No Honeymoon for Hillary
Published on
Tuesday, November 08, 2016
by
The Nation
No Honeymoon for Hillary
If Clinton wins, shell inherit massive public anger unless she fights for
progressive changes on trade and industrial policy.
by
William Greider
Delegates hold up signs protesting the Trans-Pacific Partnership at the
Democratic National Convention, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, July 25, 2016.
(Photo: AP Images / Bill Clark)
eres a question to ponder during the final crazy moments of the 2016
election. Who will own the working-class anger once Donald Trump has been
dumped by the voters? If Hillary Clinton wins the election, the Democratic
Party will have the chance to reclaim its ruptured relationship with working
peoplethe wounded victims who lost their livelihoods to brute-force
globalization.
With Trump out of the way, Democrats could reclaim their old franchise by
proposing an aggressive agenda for reforming US industrial
strategyrestoring the economys balance and equity that Bill Clintons New
Democrats effectively dismantled a generation ago under the banner of free
trade. Trumps fed-up rebellion was driven by many things, but especially
by the gutting of US manufacturing.
Michelle Obama has given us a bright slogan for reform: When they go low,
we go high. Instead of Trumps cheap-shot bigotry and vile resentments,
Democrats need to envision a generational shift of positive purpose. Not to
withdraw from global tradeof course notbut to adopt substantive reforms
that redefine Americas own national priorities and terms of trade so that
globalization can actually benefit all sectors of our society, not just the
greedy One Percenters.
We know this is possible in globalization because our rivals in trade manage
to sustain broadly shared prosperity for their societies by designing their
own self-interested industrial strategies. They do not ask themselves what
will be good for the global trading system. They ask if it will be good for
Germany or Japan, Sweden or China. Donald Trumps ad-lib sloganAmerica
Firstwas widely ridiculed by establishment cheerleaders in the United
States. But Germany first or Japan first (not to mention Sweden and
China first) are implicit strategies of the most successful exporting
nations.
Only in America do the policy-makers claim to be above such crass
nationalism. They want the United States to be seen as the high-minded
indispensable nation leading the world to higher ground. Foreign rivals
privately scoff at US pretensions, but they also know how to manipulate
American hubris at the negotiating table.
Washington policy-makers essentially identify the US national interest in
terms of American owners, not workers.
The US approach to trade policy involves a crucial difference. Washington
policy-makers essentially identify the US national interest in terms of
American owners, not workers. That is, the policy objective reflects the
interests of the investors and shareholders who own the multinational
enterprises and far-flung capital investments. Elsewhere in the world, a
German or Japanese economistand probably most politicianswould say it is
the interests of the workforce that determine the national interest.
In other words, the US governments industrial policy focuses first on
serving capital, with an unspoken assumption that labor and society will
benefit too if US multinationals succeed. Thus, US industrial strategy has
willingly sacrificed the wage incomes of American workers to boost the
profits of US multinationals by encouraging the offshoring of American jobs.
This policy preference is embedded in trade deals, the tax code, and the
permissive rules of corporate governance, in which CEOs are personally
enriched for concentrating primarily on shareholder value. That
narrow-minded standard has spawned a generation of fraudulent returns, but
it also warps the economy.
The distinctive US industrial strategy helps explains why globalization
destabilized the American middle class.
The distinctive US industrial strategy helps explains why globalization
destabilized the American middle class while rival trading nations prospered
by promoting social solidaritydefending workers and shielding vulnerable
sectors from globalizations stormy pressures.
In Germany, for example, during the financial crash of 2008, the German
labor federation made a deal with major manufacturers. Instead of massive
layoffs, the companies agreed to keep workers on the payroll rather than
dismantle its experienced workforce. As sociologist (and longtime Nation
contributor and editorial board member) Norman Birnbaum explained, Germans
shared the political view that what made Germany strong was its educated,
highly skilled working class. The German chancellor oversees such
industrial relationships and can pressure wayward companies attempting to go
against the national consensus. German employeesboth white-collar and
blue-collarhave a formal voice in kibitzing management decisions.
In contrast, Americas high-tech companies in Silicon Valley have routinely
offloaded millions of jobs to Taiwan or China when new product lines are
ready to be upscaled for mass production. The investors demand it. Shifting
the production to low wages in Asia boosts their returns on capital. The
federal government gives its blessing and facilitates the job shift with its
permissive trade agreements.
