free mkt neo lib 2 bak

11 21 no lnx<div>
</div><div><div>freemktneolib2</div><div>
</div><div>11 21 italics</div><div>
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</div><div>&nbsp;1/18</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;FREE MKT NEO-LIB2 1/18 age of trump</div><div>
</div><div>see orig, also regulation and deregulation</div><div>
</div><div>also neo-con</div><div>
</div><div>see also CAPITALISM</div><div>
</div><div>see critical thinking</div><div>
</div><div>wow, neglected 4/16</div><div>
</div><div>added trump 1119 despite tariff heresy (hey gop no longer think deficits are a problem, so why not?)</div><div>
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</div><div>see story (1)</div><div>
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</div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/capitalism/ ...it's unclear when the pandemic will come to an end. What may be an even more important question is whether the U.S. will be prepared for the next one. The past year and a half suggests that the answer may be no,,,medical anthropologist who has spent the past 20 years studying how the Chinese government reacts to infectious disease, my research can provide insight into how countries, including the U.S., can better prepare for disease outbreaks.</div><div>
</div><div>Researchers agree that a good response starts with a strong public health system. But this is something that has been sidelined by the United State ,,,,https://theconversation.com/what-exactly-is-neoliberalism-84755,,,neoliberal system, which places more value on free markets and deregulation than public welfare....eoliberalism promotes a free market accessible to the wealthy few, making essential services less free for everyone else.</div><div>
</div><div>As US neoliberalism evolved, public health devolved</div><div>Neoliberal economic policies became popular in the 1980s during the Reagan and Thatcher eras. This new approach aimed to make government leaner and more efficient through measures like market deregulation, privatization and reduction of government provision of public services like health and education – resources that do not necessarily lend themselves to market production.</div><div>
</div><div>While neoliberal governments still work to promote the health, welfare and security of their citizens, they place the responsibility of providing those services in the hands of private entities like health insurance companies and nongovernmental organizations. This gives the government space to focus on economic performance.</div><div>
</div><div>But placing responsibility for a public good into the hands of a private corporation turns that good into a commodity that people need to buy, rather than a...Spending on health care in the U.S., including on hospitals, medications and private insurance, has more than tripled in the past 60 years. But the public health system that helps the nation prepare for the unexpected has been neglected.</div><div>
</div><div>U.S. spending on the local health departments that help to avert epidemic outbreaks and protect the health of populations fell by 18% between 2010 and 2021. Two and a half cents of every medical dollar goes toward public health, a figure that has fallen from 1930 levels of 3.3 cents of every dollar. This has allowed the U.S. to manage health risks like chronic diseases that threaten individual's health. But it leaves the nation inadequately prepared for population-level major health threats that have a much bigger effect on the economy and society.</div><div>
</div><div>Public health cuts left the U.S with a skeletal workforce to manage the pandemic. Because of this, responsibility fell to individuals. For example, without mandatory workplace COVID-19 safety guidelines, essential workers faced daily exposure to the coronavirus with insufficient to no protective gear and sanitizing supplies. They had to protect both their own health and the health of their families when they returned home, a difficult task without proper resources and support.</div><div>
</div><div>And this was not unique to the U.S. There were similar COVID-19 outcomes in other neoliberal countries like the U.K. and India that had shifted priorities away from public health.</div><div>
</div><div>How Asian nations learned their lessons</div><div>The story was different in many Asian nations where people enjoy the same types of individual liberties as those who live in neoliberal societies. The difference is a collectivist type of mindset that guides these societies and encourages people and government to take responsibility for one another. In her book Flexible Citizenship, anthropologist Aihwa Ong argues that this leads to a societal model where citizens can be independent and self-reliant while also able to rely on a state that supports the collective. Countries like Taiwan and South Korea may have been better prepared to respond to the pandemic because most people are accustomed to protecting themselves and their communities.</div><div>
</div><div>Like China, these countries also learned from their recent experience with a pandemic. In 2003, China and much of Asia were caught off guard with the emergence of SARS. Like the U.S., China's public health system had taken a backseat to investment in market reforms for over 20 years. As a result, it couldn't accurately track individual cases of infections.</div><div>
</div><div>Following the end of the SARS outbreak, however, the Chinese government improved training for public health professionals and developed one of the most sophisticated disease surveillance systems in the world. This allowed China to respond more quickly to the 2009 H1N1 pandemic and late 2019 COVID-19 outbreaks, once it was able to get past the initial bureaucratic and political hurdles that prevented local doctors and government officials from sounding the alarm.</div><div>
