THE NEOLIBERALS

Judis, John

NEOLIBERALS High-tech politics for the '80s? BY JOHN JUDIS The workshop was entitled 'issues for the '80s." It was held at the Hilton Hotel, across the street from Philadelphia's Convention Hall,...

...Neoliberal support for free trade stems partly from an identification with the new high-tech entrepreneurs, whose prosperity depends on the elimination of any international trade barriers, but also partly from an acceptance of Nineteenth Century British economist David Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage...
...Reich and Magaziner also frame the argument in terms of the difference between "public" and "private" investment criteria...
...Such a ploy is legal in Texas...
...The only major difference between the United States and Germany and Japan is that our Government doesn't admit to the intimacy of its relation to business...
...We're going to revive this party's tradition of concern for social justice," he declares...
...And Siegelman's liberal past may come back to haunt him if he later runs for governor or a seat in Congress...
...Fallows: "On the Lefi, the resumption of the draft is a crucial issue because the alternative is a poor man's army thai increases the possibility of cavalier wars...
...I'm a conservative and she's a liberal," Richards's Republican opponent says...
...If you have never helped before, there couldn't be a better time to start...
...We've underpaid our writers and overworked our staff...
...were first drawn to polltics during the Kennedy Administration...
...He sees 1982 as a historic year in which farmers, laborers, and low- and moderate-income people will forget their differences and form a coalition...
...Now, however, many are taking the John Connally route and declaring themselves born-again Republicans...
...They have pointed out that the Navy's new Trident submarine, which will hold twenty-four missiles, is not as effective as the smaller, less expensive Polaris, which holds sixteen missiles...
...Hart himself, one of the few Democratic incumbents to survive the Reagan landslide, squeaked by with 50.3 per cent of the vote...
...1 You might set up a regular schedule of long-term gifts to The Progressive—and let us know, so that we can plan accordingly...
...Norman Cousins, who served as editor of Saturday Review for more than half of the magazine's existence, blamed its demise primarily on the steep postal rate increases that have been imposed in recent years...
...Thurow proposes a "national corporate investment committee to redirect investment flows from our 'sunset' industries to our 'sunrise' industries...
...I want to assure you as earnestly as I can that this is no routine request for additional support...
...Nobody doubts her, for she wasn't an activist when she served as secretary of state from 1959 to 1963, those last years of poll taxes and literacy tests...
...Our shortfall is not in subscription income: Both new subscriptions and renewals are running ahead of projections...
...You see, The Progressive can't "sell" its circulation to the corporate advertisers whose slick hucksterism sustains the mass media...
...Tim Funk (Tim Funk reports on state politics for The Anniston Star in Alabama...
...In the United States, however, the conditions exist for neither mode of planning...
...I'm a chicken expert myself," he said...
...He is a veteran of the anti-war movement, a former staff aide to the late Representative Allard Lo-wenstein of New York, a Georgetown University Law School graduate, and the Alabama coordinator of the 1972 McGovern Presidential Campaign...
...A close look at Washington today shows that his time may be near...
...On July 9, I mailed an emergency appeal to some 12,000 loyal readers who have previously contributed generously to The Progressive's Membership Fund...
...Hart's position allows neoliberals to advocate cutbacks in the Reagan Administration's spending levels in the name of greater military effectiveness...
...Despite Carlson's talents, however, Wellstone is confident that he can win in November...
...But the neoliberals do have what could be called a military policy...
...More recently, the deployment of the Trident submarine off the Washington coast has given an added urgency to the Northwest's anti-nuclear movement and Lysen has found himself in the vanguard of state legislators petitioning Congress for an immediate nuclear freeze...
...He has also advanced some strategic no-, tions of his own, which are shared by other neoliberals: He rejects the quest for nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union, and defends the doctrine of deterrence...
...Steel or Ford...
...His picture appeared all over the state when he rode a bull at a rodeo...
...Sam Delson (Sam Delson is a Minnesota-based freelance writer who worked at The Nation this summer...
...For years he has been a leader of the military reform movement...
...His National Defense and Economic Growth Education Act hits all the bases, from installing computers in the classroom to restoring Federal funding for disadvantaged children...
...Tsongas proposed the combining of the "free-market system" with the "welfare state" to produce "free-market forces softened by compassion...
...To us, the $60,000 we must raise right now is a lot of money, and I suspect it is to you, too...
...Though The Progressive's financial health has always been precarious, I can recall no time in all those years when the situation was as critical as it is today...
...A Paradox You may remember one of the clever Gilbert and Sullivan tunes, "Aparadox, aparadox, a most ingenious paradox...
...Senate...
...Hanson warns that a "policy that strengthens capitalism . . . may do no more than improve the conditions for coupon-clippers...
...The neoliberal reformers are not militarists...
...Steel will use its earnings to buy Marathon Oil rather than renovate its own plant and equipment...
...We've managed to scrape by, cutting every possible corner and practicing every conceivable economy...
...Neoliberals, typified by Tsongas, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, generally see eye to eye with Senator Edward Kennedy or with former Vice President Walter Mondale...
...That puts The Progressive's survival squarely in your hands...
...Hart and the military reformers stress "small size," "numbers," and "reliability...
...Both sets of ideas dwell in that peculiar limbo of American politics that is neither strictly left-wing nor right-wing...
...Robert Reich, former Federal Trade Commission official and co-author of Minding America's Business, an argument for Government intervention in the marketplace...
...A return to international free trade is as unrealistic as a return to the free market at home...