The late Andrew Grove, the legendary inventor and co-founder of Intel,
reported for Bloomberg back in 2010 that Apple had 25,000 jobs in the United
States and 250,000 in South China. Grove, who died last March, complained
repeatedly that US industrial strategy was destroying Americas own
manufacturing prowess. The multinationals reaped bigger profits, but China
and Taiwan gained the engineering experience and infrastructure to dominate
the future. With corporate tax cuts and generous subsidies, Washington was
unwittingly financing the American decline.
Grove proposed a jobs-centric economic theory to stop the bleeding and
launch the American restoration. He suggested an extra tax could be levied
on multinationals for their products made by offshore labor but sold to US
consumers. The revenue would finance a general fund to assist companies that
intend to scale up their new production in America instead of shipping jobs
and technological skills to foreign countries.
CEOs and corporate directors whose companies are shrinking the US industrial
base would be reminded that their personal rewards depended upon the
industrial strength of the home country, which they have been systematically
dismantling. If what Im suggesting sounds protectionist, so be it, Grove
wrote. If the result is a trade war, treat it like other warsfight to
win.
It sounded like Donald Trump might have been channeling Andy Grove.
After millions or billions of words, we still dont know what Clinton really
thinks about globalization.
* * *
Many House and Senate Democrats might want to push fundamental trade
reforms, but they have a problem. Her name is Hillary Rodham Clinton. Their
newly chosen party leader is by nature a cautious and defensive politician,
and she finessed the subject of trade reform during the long presidential
campaign. While Trump pounded stupid trade deals, HRC concentrated on
worthy social and economic reforms. After millions or billions of words, we
still dont know what she really thinks about globalization.
Yet Clinton will inherit the public anger if she has nothing substantive to
say about big change. The partys progressive ranks will probably form a
loose caucus of the usual suspects to give her a push, and they wont wait
patiently to do so. No time for happy talk and no honeymoon for Hillary. If
Clinton assumes the anger has faded and she can ignore it, she will be
preparing for a one-term presidency.
While Trump led to the GOP crackup, a Clinton II presidency might generate a
parallel clash among Democrats. In olden days, the Democratic Party would
have naturally stood up for the working class and organized labor. But the
New Democrats of the Clinton-Obama era backed away from both. New Dems are
more comfortably aligned with business and banking elites, as well as
professionals with progressive social values.
The first decisive test for Clinton will arrive even before she can take the
office. President Obama and the business lobby are planning to push through
the Trans-Pacific Partnership deal in the lame-duck session of Congress
right after the election. HRC says she is opposed, but the White House has
wired the deal with the GOP. If they prevail, it will instantly ruin the
legitimacy of Clintons presidency. If she claims she is opposed, who will
believe her? The arrogant corporate establishment would be rigging
government in the face of public anger, abetted by the lame-duck Democratic
administration.
Political reporters in 2016 narrowly portrayed Trumps angry voters as only
aging white guys who lost their factory jobs. But the victims of depressed
incomes and lost prospects are a far more diverse assemblage of wounded
Americans. They share the same hurt and insecurities across their
differences of race, religion, ad ethnic loyalties.
Rump-group rebel Democrats in the Senate are in the minority, but they will
have the voters on their side.
The ranks of the discontented include millions of Democratic
votersworking-class African Americans and Latinos, young people struggling
to get started, women seeking equity and power, old liberals and young
Bernie supporters. The Democratic Party could build a stable governing
majority if it could figure out how to reunite all these disparate people
with the white guys who share the same economic grievances.
The rump-group rebelspeople like Senators Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders,
Jeff Merkley, and Sherrod Brownare definitely in the minority, but they
will have the voters overwhelmingly on their side. And that potentially
includes lots of Trump voters, too.
In theses troubled times, the old politics of class solidarity can become
the new politics of fundamental reform. Democrats must learn again how to
listen to these neglected citizensreally listenin order to create an
economic agenda that speaks concretely to what people want and need. In
practical terms, this means reinventing an old-fashioned political party
that gains its power from organized people instead of organized money.
