FALL 2014SPECIAL ISSUE

The Public Eye

Neoliberalism
How the Right
is Remaking
America

contents

In this issue

THE PUBLIC EYE

Q U A R T E R LY

From the New Right to Neoliberalism:

the Threat to Democracy Has Grown
PRA founder Jean V. Hardisty explains how free-market ideology has eclipsed
concerns for preserving democracy.
2
The Shell Game of Contingent Employment:
the Neoliberal Labor Agenda
Part of neoliberalisms project is to obscure lines of accountability between workers
and their employers. Community Labor Uniteds Darlene Lombos, labor attorney
Sarah Leberstein, and labor organizer Elvis Mndez show how neoliberals have
broken the promise of the employment relationship.
4
Neoliberal Feminists Dont Want Women to Organize
Sarah Jaffe pushes beyond Lean In feminism to an analysis
that prioritizes the needs of low-wage working women.

Beyond Prisons, Mental Health Clinics:

When Austerity Opens Cages, Where Do the Services Go?
As Illinois closes more of its public prisons and other institutions,
legal scholars Liat Ben-Moshe and Erica R. Meiners follow the money
and challenge assumptions about privatization and state control.
8

PUBLISHER

Tarso Lus Ramos

GUEST EDITOR

Mariya Strauss
COVER ART

Ali Cat Leeds

PRINTING

Red Sun Press

EDITORIAL BOARD

Frederick Clarkson
Alex DiBranco
Jean Hardisty
Kapya Kaoma
Tarso Lus Ramos
Rachel Tabachnick
The Public Eye is published by
Political Research Associates
Tarso Lus Ramos
Executive Director

Theresa Blackman

O perations Coordinator

Eric Ethington

C ommunications Director

An Uncharitable Choice:
the Faith-Based Takeover of Federal Programs
PRA senior fellow Frederick Clarkson explores how the Charitable Choice
privatization project became the perfect vehicle for the Christian Right to enter
into a lasting partnership with neoliberals.
12
To Shock the Heart of the Nation:
a conversation with Rev. Dr. William Barber II
Public Eye Guest Editor Mariya Strauss interviews North Carolinas NAACP
President about the Forward Together Moral Movement and the promise of a
renewed social justice movement across the South.
14
How Colorblindness Co-Evolved with Free-Market Thinking
Sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant discuss the relationship between
neoliberal economics and shifting strategies to maintain White supremacy. 16
Globalization and NAFTA Caused Migration from Mexico
David Bacon documents the displacement, and subsequent criminalization,
of Mexican people across the border since NAFTA, and offers a warning of what
could happen if this failed policy continues to be copied across the globe.
19

Friedrich von Hayek, Thomas Piketty, and the
Search for Political Economy
Author and historian Kim Phillips-Fein considers how two polemically opposed
booksa foundational text of neoliberalism and a contemporary treatise on capital
and inequalityhave shaped debates over the political nature of economic life.
22

Kapya Kaoma

Religion and Sexuality Researcher

Mark Brown

Finance Manager

Kassia Palys

Development Associat e

Cole Parke

Gender Justice Researcher

Mariya Strauss

Economic Justice Researcher

Rebecca Suldan

Program Coordinator
Fellows

T.F. Charlton
Frederick Clarkson
Victor Mukasa
Spencer Sunshine
Rachel Tabachnick
Interns

Sam Cantor Aviva Galpert Jacey Rubinstein

Board of Directors

Dania Rajendra, Chair

Katherine Acey Janet Jakobsen Hamid Khan
Maria Elena Letona Scot Nakagawa
Jean V. Hardisty, Ph.D.

Founder And President Emerita

1310 Broadway, Suite 201

Somerville, MA 02144-1837
Tel: 617.666.5300
publiceye@politicalresearch.org
Political Research Associates, 2014
All rights reserved. ISSN 0275-9322
ISSUE 80

www.politicalresearch.org

introduction from the guest editor and executive director

Neoliberalism and the Right

Why this special issue?

eoliberalismwith its emphasis on unfettered markets, austerity, eliminating the social safety net, and
privatization of government functionsis a right-wing project whose stunning success imperils the prospects for democracy in the U.S. and around the globe. As our diminished liberties and economic opportunities command newspaper headlines and generate widespread dissatisfaction, its a critical moment to
explore how the right-wing backlash movements that have remade U.S. politics and society over the last several
decades paved the road to this place.
Readers of The Public Eye and PRAs other publications have come to expect analysis of White nationalists, libertarians, neoconservatives, Christian nationalists, and other right-wing sectors arrayed against social and economic
justice. And neoliberals? If, as we maintain, the Right is comprised of those forces that advance unfair power and
privilege for the few against the dignity and equality of the many, we cannot understand and effectively challenge
the Right without confronting neoliberalism. The neoliberal project overlaps and intersects with these factions on
the Right (including erstwhile liberals), alternately engaging and enraging them. (For example, the Christian Right
is largely on board with neoliberal economics, but promotes an interventionist role for government with respect to
conservative morality. White nationalists celebrate neoliberal erosion of civil rights legislation but cannot stomach
the Chamber of Commerce on immigration.)
Given the scope of our topic, weve broken with the The Public Eyes usual format, opting instead for a collection
of short essays. Without pretense of being comprehensive, the writings here (and on our website) offer a variety of
perspectives on neoliberalism and the Right. These pieces seek to demystify neoliberalism, challenge the logic of
neoliberal ideas that have come to take on the ring of common sense, and explore how neoliberalism is shaping civil
society, politics, movements, and communities. Think of this issue, then, as a partial portrait of neoliberalismin
mosaic.
When, as Kim Phillips-Fein writes, a shy Austrian economist wrote the neoliberal manifesto The Road to Serfdom
in 1944, it resonated with American business leaders angry with the way their power and profits had been limited
by Roosevelt and the New Deal. Friedrich von Hayeks vision of a market unfettered by taxes or regulations has since
blossomed darkly into the deregulated global markets, vulture funds, the transfer of public goods and services into
private corporate hands, and the near-total domination of workers and unions that Jean Hardisty describes. Hardisty challenges us to consider how right-wing strategy has changed, as an ascendant economic and political oligarchy bypasses and undercuts our imperfect democratic institutions with impunity.
Indeed, the notion of a free-market society has not only exacerbated economic injustice. It has also worked to
undercut the power and potential of social movements and demands for systemic change, as Sarah Jaffe discusses in
her critique of an elite feminism that pushes individual women to achieve greater success on par with men.
This emphasis on the individual is part of neoliberalisms trickery; in fact, neoliberalism cares not for the welfare
of the individual, as David Bacon powerfully documents in his piece and photographs on the post-NAFTA displacement of people across borders. The pervasive and effective denial of systemic racism has also become a tool for neoliberal policymakers; Howard Winant and Michael Omi describe the co-evolution of neoliberalism and colorblind
racial ideology in the United States as mutually dependent and reinforcing ideologies.
Though neoliberals claim to support smaller government, policies such as the privatization (and even closure)
of prisons merely redirect public resources and reallocate public costs, as Erica Meiners and Liat Ben-Moshe find.
Just as neoliberal politicians try to shed responsibility for marginalized populations in need of basic public services,
private employers evade responsibility for adhering to basic workplace fairness laws, as Darlene Lombos, Sarah Leberstein, and Elvis Mndez write. Whats more, in many areas, neoliberalism has come to dominate the agendas of
both main political parties. As Frederick Clarkson shows, the faith-based initiatives of private religious groups
siphoning federal dollars has continued from the Bush years with the full blessing of the current Democratic administration.
And there are even more perspectives for which we didnt have the space in these pages. Dont miss the additional
essays published at www.politicalresearch.org, by Jane Slaughter, Craig Harshaw, Rich Meagher, and others.
The Right often achieves its peak effectiveness at the convergence point between the potential for private profit
and the opportunity to maintain superiority over others. Examples include current public policy on immigration,
reproductive justice, worker rights, and mass incarceration. PRA situates our work at such crossroads of exploitation and oppression/exclusion, and works with social justice movements to build power in the face of organized
opposition. The total picture of where we are is still coming into focus, but these essays help us to see that moving
forward from here requires grappling withand overcomingthe influence of neoliberalism.
-Mariya Strauss and Tarso Lus Ramos

FALL 2014

Political Research Associates 1

BY JEAN V. HARDISTY

From the New Right

to Neoliberalism, the
Threat to Democracy
Has Grown
The gloves are off for the Rights Chamber of Commerce wing.

he U.S. is in the grip of an

unprecedented dominance
of right-wing ideologies and
policies. Many progressive
commentators see that the
same band of New Right actors that have long pushed a conservative
agenda are up to their old tricks, trying
to block any reformist progress under a
Democratic president. But what we are
experiencing now is not simply more
of the same. There has been a political
shift in the Rights reigning ideology.
The shift is from the Rights fixation on
capturing and consolidating power to establishing rule by the laws of unfettered
capitalism.
The Rights current success owes much
to its persistent pursuit of a well-established social agenda and its increased
emphasis on existing economic goals.
To maintain that we are in the old
struggle alone is to miss the rise of what
we might call the Rights Chamber of
Commerce wing. This sector has a storied history that many people, aside from
economists, often gloss over. Its current
manifestation embraces a far-reaching,
effective, and increasingly entrenched
ideology: neoliberalism.
Political Research Associates and many
others have documented the Right
from the 1970s and the rise of the New
Right, to the reelection of George W.
Bush in 2004, to the present moment.1
But it is wrong to think that our current

2 The Public Eye

condition is simply the triumph of the

New Right coalition. The New Right used
democratic processes to promote a reactionary, antidemocratic agenda: for example, use of the referendum, partisan
redistricting, voter mobilization, new
media outlets, and boycotts of companies that support gay rights or reproductive choice. Neoliberal political theory,
in contrast, explicitly opposes democratic goals and principles.

WHAT IS NEOLIBERALISM?
Neoliberalism can be a difficult concept
for most progressives, who may incorrectly understand it as a watered-down
version of New Deal liberalismin other
words, part of the platform of the current
Democratic Party. But that is not what
neoliberalism is. Because neoliberalism
best captures the shift we are seeing in
the U.S., it is crucial that we understand
its actual meaning.
Neoliberalism is the economic, social,
and political analysis that best describes
the startlingly unequal distribution of
wealth and power in the U.S. today. Neoliberalism, and the policies it undergirds,
results from the triumph of capitalism
and is sometimes called late-stage capitalism or super-capitalism.
The roots of neoliberalism lie not primarily with the New Deal but in the years
immediately after World War II, when a
group of U.S. and European economists
met to discuss how to prevent another

Holocaust. They concluded that the only

protection against dictatorship, fascism,
or rule by military junta was individual
freedom, which only a weak government
and unfettered, free-market capitalism
could preserve. As pure theory, this describes classical liberalism, best formulated by 17th-century English philosopher
John Locke and 19th-century British philosopher John Stuart Mill. But, in practice, neoliberalism takes this theory to
extremes. Unlike neoliberalism, classical liberalism neither explicitly opposes

FALL 2014

Activists gather in Peace Arch Park on the U.S.-Canada border in 2012 for a cross-border action protestingthe Trans-Pacific Partnership.
Photo courtesy of Caelie Frampton.

democratic principles nor seeks to replace democracy with oligarchy.

A leading U.S. participant in the postwar economic think tank was University
of Chicago economist Milton Friedman,
who received intellectual guidance from
group members Friedrich von Hayek, of
Germany, and Ludwig von Mises, of Austria. They founded the Mont Plerin Society, which convened neoliberal leaders
to discuss strategy and which continues
to meet today. Friedmans ideas became
the guiding principles of U.S. neoconser-

FALL 2014

vatives, driving the economic reforms

of the Reagan administration.2 These
morally conservative former Democrats
switched parties and embraced a new
conservatism that sidelined blatant racism and anti-Semitism, and touted freemarket capitalism.
Later in the 20th century, leftist scholars from emerging countries (and some
wealthy ones) adopted the term neoliberalism as a pejorative to capture the policies of exploitation, privatization, and
inequality imposed on them by the U.S.

and other economic superpowers. This

was done through trade agreements, and
by the policies of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Leftist
U.S. scholarsperhaps most prominently, Noam Chomskyadapted the term
to describe the co-optation of economic
and political institutions of developing
nations.
Neoliberalism became characterized by
the use of international loans and other
mechanisms to suppress unions, squelch

Hardisty, continued on page 10

Political Research Associates 3

BY DARLENE LOMBOS, SARAH LEBERSTEIN, AND ELVIS MNDEZ

The Shell Game of Contingent Employment

When subcontractors, freelancers, and independent contractors get hurt or abused on
the job, these workers are finding it harder to hold employers accountable. This is no
accidentits a direct result of a neoliberal labor agenda.

n 2011, Host Hotels & Resorts, tors had difficulty determining which AN OLD NEOLIBERAL PARADIGM
Inc., a corporate partner of the ones could be held responsible for the vi- We increasingly see businesses like the
Marriott hotel chain, used a general olations. Host Hotels, which ultimately Marriott (and corporate partner Host
contractor that it had hired to reno- benefited from the sub-minimum wages Hotels) seeking to shed the burden of
vate guest rooms at the Host-owned and tax evasion, asserted that it had government regulation by passing off liCopley Marriott in Boston. A convoluted no legal obligation to the workers and ability to intermediaries such as staffing
web of subcontractors emerged, as the should not be held liable for any of the agencies, or by falsely claiming that no
general contractor subcontracted the violations committed by the subcontrac- labor laws apply at all because the workwork to several other companies, and tors or their subcontractors.2
ers are either independent contractors
some of that subconor corporations in busitracted work was then
ness for themselves. By
further subcontracted,
restructuring work relawith more than a dozen
tionships in these ways,
firms working on the
some of the nations
same project.
largest
corporations
A state-led, multiaim to shift much of
agency
investigation
their workforce outside
found that 15 contracthe scope of employtors on the project comment laws and employmitted a wide array of
ment taxes that apply
labor law violations.
to employeesas deWorkers from a churchfined by labor laws that
sponsored rehabilitastill presume a convention project in Philational workplace, with
delphia were paid only
one employer and the
four dollars an hour
on-site workers the emjust half the state miniployer directly hires.
mum wageand no
This shift in work
overtime, though they
Companies pass on liability to their subcontractors, making it hard to structures, combined
were required to work
identify the boss. Photo courtesy of Greg Wass. with increased attacks
12-hour days and more
on the labor movement
than 60 hours per week.
and the de-funding of
All told, contractors failed to report or
Companies at every possible level of the nations labor enforcement agenpay taxes on more than $1 million in the project avoided accountability for cies, has depressed workers income
wages, and at least one of them failed to the mistreatment of the workers. Despite and weakened their ability to claim bamaintain workers compensation insur- having found that 15 companies had bro- sic workplace rights like overtime pay
ance policies for the hazardous work. ken the law and abused their workers, and health and safety protections. OutThey misclassified many of the workers authorities only held three subcontrac- sourcing and independent contractor
as independent contractors, thus evad- tors to the most immediate sanction misclassification have also drained miling tens of thousands of dollars more in stop work orders. The general contractor lions from local, state, and federal cofunemployment insurance taxes, work- neither faced significant penalties nor fers, undermining the social safety net
ers compensation premiums, and em- admitted wrongdoing. As a summary just as workers need its protection even
ployer-side taxes, while stripping work- of the investigation put it, The issue of more. The isolation from fellow workers
ers of basic workplace rights.1
which entity was legally the employer that the independent contractor desigBecause so many layers of contractors and responsible for the wages was never nation engenders cuts against workers
were involved in the project, investiga- resolved.3
ability to organize to challenge abuses re-

4 The Public Eye

FALL 2014

sulting from subcontracted work structures.

