Robert Reich, A Reactionary Corporatist in Progressive Clothing, Pushing Another Bush-era Plan: Immigration Reform

by Scott Creighton

The previous reactionary Republican plan pushed by this career fake progressive named Robert Reich was the North American Free Trade Agreement (crafted by the George H. W. Bush administration) and the second was Welfare Reform (“The bill was a cornerstone of the Republican Contract with America and was authored by Rep. E. Clay Shaw, Jr. (R–FL-22).”)

Now Robert Reich brings his fake progressive superpowers to bear on the issue of open borders and unimpeded illegal immigration, something supported by the US Chamber of Commerce and something created by John McCain and George W. Bush back in 2005 and 2006.

When I write or talk about the “fake left” few fit the bill better than Robert Reich.

(The following are a series of notes I am using for my next video. In order for the video links to work, I have to publish the article minus the actual video, as it has yet to be made. I will add the video in a few minutes after I make it and process it.)

Robert Reich wanted to make sure we didn’t pull out of bad trade deals and “globalization” as a whole.

“Economic determinists — fatalists, really — assume that globalization and technological change must now condemn a large portion of the American workforce to under-unemployment and stagnant wages, while rewarding those with the best eductions and connections with ever higher wages and wealth. And therefore that the only way to get good jobs back and avoid widening inequality is to withdraw from the global economy and become neo-Luddites, destroying the new labor-saving technologies.

That’s dead wrong. Economic isolationism and neo-Ludditism would reduce everyone’s living standards.” from Robert Reich’s website

Reich also promoted NAFTA saying it would bring more and better jobs to the US

“The NAFTA is in my view, good for this country. I can say that as Secretary of Labor unambiguously. It will create more jobs it will create better jobs.

Robert Reich pushes for Comprehensive Immigration Reform for “humanitarian” reasons

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“‘Flexibility’ becomes the watchword with respect to labour markets…

Flexible employment arrangements can indeed be sometimes mutually beneficial, he adds. However, its effects on the whole concerning insurance coverage, pension rights, wage levels, and job security are by no means positive. (C 151)

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What is neoliberalism? Harvey defines it as “a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free market, and free trade.” (B 2) In other words, the freedoms of the individual are guaranteed by the freedoms of the market. As he cites Treanor, “neoliberalism values market exchange as ‘an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide to all human action, and substituting for all previously held beliefs’.” (B 3) But this utopian rhetoric camouflages a more sinister political purpose; the reconstruction of the power of economic elites and the reestablishment of the conditions for capital accumulation. For Duménil and Lévy, he writes, “neoliberalization was from the very beginning a project to achieve the restoration of class power.” (B 16) Between these two dimensions of neoliberalism, the utopian and the political, the latter has dominated. When the libertarian and individualistic principles of neoliberalism clash with the restoration of class power, Harvey writes, “then the principles are either abandoned or become so twisted as to become unrecognizable.” (B 19) Neoliberalism will side with a good business climate and the integrity of the financial system at the expense of collective rights, the quality of life, the well-being of the population, or the capacity of the environment to restore itself. On this last point, the era of neoliberalism does not just coincidentally coincide with that of the sixth mass extinction of plant and animal species and climate change; its commitment to the financialization of everything overflows even the demand for an inhabitable earth.

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Canals, Amadeus ^LU (2013) MIDM71 20131
LUMID International Master programme in applied International Development and Management

Abstract

This thesis set out to explain the emergence of production units that favour harsh working conditions in the garment industry of Athens. A neo-Marxist political economic approach was used in order to trace the causes of this emergence over the last fifty years and explain the transitional period from Fordism to flexible regimes of accumulation. The hollowing out of the Welfare State in favour of Neoliberal policies has had several implications for the garment industry and the working conditions of migrant garment workers. A new hierarchical organizational structure has evolved and new strategies have been adopted by manufacturers and retailers. As a consequence, different forms of vulnerability now threaten garment workers.

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Neoliberal Modernization At The Mexican Periphery: Gender, Generation And The Construction Of A New, Flexible Workforce

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Neoliberalism and Higher Education

…Whereas in other theories, the achieving of a better life for all requires a measure of state intervention, in the polemics of neoliberalism (elaborated by Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek and put into practice by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher), state interventions — governmental policies of social engineering — are “presented as the problem rather than the solution” (Chris Harman, “Theorising Neoliberalism,” International Socialism Journal, December 2007).

The solution is the privatization of everything (hence the slogan “let’s get governments off our backs”), which would include social security, health care, K-12 education, the ownership and maintenance of toll–roads, railways, airlines, energy production, communication systems and the flow of money. (This list, far from exhaustive, should alert us to the extent to which the neoliberal agenda has already succeeded.)

The assumption is that if free enterprise is allowed to make its way into every corner of human existence, the results will be better overall for everyone, even for those who are temporarily disadvantaged, let’s say by being deprived of their fish.

The objection (which I am reporting, not making) is that in the passage from a state in which actions are guided by an overarching notion of the public good to a state in which individual entrepreneurs “freely” pursue their private goods, values like morality, justice, fairness, empathy, nobility and love are either abandoned or redefined in market terms.

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Obama explains how the wealthy elite across the globe exploit migrant labor to make more profits.

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a house painter in California explains what unfettered immigration has done to his life and industry over the past couple of decades

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