Gene Sperling and the Neoliberal God that Prevailed

Gene Sperling and the Neoliberal God that Prevailed

Gene Sperling and the Neoliberal God that Prevailed

Today, Obama appointed Gene Sperling to succeed Larry Summers as head of the National Economic Council, returning him to the position he held during the Clinton administration. In the interim, Sperling has been a fairly typical Establishment factotum, holding spots at the Brookings Institution, Bloomberg News, Goldman Sachs, the Council on Foreign Relations, and, since 2008, the Treasury Department, as a senior adviser to Timothy Geithner. Geithner brought Sperling along to help defend a weak regulatory scheme for failing banks, in order to avoid nationalizing them. Sperling was an architect of the tax cut extensions for the richest Americans but, as Matt Yglesias pointed out, has also advocated a more progressive tax code and stronger social safety net.

In the beginning of 2006, Jeff Faux wrote an article in Dissent warning of a looming economic crisis?a ?prospect [that] has scarcely been noticed in the mainstream political debate.? Faux worried that the Democratic Party lacked economic leaders with the foresight to acknowledge fissures in the American economy.

[As] the Democrats have become more dependent on financing from the rich and globally connected, the party?s Washington policy apparatus?dominated by Clinton New Democrats?tend to avoid thoughts that give discomfort to the multinational investor class. The result is that the ideas upon which the Democrats are planning for their next chance to rule do not reach the scale of the problems the country faces.

To Faux, Gene Sperling exemplified the financially connected New Democrat: ?His views are as representative of the Democratic establishment?s thinkers as you can get.? In his book The Pro-Growth Progressive, Sperling acknowledged the downward spiral facing U.S. workers in an open global market, but suggested we mitigate the problem through invisible-handed policies that rely on corporate benevolence. ?U.S. companies who argued alongside us that China?s WTO entry would bring American values and labor standards to China should help ensure that increased economic engagement moves China in that direction by adopting voluntary codes of conduct, monitoring factories, and standing up to worker suppression.?

Faux quipped in response, ?Had we waited for the robber barons of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to voluntarily improve the conditions of labor in America, we?d still be employing twelve-year-olds in coal mines.? He concluded,

One has the impression that Sperling does see bad times ahead, but to fully acknowledge the problem would require a political aggressiveness that the party?s generals and financiers would rather avoid. So, in the end, Sperling pretty much leaves us where we began: facing an inevitable crisis in living standards that the politicians are loath to admit and for which therefore the people are unprepared.

Sperling might not be the lackey for Wall Street that some are making him out to be?former JP Morgan executive and new White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley, who ?aggressively? opposed the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, fits that bill much better?and he holds out for the American vision ?that growth and upward mobility would ensure a broad middle class that always has room for those willing to work and seek new opportunities.? That does nothing to change his economic ideas, or the meaning of his appointment on the heels of Summers’s departure: the reinvigoration of the neoliberal god that prevailed.