</div><div>Some have attributed this swift action to China's authoritarian form of government that allows for greater control over individual lives. But prioritizing public health is not new to China. This became official practice as early as 1910 when it adopted the methods of quarantine, surveillance and masking to respond to an outbreak of pneumonic plague.</div><div>
</div><div>Could this work in the US?</div><div>Much like SARS did with China, COVID-19 has exposed huge holes in the American public health infrastructure.</div><div>
</div><div>Take for example contact tracing. SARS taught China and other affected countries the importance of a robust system to identify and track people who may have been exposed to the COVID-19 virus. The Chinese government sent more than 1,800 teams of scientific investigators to Wuhan to trace the virus, which helped their efforts to quickly bring the virus under control.</div><div>
</div><div>In the U.S., on the other hand, poorly funded and thinly staffed public health departments struggled to test and notify people who had been in direct contact with infected individuals. This crippled the U.S.'s ability to prevent the spread of COVID-19.</div><div>
</div><div>In my home state of Massachusetts, the local government teamed up with the global health organization Partners in Health to start a contact tracing operation. But even then, people were left to fend for themselves. This became all the more evident as people scrambled for vaccines after their initial approval, through Facebook groups and informal volunteer networks that worked to help people secure appointments. Those who had resources learned how to take advantage of the system while others were overlooked.</div><div>
</div><div>This is typical of a U.S. health care system that is consumer-oriented and market-based. Americans are often convinced that the solution to a health problem must be technical and costly. The focus was placed on developing vaccines and therapeutics, which are essential for ending the pandemic, while ignoring lower-cost solutions.</div><div>
</div><div>But masking and social distancing – non-pharmaceutical interventions that have long been known to save lives during disease outbreaks – fell by the wayside. Uptake of these simple interventions is dependent on strong and coordinated public health messaging.</div><div>
</div><div>As seen in several Asian nations like Taiwan and South Korea, a well-thought-out plan for public health communication is key to a unified response. Without clear, coordinated directions from a public health system, it becomes difficult to prevent the spread of an outbreak.</div><div>
</div><div>What it takes to be prepared</div><div>Anthropologist Andrew Lakoff describes preparedness as more than just having the tools. It's also about knowing how and when to use them, and keeping the public properly informed.</div><div>
</div><div>Such preparedness can only happen in a coordinated fashion organized by national leadership. But the U.S. has seen little of this over the past year and a half, leaving pandemic response up to individuals. In an era where emergent viruses are an increasing threat to health and welfare, the individualism of neoliberal policies is not enough. While neoliberalism can be good for an economy, it's not so good for health.The Conversation</div><div>
</div><div>Elanah Uretsky, Associate Professor of International and Global Studies, Brandeis University</div><div>
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</div><div>an 1021</div><div>
</div><div>no lnx</div><div>
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</div><div>The pernicious lies of neoliberalism still haunt us — threatening the future of life on Earth</div><div>
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</div><div>&nbsp;Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies October 21, 2021</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp; &nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>In country after country around the world, people are rising up to challenge entrenched, failing neoliberal political and economic systems, with mixed but sometimes promising results.</div><div>
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</div><div>Progressive leaders in the U.S. Congress are refusing to back down on the Democrats' promises to American voters to reduce poverty, expand rights to healthcare, education and clean energy, and repair a shredded social safety net. After decades of tax cuts for the rich, they are also committed to raising taxes on wealthy Americans and corporations to pay for this popular agenda.</div><div>
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</div><div>Germany has elected a ruling coalition of Social Democrats, Greens and Free Democrats that excludes the conservative Christian Democrats for the first time since 2000. The new government promises a $14 minimum wage, solar panels on all suitable roof space, 2% of land for wind farms and the closure of Germany's last coal-fired power plants by 2030.</div><div>
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</div><div>Iraqis voted in an election that was called in response to a popular protest movement launched in October 2019 to challenge the endemic corruption of the post-2003 political class and its subservience to U.S. and Iranian interests. The protest movement was split between taking part in the election and boycotting it, but its candidates still won about 35 seats and will have a voice in parliament. The party of long-time Iraqi nationalist leader Muqtada al-Sadr won 73 seats, the largest of any single party, while Iranian-backed parties whose armed militias killed hundreds of protesters in 2019 lost popular support and many of their seats.</div><div>
