Progressive Policy Institute, the Clinton think tank. It was a book
you could buy at airport newsstands, part of the campaign literature
describing the Clinton administration’s program. It has a section on
“entrepreneurial economics,” which is economics that’s going to
avoid the pitfalls of the right and the left.
It gives up these old-fashioned liberal ideas about entitlement and
welfare mothers having a right to feed their children—that’s all
passé. We’re not going to have any more of that stuff. We now have
“enterprise economics,” in which we improve investment and
growth. The only people we want to help are workers and the firms
in which they work.
According to this picture, we’re all workers. There are firms in
which we work. We would like to improve the firms in which we
work, like we’d like to improve our kitchens, get a new
refrigerator.
There’s somebody missing from this story—there are no
managers, no bosses, no investors. They don’t exist. It’s just
workers and the firms in which we work. All the administration’s
interested in is helping us folks out there.
The word entrepreneurs shows up once, I think. They’re the
people who assist the workers and the firms in which they work.
The word profits also appears once, if I recall. I don’t know how
that sneaked in—that’s another dirty word, like class.
Or take the word jobs. It’s now used to mean profits. So when,
say, George [H. W.] Bush took off to Japan with Lee Iacocca and the
rest of the auto executives, his slogan was Jobs, jobs, jobs. That’s
what he was going for.
We know exactly how much George Bush cares about jobs. All
you have to do is look at what happened during his presidency, when
the number of unemployed and underemployed officially reached
about seventeen million or so—a rise of eight million during his term
of office.
He was trying to create conditions for exporting jobs overseas.
He continued to help out with the undermining of unions and the
lowering of real wages. So what does he mean when he and the
media shout, “Jobs, jobs, jobs”? It’s obvious: “Profits, profits,
profits.” Figure out a way to increase profits.
The idea is to create a picture among the population that we’re
all one happy family. We’re America, we have a national interest,
we’re working together. There are us nice workers, the firms in
ann
(Ann)
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