Double Your Money! Double Your Clout!!
We’re making headway in our annual fund drive, but not nearly enough. Either we meet our fundraising goal of $100,000 or we’ll be forced to cut back the operation of our website.
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It’s hard to believe this is CounterPunch’s 20th year. It’s even harder to comprehend celebrating this anniversary without our guiding spirit Alexander Cockburn. The last year has been an extreme 
challenge for all of us CounterPunchers. But we’ve put our noses to the grindstone and tried very hard to live up to Alexander’s lofty standards to produce every day a style of radical journalism that is smart, unconventional and enlivened with wit and humor.
Many of you have told us you’re proud of the work we’ve done keeping CounterPunch going and developing the magazine format that was one of Alex’s last wishes. Now it’s the time of year when we need to implore you for your financial support. We only interrupt you with one fund appeal a year. And you can be assured that when we ask you for your financial support, we really mean it.
Early on, Alex and Jeffrey decided that we’d only do one of these humiliating fund drives a year and when we reached our goal we would stop. Stop with a screeching of tires. In the past, this kind of faith in our readers has worked. You’ve responded promptly and generously.
Now we find ourselves in Year Five of Obama time. Look around: No one has any spare money. Few people have job security. Nobody’s having any fun. And we don’t derive much pleasure from saying, we told you so. But, hell, we TOLD YOU SO. And, guess what, Hillary is waiting in the wings.
So what are we going to do? What we’ve always done. We’re going to bear down, keep churning out some of the best writing on any side of the political spectrum, from journalists, young and old, new and familiar, from around the world. We’re going to get under people’s skin, make them uncomfortable, make them squirm–and occasionally make people laugh at the absurdity of it all.
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Debt and Deficit as Shock Therapy
When Naomi Klein published her ground-breaking book The Shock Doctrine (2007), which compellingly demonstrated how neoliberal policy makers take advantage of overwhelming crisis times to privatize public property and carry out austerity programs, most economists and media pundits scoffed at her arguments as overstating her case. Real world economic developments have since strongly reinforced her views.
Using the unnerving 2008 financial crash, the ensuing long recession and the recurring specter of debt default, the financial oligarchy and their proxies in the governments of core capitalist countries have embarked on an unprecedented economic coup d’état against the people, the ravages of which include extensive privatization of the public sector, systematic application of neoliberal austerity economics and radical redistribution of resources from the bottom to the top. Despite the truly historical and paradigm-shifting importance of these ominous developments, their discussion remains altogether outside the discourse of mainstream economics.
The fact that neoliberal economists and politicians have been cheering these brutal assaults on social safety-net programs should not be surprising. What is regrettable, however, is the liberal/Keynesian economists’ and politicians’ glaring misdiagnosis of the plague of austerity economics: it is all the “right-wing” Republicans’ or Tea Partiers’ fault, we are told; the Obama administration and the Democratic Party establishment, including the labor bureaucracy, have no part or responsibility in the relentless drive to austerity economics and privatization of public property.
Keynesian and other liberal economists and politicians routinely blame the abandonment of the New Deal and/or Social-Democratic economics exclusively on Ronald Reagan’s supply-side economics, on neoliberal ideology or on economists at the University of Chicago. Indeed, they characterize the 2008 financial collapse, the ensuing long recession and the recurring debt/budgetary turmoil on “bad” policies of “neoliberal capitalism,” not on class policies of capitalism per se. [1]
Evidence shows, however, that the transition from Keynesian to neoliberal economics stems from much deeper roots or dynamics than pure ideology [2]; that neoliberal austerity policies are class, not “bad,” policies [3]; that the transition started long before Reagan arrived in the White House; and that neoliberal austerity policies have been pursued as vigorously (though less openly and more stealthily) by the Democratic administrations of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama as their Republican counterparts. [4]
Indeed, it could be argued that, due to his uniquely misleading status or station in the socio-political structure of the United States, and equally unique Orwellian characteristics or personality, Mr. Obama has served the interests of the powerful financial oligarchy much better or more effectively than any Republican president could do, or has done—including Ronald Reagan. By the same token, he has more skillfully hoodwinked the public and harmed their interests, both in terms of economics and individual/constitutional rights, than any of his predecessors.
Ronald Reagan did not...
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The insidious greed and public looting that Wall Street has nurtured to an art form in New York... Reports are that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is engaged in a massive, covert military buildup. An... Will Tea Party machinations over Obamacare lead to the Republican Party’s demise?
No one, so far as I know,... THOSE WHO are interested in the history of the Crusades ask themselves: what brought about the Crusaders’ downfall?... Visit our archives for even more interesting articles from past CounterPunch authors.
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