, all three of the left parties look to have poor political prospects for the near future.
With authoritarian-minded governments and movements in ascendancy in various places of various types, there's a lot of speculation about an wide-reaching authoritarian trend internationally: the US under Trump and his pliant Republican Party, Poland, Hungary, Turkey, Russia of course, Austria, Brazil, the Phillipines, Argentina to some extent. Most American would probably include Venezuela in that list, and that's partially accurate. But the reporting on Venezuela in the US is pretty pathetic. And with it, we can never forget, "Venezuela claims the world’s largest proven reserves of petroleum, an estimated 298 billion barrels of oil." (Michael Klare, The Desperate Plight of Petro-StatesTomDispatch 05/26/2016)
Such trends are hard to measure. Marc Plattner gives his version of such concerns in Liberal Democracy’s Fading AllureJournal of Democracy 28:4 (Oct 2017). That publication's website states, "The Journal of Democracy is part of the International Forum for Democratic Studies, housed within the National Endowment for Democracy." The NED is rightly suspected of an excessive enthusiasm for regime change in countries in which US neocons and "humanitarian hawks" disapprove of the government in power. I mention that not to suggest that their arguments be disregarded, but rather that they should be understood in the broad context of NED's outlook and practice.
Plattner is looking back at the triumphalist "end of history" narrative after the fall of the eastern European Communist governments after 1989 in what former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer once called revolutions by implosion.
Looking at the global situation today, a quarter-century later, we see a vastly different picture. Those same principles and practices, which by the 1990s seemed to have fully regained their former attraction and to have spread to a much wider range of countries than ever before, now seem again to be losing their luster. Today liberal democracy is clearly on the defensive. Authoritarian regimes of various stripes are showing a new boldness, and they appear to be growing stronger as the confidence and vigor of the democracies wane.
Plattner expresses particular concern about the rise of populism in Peru:
In April 2016 in Peru, voters handed a landslide congressional victory to Popular Force, the party of populist former dictator Alberto Fujimori, who is serving a 25-year prison term for severe human-rights violations committed during his presidency. The party’s 2016 presidential candidate, the former leader’s daughter Keiko Fujimori, won a very substantial plurality in the April first round—almost 40 percent, nearly twice the vote share of second-place finisher Pedro Pablo Kuczynski. Yet this still left her well shy of a majority, and she was forced to face Kuczynski in a June runoff. She lost to him by less than a single percentage point, but her party’s legislative majority means that her influence on Peru’s political direction is considerable.
While the Peruvian case is important, the election of the rightwing/oligarchic government of Mauricio Macri in Argentina (end of 2015) and the "soft coup" in Brazil (2016) are currently notably more significant in terms of their effects on democracy and the neoliberal policies that undermine it.
Neither Argentina nor Brazil has abolished elections or political parties. And the "soft coup" that put current President Michel Temer in power in Brazil was more authoritarian in nature than the straightforwardly democratic election that brought Macri to the Presidency in Argentina.
But Macri's government is a great example of predictably bad economic policies - although of the kind approved and insisted upon by the IMF and the "Washington Consensus" - and how they are easier to maintain in more authoritarian conditions than in democratic ones. Macris's government came after 12 1/2 years of kirchnerismo government, i.e., left social-democratic Peronism under the Presidencies of the late Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. Although Macri in his 2015 campaign made gestures toward Peronist perspectives and was supported by a Peronist faction (Peronism is a complex political phenomenon, to put it mildly), his economic policies have been the textbook neoliberal playbook of budget cuts, privatization, low taxes for the wealthy, and lower salaries and wages for the majority. The results, of course, have been high inflation and a slumping economy.