...If you have helped The Progressive before, please help again now if you possibly can...
...They believe, in Tsongas's words, that the United States should seek only "rough equivalence" in weaponry with the Soviet Union, and that Washington should shed its "East-West mentality" in dealing with the Third World...
...Today, however, many of these women are working to get Ann Richards elected...
...All they wanted in return was a say in fashioning the magazine's editorial policies...
...We've been guided by the assumption that this time of Reaganomics and regression at home, of adventurism abroad spiced by fantasies of "limited" and "winnable" nuclear war, is also a time when it is of the utmost importance to carry The Progressive's message to more and more Americans...
...With an expansion of educational opA Prairie Populist with a Ph.D...
...Hightower's Republican opponent may be even more buffoonish than Reagan Brown, whose tongue got twisted during a speech, resulting in a reference to Booker T. Washington as "that great black nigger...
...If the microelectronic revolution makes American industry more competitive, but also shrinks employment and effective demand, then society will face a crisis similar to the one it faced in the late 1920s, when technological innovation caused a sharp increase in production—a 40 per cent increase over the decade—while it reduced the agricultural and manufacturing labor force...
...goods can be undersold by cheaper foreign labor, into such high-productivity industries as computers, where technology and skilled labor give America the edge...
...Sheldon Sunness (Sheldon Sunness is a New York-based free-lance writer who recently visited Washington...
...Hart explained the military reformers' approach in a recent position paper: "The Pentagon defines quality in technical terms: high technology equals quality...
...In this respect, neoliberalism breaks not only with old liberal notions, but also with the Reagan Administration's exaltations of the free market...
...Hart remains the most visible representative of neoliberalism...
...In the 1976 and 1980 elections, Jimmy Carter failed to carry a single Western state...
...The neoliberals may suffer the same fate in 1984 and 1988 as Jerry-Brown did in 1980, when he tried to unite liberal Democrats with conservative Republican proponents of a balanced budget...
...But we've always said No, and we intend to keep on saying No...
...I don't believe I need to...
...The auditor also sits on the Land Exchange Board, which controls the use of state property, as well as on the Executive Council and the Housing Finance Agency...
...In the late 1960s, they opposed the Vietnam war but worked within the system—Hart in Robert Kennedy's and then Eugene McCarthy's Presidential campaigns, Fallows as an antiwar editor of The Harvard Crimson...
...Ann Richards contends that liberal-conservative arguments are irrelevant: "I don't understand how the investment of state funds and the best return on the dollar falls into some philosophical catch-back," she says...
...And without these programs, the microelectronic revolution could cause both employment and demand to plummet, forcing the United States to the brink of depression and transforming neoliberalism into a politics of managed austerity rather than of prosperity and freedom...
...His Rural Recovery Program 'Grandstander' Wellstone would encourage strategic investment of pension funds in local industries...
...Richards's Republican opponent is Allen Clark, a West Point graduate who lost both legs in Vietnam, a former aide to Governor Clements, and for two weeks the number-two man in the Veterans Administration before resigning in protest against the way VA Administrator Chester Nimmo operated...
...THE PROGRESSIVE I 33 Will The Progressive Survive...
...A resume like that often spells political death for statewide candidates below the Mason-Dixon line...
...The incumbent is also a skilled political fighter who stunned his opponent in an August 25 debate by charging that Wellstone has a perceptual disability that renders him unable to analyze mathematical data...
...They oppose such costly weapons as the Army's M-l tank or the Air Force's F-15 fighter as "too complex to work well on the battlefield...
...I wrote my first article for The Progressive back in 1959 (for $25, and I wish I could tell you the rates are much better now...
...Free trade has always been a luxury of countries whose industrial might is unchallenged—Britain in the Nineteenth Century, the United States after World War II...
...a lot of them were image-building, feel-good-about-yourself kinds of things...
...But the more ambitious reforms pursued by Siegelman—a campaign finance disclosure law that would require candidates to report contributions before the election and a computerized statewide voting list that would purge from the rolls voters who have died or moved away—have stalled in the legislature...
...Social democracy and Atari make an intriguing match on paper, but the two may not get along as well in real life...
...Sincerely, THE PROGRESSIVE I 35...
...The neoliberals believe the discipline of the international market will create an international division of labor that, in turn, will accurately reflect the capabilities and potentials of different countries...
...Proponents of the Kennedy-Hatfield immediate freeze have termed Jackson's proposal "a fig leaf over the nuclear arms race...
...Neoliberals reconcile their social democratic distrust of the market with their frontier enthusiasm for small business by drawing a distinction between entrepreneurs and other businessmen...
...By replacing the forty-one Polaris submarines with twenty Tridents, the Navy will make the entire submarine force more vulnerable to detection...
...Wart: "Price controls are Democratic...
...Hart and Tsongas are the most prominent neoliberal politicians, but Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey and Representative Tim Wirth of Colorado are often mentioned as members of the group...
...A recent poll commissioned by national Republican officials indicates that the two men who top the Texas Republican slate this year are lagging behind their Democratic opponents...
...Clark is a substitute who entered the race at the request of Republican Party officials seeking a stronger opponent for Richards than the man who won the primary...
...Felix Rohatyn has called for creation of a new Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) that would give loans to sunrise industries and to such capital-intensive manufacturing industries as steel or automobiles, which are now losing ground to superior foreign management and technology...
...it's a bizarre distortion of priorities in our society...
