U.S. President Clinton may have set the standard in the modern era for political representatives of the “left” who sold out to neoliberalism and corporate power. But he’s not alone by any stretch of the imagination. His gambit has been emulated by parties of the supposed left, particularly in the industrialized Northern countries, for decades. And current U.S. President Barack Obama has, in contrast to the campaign promises that instilled renewed optimism in millions of young Americans who buoyed his election victory in 2008, continued the trend toward policies that favour corporate America—like a health care law that legally cornered the health market on behalf of medical insurance companies, and continuing bank bailouts and financial support for Wall Street. Much of this has come at the expense of U.S. taxpayers, many of whose public services continue to face steep funding reductions, and the working class, which has watched its net worth and earning potential decline.
Little wonder, then, that stock markets and corporate profits surged to record highs in 2012, under Obama’s tenure.
Neoliberalism has, by and large, seduced the left with its promises of power and fineries, eliciting an array of false reformists, of wolves in sheep’s clothing. There was British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his vision for a New Labour, which manifested as little more than Thatcherism with a friendlier face, and an all-too-willing vim for the War in Iraq. There was Canada’s Liberal Party under the steely grip of Jean Chretien, which bought wholesale into the dubious mantra of trade liberalization post-NAFTA, and undertook the most severe austerity program in Canada’s modern history in the mid-1990s, vitiating both transfers to individuals and to the provinces in order to avert slamming into a largely fictitious “debt wall.” The Liberals’ policy decisions in the 1990s drove a wedge between the wealthiest and poorest Canadians that continues to grow, along with household debt.
Federal New Democrat Thomas Mulcair has thus far responded to media pressure to become “electable” by shifting his New Democrats decidedly toward the centre of the political spectrum. How much further to the right he will permit the party to drift in the name of having a shot to lead the country—and whether a merger with the Liberal party will enter the realm of possibility—remains to be seen.
The Liberals’ spritely new leader Justin Trudeau, meantime, has selected a former oil industry lobbyist, Cyrus Reporter, as his chief of staff—indicating that the Liberal Party will remain “Plan B” for Canadian oil sands profiteers, just as Barack Obama was (in fact) “Plan A” for Wall Street in both 2008 and 2012. And the return on investment for America’s too-big-to-fail firms has been spectacular.
The Political Compass, a website devoted to analysis of politics and ideology, described the 2012 U.S. presidential election—between Democratic incumbent Obama and his Republican challenger Mitt Romney—as follows:
This is a U.S. election that defies logic and brings the nation closer towards a one-party state masquerading as a two-party state.The Democratic incumbent has surrounded himself with conservative advisors and key figures—many from previous administrations, and an unprecedented number from the Trilateral Commission. He also appointed a former Monsanto executive as Senior Advisor to the FDA. He has extended Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, presided over a spiralling rich-poor gap and sacrificed further American jobs with recent free trade deals. Trade union rights have also eroded under his watch. He has expanded Bush defence spending, droned civilians, failed to close Guantanamo, supported the NDAA which effectively legalizes martial law, allowed drilling and adopted a soft-touch position towards the banks that is to the right of European Conservative leaders. Taking office during the financial meltdown, Obama appointed its principle architects to top economic positions. We list these because many of Obama’s detractors absurdly portray him as either a radical liberal or a socialist, while his apologists, equally absurdly, continue to view him as a well-intentioned progressive, tragically thwarted by overwhelming pressures. 2008’s yes-we-can chanters, dazzled by pigment rather than policy detail, forgot to ask can what? Between 1998 and the last election, Obama amassed $37.6 million from the financial services industry, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. While 2008 presidential candidate Obama appeared to champion universal health care, his first choice for Secretary of Health was a man who had spent years lobbying on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry against that very concept…This time around, the honey-tongued President makes populist references to economic justice, while simultaneously appointing as his new Chief of Staff a former Citigroup executive concerned with hedge funds that bet on the housing market to collapse. Obama poses something of a challenge to The Political Compass, because he’s a man of so few fixed principles.
As outrageous as it may appear, civil libertarians and human rights supporters would have actually fared better under a Republican administration. Had a Bush or McCain presidency permitted extrajudicial executions virtually anywhere in the world, expanded drone strikes and introduced the NDAA, the Democratic Party would have howled from the rooftops. Senator Obama the Constitutional lawyer would have been one of the most vocal objectors. Under a Democratic administration however, these far-reaching developments have received scant opposition and a disgraceful absence of mainstream media coverage.
As author, cultural critic and former New York Times war correspondent Christopher Hedges observes, America is subject to “a rigged political system, one in which it is impossible to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, General Electric or ExxonMobil” (Hedges, “The Day That TV News Died.”). In Europe, so-called “liberal” and “socialist” parties have slavishly bought into austerity measures, exposing the European social democratic model to the avaricious claws of multinational capital. And increasingly, the same is becoming true of Canada, where none of the parties that stands a chance of winning the federal election can reasonably be expected to usher in substantive reforms that run contrary to the interests of the corporate elite, in the absence of sustained pressure from the citizenry. In this new reality, there is, more and more, only one option, one exercise of genuine democracy still available to activists who hold out hope for a better world, and that is mass protest.
But the neoliberal state, devoted to the service and protection of major corporations and powerful financial interests, is decidedly unenthusiastic about permitting street protests to overstay their welcome.