Kirchnerismo was notable in having broken with the Washington Consensus on free trade and debt by maintaining capital controls and refusing to pay vulture funds for debt that had to be defaulted on after the financial crisis of 2001. The goal was to develop the domestic economy and in particular to develop Argentine industry. Foreign debt has been a problem for Argentina as a block to national development and independence from foreign control since the "unitarian" government of Bernardino Rivadavia took a major loan from the British Baring Brothers bank in 1824. Developments in Argentina would later touch off what became known as the Baring Crisis of 1890-91, which "originated in Argentina but it was felt all over the world, first in London." (Gerardo della Paolera and Alan M. Taylor, Straining at the Anchor: The Argentine Currency Board and the Search for Macroeconomic Stability, 1880-1935 [2001])
The Elliott Management hedge fund of Paul Singer, an American vulture capitalist and one of the largest contributors to the Republican Party, bought up defaulted Argentine debt and sued in American courts, getting a bizarre and genuinely radical decision in their favor from Federal Judge Thomas Griesa in a ruling upheld by the Supreme Court. Once Macri was elected President, he quickly made a settlement that was extremely favorable for Singer's vulture funds, taking on new debt to pay it off. (The Vulture: How Billionaire Rubio Backer Paul Singer Made Billions off Argentina Debt CrisisDemocracy Now! 03/11/2016; Katia Porzecanski, Singer Makes 369% of Principal on Argentine Bonds in Debt OfferBloomberg Markets 03/01/2016)
Time magazine of 05/02-09/2016 included Macri in its list of 100 Most Influential People, with a two-paragraph tribute from Mauricio Macri:
Argentina is rich in natural resources and human capital, but its economic progress has been hobbled by the ineptitude and corruption of its political leaders. Over the past decade, the policies of Argentina's ruling duo, Nestor and Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, led to rampant inflation, falling currency value and capital flight. The result was the 2015 election of the reformist Mauricio Macri.
Macri has removed Argentina's currency controls, allowing more freedom for trade. He has pledged to reintegrate Argentina into the global economy, seeking private investment from abroad. And he has taken action to end the 15-year default that has kept the country in economic exile since 2001. Macri still has important tasks ahead of him, including taming inflation. But if he lives up to his promise, Argentina may finally do the same. [my emphasis]
At that time, the Macri government was raising regulated prices on public utilities and the economy was slumping. Macri's supporters were telling everyone to be patient and wait for the segundo semestre (second half of the year). Argentina is in the first half of Macri's third year as President. But still waiting for the segundo semestre. This video from the beginning of his second half-year in office mocks, "The second half was born dead." Segundo semestre de Macri 07/01/2016:
There have been some disturbing signs of political repression.
Gastón Chillier and Ernesto Semánmarch wrote about the concerns that were already emerging in Macri's "first half-year" in What Obama Should Know About Macri’s ArgentinaNew York Times 03/23/2016, including the already-iconic case of indigenous activist Milagro Sala. Obama left the general impression with US voters and a political press that's largely oblivious to Latin American affairs that he had a left-leaning policy on Latin America, largely because of his pragmatic abandonment of the long-standing, failed Cuba policy. But actually his Latin American policy was generally conservative, including welcoming the political-military coup in Honduras and the extra-constitutional soft coups in Paraguay and Brazil. Obama's relations with Cristina's government was distant. But he made a point of embracing Macri after his election:
Mr. Obama’s historic trip to Cuba has all the pageantry of a farewell to the Cold War in Latin America. His visit to Havana will serve as a symbolic climax in the normalization of American relations with Cuba’s Communist government. But his excursion to Argentina has a very different resonance.
Shortly before Mr. Obama’s arrival in Buenos Aires, his administration announced the declassification of United States government documents relating to Argentina’s 1976-83 military dictatorship. Yet the visit is not about the current state of human rights, but about free trade and hemispheric security.
An acknowledgment of the malign role the United States played in the early years of the dictatorship is welcome, if overdue. But to ignore the red flags on human rights raised by the recent actions of Argentina’s new ruling party is a worrying reminder of that legacy. For Mr. Macri, Mr. Obama’s visit is already an endorsement. [my emphasis]
There have been some questionable legal investigations of senior officials from the previous government, including Cristina herself. The details of such cases can be difficult to judge from outside. The allegations against Cristina herself always looked fairly thin to me.
But after the 2017 midterm elections which brought her back to Congress and gave her a stronger position as leader of the opposition, the questionable arrests escalated and included the previous Foreign Minister and former Vice President Amado Boudou. And a new legal charge against Cristina Fernández that didn't result in her arrest because of her new parliamentary immunity. But the charge related to a sensational suicide of a prosecutor named Alberto Nisman in early 2016, who had been working for years on the AMIA bombing case from 1994. I know enough about the details of that case to say with confidence that those charges are bogus. So those are not good signs.