Reorganization of work structures also
acts to direct workers anger away from
the company calling the shots (such as
a general contractor) and onto the direct
employer, or even to the workers themselves, who may believe their situation
stems from their own failings as independent business people. All of these factors
undermine workers ability to organize
into unions and worker collectives, one
of the fundamental goals of neoliberalism and its pursuit of an unregulated free
market.

FREE MARKETS, UNFREE WORKERS

The rise to power of Ronald Reagan in
the United States and Margaret Thatcher
in the United Kingdom ushered in a new
era of economic policy. Minimal corporate taxation, privatization of public
goods, and the deregulation of businesses became the dominant policies promoted for economic growth. The attacks
against organized labor, progressive
organizations, and community groups
that opposed the new regime were brutal. The percentage of workers in unions
plummeted.
Across the country, new formations
emerged to try to deal with this onslaught of attacks on workers. Coalitions
of organized labor, grassroots organizations, and worker centers began fighting
back and winning campaigns through a
combination of militant rank-and-file
membership, intelligent planning, and
strategic organizing. The target of these
campaigns was often a clearly identifiable owner of the business, and so workers and community allies knew whom
to hold responsible for the conditions
of work. This, however, is no longer the
case, as seen in the Copley Mariott and
other examples where companies pass
on liability to their subcontractors and
outsourced agencies, making it difficult
for workers to hold real employers accountable.
Such interruption in the employer-employee relationship is reminiscent of the
neoliberal structural adjustment policies the World Bank and International
Monetary Fund (IMF) have imposed on
so-called developing countries. As the
IMF and World Bank required national
governments to loosen labor laws and
other regulations to promote free trade

FALL 2014

and supposed foreign investment, corporations have similarly restructured

the relationship between employer and
employee to avoid government regulation altogether and to create confusion
over who is responsible for workers. Ultimately, the result is the same: structural
adjustment and debt repayment policies
have increased poverty and undermined
local governments ability to provide
basic health care, education, and employment for their citizens, while the restructuring of employer-employee relationships has helped create a shadow (or
underground) economy free from regulation and has reduced the governments
ability to provide an adequate safety net
for the growing low-wage, contingent
workforce.
In Massachusetts, the Joint Task Force
on the Underground Economy and Employee Misclassification has collected
more than $55 million in the past five
years from individuals and businesses
that engage in strategies to avoid responsibility for their workers.4 The Task Force
utilizes existing labor laws and regulations to recover nonpayment of wages
and payroll taxes, licenses and permit
fees, unemployment and workmans
compensation insurance, and other important monies owed to workers and
the state. Despite its successes, the Task
Force is limited by existing labor law and
is unable to broaden its scope of accountability to include companies who surely
profit from workers, but may not be legally defined as their direct employer.

TOWARD A NEW LEGAL FRAMEWORK

Extensive use of abusive subcontracting
and misclassification schemes and other outsourcing tools are eroding the 80
years of labor protections that many have
come to take for granted. Community
Labor United and the Immigrant Worker
Center Collaborative are working to close
that accountability gap in Massachusetts
with a new legal framework, being developed by the National Employment Law
Project, that holds all entities in the labor supply chain responsiblewhether
they initiate the demand for the work,
orchestrate a project, or directly hire and
supervise the workers. We call this the
accountable employer framework.
Accountable employers know what
work is being performed, often control
the conditions under which it is per-

formed, and have the power to ensure

compliance with labor laws and regulations. All entities and creators of supply
chain or outsourced work arrangements
would then be held liable for performing
these key employer functions.
In the Copley Marriott case, the Accountable Employer framework would
hold multiple parties responsible because of the labor violations they perpetrated. The Philadelphia church that
supplied $4-an-hour workers would be
accountable for creating and ending the
employment relationship; the general
contractor and its subcontractor would
be accountable for managing the enterprise internally and externally; and Host
Hotels would be accountable because it
received the fruits of the workers labor.
Similarly, a new Accountable Employer statute would make a large corporate
employer like Wal-Mart responsible for
wages and working conditions in its supply chain even if it outsources much of
the labor (and even management). WalMart controls the timing and manner of
delivery of the goods on its store shelves,
decides how goods are handled when
they are unloaded and delivered, and
uses its market dominance to force contractors to keep costs as low as possible.
Wal-Mart engenders labor violations in
its supply chain and therefore should be
on the hook for these abuses.
As corporations continue to look for
ways to skirt government regulations
and increase their profit margins, many
will continue to hire intermediaries or
misclassify workers as a way of outsourcing responsibility and escaping liability.
This shift is part of neoliberalisms broader political realignment towards deregulation of markets and the empowerment
of corporations. However, employer accountability can be restored through legislation that holds all entities throughout
the web of contractors and subcontractors responsible for their workers.
Darlene Lombos is the Executive Director
of Community Labor United. She is also the
Vice President of the Greater Boston Labor
Council. Sarah Leberstein is a staff attorney
at the National Employment Law Project
(NELP). She advocates for policy reforms
promoting the workplace rights of non-standard workers and enforcement.Elvis Mndez
is a coordinator at the Immigrant Worker
Center Collaborative in Boston, Mass.

Political Research Associates 5

THEOCRATIC RUMBLINGS

BY SARAH JAFFE

Neoliberal Feminists Dont Want

Women to Organize
Lean any way you want; the view from the bottom of the economic system doesnt change.

o say that Sheryl Sandberg

ruined my life would be to
make the same mistake that
Sandberg herself makesit
would be to assume that the
successes or failures of an
individual woman, feminist or no, equal
the successes or failures of feminism.
Nevertheless, writing about feminism
and the workplace in the shadow of Lean
In has been a task in itself. One must,
it often seems, either define oneself as
for or against Sandberg. Critique of her
was critique of feminism, at least for the
heady months around her books publication when well-known feminists felt
compelled to take sides.
Sandberg is not herself the problem,
but she exemplifies it in a way that has
been instructive. When Jill Abramson
was fired from her position as executive
editor at the New York Times,1 reportedly
after she confronted the papers publisher over her discovery that her pay was
less than that of her (male) predecessor,
among the many outraged reactions from
feminists was the response that leaning
in doesnt work after all. Abramsons experience, similar to that of so many women, seemed a rebuke to the idea, promoted in Sandbergs book, that individual
women were holding themselves back. It
reminded us that no matter how hard we
try, sexismsexism in the workplace
cannot be defeated individual success
story by individual success story.
One of the insidious things about neoliberalism is how it has managed to absorb our vibrant, multifaceted liberation
struggles into itself and spit them back
out to us as monotone (dollar-bill-green)
self-actualization narratives. The way
this has happened to feminism is particu-

6 The Public Eye

larly illuminating. As I wrote in Dissent

last winter, the so-called second wave
of feminism fought for women to gain
access to work outside of the home and
outside of the pink-collar fields.2 Yet in
doing so, as Barbara Ehrenreich has written, some feminists wound up abandoning the fight for better conditions in what
had always been considered womens
workwhether that be as teachers and
nurses, or the work done in the home for
little or no pay.
In fact, the flight of middle-class
women into the paid workplace left
other women, namely domestic workers, cleaning up the mess left behind,
and many of those middle-class women
seemed unwilling to deal with the fact
that they too, sometimes, could oppress.
As Ehrenreich wrote in Maid to Order, a
piece published in the anthology, Global
Woman, which she co-edited with Arlie
Russell Hochschild, To make a mess
that another person will have to deal
withthe dropped socks, the toothpaste
sprayed on the bathroom mirror, the
dirty dishes left from a late-night snack
is to exert domination in one of its more
silent and intimate forms.3
While some women have experienced
the workplace as a site of liberation and
increased power, for many others, the
workplace was never a choice. Particularly for women of color, whose domestic work was excluded intentionally from
New Deal-era labor laws, the workplace
was and remains a site of oppression.
And to this day, women remain concentrated in the economys lowest-paying
jobssome two-thirds of minimumwage workers are women, and three of
the fastest-growing occupations in the
country are retail sales, food service, and

home health care, which are both lowwage and female-dominated jobs. Home
health care workers, in many ways the
face of the new service economy, were
just ruled only partial public employees by the right-wing Roberts Supreme
Court.4 More than 90 percent of them, according to the Economic Policy Institute,
are female.
Those are jobs at which, no matter
how hard one leans in, the view doesnt
change.
And these days, the conditions for
more and more workers are beginning
to resemble those at the bottom; fleeing
the female-dominated workplace, rather
than improving it, has left middle-class
women more, not less, vulnerable. The
devaluation of work that involves care,
work for which women were assumed to
be innately suited, continued apace when
feminism turned its back. As other jobs
have disappeared, the low wages that
were acceptable when women were presumed not to need a family wage, because they ought to be married to a man
whod do the breadwinning, became the
wages that everyone has to take or leave.
Though the movement for paid sick
leave has gained some important wins
in recent months and years, alongside
a growing movement to raise the minimum wage, an expansive family policy
that would actually allow more than a few
days paid leave or allow workers more
control over their own schedules remains
a pipe dream.
Equal pay for equal work means little
when the wages for all are on the way
down. You would be hard pressed to
find a self-proclaimed feminist, even of
the most neoliberal variety, who doesnt
argue in favor of equal pay, but this fo-

FALL 2014

cus has often served to stifle discussion on trips to save women from brothels. Salon of Mams organization and others
of other concerns in the workplace. As Sheryl Sandberg was on the board of her like hers, What they do is normalize
Marilyn Sneiderman, lifelong labor or- foundation, alongside Susan Sarandon. existent labor opportunities for women,
ganizer and director of the New Labor Hillary Clinton was a fan. Mams rise to however low the pay, dangerous the conCenter at Rutgers University, told me, fame dovetailed with the rise, across the ditions, or abusive an environment they
the fight for fair pay might seem an indi- U.S., of an obsession with saving sex may be. And they shame women who revidual struggle for high-end workers like workers and increasing criminal penal- ject such jobs.8
This is neoliberal feminism at its finAbramson, but for a hotel housekeeper, a ties for sex trafficking.
Her fame attracted prominent femi- est. As Gira Grant writes, the idea that
nurse, a janitor, the best way to improve
women in Camyour job isnt to get
bodiaor in the
promoted through
United Statescan
the ranks, but to
While some women have experienced the workplace
organize
themorganize with your
selves
and
change
fellow workers.
as a site of liberation and increased power, for many
their working conNeoliberal femiothers, the workplace was never a choice. Particularly
ditions is almost
nism is a feminism
always absent from
that ignores class
for women of color, whose domestic work was
the conversation.
as a determining
excluded intentionally from New Deal-era labor laws,
Selma
James,
issue in womens
the workplace was and remains a site of oppression.
one of the founders
lives. It presumes,
of the 1970s Wages
as Tressie McMilfor
Housework
lan Cottom pointed
movement and a
out in an article
leader in the Globon her personal
al Womens Strike,
website, that givcriticized
how
ing power to some
some
feminists
women will auturned grassroots
tomatically wind
organizing
projup trickling if not
ects into jobs for
power, than at
the girls as a way
least some lifestyle
for some women to
improvements
have power by credown to women
ating mechanisms
with less power.5
to save others. In
This applies intodays political cliternationally
as
mate, we must be
well as domesticalwary of claims that
ly. Nancy Fraser, in
feminism is best
her book Fortunes
Neoliberal feminists continue to disregard class as a determining issue in womens
served by increasof Feminism: From
lives. Photo courtesy of Christian Enrique Ortega Loaiza.
ing the power of
State-Managed
individual (white,
Capitalism to Neomiddle-class)
liberal Crisis, cites
women, and quesHester Eisensteins
argument that feminism has entered nists to a cause that continues, as Melissa tion over whom they exercise that power.
into a dangerous liaison with neolib- Gira Grant writes in her book Playing the We must understand the difference beeralism, embracing critiques of the state Whore, to be supported by the Religious tween power for a few and a real change
and mens economic power that allowed Right and to criminalize women who in how power affects us all.
for deregulation. Fraser sees neoliberal are trying to make ends meet any way
feminism embracing a pro-globalization they can.6 Yet the solutions offered to
mentality that regards women in the de- the women saved by Mams organization Sarah Jaffe is an independent journalist and
veloping world as in need of saving by (currently undergoing a name change the co-host of Dissent magazines Belabored
after Newsweek published its expos of podcast. Her work has appeared in The Naenlightened Western feminists.
Take Somaly Mam, the Cambodian Mams fabrications7) were mostly low- tion, the Washington Post, the Atlantic,
NGO entrepreneur who built her career wage sweatshop jobs producing clothing In These Times, The Week, and many
on her own fraudulent tale of being sex for Western consumption. As Anne Eliza- other publications. You can follow her on
trafficked as a child. Westerners flocked beth Moore, who has spent years working Twitter @sarahljaffe and find all her work at
to her story and her cause, joining her in and reporting on Cambodia, writes in adifferentclass.com
FALL 2014

Political Research Associates 7

THEOCRATIC RUMBLINGS

BY LIAT BEN-MOSHE AND ERICA R. MEINERS

Beyond Prisons, Mental Health

Clinics: When Austerity Opens
Cages, Where Do the Services Go?
Neoliberal policies that result in institutional closures carry a cost, too. Could communities
seize the moment to redirect resources toward self-determination and liberation?

n 2012, in a strange moment of

jubilation for anti-prison activists, Illinois governor Pat Quinn
proposed the closure of two adult
prisons, two juvenile detention
centers, and six adult transition
centers (ATC).1 Though the decision was
met with fierce opposition from labor
unions representing prison workers, as
well as some surrounding community
members, and from the law enforcement community, by 2014 Illinois had
nevertheless closed seven correctional
facilities.2
As part of the Quinn administrations
larger policy aim to balance the budget,3
the state also aimed to close facilities
housing people with disabilities and to
move people into smaller communitybased settingsa process often called
deinstitutionalization.4 By 2014, this rebalancing initiative5 aimed to close four
State Operated Developmental centers
(SODCs) serving people with intellectual
and developmental disabilities and two
psychiatric hospitals.6
These shifts are partly a result of the
cluster of economic and political policy
changesincluding
decentralization,
privatization, and free-market reforms
that began in the U.S. in the 1960s and
strengthened with the election of Ronald Reagan and are often described as
neoliberalism. While these facilities were
not closed to advance the peoples wellbeing, the shuttering of these oppressive

8 The Public Eye

structures offers a cause for celebration

but also a caution. This is especially true
if incarceration is defined more widely to
include not only prisons but institutions
that house people with disabilities, juvenile detention centers, and more.
While these neoliberal policies may
inspire some to celebrate the closure of
institutions such as prisons and SODCs,
this jubilation is tempered. Prison closure means more resources are needed
in public community services. These
include: mental health clinics; personal assistance services (for people with
disabilities); affordable and accessible
housing and meaningful public education as alternative ways of dealing with
difference and harm; and increasing the
life chances and opportunities of many,
particularly the poor, disabled, and/or
communities of color. Yet such services
are shrinking instead of growing during
these times of closure.

VANISHING SERVICES
At the same time as these institutions
shut across the state, the city of Chicago, under the watch of Mayor Rahm
Emanuel, shut down six of twelve public
mental health clinics in 2012.7 Cuts to
Chicagos public housing that began during the mid-1990s ramped up.8 In 2013,
Chicagos unelected school board voted
to close fifty public schools, affecting approximately forty thousand students pri-

marily in Black and Brown communities

on the west side. Since 2001, more than
150 public schools in low-income Black
and Brown communities across Chicago
closed or restructuredharming neighborhoods and displacing the problem
of low academic achievement back
onto communities and young people.
The shuttering of public institutions
that regulate the lives of the most marginalized communities is an uneven,
but strong, nationwide trend. A 2012
report by The Sentencing Project states:
In 2012, at least six states have closed
20 prison institutions or are contemplating doing so, potentially reducing
prison capacity by over 14,100 beds and
resulting in an estimated $337 million
in savings.9 Between 2010-2011, 1,069
public schools closed, primarily in urban
communities of color across the nation.10
Public housing vaporized, losing a quarter million housing units over the last decade, according to political scientist Edward G. Goetz, author of New Deal Ruins:
Race, Economic Justice, and Public Housing
Policy.11

ENDING CONFINEMENTOR
CUTTING FUNDS?

JUST

Through one lens, todays closures suggest to some observers that the prison
nation is retreatingloosening its grip
on those it has historically targeted for
surveillance, confinement, and punish-

FALL 2014

ment. Natasha Frost, Associate Dean tion and deinstitutionalization, not nec- laroffer an important window into our
at Northeastern Universitys School of essarily because of an ethical recognition current political moment. They also offer
Criminology and Criminal Justice, even of the continuing harm of confinement a warning about the importance of thinkwent so far as to state in the New York and segregation, or because of an under- ing more critically about human capture
Times in 2013, This is the beginning of standing of the intertwined histories of and confinement and the use of public
the end of mass incarceration.12
capitalism, white supremacy, ableism, dollars. Populations in psychiatric hosYet if imprisonment is underpitals began to plummet in the
stood to include other sites of
1950s; deinstitutionalization in
enclosure like psychiatric hospimental health was in full swing
tals and large state institutions
by the 1970s, when Reagan beAs people move between different
for people with disabilities,13
came the Governor of California
forms and scales of cages, and
then the decline in incarceration
and decided to close down all the
began in the 1960s. In 1955, the
state hospitals.17 Hardly a chamas patterns of surveillance and
state mental health population
pion of the oppressed, Reagan
punishment morph, new forms of
was 559,000, nearly as large (if
referred to institutions housing
measured on a per capita basis)
people with mental disabilities
capture do emergeyet resistance
as the prison population today.
in California as the biggest hois also possible.
By 2000, it had fallen to below
tel chain in the state. Not only
100,000.14 In addition, by 2011,
did this characterization neatly
eleven states had closed all stateobscure the squalid conditions
operated institutions for people
inside public facilities, but fiswith intellectual/developmental
cal responsibility masked the
disabilities.15
(imagined and real) possibilities
The earlier exodus of people
for profit through privatization.
identified with mental and
While there were possible posiphysical disabilities from state
tive outcomesfor instance,
institutions was the result of
the benefits of living in the comtwo things: policy that aimed
munity with supports and not
to cut funding to these public
in large state-run institutions
facilities, and massive organizfew to none of the local necesing. Deinstitutionalization of
sary community services were
those labeled as mentally ill or
supported, either financially or
intellectually disabled during
ideologically.
that era was fueled by grassroots
Earlier waves of deinstitutionmobilization by those most afalization invoked efficiency and
fected by the problems within
the imperative of shrinking big
institutions, as well as shift in
governmentboth pillars of
professional opinion, major
neoliberalismand yet many
exposs of abuse, and activism
of these developmental centers
(including in the legal arena)
and psychiatric hospitals were
Photo courtesy of Project NIA, which advocates for
by family members of those
converted into public prisons
community-based justice models in Chicago.
with disabilities. For instance,
shortly afterwards. For example,
in 1979, self-advocates (people
by 2011, Illinois had closed eight
with intellectual disabilities
mental health hospitals and inwho engage in advocacy) in Nebraska and punishment in the United States, but stitutions for people with intellectual
held a press conference stating that all because of a desire to curb public spend- disabilities, two of which became correcinstitutions should be closed and that ing on social services. These include the tional facilities and one a womens prispeople with disabilities have the right to very services that people need as alter- on.18 Far from shrinking big government,
live freely in communities of their own natives to more oppressive edifices and these public facilities were repurposed
choosing.16 Although rationalized by the as preventive measures to winding up in for other forms of human captivity.
argument that people with disabilities such places. While public neighborhood
As political actors like Reagan began
need not be segregated from their peers urban schools, public housing, and men- to champion closing the hotels of the
in order to have access to the supports tal health clinics are shuttered, private state and argued for the end to big govthey need, these earlier waves of deinsti- companies and not for profit services ernmentand indeed public resources
tutionalization coincided with emergent partially fill the void.
for housing, healthcare, and social sershifts in governancenotably the privavices shranksupport for policing and
tization of public entitiesand provided
prisons grew. The era of the carceral big
a prototype for future closures of all kinds REAGANS HARSH LEGACY
government exploded as the welfare
Earlier forms of downsizingdeinsti- state morphed into a more punitive set of
of state institutions.
Today, states grapple with decarcera- tutionalization movements in particu- institutions.

FALL 2014

Political Research Associates 9

Hardisty, continued from page 3

It is important to note that big government did not decline as Reagans hotels shut their doors. The shrinkage of
the safety net from the Reagan era to the
nineties, coupled with an expansion of
corrections, created a trade-off between
social services and incarceration. In
Punishing the Poor, sociologist Loc Wacquant documents that in 1980, public
housing received federal funding of 27.4
billion dollars, while the federal budget
for corrections was 6.9 billion (not including spending on police or courts).
By 1990, funds for public housing had
been reduced to 10.6 billion dollars,
while the corrections budget rose to 26.1
billion (and then almost doubled again
by 1995).19 In essence, by the nineties,
resources for jails and prisons exceeded
support for public housing programs in
the U.S., at a moment when housing assistance was especially needed because of
the reduced economic support for poor
families.

A CHANCE TO REINVEST
Today, closures of mental health clinics
and schools in Chicago are not necessarily leading to the rise of penal big government, as rebalancing also includes cuts
in prison spending. As with earlier deinstitutionalization movements, this is an
opportunity for jubilation but also a time
for analysis and radical activism. While
the rhetoric of the earlier era was (and for
many still is) that big government must
be dismantled, in reality the government
did not shrinknor did people necessarily become freer. Today, even as prisons
are included in these forms of downsizing, without public investment in public
servicesneighborhood schools, housing, and health servicesracialized and
ableist forms of capture and confinement
continue.
In this current moment of state supported institutional closures, learning
from earlier organizers engagements
with the states deinstitutionalization initiatives is crucial. As early as the 1970s,
disability advocates recognized that the
devil was in the details. The closure of an
institution did not mean the budget of
that institution was then transferred to
community services.
Closures didnt automatically translate into peoples liberation or the end of
confinement. Monies that had been utilized for the care of people with disabili-

10 The Public Eye

ties either disappeared from the budget

altogether or remained for the upkeep
of institutions, even those with a very
small number of residents. Former Commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Youth Services Jerome Miller,
who closed down all juvenile detention
centers in Massachusetts in the 1970s,
observed that when institutions began to
close in New York State and Pennsylvania, while thousands of patients were left
with little housing or treatment options
in the community, the budget for the depopulated hospitals actually increased (at
the beginning stages of deinstitutionalization). Miller notes that although most
mental patients left the institutions in
past decades, the staff, resources, and
budgets remained tied to the institution
and not available for community use.20
Alternatives emerge when facilities
shut their doors. Closures, as prison justice organizer Angela Davis suggests,
provide an opportunity for not only a
radical imagining of the kind of social
landscape desperately neededbut also
the moment to build it. As people move
between different forms and scales of
cages, and as patterns of surveillance
and punishment morph, new forms of
capture do emerge and yet resistance is
also possible. The state often refuses to
offer services in place of the ones that
were shuttered, leaving the responsibility to the individual (or her family and the
market). This is a moment to collectively
demand, fund, and build public infrastructure that will move everyone closer
towards a world that does not rely on
segregation and confinement, or access
to private capital, as its mode of dealing
with structural inequities.
Erica R. Meiners teaches and organizes in
Chicago. A Professor of Gender and Womens Studies and Education at Northeastern
Illinois University, she is author of the forthcoming Intimate Labor (University of Minnesota Press), which explores how ideas of
children contributed to the build-up of the
U.S. prison nation. Liat Ben-Moshe is an
Assistant Professor of Disability Studies at
the University of Toledo. Her work examines
the connections between prison abolition
and deinstitutionalization in the U.S. BenMoshe is the co-editor of Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in
the United States and Canada (Palgrave
McMillan 2014) and an upcoming issue of
Women, Gender, and Families of Color.

regulation, elevate corporate privilege,

privatize public services, and protect the
holdings of the wealthy. As U.S.-backed
policies and puppet politicians were labelled neoliberal by scholars, the term
became widely-recognized shorthand for
rule by the rich and the imposition of limits on democracy.3
Neoliberalism has now come home to
roost, with the people of the U.S. subject to its policies and goals. Here in the
United States, we are increasingly not a
democracy but a country ruled by an oligarchy. Neoliberals most often exercise
power in the U.S. not by working through
the International Monetary Fund, the
World Trade Organization, or the World
Bank, but rather by shifting rule from the
people to corporations. Voting rights, reproductive rights, the right to a fair and
just legal system, a strong and effective
safety net for the poor, and even the right
to a secular state are all under attack.

AUSTERITY AT HOME AND ABROAD

Democratic principles are now under attack. Voting rights (an issue that many
thought to be settled through Supreme
Court decisions and the remarkable organizing of the Civil Rights Movement)
are being limited. A constant drumbeat
of the message of scarcity and debt helps
smaller government neoliberals to justify putting additional budgetary restrictions on government agencies and functions. (A recent example of this was the
2012 sequestration passed by Congress,
which imposed draconian cuts on federal
agencies even as private financial service
corporations enjoyed record profits.)
In its Citizens United decision, the Supreme Court made legal the right of an
individual or corporation to exercise
disproportionate influence in elections.
The established right of women to have
access to safe and legal abortion is increasingly diminished; moreover, our intelligence services can monitor our most
personal movements seemingly without
limit or public justification. These trends
all point to the Rights attacks on democracys very core.
Today, the neoliberal Right has succeeded in making weak and ineffectual the policies that have long kept the
forces of capitalism at least somewhat
in balance with commitments to human
rights.
Three additional examples illustrate

FALL 2014

how neoliberals have, by seizing the policy-making roles normally held by representative government, weakened democracy. We see growing dominance by the
captains of capitalism in the Trans-Pacific
Partnership (TPP), a trade agreement that
elites representing businessincluding
more than 600 from the U.S., and representatives from eleven other democratic and free market countries are now
negotiating.4 Excluded from this process
are any elected representatives. The U.S.
representatives, who are negotiating in
secret, are primarily corporate lobbyists, whose job is to oppose regulations
and protect the aggregation of profit by
their companies, and who are, almost by
definition, neoliberals. What the rest of
us know of the TPP negotiations comes
from leaked documents.5
This closed decision-making process,
which will affect the people of all twelve
countries (the U.S., Brunei, Malaysia,
Australia, Canada, Chile, Japan, Mexico,
New Zealand, Peru, Vietnam, and Singapore) and more, involves only negotiators who support neoliberal principles.
TPPs proposed trade policies, which
feature deregulated markets and bans on
organizing and safety programs, reveal
just how far neoliberals would go to impoverish workers and sideline efforts to
promote the general good.
As currently conceptualized, TPP
goes beyond North American Free Trade
Agreements (NAFTAs) promotion of
prominent neoliberal policies through
the export of jobs to low-wage countries and the simultaneous repression of
union organizing. TPP would also ease
restrictions on food safety, drug prices,
and financial regulation, allowing corporations even greater freedom to make
decisions that could harm consumers.
It is possible that TPP, which Congress
must ratify, will never be approved, despite President Obamas commitment to
fast track the agreement. A coalition
of environmental and labor groups and
151 Congressional representatives has
formed to oppose it.6 However, the media, by failing to cover the story, has left
the general public uninformed.
Cloaked in even greater secrecy is the
Trade in Services Agreement (TISA).
This agreement would set the terms for
cross-border services, from banking
and construction to telecommunications and tourism. It would further deregulate the financial sector and prevent

FALL 2014

countries from imposing restrictions on sion, have done little to counter mountforeign financial firms. Even as 50 coun- ing inequality and the disproportionate
tries have been in talks about TISA since political influence of the wealthy. The af2012, all we know of TISAs draft content fluent in the U.S., as a recent study by pois through the material that leaker Julian litical scientist Martin Gilens has demonAssange published
via WikiLeaks in
June 2014.
The U.S. is drifting toward oligarchy,
A third example
of neoliberalisms
while people living here seem to lack
opportunistic
the indignation and power to overthrow
greed in the private financial secneoliberalism. Yet there are opportunities
tor is the existence
for resistance.
of vulture funds,
which enable a
small number of
hedge funds to
make a profit from the debt defaults of strated, dominate political and economic
entire nations. Vulture funds purchase decision-making.10
the debt of (usually the economically
The U.S. is drifting toward oligarchy,
weakest) countries at a reduced rate, while people living here seem to lack the
then file lawsuits to force the countries indignation and power to overthrow neoto repay the debt at a higher rate. These liberalism. Foundations, in many cases
hedge funds are known as vulture funds the life-blood of progressive non-profit
because the hedge fund purchased the groups, now encourage their grantees
debt with full knowledge that the selling to pursue social entrepreneurship by
country could not repay it without imple- developing a money-making arm; such
menting debilitating austerity policies. groups are increasingly judged by capiVulture fund capitalists benefit at the ex- talist standards of efficiency and repense of emerging countries inability to sults. Yet, there are opportunities for resustain their debt burden. This example sistance. The Occupy Movement, though
of rapacious capitalism is a dominant flawed (like all movements), was procharacteristic of neoliberalism.7
phetic in its message that people must
call out and overturn a power structure
run by banks, corporations, and the rich.
CHALLENGING NEOLIBERALISM
If the Left is to mount a defense of the
Some have argued that because everyvictims
of neoliberalism (in other counone was hurt by the recent recession,
tries,
and
now in the U.S.), it must base
it cannot be true that the current system
that
defense
on an understanding of how
is rigged to benefit the wealthy. Millionaires lost millions as the stock market and why growing inequality is happencrashed, businesses went into survival ing. A good first step is to recognize that
mode, banks had to be bailed out, and there has been a shift in the mechanisms
huge corporations nearly went under. and strategies that elites are using to
But, as economist Philip Mirowski points achieve dominance. Using the moniker
out, Unaccountably, the political right of freedom, free-market ideologues (who
emerged from the tumult stronger, un- have only the interest of corporations
apologetic, and even less restrained in its not peopleat heart) have captured, disrapacity and credulity than prior to the mantled, and reconstituted the machinery of governance. As these neoliberals
crash.8
Banks, interest groups, corporations, pursue their policies, in the absence of
the financial sector, and wealthy Repub- either external controls or organized oplicans are still able to block attempts to position, we see an increasing and alarmrestructure the economic system that ing decline in democracy.
brought us the crash. Even the reforms
in the DoddFrank Wall Street Reform
and Consumer Protection Act of 2010,9
which were designed to correct the abuses of power that led to the recent reces-

Jean Hardisty is the founder and President

Emerita of Political Research Associates
and a Senior Scholar at the Wellesley Centers for Women at Wellesley College.

