Neo-Liberalism in the U.S.A.

by Dennis Green

Even before Bill Clinton was elected President of America, the Neo-Liberalism Movement in this country held sway over the Democratic Party. This is the movement away from Progressive, populist, Jacksonian Democracy ideals toward a Democratic Party in league with Wall Street. Sometimes called “Corporate Democrats,” they are faux liberals, not ideological conservatives like the “Blue Dogs,” but willing to side with “Big Money” rather than the interests of the common man.

Concentrated economic power is a much bigger threat to democracy in America today than either the Religious Right or “Islamo-Fascism” abroad. It has blocked meaningful health care reform with hundreds of millions of dollars in lobbying, as well as any substantial movement away from dependency on foreign oil. And most recently, it has stymied any economic reform whatsoever. Congress isn’t just dysfunctional, it’s on the make and on the take. The fix is always in.

Armchair politicians who complain about President Obama’s “socialism” and his “radical” ways don’t have the slightest understanding of this shift in American politics that began after the defeat of Walter Mondale for president. That’s when Democratic strategists decided that they couldn’t depend on liberals groups, think tanks, labor unions and vox populi to compete with the Republicans for campaign funds. This was a purely pragmatic decision, and had nothing to do with ideology.

Rahm Emmanuel, President Obama’s Chief of Staff, was Bill Clinton’s chief political advisor, and he learned from the failure of health care reform in 1994 that you couldn’t go into the process cross-wise with the big insurance and pharmaceutical companies. So he assured these economic powers, known as the “medical/industrial complex,” that their perks and privileges would not be threatened, (such as exemptions from anti-trust laws), but also that their subscriber/customer bases would be vastly expanded through federal subsidies to low income Americans.

The trade-offs? No banning of patients with “pre-existing” conditions, no dropping of the very sick, some indefinite limit on lifetime expenditures — but the additional profits for Big Pharm and Big Insurance far outweigh these concessions. And there will be no “public option” let alone a “single-payer” plan, the only measures which would make reform of insurance and drugs really meaningful.

The line between “pragmatic” and “cynical” can be thin indeed, just as the line between my days as a “realist” and those as a “pessimist” are often blurred. Yet I think that being a ruthless pragmatist means that I have to accept most things as they are, the things I cannot change. And give me the wisdom to know the difference.

Real health care reform means bringing the hospitals, doctors and nurses to heel, eliminating “fee for service” reimbursement and payment plans, as well as all unnecessary tests and procedures shown statistically to make no improvement in outcomes. But that is a long way off.

In the meantime, the neo-liberal, corporate Democrats are just as corrupt as their Republican counterparts, and as corrupt as regimes we prop up in Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s human nature, and that’s the way it is, goin’ out West young man!

©2009 Dennis Green