Obama rescues neoliberalism from itself

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Obama rescues neoliberalism from itself

The following year Barack Obama was elected to the presidency. In his inaugural address he told the American people that markets needed supervision to work.

“Nor is the question before us whether the market is a force for good or ill,” President Obama said, looking into the camera. “Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched. But this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control. The nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous.”

Americans who were hopeful that the age of neoliberalism was coming to an end (even if they didn’t know there was a name for it) cheered: Obama’s popularity soared above 60 percent.

Instead of ending neoliberalism, though, Obama expanded it dramatically with the Affordable Care Act, putting the nation’s healthcare needs in the hands of billion-dollar insurance companies and extending the privatization of Medicare through the Medicare Advantage scam that George W. Bush had brought to being.

He refused to regulate the nation’s monopolies, instead extending George W. Bush’s Emergency Economic Stabilization Act and the Troubled Asset Relief Program that poured ever-more money into the pockets of Wall Street banksters.

Advised by notorious neoliberal Larry Summers (formerly Clinton’s Treasury Secretary) and former Wall Street banker Timothy Geitner (as Obama’s Treasury Secretary), Obama passed on the opportunity to re-regulate the banks or push for legislation like a revisited Glass-Steagal to prevent checkbook banks from gambling in the stock market with your and my deposits. Instead, he went with the watered-down Dodd-Frank legislation championed by two noted neoliberal legislators who were both deeply in the pockets of Wall Street banks.[cxiii]

Bankers are still running many of their old scams even as I write these words in 2022.

Meanwhile, President Obama oversaw without objection the explosion of the neoliberal dream of a so-called “gig economy” where companies relabeled their employees as “independent contractors” to avoid insurance, taxes and the regulations and liabilities that come as an employer.

Even his smallest pushbacks against neoliberalism – including an attempt to raise income taxes on the morbidly rich and advance universal pre-K – were shot down by Republicans and neoconservative Democrats in Congress.

Dissatisfied, Americans decided to try the Republicans again.