Political Research Associates 11

BY FREDERICK CLARKSON

An
Uncharitable
Choice
the Faith-Based Takeover
of Federal Programs
Two presidents in a row have
increasingly steered federal grants
and contracts to conservative
Christian groupsincluding
houses of worship.

he privatization of public services has long been a feature of

neoliberalism. It has also been
part of the domestic and global
agenda of the Christian Right,
and more broadly, of conservative evangelicalism. The free-market agenda of the
economic elite and the interests of elite
evangelicalism found common cause and
a historic opportunity during the Clinton
administration. It is a relationship that
continues to this day under the rubric of
the Faith-Based Initiative.
The forerunner to this groundbreaking
notion was injected into policy during the
Clinton administrations efforts to change
welfare as we know it. Called Charitable
Choice, it was the first time Congress gave
explicit legislative direction to federal
agencies to provide religious institutions
with grants and contracts to carry out
federal programs on an equal basis with
other groupswithout requiring that religious groups separate out their religious
agendas.1 Critics presciently observed
this risked problematic entanglements
between church and state. Even President
Clinton was concerned enough to issue
signing statements as Charitable Choice
provisions were added to federal legislation. On one such occasion, he said that
his administration would not permit governmental funding of religious organizations that do not or cannot separate their

12 The Public Eye

religious activities from [federally funded

program] activities, because such funding would violate the Constitution.2
Senators John Ashcroft (R-MO) and
Dan Coats (R-IN) led the successful effort to insert Charitable Choice into the
1996 welfare reform bill.3 The intentions
of backers varied, as they still do, but
the effect has been to begin to privatize
government-funded services, and in particular to increase the capacity of conservative Christian institutions to provide
such services in the U.S. and around the
world. But its birth was a relatively quiet
moment in American legislative history.
As David Kuo, an aide to Sen. Ashcroft
and later the Deputy Director of the original White House office of Faith-Based and
Community Initiatives in the Bush administration, recounts, they picked the name
Charitable Choice because it sounded innocuous. It didnt draw attention to anything religious, he recalled:
Charitable choice was something anyone could support and few people
could justify voting against. The name
just worked. The bill was drafted within
months. Most religious groups loved it.
Scarcely a peep came from liberal advocacy groups. The lack of liberal objection likely also came from the perception that it was just a small, relatively
insignificant amendment. The greatest
pushback came from other compassionate conservatives who wanted the
bill to allow for more religious content.4
Once the Charitable Choice precedent
was set, follow-up efforts to pass more
expansive legislation did not succeed.
But President George W. Bush was able to
implement a more limited program5 via
executive order, which was subsequently
continued and expanded under President
Obama. This effort created a dozen offices6 within the White House and a number
of federal departmentsmost prominently, the Department of Health and Human
Services (HHS), but also including the
Departments of State and Homeland Security, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Agency for International Development. These programs
have taken money out of existing, primarily social service programs and redirected
the funds to religious agencies. But since
many of the conservative Christian bodies

that wanted to receive Faith-Based Initiative funds lacked the institutional capacity and experience to be eligible, there was
an early emphasis on training, capacity
building, and technical assistance so that
groups that wanted to become eligible
could be shoehorned in.7
This redirection of resources also tended to politically empower religious organizations and leaders, such as prominent
evangelical pastor Rick Warren, whose
economic view tends toward laissez-faire
neoliberalism.8 Warrens popularity has
helped in recent years to strengthen the
political constituency for free-market
policies.
None of this was a coincidence, since
one of the driving forces behind this reorientation of federal policy was a secretive,
business-oriented network of conservative
Christianity known as The Family. The
group made news during the 2008 election campaign when such major figures
as Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and
John McCain were shown to have varying
degrees of a relationship with the powerful network. Later, the sex scandal involving Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) was shown to
involve a Family-owned condo called the C
Street House, which also gained national
notoriety.9

THE FAMILY
Jeff Sharlet, in his 2008 book The Family:
The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of
American Power, exposed the historic relationship between elements of conservative
Christianity and the anti-labor, anti-government deregulation agenda (and other
elements) of the business lobby. Founded
as a political network of anti-labor Christian businessmen, the organization has
vastly expanded into a quiet, behind-thescenes old boys network of people who
use their personal relationship with Jesus
to facilitate business and political dealings
in the U.S. and many other countries.10
Sharlet explained that faith-based
initiatives are as liberal as they are fundamentalist, their privatization of social
services an exercise of the unstated conviction of classical liberalism that the free
market is absolute and yet requires a government subsidy. They are to religion,
Sharlet continued, what Clinton-era free
trade deals were to labor: a rationalization in the name of efficiency.11

FALL 2014

Indeed, the federal funds redirected to

faith-based services have enjoyed a certain
de facto exemption from standard levels
of accountability and transparency. The
notion of exemptions for religious organizations from federal laws and policies has
been expanded in the wake of the Hobby
Lobby v. Burwell decision of the U.S. Supreme Court. The Hobby Lobby decision
likely portends future efforts to widen the
range of exemptions along with the range
of organizations qualified to claim them.
Just as neoliberals claim that the free
market is more efficient than government, there has been a similar claim
about faith-based social service delivery.12
But there was little evidence for this. Indeed, John DiIulio Jr, the first director of
the faith-based office under President
Bush, has said there is no evidence that
faith-based agencies perform any better
than non-religious providers of social services.13
Similarly, David Kuo revealed that
there was no evidence to support another
of the claims used to justify Charitable
Choice, (later renamed the Faith-Based
Initiative)that there was discrimination
against religiously based grant applicants,
particularly with regard to hiring practices. In many ways, they were proposing a
solution in search of a problem. Alarmed,
we looked under every rock and rule and
regulation and report. Finding these examples became a huge priority. Without
them, the powerful political rhetoric of
government discrimination against faithbased groups of religious hiring would
have to disappear ... If President Bush was
making the world a better place for faithbased groups, we had to show it was a really bad place to begin with. But in fact, it
really wasnt that bad at all.14
Kuo later became disaffected, and wrote
a book about it.15 He had hoped that Bushs
campaign promise of compassionate conservatismproviding $8 billion new dollars for fighting poverty in the U.S.would
come true. But he found himself helping
direct a vast amount of faith-based patronage money and activities designed to
influence electoral outcomes in key states
under the direction of the White House
political team. Even more galling, there
was no real increase in anti-poverty funds
for anti-poverty work. Kuo did, however,
observe a lot of cronyism and self-dealing
leading to a variety of scandals.16
FALL 2014

As a presidential candidate, Obama

promised to clean up the faith-based program and hold federal grantees accountable. If you get a federal grant, you cant
use that grant money to proselytize to the
people you help and you cant discriminate against them, Obama said during a
July 2008 campaign speech. But a 2014
investigation by Andy Kopsa in The Nation
magazine found that little has changed.
Kopsa writes: An entire federally funded evangelical economy took root during
the Bush years, and under Obama it continues to thrive. Kopsa documented, for
example, tens of millions of dollars going
to fund ineffective, religiously based abstinence and AIDS education programs in
the U.S. and in Africa, as well as millions
going to religiously based, anti-abortion
crisis pregnancy centers in the U.S., also
for abstinence education. Millions more
have been diverted from Medicaid programs to fund heterosexual marriage
promotion via state affiliates of Focus on
the Family (FOF) and the Family Research
Council (FRC). Kopsa reported, for example, that The Family Leader, a politically
important Christian Right organization in
Iowa (and the state FOF and FRC affiliate),
took $3 million in federal funds to conduct Healthy Marriage Workshops while
simultaneously waging a campaign to
amend the state constitution to ban samesex marriage. After being outed in the
press as an HHS grantee in 2010, Kopsa
reported, the group denied using federal
money inappropriately but requested to
opt out of their last year of funding.17
And all this happened even as the
Obama administration strengthened the
proscription against federal funding of
abortion. The Obama administration, in
the course of seeking to pass the Affordable Care Act, declared its intention to
make the legislation abortion neutral.
Yet in a remarkably Orwellian redefinition
of neutral, it adopted the anti-abortion
provisions of the Hyde Amendment,
which in the 1970s had proscribed using
federal Medicaid funds to provide abortions.18

as an anti-labor organization of Christian

businessmen in the early 20th century, The
Family has grown to become a behind-thescenes network of power and influence extending across party lines. In many ways,
it is as transpartisan as neoliberalism itself
and an increasingly important transmitter
of neoliberal ideology.
The Familys most public role is as the
host and organizer of the National Prayer
Breakfast, at which every president since
Eisenhower has been a featured speaker.
But The Family mostly functions as a quiet
broker of conservative Christian ideas,
personnel, and relationships. Sharlet
describes the morphing of elite business
and Christian fundamentalism this way:
[E]lite fundamentalism, certain in its entitlement, responds in this world with a
politics of noblesse oblige, the missionary
impulse married to military and economic
power. The result is empire. Not the old
imperialism ... Rather the soft empire of
America that across the span of the twentieth century recruited fundamentalism to
its cause even as it seduced liberalism to
its service... .19
The use of religious institutions to promote the privatization of a variety of government services has been shrouded in a
faith-based fog. As David Kuo observed,
it became easier for political appointees to
direct federal funds to politically favored
groups while resisting press and Congressional scrutiny. And, as Andy Kopsa
demonstrated, transparency and accountability are shockingly lacking, even in an
administration that has promised both.
It should be a matter for public debate
that political appointees in both parties
are not only diverting federal funds to
pursue political agendas well beyond the
intent of Congress but also are deepening the governments reliance on religious
institutions as service providers. These
trends do not seem to be aberrations and
glitches in a fresh approach to the delivery of government services so much as a
transpartisan program of neoliberal transformation of our governments functions
at all levels.

TRANSPARTISANSHIP

Frederick Clarkson, a senior fellow at PRA, is

co-founder of the group blog Talk To Action)
and the author of Eternal Hostility: The
Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy (Common Courage Press, 1997).

Kuo, like Ashcroft and Coats, was a member of The Family (aka The Fellowship), a
semi-secret society of what Sharlet calls
elite fundamentalists. Since its founding

Political Research Associates 13

BY MARIYA STRAUSS

At a March 2014 protest, North Carolina residents challenge the state legislatures neoliberal agenda. Photo courtesy of Light Brigading.

To Shock the Heart of the Nation:

a conversation with Rev. William Barber II, a leader of the Moral Marches

e had some happy clients when we found out they

wouldnt have to pay the North Carolina estate
tax, Elizabeth Quick, an estate lawyer in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, told Forbes magazine
in July 2013.1 The states Republican governor, Pat McCrory, had
just signed a repeal of the estate tax that removed the obligation
for one wealthy family to pay more than $2 million, and another
family $680,000, into state coffers.
So that those two families (plus around 20 others) could keep
the entirety of their estates intact, the governor and state legislature eliminated the Earned Income Tax Credit, depriving
907,000 low-income North Carolinians of state funds that many
counted on to pay their utility bills and rent.2
Tax cuts for the wealthy are a common Republican tactic,
but this wasnt just a Republican maneuver. McCrory and the
GOP-dominated legislature were just getting started on a set of
policy changes reflective of a comprehensive and far-reaching
neoliberal agenda. Within the first 50 days of the 2013 legislative session, the lawmakers, whose campaigns had been backed
by some of the wealthiest families in the state, enacted a string
of new laws that transfer wealth from poor to rich.3 The state
moved to refuse federal dollars for expanding Medicaid to cover
500,000 more people under the Affordable Care Act; suppress
the vote with a restrictive voter ID law; cut off unemployment
benefits for 170,000 North Carolinians; and slash teacher salaries to bring North Carolina to 46th place nationwide for teacher
pay.4
These policies were among the wishes of Art Pope,5 a retail
tycoon and former state representative whose interest in politics is so keen that he became McCrorys state budget director (a
position from which Pope just stepped down amid controversy
over how concentrated his power had become).6 Popealong
with organizations such as the (billionaires and political allies
of Pope) Koch brothers Americans for Prosperityexerts such

14 The Public Eye

influence on Gov. McCrory and state legislators that even some

Republicans in the state have suggested it is too much. In one
egregious example, in 2013, Pope entered the statehouse during debate on a bill that would have allowed public funding of
campaigns for judgeships and collared a GOP lawmaker who
was considering a compromise, reminding the lawmaker of
Popes past contribution to his campaign and thus personally
ensuring the bills death.7
Pope also funds NC-based think tankssuch as the Civitas Institute and the John Locke Foundation that generate research
to support the neoliberal agenda that has, in two short years,
come to dominate the political process in North Carolina. He
drives the budgetary policy goals of this administration, complained one anonymous North Carolina Republican lobbyist to
the Washington Post in July 2014.8
But a grassroots movement is underway to fight back against
Pope and the free-market incursions he and other neoliberals
are making against the states hard-won policies for racial and
economic justice. Tapping into the same religious core that fueled the Civil Rights Movement, state NAACP President Rev.
Dr. William Barber II has energized a broad swath of people in
the state to take to the streets at least 70 times since 2012 to say
that enough is enough. Rallying thousands of North Carolinians around a 14-Point Peoples Agenda,9 the Moral Marches (or
Moral Mondays, as they were first popularly dubbed) have come
to be seen as a touchstone for a renewed social justice movement
across the South. As Barber prepared to spread a message of
hope and democracy through a week of actions that took place
Aug. 22-28 in Raleigh and other Southern state capitals, he
talked with me about North Carolinas free-market ideology and
how it has already affected the people who live there. Barber,
referring to the billionaire-backed Tea Party, the national group
that pushes free-market policies at the local and state level, says
these past two legislative sessions have been a coordinated,

