Gutless Democrats fear fights: Why triangulating neo-liberal Clintonites back big business over peop
As the Democratic primary heated up to the boiling point, one particular line of attack on Bernie Sanders had the distinctively Karl Rove-ian stench of attacking Sanders strength. Vox, Slate and AEI all bought the spin and struck the same theme: If Bernie Sanders cares about poor people, how come he doesnt want to trade with them?
But even more than Rove, we can catch a distinctive whiff of Thatcherism here: There is no alternative; either we do trade on neoliberal terms or else we head back to caveman status. We cant do things in a more equitable manner, were being told, even though history repeatedly shows that we canreplacing monarchy with democracy, abolishing slavery, getting rid of child labor, establishing equal rights for women. All these equalizing advances weve come to take for granted were unthinkable once: there was simply no alternative
or, again, so we were told.
Economist Dean Baker debunked the underlying argument on his Beat the Press blog as the attack on Sanders first appeared, and elaborated his critique more fully in a piece solicited by the Washington Postwhich then declined to run it. Baker first noted that conventional economic theory calls for rich countries to run surpluses with developing countriessupplying the capital they need to developand that this pattern prevailed throughout most of the 1990s. The United States had a modest trade deficit in these years, but Europe and Japan had large surpluses, Baker recalled, but This pattern was reversed in 1997 with the U.S.-I.M.F.s bailout from the East Asian financial crisis.
That bailout, directed by the Clinton Treasury department and the I.M.F., came with very harsh terms, which led developing countries to decide they had to keep large foreign exchange reservesmeaning U.S. dollarsin order to avoid a similar fate. This in turn required running large trade surpluses, the exact opposite of what conventional, textbook economic thinking had previously assumed. This was the period in which the U.S. trade deficit exploded, going from just over 1 percent of GDP in 1996 to almost 6 percent of GDP in 2005, a rise in the size of the annual deficit equivalent to almost $900 billion in todays economy, Baker noted. This rise in the trade deficit coincided with the loss of more than 3 million manufacturing jobs, roughly 20 percent of employment in the sector.
http://www.salon.com/2016/04/23/gutless_democrats_fear_fights_why_triangulating_neo_liberal_clintonites_back_big_business_over_people/
RiverLover
(7,830 posts)He's going to crush Hillary in the GE on this one issue. Unless she's indicted. Then all he has to do run on that.
Everyone wants Made In America again.
Thank Goddess we still have a sliver of hope with Bernie still in the race.
hollowdweller
(4,229 posts)Trade is one issue that is a winner but neither party till now has touched because of the money that goes to them for fucking the American worker.
The population however is tired of waiting for the big payoff they keep getting promised.
I think if she wins Clinton is really going to have to come out with some big stuff for the middle class or Trump is going to run over her ass. I really do.
bemildred
(90,061 posts)Been watching it for, lessee, 2016 - 1981 == 35 by years now. You want the Reagan Revolution, that's it, a revolution of the rich against the poor, and revolution of the takers against the workers. And they want you to be grateful to them for giving you a job too.