Now that maybe some of you are coming down from your Obama-highs, let’s take a closer look at what the majority of you actually voted for.
Rewind to the Fall of 2006, when socialistworker.org had this to say about Barack Obama (emphasis mine):
In Latin America, they’ve got a name for the kind of politics that Sen. Barack Obama represents: neoliberalism with a human face. It’s an attempt to revive an unpopular free-market, pro-business agenda behind the leadership of someone whose personal history suggests an affinity with the exploited and oppressed.
I wouldn’t bother with the rest of the story as it does little to prove its point. But that doesn’t invalidate the point.
Two years later in the Summer of ‘08, Naomi Klein sounded the alarm when Obama appointed a Wal-Mart proponent to head his economic policy team. Again, not recommended reading unless you’ve got a vendetta against Milton Friedman. However, I found the following very relevant to our current situation:
Now is the time to worry about Obama’s Chicago Boys and their commitment to fending off serious attempts at regulation. It was in the two and a half months between winning the 1992 election and being sworn into office that Bill Clinton did a U-turn on the economy. He had campaigned promising to revise NAFTA, adding labor and environmental provisions and to invest in social programs. But two weeks before his inauguration, he met with then-Goldman Sachs chief Robert Rubin, who convinced him of the urgency of embracing austerity and more liberalization.
Just in case former President Clinton’s neoliberal leanings have slipped your mind, Wikipedia provides a nice refresher course (via Robert Pollin):
… neoliberalism under the U.S. Bill Clinton administration – steered by Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin – was the temporary and unstable policy inducement of economic growth via government-supported financial and housing market speculation, featuring both low unemployment and low inflation rates. This unusual coincidence was made possible by the disorganization and dispossession of the American working class. Santa Cruz history of consciousness professor Angela Davis and Princeton sociologist Bruce Western have supported the position that the high rate (compared to Europe) of incarceration in the U.S. – specifically 1 out of every 37 American adults is in the prison system – heavily promoted by Clinton administration, is the neoliberal U.S. policy tool for keeping unemployment statistics low, while stimulating economic growth through the maintenance of a contemporary slave population and the promotion of prison construction and “militarized policing.” The Clinton Administration also embraced neoliberalism by pursuing international trade agreements that would benefit the corporate sector globally (normalization of trade with China for example). Domestically, Clinton fostered such neoliberal reforms as the corporate takeover of health care in the form of the HMO, the reduction of welfare handouts, and the implementation of “Workfare.”
Let’s not forget that Barack Obama very recently supported a bill to hand out $700+ billion (with no strings attached) to his Wall Street financiers – he even chided Congress after they denied this massive theft of taxpayer money the first time around. Thanks to our Congressional cowards (including President-elect Obama), these corporate thieves are now being subsidized by the hundreds of billions on our dime, while we stand around, thumbs up our asses, watching what savings/investments we might have evaporate into the ether. Since this Wall Street handout was passed on Oct. 3, the NYSE Composite Index has plummeted 25%, wiping out at least $3,000,000,000,000 in wealth. Great job!
Ok, enough of the history lesson. Here’s some present day current-event shit.
Last week Obama assembled his Transition Economic Advisory Board. His selections should be a pretty good indication of the types of economic policies his administration will pursue.
Here are some of Willem Buiter’s thoughts on the 17 members:
There are far too few members with an serious background in economics, capable of grasping the complexities of the financial crisis… Most of this Transition Economic Advisory Board appears completely out of its depth…
Larry Summers in particular has never seen a bail-out he did not like and never one so large that he did not want to boost its size further. He will have a field day in the current crisis…
To summarize: the members of Obama’s Transition Economic Advisory Board are too old, too uninspiring and too much part of the problem to deliver the change America needs and to keep alive the hope that Obama may have inspired through his election. A wasted opportunity.
I suggest you read the whole thing.
Bloomberg News‘ columnist Johnathan Weil also had a few things to say about the TEAB:
It’s hard to believe Barack Obama would even think of calling this change…
Obama’s economic crew might as well be called the Bailout Bunch…
…by my tally, almost half the people on Obama’s economic advisory board have held fiduciary positions at companies that, to one degree or another, either fried their financial statements, helped send the world into an economic tailspin, or both…
Many of them should be getting subpoenas as material witnesses right about now, not places in Obama’s inner circle…
It’s a good read, particularly if you like soap operas – I should say it’s “shocking” but, well, then I’d be admitting to being quite naive.
TEAB member Larry Summers (see Buiter’s comments above) is the current favorite to replace Hank Paulson as Treasury Secretary. Some people may already be familiar with Larry Summers because he caught some heat when he was fired as President of Harvard University for the following sexist comment (although I’m obviously not fit for Harvard because for the life of me, I have no idea what this comment is actually saying): “There are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination.” I don’t know about you, but if I wanted to piss off a bunch of women, I’d opt for the much simpler “kuntz.”
Larry also created a bit of controversy in 1991 when, as the Chief Economist for the World Bank, he wrote a memo suggesting that Africa might be a nice place for developed nations to dump their toxic waste.
The rest of Summers’ resume is less exciting but far more damaging. Internationally, he had significant roles in the economic ransackings of Lithuania, Russia, South Korea, and Mexico. Domestically, he opposed regulating derivatives (one of the reasons we’re in this mess we’re in), lobbied to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 via passage of the Financial Services Modernization Act in 1999 (maybe a reason we’re in this mess we’re in), and supported the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 (definitely a reason we’re in this mess we’re in). He’s currently a consultant to Goldman Sachs (a profiteer benefitting from this mess we’re in) and is managing director of a hedge fund (not innocent in this mess we’re in).
That’s right folks. Your President-elect Barack Obama is seriously considering putting one of the high priests of the bubble economy in charge of rescuing the bubble economy he was instrumental in creating. Just like his predecessor, savior King Paulson!
Wtf?!
This is what we were promised by “change?” Sorry, but to me this looks, swims and quacks like the same old incompetent neoliberal crap… only this time it’s being recycled by a happy HOPEful “human face.”
Explore: GlobalResearch.ca, FT, Bloomberg, TPMCafe, The Big Picture.