There have also been some questionable acts of repression against some of the many demonstrations against Macri's policies. Those are also difficult to judge from afar. But it's a pattern that is certainly disturbing from the standpoint of democracy and human rights.
And the borrowing that has historically been such a burden and trap for Argentina is continuing. Axel Kiciloff, currently a Congressional deputy from Buenos Aires city, the last Minister of Economics under Cristina's government and still a close ally of hers, warns that Macri's government is taking on a "colossal" amount of debt that, in his formulation, is being used for speculative purposes and is of "little benefit for the national economy." Kiciloff also charges Macri with trying to evade constitutional procedures and attempting to govern by decree. ("El DNU es anticonstitucional"Página/12 14.01.2018)
You think the Bernie Sanders movement was about socialism? Not really. Sanders voters have the same beliefs about economic equality and government intervention as Hillary Clinton supporters. On the importance of Social Security and Medicare, Sanders voters actually have more conservative views ...
Where they mainly differ is on international trade and the question of whether politics is a rigged game. The ideological content of Sanders’s platform is not what drew voters. It was, instead, his counter-positioning to Clinton as a clean, uncorrupted outsider.
But the word "neoliberal" doesn't appear in it. It's apparently the quoted passage that Amanda Marcotte interprets as she does in the tweet.
This led to an exchange with MSNBC's Joy Reid.
It actually a real term. It just doesn’t mean what they think it does. And they falsely apply it to liberal women/WOC as a smear. pic.twitter.com/TGpfPXKjdi
I must admit that I don't know who the "rose avi" is to whom she refers there, and even Mr. Google couldn't clarify it for me. Maybe she's referring to some academics who write on neoliberalism?
Apparently this notion that complaining about neoliberalism means you think women's rights, minority rights and immigrants rights should be low priorities has become a "thing" (slogan, polemic, whatever) among the corporate Democrats. Joy Reid at least notes that neoliberalism is a meaningful term, although her notion of what is seems to be limited. Milton Friedman and his libertarian-monetarist ideas, for instance, don't fit entirely comfortably into the mode of Reagan-Thatcher economics. And neoliberalism is a broader social ideology, as well.
The report on which Chait relies for his analysis is Lee Drutman's Political Divisions in 2016 and Beyond:Tensions Between and Within the Two PartiesDemocracy Fund Voter Study Group June 2017. Chait seems to be inviting his readers to jump to the conclusions that Sanders voters are more conservative than economic issues than Hillary voters, including on support for Social Security and Medicare. Drutman specifies that the Sanders/Clinton comparison is based specifically on their primary voters. Hillary Clinton had much higher name recognition and did especially well in early primaries in 2016. And not all the states have primaries. So those findings are interesting information. But generalizing those to defining characteristics of the divisions within the Democratic Party at this moment.
Bernie's support also skewed distinctly younger than Hillary's, which could account for much of the discrepancy on the intensity of support for Social Security and Medicare. Younger voters are generally not focused on those issues. No, that's not a dig at millennials. It may be partially a factor of age in general, in the sense that people under 35 don't tend to focus on retirement planning very much. But it also has to do with the economic challenges facing people in their 20s and 30s, including the student loan debt that has soared the last 15 years. But it's also because of the massive disinformation campaign over decades against Social Security, with Republicans claiming relentlessly and falsely that Social Security will go broke in a few years. With many Democrats including Barack Obama constantly feeding into that by talking about the alleged need for "entitlement reform." A lot of younger voters just aren't aware of how bogus those claims are.
And it's an even bigger leap from there to what Amanda Marcotte tweeted, apparently taking "neoliberals" to be nothing more than an insult word for Hillary partisans, that neoliberals/Hillary-partisans are more progressive on economic issues than Bernie/New Deal Democrats.
Talk about neoliberalism, by the way, is a particular bugaboo for Jonathan Chait, e.g., How ‘Neoliberalism’ Became the Left’s Favorite Insult of LiberalsNew York 07/16/2017. That piece was devoted to griping that "neoliberal" was just an insult against True Blue Liberals from dirty leftie hippies. That case surely benefits from the fact that outside of the US and Canada, the meaning of "liberal" in economic policy means "free-market," deregulation, anti-union policies. And that's the "liberal" in neoliberalism when it comes to economic policy.