...During a decade in the Washington legislature, Lysen established a reputation as a political maverick willing to make the unpopular fight...
...David Birch's studies of job creation are cited to demonstrate the importance of small business...
...On the contrary, it can mean a financial drain...
...Hart and his Senate colleague...
...Texas has always had its ticket-splitters, conservative Democrats who support local and statewide Democratic candidates but are seldom able to stomach their party's national ticket...
...portunities, a legislated reduction in the workweek, and the institution of full-employment programs, the rise in productivity brought about by the microelectronic revolution could lead to greater freedom and leisure for all Americans...
...She organized her first campaign in 1972 when Sarah Weddington, then a candidate for the state legislature, couldn't find a man willing to advise her...
...perhaps this is the first issue of The Progressive you have ever seen...
...in the past decade, postal rates have become a crushing burden here at The Progressive, too, and at many other publications, some of which won't make it into 1983...
...The significance of the workshop was lost on neither the conference participants nor the press...
...She won the primary by a wide margin, almost without a runoff, but Harding withdrew before the runoff could be held...
...Arne Carlson, the Republican incumbent, accuses Wellstone of political grandstanding and says he should be running for national office, but Wellstone contends that the state auditor should be a policymaker rather than an accountant...
...Where we are hurting, and hurting badly, is in contributions from readers who support The Progressive above and beyond the regular subscription price...
...The Post-industrial Society: Like supply-side Republicans, neoliberals assume that economic growth will create jobs...
...It is as difficult to define neoliberalism as it was to define liberalism...
...I don't see how anyone can run for office without talking about unemployment and the arms race...
...Reich and Magaziner and other neoliberals offer a range of programs intended to stimulate and protect the growth of small business...
...A veteran of more than a decade in the Minneapolis City Council and the state legislature, Carlson is expected to seek higher office within a few years...
...This article is adapted from "Ronald Reagan and America's Crisis," to be published by the Institute for Policy Studies...
...dissertation on the roots of black militancy and has written extensively on labor and community organizing...
...And he was the only white politician of note in Alabama who publicly supported extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act...
...I won't burden you with any of them...
...An Urgent Appeal to Our Readers Dear Friend: My colleagues here at The Progressive were kind enough to come up with half a dozen excellent suggestions for opening this letter—amusing but appropriate anecdotes, suitable quotations from the classics, clever turns of phrase that would be sure to grab your attention and keep you reading...
...But Siegelman only announced for reelection after looking long and hard at the races for lieutenant governor and Congress...
...The name recognition came from his days as president of the University of Alabama student body back in 1968 and his later position as executive director of the state Democratic Party.He was well known in Birmingham, where he served as the Party's general counsel, and in Mobile, where he was born...
...As I write these words early in September, I can't say with any measure of certainty how long it will be possible to continue publishing this magazine...
...The neoliberals are convinced that unless the Democratic Party adapts itself to the shifts in population from the Frostbelt to the Sunbelt and from manufacturing to service jobs, it will forfeit its national majority and survive merely as a regional party of the Great Lakes and Northeast...
...Unless you help now, this magazine will be long gone by then...
...That monthly magazine's circulation when its last issue went to press was 480,000—almost ten times the size of The Progressive's...
...Moreover, the BPA head during the fateful years, Sterling Munro, had earlier served as Henry Jackson's top aide...
...A gifted orator, Wellstone brought weary delegates to their feet with a hell-raising speech that prompted comparisons to such legendary prairie populists as Robert M. LaFollette Sr...
...Most ignored the "nuts and bolls" campaign seminars in the Convention Hall to jam the poorly air-conditioned room where Hart's workshop was held, Except for Nulty, who spent much of the time arguing with the other speakers, these were the representatives of the new liberalism— 'neoliberalism," as it has been called...
...Besides Fallows, Yergin, and Reich, the neoliberal thinkers include economist and Newsweek columnist Lester Thurow, New York financier Felix Rohatyn, MIT professor David Birch, and public opinion analyst John Naisbett...
...Siegelman, dubbed "The Golden Flake" by critics who think he's a liberal fish out of water in Alabama, has been an expert media manipulator...
...The workshop promised the clearest presenlation of those—or any—politics during what was expected to be a three-day cliche f est...
...There are signs that the party could be headed in this direction...
...Two important economic assumptions and one political assumption underlie the neoliberal economic programs, and they are all suspect...
...So far, the campaign has been quiet, with Frink appearing at George Wallace rallies and Siegelman raising campaign money at cocktail parties attended by the likes of Scottie Fitzgerald Smith (daughter of F. Scott and Montgomery-born Zelda...
...His first book, How the Rural Poor Got Power: Narrative of a Grass-Roots Organizer, detailed his experiences as a founder of the Organization for a Better Rice County in southeast Minnesota...
...Except at a publication like The Progressive...
...But the kind of growth created by the microelectronics revolution may not...
...He would also reinstitute the draft, albeit without student deferments and other class-based criteria...
...You may be a new reader...
...Alabama's election laws are out-of-date and, if Siegelman can win legislative approval for his reforms, he will have left his mark on the state...
...Time is of the essence...
...It will not be easy, however, for Hart or any other neoliberal to hold together the projected coalition of Frostbelt and Sunbelt, trade unionist and high-tech entrepreneur...
...The American media's economics simply aren't set up to operate on circulation income alone...
...Hightower, for the most part, has been focusing on what he plans to do if elected: establish a statewide system of farmers' markets, expand Texas farmers' share of the international market, and provide a more vigorous voice in Washington...
