Professor Kuttner quotes historian Quinn Slobodian who claimed: "The neoliberal project was focused on designing institutions -- not to liberate markets, but to encase them, to inoculate capitalism against the threat of democracy" (Ibid., p. 12).
Take NAFTA, for example. It was "a 'free trade' initiative whose fine print yoked Mexico more closely to US financial markets and gave corporations new rights to file complaints against domestic health. safety, and environmental regulation as supposed barriers to trade" (Ibid., p. 13). Moreover, with countries shackled by such global institutions and agreements, it became much easier for financial markets to pressure yoked countries to inflict austerity measures on their populations, lest the country in question lose investor confidence. (Ibid., p.14). According to Professor Kuttner, "Globalization has become a prime instrument of neoliberalism, both ideologically and institutionally" (Ibid.).
Neoliberal Clinton would further damage America and the world in 1996, when he urged the expansion of NATO, beginning in 1999. His announcement -- condemned by the eminent Russia scholar, George Kennan, as a "fateful error" -- was nothing more than a cheap political stunt designed to garner the votes of Eastern European ethnics living in the American mid-west. Slick Willy's fateful error would ultimately transform our new post-Cold War friends, the Russians, into an enemy. Thus, he recklessly set in motion the events that provoked Russia's invasion of Ukraine. That invasion provoked the economic sanctions that have now boomeranged, thus hammering another nail in the coffin of his neoliberal order. .
Just as bad, Clinton put an "end to welfare as we know it" by "repealing the New Deal's Aid to Families with Dependent Children program in favor of a stingier and more punitive alternative called Temporary Assistance to Needy Families" (Kuttner, p. 13). He also continued the mass incarceration of Blacks begun by Republicans in the 1980s.
Having not done enough damage, in 1999 Clinton "supported Congress's repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, the New Deal Act that had done more than any other to end speculation, corruption, and the boom bust cycle in America's financial sector" (Gerstle, p. 157).
It's repeal, when combined with President George W. Bush's pressure on "banks and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to issue more mortgages to low-income applicants" (Ibid., p. 213) -- including many "subprime" mortgages to borrowers deemed to be credit risks -- ushered in the securitization of mortgages by investment banks -- and the subsequent predatory lending encouraged by such securitization. When the resulting housing bubble popped, it brought on the Great Recession, which, in turn, initiated the collapse of the neoliberal order.
According to Professor Gerstle, the bursting of the speculative housing bubble brought on the threat "of global financial annihilation" (Ibid., p. 220). "U.S. households lost somewhere between $11 trillion and $20 trillion in net worth" (Ibid., p. 221). "The median household lost half of its wealth between 2007 and 2010" (Ibid.) and unemployment doubled from 4.7 percent in early 2008 to 9.4 percent in May 2009. (Ibid., p. 222).
The Great Recession was the fourth catastrophe to occur during the presidency of George W. Bush (the terrorist attacks on 9/11, the debacle of his illegal invasion and deliberately neoliberal, and thus poor, administration of Iraq, and his abysmally feckless response to Hurricane Katrina being the other three). But it was decisive in bringing about the election of America's first Black president, Barack Obama.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
1