Chait's July piece includes this gripe about the left, "Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz? Neoliberals both." That's a link to a Jacobin piece by Paul Heideman (Bulletproof Neoliberalism 06/01/2014) that, well, doesn't actually say that. It's a review of a book by Philip Mirowski. Citing it, Heideman writes:
Mirowski thinks that this is at least in part a result of the impotence of the loyal opposition — those economists such as Joseph Stiglitz or Paul Krugman who attempt to oppose the more viciously neoliberal articulations of economic theory from within the camp of neoclassical economics. Though Krugman and Stiglitz have attacked concepts like the efficient markets hypothesis (which holds that prices in a competitive financial market reflect all relevant economic information), Mirowski argues that their attempt to do so while retaining the basic theoretical architecture of neoclassicism has rendered them doubly ineffective.
That's different than saying Krugman and Stiglitz are neoliberals. I would push back on the characterization of the two as buying into neoclassical assumptions. Both are Keynesians. Now, neither of them identify as anti-capitalist. And classical economic, neoclassical economics, Keynesian economics all share with neoliberalism some basic assumptions about the functioning and even the normative value of capitalism.
But both Krugman and Stiglitz are leading critics of real existing neoliberalism, even if they haven't roused the academic economic profession out of its stubborn conservatism. (Or conservatism in its liberalism?) Both have been astute critics of problems of the eurozone and of the limitations of Obama's general tendency to embraced neoliberal assumptions on issues like Social Security and the balanced budget.
In der politischen Debatte war und ist selten davon die Rede, dass die Sparpolitik ein Problem für Millionen Europäer ist. Stattdessen werden Bürger gegeneinander in Stellung gebracht: Deutsche dürfen nicht für Griechen zahlen! Sozialleistungen werden zu Problemen umdefiniert: In Griechenland sind die Renten zu hoch! Frankreich droht an seinem Sozialstaat zu ersticken!
In Deutschland haben Politiker, denen soziale Fragen nicht wurscht sind, die Macron-Regierung zu Recht für die Arbeitsmarktreformen kritisiert. Dumm wäre es, wenn sie den Versuch der französischen Regierung, die europäische Sparpolitik zu beenden, deshalb nicht unterstützen würden.
[In the poilitical debate, there has been and is seldom said that austerity policy is a problem for millions of Europeans. Instead, citizens are set against each other: German shouldn't have to pay for the Greeks! Social services are redefined into a problem: In Greece, the pensions are too high! France is about to be smothered by its social state!
In Germany, politicians who are not indifferent to social questions rightly criticize the Macron government for its [austerian] labor market reforms. It would be dumb for that to become a reason not to support the French government's attempt to put an end to the Euorpean austerity policy.]
The word "digitalization" - as distinct to "digitization" or "digitizing" - is a word that I noticed playing a role I had never remarked before in the German and Austrian parliamentary elections this year.
The current entry for Digitization in Wikipedia reads, "Digitization, less commonly digitalization, is the process of converting information into a digital (i.e. computer-readable) format, in which the information is organized into bits." This meaning is the one with which I've been previously familiar, converting analog information to digital form.
But the usage of "digitalization" that I've recently noticed has more of the meaning of the economic, social and political effects of digital technology, a much broader usage than that of converting analog information into digital. Ditigilize" also is used for administering the drug digitalis.
Manuel Arias Maldonado in The internet against democracy/Internet contra la democraciaEurozine 05.10.2017 uses the term to talk about the increased use of digital media and its effects on politics, in particular. He uses it to discuss the now-popular concern of "fake news."
If this following article is a measure, "digitalization" has entered the vocabulary of ConsultantSpeak, 7 prescriptions for a digital GermanyPolitico EU (n/d; accessed 10/08/2017)
“One part of the solution is to be much more aggressive in making Germany more attractive for people from the outside who are young and bring knowledge in the digital space,” said Andreas Behrendt, a partner at consultancy McKinsey & Co. specialized in industrial digitalization. ...
