Last week, President Obama laid out, according to his own fact sheet, "a comprehensive, balanced deficit reduction framework to cut spending, bring down our debt and increase confidence in our nation’s fiscal strength...". Instead of talking about how best to improve the lives of everyone, we're talking about how to balance the budget and reduce the deficit. The fact that the goal is to reduce our deficit means that even if we win this battle, we will lose the war: The war of ideas.
Ladies and Gentleman, we're fighting a war and most of us don't even know who the enemy is. We meander from one battlefield to another almost always losing ground. How do we balance the budget? How much should we deregulate utilities? OMG, inflation? All of these battles are fought on the terms of our opposition. The result? Social Security cuts, tax cuts that favor the wealthiest people, deregulating and privatizing areas of the economy that have no right being privately owned, and "free" trade that leaves our labor force unemployed are just a few of the many loses. Sure, we occasional win a battle with a tax cut that targets the working or a stimulus bill that invests in the public good, but these victories keep getting fewer and shallower.
When President Obama referred to the "failed policies of the past", he never named what those policies were. It's just as well because he's shown that he follows the same ideas. As good a man as he is, President Obama is trapped within an economic ideology that will always make instituting progressive policies an uphill battle. This ideology is so dominant in our institutes that most don't even recognize it as an ideology - it's just mainstream economics to them.
Once we name and recognize the ideology, we can start calling it out. Instead of fighting progressive battles within the framework of the ideology, we can fight the ideology itself and advocate for progressive policies on our own terms. As you may have figured out by now, the ideology I speak of is called, Neoliberalism.
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