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</div><div>Chile's billionaire president, Sebastian Piñera, is being impeached after the Pandora Papers revealed details of bribery and tax evasion in his sale of a mining company, and he could face up to 5 years in prison. Mass street protests in 2019 forced Piñera to agree to a new constitution to replace the one written under the Pinochet military dictatorship, and a convention that includes representatives of indigenous and other marginalized communities has been elected to draft the constitution. Progressive parties and candidates are expected to do well in the general election in November.</div><div>
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</div><div>Maybe the greatest success of people power has come in Bolivia. In 2020, only a year after a U.S.-backed right-wing military coup, a mass mobilization of mostly indigenous working people forced a new election, and the socialist MAS Party of Evo Morales was returned to power. Since then it has already introduced a new wealth tax and welfare payments to four million people to help eliminate hunger in Bolivia.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>The Ideological Context</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Since the 1970s, Western political and corporate leaders have peddled a quasi-religious belief in the power of "free" markets and unbridled capitalism to solve all the world's problems. This new "neoliberal" orthodoxy is a thinly disguised reversion to the systematic injustice of 19th-century laissez-faire capitalism, which led to gross inequality and poverty even in wealthy countries, famines that killed tens of millions of people in India and China, and horrific exploitation of the poor and vulnerable worldwide.</div><div>
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</div><div>For most of the 20th century, Western countries gradually responded to the excesses and injustices of capitalism by using the power of government to redistribute wealth through progressive taxation and a growing public sector, and ensure broad access to public goods like education and healthcare. This led to a gradual expansion of broadly shared prosperity in the United States and Western Europe through a strong public sector that balanced the power of private corporations and their owners.</div><div>
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</div><div>The steadily growing shared prosperity of the post-WWII years in the West was derailed by a combination of factors, including the 1973 OPEC oil embargo, Nixon's freeze on prices and wages, runaway inflation caused by dropping the gold standard, and then a second oil crisis after the 1979 Iranian Revolution.</div><div>
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</div><div>Right-wing politicians led by Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the U.K. blamed the power of organized labor and the public sector for the economic crisis. They launched a "neoliberal" counter-revolution to bust unions, shrink and privatize the public sector, cut taxes, deregulate industries and supposedly unleash "the magic of the market." Then they took credit for a return to economic growth that really owed more to the end of the oil crises.</div><div>
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</div><div>The United States and the United Kingdom used their economic, military and media power to spread their neoliberal gospel across the world. Chile's experiment in neoliberalism under Pinochet's military dictatorship became a model for U.S. efforts to roll back the "pink tide" in Latin America. When the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe opened to the West at the end of the Cold War, it was the extreme, neoliberal brand of capitalism that Western economists imposed as "shock therapy" to privatize state-owned enterprises and open countries to Western corporations.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>In the United States, the mass media shy away from the word "neoliberalism" to describe the changes in society since the 1980s. They describe its effects in less systemic terms, as globalization, privatization, deregulation, consumerism and so on, without calling attention to their common ideological roots. This allows them to treat its impacts as separate, unconnected problems: poverty and inequality, mass incarceration, environmental degradation, ballooning debt, money in politics, disinvestment in public services, declines in public health, permanent war, and record military spending.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>After a generation of systematic neoliberal control, it is now obvious to people all over the world that neoliberalism has utterly failed to solve the world's problems. As many predicted all along, it has just enabled the rich to get much, much richer, while structural and even existential problems remain unsolved.</div><div>
</div><div>
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</div><div>Even once people have grasped the self-serving, predatory nature of this system that has overtaken their political and economic life, many still fall victim to the demoralization and powerlessness that are among its most insidious products, as they are brainwashed to see themselves only as individuals and consumers, instead of as active and collectively powerful citizens.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>In effect, confronting neoliberalism—whether as individuals, groups, communities or countries—requires a two-step process. First, we must understand the nature of the beast that has us and the world in its grip, whatever we choose to call it. Second, we must overcome our own demoralization and powerlessness, and rekindle our collective power as political and economic actors to build the better world we know is possible.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>We will see that collective power in the streets and the suites at COP26 in Glasgow, when the world's leaders will gather to confront the reality that neoliberalism has allowed corporate profits to trump a rational response to the devastating impact of fossil fuels on the Earth's climate. Extinction Rebellion and other groups will be in the streets in Glasgow, demanding the long-delayed action that is required to solve the problem, including an end to net carbon emissions by 2025.</div><div>