German universities have been slow to adapt to the changing digital landscape in engineering and need to catch up by offering more majors directly linked to Industrie 4.0. Too many students are studying subjects that won’t prepare them for digitalization. “Universities shouldn’t just administer digitalization, they need to also shape it,” Cornelia Quennet-Thielen, Germany’s deputy education minister, said recently. [my emphasis]
And this business case at the Harvard Business School also uses the term, Digitalization at Siemens Feb 2017: "The increasing impact of digital technologies on all of its business units had prompted CEO Joe Kaeser and his team to put digitalization at the core of the new corporate strategy, alongside electrification and automation." (my emphasis)
Europe’s largest economy has been firing on all cylinders in recent years, but the coming digital revolution will test the resilience of its industrial core like never before.
To thrive in this new world (or maybe even to simply survive), industrial companies will have to fundamentally change the way they approach their business, from the drawing board to the factory floor to the repair shop. For Germany, where industry accounts for nearly one-third of the economy, the stakes in successfully managing digitalization are acute. [my emphasis]
Karnigschnig's article also hints at "digitalization" becoming yet another neoliberal buzzword for damaging economic trends that the One Percent would prefer the public to regard as something like a natural law at work, the way "globalization" has been used for decades:
Digital advances — from artificial intelligence to robotics to 3D printing — will transform manufacturing. And yet, in a recent ranking measuring the digital preparedness of 35 industrialized countries, Germany finished 17th, lagging behind even France. The country’s blue-chip industrial companies have been quick to embrace digitalization, but its vaunted Mittelstand — the small- and medium-sized businesses that employ most Germans and account for more than half of GDP — have been slow to embrace the digital revolution. ...
Digitalization promises to turn the nature of work as we know it on its head, demanding more flexibility from both workers and their employers. The rules governing employment will need to adapt. [my emphasis]
In the neoliberal vocabulary, the "need to adapt" rules on employment to provide "more flexibility from both workers and their employers" means weakening unions and labor laws.
Watch for "digitalization" to pop up in discussions of "the changing economy" and the need for "retraining" to address the "skills mismatch."
But some labor and manufacturing experts say the real story is far more complex than a “skills mismatch.” And some say that the basic premise — 600,000 unfilled jobs — paints a deeply misleading picture.
“I do not find any credible evidence of anything approaching a shortage in manufacturing workers anywhere in the country,” said Andrew Sum, a professor of economics at Northeastern University who specializes in education and the labor market. ...
Since the beginning of the century, manufacturing wages for production workers have barely increased, Sum said. And in the last two years, as employers have said they’ve been having difficulty filling spots, wages have declined slightly.
“If there was a big shortage of workers, than we should find wages rising. But this just isn’t the case,” Sum said. “That doesn’t mean that specific companies won’t ever have trouble finding a machinist, but when you add it all up, it doesn’t amount to very much.”
Some academics and labor advocates say a problem with the skills mismatch argument is that it shifts the blame for the jobs crisis onto workers who lack skills, and away from cash-rich companies declining to hire. The supposed mismatch also relaxes debate on the need for fiscal stimulus policies to increase payrolls.
"Digitalization" already seems to be becoming another buzzword in that vocabulary.
Austria's social-democratic Chancellor Christian Kern gives a version of it in this interview, An interview with Christian KernThe Economist 06/02/2017:
More generally, what needs to happen to the “Austrian model” to make it work in the future?
I think it is important to proceed with it. Of course the challenge is to modernise and adapt it, and that will take some time. But particularly given the coming digitalisation it is important to seek a social balance because this will be a time of great social fragmentation between winners and losers. We see it as our job to make sure there is a fair distribution of prosperity. Part of the Austrian model has always been making sure that no-one is left behind. Scandinavia aside, we are one of the world’s more egalitarian countries and we should preserve that business model. [my emphasis in bold]
Sen. Chuck Schumer after his pre-rollout rollout on Sunday, presents the Democrats' A Better Deal for American WorkersNew York Times 07/24/2017.
The column version doesn't give me more encouragement than yesterday's version he delivered on This Week. This one continues with the litany Democrats have been maintaining for so many years now of apologizing for being Democrats:
In the last two elections, Democrats, including in the Senate, failed to articulate a strong, bold economic program for the middle class and those working hard to get there. We also failed to communicate our values to show that we were on the side of working people, not the special interests. We will not repeat the same mistake. This is the start of a new vision for the party, one strongly supported by House and Senate Democrats.
