The anti-capitalist rhetoric of certain Republican candidates sounds like it was ripped from the pages of The Nation. Rick Perry’s lurid description of “vulture capitalism” could have been cribbed from Alexander Cockburn or any number of other lefty writers. Newt Gingrich, likewise, denounces “crony capitalism” and asks, “Is capitalism really about the ability of a handful of rich people to manipulate the lives of thousands of people and then walk off with the money?” Right on, the left shouts. Newt sounds like one of those liberal professors poisoning young minds at elite universities.
Will it last? Skeptics are entitled to their doubts, but I'm confident that, as with the Populist movement of a century ago, OWS will bring lasting change
The ugly part of this gimmick is that it punishes most severely the very people who most need help.
The opportunistic cross-dressing by conservatives amounts to a battlefield conversion. Just as it’s said there are no atheists in a foxhole, there are no candidates in this year’s politics witless enough to stand up and defend the most bloodthirsty tactics of rapacious capitalism. Except one. Mitt Romney, the man the GOP will likely nominate for president. He is the “vulture capitalist” Rick Perry has in mind. Rivals cannot resist attacking Romney’s very profitable years running Bain Capital, a private-equity giant that specializes in creative destruction, eliminating jobs and sometimes whole companies to reward investors.
Romney awkwardly tries to explain why firing people can be good for the country. A hard sell, when so many people have been on the receiving end. Barack Obama will no doubt remind voters this fall that whatever anger they feel toward him, Republicans are running a “vulture” for president. How bizarre our politics have become. An Obama-Romney contest might determine which one gets tagged as the Herbert Hoover of this Great Recession.
The opportunism could have serious meaning because it reflects a deeper confusion of purpose and an insecurity in the Republican Party (Democrats have their own confusion, but that’s another story). Republicans have worked themselves into an ideological dead end that is untenable as a governing strategy. Reviving hard-nosed laissez-faire doctrine appeals to hard-core right-wingers but says nothing relevant about healing the economy or halting the steady disintegration of the broad middle class.
Some conservative thinkers seem to recognize this. They are floundering in search of alternative thinking, beginning to acknowledge economic and social realities the right has long ignored, even denied (economic injuries the left has addressed for decades). Just as candidate Newt condemns “crony capitalism” and Perry denounces “vultures,” historian Francis Fukuyama has abruptly rescinded the happy talk that made him famous twenty years ago. At the end of the cold war, Fukuyama’s book The End of History and the Last Man declared that left-right ideological conflicts were over. Liberal democracy had won. It would henceforth prevail around the world.
Hold that prophecy. The professor has issued a sort of retraction (he might say “correction”). His essay in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, explained that “some very troubling economic and social trends, if they continue, will both threaten the stability of contemporary liberal democracies and dethrone democratic ideology as it is now understood.”
Yikes. What trends are those? Global capitalism, he said. Free-trade doctrine and new technology, along with the steady offloading of American jobs, are destroying the middle class—the necessary foundation for democracy in advanced economies. “What if the further development of technology and globalization undermines the middle class and makes it impossible for more than a minority of citizens in an advanced society to achieve middle-class status?” Fukuyama asked.
His alarming observations were picked up by other conservative commentators and treated respectfully, a sign that these anxieties are widely shared. Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, longstanding advocate of globalization, embraced Fukuyama’s argument. New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote with sympathy for the struggling white working class. It votes Republican and gets hammered by corporate capitalists in return.
Fukuyama treats this threat to the middle class as a newly discovered insight, but of course, it is precisely what organized labor and liberal-left critics have been saying for about thirty years. Fukuyama’s warning reminded me of a disturbing article by Robert Kuttner I read in 1983 in The Atlantic, “The Declining Middle.” Fukuyama’s explanation of the economic forces echoes the book I published in 1997, One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism. Alas, the Stanford historian lacked the grace to acknowledge that he was catching up with the liberal left, essentially confirming our critique. If Fukuyama said so, he would lose membership in the Conservative Thinkers Club.
Nevertheless, I salute Fukuyama for putting some hard truths on the table. His essay will help other conservatives get over the tired bromides about free trade and see through the false claims promoted by the multinationals. The trade issue is at the core of US economic deterioration, yet it is the great silence in the 2012 campaign. It will keep chewing up the American middle class until one party or the other finds the courage to do something about it.
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posted by: cka2nd at 01/20/2012 @ 10:29am
And before Happy, Yad or limo pull a muscle, yup, not all leftists worship Europe or European Social Democrats. That's just a right-wing myth, and a rather simple-minded one, at that.
What Yad and my friend crabwalk have forgotten to mention is that what is keeping the overall unemployment rate so high is the loss in public sector jobs, even as privated sector job growth has rebounded, somewhat.
Of course, the assault on civil servants has been a bipartisan affair, with Democratic governors eschewing going after bargaining rights in favor of getting their public union lapdogs - I'm sorry, "leaders" - to sign agreements sticking it to their members, and then threatening layoffs and conducting re-votes to force said members to approve the giveback deals (kind of like the European Community bureaucrats forcing nations to vote two and three times to cede their sovereignty to the technocrats and Central Bankers).
If the other Democratic handmaidens to the financial sector are anything like Andrew "Governor One Percent" Cuomo, they're also laying the groundwork for the future privatization of much of the public sector, and don't be surprised if for-profits grab much of what the public sector and non-profits have traditionally done (because privately run, for-profit jails and juvenile centers have been sooooo wonderful).
