Neoliberalism, Global Recession and the American Inner Cities. By Renaldo C. McKenzie

 

In the wake of the global recession that began in 2008, the global embrace of neoliberalism left scars on the international economy and has economically eviscerated the inner cities of the United States and disenfranchised the individuals who reside in such areas.  David Moss observed that the post-industrial economic failure of the early 21st century involved and insidious interplay between bank failure, deregulation and racial/social inequity.  From the standpoint of a Jamaican national on asylum in North America living in an urbanized environment, personal savings as a percentage of disposable income has been falling steadily since its high point of 13.7 percent.  Since the 1980s, it has declined to such an extent that today, personal savings, as a percentage of disposable income stands at -2.9 percent.  Correspondingly, over the last thirty years the middle class in the United States has been shrinking, while poverty and childhood hunger have been on the rise (Moss).

However The failures continue as no lessons have been learned since the two global recessions.

After posting this last night: @Times published an article promoted on twitter saying:

"No lessons have been learned." Despite lawmakers' promises to avoid the mistakes made in 2008, much of the $2.2 trillion dollar bailout package went to wealthy institutions and people.. twitter.com/time/status/12

The IMF reported that Global recession will be ‘way worse’ than 2008 crisis: IMF: The coronavirus pandemic has brought the global economy to a standstill and plunged the world into a recession that will be “way worse” than the global financial crisis a decade ago, the head of the International Monetary Fund said on Friday, calling it “humanity’s darkest hour.” IMF’s managing director, Kristalina Georgieva

Concurrently, unions and union activities have de-intensified and protest movements have been infiltrated and or intimidated “out of business” thereby ensuring that the neoliberal state remains functionally relevant to the global elites in the United States. Unemployment has reached new high and communal arrangements among the working class affected (a practice more typical of the developing world) have spiked. This symbolic violence against the working class by the elites has been met with complicity without any plausible opposition to the state. “Union dormancy” and lack of effective social protestations have guaranteed a massive transfer of wealth from the middle class to the very rich. This has been the experience of many people in the global south, who have suffered from the imposing force of the large corporation from the neoliberal state. The United States, however, is highly diversified and developed with annual per capita incomes and domestic production that more than quadruple Jamaica’s rates. Yet, globalization and the current recession have produced similar hardships among their most vulnerable peoples, with rising poverty and extremely high unemployment. The current global recession followed a disappointing economic recovery that started at the end of 2001 and culminated in 2010. That recovery marked the first time on record that poverty and the incomes of typical working-age households worsened despite six years of economic growth. The share of Americans in poverty climbed from 11.7 percent in 2001 to 15.7 percent in 2010 and median household income declined 3.6% reaching its lowest point since 1997. Not only high levels of unemployment have characterized the recession, but also by the speed at which the ranks of the unemployed swelled. Between the start of the recession in December 2007 and January 2010, the unemployment rate more than doubled, from 4.9 percent to 9.7 percent.  

American conservative ideology which promotes a new protestant ethic of individualism, self-interest, and neo-liberalism opposes and challenges any meaningful democratic intervention by the state because in the neoliberal state such as the US, the cure is worse than the disease,”  Traditionally, the United States has loathed big government and any kind of social program that involves socialism.

Ironically, the signs of the trouble with neoliberalism existed for at least a decade before the spectacular economic collapse in the early part of the 21st century (see, e.g., Held, “Global Covenant”).  A social-democratic approach to globalization may be the answer to the turbulence caused by the full-on embrace of neoliberalism.  Yet, the neoliberal way of international business and trade has become so entrenched in the post-World War II era that it may be difficult to dislodge.  The global destabilization of recent years, however, has gone a considerable way in loosening it. Globalization is a term that can vary and has been the subject of much debate, largely because several transformations have been attributed to it, including political, cultural, and economic change.  Scholars have found bifurcating the concept of globalization into a pair, distinct, interrelated concept useful in discussing the concept in any broad level (Beck)

The first concept is globality.  It consists of the flow of economic, cultural, and technological forces between nations.  It is these forces that have been the engine that driving globalization, breaking down barriers of politics, culture, time, and space to create “overlapping communities of fate” (Held “Global Transformations” 445). Globality is the macro facet of globalization, it is large in scope and has been considered irreversible.  Once globality has occurred, the changes it has rendered are no longer reversible or manageable within the scope of a single nation’s power or influence. Ulrich Beck, a scholar of globalization, explains that globality implies that “nothing which happens on our planet is only a limited local event” (9). The phenomenon of globality does not prohibit a state from acting in the best social or economic interests of its own citizens.  However, when globality is a factor, a state must look beyond its own borders to devise creative and cooperative policy solutions to economic, social and security issues (Brodie).