...The export of capital by American multinationals has been at the expense of technological renovation at home...
...In sum, the neoliberals would have government encourage "entrepreneurialism," in Hanson's terms, against "capitalism"— productive investment against speculation, Apple Computer's management practices against those of U.S...
...If the Government had set out deliberately to destroy the 341 OCTOBER 1982 smaller magazines, he said, it couldn't have done so more effectively...
...neolibcral ideas will probably frame the policy debates, and the likes of Fallows, Reich, and Yergin will All influential administration posts, The roots of neoliberalism reach back into the decentralized, democratic, but non-socialist side of the New Left, which wis inspired more by John Kennedy than Che Guevara...
...A former county commissioner from Austin, Richards entered the May primary at the last minute after the incumbent, Warren G. Harding, was hit with a grand jury investigation of his office...
...As one reviewer remarked, this was, at best, "Car-terism without Carter...
...I think everybody wants that...
...This disparity between economic growth and jobs helped sustain the Great Depression...
...Last year, he chronicled the efforts of rural Minnesotans to halt a massive highvoltage powerline project that threatened to destroy their farms in Powerline: The First Battle of America's Energy War...
...Like the progressives of the early Twentieth Century, neoliberals do not seek to destroy private enterprise but to rid it of its harmful impurities...
...As far as the American Left is concerned, the neoliberals have opened the debate about democratic economic planning and begun to discuss how the new computer-age technological revolution will affect our society and our politics...
...As utility rates trebled in three years to pay off the plants—three of them have been scuttled or mothballed—citizens' groups called Irate Ratepayers spawned across the state...
...Reich and Magaziner believe "small business development is crucial to a country as a source of dynamic innovation and regional employment...
...Although long a leading voice of the Pentagon on Capitol Hill, Jackson has also made overtures to peace groups, offering his own version of a freeze: an escalate now, freeze later proposal which Lysen: The 'Gadfly' who Stings many critics view as an "anti-freeze...
...But there are more immediate political obstacless...
...The survival of Minnesotans is a Minnesota issue," he insists...
...Yet his speeches and campaign literature deal with nuclear war, James Watt, and Reaganomics...
...The neoliberals endorse several kinds of government intervention...
...But all that is for later...
...If a few thousand of The Progressive's readers can sustain it by contributing $25 or $50 or whatever they can afford, why should we sell this magazine's famous tradition of independence to a single donor...
...The colorful and quotable "Whole Hog" Hightower is the best-known of the Hightower: A Campaign that Flies down-ballot Democratic candidates, though treasurer candidate Ann Richards, a forty-nine-year-old political pro with white hair and a tart Texas drawl, is not far behind...
...Reich, Magaziner, and Thurow cite a range of structural impediments to the successful institution of planning: the separation of powers, the decline of political parties, and the absence of a civil service tradition in the United States...
...But we know that for a magazine like this one, increased circulation does not necessarily mean greater financial security...
...They know that a well-timed Federal deficit will no longer pull the automobile industry or the whole economy out of a slump, nor will the threat of U.S...
...Siegelman says he's running for reelection this year because he's confident the next legislature will pass his reforms if he's still around to push them...
...If I get one-tenth of his funds, I'm sure we'll win...
...Their opposition to high-priced weapons dovetails with neoliberal concerns about the disastrous effect of skyrocketing military expenditures on the civilian economy's ability to compete with foreign firms...
...Some labor officials, as Nulty made clear in Hart's workshop, even see the neoliberal proposals for worker participation as a disguised assault on collective bargaining...
...and Floyd Olson...
...Those advertisers generally want no part of a magazine like ours, which has what they call an "adverse climate of selling...
...Over the long run, there are some actions you might want to consider as ways of providing The Progressive with a more secure financial footing, so that the magazine is not condemned to struggle perpetually with the prospect of collapse: f You might consider providing for The Progressive in your will...
...intervention compel developing countries to bow to Washington's will...
...Nonetheless, most neoliberals insist on a central role for small business and the entrepreneurial spirit...
...He is also calling for employee control of state pension funds, a moratorium on both farm and residential foreclosures, and the creation of a state bank to make low-cost loans for housing, students, and small businesses...
...Senator, governor, and lieutenant governor are, as usual, moderate to conservative—despite their opponents' claims to the contrary—but in the races for attorney general, land commissioner, agriculture commissioner, treasurer, and comptroller, the candidates are clear progressives—and clear favorites to win their respective races...
...Hart's workshop demonstrated that neoliberalism, which many Democrats initially scorned as an attempt to Reaganize the party, has now staked out a legitimate position withinil...
...This is precisely what happened in the early 1960s, when the Kennedy Administration abandoned the Eisenhower Administration's threat of massive retaliation in favor of a buildup of counterinsurgency forces...
...But workers in such developed countries as the United States have reason to doubt whether they benefit from the flight of capital to foreign havens and from the collapse of whole regions and industries as a result of competition with cheap labor abroad...
...The military reform movement defines quality tactically, in terms of the characteristics that are most important in actual combat...
...And its losses in recent years have run to $1 million annually—also almost ten times The Progressive's...
...Still, I hope you will do what you can to keep The Progressive going—if you agree with me that that's a worthwhile goal...
...at most magazines, most of the revenue comes from advertising...
...These positions have important policy implications and Wellstone is campaigning on an aggressive populist platform that calls for major economic reforms...
...The neoliberals are determined, in sum, to go beyond the current wisdom of both parties...
