You’ve certainly given us plenty to respond to, and I don’t have time to respond to all of it. All I can post is a few brief things.
Regarding nationalization (or alterglobalization) I recall that when I was in college, circa the year 2000, there were major trade meetings every few months, and various leftist groups would bring thousands of protesters out into the streets. After awhile this died down. I’m sure there are still a few such protesters out there, but not enough to get the attention they got in 2000. There haven’t been many big trade deals lately, but globalization goes forward all the same. It goes forward because it brings immense benefits to an immense number of people. Anti/alter globalization is a hobby for a few of the world’s better off people. It will never be the world’s main topic.
Occupy? Same deal. A bunch of rich kids who get out of their REI tents, put on Gap clothing, drink a Starbucks Coffee, open up their Macbooks, and write blog posts about how corporations are destroying America. Obviously a movement like that is going to fritter out pretty quickly, and it did. The notion that it was suppressed by military police tactics is untrue. Police of an ordinary kind may have shown up in a few cases, but for the most part we just waited for the rich kids to get bored and go home.
Fundamentally far left economic movements must fail because when left wing economic policies are implemented, disaster ensues. You’ve mentioned Latin America. Ask someone from Venezuela how that’s working out for them. In our lifetime, free markets have lifted billions of people out of starvation and poverty. Occupy Wall Street has never lifted anybody out of poverty.
You mean “far left” economic policies like those of say, Sweden, or maybe Canada?
It appears to be your simple thesis that anything that criticizes the economic status quo is stupid, because everything is wonderful. Any criticism of capitalism is obviously the work of bored rich kids and far-left socialists.
No one disputes the accomplishments of capitalist economies. The problem is that everything is not wonderful. Unbridled capitalism is also creating fundamental problems, most particularly and to the greatest extreme in the US, and those problems are getting worse. “Occupy” wasn’t a game – the real game is being played by some of the criminals infesting Wall Street who had a major role in the economic meltdown. The fact that the richest country in the world still doesn’t have universal health care, or indeed affordable health care at all for most folks, is only a symptom of much larger problems of growing social and economic inequality – most of which stem from the fact that the richest 1 or 2% control the economy and the government, and are helping themselves to the nation’s wealth while the middle class gets squeezed and the poor get devastated.
There’s nothing “far left” about regulated capitalism and social responsibility. There’s nothing “far left” about Sweden or Canada, about having fair progressive taxation, responsibly managing the national debt, providing universal health care and a robust social safety net, having a strong and highly regulated banking system, regulating corporate monopolies and oligopolies and related practices to ensure genuine free markets, protecting the environment, cutting useless corporate handouts, and above all keeping big money out of politics. None of that is inconsistent with a capitalist economy, and indeed much of it is essential to ensure a healthy and sustainable one.
There is no “unbridled capitalism” anywhere in the developed world. We may quibble about the amount and kind of regulation, but that’s it. Just like we may quibble about the details of golbalization, but no developed country is aligned with where the OP, and apparently septimus, are coming from on that issue.
I’ve already pointed out that this isn’t true. Globalization, in and of itself, is a neutral thing; and that’s why “anti-globalization” is a misnomer from the corporate media. The question is about under what terms will it occur. Under the neoliberal paradigm, it brings immense benefits to a few people, and harms all the rest. Under others, however, the potential for good is immense. If this sort of activism is a hobby for a few of the world’s better-off, then why are such social movements in Latin America (and elsewhere) so, large, inspiring, and sometimes successful? Why are the World Social Fora held in the developing world?
I was an Occupier. Everything you’ve just written here is wrong, on all levels.
This is wrong also. There was nothing “free market” about the Asian Tigers, nor about China or Vietnam. Israel springboarded to prosperity on the foundations laid by the kibbutz movement, which was practicing anarchist economics. In Latin America today, Venezuela has run into trouble, but substantial benefits have accrued in places where governments were allowed to deviate even slightly from the neoliberal paradigm. That’s why I included the links that I did.
No, probably just believing what corporate media says.
Indeed, unbridled capitalism exists nowhere. The developed world didn’t follow it; a version of it is pushed on the underdeveloped world, but what happens in practice is free markets for the masses and welfare for the rich. That’s what the developed world has been doing to itself throughout my lifetime, with consequences that I and others have mentioned. There are no free markets, as the rulers won’t allow that. That’s why it’s important to mention, if only as an aside, that orthodox free marketeers dislike neoliberalism as well, for similar reasons.
