Naomi Klein: Neoliberalism is to blame ...

[DanTex]

79. First of all "corporatist" doesn't mean what you think it means.

ON some lefty blogs the term is used to mean "not as far left as Trotsky" but actually it means something else entirely.

I'm glad you acknowledge many of Obama's progressive accomplishments. You left out a few:
Dodd-Frank, strongest financial regulations since WW2.
Expanding healthcare to millions of people while reducing cost growth.
Saving the auto industry with large state intervention.
Embracing stimulus and rejecting austerity, resulting in a much stronger and faster recovery than Europe.

And then you leave out all the stuff that Obama was in favor of but got blocked by congress: minimum wage, equal pay, student loan reform, employee free choice act, etc.

You have a point with TARP: it should have done more to rescue mortgages. But it wasn't, as you put it "giving money to banks", it was loaning money to banks. And Iceland is a horrible analogy because they had a totally different problem. Iceland had a much, much bigger financial sector relative to GDP. They bailed out their banks and protected domestic deposits while letting foreign deposits fail. Then they took IMF loans to pay for their bailout, and imposed austerity as part of the IMF deal. None of this has anything to do with what the US did or could have done or should have done.

And then there's TPP, which personally I'm neutral on. The plus side is that it increases US influence in Asia, which is certainly better in terms of the environment and human rights than having China dominate the region economically. But there are some complaints I think are valid, such as the intellectual property provisions being too broad, the lack of addressing currency manipulation, and so on. But I don't think being reflexively anti-trade is "progressive".

As far as the others:
--Obama fought hard for the public option, but there weren't the votes in congress. And if he had gone for single payer instead, he would have lost the Senate vote by about 85-15, and his presidency would have taken a huge blow.
--Libya was not a neo-con war of conquest, it was a targeted humanitarian intervention led by Europe. Libya was already in the midst of a civil war when the intervention took place, and Gadafi was in the process of mass murder. And, look, you can argue that the world should have just sat by and watched the mass murder take place like in Rwanda, fair enough, but it's absurd to call the intervention an act of hegemonic aggression.


Who, in your mind, is not a "corporatist"? Compared to the progressive hero LBJ, Obama is a downright pacifist. JFK was a hardened cold warrior who authorized a peacetime invasion of Cuba. Oh, and FDR: jog my memory, he was involved in some kind of overseas conflict, right? Or maybe Truman, the only administration in the history of the world to engage in nuclear war, was the "true progressive"? And they were all free-traders.

The only way Obama is a "corporatist" is if every president the US has ever had is also a "corporatist".