I'll try to get to the whole excerpt later.
Miriam
Thomas Frank on the Financial Feminism of Clinton Democrats
http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/thomas_frank_on_hillary_clinton_
liberal_virtue_20160222/
Posted on Feb 22, 2016
Melinda Gates, left, Chelsea Clinton and Hillary Clinton onstage at a
Clinton Foundation event in Manhattan in March 2015. (Dennis Van Tine / STAR
MAX / IPx / AP)
The historian and arch journalist spent 2015 studying the modern Democratic
Party. His new book, Listen, Liberal, is the result of that effort, and an
excerpt published exclusively at Harpers Magazine finds in the career of
Hillary Clinton a performance of liberalism ... so realistic one could
almost believe it lived.
At a Clinton Foundation event held the day after International Womens Day
last March, Frank saw women from the Third World impressed into the efforts
of such women as Melinda Gates, actress America Ferrera and Clinton, who
were working not explicitly to improve the lives of women at the bottom of
the world economy, but to help women in the First World break the glass
ceilings in their industries.
Onto the stage before us came former secretary of state Clinton, the
Democratic Partys heir apparent; Melinda Gates, the wife of the richest man
in the world (the event was produced with the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation); various NGO executives; a Hollywood celebrity; a Silicon Valley
CEO; a best-selling author; an expert in womens issues from Georgetown
University; a Nobel Prize winner; and a large supporting cast of women from
the Third World. Everyone strode with polished informality about the stage,
reading their lines from an invisible tele¬prompter. And back and forth, the
presenters called out to one another in tones of supportiveness and sweet
flattery.
What this lineup suggested is that there is a kind of naturally occurring
solidarity between the millions of women at the bottom of the worlds
pyramid and the tiny handful of women at its very top. The hardship those
Third World women have endured and the entrepreneurial efforts they have
undertaken are powerful symbols of the struggle of American professional
women to become CEOs of Fortune 500 companies (one of the ambitions that was
discussed in detail) or of a woman to be elected president, which was the
unspoken theme of the entire event.
Reviewing Clintons tenure as President Obamas secretary of state, Frank
found that she advanced a version of feminism in which liberation is, in
part, a matter of taking out loans from banks in order to become an
entrepreneur.
Clintons other great initiative during her State Department days was the
so-called Hillary Doctrine: the recasting of the United States as the
worlds defender of women and girls. Now, here was a virtue quest of the
most principled kind. The single remaining superpower was no longer to be an
overbearing hegemon or a bringer of global financial crisisit was actually
determined to improve life for half of the planets population.
Like so many high-minded Democratic virtue quests, this one turned out to be
largely concerned with the personal, with foundations and private companies
that would partner with the United States to do things like improve
maternal and child health, close the global gender gap in cellular-phone
ownership, persuade men and boys to value their sisters and their
daughters, and make sure that every girl in the world has a chance to live
up to her own dreams and aspirations.
These aims found a major expression in the adoption and expansion of the
practice of microfinance, a financial innovation that would save the Third
World.
Foundations embraced it. Careers were built on it. Billions were spent
advancing it. The United Nations declared 2005 the International Year of
Microcredit. Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi economist who popularized
microlending, won a Nobel Prize in 2006. Three years later, Barack Obama
gave Yunus the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
And it was all so simple. While national leaders busied themselves with the
macro-matters of privatizing and deregulating, microloans would bring the
science of markets down to the individual. Merely by providing impoverished
individuals with a tiny loan of fifty or a hundred dollars, it was thought,
you could put them on the road to entrepreneurial self-sufficiency, you
could make entire countries prosper, you could bring about economic
development itself.
What was most attractive about micro¬lending was what it was not, what it
made unnecessary: any sort of collective action by poor people coming
together in governments or unions. The international development community
now knew that such institutions had no real role in human prosperity.
Instead, we were to understand poverty in the familiar terms of
entrepreneurship and individual merit, as though the hard work of millions
of single, unconnected peopleplus cell phones, bank accounts, and a little
capitalwas what was required to remedy the Third Worlds vast problems.
Millions of people would sell one another baskets they had made, or coal
they had dug out of the trash heap, and suddenly they were entrepreneurs,
racing to the top. The key to development was not doing something to limit
the grasp of Western banks, in other words; it was extending Western banking
methods to encompass every last individual on earth.
Microlending is a perfect expression of Clintonism, since it brings together
wealthy financial interests with rhetoric that sounds outrageously
idealistic. Microlending permits all manner of networking, posturing, and
profit taking among the lenders while doing nothing to change actual power
relationsthe ultimate win-win.
This is who modern Democrats are, as exemplified by Hillary Clinton, Bill
Clinton and Barack Obama, Frank writes: a group of technocrats who outsource
the work of improving the lives of the people they are supposed to represent
to markets and those who dominate them, and who are thanked and celebrated
for it because few people perceive what is actually happening.
This is modern liberalism in action: an unregulated virtue exchange in which
representatives of one class of humanity ritually forgive the sins of
another class, all of it convened and facilitated by a vast army of
well-credentialed American technocrats, while the objects of their high and
noble compassion sink slowly back into a preindustrial state.
Read Franks full excerpt here.
Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.
http://www.truthdig.com/ http://www.truthdig.com/
Thomas Frank on the Financial Feminism of Clinton Democrats
http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/thomas_frank_on_hillary_clinton_
liberal_virtue_20160222/
Posted on Feb 22, 2016
Melinda Gates, left, Chelsea Clinton and Hillary Clinton onstage at a
Clinton Foundation event in Manhattan in March 2015. (Dennis Van Tine / STAR
MAX / IPx / AP)
The historian and arch journalist spent 2015 studying the modern Democratic
Party. His new book, Listen, Liberal, is the result of that effort, and an
excerpt published exclusively at Harpers Magazine finds in the career of
Hillary Clinton a performance of liberalism ... so realistic one could
almost believe it lived.
At a Clinton Foundation event held the day after International Womens Day
last March, Frank saw women from the Third World impressed into the efforts
of such women as Melinda Gates, actress America Ferrera and Clinton, who
were working not explicitly to improve the lives of women at the bottom of
the world economy, but to help women in the First World break the glass
ceilings in their industries.
Onto the stage before us came former secretary of state Clinton, the
Democratic Partys heir apparent; Melinda Gates, the wife of the richest man
in the world (the event was produced with the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation); various NGO executives; a Hollywood celebrity; a Silicon Valley
CEO; a best-selling author; an expert in womens issues from Georgetown
University; a Nobel Prize winner; and a large supporting cast of women from
the Third World. Everyone strode with polished informality about the stage,
reading their lines from an invisible teleprompter. And back and forth, the
presenters called out to one another in tones of supportiveness and sweet
flattery.
What this lineup suggested is that there is a kind of naturally occurring
solidarity between the millions of women at the bottom of the worlds
pyramid and the tiny handful of women at its very top. The hardship those
Third World women have endured and the entrepreneurial efforts they have
undertaken are powerful symbols of the struggle of American professional
women to become CEOs of Fortune 500 companies (one of the ambitions that was
discussed in detail) or of a woman to be elected president, which was the
unspoken theme of the entire event.
Reviewing Clintons tenure as President Obamas secretary of state, Frank
found that she advanced a version of feminism in which liberation is, in
part, a matter of taking out loans from banks in order to become an
entrepreneur.
Clintons other great initiative during her State Department days was the
so-called Hillary Doctrine: the recasting of the United States as the
worlds defender of women and girls. Now, here was a virtue quest of the
most principled kind. The single remaining superpower was no longer to be an
overbearing hegemon or a bringer of global financial crisisit was actually
determined to improve life for half of the planets population.
Like so many high-minded Democratic virtue quests, this one turned out to be
largely concerned with the personal, with foundations and private companies
that would partner with the United States to do things like improve
maternal and child health, close the global gender gap in cellular-phone
ownership, persuade men and boys to value their sisters and their
daughters, and make sure that every girl in the world has a chance to live
up to her own dreams and aspirations.
These aims found a major expression in the adoption and expansion of the
practice of microfinance, a financial innovation that would save the Third
World.
Foundations embraced it. Careers were built on it. Billions were spent
advancing it. The United Nations declared 2005 the International Year of
Microcredit. Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi economist who popularized
microlending, won a Nobel Prize in 2006. Three years later, Barack Obama
gave Yunus the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
And it was all so simple. While national leaders busied themselves with the
macro-matters of privatizing and deregulating, microloans would bring the
science of markets down to the individual. Merely by providing impoverished
individuals with a tiny loan of fifty or a hundred dollars, it was thought,
you could put them on the road to entrepreneurial self-sufficiency, you
could make entire countries prosper, you could bring about economic
development itself.
What was most attractive about microlending was what it was not, what it
made unnecessary: any sort of collective action by poor people coming
together in governments or unions. The international development community
now knew that such institutions had no real role in human prosperity.
Instead, we were to understand poverty in the familiar terms of
entrepreneurship and individual merit, as though the hard work of millions
of single, unconnected peopleplus cell phones, bank accounts, and a little
capitalwas what was required to remedy the Third Worlds vast problems.
Millions of people would sell one another baskets they had made, or coal
they had dug out of the trash heap, and suddenly they were entrepreneurs,
racing to the top. The key to development was not doing something to limit
the grasp of Western banks, in other words; it was extending Western banking
methods to encompass every last individual on earth.
Microlending is a perfect expression of Clintonism, since it brings together
wealthy financial interests with rhetoric that sounds outrageously
idealistic. Microlending permits all manner of networking, posturing, and
profit taking among the lenders while doing nothing to change actual power
relationsthe ultimate win-win.
This is who modern Democrats are, as exemplified by Hillary Clinton, Bill
Clinton and Barack Obama, Frank writes: a group of technocrats who outsource
the work of improving the lives of the people they are supposed to represent
to markets and those who dominate them, and who are thanked and celebrated
for it because few people perceive what is actually happening.
This is modern liberalism in action: an unregulated virtue exchange in which
representatives of one class of humanity ritually forgive the sins of
another class, all of it convened and facilitated by a vast army of
well-credentialed American technocrats, while the objects of their high and
noble compassion sink slowly back into a preindustrial state.
Read Franks full excerpt here.
Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/donald_trump_must_honor_the_immigrant_an
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