The same basic moral and political shortfall is evident in another recent THP policy paper that reflects on data showing that the life expectancy of “low-income whites” has fallen dramatically in the U.S. in recent years. The paper makes mild calls for improved educational opportunities and “increased access to health care—including mental health care.” It makes no reference to how the U.S. working class has been subjected to a relentless top-down and Wall Street-led class war on its livelihoods, unions, job and workplace protections, and living standards. The authors do not mention how American workers in the long neoliberal era (1973-present) have been subjected to unprecedented (for U.S. workers) labor market competition with the global proletariat, including immigrant workers and workers across the low-wage global periphery, to which U.S. capital has relocated much of its manufacturing in pursuit of cheap labor. They don’t reflect seriously on how the neoliberal and global policies advanced by Wall Street and corporate America have turned millions upon millions of once “productively employed” white and nonwhite working-class people into “surplus Americans.” The same modus operandi—strong empirical work on matters related to rising American inequality and poverty combined with mildly ameliorative policy recommendations that sidestep the finance-led capitalist elephant in the national room—is evident in the rest of THP’s voluminous output. The topics range in subject matter, but the basic banker-pleasing blueprint holds. Outwardly, concerned- and liberal-sounding policy researchers are careful not to ruffle ruling-class feathers. They make no calls for genuinely progressive taxation, serious regulation of the financial sector, major public jobs programs, a rollback of the gigantic Pentagon budget to fund expanded public welfare, or the passage of legislation to re-legalize union organizing to help spark a re-expansion of what the disgraced former presidential candidate John Edwards once rightly called “the greatest anti-poverty program in American history—the labor movement.” The Skills Gap Trope A recurrent theme in THP’s impressive corpus of work is the “skills gap” explanation of American workers’ economic insecurity and inequality (see this study for one among many examples). According to this thesis, the national plagues of unemployment, underemployment and inadequate wages are mainly about American workers’ lack of adequate training for the supposed plethora of high-skills jobs that would be available to them if only they were properly instructed and certified. The skills gap thesis is invalidated by numerous facts its many establishment champions ignore (see this useful critique). It continues nonetheless to hold a prominent place in elite corporate, financial, academic and policy circles for a simple reason. As University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee urban policy researcher Marc Levine notes: “There’s a strong ideological component behind the skills gap trope: it diverts attention (and policies) from the deep inequalities and market fundamentalism” that have undermined U.S. working and living standards. As the political economist Gordon Lafer noted in his book “The Job Training Charade”: “Workers are encouraged not to blame corporate profits, the export of jobs abroad, or eroding wage standards—that is, anything that they can fight—but rather to look inward for the source of their misfortune and the seeds of their resurrection.” The Real (Alexander) Hamilton Program versus Rubin-Era ‘Hamiltonism’ Mention “the Hamilton Project” (or any other elite U.S. or global think tank) to most Americans and you will receive blank stares. You might hear a reference or two to the recent, spectacularly successful Broadway musical “Hamilton”—an Obama-lauded, multicultural paean to leading U.S. founder Alexander Hamilton’s purported embodiment of the American dreams of immigrant striving and upward mobility. Americans who paid attention in well-taught U.S. history surveys may recall Mr. Hamilton (after whom Rubin’s Brookings project is named) as the nation’s first treasury secretary and a major proponent (along with James Madison and John Jay) of the U.S. Constitution. Some might recall the essence of Hamilton’s policy agenda under U.S. Presidents George Washington and John Adams: to make the United States a major commercial and military power ruled by and for an opulent mercantile, financial and, he hoped, industrial elite. Hamilton was the early republic’s “captain of the one percent,” notes distinguished U.S. historian Gerald Horne. “A leader of finance capital … he represented the interests of big finance at the beginning of the United States.” Hamilton pursued his wealth-concentrating agenda in a spirit of open aristocratic disdain for the egalitarian tendencies of the revolutionary times in which he lived. Like other top U.S. founders and constitutional framers, Hamilton was revolted by the democratic “leveling” sentiments of the new nation’s artisans, small farmers and laboring classes. For Hamilton and others of his “rich and well born” ilk in the Federalist Party of the 1790s (the “Hamiltonian” party), “freedom rested on deference to authority. … The Federalists,” notes distinguished U.S. historian Eric Foner, “may have been the only major party in American history forthrightly to proclaim that democracy and freedom were dangerous in the hands of ordinary Americans.” The “Obamanomics”-defining Hamilton Project of the last decade is a continuation of the original Alexander Hamilton program in its commitment to capitalism and the free market merged with the limited use of state power to promote and protect private accumulation. Still, there are two key differences between the nation’s founding treasury secretary and the neoliberal think tank that bears his name today. The first and most obvious contrast is that contemporary neoliberals naturally eschew openly anti-democratic and aristocratic language even while they advance the interests and agenda of the wealthy few. Reflecting subsequent centuries of popular struggle for political and social rights and the United States’ doctrinal sense of itself as a global beacon of democracy, THP wraps its “cool-headed” findings and recommendations in the “warm-hearted” rhetoric of progressive concern for the many and the poor. A second difference is suggested by something the venerable left intellectual Noam Chomsky told Occupy Boston in fall 2011. Before the onset of neoliberal financialization in the 1970s, Chomsky said, the U.S. “had been, with ups and downs … a developing society, not always in pretty ways, but with general progress toward industrialization, prosperity and expansion of rights.” Since the triumph of finance, however, the main capital-led trend has been “de-development … a significant shift of the economy from productive enterprise—producing things people need or could use—to financial manipulation.” For all Hamilton’s authoritarian disdain for the people and commitment to the upward concentration of wealth, he sought to advance an accumulation of capital designed to make the United States into a broadly developing and industrialized state. Today’s financial elite and financialized “casino capitalism” is all about Wall Street “killing the host”: de-industrializing and dismantling productive enterprise in service to a ruling and largely globalist financial “superclass” that sees no particularly strong relationship between its bottom line and the strength of the U.S. productive base and the health of American society. We can certainly expect the long shadow of Robert Rubin and the fake-progressive neoliberal vision of his Hamilton Project and other, bigger “corporate elite networks” to loom over the expected Clinton 45 administration. The coming heavily Wall Street- and Pentagon-backed presidency of the arch-neoliberal Hillary Clinton will be no less staffed than Obama’s presidency was with neo-“Hamiltonian” elites linked to the multinational and financial sectors and to the usual top policy-planning institutions. Paul Street holds a doctorate in U.S. history from Binghamton University. He is former vice president for research and planning of the Chicago Urban League. Street is also the author of numerous books, including “Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis” (2007), “The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power” (2010), and “They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy” (2014), and is a regular contributor to Counterpunch, Z Magazine/ZNet, Black Agenda Report and teleSUR English. He has taught American history at several Chicago-area colleges and universities and currently lives in Iowa City, Iowa. Your support matters…

Independent journalism is under threat and overshadowed by heavily funded mainstream media.

You can help level the playing field. Become a member.

Your tax-deductible contribution keeps us digging beneath the headlines to give you thought-provoking, investigative reporting and analysis that unearths what's really happening- without compromise.

Give today to support our courageous, independent journalists.

SUPPORT TRUTHDIG
In this Article:
#barack obama#brookings institution#economics#obama administration#politics#robert rubin#td-original#usa