* * *
Oddly enough, the next great trade debate has already started in Washington
circles. In recent weeks, various establishment voices have been churning
out their views in blogs and op-ed columns in leading newspapers. Their new
theme is sympathy for the losers. But their real objective is to define the
limits of acceptable thinking in the coming political debate. None of them
accept blame for the wreckage their globalization doctrine caused Americans,
much less offer apologies to the victims.
The wise men of Wall Street and Washington are clearly nervous, however,
about the rebellious direction of 2016 politics. In The Washington Post,
financier Robert Rubin, architect of Clintonomics, offered a grab bag of
business-school clichés he titled Inclusive Growth. Develop innovative
measures to address ongoing wage and job pressure, Rubin suggested.
Restore a sense of common purpose. Nice words that dont say anything. My
translation: Please dont shoot us bankers.
Leaders of the Brookings Institution and American Enterprise Institutetwo
corporate fronts that pose as academic think tanksoffered similar bromides
and sounded more anxious. Despite the sweet talk, their corporate agenda
hasnt really changed. It still includes cutting corporate taxes, subjecting
regulation to rigorous cost-benefit calculations, shrinking Social Security
and other federal programs that common folks value greatly.
But I encountered a shocking deviation from a most unlikely sourceLawrence
Summers. He was Rubins sidekick in the Clinton administration and succeeded
him as Bill Clintons Treasury Secretary. Time magazine famously dubbed
Rubin and Summers and Fed chairman Alan Greenspan as the Committee to Save
the World. A few years later, their world famously crashed in the Great
Recession.
Now Larry Summers sounds like a heretic. In a July column in The Washington
Post, Summers abandoned the elite faith in globalization and urged instead a
new doctrine he calls responsible nationalism. With both NAFTA and Chinas
admission to the World Trade Organization, he acknowledged the most
extravagant predicted benefits have not materialized.
The popular rebellion of 2016, he said, indicates the willingness of
publics to be intimidated by experts into supporting cosmopolitan outcomes
appears, for the moment, to have been exhausted. The former Harvard
president suddenly sounds vaguely populist. Summers proposed a commonsense
way to think about reforming the US trading system:
A new approach has to begin from the idea that the basic responsibility of
government is to maximize the welfare of citizens, not to pursue some
abstract concept of the global good.
It may be inevitable that impersonal
forces of technology and changing global economic circumstances have
profound effects. But it adds insult to injury when governments reach
agreements that further cede control to international tribunals of one sort
or another. This is especially the case when, for legal reasons or reasons
of practicality, corporations have disproportionate influence in shaping
global agreements.
Read his words again and you can glimpse a rough blueprint for reforming the
US approach to globalization. Summers, in fact, is reversing the harsh
top-down priorities he and other Clintonistas enforced when they were in
power. He is now putting people first in the national interest and
subordinating corporate power.
Summers doesnt have answers for every disorder he cites. But he does ask
some stinging questions. Why should the global system prevent sovereign
nations from limiting inflows of foreign capital in their economies? Why
should a country be prohibited from shielding its citizens from GMO crops?
Why do corporations have the right to their own private legal system, the
investor state, where they can sue a nation for damages if it enacts
environmental regulations that threaten corporate profits? NAFTA created
this bizarre arrangement and the TPP proposes to expand it (see my Nation
article from 2003, Rolling Back the 20th Century).
Summers has evidently switched sides. When he was in power with Clinton and
Obama, he was a ruthless advocate of corporate privilege and bankers first.
Summers now insists that new trade agreements must be different: judged not
by how much is harmonized or by how many barriers to global commerce are
torn down but by whether people as workers, consumers and voters are
empowered.
Summers almost sounds like a Bernie Sanders revolutionary. But can we trust
him? Alas, no. I once wrote a Nation blog about Summers titled Professor
Pants on Fire. A friend of mine suggests he is slyly lobbying again to
become Federal Reserve chair, the post Summers was denied when left-liberal
progressives (myself included) stormed against his appointment and Janet
Yellen got the job. He may once again be playing a double game, hopeful no
one will catch up with his contradictions. Unfortunately for him, there is
WikiLeaks. Earlier this year, the professor urged the Clinton campaign not
to indulge in bank bashing. John Podesta, Clintons campaign chairman,
dismissed his message as the worst advice ever.