The second dimension of globalization, globalism, refers to a political mindset or political rationality that promotes a universal worldview and standardized governing practices that potentially trump national policy preferences and state sovereignty. The prevailing experiment with globalism, neoliberal globalism, prioritizes economic growth and market logics over most other goals and institutions of governance. As Beck further explains, it is an “ideology of rule by the world market,” asserting that the complexities of politics “can be run in the way that a company is run” (9). Neoliberal globalism was consolidated under the “Washington Consensus” in the 1980s, and has in large part promoted a model of governance 

with varying degrees of transparency, coercion, and consensus, a bundle of reinforcing governing instruments, prominent among them privatization, trade liberalization, deregulation, public sector reduction, and social policy reform…. [a]lthough tarnished and destabilized by the current economic crisis, [this model] aspires to subject both citizens and governments to the rigors of markets, ideally constraining them from interfering with global capital flows, self-regulating markets, and consumer choice and sovereignty (Brodie 1563).

Neoliberalism arose as one of two competing concepts of what the international economic regime should look like in the wake of the Second World War.  With the newly established GATT came what has been referred to as embedded liberalism; its alternative is what is now often called neoliberalism.  Embedded liberalism is a term that was first used by John Ruggie in 1982, referring to the compact made between governments and their people in acquiescing to the post-Second World War international economic order agreed to at the Bretton Woods Conference in New Hampshire in 1944 (392-396). Embedded liberalism has as much to do with the liberalization of trade and financial flows at the international level, as it does with the sovereignty of states to moderate the risks of their involvement in the international markets through their monetary and fiscal policies. In the embedded liberalism compact of the post-Second World War period, states found a way to balance achieving domestic policy and pursuing outward-looking policies in the international economy. To conceptualize GATT as a regime that resulted from the embedded liberalism compact, is to suggest that its foundations lay in the experiences not only of the Great Depression, but also of World War II, and as suggested in a recent book by Thomas Zeiler, of a series of contested policy choices negotiated by those countries that established GATT (General Agreement on Tariff and Trade, 1947 and WTO Annexation 1994) and the Bretton Woods institutions (Zeiler). 

The social-democratic view, embedded liberalism, was essentially a social contract by which the welfare states of the Western world that met at Bretton Woods agreed to discontinue the economic nationalism that characterized the post-First World War period. As a result of the Great Depression of 1929, the U.S. enacted the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act, which levied the highest tariffs to date against its trading partners.  The Bretton Woods conference sought to undo this state of affairs by establishing: 1) the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to liberalize financial markets; 2) the World Bank to lend countries devastated by the Second World War development assistance; and 3) the GATT framework within which trade in goods could be liberalized (Escobar). 

Under the domestic social contract envisioned in the post-Second World War period, there was a commitment to the liberalization of trade and finance. There was an understanding that the welfare state would absorb the effects of internationalizing national economies through fiscal and monetary policies. Since these policies were adopted with the hope that they would help avoid outcomes, such as the Great Depression, it was thought that the liberalization of financial markets and trade would have public support. It was the guarantee of economic stability that encouraged Western states to agree to lower trade barriers during negotiations of GATT, after the Second World War.

Keynesian economics provided the theoretical and political foundations for the welfare state. Though Keynesian economics was by no means a homogeneous body of thought or praxis, its central insight was in demonstrating how national income was predicated upon a perception of investment demand that had a multiplier effect on consumption and economic output as determined by the level of demand (Keynes). Keynesian economics looked to motivations such as foresight, short-sightedness, ostentation, and extravagance, which all involved empirical investigations of consumption, income ratios, interest rates, investment, and expenditure. 

The New Deal, designed as an attempt to pull the United States from the Great Depression, is the best example of welfare state economics for this country.  Its objective was to stabilize the capitalist order, not transform it, and its means were largely limited to Keynesian-type monetary and fiscal policies in pursuit of the principle of full employment, and a safety net of social services for those in need. The Great Society initiatives of the 1960s added several layers of welfare programs onto this base. But they were rendered politically acceptable only by strict and extensive specification of the boundaries of state intervention, eligibility requirements, and the modalities of private sector provision of public services (Ruggie “Embedded Liberalism”). However, unlike in Europe where the welfare state had political support from both the right and left, no socialist party emerged in the United States. This case of American exceptionalism and the legal limitations placed on the New Deal, undermined embedded liberalism over time.