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</div><div>While scientists warned us for decades what the result would be, political and business leaders have peddled their neoliberal snake oil to keep filling their coffers at the expense of the future of life on Earth. If we fail to stop them now, living conditions will keep deteriorating for people everywhere, as the natural world our lives depend on is washed out from under our feet, goes up in smoke and, species by species, dies and disappears forever.</div><div>
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</div><div>The Covid pandemic is another real-world case study on the impact of neoliberalism. As the official death toll reaches 5 million and many more deaths go unreported, rich countries are still hoarding vaccines, drug companies are reaping a bonanza of profits from vaccines and new drugs, and the lethal, devastating injustice of the entire neoliberal "market" system is laid bare for the whole world to see. Calls for a "people's vaccine" and "vaccine justice" have been challenging what has now been termed "vaccine apartheid."</div><div>
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</div><div>Conclusion</div><div>
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</div><div>In the 1980s, U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher often told the world, "There is no alternative" to the neoliberal order she and President Reagan were unleashing. After only one or two generations, the self-serving insanity they prescribed and the crises it has caused have made it a question of survival for humanity to find alternatives.</div><div>
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</div><div>Around the world, ordinary people are rising up to demand real change. The people of Iraq, Chile and Bolivia have overcome the incredible traumas inflicted on them to take to the streets in the thousands and demand better government. Americans should likewise demand that our government stop wasting trillions of dollars to militarize the world and destroy countries like Afghanistan and Iraq, and start solving our real problems, here and abroad.</div><div>
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</div><div>People around the world understand the nature of the problems we face better than we did a generation or even a decade ago. Now we must overcome demoralization and powerlessness in order to act. It helps to understand that the demoralization and powerlessness we may feel are themselves products of this neoliberal system, and that simply overcoming them is a victory in itself.</div><div>
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</div><div>As we reject the inevitability of neoliberalism and Thatcher's lie that there is no alternative, we must also reject the lie that we are just passive, powerless consumers. As human beings, we have the same collective power that human beings have always had to build a better world for ourselves and our children — and now is the time to harness that power.</div><div>
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</div><div>Medea Benjamin is cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran.</div><div>
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</div><div>
</div><div>Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher with CODEPINK and the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.</div><div>
</div><div>FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES</div><div>
</div><div>'Joker': A harsh indictment of neoliberalism and gangster capitalism ... ›</div><div>
</div><div>America has arrived at one of history's great crossroads - Alternet.org ›</div><div>
</div><div>'They've turned into raging monsters': Noam Chomsky links GOP lies ... ›</div><div>
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</div><div>
</div><div>The fatal flaw of neoliberalism: it's bad economics | Economics | The ... ›</div><div>
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</div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/neoliberal/</div><div>
</div><div>Most Chileans recently voted out the remnants of military dictator Augusto Pinochet, along with Milton Friedman's policies and many U.S. interventions. They are at work on a radically new Constitution. In the United States, former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden gave diminishing lip service to (or just ignored) neoliberal orthodoxy to push for and get massive government interventions into U.S. capitalism. Most of what remains of private capitalism is surviving on unprecedented, massive government life support, monetary and fiscal. A tired rerun of Cold War-style demonizing provides the ideological cover for the fading neoliberalism. Both major parties endorse huge and growing government economic interventions as urgently needed, homeland security-driven, anti-China policies.</div><div>Pity the poor libertarians. Their audience fades because the same intrusive government they blame for all economic ills demands loyalty in its fight with China. Former President Richard Nixon was less dishonest 50 years ago when he reportedly said, "We are all Keynesians now." In contrast, today's GOP mouths "conservative economics," yet merely quibbles over details of the government's gigantic money creation and deficit financing.</div><div>
</div><div>Today's declining U.S. capitalism can no longer repeat its previous bland celebrations of private enterprises and free markets. Too much is going wrong, provoking criticism, and deepening divisions across U.S. society. The last time U.S. capitalism stumbled this badly—the Great Depression of the 1930s—public health did not suffer massive failure at the same time. Yet, then too, criticism of capitalism reached far, wide, and deep. It was expressed in the unionization by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) of millions alongside zooming enrollments in two socialist parties and one communist party.</div><div>