Nevertheless, I suggest that reform activists can test his sincerity. Invite
Summers to join their fight for reform and advise them on strategy. He is a
brainy guy. He could become a sophisticated ally in the fight ahead. If he
turns out to be a fake, take charge of his sound ideas and dump him hard.
Meanwhile, there is another important document people can consult to get a
stronger understanding of the battlefield for reforming the trading system.
Its called The New Rules of the Road: A Progressive Approach to
Globalization. The co-authors are two heavyweight intellectualsLori
Wallach and Jared Bernsteinand longstanding critics of corporate-led
globalization. They believe the system has reached a tipping point in both
small-democratic rebellion and economic distress.
The current trade agreement process, Wallach and Bernstein write, has
been co-opted by corporate interests whose goal is to establish binding,
enforceable global rules that protect their investments and profits. The
corporate capture comes at the expense of both peoples rights to
democratically govern their own affairs and the ability of sovereign
governments to effectively enforce worker, consumer and environmental
safeguards.
Their prose is clear and uncompromising. They recite the new rules that the
country must embrace if it is to get back on track and rebalance society.
The process is necessarily long term. It took a generation to disassemble
things.
But this document is an epochal rebuke to the governing elites that have
owned both political parties for the last generation. The Wallach and
Bernstein text is not just another trade debate; they have raised the
political stakes in honest language and shocking detail. They accuse the
globalists of stealing self-government from the American people.
Once this assertion is on the table in plain English, it becomes a stark
challenge to citizens, not just their elected representatives. Will citizens
rise to the crisis of democracy and fight back? Or will they shrug off their
embarrassment and settle for the status of weaklings?
I am an optimist about America for the long run, because I know the American
story well enough to know about the long delays and detours that frustrated
the yearnings for justice or simple fairness. There are lots of cruel
chapters when people did not redeem their principles. At the risk of
sounding melodramatic, I sense that we are again at one of those testing
moments.
© 2015 The Nation
William Greider
William Greider is national affairs correspondent for The Nation. He is
author of "Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country"
and, most recently, "Come Home, America: The Rise and Fall (and Redeeming
Promise) of Our Country."
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No Honeymoon for Hillary
Published on
Tuesday, November 08, 2016
by
The Nation
No Honeymoon for Hillary
If Clinton wins, shell inherit massive public anger unless she fights for
progressive changes on trade and industrial policy.
by
William Greider
6 Comments
Delegates hold up signs protesting the Trans-Pacific Partnership at
the Democratic National Convention, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, July 25,
2016. (Photo: AP Images / Bill Clark)
eres a question to ponder during the final crazy moments of the
2016 election. Who will own the working-class anger once Donald Trump has
been dumped by the voters? If Hillary Clinton wins the election, the
Democratic Party will have the chance to reclaim its ruptured relationship
with working peoplethe wounded victims who lost their livelihoods to
brute-force globalization.
With Trump out of the way, Democrats could reclaim their old
franchise by proposing an aggressive agenda for reforming US industrial
strategyrestoring the economys balance and equity that Bill Clintons New
Democrats effectively dismantled a generation ago under the banner of free
trade. Trumps fed-up rebellion was driven by many things, but especially
by the gutting of US manufacturing.
Michelle Obama has given us a bright slogan for reform: When they
go low, we go high. Instead of Trumps cheap-shot bigotry and vile
resentments, Democrats need to envision a generational shift of positive
purpose. Not to withdraw from global tradeof course notbut to adopt
substantive reforms that redefine Americas own national priorities and
terms of trade so that globalization can actually benefit all sectors of our
society, not just the greedy One Percenters.
We know this is possible in globalization because our rivals in
trade manage to sustain broadly shared prosperity for their societies by
designing their own self-interested industrial strategies. They do not ask
themselves what will be good for the global trading system. They ask if it
will be good for Germany or Japan, Sweden or China. Donald Trumps ad-lib
sloganAmerica Firstwas widely ridiculed by establishment cheerleaders in
the United States. But Germany first or Japan first (not to mention
Sweden and China first) are implicit strategies of the most successful
exporting nations.
Only in America do the policy-makers claim to be above such crass
nationalism. They want the United States to be seen as the high-minded
indispensable nation leading the world to higher ground. Foreign rivals
privately scoff at US pretensions, but they also know how to manipulate
American hubris at the negotiating table.
