Tag Archives: neoliberalism

Political Rants

About casting lead upon the waters

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

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

Pivot to aggression

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

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

Countering what, exactly?

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

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

Block v. block

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

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

luv u,

jp

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

Putting power back in its place

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

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

Learning from teachers

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

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

New economy, new tactics

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

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

Shake them upside-down

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

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

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.

Political Rants

Making The case for Postal banking.

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

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

Loudest voice in the room

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

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

Why we need postal banking

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

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

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

Put some bank in the reconciliation bill

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

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

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.