Neoliberalism is the countervailing view of the post-Second World War international economic order. Central to this neoliberal conception of the domestic and international economies is a view of economic policy as the result of the spontaneous direction or whims of the market. By contrast, Keynesian economics regarded the market as part of the socio-economic fabric. Under the neoliberal view of the international economic order, the role of the state is minimal--to lay down a framework for the rule of law by protecting property and contract rights (Keynes).  The market, and not the state, is the motor of progress.  The market works through maximization of the utilities of rational market actors, a process that is thought of as natural and inevitable.  The role of the state is merely that of ensuring that actors in the marketplace have unfettered freedom to maximize their utilities in the market. The state has the limited role of providing the goods that the marketplace cannot, such as education and health care. Short of this exception, neo-liberals hold the view that the spontaneity or unintended actions of individuals generates economic order. This neoliberal/pro-trade position is thus based on a public/private distinction. The economy is a private non-political sphere that ought to be free of any governmental regulation, while the state is a public political sphere distinct from the marketplace (Ropke). 

The neoliberal position or the pro-trade position in today’s globalized economy can be summarized as follows: the GATT/WTO regime works by restraining government interference in international trade, leaving private firms as much room to go about their business affairs. Consequently, trade proponents characterize actions interfering with the free movement of goods, services, and capital as unjustifiable interference with free trade. This pro-trade bias is the ascendant interpretation of the international trading regime since the completion of the Uruguay Round (Colàs).

While in the current period there has been an ascendancy of the neoliberal position over the several decades leading up to the recent recessionary period, it is arguable that both the neoliberal/pro-trade and the embedded compromise positions are alternating perspectives of the international economic order. Attempts to constitutionalize the international trading framework with pro-trade values thus appear to be an effort to tilt the balance against the social in trade. However, there is no reason to expect that the contemporary ascendancy of the pro-trade position is unassailable. Indeed, that is why it is instructive to contextualize the current pro-trade bias within the ascendancy of neo-liberal reformism following the collapse of the post- Second World War Keynesian consensus.

GATT/WTO programs ought to be seen within the context of the ongoing processes of economic reform promoted by other institutions such as the World Bank, the OECD and the IMF. There had been, early in the new century, a growing convergence in policy reform towards a commitment to neo-liberalism.  Privatization of government owned enterprises, de-regulation of controls on the economy (like price controls), and liberalization of barriers to international trade are central commitments of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism has also been referred to as the Washington Consensus (Williamson). Although proposals under neoliberalism are varied, they can be classified into two broad categories given the extent of their commitment to regulatory controls of the economy. The first set of proposals, which have been the direction of reform in developing countries, are "overtly intolerant of governmental activism in the economy and [are] hostile to worker and welfare rights" (Unger 9-10). The second set of proposals are "a chastened, liberalized version of social democracy that . . . [are] fast becoming the new center of gravity of Western politics." (Unger 9-10) 

The push to liberalize world trade by the WTO cannot be de-contextualized from the initiatives of the Bretton Woods institutions, which condition their loans to developing countries on the removal of trade barriers to permit the flow of goods, services, and capital into their national economies.  The process of constitutionalizing the WTO process involves exploring the intersection of its own mandate with other institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank (Jordan). This tends to undermine the embedded liberalism social compact. Following the Second World War, successive rounds of trade liberalization achieved very low tariffs between Western countries, giving rise to neoliberalism and its attendant programs of deregulation and privatization. Meanwhile state intervention to protect domestic values, especially in developing countries ,where a more insidious version of neoliberalism is being implemented, has been greatly compromised or altogether ended. Trade liberalization is only one facet of the variety of reforms that have significantly reduced the capacity of governments to protect domestic values under the embedded liberalism compact.