FALL 2014

premeditated attempt to undermine progress and engage in regressive Tea Party policies.
This is really Robin Hood in reverse, Barber told me. It is
government of business, bought by business, for business. And
not just businessbecause lots of business leaders disagree
with thembut this is Tea Party greed. This is Koch brothertype greed.
Barber bristles, though, at the notion that conservatism or
partisan politics are at the root of the problem. I fuss against
these terms liberal versus conservative, he says, because I
want to conserve the essence of our Constitution and then liberally make sure everybody has access to them. What were dealing with is extremism, and you cant just define it as conservative.
At the local level, says Barber, the state legislatures extreme
adherence to free-market neoliberal policy is gutting the states
public school system.10 Five thousand teachers being fired, being removed, and local school boards decrying [this] because of
the impact that it was having on classroom sizes and students,
he says.
Barber adds that, because of the salary cuts, he sees teachers
actively leaving North Carolina. In fact, he said, one state,
Texas, sent memos out and said if youre in North Carolina,
come to Texas. And you know thats kind of sad, considering
Texass regressiveness, when they actually can offer teachers
more than North Carolina.
Barber also described the legislatures attempt to shift $10
million earmarked for public schools to voucher programs that
could only be used to pay for private schools. In shifting these
public funds into private hands, said Barber, the legislature refused to require that private schools benefiting from the vouchers maintain the same non-discrimination standards that public
schools must uphold, meaning that private schools receiving
voucher funds would have been allowed to restrict enrollment
however they chose. A Superior Court judge declared on Aug.
21 that the states school voucher program is unconstitutional,
citing the lack of accountability inherent in the program, and
issued a permanent injunction stopping the voucher program
from going forward.11
Art Pope and the Tea Party arent just alienating teachers and
progressives, says Barber. They are also alienating Republicans
across the state. Barber says that the legislature and McCrory
never made clear, even to their own constituents, what they
were planning to do once they achieved a supermajority in the
statehouse and won the governorship. They did not run saying, Elect me, Im going to take your health care, cut your public education, and strip you of your unemployment even if you
lost your job at no fault of your own, says Barber. So, weve
had a Republican unemployed person stand on the stage [at a
Moral March] and say, Im a Republican, but Im unemployed
I didnt vote for this.
Even Republicans holding public office are objecting to the
legislatures actions. Adam ONeal, a self-described conservative Republican mayor from Belhaven, NC, began a one-man
march of 273 miles to Washington, DC, on July 14 to dramatize
the impact of Gov. McCrorys and [House Speaker] Tillis refusal to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. ONeal
explained that the lack of Medicaid funds had forced the only
FALL 2014

hospital in his coastal community to close, creating a medical

desert that would certainly cost lives.12 ONeal also laments the
potential economic impact of the hospital closing; he told NPR,
How many people go retire somewhere where it doesnt even
have a hospital?13
I asked Barber what he believes is the neoliberals vision for
North Carolina:
They believe that the way to a great North Carolina is to deny
necessary funds and access to public education. Attack teachers. Deny unemployment. Deny earned income tax credit
and other safeguards for the working poor. Deny affordable
healthcare and access to healthcare, even if it allows people
to die. Deny labor rights, LGBT rights, womens rights, immigrant rights ... And then, if you really want a great America
after youve done all these things, then suppress the right
to vote and attempt to use your power to stay in office. And
then, after youve done all of that to create all this tension,
ensure that everyone has access to guns easier than they have
access to the polls. Now, that sounds crude and sinister, but
those are their policies.
Having set this grim scene, Barber continued with a surprisingly upbeat message: Whatever were facing now, its not
greater than slavery, its not greater than Jim Crow, its not greater than women being denied the right to vote. We won those
battles. But we did not win those battles by merely engaging
in political arguments. We had to tap into the moral and social
consciousness of the nation.
I am hopeful, he went on, because I believe in the deep
moral consciousness at the heart of America. Those of us who
believe in justice and who believe in freedom, we are the heartbeat of this nation. Our role now is to be like a social defibrillator, to shock the heart of the nation, to cause it to revive and to
remember what the real enemy is: regressive extremism. And
its not just about winning all the elections, but changing the
context in which our politicians have to operate.
Barber said he hopes that the momentum of the Forward Together Moral Movement (as one of the core groups organizing
Moral Marches is currently called) will spread. He sees it moving across the South from North Carolina to help change the
political context and create the possibility for the state NAACPs
14-Point Peoples Agenda to be written into legislation both in
North Carolina and beyond. The Agenda includes anti-poverty,
pro-labor policies; equality and equitable distribution of resources in public education; access to healthcare for all; fairness
in the criminal justice system; and protection and expansion of
the right to vote and the rights of immigrants.
Barber acknowledges that the neoliberal forces in his state
and across the countryremain powerful. Weve got to fight in
the courts, weve got to fight the legislative halls, weve got to
fight in the streets, weve got to push at the pulpit, and we have
to work at the ballot box, he says. If we do all of this with what
I call a moral critique, so were not trapped with the language of
Republican versus Democrat, I believe we can continue to work
towards the reconstruction of this nation.
Mariya Strauss is a Maryland-based writer and editor. You can follow Mariya on Twitter at @mariyastrauss.

Political Research Associates 15

BY MICHAEL OMI AND HOWARD WINANT

How Colorblindness Co-Evolved

with Free-Market Thinking
As White supremacists shifted tactics in response to mass social movements,
they needed a mass electoral base. Neoliberals helped build it for themand
colorblindness helped wipe out some inconvenient historical truths.

The following is an edited extract from a new

essay in the 20th anniversary re-issue of the
authors book, Racial Formation in the
United States, 3rd edition (New York: Routledge, 2014).

he hegemony of neoliberal
economics is matched and
underwritten by the racial
hegemony of colorblindness. In the U.S., neoliberalism is as much a racial
project as a class project. Although it was
developed by big capital, it owes its ascent to the mass electoral base that only
right-wing racial ideology could provide.
It is the convergence of neoliberalism
with colorblindnessthe right-wing racial ideology of the post-civil rights era
that accounts for the success of neoliberalism.
In order to acquire a mass base, neoliberalism had to undo the New Deal coalition, which had held powerunder
both Democratic and Republican administrationsfrom the 1930s to the 1970s.
The New Deal had been politically and
morally complicit with Jim Crow and indeed could not have been implemented
without deference to the solid South.
But in the post-World War II period, and
in many ways because of the war itself,
that complicity was no longer politically
viable. The Black Movement challenged
it and ultimately overthrew it, splitting
the Democratic Party in the process and

16 The Public Eye

transferring the South, as Lyndon Johnson lamented, to the Republican column.

The rise of neoliberalism in the United
States depended on the containment
of the political challenge of the Black
Movement and other social justice movements: other movements of people of
color, the Feminist Movement, and eventually the environmental and LGBTQ
movements, as well.
Containment meant more than restricting the reach of demands for greater racial equality and for a vastly expanded democracy. It also meant resisting the
demands of the 1960s movements for
the redistribution of wealth and power.
The threat that the Black Movement
and its allies posed to the New Deal coalition was quite severe. It involved the
prospect of a full-fledged social democratic system in the United States, serious commitments to full employment,
substantial curtailment of U.S. imperial
adventures, and recognition of race- and
gender-based demands for full-scale social equality and inclusion.
Capital, the Republican Party, and
the Right Wing of the Democratic Party
all united against those demands. Colorblind politics were developed from
about 1970 as the post-civil rights racial
ideology of this new coalition, this new
power-bloc. As colorblindness became
hegemonic, this new racial ideology incubated and buttressed neoliberalism, as
well.

GENEALOGY OF COLORBLIND
POLITICS
During the 1970s, neoliberal politics was
invented through a series of experiments
with racial reaction. These experiments
took form as massive resistance, the
rise of the New Right, and neoconservatism.
Nothing in the early phases of racial
reaction pointed toward what would become colorblind racial ideology. The
initial response to civil rights demands
had been driven by racist rage and fullthroated rejectionism in the form of
massive resistance. After segregation
was ruled illegal by the Supreme Court,
southern states and local governments
sought to outflank Brown and the decisions that followed it through a strategy
of education privatization. (Incidentally, massive resistance anticipated many
of todays battles over public education,
engineering closures of public school
systems and establishing private, largely
White, schools.)
But the massive resistance approach,
for the most part, collapsed quickly. It
was opposed by the majority of Americans; private segregationist groups, it
turned out, could not afford to dispense
with public education; and the federal
government acted to undo massive resistance, albeit unevenly. In response to
this failure, the organized opposition to
civil rights reform had to regroup.

FALL 2014

White supremacists had to make stra- ing the post-emancipation period into pear. Colorblindness simply advanced
tegic concessions to win allies outside the consideration. When the entire struc- racist ideology to the next level, one preSouth and to operate effectively within tural legacy of slavery was taken into ac- mised on the concept of race neutralthe national party system (both parties). countmassive theft of life and labor, ity.
To dismiss the immense sociohisThe core task they faced was developing ongoing denigration and exclusion, not
a New Right. This required what we call to mention torture and terror past and torical weight of race, to argue that it is
rearticulation. This concept refers to the presentthe chutzpah of the reverse somehow possible, indeed imperative,
ideological appropriation of elements of racism claim mounted to the very heav- to refuse race consciousness and simply
an opposing position.
ens.
not to take account of it, is by any rational standard a fools errand. But
In the early post-civil rights
because colorblindness more
years, the New Right learned
successfully rearticulated Black
to make use of the deep-seated
In the United States,
Movement demands, because it
racism of the White working
neoliberalism is as much a racial
expressed a sort of anti-racism
and middle classes, without exlite, an aspirational post-racplicitly advocating racial backproject as a class project.
ism, and most of all because it
lash. The rise of code word
overlapped with the repudiation
strategies was the first attempt
of the welfare state and was conat this. It was an effort to racesistent with neoliberal individubait less explicitly, while makalism, colorblind racial ideoling full use of the traditional
ogy turned out to have political
stereotypes. Code words like
legs.
get tough on crime and welfare handouts reasserted racist
tropes of Black violence and laRACIAL NEOLIBERALISM
ziness, often without having to
Colorblindness advanced the
refer to race at all.
neoliberal agenda piece by piece
But the use of code words was
through successive presidential
ultimately inadequate. Code
administrations, both Republiwords could not mobilize a mass
can and Democratic. Reagans
base for racial reaction, espeefforts were crucial. His iconic
cially one that would incorpocomment in his first inaugural
rate not only Whites of the Jim
addressIn this present crisis,
Crow South but also centrist
A racist animus bubbles beneath the hegemonic racial
government is not the solution
Whites across the nation.
ideology of colorblindness. Photo courtesy of Wissotzky.
to our problem; government is
In order to reach out further,
the problemdistilled a politithe New Right developed the
cal orientation that was hostile
ideologically grounded reverse
to civil rights, the welfare state,
racism (or reverse discrimination) frameThe concept of reverse racism was taxation (though Reagan did raise taxes
work. This took shape over the 1970s. presented to Whites as an effort to pro- several times), and unions.
Reverse racism had several advantages tect them from unfair claims on the
George H. W. Bush maintained this apover code words. The most important of part of Blacks or other people of color. proach, balancing the mainstream Rethese was the claim that racially inclu- The agenda was to consolidate and ex- publicanism of Wall Street with the New
sive reform policiesnotably affirmative pand the New Rights mass base among Right ferocity of his political gunslinger,
actionwere unfair to Whites: they were Whites without appealing to racist tropes Lee Atwater. Atwater became famous for
portrayed as punishing Whites who as the code words approach had done. the Willie Horton political ads (on bewere merely seeking a job, admission Attacking affirmative action and other half of Bush) and the White hands ads
to a university, or a federal contract. In civil rights reforms as unfair to Whites (on behalf of reactionary North Carolina
seeking to overcome the legacy of past (as racial quotas and supposedly pref- Senator Jesse Helms). These attacks on
racism, it was charged, ostensibly anti- erential treatment of non-Whites, etc.) presidential candidate Michael Dukakis
racist policy and state actions were them- worked to defend existing systems of and on North Carolina senatorial candiselves guilty of racism with Whites as the racial inequality and domination much date Harvey Gantt invoked centuries-old
new victims.
more effectively than use of code words.
racist themes: the criminal Black predaColorblind racial ideology came later tor and the unqualified (presumably
Racism was thus recast as something
that could affect anyone, something that still. It represented a step beyond re- lazy and undeserving) Black worker,
was practiced as much by Blacks as by verse racism because it repudiated the respectively. Without explicitly stating
Whites. A whole century of White su- concept of race itself. Colorblindness it, Republicans were coming out in oppopremacywith Whites as the subjects of built upon earlier articulations of post- sition to civil rights and to racial equality
racism, and Blacks and other people of civil rights right-wing ideology. Of while reframing themselves as the White
color as the objectswas thus peremp- course, code words did not disappear. peoples party.
torily dismissed. And that was only tak- Reverse racism charges did not disap-

FALL 2014

Political Research Associates 17

Bill Clinton brought a more Democratic version of neoliberalism to the political arena. He campaigned for reelection
in 1996 on a promise to end welfare as
we know it. Propelled by the Civil Rights
Movement in the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson had expanded the Aid to Families
with Dependent Children (AFDC) program. Thus the Great Society had partially undone the New Deals exclusion
of Blacks and Latinos from the welfare
system. Commonly known as welfare,
AFDC was the principal source of federal
aid for poor people. It was the only federal program that directly provided cash

titlement valued by Whites that Clinton

had successfully applied to a program associated with Blacks.
Obama has also been under constant
pressure to restrict entitlements, and
he has sometimes capitulated to this
pressure. Well-aware of the cauldron of
racist animus that bubbles beneath the
hegemonic racial ideology of colorblindness, Obama has avoided racial politics
as far as possible. And like Clinton, he
has deployed a more liberal version of
neoliberalism, so to speak. We can question his judgment, but like him, we must
recognize both the hegemony of colorblindness
and
the hegemony of
neoliberalismin
Neoliberalism gave its adherents
other words, the
permission to ignore the others: the
combined power
of structural racdarker nations, the poor, both of the United
ism and capital.
States and the entire planet. It required
In its abandonment
of all egalicolorblind racial ideology for this purpose.
tarian social policy commitments
in favor of a free
to Blacks. AFDC had evolved out of the market ideology (which was anything
Social Security Act of 1935, slowly de- but free in practice), in its repudiation
veloping over the decades into its Great of the welfare state, in its passionate
Society version of cash support for the embrace of market fundamentalism,
poor and excluded, though still heavily neoliberalism struck at the heart of the
stigmatized. Clinton sought White sup- Black Movements demands for economport by attacking this program.
ic redistribution and political inclusion.
Adopting the evolving racial common
sense of colorblindness, neoliberalism
PRIVATIZING WELFARE
Although it assisted many Whites as well, was able to build a mass base composed
AFDC was seen as a Black program. It had of working- and middle-class Whites
always been means-tested, unlike Social who were threatened by racial equality
Security itself and Medicare, which were and racial democracy.
These Whites, or their parents and
entitlements. It was punitive and was
grandparents,
had benefited from the
subject to constant right-wing stigma,
welfare
state
under
the New Deal when it
but it stood in sharp contrast to the 1935
was
a
Whites-only
affair
(and when it was
law, which had been crafted by Dixiequite
anti-immigrant
as
well). But when
crats and western Republicans to exclude
the
Black
Movement
and
its allies sought
Black and Brown recipients, in provito extend the welfare state to communisions FDR had never questioned.
Clintons proposal substituted for ties of colorwhen in the mid-1960s
AFDC the much more punitive Personal they sought to lift New Deal restrictions
Responsibility and Work Opportunity on social investment in those communiAct (PWORA), which effectively priva- ties many Whites got off the freedom
tized the welfare system. This was neo- train.
Neoliberalism gave its adherents perliberalism with a Democratic face.
mission
to ignore the others: the darkGeorge W. Bush implemented a harder
nations,
the poor, both of the United
core neoliberal agenda that outdid ReaStates
and
the
entire planet. It required
gan on several fronts. He attempted
colorblind
racial
ideology for this purto privatize Social Security. His effort
pose.
The
containment
of civil rights was
failed, but only because it sought to apply the same rough treatment to an en- not the goal of the neoliberal project. Indeed the neoliberal objective was larger

18 The Public Eye

than that. It was to dismantle the welfare

state, to limit taxation and other forms
of regulation of capital, and to ensure
the docility and desperation of the others: the poor, the workers who were increasingly people of color but also White
people, women, and even the middle
classes.

