[Peace-discuss] Opportunity agenda

[David Green]

They have offered neither bread nor cake or anything other than false hope and empty symbols.
The references to creating opportunities is an ideological mystification meant to suggest that reversing the decades of economic restructuring, stagnant and declining wages, unemployment and expanding poverty can be easily corrected by simple will and the right mixture of incentives for private sector capital. It is as though these realities are just the result of incorrect policies and not the inherent logic of capitalist processes.
This was the underlining implication of Obama’s business summit on Friday – that the specific issue of the long-term unemployed can be solved by a more focused determination on the part of the private sector to hire those workers.
The shameless appeal to opportunity agendas by Obama and the Democrats in the midst of a global capitalist meltdown is even more dishonest than their counterparts on the more extreme right. Because for traditional conservatism, there has never been any pretense toward believing in relatively equal outcomes in the capitalist market. Inequality, and by extension income inequality, unemployment, and “winners and losers” in the market, are all expressions of a natural social order when people are “free” to pursue their self-interests.
Democrats and reform liberalism, in contrast, claim to be committed to the rights of labor, social justice, legal equality and a progressive role for the state. Yet, in the era of neoliberalism, which has an ideological component as well as representing conscious policy decisions in the economic sphere, the philosophical and policy differences of those two approaches have almost been obliterated, reduced now to policy differences that are more tactical than substantial, notwithstanding the tea-party critique of the Democrat Party and Obama.

http://greenshadowcabinet.us/statements/let-them-eat-symbols-obama%E2%80%99s-plan-long-term-unemployed
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