...Siegelman is the first male to occupy the office since 1944...
...Because The Progressive is a non-profit enterprise with a political commitment, we've never had nervous stockholders looking over our shoulders, demanding to know where their profits were...
...They have asked many of the right questions, even if their answers fall far short...
...We know from the mail we are receiving that our readers, like many other Americans, are severely squeezed by the current state of our irrational economy...
...The single most critical question concerning the employment effects is whether the potential for future growth of the information workforce is limited," Hamrin has written...
...But other economic policy pronounceJohn Judis is political editor of In These Times and a contributing editor of The Progressive...
...According to Birch, "Two-thirds of all new jobs in the United States are generated by small firms (those with twenty or fewer employees...
...Use the adjacent card or, if the card has already been used by another reader, simply address your contribution or pledge to The Progressive, 409 East Main Street, Madison, WI53703...
...The neoliberal publications are The New Republic and Charles Peters's Washington Monthly...
...Neoliberalism is an attempt to combine policies attractive to Northern Democrats with policies that might attract more individualistic Westerners: The North gets government intervention and job retraining...
...As one party veteran observed, "The guy's been here two days and all of a sudden there's a cult around him...
...The real argument for a draft is that the military will not be respected, and decisions about its use will not be democratically made, unless every class in the nation feels it has a direct stake in its performance," Fallows has written...
...They can take much of the credit for shaking the Democratic Party out of its post-1980 torpor...
...When Richard Scammon, among other Democratic consultants, was advising Democrats not to present any alternatives to Reaganism but simply to await the Reagan Administration's failures, the neoliberals trotted out their alternatives...
...Four years ago he scored his biggest coup by exposing staggering cost overruns at five nuclear power projects commissioned by the Washington Public Power Supply System (WPPSS...
...The important thing is not to concentrate on the horrors of nuclear war, but on how to prevent the use of nuclear weapons," Fallows said during Hart's workshop in Philadelphia...
...He has attracted not only such liberal intellectuals as Reich and Fallows, but also such disillusioned neoconserva-tives as the American Enterprise Institute's Michael Novak, who are rushing back to the Democratic Party now that the failure of Reaganism is apparent...
...We can furnish further information on request...
...Tsongas's economic prescriptions were light-weight attempts to reconcile Ronald Reagan's worship of the free market with liberal commitments to the poor and aged...
...And we have about $60,000 in bills that should have been paid by now—and that must be paid soon if The Progressive is to keep publishing...
...Alabama voters rarely get excited about statewide races below governor, and Siegelman's victory in 1978 appeared to be less a mandate for better election laws than a vote for his movie-star good looks and vaguely familiar name...
...The forty-nine-year-old Frink, whose husband operates an all-gospel radio station just outside of Birmingham, has been state auditor a total of twelve years...
...I've gone from gadfly to demagogue to prophet," he says while providing his listener with newspaper quotations to prove his point...
...It would be a great relief to shed the burden of deficit publishing and perpetual fundraising...
...What raised eyebrows were figures showing Governor William P. Clements, widely considered unbeatable, trailing Attorney General Mark White, 42.1 to 46.4 per cent...
...A forty-year-old who chose to take on probably the toughest opponent in Washington rather than battle for a gerrymandered legislative seat, Lysen entered the Senate race a decided underdog...
...I was tickled to death to find somebody who would do what I told them to do," Richards says...
...Wellstone will need all of these supporters as well as favorable media coverage to defeat Carlson, a popular figure with an independent image who boasts of his record of introducing nonpartisan reforms and promoting affirmative action...
...It is laughable to suggest that such a constellation of forces could assemble on a planning board and make decisions that accord with the public's long-term interests, rather than with the most immediate interests of the participants...
...State Auditor Bettye Frink, who sports a beehive hairdo and a Moral Majority seal of approval, told reporters from the start that she would not be an activist...
...I know that a chicken has wings, but all it does is flop around...
...f You might make it a regular practice to give subscriptions to The Progressive—to friends, relations, coworkers, schools, libraries...
...Here's a paradox for you: Even though The Progressive's financial plight has never been so acute in more than two decades of my association with the magazine, the circulation has never been higher...
...With a noninterventionist foreign policy, neoliberal reforms could make an American deterrent force cheaper and more effective...
...State Senator King Lysen has neither the money nor the political record which has made Jackson a fixture in both Washingtons for the last four decades...
...And it's a safe bet that you are, too...
...Having Lester Thurow, rather than Schultze or Walter Heller, on Meet the Press elevated the level of economic discourse...
...But, four years ago, at age thirty-two, Siegelman won the job of secretary of state by pledging to reform Alabama's antiquated election laws, no less...
...They propose that Federal aid to education be increased (Hart is sponsoring a new National Defense and Economic Growth Education Act), that worker self-management and ownership be encouraged, and that retraining programs be stimulated by a voucher system that would reward employers for providing on-the-job training...
...Active government policies are necessary to enable the economy to respond quickly and effectively to worldwide structural changes...
...But since such policies would also diminish labor discipline and redistribute wealth, they would be bitterly opposed by American business...
...What Lysen does have behind him, however, are the hottest two issues in the state—public power and the nuclear freeze...
...In addition to drawing support from such dissident groups as Physicians for Social Responsibility and Irate Ratepayers, Lysen may also syphon off some of Jackson's steadiest backers...
...We hoped that letter would raise at least $108,000—the amount of our projected deficit for the rest of 1982...
