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Trump - the necessary medicine for the neoliberal economic sickness that is selling out America.


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2020 Oct 10, 6:49am   306 views  1 comment

by Al_Sharpton_for_President   ➕follow (5)   💰tip   ignore  

A bit long, and as it would be political suicide for the authors to praise Trump and to bash Biden, it's still worth a read. A few excerpts -

"But he’s a symptom of what I consider to be a problem in the political economy in the U.S. that’s been going on in its current form, you know, for 40 years. And I would peg that as the neoliberal shift, the Reagan Thatcher revolution, the sort of movement to the privatization of everything, but more particularly to the embracing of a kind of globalization and economic paradigm that holds the capital, labor and goods can all move freely and equally across the world. Well, capital can do that. Money can do that. Big companies can do that. People and goods can’t do that so easily. And that’s one of the reasons why we got many of the things that helped to bring Donald Trump to office, the hollowing out of the Rust Belt, the embrace of a set of neoliberal economic principles by both sides of the aisle. There was not a lot of air, as I wrote in my first book, between certain policies around trade and financial regulation within the Clinton administration, as there was during the Reagan period.

So there’s a kind of a sense that both sides of the aisle had sold out the American working class."

"And I had an interesting trip about a year and a half ago around the Carolinas looking at supply chains and textiles there. And I met a number of small and midsize sort of private business owners, a number of workers, a lot of white workers in the agricultural industry there. You know, honorable people couldn’t stand Trump as a person, particularly those that identify with military or veterans at all but voted for him. Why? Because they understand the hypocrisy of what the Democratic sell has been since the 90s, which is basically OK, China, if you let us give you banking services, we will send you all of our manufacturing jobs and outsource our innovation ecosystem to you. It’s amazing how clear, crystal clear, someone working in a cotton gin is on that point."

"Sure, there’s a bunch of new businesses that are going to be formed out of this. They’re going to need less people, and they’re going to invest less. That means we’re going to get a jobless recovery. And I put recovery in quotation marks of a sort that is going to be entirely new. The math, the basic math is the U.S. is a 70 percent consumer spending economy. We have had a problem with middle-class income stagnation for 20 years. We’ve had a problem with working-class income stagnation for over 40 years. That’s going to be put on steroids."

"And we believe that it will be easier for China to make up what it still needs within the supply chain and innovation ecosystem, which is not much. I mean, it kind of owns a lot of that ecosystem right now. Just slap Chinese consumer brands on the top of it. Then it will be for America and the Western world to rebuild its entire supply chain because we kept the brands and all the I.P., but we didn’t keep that kind of manufacturing ecosystem. The military is obviously very worried about that. COVID has exposed the vulnerability of supply chains. So we’re going there no matter what."

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/10/rana-foroohar-and-mark-blyth-how-deep-will-the-depression-get.html

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1   HeadSet   2020 Oct 10, 7:13am  

So there’s a kind of a sense that both sides of the aisle had sold out the American working class."

Bingo. This is why Trump won despite the Bush and Clinton/Obama machines.

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