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Only certain aspects of the neoconservative agenda are returning. However, the author is surely correct in thinking that the deficit will be used as a justification for privatization of public services. But this has been a policy for some time now as attempts are made to find new profitable outlets for capital. It fits in well with the doctrine that government should be downsized and is not efficient at providing services. They may not be efficient at doling out taxpayer money to private contractors either!

Entitlement programs will be the next line of attack as working class people will be made to pay for the crisis in the capitalist system. Profits will be restored for capital and pain restored for workers who must pay for the deficit. The standard of living in the US for most people will begin a long decline and those who managed through decades of struggle to win benefits and contracts that provided a decent living and pension will now lose all of that in the name of efficiency and non-sustainable entitlements. It seems quite easy to turn the less well off workers against those who through their unions fought hard for these contracts and are now having to give back just to keep a few of their jobs. This is from informationclearinghouse.


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How champions of Neoliberal economics are reversing New Deal economics
By Ismael Hossein-zadeh

Outsourcing policies are bound to be further accelerated by the rising budget deficits of many states and municipalities, and their need to sell off public property or outsource their traditional services in order to raise funds to finance their budgetary needs. These include outsourcing the maintenance of parks, the management of toll roads, the collection of waste, the operation of municipal neighborhood centers, and more. For example, according to a recent MSNBC report, in the two years since Mitch Daniels was elected governor in Indiana, “the state has leased the 157-mile Indiana Toll Road to an outside company for the next 75 years for $3.8 billion, hired vendors for $1.16 billion over 10 years to process welfare applications, and brought in a company to serve food at a mental hospital.”
While cash-strapped states and other local governments can generate quick cash by privatizing public property or outsourcing public services, they forgo long-term opportunities of income generation from such properties and services.
Another Wall Street plot to rob the people of their social safety net programs is the recently renewed attack on the once-sacred entitled programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Having piled up huge sums of national debt and deficit (through bank bailouts, military spending, and tax cuts for the affluent), Wall Street champions, firmly ensconced at the Congress and the White House, are now singing the “fiscal responsibility” song as a prelude to chip away at Social Security and other entitlements. This ominous scheme is clearly reflected in President Obama’s recently appointed “National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform,” a bi-partisan group that is tasked with reviewing the Social Security and other entitlements in an effort to further “trim” social spending in order to pay for the sins of major banks and military contractor.
The bipartisan nature of the attack on Social Security indicates that the plan to undercut economic safety net programs cannot be blamed solely on the blatently neoliberal Republicans. It shows that, with few exceptions, Democrats are as much indebted and committed to the powerful financial interests as are Republicans. The neoliberal economic policies of the Obama administration, crafted by his economic team of ex-bankers/Wall Street advisors, should dispel any illusions that he is committed to “change” in favor of the people.
The New Deal and other basic needs programs were put in place not so much because of F.D.R.’s or Keynes’s genius, or the goodness of their heart, as they were because of the compelling pressure from the people. Freed (or feeling free) from that pressure, the government, as the executive body of the financial/economic oligarchy, is now trying to undermine those social safety net programs, and revive the pre-New Deal/pre-Keynesian economic orthodoxy, that is, the economic model of the survival of the fittest. This sinister, profit-driven effort at undermining the poor and working people’s hard-won basic needs programs can be stopped only through a renewed and compelling pressure from the grassroots—pressure that must be exerted not through the Democratic Party machine but independent of the so-called two-party system.
Ismael Hossein-zadeh, author of The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism, teaches Economics at Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa.

The neoconservatives' rise to power

This is a review of a book by Jacob Heilbrunn on the neoconservatives reviewed by Andrew Bacevich in the LA Times. As the article points out many of the neoconservatives were originally leftists sometimes associated with Trotskyism. Poor Trotsky, not only was he murdered by a Stalinist axeman but now some of his disciples have joined the enemy and replaced permanent revolution by permanent crisis to be used to advance US hegemony and power worldwide.

'They Knew They Were Right' by Jacob Heilbrunn
The neoconservatives' rise to power
By Andrew J. Bacevich
January 20, 2008
They Knew They Were Right

The Rise of the Neocons

Jacob Heilbrunn

Doubleday: 320 pp., $26

Explications of neoconservatism (most of them scathingly critical) continue to accumulate. Jacob Heilbrunn's contribution to this genre distinguishes itself from the rest -- or at least tries to -- by exploring in detail "the mental world" that neoconservatives inhabit. The principal result of that exploration is to expose the intellectual pretensions of that world's inhabitants. When it comes to ideas, the neocon legacy promises to be thin, derivative and largely pernicious.

In "They Knew They Were Right," Heilbrunn, a Washington-based journalist who was formerly a senior editor at the New Republic and later an editorial writer for the Los Angeles Times, provides a succinct but comprehensive neoconservative genealogy. Beginning his account in the 1930s, he surveys the people, publications and events that have combined in the present-day to give us the Weekly Standard, the American Enterprise Institute and various talking heads on Fox News, along with the Bush Doctrine of preventive war and the debacle of Iraq.