Washington policy-makers essentially identify the US national interest in
terms of American owners, not workers.
The US approach to trade policy involves a crucial difference. Washington
policy-makers essentially identify the US national interest in terms of
American owners, not workers. That is, the policy objective reflects the
interests of the investors and shareholders who own the multinational
enterprises and far-flung capital investments. Elsewhere in the world, a
German or Japanese economistand probably most politicianswould say it is
the interests of the workforce that determine the national interest.
In other words, the US governments industrial policy focuses first on
serving capital, with an unspoken assumption that labor and society will
benefit too if US multinationals succeed. Thus, US industrial strategy has
willingly sacrificed the wage incomes of American workers to boost the
profits of US multinationals by encouraging the offshoring of American jobs.
This policy preference is embedded in trade deals, the tax code, and the
permissive rules of corporate governance, in which CEOs are personally
enriched for concentrating primarily on shareholder value. That
narrow-minded standard has spawned a generation of fraudulent returns, but
it also warps the economy.
The distinctive US industrial strategy helps explains why globalization
destabilized the American middle class.
The distinctive US industrial strategy helps explains why globalization
destabilized the American middle class while rival trading nations prospered
by promoting social solidaritydefending workers and shielding vulnerable
sectors from globalizations stormy pressures.
In Germany, for example, during the financial crash of 2008, the German
labor federation made a deal with major manufacturers. Instead of massive
layoffs, the companies agreed to keep workers on the payroll rather than
dismantle its experienced workforce. As sociologist (and longtime Nation
contributor and editorial board member) Norman Birnbaum explained, Germans
shared the political view that what made Germany strong was its educated,
highly skilled working class. The German chancellor oversees such
industrial relationships and can pressure wayward companies attempting to go
against the national consensus. German employeesboth white-collar and
blue-collarhave a formal voice in kibitzing management decisions.
In contrast, Americas high-tech companies in Silicon Valley have routinely
offloaded millions of jobs to Taiwan or China when new product lines are
ready to be upscaled for mass production. The investors demand it. Shifting
the production to low wages in Asia boosts their returns on capital. The
federal government gives its blessing and facilitates the job shift with its
permissive trade agreements.
The late Andrew Grove, the legendary inventor and co-founder of Intel,
reported for Bloomberg back in 2010 that Apple had 25,000 jobs in the United
States and 250,000 in South China. Grove, who died last March, complained
repeatedly that US industrial strategy was destroying Americas own
manufacturing prowess. The multinationals reaped bigger profits, but China
and Taiwan gained the engineering experience and infrastructure to dominate
the future. With corporate tax cuts and generous subsidies, Washington was
unwittingly financing the American decline.
Grove proposed a jobs-centric economic theory to stop the bleeding and
launch the American restoration. He suggested an extra tax could be levied
on multinationals for their products made by offshore labor but sold to US
consumers. The revenue would finance a general fund to assist companies that
intend to scale up their new production in America instead of shipping jobs
and technological skills to foreign countries.
CEOs and corporate directors whose companies are shrinking the US industrial
base would be reminded that their personal rewards depended upon the
industrial strength of the home country, which they have been systematically
dismantling. If what Im suggesting sounds protectionist, so be it, Grove
wrote. If the result is a trade war, treat it like other warsfight to
win.
It sounded like Donald Trump might have been channeling Andy Grove.
After millions or billions of words, we still dont know what Clinton really
thinks about globalization.
* * *
Many House and Senate Democrats might want to push fundamental trade
reforms, but they have a problem. Her name is Hillary Rodham Clinton. Their
newly chosen party leader is by nature a cautious and defensive politician,
and she finessed the subject of trade reform during the long presidential
campaign. While Trump pounded stupid trade deals, HRC concentrated on
worthy social and economic reforms. After millions or billions of words, we
still dont know what she really thinks about globalization.
Yet Clinton will inherit the public anger if she has nothing substantive to
say about big change. The partys progressive ranks will probably form a
loose caucus of the usual suspects to give her a push, and they wont wait
patiently to do so. No time for happy talk and no honeymoon for Hillary. If
Clinton assumes the anger has faded and she can ignore it, she will be
preparing for a one-term presidency.