TOWARD A MARKET-BASED
HEGEMONY
This was the neoliberal agenda. Restricting the welfare state, abandoning
and punishing the poor, the neoliberal
argument went, was not about race, since
we are all colorblind now. These policies
were presented as an effort to treat everyone alike, to apply the same marketbased rules to all. If you disagreed with
this, you were the real racist.
Neoliberalism required a racial ideology that repudiated the movement agenda
of state-enforced equality and the extension of democratic rights to people of
color (women, labor, imperial subjects,
LGBTQ people...). The exhortation to be
colorblind avoided a regression to overt
White supremacy or a reversion to explicit policies of Jim Crow segregation.
Repelling, repressing, and rearticulating
the Black Movements (and allied movements) agendas would not be enough for
this purpose.
In order to achieve hegemony for the
neoliberal project of reinforced social inequality in a U.S. rid of its welfare state,
with all the redistributive dimensions of
social rights finally repudiated, it would
be necessary not only to oppose demands
for racial justice and racial democracy;
it would be necessary to take race off the
table. It would be necessary to become
colorblind.
Michael Omi is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies and the Associate Director of
the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive
Society (HIFIS) at the University of California, Berkeley. Howard Winant is Professor
of Sociology at the University of California,
Santa Barbara, where he is also affiliated
with the Black Studies, Chicana/o Studies,
and Asian American Studies departments.
Winant is the founding director of the University of California Center for New Racial Studies (UCCNRS), and the author of a number of
books, including The New Politics of Race:
Globalism, Difference, Justice (UMinn
Press, 2004) .

FALL 2014

BY DAVID BACON

Globalization and NAFTA Caused

Migration from Mexico
When NAFTA was passed two decades ago, its boosters promised it would bring First
World status for the Mexican people. Instead, it prompted a great migration north.

Rosario Ventura is a Triqui indignous immigrant from Oaxaca and lives in Madera, California. She and her husband, both farm workers, were strikers at a large
berry farm in Washington State last year and helped organize a new union, Familias Unidas por la Justicia/Families United for Justice. Photo by David Bacon.

ufino Domnguez, the former

coordinator of the Binational
Front of Indigenous Organizations, who now heads the Oaxacan Institute for Attention to
Migrants, estimates that there are about
500,000 indigenous people from Oaxaca
living in the U.S., 300,000 in California
alone.1
In Oaxaca, some towns have become

FALL 2014

depopulated, or are now made up of only

communities of the very old and very
young, where most working-age people
have left to work in the north. Economic
crises provoked by the North American
Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and other
economic reforms are now uprooting and
displacing these Mexicans in the countrys most remote areas, where people
still speak languages (such as Mixteco,

Zapoteco and Triqui) that were old when

Columbus arrived from Spain.2 There
are no jobs, and NAFTA forced the price
of corn so low that its not economically possible to plant a crop anymore,
Domnguez says. We come to the U.S. to
work because we cant get a price for our
product at home. Theres no alternative.
According to Rick Mines, author of the
2010 Indigenous Farm Worker Study,

Political Research Associates 19

the total population of Californias in- tility towards migrants, the starting point bated the treaty, then-Mexican Presidigenous Mexican farm workers is about must be an examination of the way U.S. dent Carlos Salinas de Gortari toured the
120,000 ... a total of 165,000 indigenous policies have produced migrationand United States, telling audiences unhappy
farm workers and family members in Cal- criminalized migrants.
at high levels of immigration that passifornia.3 Counting the many indigenous
Trade negotiations and immigration ing NAFTA would reduce it by providing
people living and working in urban ar- policy were formally joined together by employment for Mexicans in Mexico.
eas, the total is considerably higher. In- the Immigration Reform and Control Act Back home, he made the same argument.
digenous people made up 7% of Mexican (IRCA) of 1986. Immigrants rights activ- NAFTA, he claimed, would set Mexico on
migrants in 1991-3, the years just before ists campaigned against the law because a course to become a first-world nation.6
the passage of the North American Free it contained employer sanctions, pro- We did become part of the first world,
Trade Agreement. In 2006-8, they made hibiting employers for the first time on a says Juan Manuel Sandoval of Mexicos
up 29%four times more.4
federal level from hiring undocumented National Institute of Anthropology and
California has a farm labor force of workers and effectively criminalizing History. The back yard.7
about 700,000 workers, so the day is not work for the undocumented. IRCAs libfar off when indigenous Oaxacan mi- eral defenders argued its amnesty provi- INCREASING PRESSURE
grants may make up a majority. They are sion justified sanctions and militarizing NAFTA, however, did not lead to rising
the workforce that has been produced by the border,5 as well as new guest worker incomes and employment in Mexico,
NAFTA and the changand did not decrease
es in the global econothe flow of migrants.
my driven by free-marInstead, it became a
We come to the U.S. to work because we
ket policies. Further,
source of pressure on
the U.S. food system
Mexicans to migrate.
cant
get
a
price
for
our
product
at
home.
has long been depenThe treaty forced corn
dent on the influx of
Theres no alternative.
grown by Mexican
an
ever-changing,
farmers without subRufino Domnguez, director of the Oaxacan
newly-arrived group of
sidies to compete in
workers that sets the
Mexicos own market
Institute for Attention to Migrants
wages and working
with corn from huge
conditions at the entry
U.S. producers, who
level in the farm labor
had been subsidized by
market, Mines says.
the U.S. Agricultural exports to Mexico
The rock-bottom wages paid to this most programs. The bill eventually did enable more than doubled during the NAFTA
recent wave of migrantsOaxacas indig- more than 4 million people living in the years, from $4.6 to $9.8 billion annuenous peopleset the wage floor for all U.S. without immigration documents to ally. Corn imports rose from 2,014,000
the other workers in California farm la- gain permanent residence. Underscoring to 10,330,000 tons from 1992 to 2008.
bor, keeping the labor cost of California the broad bipartisan consensus support- Mexico imported 30,000 tons of pork
growers low, and their profits high.
ing it, the bill was signed into law by Ron- in 1995, the year NAFTA took effect.
ald Reagan.
By 2010, pork imports, almost all from
Few noted one other provision of the the U.S., had grown over 25 times, to
LINKING TRADE AND IMMIGRATION
U.S. trade and immigration policy are law. IRCA set up a Commission for the 811,000 tons. As a result, pork prices
linked. They are part of a single system, Study of International Migration and received by Mexican producers dropped
not separate and independent policies. Cooperative Economic Development 56%.8
Since NAFTAs passage in 1993, the U.S. to study the causes of immigration to
According to Alejandro Ramrez, genCongress has debated and passed sev- the United States. The commission eral director of the Confederation of Mexeral new trade agreementswith Peru, held hearings after the U.S. and Canada ican Pork Producers, We lost 4,000 pig
Jordan, Chile, and the Central American signed a bilateral free trade agreement, farms. Each 100 animals produce 5 jobs,
Free Trade Agreement. At the same time, and made a report to President George so we lost 20,000 farm jobs directly from
Congress has debated immigration policy H.W. Bush and Congress in 1990. It imports. Counting the 5 indirect jobs deas though those trade agreements bore found that the main motivation for com- pendent on each direct job, we lost over
no relationship to the waves of displaced ing to the U.S. was poverty. To slow or 120,000 jobs in total. This produces mipeople migrating to the U.S., looking halt the flow of migrants, it recommend- gration to the U.S. or to Mexican cities
for work. Meanwhile, heightened anti- ed that U.S. economic policy should a big problem for our country.9 Once
immigrant hysteria has increasingly de- promote a system of open trade ... the Mexican meat and corn producers were
monized those migrants, leading to mea- development of a U.S.-Mexico free trade driven from the market by imports, the
sures to deny them jobs, rights, or any area and its incorporation with Canada. Mexican economy was left vulnerable to
equality with people living in the com- But, it warned, It takes many years price changes dictated by U.S. agribusieven generationsfor sustained growth ness or U.S. policy. When the U.S. modmunities around them.
To resolve any of these dilemmas, from to achieve the desired effect.
ified its corn policy to encourage ethanol
The negotiations that led to NAFTA production, he charges, corn prices
adopting rational and humane immigration policies to reducing the fear and hos- started within months. As Congress de- jumped 100% in one year.10

20 The Public Eye

FALL 2014

NAFTA then prohibited price supports,

without which hundreds of thousands of
small farmers found it impossible to sell
corn or other farm products for what it
cost to produce them. Mexico couldnt
protect its own agriculture from the fluctuations of the world market. A global
coffee glut in the 1990s plunged prices
below the cost of production. A less entrapped government might have bought
the crops of Veracruz farmers to keep
them afloat, or provided subsidies for
other crops.
But once free-market structures were
in place prohibiting government intervention to help them, those farmers paid
the price. Campesinos from Veracruz,
as well as Oaxaca and other major cornproducing states, joined the stream of
workers headed north.11 There, they became an important part of the workforce
in U.S. slaughterhouses and other industries.
U.S. companies were allowed to own
land and factories, eventually anywhere
in Mexico. U.S.-based Union Pacific,
in partnership with the Larrea family,
one of Mexicos wealthiest, became the
owner of the countrys main north-south
rail line and immediately discontinued
virtually all passenger service.12 Mexican rail employment dropped from more
than 90,000 to 36,000. Railroad workers
mounted a wildcat strike to try to save
their jobs, but they lost and their union
became a shadow of its former self.
According to Garrett Brown, head of
the Maquiladora Health and Safety Network, the average Mexican wage was
23% of the U.S. manufacturing wage in
1975. By 2002, it was less than an eighth.
Brown says that after NAFTA, real Mexican wages dropped by 22%, while worker
productivity increased 45%.13

ATTRACTING INVESTORS, REPELLING

WORKERS
Low wages are the magnet used to attract
U.S. and other foreign investors. In midJune, 2006, Ford Corporation, already
one of Mexicos largest employers, announced it would invest $9 billion more
in building new factories.14 Meanwhile,
Ford closed 14 U.S. plants, eliminating
the jobs of tens of thousands of U.S. workers. Both moves were part of the companys strategic plan to cut labor costs and
move production. When General Motors
was bailed out by the U.S. government

FALL 2014

in 2008, it closed a dozen U.S. plants,

while its plans for building new plants
in Mexico went forward without hindrance.15 These policies displaced people, who could no longer make a living as
theyd done before. The rosy predictions
of NAFTAs boosters that it would raise
income and slow migration proved false.
The World Bank, in a 2005 study made
for the Mexican government, found that
the extreme rural poverty rate of around
37% in 1992-4, prior to NAFTA, jumped
to about 52% in 1996-8, after NAFTA
took effect. This could be explained, the
report said, mainly by the 1995 economic crisis, the sluggish performance
of agriculture, stagnant rural wages, and
falling real agricultural prices.16
By 2010, 53 million Mexicans were
living in poverty, according to the Monterrey Institute of Technologyhalf the
countrys population.17 The growth of
poverty, in turn, fueled migration. In
1990, 4.5 million Mexican-born people
lived in the U.S. A decade later, that
population more than doubled to 9.75
million, and in 2008 it peaked at 12.67
million. Approximately 9.4% of all Mexicans now live in the U.S., based on numbers from Pew Hispanic. About 5.7 million were able to get some kind of visa;
but another 7 million couldnt, and came
nevertheless.18
From 1982 through the NAFTA era,
successive economic reforms produced
migrants. The displacement had already grown so large by 1986 that the
commission established by IRCA was
charged with recommending measures
to halt or slow it. Its report urged that
migrant-sending countries should encourage technological modernization by
strengthening and assuring intellectual
property protection and by removing existing impediments to investment and
recommended that the United States
should condition bilateral aid to sending
countries on their taking the necessary
steps toward structural adjustment. The
IRCA commission report acknowledged
the potential for harm, noting (in the
mildest, most ineffectual language possible) that efforts should be made to ease
transitional costs in human suffering.19
In 1994, however, the year the North
American Free Trade Agreement took
effect, U.S. speculators began selling off
Mexican government bonds. According
to Jeff Faux, founding director the
Economic Policy Institute, a Washington,

DC-based progressive think tank,

NAFTA had created a speculative bubble
for Mexican assets that then collapsed
when the speculators cashed in.20 In
NAFTAs first year, 1994, one million
Mexicans lost their jobs when the
peso was devalued. To avert a flood of
capital to the north, then-U.S. Treasury
Secretary Robert Rubin engineered a
$20 billion loan to Mexico, which was
paid to bondholders, mostly U.S. banks.
In return, U.S. and British banks gained
control of the countrys financial system.
Mexico had to pledge its oil revenue to
pay off foreign debt, making the countrys
primary source of income unavailable for
the needs of its people.
As the Mexican economy, especially
the border maquiladora industry, became increasingly tied to the U.S. market, tens of thousands of Mexican workers lost jobs when the market shrank
during U.S. recessions in 2001 and 2008.
It is the financial crashes and the economic disasters that drive people to work
for dollars in the U.S., to replace life savings, or just to earn enough to keep their
family at home together, says Harvard
historian John Womack.21

IMMIGRANTS, MIGRANTS, OR
DISPLACED PEOPLE?
In the U.S. political debate, Veracruz
uprooted coffee pickers or unemployed
workers from Mexico City are called immigrants, because that debate doesnt
recognize their existence before they
leave Mexico. It is more accurate to call
them migrants, and the process migration, since that takes into account both
peoples communities of origin and those
where they travel to find work.
But displacement is an unmentionable
word in the Washington discourse. Not
one immigration proposal in Congress
in the quarter century since IRCA was
passed has tried to come to grips with the
policies that uprooted miners, teachers,
tree planters, and farmers. In fact, while
debating bills to criminalize undocumented migrants and set up huge guest
worker programs, four new trade agreements were introduced, each of which
has caused more displacement and more
migration.
David Bacon is a California writer and photographer. His latest book is The Right to
Stay Home (Beacon Press, 2013).