Blocking traffic? Well yes, afflict the comfortable. Many Occupiers were homeless and/or long-term unemployed, some were retired, and many of the rest of us were part of a rotating cast that participated when we weren’t at work. This snark came up, and comes up, again and again, and it’s frankly wrong.
You can be the lone voice of reason. No one will listen or care. What’s stronger : your lone voice of (possible) truth, or “Obama’s gonna take our guns!” and “Obama looks weak because he’s reluctant to risk a nuclear war with Russia” and “I want the old health insurance back, where I can be murdered if I run out of money for even a brief period of time and have a pre-existing condition”.
You can vote. Good luck with that - any vote you cast is drowned out by people thinking stupid stuff like the above.
The only viable option you actually have that is a PITA and may not be possible for you specifically is to leave. Some nicer countries might take you if you meet their requirements. This is the only option that will make any material difference for you.
Just an observation, but it seems to me that if you “afflict the comfortable”, you can’t then be surprised when said comfortable don’t get won over by your arguments.
We may, and we do. There are degrees of regulation on the conduct of business and politics – in a word, how you are allowed to make money and the extent to which you can control the political system and public opinion to serve your own interests once you have a lot of it. That the US has a non-zero level of such regulation isn’t the point – the point is that the conditions I described do in fact exist, and they benefit no one except the 1% and the politicians who serve them.
Of course the perennial argument is that it’s a democracy, and the people elect these politicians. Well, yes, but they elect them based on the fables that are relentlessly promoted by the plutocrats who are empowered to spend as much as they like in order to do so: voodoo economics is real, tax cuts for “job creators” actually create jobs (because there’s nothing more pitiful than a corporation or a plutocrat that suddenly finds itself with too much money – the first priority is always to invent some jobs so they can give it away!), and my personal favorite: money equals speech, so every billionaire must be able to flood the national media with his particular viewpoint, such as his epiphany about the fact that climate change is positively, absolutely a disproven hoax.
And this is why, when Pew Research finds that Americans in the upper fifth of the income distribution earn 16.7 times as much as those in the lowest fifth – by far the widest such gap among the 10 advanced countries in the Pew Research Center’s 2013 global attitudes survey, fewer than half of Americans care – a far lower level of concern than in any other country except Australia, where the top fifth earned only 2.7 times the bottom fifth.
The median household income is only about half of what it would be if it had kept pace with the economy since 1970, but the income of the 1% has soared – the top 400 taxpayers quadrupled their income between 1992 and 2007 alone. And the gap is increasing: relative to decadal trends prior to 1979, in the period 1979-2005 the bottom 90% of earners all saw reduced income gains; the top 10% saw increased gains rising rapidly with higher income levels, with the top 1% raking in almost $600,000 more per household than if historical trends had stayed constant. When the economy tanked between 2007 and 2009, due in part to Wall Street criminality, the unemployment rate doubled, Americans lost an average of 35% in their home equity, and Wall Street profits went up 720%. Cite.
The messed up thing is that these numbers are empirical facts. They aren’t opinions. If you’re not among a vanishingly small percentage of the population, you get no benefit from all the productivity improvements to the economy made over the last few decades. Similarly, lowering taxes on the rich is not helping you - it’s just making the rich even richer.
That’s the facts. All parties should be basing their discussion about what to do starting with these basic undeniable realities and going from there.
Instead, a particular party can just pretend that reality doesn’t even exist.
Even if true, that’s of spectacular irrelevance to what happens here in the U.S.
The OP has gotten derided because of hyperbolic nonsense like
I thought there could be reasonable conversation about issues of immediate concern to Americans (jobs, foreign threats, immigration, tax reform etc.) and the OP is freaking out about things that are either way down the list of the vast majority’s concerns, or outright caricatures of what significant numbers of people think.
“Spectacular irrelevance”? How on earth can the outcomes of economic and social policies in other western democracies possibly be irrelevant? Without the lessons of history – domestic and foreign – all you have is wilful ignorance that rejects facts and experience in favor of gut feel and preferred dogma. I see this all the time, for example, in the rejection of universal health care which is not just successful in all other industrialized countries but is indeed a treasured foundation of contemporary social policy, but I’m told by right-wing types that it can never, ever work in the US because… freedom, or something. Exactly the same thing was said about Medicare in the late 50s and early 60s. And of course climate change is a hoax because scientists are all crackpot conspirators. :rolleyes: Reality denial is never a winning long-term strategy.