</div><div>Yet, the New Deal negotiated by former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the employer class, on the one hand, with the coalition of unionists, socialists, and communists, on the other hand, achieved then much more than what President Biden seeks now. The pendulum then swung much farther from private enterprise and free markets to broad and deep economic interventions by the government—exemplified by Social Security, unemployment compensation, the minimum wage, and the federal hiring program. The pendulum now swings likewise, if less far, from the neoliberal tradition of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan to the government-led and government-regulated capitalism focused on "winning" the competition with China (or, as Trump promised, punishing the "cheating" performed by U.S. trading partners).</div><div>
</div><div>Then, the poles of economic debate mirrored the policy oppositions. It was private self-regulating and self-healing capitalism versus government regulatory interventions to save capitalism from self-destruction. Now, something basic has changed. The three capitalist crashes in 2000, 2008, and 2020, each much worse than the previous one, plus the failures to prepare for or cope with COVID-19, ushered in massive, ongoing government economic intervention. The Federal Reserve has smashed all prior records of money creation. The Treasury has smashed all prior records of financing government budget deficits with an expanding national debt. The private versus government parameters of economic debate are gone, replaced by de facto debates over the size, duration, and appropriate beneficiaries or targets of government interventions, monetary and fiscal.</div><div>
</div><div>Of course, government interventions in the economy were needed, solicited, and obtained across U.S. history by its private capitalists. But the latter feared that widening and eventually universal suffrage could turn government toward serving the interests of labor (the majority) rather than capital (the minority). So it was important to demonize the government's economic interventions, to compare their effects unfavorably to what private capitalism had accomplished and could yet achieve. But now what remains of private capitalism increasingly depends upon and expects government interventions as the equivalent of life support in medically extreme situations. The old demonization of government economic intervention sounds increasingly hollow and out of touch with reality. To modernize Nixon, we might say, "We are all interventionists now." And this has its inevitable effects on economic debates in academia, politics, and the media.</div><div>
</div><div>The die-hard libertarians and other supporters of free-market, private capitalism increasingly lump together liberals, social democrats, insufficient "conservatives," Keynesians, socialists, and communists. They comprise an evil, awful bloc of "the other," advocates for government economic intervention. While there are gradations among them, ranging from Xi Jinping to Donald Trump to Joe Biden, they are all viewed as advocates of massive government economic intervention. By articulating such a perspective, the die-hards inadvertently isolate and marginalize themselves as well as the economic debates defining them.</div><div>
</div><div>Contradictory discourse proliferates. U.S. officials denounce Chinese private megacorporations for their close ties to the Chinese government and military, as if their U.S. counterparts do not have comparable ties to the U.S. government and military. Chinese officials have celebrated their "socialist" achievements over the last 25 years, as if China had not invited and enabled private capitalist enterprises to enter and fuel those achievements. Increasingly, spokespersons in economies with greater degrees of private capitalism refer to economies with greater government intervention as "models" to be learned from. Thus, "we" must "learn" from "them" in order to better compete with them.</div><div>
</div><div>Slowly, the realization dawns that maybe it never was appropriate to center analytical attention and doctrinal disputation on the private versus public sectors of capitalist economies. Maybe all capitalisms mixed private enterprises and free markets with public enterprises and publicly regulated enterprises, markets, and economic planning activities. We do know that slave economic systems mixed private slave enterprises with public slave enterprises and state regulations of slave enterprises. We know that the same applies to feudal economic systems. It was a distraction to focus on the private versus public dispute as if it were central to understanding capitalism's place in history and in modern society.</div><div>
</div><div>Perhaps economics as a discipline is shifting gears to focus on a different basic discourse and debate. At the micro level, this debate would contrast and compare the functioning and effects (economic, political, and cultural) of two alternative organizations of workplaces. One of them, contemporary capitalism—embodied in both private and public enterprises—entails a version of the dichotomies inherited from slavery and feudalism. In these dichotomies, a small minority—enslavers in slavery, lords in feudalism, and employers in capitalism—makes all the key workplace decisions, holds the major power positions, and accumulates disproportionate wealth relative to what the majority—slaves, serfs, and employees—gets. The alternative workplace organization now struggles to emerge from the shadows and margins of those dichotomous discourses and realities. It exhibits a communal, collective, or cooperative organization of the workplace. Instead of hierarchy, this alternative is a horizontal organization that makes all workplace participants equally powerful. Each has one vote to decide democratically what to produce, how and where, and what to do with the surplus or profits to which all workplace participants contributed. These are called worker self-directed enterprises, or WSDEs (see Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism).</div><div>
