Tag Archives: Neoliberalism

[embedded content] Defunding a program is the best way to promote privatization. He discusses here public education, but you can go down the line. The idea of voucherizing Medicare is basically a way of defunding it, worsening its quality and eventually move to private health (you get it if you pay for it). And on education note that while Chomsky is right that it worked well and is being defunded and privatized (think charter schools), it is also true that the system was always unequal and...

By David FieldsBetween roughly the early 1940’s and early 1970’s, the financial architecture of the world economy centered on a US engineered Keynesian accumulation agenda, as a response to the devastation wrought by the Great Depression. The capitalist institutional structure, or social structure of accumulation (Kotz, McDonough, and Reich, 1994), rested on finance being subservient to the promotion of  industrial enterprise. With socially-engineered capital-labor compromises in...

By Thomas Palley (Guest blogger)2016 was supposed to have been the year of Jeb Bush versus Hillary Clinton: the year when the established Bush dynasty confronted the upstart rival Clinton Dynasty. But the year of the insider has turned into the year of the outsider. On both sides, voters have unexpectedly given vent to thirty years of accumulated anger with neoliberalism which has downsized their incomes and hopes.Though the Republican rebellion has been more clear-cut in its dismissal of...

As should other countries: it’s plain common sense.The EU and Eurozone are catastrophic. Of course, sanity prevailed and the UK never joined the Eurozone, but the EU itself is still catastrophic.Britain should leave the EU as quickly as possible, for the following reasons: (1) to protect the UK’s economic and political sovereignty;(2) to protect its democracy;(3) to protect its welfare state and social services;(4) to have some hope for a Post Keynesian-style or MMT-style economic policy in...

This is how the mission of the President’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform was defined by the White House on February 18, 2010: The Commission is charged with identifying policies to improve the fiscal situation in the medium term and to achieve fiscal sustainability over the long run. Specifically, the Commission shall propose recommendations designed to balance the budget, excluding interest payments on the debt, by 2015. This result is projected to stabilize the...

We need big, big changes in the United States. Many of them will require the Federal Government to spend unprecedented amounts, including deficit spending to enable us to solve problems that have languished, creating needs, for many, many years. How can we get these changes legislated through a political system that has been increasingly less responsive to most people over the past four decades. There’s only one way that will work without revolution. We need a movement for change powerful...

New paper by Franklin Serrano and Luiz Eduardo Melin. From the abstract: Throughout the world, the reversion of fortune suffered by the Brazilian economy since reaching its zenith as recently as 2010 has confounded shrewd commentators, seasoned analysts and market players alike. As 2015 unfolded, ominous projections (“An Economy on the Brink”, “Brazil’s Economy Falters” “Worse May Be To Come”) were no less widespread than expressions of bewilderment (“Whatever Happened to Brazil”, “Brazilian...

My talk in Argentina last week about what to expect after the right wing electoral victory. In Spanish without subtitles.[embedded content] My brother and Revista Circus made it possible.

By Franklin SerranoA sharp slowdown in the Brazilian economy presents a critical challenge for the Workers’ Party (PT) government led by Dilma Rousseff. Between 2011 and 2014, economic growth averaged only 2.1 percent annually, compared with 4.4 percent in the 2004-2010 period.The recent downturn can be squarely blamed on economic policies implemented by Rousseff’s first administration (2010-14). This policy change sought to reduce the state’s role of directly promoting the expansion of...