Float Like a Butterfly
Ventura County Local Politics - September 9, 2010
Op-ed on the Rope-A-Dope Neocapitalist Plutocracy
By F. William Bracy
Just when you thought you'd made a full recovery from the Bush Administration's era of sports metaphoria – well, not so fast.
Recovery experts will tell you that you must learn to face your demons, so for those who have forgotten what difficult days those were, think back on a classic from a member of G.W's diplomacy team, Christopher Hill, who said upon emerging from a nukular summit with North Korean officials in Beijing: “. . .it's always like 3 yards, 3 yards, 3 yards. And then it's always 4th and 1, and you make a first down and do 3 more yards.”
If there were boxing metaphors, I don't remember them. The real beauty behind Ali's rope-a-dope strategy, however, is the fact that just like his opponents, the “dope” always believed he was winning, which is right where we are with today's tax-fearing neoliberals.
Free Market Fundamentalism
How is it that the newly realized American corporatist-fascist state (not only warned of by Ike [and someone else] but taking hold just since the days of Jack and Jackie's Camelot ) cannot seem to adequately provide for the health and well-being of all its citizens? How is it that capitalism as enunciated by free-market fundamentalists Friedrich von Hayek, Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan will fail, ostensibly, under a system of progressive taxation? How is it that the incentive to innovate and invent will somehow as a force of nature wither and die should there be any attempt to impose regulation? How is it that competition will be stymied the instant that workers are allowed to organize in a manner that seeks only to protect them from injury and exploitation? How is it that the mere hint of the kind of regulatory environmental oversight which could end up saving the planet is detrimental to business, and is not to be tolerated?“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power” [Benito Mussolini (1883 – 1945) Fascist Dictator of Italy]
If indeed their postulates are to hold up, how does one explain, then, that the free market's unseen hand, through all its years of greatest glory, flourished under a system of progressive taxation? . . .that innovation and invention escalated stratospherically in the presence of fair practices legislation? . . .that the greatest middle class the world has ever seen literally erupted with the appearance of collective bargaining?
How also does one explain the latest “China syndrome,” with that country's natural gravitation toward new green technology – that is, if we're expected to believe that the coming Green Revolution represents such an existential threat to 20th and 21st Century American style neocapitalism?
Entering the Rope-A-Dope Arena
Special interests have figured out that they need a clever way to invigorate the now stagnating Bushies along with a few grass-roots relics like Gingerich and Armey, and it's obvious that what they've come up with is political rope-a-dope, courtesy of the great Muhammed Ali. Their latest bright idea is to spread confusion between Wall Street's interests and Main Street's interests, and they're hard-selling it, even as the top 2 percent of Americans have seen their incomes increase by 280 percent while the small-town folks have seen nothing but decreases in all areas of their financial lives.None of this will succeed long-term, however, until they find a way to whip struggling, work-a-day people who self identify as conservatives, tea-partiers and libertarians into a lather – getting them to vote against their own best interests. Could the thoroughly discredited trickle-down theory of economics be coming back into vogue, and if this isn't yet another example of roping the dopes, what else could you call it?
Friedman, Pinochet and the “Chilean Miracle”
The United States was once a third-world nation, of course, and it well could again become one. This time it wouldn't be like having Milton Friedman and the CIA marching into Chile to prop up Augusto Pinochet thinking, mistakenly of course, that they were solving the Salvatore Allende “Marxist problem.” Sure, Pinochet was a bloody dictator, but he was our bloody dictator, don't forget (as was the Butcher of Baghdad for a time). Rather, for the real dirty work here at home, we've had Friedman protegé Alan Greenspan at our immediate disposal to tear down what remains of America's post-WW2 decades of progress, even though we did receive a mea culpa of sorts from the man. It isn't enough, of course. Professor Greenspan seems quite comfortable in the knowledge that he did his best to carry as much water as he could for the meritocracy (who?) in America and their own bloody stranglehold on the “undeserving” poor.If this in any way sounds like events that have taken place in Argentina, which once had an economic output that was equivalent to most nations in Europe, it's because of some close parallels. In both cases it was Uncle Sam's meddling in the affairs of sovereign nations, and not only that, but meddling under the banner of American neoliberalism that brought these once-prosperous nations practically to their knees. Now the meddlers are calling for those same reforms here – cut taxes, disband the unions, do away with all government regulation, eliminate social programs, privatize, privatize, privatize and do it by roping in as many dopes as possible – particularly as election time approaches. Furthermore, if you told most of these people that they were basing their philosophy on classical 18th and 19th Century liberalism, they wouldn't believe you.
Argentina had its wake-this-sleeping-giant moment, but it was a short ten years of partial success achieved by following the Reagan economic model during the Carlos Menem presidency. Ten years. . .and successful only if measured by GDP output. The campaign rhetoric during the run-up to the election was centered by all candidates – leftists and righties alike – on the needs of the poor. But who has delivered the goods since Memem's center-right government took office in 1989? Menem's borrowed neoliberal policies controlled rampant inflation and brought partial recovery to the economy but by 1999 the poor were poorer than ever. This is something we're quite familiar with here in the U.S., but only the elite ruling class in this country would call this a successful recovery. Because in America as long as Wall Street recovers, the rich recover, and the fact that there are still no jobs doesn't mean they (the meritocracy) won't spin it – unflinchingly – as something called a jobless recovery.
If you want an answer to the earlier question, “Who has delivered since 1989?” it was of course Menem's successor, Néstor Kirchner, a center-left Peronist, elected in 2003 – serving only one 4-year term – very popular and a tantalizingly “Clinton-esque” figure to follow their “Reagan-man,” . . .again only a decade removed from a parallel political leadership experience we've had here at home. Kirchner was (and still is) roundly criticized by the Wall Street Journal, which in and of itself should have told Argentine voters that he was the best man for the job. Skeptics take note:
“In the economic arena, the Kirchner government has overseen a strong revival of the Argentine economy, with economic growth rates of 8.8% in 2003, 9% in 2004, 9.2% in 2005, and an estimated growth rate of 7.8% in 2006. Unemployment decreased from a high of about 24% in 2002 to about 11% in early 2006. In June 2005, the Kirchner government was successful in restructuring more than $100 billion in defaulted bond debt at about 34 cents on the dollar, saving the country more than $67 billion in the largest debt-reduction ever achieved by a developing country.” (source: See link at end – "Argentina: Political and Economic Conditions and U.S. Relations" [p.crs-4] by Mark P. Sullivan, Specialist in Latin American Affairs, Foreign Affairs, Defense, and Trade Division.)
And I'll conclude by again following up on an earlier point. . .no jobless recovery can ever be called a recovery; take it from our neighbors to the South and project forward into our own future if you dare. If and when the psycho-babblers – the Bill Kristols, the Paul Wolfowitzs, the Dick Cheneys – fail here in the U.S., they will only redouble their efforts on you, our southern neighbors.
There are times when not even your best friends will tell you; A jobless recovery occurs only in the mind of a neocapitalist rope-a-dope plutocrat.