A Full-Blown Lootocracy Economics, Finance and Crisis

A Full-Blown Lootocracy

Economics, Finance and Crisis

by ROB URIE

There is a popular cliché that the political right sticks together to support ‘right’ causes while the left tears itself apart over internecine squabbles. The challenge back is that there hasn’t really been a left to speak of in the US for the last thirty-five or so years. Undoubtedly there have been a lot of people fighting the good fight from left perspectives. But the face of the left put forward in public debates has been of center-right actors playing politicians and economists to push ideas and policies in sync with the interests of the rightward-moving social order— hegemony in Antonio Gramsci’s explanation of social apologetics. The problem today is that these ideas and policies are to some fair extent responsible for current circumstance. When self-described liberal economists like Paul Krugman pushed the antique contrivance of ‘comparative advantage’ to legitimate ‘free-trade’ policies, including outsourcing Western jobs to low wage countries, their public posture as compassionate liberals effectively sold the idea to people who trusted them but who may have failed to understand the economics. Similarly when Democrat Presidents sold bank deregulation on the basis of economic ‘efficiency’ and bank bailouts to ‘save the economy’ they added liberal ‘legitimacy’ to economic ideas that the radical right could not have effectively sold only a generation before.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/05/02/economics-finance-and-crisis/