Hillary's Wall Street-Friendly Economic Plan Costs Her Michigan
Wednesday, March 09, 2016
Hillary's Wall Street-Friendly Economic Plan Costs Her Michigan
by
Les Leopold
Common Dreams
Billed as a major populist economic address, Hillary Clinton put forth her jobs program in Michigan.
Wall Street is smiling. Team Hillary is crying.
Her program fits perfectly within the neoliberal framework as she focuses on how to use public funds and policies to promote private sector gain. There are tax incentives to urge large and small corporations to create more jobs in the U.S.
There are tax breaks to encourage corporations to provide more training and profit sharing plans. And there are tax breaks to promote long term investment instead of short-term gains. To balance this equation, she also calls for exit taxes if companies take tax breaks and then move out of the country. Her mantra is clear: if you do right to the American people, we'll do right by you.
Along the way, she waxes euphoric about the buoyancy of the private sector: "New businesses are opening. Families are moving in. The streetlights are on again. The buses and running again. There is a palpable feeling of pride and community and we have to spread economic revitalization to all of Detroit's neighborhoods." (See here for full speech.)
Not a word is mentioned about public goods or public sector jobs. Clearly, the only real job is a private sector job.
Hillary Sends a Signal to Wall Street: Voters Reject Message
At the same time, she uses a dog whistle to let Wall Street know that she won't be coming down hard on them: "I'm not interested in condemning whole categories of businesses or the entire private sector."
Furthermore, she dances around the perils of free-trade deals by putting the entire blame on China, and therefore not on the Clinton and Obama administrations who were/are gung-ho free traders.
Her silence about NAFTA, however, is deafening. And that's very good news to corporate and financial elites because NAFTA is the trade deal that has facilitated the financial strip-mining of the American worker.
It has placed U.S. workers into direct daily competition with much less expensive labor south of the border.
In fact, Hillary argues all such debates are now ancient history. It's unproductive, she claims, to be "re-fighting battles from 20 years ago..."
But those battles are not over for Michigan workers who feel the incessant pressure from NAFTA on job security and the downward pressure on incomes and benefits. Hillary can't rebuild the middle-class, even on her own free-market terms, without undoing large parts of NAFTA, and Michigan voters know it.
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She rejects the two real power moves that could actually change elite Wall Street and corporate behavior. She does not talk about outlawing stock buybacks. And she does not mention the financial speculation tax.
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While noting that the "auto industry just had its best year ever," Hillary ignores the outrageous case of financial strip-mining at GM. She couldn't mention it because it would also show the revolving door between the Obama administration and Wall Street.
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Much more at link~
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/03/09/hillarys-wall-street-friendly-economic-plan-costs-her-michigan
Those CONservatives DO love their TRICKLE DOWN.
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