Our better deal is not about expanding the government, or moving our party in one direction or another along the political spectrum. Nor is it about tearing down government agencies that work, that effectively protect consumers and promote the health and well-being of the country. It’s about reorienting government to work on behalf of people and families. [my emphasis]
A few decades back, it became a joke to say, "What we have here is a problem of communication." The joke was that this is a nicey-nice way of papering over disagreements that are over substantive questions, not just word choices. The Republicans have communicated very well that they want massive tax cuts for the very wealthiest. I understand what they're doing, it's not that they've failed to communicate that. It's that I think it's a bad idea.
So Schumer saying the Democrats are not communicating well enough is something similar, an excuse for not being able to get voters to identify the Democratic Party as anything much more clearly than being a party of urban elites. In the first paragraph just quoted, he tries to say two different things at once. One is the party now has a new vision. But they are adopting this new vision not because anything was wrong with their previous approach, only that they've had a failure to communicate effectively.
This is not very convincing as a re-positioning statement.
And he continues with the Democrats' chronic habit of framing issues in Republican terms. The Democrats are the party that has at least some visible remnants of the New Deal idea of positive govenrment, of government as an activist democratic entity that can and should work for the general good and particularly for the well-being of working people, poor and otherwise. The Republicans have long since successfully positioned themselves as the anti-government party. As in St. Reagan's famous campaign line, "Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem." (Although he often pronounced it, "gubment.")
When Schumer writes, "Our better deal is not about expanding the government ...", he's repeating what long since has become a me-too refrain of Democrats saying, we're against the gubment, too!
Schumer talks up antitrust enforcement. But he's hardly sending a clear message. An obvious antitrust message might be, "Break Up ExxonMobil!" Or, "Split Up the Too-Big-to-Fail Banks!"
Here's Schumer's version:
Right now our antitrust laws are designed to allow huge corporations to merge, padding the pockets of investors but sending costs skyrocketing for everything from cable bills and airline tickets to food and health care. We are going to fight to allow regulators to break up big companies if they’re hurting consumers and to make it harder for companies to merge if it reduces competition. [my emphasis]
There's a big difference in saying, we want to break up this monopoly that is acting in destructive ways, and saying, "we'll allow some regulators to consider breaking up some monopoly or other if they decide it's bad." One sounds like tackling an identifiable problem, maybe even like the classic populist stance of standing up for the People against the Elite. Schumer's version sounds like the Democrats making a half-hearted gesture at being Democrats, apologizing for it as he does it.
And this is another case of the Democrats rolling out lists. He has a list of three themes, then a hodgepodge of proposals. Which adds up to a muddled message.
And the message he does deliver is full of telltale signs of the Democrats' adherence to neoliberal economics. American voters may not use the term "neoliberal" very much. But they do recognize some of these arguments and don't put much faith in them.
The neoliberal Gospel holds that it's wrong for the gubment to directly create jobs. Doing so for the explicit purpose of creating jobs is derided as creating "make-work jobs." But creating jobs is, you know, making work. So accepting that framing, as the Democrats have for decades now, is already buying into the notion that there's something wrong with jobs directly created by the government. Because, of course, gubment is not the solution to our problem, gubment is the problem," amirite?
The neoliberal buzzwords for sounding like you maybe possibly want to do something to increase jobs without doing so directly include: "infrastructure"; "training"; and, "education." Obviously, infrastructure, training and education are good and necessary things. But "infrastructure" is easy to say, while committing public funds to specific projects to accomplish specific goals with an explicit purpose of stimulating the economy and creating jobs where people will get not only trained but paid is much more specific. But "infrastructure" in the abstract sounds great. And a package of tax breaks for hedge funds combined a privatization program (everyone loves toll roads, right?) can also be packaged as "infrastructure." Which is what Trump's plan is about, to the extent it's a real plan at all.
Of course, corporate-deregulation treaties packaged as trade agreements like TTIP and TPP are a major part of the neoliberal scheme. Democrats and Republicans have justified those in the United States since the debate of NAFTA ratification by saying, we know they will costs some jobs, but there will be more jobs to replace them, and we will have retraining programs to take care of the displaced workers. Jobs went away, the new jobs weren't in the same areas the jobs were lost, and the retraining did little to ameliorate the situation, when it happened at all. At this point, "training" in this context is like a ritual incantation with little credibility.
