[Peace-discuss] [sftalk] [sf-core] More dead children on Obama's watch

[C. G. Estabrook]

Contemporary neoliberalism began as a reaction to the "golden age of capitalism," the generation after WWII, which ended with "the sixties," when the critique of capitalism in the US was reborn. (See e.g. Carl Davidson, "Name the System.")

The standard account remains David Harvey, "A Brief History of Neoliberalism" (2007).

  
On Apr 3, 2013, at 9:56 AM, Mike Lehman <rebelmike at earthlink.net> wrote:

> On 4/3/2013 8:58 AM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
> > The left in America means opposition to the class-oppression of capitalism, joined to the recognition that US wars are in the interests only of the capitalist class. Liberalism is an attempt to meliorate capitalism (from whatever motive, including the defense of the capitalist order) and eliminate the excesses of the foreign policy of the US, seen as basically sound. (E.g., the late Anthony Lewis, the liberal extreme of NYT columnists, held long after the US war in Vietnam that the greatest international crime since WWII had been "a blundering attempt to do good.")
> >
> > The argument here began with John Stauber's important article, "The Progressive Movement is a PR Front for Rich Democrats"<http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/03/15/the-progressive-movement-is-a-pr-front-for-rich-democrats/>, which describes current liberal attempts to co-opt the left. It was just that sort of co-option of the anti-war movement that made Barack Obama president. (That he realized such a campaign would be necessary is clear from The Audacity of Hope: his lying pretense to be the peace candidate was his most audacious hope.)
> >
> > Americans are only slowly becoming aware of the conscious neoliberal campaign from the 1970s, designed to combat the American left that had emerged in the 1960s...
> Carl,
> As a historian, I'm not exactly sure what you're up to in confining the 
> US left to a post 1960 timeline. That's a brutalization of history that 
> sounds like the work of neoliberalism to me, which is what you -- 
> ostensibly -- oppose. I'd suggest just not touching that third rail if 
> you really know so little about it.
> 
> Since there seems to be so much attached to sorting out who's left and 
> who's liberal, I'd suggest again that you start naming names so the rest 
> of us can sort out exactly what you're point is in these fulminations. 
> Or is it that you consider it's only you that is pure enough to be in 
> goodstanding as a card-carrying member of the left? The rest of us are 
> liberal pond scum...?
> 
> The reason I ask is that I find your obsession with flinging big piles 
> of collective guilt at everyone in earshot is, well, as distasteful and 
> useless as others have found it with folks like J. McCarthy, J. Stalin, 
> A. Hitler, R. Reagan, R. Santorum...
> On the other hand, if we need to cast out the evil amongst us, we need 
> to be more specific about who the class traitors are, right?
> Mike