Political Research Associates 21

BY KIM PHILLIPS-FEIN

Friedrich von Hayek, Thomas Piketty,

and the Search for Political Economy
Seventy years after the Right embraced von Hayeks manifesto,
does Pikettys rock-star reception portend a new revolution?

European
economist
travels to America to give
a few lectures on his new
book, recently published
by a university press.
Although a successful
scholar, he is hardly a celebrity, especially in the United States. Yet almost as soon
as he arrives, this economist is swept
into a book tour exceeding any authors
wildest dreamscrowds of thousands
at his public talks, generous offers from
wealthy donors to continue and expand
the work, and reprints in popular magazines.
The story is drawn from the life of Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek,
who visited the United States in 1945 to
publicize his book The Road to Serfdom,
considered today as one of the foundational texts of neoliberalism. But it also
resonates with the more recent example
of Thomas Piketty, the French academic
whose 577-page Capital in the TwentyFirst Century has been on the New York
Times bestseller list for 16 weeks (as of
this writing) following its publication in
April 2014.1 Pikettys American tour this
past spring became a news story as much
as his book: he met with Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew and the Council of Economic Advisers and appeared on Stephen
Colbert, and Business Week ran a cover
feature on Pikettymania.
At first glance, Hayek and Piketty seem
to have nothing in common. Writing in
the wake of the Great Depression and
in the middle of World War II, Hayek
argued that even as the United States,
United Kingdom, and the USSR were allies in a fight against Nazi Germany, the
real threat to civilization was the move
toward economic planning and regulation embodied by the New Deal. We

22 The Public Eye

have progressively abandoned that freedom in economic affairs without which

personal and political freedom has never
existed in the past, he wrote.2 Pikettys
project is entirely different: it is to document the history of inequality over the
course of the 20th century; to show that
the gap between rich and poor (and especially between the very rich and the rest
of the society) has been widening rapidly,
especially in recent years; and to argue
that the general tendency of capitalism
itself may be to generate ever-higher levels of inequality unless political institutions and taxes exist to counteract this.
Hayek hardly saw economic inequality as
a problem; for Piketty, it is the primary
threat to social cohesion and democracy.
Yet the two actually have more in common than might appear, for both books
suggest the deeply political nature of economic life.
Hayeks American journey followed
several years of frustration for the Austrian economist. As chronicled by historian Angus Burgin in his study The
Great Persuasion, Hayek found himself
outmatched in the early 1930s by John
Maynard Keynes (his academic rival), as
Hayeks criticism of government involvement in the economy became increasingly out of place in the context of the
Great Depression. He began to search
for a way to update the old liberal creed
of economic liberalism and opposition to
the power of the state. As hard as it may
be to believe today (as neoliberalism occupies a dominant place in American
policy circles), neoliberal thought was
born out of a sense that the earlier wave
of economic liberalism had collapsed in
the Depression years.
Instead of rigidly insisting on economic
individualism, Hayek tried to reframe the

issues in terms of the need to protect the

fragile, creative spontaneity of the marketplace. The real danger of the welfare
state and economic planning, according
to Hayek, was that no matter how well-intentioned its advocates (the totalitarians
in our midst, as he put it) might be, they
would lead Britain and the United States
down a path ending in political disaster.3
His book had some difficulty finding
an American publisher but was eventually taken on by the University of Chicago
Press, which planned an initial print run
of 2,000 for release in September, 1944.
Front-page reviews in the New York Times
Book Review and other publications boosted interestand only a few weeks after
publication, the Press had to scramble to
get out a second, then a third, edition.4
Imagine the shy Austrians surprise
when he arrived in the United States for
a five-week book tour in April, 1945,
and was met by a crowd of 3,000 at an
early speaking engagement at New Yorks
Town Hall, also broadcast over the radio.5 Conservative businessmen who
had been deeply frustrated by the rise of
labor unions and expansion of government regulation during the New Deal had
been eager to find what one referred to as
a bible of free enterprise, a book that
could articulate the underlying principles
of capitalism in the rhetoric of freedom,
giving them a way of opposing the new
order without appearing motivated solely
by self-interest.6 Hoping to find ways to
limit labors reach and undermine the
welfare state, these businessmen were
thrilled to discover The Road to Serfdom.
The book also owed much of its success to Readers Digest, which published
a condensed version for its readership of
8 million people; Look magazine printed
a handy cartoon version, which was then

FALL 2014

picked up by General Electrics in-house Hayek, he was at odds with the econom- which everyone is intimately familiar,
magazine.7
ics profession even before his book was affecting our most basic choices about
Hayek was a little chagrined by this published, alienated even as a young as- work, consumption, family, and idensuccess; he worried that he would no lon- sistant professor at the Massachusetts tityand the economy is something that
ger be taken seriously by scholars, that Institute of Technology by its retreat into all activists in the unions and in politics
his admirers in the business community mathematics and avoidance of history of whatever stripe, as well as journalists,
had discarded the subtlety of his argu- and politics.
commentators and social scientists need
ments. But he was also happy to accept
Hayek became a theorist, even a polem- to understand.10
a positionfinanced by one of the early icist, eschewing narrow mathematical
The response to Piketty from liberal
conservative
audiences, eager
foundationsat
to find an analythe Committee of
sis deeper than
At first glance, Hayek and Piketty seem to have nothing
Social Thought
a Paul Krugman
in common. However, Pikettys success, like that of Hayek,
at the Univercolumn, reflects
sity of Chicago.8
not only the
comes in part because of his willingness to write about the
While a bit wary
economic polieconomy as a political space. As he suggests, economic
of his business
tics of our own
supporters, he
time: the stark,
inequality is a topic far too important to be left to
was also aware
growing separaeconomists. Its a subject with which everyone is intimately
of the potential
tion between the
for an alliance
very rich and the
familiar, affecting our most basic choices about work,
with them. As he
rest of American
consumption, family, and identity.
wrote in the prefsociety, a diviace to The Road to
sion that affects
Serfdom, When
everything from
a
professional
education and
student of social
health care to
affairs writes a
the very terms
political book,
of political parhis first duty is to
ticipation (and
say so. This is a
which may even
political book.9
be starting unIt might have
settle elites, such
been hard for
as those who
Hayek, writing
have greeted Pikin 1944, to imagettys work with
ine the world of
enthusiasm). It
2014 into which
also indicates a
Pikettys
book
longing,
howappeared. One
ever tentative, to
of Pikettys major
bring these ecoclaims is that the
nomic questions
level of inequalinto
political
ity in a society is
debate in ways
Friedrich von Hayek came to the U.S. in 1945; Pikettymania, by contrast, has been a phenomdetermined by
that reflect their
enon of 2014. Photos courtesy of the Ludwig von Mises Institute (left) and Sue Gardner (right).
politics and socentrality to our
cial normsthe
livesreviving
deregulation of
an approach to
finance, the political mobilization of the arguments but also by and large avoiding economic life that sees it shot through
wealthy, and even the dominance of the data altogether. Overlooking any pos- with ideas about justice and indeed even
free-market ideas that Hayek once cham- sibility that corporations or inequality freedom.
pionedall of which have given rise to might limit freedom, Hayek argued that
the ascendance of the super-elite.
the heavy hand of the state was all that
The differences between the two books people had to fear.
Kim Phillips-Fein is the author of Invisare not just about their arguments, or
However, Pikettys success, like that of ible Hands: The Businessmens Crusade
even their politics. Theyre also method- Hayek, comes in part because of his will- Against the New Deal (W.W. Norton,
ological: Piketty is an empiricist, whose ingness to write about the economy as a 2009). She teaches history at the Gallatin
major contribution lies in his assembling political space. As he suggests, economic School of Individualized Study at NYU, and
of massive quantities of statistical infor- inequality is a topic far too important to in 2014-15 is a Cullman Center Fellow at the
mation about economic inequality. Like be left to economists. Its a subject with New York Public Library.

FALL 2014

Political Research Associates 23

endnotes

Hardisty, p.2
1. See Stephen Steinberg, Turning
Back: The Retreat from Racial Justice in
American Thought and Policy (Boston:
Beacon Press, 2000); Jean Hardisty,
Mobilizing Resentment (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1999); Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons, Right-Wing Populism
in America: Too Close for Comfort (New
York,: Guilford Press, 2000); Joseph
Crespino, In Search of Another Country:
Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution (Princeton University
Press, 2007).
2. David Harvey, A Brief History of
Neoliberalism (Oxford University Press,
2005), 19-38.
3. Noam Chomsky, Profit over People:
Neoliberalism and Global Order (New
York: Seven Stories Press, 1999), 1962.
4. Roger Bybee, TPP: Trumping
Public Priorities, Dollars and Sense,
March/April 2014.
5. Joseph Stiglitz, On the Wrong
Side of Globalization, New York Times,
Mar. 16, 2014, http://opinionator.
blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/15/onthe-wrong-side-of-globalization/.
6. DeLauro, Miller Lead 51 House
Dems Telling President They Will Not
Support Outdated Fast Track for TransPacific Partnership, accessed Aug.
16, 2014, http://delauro.house.gov/
index.php?option=com_content%20
&view=article&id=1455.
7. Carey L. Biron, U.S. A Favourite
Roost of Vulture Funds, Inter Press
Service (IPS), Nov. 7, 2013. Also see
Peter Stone, The Vulture-Fund Billionaire is the GOPs Go-To Guy on
Wall Street, Mother Jones, Oct. 4,
2013, http://www.motherjones.com/
politics/2013/07/paul-singer-elliottrepublican-fundraiser.
8. Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go To Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown
(London: Verso, 2013), 1-2.
9. The Dodd-Frank Act was designed
to rein in the financial sector that has
been made dangerously unfettered by
the defanging and ultimate abolishment of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999.
Lobbyists for the financial industry
have largely succeeded in getting
Dodd-Frank watered down, especially
targeting the powers of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the
brainchild of now-Senator Elizabeth
Warren. See Bob Ivry, The Seven Sins
of Wall Street: Big Banks, Their Washington Lackeys, and the next Financial
Crisis (Washington, DC: Public Affairs,
2014).
10. Martin Gilens, Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political
Power in America (Princeton University
Press, 2012).

Lombos, Leberstein, and Mndez,

p.4
1. Casey Ross, State Investigates Use
of PA Shelter Workers Hired for Project
at Copley Marriott, Boston.com, Jan.
20, 2012, http://www.boston.com/
business/articles/2012/01/20/use_
of_shelter_workers_at_copley_marriott_project_investigated/?page=2.

24 The Public Eye

2. Heather Rowe, 2012 Annual Report, Massachusetts Joint Enforcement Task Force on the Underground
Economy and Employee Misclassification, http://www.mass.gov/lwd/eolwd/jtf/annual-report-2012.pdf.
3. Casey Ross, Marriott Copley Place
Project Flouted Pay Law, Boston Globe,
Sept. 4, 2012, http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2012/09/03/investigators-find-widespread-labor-violations-copley-marriott-renovation/
iIRlNeRovG05Dkbta3rOTI/story.html.
4. Rowe, 2012 Annual Report.
5. Rowe, 2012 Annual Report.

Jaffe, p.6
1. Katherine Fung, Fired NYT Editor
Jill Abramsons Pay Was Not Comparable, Morning Joe Hosts Say, Huffington Post, May 15, 2014, http://www.
huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/15/
jill-abramson-equal-pay-gapgender_n_5330222.html.
2. Sarah Jaffe, Trickle-Down Feminism, Dissent: A Quarterly of Politics
and Culture, Winter 2013, http://www.
dissentmagazine.org/article/trickledown-feminism.
3. Barbarah Ehrenreich and Arlie
Russell Hochschild, Maid to Order,
in Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and
Sex Workers in the New Economy, ed.
Barbarah Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell
Hochschild (New York: Holt Paperbacks, 2004).
4. John A. Logan, Once Again, The
Roberts Court Rules Against American
Workers, The Hill, July 2, 2014, http://
thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/
labor/211138-once-again-the-robertscourt-rules-against-american-workers.
5. Tressie McMillan Cottom, The
Atlantic Article, Trickle Down Feminism, and My Twitter Mentions. God
Help Us All, Tressiemc, June 23, 2012,
http://tressiemc.com/2012/06/23/
the-atlantic-article-trickle-down-feminism-and-my-twitter-mentions-godhelp-us-all.
6. Melissa Gira Grant, Playing the
Whore: The Work of Sex Work (New
York: Verso, 2014).
7. Simon Marks, Somaly Mam: The
Holy Saint (and Sinner) of Sex Trafficking, Newsweek, May 21, 2014, http://
www.newsweek.com/2014/05/30/
somaly-mam-holy-saint-and-sinnersex-trafficking-251642.html.
8. Anne Elizabeth Moore, Heres
Why It Matters When a Human
Rights Crusader Builds Her Advocacy on Lies, Salon, May 28, 2014,
http://www.salon.com/2014/05/28/
heres_why_it_matters_when_a_human_rights_crusader_builds_her_advocacy_on_lies.

Ben-Moshe and Meiners, p.8

1. The goal was that those housed in
ATC would be put on electronic monitoring. See Fiscal Year 2013 Budget,
Office of Governor Pat Quinn, http://
ftpcontent4.worldnow.com/kfvs12/
news/ FINAL%20Efficiencies%20
Fact%20Sheet%20-%20FY2013%20
Budget.pdf.
2. Quinn Gets Go-Ahead to Close

Illinois Prisons, CBS Chicago, Dec.