Last I saw fewer than half of Americans were convinced that Obama is Christian, while 11% (and 17% of Republicans) “knew” he was Muslim – the rest weren’t sure or declined to answer. Those numbers are from a poll taken two months into his presidency, and were essentially unchanged from pre-election polls. And as many as 38% suspect Obama was not born in the US – 15% know this “for sure” – and according to this poll, 45% of Republicans think he was born outside the US.
Still think those are “caricatures of what significant numbers of people think” and that it’s “hyperbolic nonsense” to say that these were real election issues? And then of course The Donald insinuated himself into the election process with his pretend campaign that got a lot of airtime, the centerpiece of which was Obama’s alleged Kenyan birthplace. I don’t use the word “lunatic” lightly, but out of necessity I find myself using it a lot in these political contexts.
wolfpup: I think the reason many people are snarking at the OP is that he or she seems to think they have discovered something new about Americans. All those things you are writing about-- how are they different from previous times in the US? No, we are not Europe. We have never been Europe. We do not aspire to be Europe. And we’ve done just fine, thank-you very much.
The OP may fancy himself a modern-day Cassandra, but he seems a lot more like Chicken Little.
Some of this is new, though. My link to Eisenhower goes to his famous letter to his brother, in which he states that there’s no way a serious political party would attempt to eliminate everything that people fought so hard to get: the social safety net, workplace safety measures, and so on. Going back to the Gilded Age would have been unthinkable.
This has changed.
We aren’t doing fine. Neither is much of Europe. I’m looking at places in various countries where at least the choice exists to go from bad to possibly better, instead of bad-to-worse, which seems to be happening here.
“Neoliberalism” tends to be a boogeyman that folks on left lash out at without being very specific about what exactly they’re attacking. If you want to convince us that you have a reasoned policy position rather than just ranting, perhaps you could start by defining what you mean by Neoliberalism.
In your OP you posted links supposedly showing that Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, and Bush, along with “orthodox free marketeers” (?), had all rejected Neoliberalism. The links don’t really seem to say what you claim they say. One tells us that Eisenhower didn’t want to eliminate Social Security. One discusses various types of free trade. How is all of this supposed to add up to a rejection of Neoliberalism?
Fine with me. But that has absolutely nothing to do with an evidence-based approach to policymaking.
The more pertinent observation would be that many people in America have done just fine, and others have done terribly, and suffered needless hardships in a bountiful nation that can do much better. Being probably the best country in the world in which to be wealthy is great but it isn’t a complete description of “doing fine”. And some would argue with your assertion just from first principles, based on things like the numbers I posted upthread. When unemployment doubles and people’s home equity plummets while Wall Street crooks enjoy the Bush tax cuts and see their profits soar more than 700%, and when the US still has more uninsured people than Canada has total population, and thousands of others are going bankrupt paying medical bills – well, maybe things aren’t quite as rosy as you think.
You don’t have to aspire to be Europe or anyplace else to value the lessons that can be gleaned from their policy outcomes. That kind of flippant dismissal, characterizing essentially the whole western world as a bunch of socialists that America should smugly disdain was used by conservative hardliners to oppose Medicare, social security, and virtually every progressive reform that is now entrenched and valued by left and right alike. It’s just a pointless setup for future fear-mongering polemics against similar important reforms.
The correct observation is that most people have done just fine, and that the poor do not have it very badly off.
And that expecting people to pay back their student loans is not an injustice.
And the most pertinent observation is that it does no harm to a person by earning more than he does, when that person has the ordinary means of life.
Occupy never got anywhere because
[list=A[li]they had no idea what they wanted, and []the notion that they were entitled to as much as someone who had worked all their life is and was ridiculous, and []yuppies complaining about how tough they got it is almost as boring as anarchists complaining about how unfair life is.[/list][/li]
The leftie complaint is always that conservatives say “I’ve got mine”. The trouble is, the response is generally “I want yours along with an apology”. You aren’t likely to get either.
No “serious politician” is advocating a return to the 19th century today.
No, it hasn’t.
Yes, we know-- the sky is falling.
OK, I worded that poorly. I meant to say that we, as a country, have done just fine. The country as a whole, that is. The similarities between the US and any European country far, far outweigh the differences.
You are, of course, correct that lots of people have had a tough time of it. I also don’t mean to gloss over the terrible history of social injustice in the US. But… things are getting better, not worse on almost all fronts. If we want to speak to evidence based policy making, there is no “evidence” to support the claims in the OP.