Neoliberals argue that social issues cannot be integrated within today’s globalized economy because they require governmental interventions in the marketplace. They argue that free trade requires decision-making to be left to the marketplace with an attendant commitment to sharply limiting permissible governmental interventions that compromise the benefits of free trade.  Pro-traders call for a neutral state in international trading relations among states (Sunstein).  Indeed, countervailing duty law is predicated on the assumption of a neutral state. Countervailing duty law presupposes that there has been a departure from the normal functioning of the market through pro-active state intervention to provide subsidies or through lower than fair value sales within a given industry.  The countervailing duty law clarifies my case of the neutral state assumption. Countervailing duty law presumes that when a state subsidizes an industry, it interferes with the efficient working of the market by lowering the prices of its exports. This deviation from efficient markets is prohibited because subsidies are considered to give a foreign producer an unfair competitive advantage since they are not operating under competitive market conditions. 

Neoliberal regulatory intervention in the United States has resulted in the disenfranchisement and displacement of individuals who are largely non-white and of lower economic status.  Gentrification and the use of eminent domain and governmental taking in the name of development has allowed neoliberal, corporate interests to literally remove people from the places in which they live and force them to move elsewhere:  often to areas that end up to be less desirable or affordable. As Kennedy and Leonard point out, 

For [displaced] households, both the economic and social costs of displacement can be extremely high.... When a household leaves a neighborhood through displacement, it misses out on the opportunity to share in the social and economic improvements the neighborhood might enjoy in future generations. Moreover, those future generations in the neighborhood miss out on the history and grounding those residents might have provided.  (17).

In stark contrast to the arguments about the harmful effects of gentrification, two recent studies have attempted to precisely measure displacement and challenge the conventional wisdom that the displacement of low-income households takes place at a greater rate in gentrifying neighborhoods, as compared to others.  Both studies compared mobility rates between gentrifying and non-gentrifying neighborhoods. The researchers assert that their data indicates that low-income households are more likely to remain in gentrifying neighborhoods. They conclude that such low-income houses "choose" to devote more of their income (two researchers estimated some households were spending up to sixty-one percent of income on housing costs) to remain in gentrifying neighborhoods because living conditions and amenities are improving.  Putting aside the question of mobility rates for low-income households as compared to more affluent households, the studies did not seem to control for the effect of public housing residence, or for the impact of rent stabilization ordinances on the ability of such households to "choose" to remain in such neighborhoods. The other question the studies did not examine was whether a household that "chose" to leave could also exercise a similar choice to re-enter the community at a later time.

The terms of the displacement debate are misplaced. The arguments center on claiming or disclaiming whether the poor are massively and disruptively dislocated from their neighborhoods to their disadvantage. There is very little contemporary empirical evidence to support such a dramatic view of dislocation. Therefore, the studies that refute massive dislocation are not proving much. Instead, the evidence shows that, absent the exercise of eminent domain against residential tenants, the dislocation from gentrification is relatively gradual, quiet, and only observable if you know, work with (as many community organizations do), or simply ride the bus or the subway with someone from one of those neighborhoods.  The stories are of the impending change and the change is dramatic, but incremental.

As conditions in a neighborhood improve, what incentive would a poor person have to move, other than the rising cost of living? If you are poor, you have a limited amount of income. Logic dictates that as long as you can afford the rent, and rents are otherwise rising in your neighborhood, you are likely to stay put for as long as you can. Perhaps you cut back on purchases or move in with family members or friends. Perhaps you just work the added expense into the cycle of robbing Peter to pay Paul, the paycheck-to-paycheck existence that characterizes the lives of so many low and middle income American,s who shuffle additional costs in an endless juggle of past-due bills--an act that one is forced into when expenses exceed income.

Therefore, the displacement studies cannot merely evaluate relocation rates empirically. Instead, longer-term qualitative studies must be conducted on the impact that gentrification has had on the lives of poor residents in gentrifying neighborhoods. In that way, we can perhaps arrive at an answer to a question echoed throughout cities by those that have witnessed neighborhood transitions via a hot real estate market: "Where do they go?" An answer to that question would make the displacement debate a bit more meaningful and helpful to the people who may be enjoying the upgraded services and amenities in their gentrifying neighborhoods, but who are aware that their days in those neighborhoods are numbered.

Truth be told, the most significant harm from gentrification may be the change in the neighborhood. The neighborhood will integrate, but that integration will not be stable. There will be a progression. You only have to look at formerly Black neighborhoods, like Georgetown in Washington, D.C. and Bolton Hill in Baltimore, to understand the likely result. Therefore, the harm of gentrification is really that a hyperactive real estate market can have devastating effects on anyone financially ill equipped. Dozens of actions by real estate investors, new residents, and others make this an inevitable process.