Along the way, Heilbrunn rousts all the usual suspects -- the Trotskyist Max Shachtman, the political theorist Leo Strauss, the nuclear strategist Albert Wohlstetter, the cultural critic Allan Bloom and the militantly anti-communist Democratic "senator from Boeing," Henry "Scoop" Jackson -- and he recounts the contribution each made in shaping today's neoconservative worldview. Heilbrunn devotes particular attention to political journalists Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, who over the course of very long careers have never ceased to write, to organize and to agitate. Absent Kristol's considerable entrepreneurial talents and Podhoretz's flair as a polemicist, neoconservatism as we know it would not exist.

Little in this survey qualifies as genuinely new. The book is not deeply researched. Heilbrunn makes no great discoveries and drops no bombshells, although his contention that "neoconservatism is in a decisive respect a Jewish phenomenon" will likely raise hackles in some quarters. To describe neoconservatism as "ineluctably Jewish," he insists, "is anything but an anti-Semitic canard." Fair-minded readers are unlikely to dispute his judgment.

Beyond emphasizing neoconservatism's Jewish roots -- hardly a revelation -- three broadly unflattering impressions emerge from Heilbrunn's narrative.

First, to describe the neocons as conservative is to misconstrue their purpose, which is to overturn rather than to preserve. Although having nominally made a transformative ideological journey from the left to right, neoconservatives, writes Heilbrunn, have "never really ceased to be radicals in temperament and style." This residual radicalism is especially evident when it comes to foreign policy, which neoconservatives invariably view as a contest pitting good against evil. Contemptuous of realism, disdaining stability and equilibrium, neoconservatives show pronounced utopian propensities, fueled by exaggerated expectations about America's capacity to set things right. Whether directed against communism, "Islamofascism" or the United Nations (or domestically against the CIA, the State Department and liberal Democrats), this utopianism finds expression in a penchant for uncompromising and confrontational militancy.

Second, whatever Kristol, Podhoretz and their adherents might have us believe, when it comes to offering insights into the human condition, neoconservatives have not made much of a mark, Heilbrunn contends. Rather than exhibiting genuine creativity, they specialize in repackaging the obvious or in anticipating next month's conventional wisdom. They are gadflies and rabble-rousers rather than fresh, cutting-edge thinkers. Their genius lies in self-promotion, their ideas offered with "grandiosity and the conviction of self-importance," which appear on closer examination to be less than advertised. Even in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when their influence was at its zenith, neoconservatives were serving up little more than warmed-over Wilsonianism laced with Machtpolitik.

Third, although they pose as intellectuals, neoconservatives more typically function as propagandists. Theirs is not the disinterested pursuit of truth so much as the endless repetition of ostensibly self-evident truisms. The neoconservative universe allows little room for ambiguity, irony or paradox. According to Heilbrunn, they subscribe to a vision of "binary simplicity," in which right and wrong, black and white, friend and foe are easily distinguished. Whatever the topic -- whether science or sexuality, the future of war or the future of the Middle East -- for neocons it's all cut and dried.

The radical inclination, the intellectual banality and the overweening certainty all derive from what Heilbrunn accurately describes as "a highly selective and moralistic view of history as a drama of salvation and idolatry." The point is a crucial one. For neoconservatives, the past begins and ends with the period 1938 to 1945. This is history as tendentious parable in which appeasement always invites aggression; "isolationism" paves the way for holocaust; and vigorous leadership (neoconservatives strongly favoring Winston Churchill over Franklin Delano Roosevelt) ensures the ultimate triumph of freedom, albeit too late to save the millions carted off to the Nazi death camps.

Neoconservatives, writes Heilbrunn, "see new Munichs everywhere and anywhere," a reference to Britain's 1938 pact over Hitler's seizure of part of Czechoslovakia. He might have added that they are as quick to see a new Hitler and to anticipate a new Auschwitz -- and U.S. power as the only force capable of averting the awful consequences that threaten.

For neoconservatives, therefore, crisis is a permanent condition. They revel in crisis, confident that they alone stand between survival and Armageddon. As Heilbrunn observes, "it's always imperative to have, somewhere, somehow, an enemy -- both at home and abroad." This suits the neoconservatives' "need to see themselves as lonely prophets standing in the breach between implacable foes on the one hand and weak-kneed liberals (and paper-pushing bureaucrats) on the other."

The Iraq war stands as testimony to where this sort of thinking leads. One might expect, therefore, the neoconservative movement of having been permanently discredited. Not so, says Heilbrunn,; they'll be back. He's right, if only because neoconservative fears and ambitions reflect something deep-seated in the American psyche.

So while this book takes its place along many other attempts to figure out what makes neoconservatives tick, it is unlikely to be the last word

Andew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University.