While Trump led to the GOP crackup, a Clinton II presidency might generate a
parallel clash among Democrats. In olden days, the Democratic Party would
have naturally stood up for the working class and organized labor. But the
New Democrats of the Clinton-Obama era backed away from both. New Dems are
more comfortably aligned with business and banking elites, as well as
professionals with progressive social values.
The first decisive test for Clinton will arrive even before she can take the
office. President Obama and the business lobby are planning to push through
the Trans-Pacific Partnership deal in the lame-duck session of Congress
right after the election. HRC says she is opposed, but the White House has
wired the deal with the GOP. If they prevail, it will instantly ruin the
legitimacy of Clintons presidency. If she claims she is opposed, who will
believe her? The arrogant corporate establishment would be rigging
government in the face of public anger, abetted by the lame-duck Democratic
administration.
Political reporters in 2016 narrowly portrayed Trumps angry voters as only
aging white guys who lost their factory jobs. But the victims of depressed
incomes and lost prospects are a far more diverse assemblage of wounded
Americans. They share the same hurt and insecurities across their
differences of race, religion, ad ethnic loyalties.
Rump-group rebel Democrats in the Senate are in the minority, but they will
have the voters on their side.
The ranks of the discontented include millions of Democratic
votersworking-class African Americans and Latinos, young people struggling
to get started, women seeking equity and power, old liberals and young
Bernie supporters. The Democratic Party could build a stable governing
majority if it could figure out how to reunite all these disparate people
with the white guys who share the same economic grievances.
The rump-group rebelspeople like Senators Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders,
Jeff Merkley, and Sherrod Brownare definitely in the minority, but they
will have the voters overwhelmingly on their side. And that potentially
includes lots of Trump voters, too.
In theses troubled times, the old politics of class solidarity can become
the new politics of fundamental reform. Democrats must learn again how to
listen to these neglected citizensreally listenin order to create an
economic agenda that speaks concretely to what people want and need. In
practical terms, this means reinventing an old-fashioned political party
that gains its power from organized people instead of organized money.
* * *
Oddly enough, the next great trade debate has already started in Washington
circles. In recent weeks, various establishment voices have been churning
out their views in blogs and op-ed columns in leading newspapers. Their new
theme is sympathy for the losers. But their real objective is to define the
limits of acceptable thinking in the coming political debate. None of them
accept blame for the wreckage their globalization doctrine caused Americans,
much less offer apologies to the victims.
The wise men of Wall Street and Washington are clearly nervous, however,
about the rebellious direction of 2016 politics. In The Washington Post,
financier Robert Rubin, architect of Clintonomics, offered a grab bag of
business-school clichés he titled Inclusive Growth. Develop innovative
measures to address ongoing wage and job pressure, Rubin suggested.
Restore a sense of common purpose. Nice words that dont say anything. My
translation: Please dont shoot us bankers.
Leaders of the Brookings Institution and American Enterprise Institutetwo
corporate fronts that pose as academic think tanksoffered similar bromides
and sounded more anxious. Despite the sweet talk, their corporate agenda
hasnt really changed. It still includes cutting corporate taxes, subjecting
regulation to rigorous cost-benefit calculations, shrinking Social Security
and other federal programs that common folks value greatly.
But I encountered a shocking deviation from a most unlikely sourceLawrence
Summers. He was Rubins sidekick in the Clinton administration and succeeded
him as Bill Clintons Treasury Secretary. Time magazine famously dubbed
Rubin and Summers and Fed chairman Alan Greenspan as the Committee to Save
the World. A few years later, their world famously crashed in the Great
Recession.
Now Larry Summers sounds like a heretic. In a July column in The Washington
Post, Summers abandoned the elite faith in globalization and urged instead a
new doctrine he calls responsible nationalism. With both NAFTA and Chinas
admission to the World Trade Organization, he acknowledged the most
extravagant predicted benefits have not materialized.
The popular rebellion of 2016, he said, indicates the willingness of
publics to be intimidated by experts into supporting cosmopolitan outcomes
appears, for the moment, to have been exhausted. The former Harvard
president suddenly sounds vaguely populist. Summers proposed a commonsense
way to think about reforming the US trading system:
A new approach has to begin from the idea that the basic responsibility of
government is to maximize the welfare of citizens, not to pursue some
abstract concept of the global good.
