EMBEDDING THE ECONOMY–WITH CARE
‘It’s the economy, stupid.’ The catchphrase grabs your attention with a jolt. It was dreamed up by a US political fixer named James Carville to help get his boss Bill Clinton elected to the US presidency way back in 1992. It worked and Clinton carried on the globalization-austerity-privatization-internment policies of the preceding Reagan and Bush administrations, all with a Democratic ‘progressive’ gloss.
Like many political slogans it hid more than it revealed. It implied a Clinton administration could ‘fix’ the economy and address the concerns of the multitude who felt excluded from that most elusive of fantasies: The American Dream. Prosperity for all was just around the corner.
These were the halcyon days of corporate globalization. But Clinton and Blair’s ‘third way’ idea that you could take off the sharp edges of the neoliberal austerity championed by Reagan and Thatcher, while maintaining robust capitalism-off the-leash growth, proved pretty small beer. The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank
