GOVERNMENT ISNT BROKEN, it has been relocated piece by piece into the hands of corporations, their agents (executives) and the rich who control them. Understanding of this state of affairs appears to be reflected in election results that rotate both corporate-state Parties in and out of office with increasing public frustration. The Democrats rebuke in recent mid-term elections and eternally low approval ratings for Congress suggest that a large number of people perceive that something is broken with American politics. What doesn’t appear to be as widely understood are the changes to Western political economy that have taken place over the last forty years that could best be described as a neo-liberal (fascist) coup. The traditional left/right divide theorized to be embodied in oppositional politics, Democrats versus Republicans, has been supplanted by the unified economic agenda of the radical right with ‘political’ differences consigned to cultural issues being decided at the state and local levels. Economists write implicitly or explicitly about capitalism (e.g. ‘markets’) as if the federal, state and local governments weren’t fully integrated with ‘markets’ through government funded research and development, military entanglements in the interests of capitalists, regulations, transfers and expropriation. Politicians speak of foreign and domestic programs, legislation and regulations as if the resulting economic outcomes were unrelated to their form and intent. These tendencies are nowhere more evident than in ‘trade’ agreements, the political framework of ‘market’ relations. Democrats have been the more effective proponents of neo-liberal trade policies since Bill Clinton passed NAFTA in 1993. With Republicans regaining control of Congress, the Democrat establishment is scrambling to claim ‘political’ differences while President Obama and Congressional Republicans promote nearly identical economic agendas through trade agreements. This ‘works’ by giving civil decision-making authority to supranational agencies through economic leverage, the right to be compensated for not destroying the world. Countries with the weakest labor protections, environmental regulations, banking restrictions and public interest legislation are being made the new ‘politics,’ the direction of ‘public’ policy via economic policy, by design. The very idea of ‘free trade’ depends on a specious circle of premises, on the premise that ‘external’ restrictions like government regulations hinder trade while ‘internal’ restrictions like concentrated economic power -- monopoly power and economic power expressed through captured state power -- simply don’t exist. However, the ‘free-trade’ negotiators behind past and future trade pacts harbor no such illusions. The creation of supranational agencies, as TPP (Trans Pacific Partnership) and TTIP (Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) do, doesn’t reduce or eliminate state power; it relocates it from civil to corporate control. And the ‘protections’ being granted are from market competition through patents and restrictions. The question of why the nominally elected representatives of a nominally democratic nation would voluntarily cede control to supranational agencies gets to the heart of present circumstance. The premise of the question is that supranational agencies, a/k/a/ multinational corporations, don’t already effectively control civil governance in the U.S. While public focus tends toward national politics, ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) has spent the last decade writing corporate interests into local and state legislation. And while public perceptions of Barack Obama’s bank bailouts, subsidies and guarantees tend toward corruption-lite in the form of campaign contributions, Mr. Obama’s greater betrayal was in reviving the forces of neo-liberalism rather than bringing them to heel. Had ‘market’ forces been allowed to play themselves out, neo-liberalism would most likely have disappeared in a puff of smoke with Wall Street in 2008. Those not paying close attention might miss how deeply cynical current U.S. politics, particularly those of Clinton/Obama Democrats, are. Of what value is Mr. Obama’s (nominal) support for raising the minimum wage if the trade deals he is promoting are designed remove the civil capacity for setting a minimum wage? What credibility do Mr. Obama’s environmental policies, such as they are, have when he is actively working to subvert the capacity for civil environmental regulation through trade deals? And lots of smart people are railing against Republican efforts to subvert Dodd-Frank bank ‘reforms.’ But if banking regulation is ultimately decided by the nation with the fewest bank regulations, how aren’t Republicans just doing in public what trade-deal supporting Democrats are doing out of public sight? Neo-liberalism re-emerged from the social compromises of the New Deal because the logic of capitalism was retained in the West. The government–market distinctions made in neo-liberal theory are wholly self-serving for those who have benefitted from them and are radically uninformed by those who have internalized neo-liberal logic.
Posted on: Mon, 19 Jan 2015 21:37:07 +0000
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