Neoliberalism, or: I was so much older then; I'm younger than that now.

Here's another post that doesn't have anything to do with writing/publishing -- but it's not exactly political, either. It's based on an email* I got this week about a post Robert Reich published on his Substack that's called "The Tragic History of Neoliberalism". In it, he's refuting comments made by David Brooks, a New York Times columnist who now claims to be a moderate, even though he has, in fact, been a conservative forever.

Reich, whose decades-long career in the federal government includes a stint as Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton, starts his rebuttal with this chart, which I have unapologetically lifted from his Substack. (He lifted it from the Economic Policy Institute, so I don't feel bad about stealing it. The chart might be easier to read at the EPI link, plus it's interactive there.) 

What it shows is that along about, oh, the late 1970s, the gap between worker productivity and worker conpensation began to widen, to the point where, since 1979, worker-bee productivity has increased 86 percent, while worker-bee pay has increased just 27%.

I canceled my NYT subscription quite some time ago, so I haven't actually read the David Brooks column that sparked Reich's post. So I'm going by what Reich has to say about it, which is that what Brooks wrote is an apologetic for neoliberalism. Brooks claims that while wages stagnated in the 1970s and '80s, they began to increase in the early 1990s and, along with productivity, have continued to increase. Brooks says that's the result of neoliberal economic policies, and we should go back to them.

Reich rightfully points out that while wages have trended upward a little bit, the rise in productivity has far outstripped it, and that's due to an imbalance of power caused by those neoliberal economic policies that has basically stolen money from the pockets of the worker bees and put it in the pockets of the fabulously well-to-do.

He doesn't actually use the terms "worker bee" and "fabulously well-to-do", but that's the gist of it.

As I read Reich's post, the refrain of a song kept playing in my head. The song is called "My Back Pages", and I've made that refrain the title of this post. My earworm was the 1967 version by the Byrds: 

I never knew the name of the song until I looked it up this week. I also didn't know that it was written by Bob Dylan, although it made perfect sense when I found that out. Dylan was 23 when he wrote "My Back Pages"; it was his declaration that he was stepping away from writing protest songs because he'd begun to realize that right and wrong, good and evil, weren't as clearly defined as he'd thought they were. He was maturing away from his youthful certainty.

I was interested to see Robert Reich out-and-out say he was questioning neoliberalism, because he was part of the administration that instituted it. Bill Clinton was a Democrat elected in 1992 after 12 years of Republican rule -- first Ronald Reagan, then George H.W. Bush. Clinton ran as an antidote to the GOP's pro-business, anti-worker-bee policies. (In 1981, Reagan fired 11,000 striking air-traffic controllers, leading to the near-collapse of the union movement in America and facilitating that widening gap between wages and productivity in the chart up top.) 

Clinton ran on bringing the New Deal back, to make life easier for American workers. But then -- ah, then -- he continued and expanded the policies begun under Reagan and Bush the Elder that favored free-market capitalism, deregulation, and a reduction in government spending (as long as military spending wasn't cut), and called it neoliberalism.

I enthusiastically voted for Clinton twice. I thought neoliberalism made sense. I believed in capitalism and thought Clinton's success in balancing the federal budget was terrific. I didn't even mind when he instituted "workfare" to force folks on welfare to get a job, thereby cutting -- all together now -- waste, fraud, and abuse.

What I didn't understand was what those policies were doing to my own earnings. I started out in the working world in 1979 -- right about the time when the wage gap really began to widen. 

I was so much older then. I'm younger than that now.

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Reich closes out his post by saying, "Neoliberalism should not and cannot be rehabilitated." Going down that road, he says, will just bring us more of the same: suppressed wages, more profit going to the rich, even less help for those who need it, and more and more Trumps.

He's pushing for a progressive populist movement. I'm leery of labeling anything populism, given that far-right populists, aka MAGA, helped to elect Trump. But I agree that we cannot keep going down the road we're on and hope to continue to call ourselves a first-world nation.

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"Fabulously well-to-do" is from Breakfast of Champions, a novel by Kurt Vonnegut that was published in 1973: 

Everybody in America was supposed to grab whatever he could and hold on to it. Some Americans were very good at grabbing and holding, were fabulously well-to-do. Others couldn’t get their hands on doodley-squat.

Vonnegut, like George Carlin, saw it all coming. I miss them both.

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*Is it just me, or are we all getting inundated with daily long-form emails we feel obliged to read since social media has been throttling organic reach?

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Ironically, I need to lengthen this already lengthy post by updating you on this: My former employer, WilmerHale, won a court case against Trump this past week. To summarize the backstory, Trump has been mad at WilmerHale ever since Bob Mueller, who was a partner at the firm, was appointed as a special counsel to investigate accusations of Russian interference in the 2016 election. So in March, Trump issued an executive order that was clearly designed to put WilmerHale out of business. It wasn't the only big law firm that Trump targeted in this way, and the management at some firms agreed to settle by providing free legal work to the administration in exchange for having the executive orders against them lifted. But WilmerHale (and two others) chose to fight.

This past week, that strategy paid off. D.C. District Judge Richard Leon blocked Trump's executive order. In a blistering opinion containing 27 exclamation points, Judge Leon agreed with the firm. In part, he said: "I have concluded that this order must be struck down in its entirety as unconstitutional. Indeed, to rule otherwise would be unfaithful to the judgment and vision of the Founding Fathers!"

No word so far on whether Trump will appeal. I suspect he won't; the sturm und drang is what he was after. So this ought to be the end of it.

Kudos to the judge. And congrats to WilmerHale on being on the right side of history once again.

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These moments of bloggy reverse aging have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.