Neoliberalism, Racial Violence and a Virus
Neoliberalism, Racial Violence and a Virus
Richard Gale and Gary Null PhD
Progressive Radio Network, June 9, 2020
The combination of the coronavirus pandemic and the eruption of large protests across the nation over the police murder of George Floyd and law enforcement’s culture of racial violence is exposing the systemic hypocrisies among Democrats and Republicans alike. Liberal Democrats have been voicing their approval for the lockdown and social distancing to curb the spread of the CoV19 virus in defiance of Trump’s egging on the Red states to reopen for business. Yet at the same time Democrats are pulling their weight behind the large gatherings of protesters. Over the weekend, estimates between 100,000 and 200,000 joined demonstrations in Washington DC. This would seem to contradict the benefits of lockdown guidelines.
On the other side of the aisle, the GOP and its conservative supporters undermine the severity of the COVID’s risks and favor a return to business and life as usual. Now as the demonstrations continue to escalate, we find Trump’s base criticizing demonstrators for endangering the public health by disregarding the lockdown. This bizarre Kaftaesque standoff between the political Left and Right is a sad theatrical tragedy because a critically important villain behind both the recession due to the shut down of business and the rise in a new civil rights protests is missing from the stage. That is, the neoliberal regime of capital that today controls both parties.
The mainstream media, thoroughly controlled by neoliberalism’s corporate power brokers, ignores the role Wall Street and the mega corporations hold to manufacture the narrative to keep the nation divided. The culprit is not the deep racial divides and prejudices in the country, but the nightmarish complex of capitalism that profits from keeping the structure of these divisions in place. It is neither the neoliberalism’s pawns on the Left or the Right. It finds its early predecessors in the British East India Trading Company, the European colonial Opium Wars and a primitive English neoliberalism that exploited the Irish potato famine. Each are examples of a proto-neoliberalism benefitting from its efforts to ghettoize non-European populations and keep them subservient and impoverished for colonial abuse and imperial growth. This is the same neoliberal game plan that has lingered across the US since Reagan but today it is far more sophisticated and has fully captured Washington and state governments.
Although the Occupy generation is fully awake to the real miscreants and parasites behind the riots, it has now taken the spark of a racially motivated murder to trigger demonstrations and riots. The Occupy youth understood neoliberalism’s fueling poverty, racism and the collapse of a middle class. Strapped with decades’ worth of student debt and poor credit, their future seemed to lead only towards low paying jobs and a life defined by inequality.
Geopolitical researcher Tony Cartalucci captures the neoliberal underpinnings of our racist culture when he recently wrote,
“Deeply rooted racism in the US is just one of many symptoms of an overall desire for hegemony and the notions of racial, political, and cultural supremacy that underpin it. Until this is addressed, racism will continue, with only the most superficial and unsustainable efforts made to stop it.”
Today neoliberalism’s institutionalized violence pervades all of American society. Its racism reaches into poorer neighborhoods where the junk food industry dominates. Poor Blacks, Hispanics and Whites are forced to go on public assistance but then are in turn condemned for doing so. A private prison system dependent upon keeping incarceration centers at full occupancy targets poorer minorities whose lives are regarded as dispensable. The ghettoization of Detroit, Camden, Baltimore and the rust cities of the Mid-West are all neoliberal success stories following the out-sourcing of jobs that commenced with Clinton and his Wall Street cronies.
Overdue payments for auto and student loans, mortgages, credit cards and medical bills are piling up for tens of millions of Americans. Endemic to the crisis is securing a home to live with sense of dignity due to the absolute control landlords have over rentals. For the past 60 years minorities have suffered from bank redlining that keeps them imprisoned in low value neighborhoods. These are all instruments of neoliberalism’s machinery.
Yet perhaps the most egregious of neoliberalism’s vulture capitalism is equity partnerships. This weapon of economic mass destruction is behind the flurry of recent retail store bankruptcies and the loss of millions upon millions of jobs that were exported overseas. As we speak, we are challenged with more advanced and efficient automation, artificial intelligence and robotics to replace even more jobs. These too are weapons of neoliberalism that has led to the ghettoization of America.
The question that keeps us all at the edge of our seats is whether the revolt underway in America will bring forth meaningful change and constructive reform. History might teach us otherwise. Millions around the globe demonstrated against the US invasion of Iraq, but it didn’t mean a damn thing. Similarly the 1992 beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles, Occupy, the birth of Black Lives Matter in the wake of the police murder of 18 year old Michael Brown in Fergusson, and the nation-wide protests against the Trump administration produced no realistic policy change in Washington or state legislators. People are still being segregated by fast food chains, class disparities in funding public education, health insurance, bank and credit card lenders. The neoliberal agenda assures the media will not educate us in these matters. This is why a mass boycott and protest against all of the mainstream media networks is long overdue.
Finally, the neoliberal agenda has mastered the art of profiting from crises and catastrophes. The protests may only turn out to be side spectacles. As we have witnessed, the emergency handling of the pandemic and its impact on the economy became another opportunity for both parties to fleece taxpayers and increase the elites’ coffers with an insane bailout. Hopefully the failures for reform during other times of crisis and protest have accumulated within the deeper recesses of the nation’s unconscious and is reaching a tipping point where real change is finally at hand.