Chuck's substitution for a program to create jobs or actual training programs is, yes, you guessed it, tax cuts for business! (Remind me again how the Dems are different than the Republicans; sometimes it's hard to keep up.)
A federal jobs program can be complex. But it doesn't require a new Manhattan Project effort to discover how to do it. They can be a combination of directly creating positions and actual job-training relevant to available local jobs. It requires good administration to be done in an optimal way. But it's not a mystery. And much more straightforward to explain than some trickle-down hocus pocus with tax cuts for business.
This Better Deal effort so far looks like the Democrats think they can coast to electoral victory in 2018. I would rather see some urgency about getting the base voters out next. And "gosh, we apologize for being Democrats but we're really not so bad" is just not the best way to achieve that.
Such is the case with news that Argentina plans to sell a 100-year bond, a story tailor-made to illustrate exactly how extreme financial market risk-taking has become. It also shows that global investors either a) have the attention span of a gnat or b) are not paid for making good long-term decisions. I’ll vote for the latter, but am willing to listen to arguments for the former. ...
Sober, sensible bond fund managers, the ones who don’t invest as if central bank liquidity will be endless, have had a tough few years. Their peers more willing to take risks have been right, and may well continue to be right, at least as the game they are playing judges rightness.
Capital markets do not discipline borrowers when they are dominated, as they are, by agents acting for principals. For the International Monetary Fund or any other person or body to speak as if they do or will is absurd. All that counts is how the credit looks in the time frame against which the performance of the fund manager is judged.
So, the markets are on a momentum high and risk-taking, at its far reaches, is extreme.
Remember, this is the same market that brought you 800-some crypto-currencies with a value of more than $100 billion. By comparison, 100-year Argentina bonds are stolid, sensible investments appropriate to widows and very young orphans.
Obviously, the Argentine press has been covering this quite a bit:
Martin Wolf's mini-review of Yanis Varoufakis' new book, Adults in the Room, due to be published in the US in the fall:
This is a superbly written account of the struggle to alleviate the austerity imposed upon the Greek people by the eurozone. Greece, argues Varoufakis, has been put in a debtors’ prison and robbed of autonomy and dignity for the indefinite future. Critics would argue that he failed as finance minister in 2015 because he was insufficiently politic. More plausibly, he could never have succeeded, such were the vested interests arrayed against him. This outcome was — and is — a tragedy, because he was — and is — right. The bulk of Greek debt should indeed be cancelled outright. Read and weep. [my emphasis]
The Greek economy continues to be a grim example of the miserable, destructive failure of neoliberal economics. It has other description. I tend to call it Herbert Hoover/Heinrich Brüning economics because it involves applying drastic pro-cyclical economic policies during a depression. And the Hoover/Brüning label is also a reminder of the potentially large political consequences of such misguided policies.
Neoliberalism as economic policy does have its own particular history as a response to the welfare state. In some key ways, it's more acutely ("free-market") liberal than the Hoover/Brüning edition. A more common synonym for neoliberalism is the Washington Consensus. In the worst, imperialistic, anti-popular sense of "Washington."
James Santel, a speechwriter in the Obama White House, has some important observations in his review of a collection of Barack Obnama's speeches, Orator-in-ChiefThe American Scholar 04/28/2017.
He does a good job of relating Obama's chronic appeals for bipartisanship, which he often presented as an end in itself, with the larger ideology of neoliberalism, one of whose key concepts is TINA (There Is No Alternative), the idea that all the major ideological questions prior to the fall of the Soviet Union have been solved. The basics of liberal democracy and economic liberalism, i.e., the "free market" economics of deregulation, privatization, low wages, labor "flexibility" (loss of job protections and unions), and the continuing reduction of the welfare state, have triumphed in the world. The only real questions now remaining, or legitimately remaining, are technical issues of how to implement the policies to make life and business more agreeable for corporations and the super-rich.
