Tag Archives: Neoliberalism

Backgrounder. Using government capture to favor special interests ("capital").TruthoutOut of Control: A Brief History of Neoliberal Deregulation in the USA T.J. Coles, Clairview Books | Book Excerpt

As a result, I would tend to suggest a slightly different definition that seems to work quite well today. The definition would be: neoliberalism is a political strategy promoting the interests of big money that utilises the economist’s ideal of a free market to promote and extend market activity and remove all ‘interference’ in the market than conflicts with these interests. This replaces a definition based on following an idea (the author’s market neoliberalism), by one of interests...

The IMF is one institutional which has been responsible for maintaining this world order. Since governments need exceptional financing, they are arm-twisted by the IMF. A recent United Nations General Assemby note, Promotion Of A Democratic And Equitable International Order, has recognized this and criticizes the IMF strongly.… The report is 18 pages long and critical of the IMF from the start to the end. Please read. You won’t find any discussion of the report in the mainstream media....

This neoliberal era has a habit of getting ahead of itself and exposing its internal contradictions. In fact, the Capitalist system, as Marx, Keynes and others have demonstrated, it inherently inconsistent. The imposition of neoliberalism has only heightened those inconsistencies and made it more likely that we will move beyond this period in the foreseeable future (fingers crosssed). Last week, the Australian Bureau of Statistics released the latest Retail Sales data for August 2017. The...

This is a longish article that puts forward analysis diagnosing the challenge and proposes a plan in outline for addressing it, based on full employment, a job guarantee and a basic income. The latter part of the article is about the opportunities present by our entering the Information Age. Those opportunities can be seized rather than left to the whims of the market and its penchant for rent-seeking in a neoliberal environment.A lot in crammed into this one piece. Hopefully, people will...

On May 6, 1997, just 4 days after coming to office in what was to become Tony Blair’s retrogressive regime, the then British Labour Chancellor Gordon Brown announced that Labour would legislate the so-called independence of the Bank of England. The BBC claimed this was the “most radical shake-up in the bank’s 300-year history”, which gave “the bank freedom to control monetary policy”. Gordon Brown’s legacy to the British people, of course, is in his famous ‘light touch’ regulation, which he...

Short summary of Mike Perry's new book, which itself is a wide-ranging summary of liberal social, political and economic history, a treatment of neoliberalism, and recommendations for getting out of the box that the ruling elite has constructed to contain alternatives to the power structure.Progress in Political EconomyMorality and Power: On Ethics, Economics and Public PolicyMike Berry

Earlier in the week I was in Britain. Walking around the streets of Brighton, for example, was a stark reminder of how a wealthy nation can leave large numbers of people behind in terms of material well-being, opportunity and, if you study the faces of the people, hope. I am used to seeing poverty and mental illness on the streets of the US cities but in Brighton, England it very visible now as Britain has struggled under the yoke of austerity. Swathes of people living from day to day...

The United Nations Trade and Development Report 2017 was published last week and carried the sub-title “Beyond Austerity: Towards a Global New Deal”. It is amazing that 9 years after the crisis emerged we are still discussing austerity and its on-going damaging consequences. Effectively the crisis interrupted the neoliberal agenda to increase the incomes shares of the elites at the expense of the workers, with growth being a secondary consideration if at all. Austerity was the means by...

‘America needs its unions more than ever.’ And ‘Labour reform could help restore the bargaining power of US workers.’ Can you believe that these are titles from articles in the Financial Times?  Mario Draghi, the president of the ECB, recently boasted that since 2015 the euro-zone gained more than 5 million jobs. New cheap jobs yes, and productivity remains historically low. Today’s lacking investment means that technology does not substitute for labour – the normal trajectory in...