19, 2012, http://chicago.cbslocal.
com/2012/12/19/quinn-gets-goahead-to-close-illinois-prisons.
3. Quinn Confirms Plan to Close
14 IL Facilities, WISTV, Feb. 23,
2012,
http://www.wistv.com/story/16989115/quinn-confirms-plan-toclose-14-il-facilities.
4. Fiscal Year 2013 Budget.
5. Governor Quinns Rebalancing
Initiative, Nov. 2011, http://cgfa.
ilga.gov/upload/GovernorsDDandMHCRebalancingInitiative.pdf
6. Governor Quinns Rebalancing
Initiative.
7. Dana Ballout, Chicagos Mental
Health Clinics Closings: 20 Months
Later, Al Jazeera America, Dec. 26,
2013, http://america.aljazeera.com/
watch/shows/the-stream/multi media/chicago-mental-healthclosings20monthsafter.html.
8. Sara Olkon, Ida B. Wells Complex Set to Close, But Some Residents
Arent Ready to Leave, Chicago Tribune, Aug. 11, 2008, http://articles.
chicagotribune.com/2008-08-11/
news/0808100304_1_mixed-incomepublic-housing-ida-b-wells.
9. Nicole D. Porter, On the Chopping
Block 2012: State Prison Closings, The
Sentencing Project, Dec. 2012, http://
sentencingproject.org/doc/publications/On%20the%20Chopping%20
Block%202012.pdf.
10. Emma Brown, D.C. to Close
15 Underenrolled Schools, Washington Post, Jan. 17, 2013, http://
www.washingtonpost.com/local/
education/chancellor-kaya-hen derson-names-15-dc-schools-onclosure-list/2013/01/17/e04202fa6023-11e2-9940-6fc488f3fecd_story.
html. See also http://dianeravitch.
net/2013/01/13/los-angeles-community-fights-to-block-school-closing/.
11. Edward Goetz, New Deal Ruins:
Race, Economic Justice, and Public
Housing Policy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013).
12. Erica Goode, U.S. Prison Populations Decline, Reflecting New Approach to Crime, New York Times,
July 25, 2013, http://www.nytimes.
com/2013/07/26/us/us-prison-populations-decline-reflecting-new-approach-to-crime.html.
13. Liat Ben-Moshe, Chris Chapman,
and Allison C. Carey, eds., Disability
Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada (New
York: Palgrave McMillan Press, 2014).
14. Bernard E. Harcourt, Reducing
Mass Incarceration: Lessons from the
Deinstitutionalization of Mental Hospitals in the 1960s, Ohio State Journal
of Criminal Law 9:1 (2011): 54.
15. David L. Braddock et al., The State
of the States in Developmental Disabilities (Washington, DC: University of
Colorado Department of Psychiatry
and Coleman Institute for Cognitive
Disabilities, 2011).
16. Allison C. Carey, On the Margins of
Citizenship: Intellectual Disability and
Civil Rights in Twentieth-Century America (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 2009).
17. Paul L. Ahmed, State Mental Hospitals: What Happens When They Close,

eds. Paul L. Ahmed and Stanley C.

Plog (New York: Plenum Medical Book
Company, 1976); James W. Trent Jr.,
Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of
Mental Retardation in the United States
(Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1995).
18. David L. Braddock et al., The State
of the States in Developmental Disabilities.
19. Loc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor:
The Neoliberal Government and Social
Insecurity (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2009).
20. Jerome G. Miller, Last One Over
the Wall: The Massachusetts Experiment
in Closing Reform Schools (Columbus:
Ohio State University Press, 1991).

Clarkson, p.12
1. Jeff Sharlet, The Family: The Secret
Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (New York: HarperCollins,
2008), 381.
2. William J. Clinton, Statement on
Signing the Consolidated Appropriations Act, FY 2001, Dec. 21, 2000,
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/
index.php?pid=1073.
3. Jeff Sharlet, The Family.
4. David Kuo, Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction (New
York: Free Press, 2007), 84-86, Kindle
Edition.
5. Bill Berkowitz, Tilting at FaithBased Windmills: Over a Year in the
Life of President Bushs Faith-based
Initiative, The Public Eye, Summer
2002,
http://www.publiceye.org/
magazine/v16n2/Berkowitz.html.
6. Federal Centers for Faith-based
and Neighborhood Partnerships,
http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/ofbnp/offices/federal.
7. David Kuo, Tempting Faith; see also
Ted Slutz, Congregations and Charitable Choice, The Polis Center, Religion
& Community (vol. 4, #5, 2000).
8. Bill Anderson, Correction from
Pastor Rick Warren, LewRockwell.
com, Feb. 2, 2008, http://www.
lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/correctionfrom-pastor-rick-warren/.
9. Scott Horton, Inside C Street: Six
Questions for Jeff Sharlet, Harpers,
Sept. 29, 2010, http://harpers.org/
blog/2010/09/inside-c-street-sixquestions-for-jeff-sharlet/.
10. Frederick Clarkson, All in The
Family, The Public Eye, Summer 2008,
http://www.publiceye.org/magazine/
v23n2/book_allin_the_family.html.
11. Sharlet, The Family, 382.
12. Eyal Press, Lead Us Not into
Temptation, The American Prospect,
Dec. 19, 2001, http://prospect.org/article/lead-us-not-temptation.
13. Testimony of the Rev. Barry W.
Lynn, Executive Director Americans
United For Separation of Church and
State, U.S. House of Representatives
Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on Constitution, Civil Rights,
and Civil Liberties, Nov. 18, 2010.
http://judiciary.house.gov/_files/
hearings/pdf/Lynn101118.pdf.
14. Kuo, Tempting Faith, 208-209.
15. Kuo, Tempting Faith.

FALL 2014

16. Bill Berkowitz, Faith-Based Initiatives in the Obama Administration?,

Religion Dispatches, June 15, 2009;
Rick Cohen, Fides: Faith and Money
in the Bush Administration, NonProfit Quarterly, Mar. 21, 2006; Peter
Wallsten, Tom Hamburger, and Nicholas Riccardi, Bush Rewarded by Black
Pastors Faith: His stands, backed by
funding of ministries, redefined the
GOPs image with some clergy, Los
Angeles Times, Jan. 18, 2005, http://
articles.latimes.com/2005/jan/18/
nation/na-faith18.
17. Andy Kopsa, Obamas Evangelical
Gravy Train, Nation, July 2014, http://
www.thenation.com/article/180435/
obamas-evangelical-gravy-train.
18. Frederick Clarkson, From RightWing to Pro-Choice: The Shifting Goalposts of Abortion Neutrality, Religion
Dispatches, Dec. 9, 2009, http://religiondispatches.org/from-right-wingto-pro-choice-the-shifting-goalpostsof-abortion-neutrality/; and Frederick
Clarkson, Anti-Abortion Strategy in
the Age of Obama, The Public Eye,
Winter 2009, http://www.politicalresearch.org/2009/12/01/anti-abortion-strategy-in-the-age-of-obama-2/;
see also Frederick Clarkson, More
Creeping Religious Rightism in the
Democratic Party, Talk to Action, Dec.
12, 2009, http://www.talk2action.
org/story/2009/12/12/1666/2372.
19. Sharlet, The Family, 386.

Strauss, p.14
1. Ashlea Ebeling, Estate Tax Repeal
in North Carolina Means Big Tax Savings For Some, Forbes, July 30, 2013,
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ashleaebeling/2013/07/30/estate-tax-repealin-north-carolina-means-big-tax-savings-for-some.
2. Cedric Johnson, Eliminating
Estate Tax Provides Tax Cut to North
Carolinas
Wealthiest
Individuals, The Progressive Pulse, May 8,
2013,
http://pulse.ncpolicywatch.
org/2013/05/08/eliminating-estatetax-provides-tax-cut-to-north-carolinas-wealthiest-individuals.
3. Lucy Butcher, NAACP Plans
Civil Disobedience at General Assembly Monday Evening, The Carolina
Mercury, Apr. 29, 2013, http://www.
carolinamercury.com/2013/04/
naacp-to-lead-protest-at-general-assembly-this-evening.
4. Kelly Phillips Erb, NC Lawmakers

Reckon with the Three Rs: Reading,

Writing, & (Tax) Reform, Forbes, Aug.
6, 2013, http://www.forbes.com/
sites/kellyphillipserb/2013/08/06/nclawmakers-reckon-with-the-three-rsreading-writing-tax-reform.
5. Matea Gold, In N.C., Conservative Donor Art Pope Sits at Heart of
Government He Helped Transform,
Washington Post, July 19, 2014,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
politics/in-nc-conservative-donorart-pope-sits-at-heart-of-governmenthe-helped-transform/2014/07/19/
eece18ec-0d22-11e4-b8e5d0de80767fc2_story.html.
6. Chris Kromm, After Tumultuous
Reign, Art Pope Steps Down As NC
Budget Chief, The Institute for Southern Studies, Aug. 7, 2014, http://www.
southernstudies.org/2014/08/aftertumultuous-reign-art-pope-stepsdown-as-nc-b.html.
7. Andy Kroll, This is What a Millionaire Calling In His Chits Looks
Like, Mother Jones, June 14, 2013,
h t t p : //w w w . m o t h e r j o n e s . c o m /
mojo/2013/06/art-pope-north-carolina-judicial-elections-public-money.
8. Matea Gold, In N.C., Conservative Donor Art Pope Sits at Heart of
Government He Helped Transform,
Washington Post, July 19, 2014,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
politics/in-nc-conservative-donorart-pope-sits-at-heart-of-governmenthe-helped-transform/2014/07/19/
eece18ec-0d22-11e4-b8e5d0de80767fc2_story.html.
9. 14 Point Peoples Agenda
for North Carolina, North Carolina NAACP, http://www.naacpnc.
org/14_point_agenda.
10. NCAE Wins Fight for Students
and Public Education in North Carolina Vouchers Declared Unconstitutional! North Carolina Association
of Educators, http://www.ncae.org/
whats-new/ncae-wins-fight-for-students-and-public-education-in-northcarolina-vouchers-declared-unconstitutional.
11. NCAE Wins Fight for Students
and Public Education in North Carolina.
12. Sue Sturgis, NC GOP Mayor
Marches to DC to Urge Medicaid Expansion, Prevention of Medical Deserts, The Institute for Southern Studies,
July 14, 2014, http://www.southernstudies.org/2014/07/nc-gop-mayormarches-to-dc-to-urge-medicaid-ex-

pans.html
13. Hyun Namkoong, A Conservative Mayor Fights to Expand Medicaid in North Carolina, NPR, Aug.1,
2014,
http://www.npr.org/blogs/
health/2014/08/01/336907606/aconservative-mayor-fights-toexpand-medicaid-in-north-carolina.

Bacon, p.19
1. Eric Hershberg and Fred Rosen,
Turning the Tide? in Latin America
After Neoliberalism: Turning the Tide in
the 21st Century, eds. Eric Hershberg
and Fred Rosen (New York: New Press,
2006), 23.
2. John P. Schmal, Oaxaca: Land
of Diversity, LatinoLA!, Jan. 28,
2007, http://www.latinola.com/story.
php?story=3908.
3. Richard Mines, Sandra Nichols,
and David Runsten, Californias Indigenous Farmworkers: Final Report
of the Indigenous Farmworker Study
(IFS) To the California Endowment,
Jan. 2010, http://www.indigenousfarmworkers.org/IFS%20Full%20Report%20_Jan2010.pdf.
4. Mines, Nichols, and Runsten,
California Indigenous Farmworkers
Final Report of the Indigenous Farmworker Study (IFS) To the California
Endowment.
5. Brad Plummer, Congress Tried
to Fix Immigration Back in 1986.
Why Did It Fail? Washington Post,
Jan. 30, 2013, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/
wp/2013/01/30/in-1986-congresstried-to-solve-immigration-whydidnt-it-work.
6. David Clark Scott, Salinas Plays
It Cool After Big Win on NAFTA,
Christian Science Monitor, Nov.
19, 1993, http://www.csmonitor.
com/1993/1119/19014.html.
7. Juan Manuel Sandoval, interview
with David Bacon, 2006.
8. David Bacon, The Right to Stay
Home: How US Policy Drives Mexican
Migration (Boston: Beacon Press,
2013).
9. Bacon, The Right to Stay Home.
10. Bacon, The Right to Stay Home.
11. David Bacon, Illegal People: How
Globalization Creates Migration and
Criminalizes Immigrants (Boston: Beacon Press, 2008), 63.
12. Bacon, Illegal People, 58.

13. Bacon, Illegal People, 59.

14. Elizabeth
Malkin,
Detroit:
Far South, New York Times,
Jul. 21, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/21/busin e s s /wo r l d b u s i n e s s / 2 1 a u to .
html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.
15. Paul Roderick Gregory, Outsourcer-In-Chief: Obama Of General
Motors, Forbes, Aug. 12, 2012, http://
www.forbes.com/sites/paulroderickgregory/2012/08/12/outsourcer-inchief-obama-of-general-motors.
16. Jos Mara Caballero et al. for
the World Bank, Mexico: Income Generation and Social Protection for the
Poor, Volume IV: A Study of Rural Poverty in Mexico, Aug. 2005, (accessed via
https://openknowledge.worldbank.
org/handle/10986/8286), 9-11.
17. Richard Wells, 3 Ways To Compete Sustainably: Lessons from
Mexico, GreenBiz.com, Oct. 9,
2013,
http://www.greenbiz.com/
blog/2013/10/09/3-ways-competesustainably-lessons-mexico.
18. Bacon, The Right to Stay Home.
19. Bacon, Illegal People, 60-61.
20. Bacon, Illegal People, 61.
21. Bacon, Illegal People, 64.

Phillips-Fein, p.22
1. Best Sellers, New York Times, accessed Sept. 14, 2014, http://www.
nytimes.com/best-sellers-books/
hardcover-nonfiction/list.html#.
2. Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, 1994 ed. (University of Chicago
Press, 1944), 16.
3. Hayek, Road to Serfdom, 199.
4. Bruce Caldwell, Introduction,
in The Road to Serfdom,Text and Documents, ed. Bruce Caldwell (University
of Chicago Press, 2007), 18-20.
5. Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2012), 88.
6. Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands
(W.W. Norton, 2009), 30.
7. Burgin, Great Persuasion, 89.
8. Burgin, Great Persuasion, 100-1.
9. Hayek, Road to Serfdom, xlv.
10. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the
Twenty-First Century (Belknap Press,
2014), 577.

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The Art of Activism

Spotlighting the efforts of artists and organizations who are engaged in the struggle for
social justice and are helping build the movement through their work.
For more than 30 years, David
working conditions in CaliforBacon has been writing about
nia, and most people I met lookand photographing people who
ing at the show had actually been
are displaced by poverty in Mexthere, many as workers. The imico and choose to cross into the
ages, therefore, underline the
United States in search of a betneed to change reality, and apter life. David writes:
preciate our mutual humanity
For me, photography is a
and the importance of our labor.
cooperative project. For over a
For three decades, Ive used a
decade, Ive worked with the
method that combines photoBinational Front of Indigenous
graphs with interviews and perOrganizations, a Mexican misonal histories. Part of the purgrant organization, and Calipose is the reality checkthe
fornia Rural Legal Assistance to
documentation of social reality,
document this contradiction.
including poverty, homelessThe photographs shown on the En los Campos del Norte (In the Fields of the North) is an exhibition ness, migration, and displaceborder wall, En los Campos of photographs of farm workers in the U.S., almost all migrants from ment. But this documentation,
del Norte (In the Fields of the Mexico, taken by David Bacon (shown here). The photgraphs are carried out over a long period of
North), are drawn from this hung on the iron bars of the border wall between Mexico and the time, also presents some of the
long-term project. They show U.S., in Playas de Tijuana on the Mexican side.
political and economic alternapoverty, the lack of housing for
tives proposed by people who
many people, and the systematic exploitation of immigrant
are often shut out of public debate. It examines their efforts to
labor in the fields. But through the photographs and accomwin the power to put some of these alternatives into practice.
panying oral histories, migrants also analyze their situation.
I believe documentary photographers stand on the side of soThey demand respect for their culture, basic rights, and greatcial justicewe should be involved in the world and unafraid
er social equality. People in Tijuana are pretty familiar with
to try to change it.

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