The most famous ideological formation of these ideas are those associated with the "end of history":
Even more exciting was what Obama’s candidacy seemed to promise about the future of politics in the United States: that it would disappear, a kind of domestic unfolding of what Francis Fukuyama predicted in The End of History and the Last Man. Again, this interpretation was encouraged by Obama’s version of American history. As he told it, the moments emblematic of the American character – the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments; the women’s rights and civil rights movements; the New Deal and the Great Society – were instances in which Americans came together to expand the meaning of liberty and justice. His speeches cast these actions not as the triumph of liberal politics, as the victory of one viewpoint over the other, but as the result of our shared values, never mind how deeply or even violently we have disagreed over the meaning of those values throughout history. Obama’s rhetoric suggested that if we simply followed our instincts and stayed true to our principles, liberalism would reign triumphant, and all Americans would recognize this development as a blessing. [my emphasis]
Politics is about conflict. So the idea of the "end of history," and its direct predecessor of an earlier decade, the "end of ideology," didn't actually assume that all conflict in politics and government would end. Only that any fundamental question that called into question the legitimacy of capitalism, or even opposed a welfare-state concept to the neoliberal one, was unacceptable and had to fade away.
But the corporate interests and the radical right were not willing to pretend that history had completely ended. What the End of History meant substantively was the collapse of the center-left parties as defenders of the welfare state. We saw that with the Democratic Party in the US, with the social-democratic parties in most of Europe. The process occurred as well, at a more accelerated pace, in much of Latin America. When it came to fundamental economic issues, and to political measures associated with the welfare state, in practice it was a one-sided surrender.
Santel describes how Obama's conception of bipartsanship played directly into the Republicans' plans to further rig the system to the benefit of the One Percent:
Even Obama in his more combative moods – during his 2011 speech on economic inequality at Osawatomie, Kansas, for instance – hardly drew lines in the sand, lest he disprove his own argument that we can move beyond partisanship. The first task of his speeches was always to convince Americans that they were in basic agreement on the ends of government, long after the GOP’s actions had made clear that this simply was not true. Obama often talked of politics as requiring compromise. “The point is, you need allies in a democracy,” he told graduates at Howard University’s commencement last year.
But what happens when those you would court as your allies cast themselves as your enemies? What happens when your opponents not only disagree with you, but harbor a completely different understanding of America’s founding principles? What happens when they not only challenge you, but question your legitimacy? What happens when they flock to a leader who calls into question the very pillars of democracy itself: a free press, the rule of law, and an educated citizenry?
Late in his Presidency, Santel observes, Obama made at least rhetorical admissions about the failure of his bipartisan vision:
His final speeches sounded notes of uncharacteristic somberness. In his final State of the Union (not included in this collection), Obama called increasing partisan rancor “one of the few regrets of my presidency.” At the memorial service for five Dallas police officers killed last summer, he said, “I’ve seen how inadequate words can be in bringing about lasting change. I’ve seen how inadequate my own words have been.”
And Santel calls the following passage from Obama's last address to the United Nations "a meditation on history as a tragic cycle, rather than an arc, steadily bending toward justice," the latter being a phrase of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s that Obama often evoked, in Obama's case as a soothing reassurance that history always progressed in a favorable way:
Let me conclude by saying that I recognize history tells a different story than the one that I’ve talked about here today. There’s a much darker and more cynical view of history that we can adopt. Human beings are too often motivated by greed and by power. Big countries for most of history have pushed smaller ones around. Tribes and ethnic groups and nation states have very often found it most convenient to define themselves by what they hate and not just those ideas that bind them together. ... Perhaps that’s our fate.
But even in that passage, it's notable that Obama called that alternative to his bipartisan notion of politics without ideological conflict "a much darker and more cynical view of history that we can adopt." Even in that moment of seeming insight in the flaw of making Bipartisanship itself a goal of one party when the other party had a more traditional idea of politics as conflict, Obama treats it with a postmodern flourish as an optional narrative. Not a recognition that the end of history and the end of ideology is a long way from having arrived.
Meanwhile, Obama has gone from the Presidency to offering end-of-ideology speech to Wall Street audiences at $400,000 a pop. For the few leaders that can steer left-of-center parties into corporate-friendly positions, there can be big paydays. Even when they leave their own party is a drastically damaged condition, as we have with the Democratic Party in the wake of the 2016 elections. Or maybe we should say, especially when they leave the left-of-center party in such a state.