Global neoliberalism seems to assume social neutrality from the perspective of the state.  Indeed, even the GATT/WTO members who most adhere to the pro-trade position do not realize the assumption that states should remain neutral in their international trading relations. According to an estimate made in the late 1980s, 75 percent of international trade was conducted on principles at odds with free trade and free enterprise. One scholar has even suggested that states are mere platforms on which multinational corporations play, exploiting the strengths of some states and the weaknesses of others (Porter 39-42.) In addition, contrary to the assumption behind the theory of comparative advantage, the cornerstone of the pro-trade position, Paul Krugman has shown that at "least under some circumstances a government, by supporting its firms in international competition, can raise national welfare at another country's expense" (Krugman 131). This is indeed how countries in East Asia, such as South Korea, achieved spectacular rates of growth over the last several decades with the state playing a disciplinary role, rewarding companies that performed well and punishing those that did not through policies such as credit allocations at below market rates (Khor, “Dilemmas”).

Thus, to presume that regulatory initiatives are invariably negative for free trade and that a neutral state is a necessary pre-condition for maximizing the gains from liberalization of trade between countries misstates the ambivalent value of regulation. It is difficult to find a regulation construed as a subsidy that does not also serve another purpose. For example, where a government provides a public road, this lowers production costs, but it also increases efficiency through measures that self-interested private actors would presumably not be expected to provide.  Kerry Rittich sums up the situation thus:

Determining both the aggregate costs and the distributive effects of regulatory interventions is a notoriously difficult exercise. Effects are routinely, rather than exceptionally, far-reaching, diffuse and variable; at some point, the feedback effects and intersection with other rules makes the determination of cost quite incalculable. Regulations almost always exact costs at the same time as they provide benefits, both within and among different social groups. Conflicting interests are the heart of regulatory initiatives; it is more common to have struggle than agreement over their form and content. Moreover, even assuming agreement could be reached on these matters, there is no agreed upon formula for determining the level or stringency of regulation; the same conflicts of interests often simply surface again at this point . . . .The final structure of regulations commonly results from the pull and demands of particular constituencies, rather than from the operation of the general or public interest, whether determined on the grounds of efficiency or anything else. (80)

Rittich highlights the problems inherent in the assumptions of the pro-trade position. First, the assumption that governmental regulation is inimical to free trade is held to be untrue as I have demonstrated above. Second, the implicit or underlying background assumption that the market forms a neutral baseline against which illegitimate interventions in the economy should be measured is inaccurate (Unger). The market is no less contingent on its outcomes than on state intervention.

The market is not a neutral baseline. Rather, it is a social institution created by rules of private law, especially those of property and contract. To assume that these rules of private law mark the baselines against which to judge illegitimate governmental activism in the marketplace assumes that these private laws are less circumstantial and controversial than the regulatory and re-distributive initiatives of re-distributive or problem solving governance. Clearly, the rules of property, contract, and exchange are as artificial as governmental price controls and regulations (Unger). The presumption that these laws are distributively neutral frameworks of coordination is problematic, to the extent that its effect is to preserve the present distribution of benefits and burdens in society.

To assume that the market marks a neutral baseline against which to judge governmental intervention is to endorse the status quo ante. Using the market as the baseline of economic activity assumes that the existing distribution of wealth and entitlements is legitimate and thus is beyond governmental interference. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, privatization led to legitimization of ill-gotten wealth when politicians, who siphoned off resources under their command and control, privatized this wealth in the name of market reform. Alternatively, one may argue that to the extent the market puts these distributions beyond the scrutiny of overt governmental intervention, it implicitly delegates enormous power to the multinational corporations (Jackson).

Pro free-trade theorists tend to define neutrality of government action in a manner that perpetuates current practices and treats government conduct in a way that tends to sustain it as inaction.  This assumption of inaction legitimizes the absence of governmental action from legal sanction. Yet, government conduct involving regulation is treated as action that can be argued to be illegal and/or illegitimate.  However, it is inaccurate to argue that regulation almost always constrains trade. The absence of regulation does not mean that the state is absent. In addition, and more significantly, social claims requiring governmental action cannot be dismissed as necessarily infringing the free trade basis of international trade. There is indeed support for the claim that social claims such as environmentalism, are complementary to, and thus support free trade.