Maybe the Dems really are just smarter than Repubs, but they are also just as much whores for the ruling class.
posted by: Yad061 at 01/19/2012 @ 5:21pm
Yes, Sen Obama did back Bushs' bailout of Wall Street, as did most GOP senators and congressmen. That does not make it "Obama's bailout" anymore than a recession that started in 2007 is "Obama's recession".
I know moving goal posts is a favored Nation con pastime so I understand, facts fail so let's break down the posts and move them down the street.
Reading Greider's article about Perry and Gingrich sounding like leftwing critics of capitalism, in attacking Romney, It struck how true the common observation that the OWS movement, now receding from the headlines, changed the national dialogue from debt and spending to inequality and economic justice.
Republicans will not admit this, but in fact, if there had been no successful OWS reframing of the debate, Republicans like Perry, Gingrich, and others would never have taken up the attack on predatory capitalism.
It seems clear that the OWS has effected not only a revitalized left but a long-dead progressive impulse in many Republicans....either that or they are cynically exploiting today's public disapproval of vulture capitalism for their own personal benefit.
In either case, it reveals a recognition that the case against capitalism, it its most mercenary forms at least, is a popular subject and can be used to appeal even to conservatives.
Thank you OWS for making a surprising difference which has changed the entire political discourse in a matter of months, from the ground up.
I remember 1984 asking people I knew: "How can you possibly vote for Reagan again? He promised to erase the deficit but doubled it instead. " And they would say: "you liberals are so cute. You worry about everything. Deficits are healthy, I read that in the paper." Whereupon, of course, Reagan by a landslide and tripled it. The rest is, as they say, history. Now you've got to wonder, when it's all so too late, where will it end? With a voter base so delusional for so long it is unimaginable they will wake up suddenly and say "oh wow, we gave away our future to a bunch of rich guys who slammed in an offshore account. Give it back." They will believe whatever they're told to believe and probably pull out the tens of millions of guns they buy each year and start shooting. I'm morbidly fascinated with how the actual foreclosure event will look. My bet is a massive wall street (and world markets crash) just before election time, with making any bailout hopeless. "Sorry about your luck guys," both parties will say. "If you think were raising taxes on the rich, we can't. We promised Grover!"
Senator Obama voted for TARP, Crabwalk.
Yes, possibly the economy is finally bottoming out (though much of the decrease in jobless claims is due to discouraged workers, involuntary early retirement and unemployment benefits expiring) and that, plus the Bin Laden kill, will probably ensure President Obama's re-election.
Of course, if the economy ever does recover to pre-Obama levels, the federal debt will power some really roaring inflation, so maybe Mr Romney will end up regretting the latest scandal that may torpedo Mr Gingrich in South Carolina.
And what does the Marxist, anti-business, union stooge Obama say about Free Trade Agreements?
I remember when the Nation cons told us that the reason these vulture capitalists (a term I hear actual real business people use, gasp!) DESERVE their payouts is because of the RISK they take. So, because Romney had no risk in Bain Capital, it stands that he deserves the pay off at the end, right? It's not like the people that had their pensions raided had any debts at risk, right? Only mortgages, student loans, medical bills, utility bills etc. After all, $375,000 a year "isn't much".
posted by: Yad061 at 01/19/2012 @ 11:37am
Perhaps you missed the latest figures, that new unemployment claims hit a four year low.
I know, more bombings in Iraq in 2005 told us that we were winning, but lower unemployment numbers show that Obamas policies are losing.
And hey, Thats right, Obama was solely responsible for all of those bailouts! President Paulson and the 34 GOP Senators and 91 GOP congressmen did all they could to stop Obama in the fall of 2008, by voting for TARP. Shame on Obama!
It is greed pure and simple and as the carpenter from Nazareth said, "The love of money is the root of all evil" and what is the love of money if not greed.
Vulture capitalism, demands for constant and immediate increased profits every quarter are not sustainable. Imagine if a worker demanded and increase in salary every quarter, we would lable him insane, yet corporations demand that and to get it they will gut companies, fire workers, and sell off assets. Anything to make the quick immediate profit which they take with them (at a 15% capital investment tax rate, no less).
But the greed extends to the middle and the working class. We clamor for products produced in overseas sweatshops where the workers are treated as little more than slaves because it can save us 23% on the cost of goods. Really, we are willing to see people enslaved in corporate misery to save a lousy 23 cents on the dollar?
It is the root of all evil my friends.
If it's a "hard sell" then shouldn't it be an even harder sell for Mr Obama?
He had billions of taxpayer dollars for bailouts and stimulus and such, but the number of unemployed (many PERMANENTLY so) and foreclosed and in poverty just goes up and up.
Mr Romney's company at least turned some distressed companies to profitability.
So they could employ people.
And pay tax money for Mr Obama to spend.
newt is, was and always will be nothing but a brazen huckster who is not capable of the truth. he will say anything to advance his personal crusade for fame and the spot light. he cares not a wit for anyone or anything. if converting to an atheist liberal would assure him the white house he would switch today. he fancies himself an intellectual but could not gain tenure at a 3rd tier college. he says he was a historian for Fannie Mae and feigns anger when he is mocked for it. The USA will be a better place when he goes the way of nixon. he has already done it once. Why is newt still here? This question goes to the soul of the American conscience.
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