</div><div>At the macro level, the emerging debate would focus on how key institutions—markets, planning apparatuses, relations between workplaces and residential communities, schools, government, political parties, and so on—would link differently to the alternative enterprise organizations. The whole capitalism versus socialism debate would then be reorganized around this question: which enterprise organization—capitalist versus WSDE—best serves the interests of the communities engaged in such a debate.</div><div>
</div><div>Capitalism versus socialism debates would then stop being about private versus public ownership and free versus government-regulated (or planned) markets. They would refocus instead on hierarchical-capitalist versus democratic-collectivist organizations of workplaces (factories, offices, and stores). The original notion of socialism as a basic critique of and an alternative to capitalism would thereby return to displace its detour into debates over private versus public.</div><div>
</div><div>This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.</div><div>
</div><div>FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES</div><div>'Joker': A harsh indictment of neoliberalism and gangster capitalism ... ›</div><div>Neoliberal Self-Parody: Slate's Matt Yglesias Glibly Reacts to ... ›</div><div>'Neoliberal proto-fascism': Noam Chomsky explains how Trumpism ... ›</div><div>RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB</div><div>What exactly is neoliberalism? ›</div><div>How 'Neoliberalism' Became the Left's Favorite Insult ›</div><div>The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism: Cultural Studies: Vol 28, No 3 ›</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div>=</div><div>interesting slide/ morph:</div><div>
</div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/neoliberalism</div><div>paul r salon</div><div>In the wake of Donald Trump's failed insurrection, the most reflective observation I have encountered is theologian Adam Kotsko's article "An Apocalypse About Nothing," in a new left-wing Christian publication called The Bias. (That confusing name apparently has a heritage in the 1960s British Catholic left.) While the 24/7 cable news narrative has been all about how dramatically different the Trump and Biden presidencies are, Kotsko stressed the opposite: Trump's child separation policy was virtually the only thing to set him apart from previous Republican presidents, while "Joe Biden is the most conservative Democratic nominee of the postwar era."</div><div>
</div><div>While many people might argue with those assessments, it's more difficult to dispute Kotsko's deeper point about the broader historical pattern: "Over and [over] again, and to an increasing degree, the alternation of power between two broadly similar political parties is treated as an apocalyptic emergency." When every election is the most catastrophically important in history — when nothing is ever gained, beyond a temporary reprieve — something is surely missing at the core.</div><div>
</div><div>Kotsko also noted that "the word 'apocalypse' refers etymologically to a revelation, or more literally an uncovering," adding: "Apocalyptic literature always finds its society and historical moment to be corrupt and decadent." So rather than rail against the overheated apocalyptic rhetoric of others, Kotsko undertook his own cool-eyed, analytical version, saying, "I will follow my prophetic and apostolic forebears in diagnosing the root cause of that corruption and decadence as a failure to recognize the truth, which has resulted in a thoroughgoing moral and political nihilism."</div><div>
</div><div>That truth is not simply the failure of the neoliberal order — ushered in by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, but embraced by Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Barack Obama as well — but a good deal more as well: the lies about human nature, freedom and the market which lie at the core of the neoliberal faith, as Kotsko unfolded in his 2018 book, "Neoliberalism's Demons: On the Political Theology of Late Capital." So I reached out to ask him to discuss what he had uncovered at the core of our historical moment's "corruption and decadence." This interview has been edited, as usual, for clarity and length.</div><div>
</div><div>Shortly after Trump's failed coup attempt, you wrote "An Apocalypse About Nothing." You called the attempt "a potentially apocalyptic moment, one in which all our certainties about constitutional government and electoral politics dissolved and all bets were off," and yet in terms of normal politics, you argue, it was hard to see why. Above the blow-by-blow melodrama, from a larger perspective many people would agree that the Democrats lack the confidence and vision to stand up to Republicans, and I think your work can help us better understand why. But I want to begin with your deeper argument. You write that in your book you argue that neoliberalism "has always been an apocalyptic discourse." First of all, how do you define neoliberalism?</div><div>
</div><div>Neoliberalism is the political and economic project which has been a shared ambition by most major parties in most Western countries for the last generation. It is a project of trying to reimagine and re-create as many parts of society as possible on the model of a competitive market.</div><div>
</div><div>What do you mean by describing it as an "apocalyptic discourse"?</div><div>
