Abstract

Why We Still Need a Third Party

The author argues that a Democratic president is unlikely to address the problem of economic inequality in the United States. So just get a Democrat, any Democrat, back in the White House and the skies will begin to clear again. But suppose a less forgiving retrospect of the Clinton years discloses that he did nothing to alter the rules of the neoliberal game that began in the Reagan/Thatcher era, With the push to boost after-tax corporate profits, shift ever more bargaining power to business, erode social protections for workers, make the rich richer, the middle tier at best stand still and the poor get poorer. We now have just such an unsparing scrutiny of Clintonomics, in the form of Robert Pollin's "Contours of Descent: U.S. Economic Fractures and the Landscape of Global Austerity." At the end of eight years, when the bubble tide had ebbed, what did workers have by way of a permanent legacy? Clinton, Pollin bleakly concludes, "accomplished almost nothing in the way of labor laws or the broader policy environment to improve the bargaining situation for workers .... Moreover, conditions under Clinton worsened among those officially counted as poor." In a piece of original and trenchant analysis Pollin shows that almost two-thirds of Clinton's fiscal turnaround can be accounted for by slashes in government spending relative to GDP (54 percent) and by capital gains revenues (10 percent). You think the next Democratic nominee is going to address the horrors engendered by the neoliberal credo to which Clinton paid such fealty? Of course not.