Democrats & Biden face a choice. Do they finish the job and end neoliberalism? Or do they declare "mission accomplished" and revert back to neoliberal policies?
The Democratic Party is having an internal battle over the "small" and the "large" infrastructure bills, but what's really at stake is the future of neoliberalism within the party. The smaller "bipartisan" bill represents the neoliberal worldview, including public-private partnerships and huge subsidies to for-profit companies, whereas the larger "reconciliation" Democratic Party-only bill hearkens back to the FDR/LBJ classic progressive way of doing things.
Milton Friedman began selling
neoliberalism to America in the 1950s, and we fully bought into it in the 1980s. Most Americans had no idea, really, what this new political/economic ideology meant; they just knew it involved
free trade, economic austerity/tax cuts and
deregulation/privatization.
The free trade part, we were told, would bring about the end of great-power wars because countries that were economically interdependent wouldn't dare ruin their own economies by going to war with a significant trading partner.
Read more at
HartmannReport.com.
-Thom