</div><div>It started off as an oppositional movement. Especially after the First World War and the Great Depression, the free market ideal was under threat. It had been discredited and different alternatives were being tried, including more radical alternatives like the Soviet Union. So the people who were theorizing this before it became public policy were constantly like, "You need to adopt our free-market ideals or else you're going to be Communists." So it was like a voice calling in the wilderness: "Get back to the gospel of the free-market or else you're going to lose your freedom forever!"</div><div>
</div><div>When Reagan came in, and Thatcher as well, they adopted a similar kind of apocalyptic tone, except that they were kind of like the messiah implementing this plan. It was defeating all these enemies. Reagan is often credited — probably falsely — with delivering the crushing blow against the Soviet Union that made its dissolution inevitable and breaking the welfare state, all these powers that were literally demonized in a lot of neoliberal discourse The perception was that he was the one vanquishing them.</div><div>
</div><div>Then when the Democrats adopted the discourse themselves, how was it apocalyptic for them?</div><div>
</div><div>I think for them it turned around the idea that once the neoliberal order was established, it was no longer a matter of defeating these alternatives, because they had been all defeated. You know, the claim that there was no alternative to neoliberalism seemed true at that moment. The only threats were just these nihilistic threats of disaster — natural disasters, chaos, failed states, terrorism — these purely negative threats that were constantly menacing the world scene. The Democrats, and basically the left wing of neoliberalism in general, positioned themselves as trying to stabilize and rationalize the neoliberal system so that these nihilistic threats would not fester and lash out.</div><div>
</div><div>In your book, "Neoliberalism's Demons," you write that "neoliberalism makes demons of us all." Can you explain what's entailed in this demonization? It's a bit different from what folks might think.....</div><div>
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</div><div>=</div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/neoliberalism/</div><div>&nbsp;common dr</div><div>
</div><div>The threat of fascism will hardly disappear when Donald Trump moves out of the White House in two weeks. On Capitol Hill, the Republicans who've made clear their utter contempt for democracy will retain powerful leverage over the U.S. government. And they're securely entrenched because Trumpism continues to thrive in much of the country.</div><div>
</div><div>Yet, in 2021, progressives should mostly concentrate on challenging the neoliberalism of Democratic Party leaders. Why? Because the neoliberal governing model runs directly counter to the overarching responsibilities of the left—to defeat right-wing forces and to effectively fight for a decent, life-affirming society.</div><div>
</div><div>Neoliberalism can be defined as a political approach that "seeks to transfer the control of economic factors from the public sector to the private sector"—and strives to "place limits on government spending, government regulation, and public ownership." Neoliberalism can be described more candidly as vast, systemic, nonstop plunder.</div><div>
</div><div>The plunder is enmeshed in politics. In the real world, economic power is political power. And privatizing political power amounts to undermining democracy.</div><div>
</div><div>After four decades of neoliberal momentum, we can see the wreckage all around us: the cumulative effects, destroying uncounted human lives deprived of adequate healthcare, education, housing, economic security and existence free of predatory monetizing. While Republican politicians usually led the wrecking crews, their Democratic counterparts often served as enablers or initiated their own razing projects.</div><div>
</div><div>As its policies gradually degrade the standard of living and quality of life for most people, neoliberalism provides a poisonous fuel for right-wing propaganda and demagoguery. Although corporate media outlets routinely assert that "moderate" Democrats are best positioned to block the right's advances, the corporate-oriented policies of those Democrats—including trade deals, deregulation, and privatization—have aided rather than impeded far-right faux populism.</div><div>In the long run, the realities of rampant income inequalities cannot be papered over—and neither can the despair and rage they engender. Phony and unhinged as it is, Trumpist extremism offers such rage a populist avenue, paved with a range of vile bigotries and cruelties. When Democrats fail to offer a competing populist avenue, their party is seen as aligned with the status quo. And in this era, the status quo is a political loser.</div><div>
</div><div>A myth of U.S. mainstream politics and corporate media is that the most effective way to counteract the political right is to compromise by ideologically moving rightward. When progressives internalize this myth, they defer to the kind of Democratic Party leadership that frequently ends up assisting instead of undermining the Republican Party.</div><div>
</div><div>That's what happened when, as incoming presidents, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama filled their administrations' top-tier positions with Wall Street movers and shakers, elite big-business consultants and the like. Those appointments foreshadowed major pro-corporate policies—such as Clinton's NAFTA trade pact, and Obama's lavish bailout for huge banks while millions of homeowners saw their houses sink under foreclosure water—policies that were economically unjust. And politically disastrous. Two years after Clinton and Obama entered the White House, Democrats lost control of Congress in the 1994 and 2010 midterm elections.</div><div>