...He has done more than talk about the need to make voting convenient so more people will head to the polls...
...From time to time, we've been approached by individuals who were willing—and able—to assume the total burden of meeting The Progressive's publishing deficit...
...Neoliberalism does not have a foreign policy of its own...
...Labor Democrats remain suspicious of the neoliberals' free-trade stance, their disdain for such unionized Northern companies as Chrysler—Hart voted against the bailout—and their fascination with nonunion or even anti-union small business and high-tech firms...
...Ironically, the neoliberals aim to enlist not the low-wage, often socially conservative but economically populist workers of the Sunbelt, but rather the socially liberal, economically conservative entrepreneurs...
...And we've always looked to our readers for the modest contributions that would help us meet our deficits...
...Right now we need your check or money order—or your pledge for the remaining months of 1982...
...Throughout the summer, he's been mending conservative fences...
...No less important to the campaign are such national issues as Reaganomics and the nuclear freeze...
...Boyd did not advocate a change in foreign policy but only in the means by which the military carried out its role...
...they were unified because of some issues that they had in common...
...By posing alternatives to both Reagan's free-market economics and the liberal Democrats' tired neo-Keynesian boilerplate, the neoliberals shoved Tip O'Neill, Dan Rostenkowski, and Charles Schultze out of the spotlight...
...For exampie, despite his reputation as "the Senator from Boeing," Jackson now confronts an aircraft company which has laid off 10,000 workers over the past two years and which may be forced to match that number soon as a result of the Congressional decision to build Lockheed's C5A military air transport instead of Boeing's 747...
...They argue that when it comes to such important decisions as whether to invest in research and development, whether to use low-wage labor or new technology to expand production, and whether to sustain a branch of industry threatened by foreign competition, "the public as a whole would be better off with a higher level or a different type of investment than individual investors are willing to make...
...The neoliberals also stress the role of human capital as an essential ingredient in productivity...
...If not only agriculture and manufacturing but also the information sector no longer are providing dynamic growth in employment opportunities, where will the new jobs be generated...
...There is no point in granting government subsidies to the steel industry, they contend, if U.S...
...Northfield, Minnesota The Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) Convention last June was marked by the emergence of a charismatic new candidate, Paul Wellstone, who captured the party's nomination for state auditor on the first ballot with more than 70 per cent of the vote, beating out two opponents who had greater experience and financing...
...That depends on you, and on how swiftly and generously you respond to this appeal...
...An Old-time Democratic Coalition' Austin, Texas On a hot August morning in Georgetown, Texas, a pleasant little town north of Austin, the Democratic nominee for state agriculture commissioner arrived to inspire the troops...
...Neoliberal economics remains a set of policies in search of a majority constituency that could lend meaning to the distinction between public and private interest when it comes to fashioning investment criteria...
...Today, California consultant Derek Hanson distinguishes between "entrepreneurialism," which seeks to "provide goods and services to society," and "capitalism," which has the sole objective of "providing income...
...I learned a long time ago how to stand alone and wait till my time has come," he says...
...the West gets free trade and support for small business and high technology...
...Hightower, the thirty-nine-year-old former Texas Observer editor, just may be right...
...These neoliberal proposals for government intervention add up to an attempt to adapt West European social democracy and Japanese state capitalism to the needs of late Twentieth Century America...
...Typically, neoliberal economics combine an argument for government intervention to correct the inadequacies of the market with an emphasis on the creative power of small business and high technology...
...Can you imagine—a quarter of a million dollars for a half minute of television time, when The Progressive might be lost forever for want of $60,000...
...But any kind of election reform faces tough going in the legislature's lower chamber, which is controlled by a club of status quo-minded politicians from the so-called Black Belt in southern Alabama, long the domain of the state's racist political establishment...
...You probably read about the suspension of Saturday Review a few weeks ago, after fifty-eight years of publication...
...Wellstone is an unconventional candidate seeking an obscure office that many people consider apolitical...
...They've never let us down...
...But there appears to be substance in addition to the studied style...
...Siegelman, a candidate for reelection this year, has had some successes: The polls stay open later, absentee voters no longer have to sign their ballots, and the elderly and disabled can stay home and vote without getting a certificate from a doctor...
...Reich and Magaziner make the clearest case for government economic planning...
...Thorstein Veblen drew a similar distinction (in his 1904 Theory of Business Enterprise) between "industry" (which was concerned with goods production) and "business" (which was concerned solely with profits...
...I agree...
...According to the social democratic model, which Thurow appears to endorse, a unified majority labor movement, with some help from business, is assumed to be capable of defining the public interest...
...0 A Maverick Battles the Odds Seattle, Washington In Washington state, a populist Democrat-turned-independent could end Henry Jackson's thirty-year tenure in the U.S...
...Where was all that power and influence that we hear about...
...He failed to deliver," taunts the challenger in his float-like-a-butterfly-sting-like-a-bee style...
...Progressives are filling the Democratic power vacuum...
...The guiding discipline for both business strategy and government industrial policy derives from the international competitive marketplace," Reich and Magaziner state...
...Like the martial artist," he says, "I'll use his strength against him" by portraying him as the candidate of the wealthy...
...Once competition heightens, nations move toward trade wars and then real wars...
...The board controls almost $5 billion in state pension funds and has been receiving an extremely low rate of return—less than 5 per cent—on its investments in recent years...
...The Politics of Planning: Hart, Thurow, and Rohatyn suggest a model of "tripartite" planning in which labor, business, and government cooperate to determine what investment patterns to encourage...
