Weekend Economists Waiting for Godot March 7-9, 2014

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65. Richard D. Wolff | Obama's Economic Significance

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/22277-obamas-economic-significance

President Obama's proven reliability as outsider president extraordinaire - putting a disarming smiley face on capitalism's depredations - is his administration's economic significance.

Enough time has elapsed in Obama's presidency to assess its economic meanings. His administration's actions and omissions tell a clear story. On one hand, Obama continued the economic program imposed on all presidents since World War II. On the other, Obama had the hardest time doing so and is likely the last to do it in the manner of those other presidents. History provides our context for assessing Obama's economic significance.

The US economy's defining moment across the past century was the 1930s eruption of an organized, self-conscious working class into politics. Massive union organizing drives by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) allied with massive popular mobilizations by socialist and communist parties. That labor-radical coalition forced huge concessions - the New Deal - from business and the wealthy. They were taxed and regulated to enable major gains for middle- and lower-income citizens. Those gains included establishing Social Security, unemployment compensation, minimum wage, and millions of federal jobs.

Labor-radical explosion from below reversed income and wealth inequalities deepened by capitalism's development after the Civil War to the 1929 crash. Haunting the historic changes across the 1930s were plausible intimations (by socialists) and occasional threats (by communists) of revolution. Labor-radical pressures generated President Franklin D. Roosevelt's famous 1944 proposals for a 100 percent top income tax rate and for a Second Bill of Rights.

When war ended and FDR died, reactionaries mobilized to roll back the New Deal and all it represented. Business, the rich and other right-wing social forces organized a conservative coalition to cut regulations, cut taxes or shift them to others, and reduce government services (other than military). Economic history since 1945 charts the reversal of the New Deal domestically alongside developing a global pax Americana.