It may be inevitable that impersonal
forces of technology and changing global economic circumstances have
profound effects. But it adds insult to injury when governments reach
agreements that further cede control to international tribunals of one sort
or another. This is especially the case when, for legal reasons or reasons
of practicality, corporations have disproportionate influence in shaping
global agreements.
Read his words again and you can glimpse a rough blueprint for reforming the
US approach to globalization. Summers, in fact, is reversing the harsh
top-down priorities he and other Clintonistas enforced when they were in
power. He is now putting people first in the national interest and
subordinating corporate power.
Summers doesnt have answers for every disorder he cites. But he does ask
some stinging questions. Why should the global system prevent sovereign
nations from limiting inflows of foreign capital in their economies? Why
should a country be prohibited from shielding its citizens from GMO crops?
Why do corporations have the right to their own private legal system, the
investor state, where they can sue a nation for damages if it enacts
environmental regulations that threaten corporate profits? NAFTA created
this bizarre arrangement and the TPP proposes to expand it (see my Nation
article from 2003, Rolling Back the 20th Century).
Summers has evidently switched sides. When he was in power with Clinton and
Obama, he was a ruthless advocate of corporate privilege and bankers first.
Summers now insists that new trade agreements must be different: judged not
by how much is harmonized or by how many barriers to global commerce are
torn down but by whether people as workers, consumers and voters are
empowered.
Summers almost sounds like a Bernie Sanders revolutionary. But can we trust
him? Alas, no. I once wrote a Nation blog about Summers titled Professor
Pants on Fire. A friend of mine suggests he is slyly lobbying again to
become Federal Reserve chair, the post Summers was denied when left-liberal
progressives (myself included) stormed against his appointment and Janet
Yellen got the job. He may once again be playing a double game, hopeful no
one will catch up with his contradictions. Unfortunately for him, there is
WikiLeaks. Earlier this year, the professor urged the Clinton campaign not
to indulge in bank bashing. John Podesta, Clintons campaign chairman,
dismissed his message as the worst advice ever.
Nevertheless, I suggest that reform activists can test his sincerity. Invite
Summers to join their fight for reform and advise them on strategy. He is a
brainy guy. He could become a sophisticated ally in the fight ahead. If he
turns out to be a fake, take charge of his sound ideas and dump him hard.
Meanwhile, there is another important document people can consult to get a
stronger understanding of the battlefield for reforming the trading system.
Its called The New Rules of the Road: A Progressive Approach to
Globalization. The co-authors are two heavyweight intellectualsLori
Wallach and Jared Bernsteinand longstanding critics of corporate-led
globalization. They believe the system has reached a tipping point in both
small-democratic rebellion and economic distress.
The current trade agreement process, Wallach and Bernstein write, has
been co-opted by corporate interests whose goal is to establish binding,
enforceable global rules that protect their investments and profits. The
corporate capture comes at the expense of both peoples rights to
democratically govern their own affairs and the ability of sovereign
governments to effectively enforce worker, consumer and environmental
safeguards.
Their prose is clear and uncompromising. They recite the new rules that the
country must embrace if it is to get back on track and rebalance society.
The process is necessarily long term. It took a generation to disassemble
things.
But this document is an epochal rebuke to the governing elites that have
owned both political parties for the last generation. The Wallach and
Bernstein text is not just another trade debate; they have raised the
political stakes in honest language and shocking detail. They accuse the
globalists of stealing self-government from the American people.
Once this assertion is on the table in plain English, it becomes a stark
challenge to citizens, not just their elected representatives. Will citizens
rise to the crisis of democracy and fight back? Or will they shrug off their
embarrassment and settle for the status of weaklings?
I am an optimist about America for the long run, because I know the American
story well enough to know about the long delays and detours that frustrated
the yearnings for justice or simple fairness. There are lots of cruel
chapters when people did not redeem their principles. At the risk of
sounding melodramatic, I sense that we are again at one of those testing
moments.
© 2015 The Nation
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William Greider is national affairs correspondent for The Nation. He is
author of "Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country"
and, most recently, "Come Home, America: The Rise and Fall (and Redeeming
Promise) of Our Country."