...The audience was not disappointed: Reich...
...This year's Democratic candidates for U.S...
...While his background is unusual for a candidate for state office, Wellstone's strategy is more in line with traditional politics...
...It is an emergency appeal for help that is absolutely indispensable if The Progressive is to continue doing its job...
...Hart's aide, Robert Hamrin, is aware of this possibility...
...This kind of support is unlikely to make Hart a Presidential contender in 1984— Making Waves in Alabama Montgomery, Alabama Don Siegelman is not your typical Alabama politician...
...Hart's support within the party elite is surprising...
...Fortunately, it's one you can alleviate by coming to The Progressive's rescue...
...Another Paradox Right now, as of Labor Day, we are about $60,000 behind in projected receipts for 1982...
...Instead, the forces that influence government reflect the disparate immediate concerns of business, labor, and many other special-interest groups...
...But please don't wait until the 1984 Olympics...
...So far, though, the response amounts to only slightly more than $40,000...
...As in Ann Richards's race, Republican Party officials persuaded the primary winner to step down after Hightower emerged as the winner, and they substituted Fred Thornberry, a forty-five-year-old Texas A&M poultry specialist...
...These lawmakers, many of whom remain in office because so few of the blacks in their districts go to the polls, re'Golden Flake' Siegelman sent Siegelman's activism...
...There are two political models of how planning might work...
...What I need to tell you, directly and emphatically, is that The Progressive is in trouble, and that it urgently needs your help...
...I want to assure you that we are not in the habit of devoting precious space to self-serving requests for financial assistance...
...Powerful speeches and a dedicated, efficient group of volunteers won him the DFL nomination as an outsider...
...If we expand the supply of money without some system of holding down wages and prices, we'll be back in an inflationary period...
...But with a confrontational, interventionist policy, the abandonment of first-strike threats for a conventional buildup could increase the likelihood of war...
...They long for the days when the secretary of state was a lady who quietly went about her clerical duties...
...We've made strenuous efforts to enlarge the readership, and we have succeeded...
...Please take a moment right now to come to The Progressive's rescue...
...But here's another paradox for you: According to a recent item in The Wall Street Journal, the American Broadcasting Company, which is paying $316.5 million for the right to televise the 1984 Olympics, will charge advertisers about $250,000 for a thirty-second commercial in prime Olympic time...
...Although unable to approach even remotely the incumbent's $2 million campaign fund (70 per cent of it comes from out-of-state contributors), Lysen remains undaunted...
...But the effect of neoliberal proposals will ultimately hinge on the foreign policy goals that an Administration adopts...
...These two pages are addressed to you now because nothing less than The Progressive's survival is at stake...
...As one Southern California consultant admitted after trying to recruit high-tech executives for the Democratic Party, many of them think planning "smacks of communism...
...Wellstone brings a wealth of activist experience to the campaign...
...They argue that if the U.S...
...The Progressive has run in the red for seventy-two of its seventy-three years...
...Significant Democratic protest against neoliberalism arose first in response to Tsongas's speech to the June 1980 conference of Americans for Democratic Action, where he proclaimed that liberalism was "at a crossroads," and to his 1981 book, The Road from Here...
...I'm here to tell you," Jim Hightower proclaimed, his white western hat pushed back on his head, "that an old-time Democratic coalition of gougees is coming together to shove the hogs out of the creek...
...A good thing, too—because there haven't been any profits...
...Indeed, Fallows argues that if a democratic draft had existed, the United States would never have sent troops to South Vietnam in the 1960s...
...Gifts to public schools and public libraries are tax-deductible...
...The nations of the world must either adopt a set of standards for the international movement of capital, or they will move again toward war and depression...
...The developing countries long ago rejected this British imperial economic line, which rationalized their confinement to the role of raw material producers...
...But it may lead to a Vice Presidential nomination or a serious run in 1988...
...standard of living is to be raised, labor and capital must be induced to move out of such low-productivity industries as textiles, where U.S...
...Democrats should not necessarily argue for more Government intervention, but for more explicit intervention, directed toward creating a dynamic economy...
...And those workshops weren't necessarily political workshops...
...With that credential in hand, he is now counting on the party organization...
...Free Trade: The neoliberals have designed their economic programs to help American firms function best within an open international market...
...He admits to being interested in an eventual run for governor...
...Her name recognition rivals Siegelman's and that alone will likely make for a close race...
...Their kind of secretary of state is challenging Siegelman in the primary election September 7—the real election, since there is no Republican opponent...
...Richards has been active politically since she and her husband, labor lawyer David Richards, were students at the University of Texas in the early 1950s...
...But there are certain shared perceptions that unite the neoliberals...
...According to a corporatist model, which Rohatyn seems to endorse, a unified, far-seeing capitalist class, with token cooperation from labor, plans on behalf of the public...
...California Governor Jerry Brown, who attended Yale Law School with Hart, and Presidential aspirant John Anderson certainly qualify for honorary memberships...
...You may be a long-time subscriber and long-time sus-tainer of this magazine...
...ments associated with neoliberalism— Thurow's Zero-Sum Society, Reich and Ira Magaziner's Minding America's Business, Rohatyn's New York Review of Books essays, and the post-industrial musings of Naisbett and Daniel Bell—are provocative attempts to come to terms with the service economy, stagflation, and international competition...
...I'm counting on you...
