Reply #127: This might help

[Panaconda]

Neoliberalism and Bottom-Line Morality
Notes on Greenspan, Rubin, and the Party of Davos
By Edward Herman

From the Reagan era onward I have been impressed with how regularly liberal and left-leaning economists I knew, who went to work in industry and finance, very soon became pro-business, anti-labor, and politically right wing. I think that what got to them was not only the impact of association with businesspeople, but the fact that business profitability became central to their own performance. As business economists, wage increases would seem bad—as encroaching on that profitability and threatening inflation and business growth (and stock prices). Tough environmental rules would also hamper profitability; their relaxation by law or friendly (non-)enforcement would enhance it. It was therefore easy to slide into what we may call "bottom-line morality," with positions on key issues dictated by prospective bottom line effects, but of course rationalized with an ideology that made this all benevolent—in the long run—and made these bottom-line moralists into Good Samaritans as they collected their fat salaries and bonuses while the vast majority waited for trickle-down. (On the fraudulence of this ideology, see David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, and Ha-Joon Chang, Bad Samaritans.)

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Greenspan, Rubin, Summers, et al

Both the New York Times and Washington Post had substantial articles on Greenspan's heavy responsibility for the ongoing crisis, in a way beating a dead horse after both papers had treated him with great deference as "the Oracle" for many years (Peter Goodman, "The Reckoning: Taking a Closer Look at a Greenspan Legacy," NYT, Oct. 9, 2008; Anthony Faiola, Ellen Nakashima, and Jill Drew, "What Went Wrong," WP, October 15, 2008). The articles feature the struggle for and against derivatives regulation in the 1990s, with Brooksley E. Born, the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) as the pro-regulation protagonist and heroine, and Greenspan as principal villain.

But both articles also call attention to the support given Greenspan in his anti-regulation fight with Born by the leading financial officials of the Clinton administration: Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, and Arthur Levitt, Jr., the first two heading the U.S. Treasury, Levitt the SEC. Rubin looks particularly disingenuous in these articles, claiming to have favored regulating derivatives in 1998, but believing that this was politically unfeasible because of industry opposition and because "there was no potential for mobilizing public opinion." The Times article then paraphrases a former CFTC official that "the political climate would have been different had Mr. Rubin called for regulation."

It should also be recognized that Rubin and Summers are no slouches when it comes to supporting the bailout of fat-cat investors. In his superb book The Global Class War, Jeff Faux features the fact that the corporate establishment which dominates both U.S. political parties is part of the "Party of Davos," that gets together periodically at lush facilities in Davos, Switzerland to party, hob-nob, and plan in the interest of the global business elite. The book focuses heavily on the character and passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and then the immediately following Mexican crisis and bailout. NAFTA was a corporate project, strongly opposed by a great majority of Democratic Party voters and by a majority of Democratic legislators. But with Robert Rubin's urging, Clinton put passage of this legislation ahead of health care reform, put a huge political effort into getting it passed, and thereby set the stage for both the failure of health care reform and the Democratic Party's political debacle in 1994. Of course the business community appreciated Clinton's service and here and elsewhere he justified their earlier vetting of his candidacy, organized by Rubin himself.

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http://www.zcommunications.org/neoliberalism-and-bottom-line-morality-by-edward-herman