The GATT/WTO regime works by restraining government interference in international trade to leave private firms room within which they can go about their business affairs.  In other words, the regime binds governments not to act. The test for whether conduct is consistent with GATT/WTO translates into the following question: under what circumstances is governmental interference with international trade justifiable? (Jackson)

Since Uruguay, there has been a rising crescendo that the market should upstage the state in economic decision making. Yet, this is an inaccurate view of the way even a market economy functions. It is inaccurate to the extent that it conceptualizes the market as if it should, or in fact does, exist separately from the state in a market economy. This view presumes that the market or the economy is a non-political sphere of private actions.

The United Nations has put forward the principle of sharing as an obligation to global equity that is (or should be) mandatory and not left to the whims of states.  It is at this crossroads where neo-liberalism and social democracy collide.  The neoliberal perspective is centered on the premise of property rights and protection thereof in the global landscape.  The social democratic perspective, on the other hand, offers up the idea that economic development should be publicly controlled or, at the least, management of production and distribution of wealth should be left in the public’s hands.

The global economy’s current state has ascended through the privatization of domestic and international economic institutions.  Market economies have emerged, as have free trade ones, and the dominance of corporations and corporate enterprise.  World trade has been viewed as the solution for bringing about global stabilization.  The private sector economy is simply considered a more efficient route to global stability and peace than wasteful and corrupt state bureaucracies. Whether real or not, such possibilities speak to creating a moral infrastructure that would lead to increased global solidarity, such as that witnessed among nations when natural or manmade disasters have occurred (e.g., the Japanese and Indonesian Tsunamis, Haiti’s earthquake, Hurricane Katrina, 9/11).  It seems that a sort of global altruism and solidarity building would have the effect of increasing security on a national and international level.

Adhering to and respecting global initiatives for human rights and economic development, although social democratic in perspective, may ultimately aid the neoliberal agenda, as well.  If those elements of the global community who are feeling a sense of deprivation or unfairness are made to feel economically and fundamentally more secure, the interests of the private sector in such regions will also be more secure.  It is an economic model of sustainability that some global companies have already embraced, and in which they have found success.  Because business and trade tend to thrive on the self-interest of the private sector, combining corporate self-interest with global altruism and security may be one way in which to achieve success in both the neo-liberal and social democratic arenas.

This preliminary analysis of the place of social issues in the global neoliberal framework examines a major axis of tension within the present international trading regime, engendered by a conflict between trade liberalization and domestic economic policies. This conflict has escalated with the advent of neo-liberalism and is illustrated by ongoing public protests that have been occurring at world economic summits since the by public protests at the failed commencement of trade talks in Seattle near the end of 1999.

While a central part of the Seattle protests was predicated on a need to integrate social policy, such as banning child labor in the WTO trade regime and having the WTO adopt enforceable labor standards, social issues are congealed into the very essence of the trade regime's history, as well as its rules and praxis. Thus, characterizing social concerns as new or as outside the scope of international trade fails to capture the reality of the organic unity between trade and social issues. To argue that social issues are outside the scope of the international trade regime mischaracterizes the regime that embeds within it social policy and free-trade goals in complementary as well as contradictory ways.

A possible resolution, simultaneously and fruitfully engaging the organic and dialectical relationship between markets and social issues in trade, is to acknowledge the interdependence of social norms and market choices. This acknowledgment can promote a more coherent resolution than a rigid adherence to policy formation through either social norms alone or market choices alone. Indeed, the very essence of social policy choices and the market is their indeterminate character. Ultimately, there needs to be recognition of the interdependence of policy and market choices from a governmental perspective.

Defining social issues as falling outside the scope of the trade regime is, thus, as incomplete as it is misleading. The inability of the current regime to acknowledge that social issues are part and parcel of the trade regime, by its reluctance to state with precision the place of social issues within its framework and their praxis, will heavily compromise its legitimacy and efficacy in the twenty-first century. Presently, by adopting a posture that suggests that the American neo-liberal economy is a self-contained regime which cannot address issues such as child labor and labor rights caused by its abandonment of domestic workers only perpetuates its policy of picking and choosing which social issues are consistent with its proclaimed mandate.

 Footnote: We never learn our lessons. #PoliceReform is needed to restore police credibility & #LawAndOrder #EconomicReform to improve the lives of the poor and marginalized.These individuals are affected

Written and updated by: Renaldo C. McKenzie