...But Rohatyn, as well as Reich and Magaziner, insist that in exchange for such subsidies, corporations must agree to government supervision of their investments...
...While Carlson sees the auditor's chief function as evaluating the finances of local governments, Wellstone considers his role on the state Board of Investors as more important...
...Playing down the liberal-conservative split is necessary, self-professed populist Jim Hightower contends, if Texas Democrats intend to win in November...
...It just won't wash," insists Lysen...
...I joined the staff as the magazine's Washington correspondent in 1968, and I have been Editor since 1973...
...But those women were not Democrats or Republicans or independents...
...In pursuit of that goal, government should try to improve the competitive position of American firms in the world market, but it cannot do this by leaving firms to fend for themselves...
...Richards has also been active in the women's movement...
...The entrepreneurs, for their part, are distrustful of government planning, unions, and aid to the less than well-to-do...
...Indeed, it could lead to net reductions, not only in the manufacturing workforce but also in services and information...
...But whether or not they succeed in building a new Democratic majority, the neoliberals will still have made a significant contribution to the country's politics...
...Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts, like other neoliberals...
...If the Democrats capture the White House in 1984...
...It was held at the Hilton Hotel, across the street from Philadelphia's Convention Hall, where the Democratic Conference had convened that June day...
...in the past year, he has also adopted neoliberal economics, from tax-based income policies and tripartite planning to post-industrial tinkering...
...They argue that the "goal of any nation's economic policy should be to improve the standards of living of its citizens...
...As former chairman of the Senate Energy Committee, Jackson was responsible for overseeing the regional Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), which, in turn, was responsible for approving all of WPPSS's financial arrangements...
...But Fallows's rejection of the first-use of nuclear weapons leads him to advocate a buildup of American and NATO conventional forces, so that they could deter a Soviet military thrust in Europe...
...In Georgetown, however, he allowed himself one little jibe at poultry expert Thornberry...
...The steelworkers' local on the economically devastated Mesabi iron ore range has given him strong support, as have the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees and the United Auto Workers...
...Hart, Tsongas, Thurow, and the others believe that the growing competitiveness of the world economy, the transition to a service-based, post-industrial society, and the erosion of America's global supremacy have rendered the old liberal politics and policies obsolete...
...Wellstone admitted he once had the problem, but insisted that he has overcome it...
...That Representative Jim Collins is trailing incumbent Lloyd Bentsen in the Senate race was not surprising...
...Weddington won...
...Frankly, we've been tempted...
...And I think we should thank the men most responsible for uniting the Democratic Party— Ronald Reagan and Governor Bill Clements...
...Lysen believes he can lay the blame for the WPPSS debacle (or Whoops, as it is now known) at Jackson's doorstep...
...Business interests predominate...
...I think general philosophy and bent and slant are very important to a lot of voters...
...I've been teaching workshops for years," she says...
...It can't fly, and neither can my opponent's campaign...
...As it happens, The Progressive is by no means the only publication in severe difficulty these days...
...Fallows, chief speechwriter in the Carter White House, popularized the military reformers' arguments in National Defense...
...I hope you feel, as I do, that this is more than a mere paradox...
...Part of the blame must rest with Siegelman, who, until recently, spent more time churning out press releases and touring the state than lobbying legislators...
...A thirty-eight-year-old political science professor at Carleton College, he wrote his Ph.D...
...That boast has some bite, for Initiative 394, the proposal to bring WPPSS spending under greater public control, won handily in last November's referendum, despite the nearly ten-to-one spending advantage of pro-WPPSS groups...
...As a freshman on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Hart came under the spell of retired Air Force Colonel John Boyd and his military reform study group...
...A laissez-faire approach is both naive and dangerous for a national economy with slow growth and for a nation within an interdependent world economy that is prone to sharp and sudden changes in supply, demand, technology, and politics," Reich and Magaziner have written...
...Colorado Senator Gary Hart, campaign manager for George McGovern's 1972 Presidential bid, had put the program together...
...According to Thornberry, Hightower's supporters include television producer Norman Lear, "a known socialist," and former state representative Frances Farenthold, "who just returned from Cuba...
...Some have already succumbed to the pressure of inexorably rising costs...
...Daniel Yergin, co-author of Energy Future and a proponent of Government-sponsored energy conservation, and Leslie EJIen Nulty, a staff economist for the machinists' union...
...Under these circumstances, government intervention maybe in order...
...Hart had invited four speakers: James Fallows, author of National Defense, a critique of Pentagon policies...
...Joe Holley (Joe Holley is co-editor of The Texas Observer in Austin...
...But I hope you won't think me arrogant for suggesting that the loss of The Progressive would be most keenly felt by you—and by many other Americans who share our commitment to creating a just, peaceful, and decent world...
...Siegelman is one of the few progressive lights in a still-dark Alabama...
...Again, we can tell you how...
...Thornberry, a soft-spoken and scholarly man with thick glasses, has called his opponent "a political radical and opportunist" who would turn the agriculture department into a "training ground for radical politicians...
...If Texas Democrats—with progressives like Hightower exerting more and more influence on the relatively conservative White wing—can hold their party together, Clements, despite his $10 million war chest, could very well be back in the oil business after November 2. Bill Clements's surprise victory in 1978 and the consequent emergence of a genuine two-party system in Texas accounts, to a degree, for the generally progressive tenor of this year's Democratic Party slate...
...Kennedy and Mondale are already far ahead of the field in organization and funding...

Vol. 46 • October 1982 • No. 10


 
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