Just one example: The OP links to a blog that supposed shows "Evisceration of environmental regulations, rollbacks of consumer protection legislation, rollbacks of financial industry regulations, less access for poor women to reproductive services, defunding of education and science research … " Having not found that quote in the article, and going back to the OP, I see that it was from someone who posted a comment to the linked article. Are you fucking kidding me? Are we now using the comment sections of blogs as cites? When the article he linked to actually said:
“Again: It’s one election, it’s a midterm (with the lower, whiter turnout that entails), the long-term structural forces still look good for Democrats…”
So, even if we assume, arguendo, that Republicans = evil = the future, the OP’s link actually states the opposite. The left lost this election. Get over it. As the OP’s link says: ** It’s one election.**
Neoliberalism is a new incarnation of 19th-century classical liberalism. There’s lots of talk about “free markets” and “free trade,” but what happens in practice is there’s free market austerity for most of the population, and a spare-no-expense safety net for the rich and corporations. Eisenhower scoffed at the idea that any serious political force in the US would try to do away with all the things working people had gained after so many years of violent struggle. In the same vein, Nixon said “We are all Keynesians now,” reflecting the compact between workers and managers/owners that was not seriously in question yet. The problem was, by the late 1970s the generations that saw their loved ones burn to death in garment sweatshops and shot by Pinkerton goons was dead.
The “orthodox free marketeers” who actually take such slogans seriously disapprove of neoliberalism as well, because it’s an incredibly unfree market on behalf of the powerful, wealthy, and privileged. The link I gave shows one example, as they refer to NAFTA and CAFTA as “managed trade.” Just today I received a letter from CISPES, letting me know about Monsanto’s efforts to use CAFTA to sue El Salvador for daring to have a plan known as the Family Agriculture Program, through which the country is rebuilding its agricultural sector. Now, 100% of the country’s corn and bean seed is now produced by local farmers and cooperatives, helping ensure food security, among other things. Monsanto, with help from the State Department, is trying to bully El Salvador into regressing into the prior arrangement. That’s neoliberalism for you.
So we aren’t in the midst of serious economic problems, the middle class isn’t shrinking, upward social mobility isn’t in jeopardy, and we haven’t seen the emergence of a precariat?
Let them eat cake, then? We have too many diabetics as it is.
No, Occupy got somewhere, indeed we got to lots of places all over the country and world, and we got a lot of these issues onto the national radar to a much greater extent than before the occupations began. In DC, we decided (“consensed”) upon this detailed declaration, through which we made it obvious what we wanted, among other things. You won’t see anything resembling your next two bullet points there. Nevertheless, the corporate media kept saying “We don’t know what they want! They don’t know what they want! Time for sports, then celebrity gossip!”
That’s what will happen if we lose all the things gained in that century and the next, and that’s exactly what the Kochs and Brownbacks of the world (among many others, not all of them Republicans!) are trying to do.
The loss of a livable planet is about as bad as a falling sky, no?
Indeed, we’re both in trouble. Some of Europe has encouraging signs of resistance, but it’s too soon to tell where that will lead.
It’s not just in the past, it’s in present, and now in the likely future. The Taibbi article I linked to above has plenty of evidence, dealing not just with student loans but how that problem affects the rest of the economy. Wolfpup added some earlier as well, and Habeed noted that, indeed, it is empirical evidence.
I liked the way it was phrased. Do you deny that sort of thing is in store?
Even if the GOP doesn’t cook the books to remain in power in perpetuity (and such things have happened for nearly a century in some countries, like Mexico’s PRI) and subsequently loses, the Democrats are not that much better. The “left” did lose this election, because ballot access laws and other roadblocks make running as a third party practically illegal, and nearly impossible. A lack of proportional representation among other things forces people to vote against the major party they disapprove of more, simply because they don’t want them to win, rather than voting for what they really want. Everybody fears throwing their vote away, and yet they end up doing that anyway, when you think about it.
But this is nothing new under the sun. The modern American electoral system has pretty much always been thus and probably always will be. First-past-the-post voting is firmly entrenched and doesn’t generate much mass opposition. If you want to work to change it fine - there are arguments to be made for proportional representation. Good luck getting it implemented, but have at it.
But ballot access arguments aside, don’t argue this is something new to this election ( and ease up on the hyperbole - there is nothing illegal about third parties, they’re probably just doomed to fail on a national level for structural reasons ).