</div><div>Now, there's scant evidence Joe Biden is looking toward significant structural changes that would disrupt the ongoing trends of soaring wealth for the very few and deepening financial distress or outright desperation for the many. Without massive pressure from progressives, it's foreseeable that Biden—like Clinton and Obama—will run his presidency as a corporate-friendly enterprise without seriously challenging the extreme disparities of economic injustice.</div><div>
</div><div>"The stock market is ending 2020 at record highs, even as the virus surges and millions go hungry," the Washington Post reported. Wall Street succeeded at "enriching the wealthy . . . despite a deadly pandemic that has killed more than 340,000 Americans."</div><div>
</div><div>The reporting came from a newspaper owned by the richest person on earth, Jeff Bezos (who currently has an estimated wealth of $190 billion that he can't take with him). In a world of so much suffering, the accumulation of such wealth is beyond pathology.</div><div>
</div><div>What's imperative for progressives is not to "speak truth to power" but to speak truth about power—and to drastically change an economic system that provides humongous wealth to a very few and worsening misery to the countless many.</div><div>
</div><div>FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES</div><div>The failure of militarized neoliberalism is laid bare in Iraq and Haiti ... ›</div><div>Neoliberalism Is Destroying Almost Everybody's Lives - How Many ... ›</div><div>Neoliberalism: Political success, economic failure - Alternet.org ›</div><div>RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB</div><div>“Neoliberalism” isn't an empty epithet. It's a real, powerful set of ideas. ›</div><div>How 'Neoliberalism' Became the Left's Favorite Insult ›</div><div>Neoliberalism: Political Success, Economic Failure - The American ... ›</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div>=</div><div>new report</div><div>
</div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/trickle-down-economics/</div><div>
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</div><div>=</div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/us-economy/</div><div>
</div><div>an 1120</div><div>The rich are getting richer and everyone else is getting poorer. That is exactly the plaN&nbsp;&nbsp;</div><div>the reason everybody is so angst-ridden about the economy is because we all have the wrong idea about what it is supposed to do and how it's supposed to work.</div><div>=</div><div>
</div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/conservatism/</div><div>
</div><div>common dr</div><div>
</div><div>What is a conservative? We've seen a lot of them in 2020, refusing to respect the needs of society.</div><div>
</div><div>The Heritage Foundation says: "Foremost among [conservatism's] transcendent values is the individual's use of his God-given free will, whence derives his right to be free from the restrictions of arbitrary force." Stanford University adds: "For conservatives, individuals and local communities are better assessors of their own needs and problems than distant bureaucrats." A 2003 study for the American Psychological Association stated: "The core ideology of conservatism stresses resistance to change and justification of inequality." There are many other forms and definitions of conservatism as political, economic, and social philosophies. The usage here may best be understood as the evolving marriage of individualism and neoliberalism (privatization, deregulation, low taxes, austerity) since the 1970s.</div><div>
</div><div>Conservatism has made 'social' a dirty word. Here are some of the details of fifty years of damage inflicted on America.</div><div>
</div><div>The Disastrous Effect of Placing Individuals Over Society</div><div>
</div><div>The anti-government, "all about freedom" individuality of conservatives has failed terribly in a time of national emergency. How did the misdirected mindset get its start? With Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, who are commonly referenced with connection to neoliberalism. Friedman is the author of some remarkable quotes: "The free market system distributes the fruits of economic progress among all people." And, according to guk The Guardian: "There is evidence that a democratic society, once established, destroys a free economy."</div><div>
</div><div>Then came Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. The former UK Prime Minister said about society: "There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families."Reagan, whose campaign slogan was, familiarly, "Let's make America great again," famously stated that "Government is not the solution to our problem; government IS the problem."</div><div>
</div><div>So now, at a time when we need to work together as a society rather than as a crowd of individuals, we've been betrayed by conservatism. As historian Neil J. Young puts it, "Now, 40 years later amid a global pandemic, that unbridled individualism has shown its deadly dimensions in Trump and the Republicans' lack of response to COVID-19...it's evident in the millions of Americans who—in refusing to wear masks, practice social distance, and momentarily deny their self-gratification—have selfishly exploited the language of 'individual responsibility' as license for their own recklessness."</div><div>
</div><div>Just as frightening is the recent conservative Supreme Court church-gathering decision that "placed religious freedom before pandemic precautions."</div><div>
</div><div>Deregulation and Subsidies: Corporations Running Rampant</div><div>
</div><div>The euphemistically-named Citizens United (CU) is an example of the deceptive measures used by conservatives. CU refers to an initiative that "seeks to reassert the traditional American values of limited government, freedom of enterprise, strong families, and national sovereignty and security." But it helps corporations, not citizens, by allowing unlimited funding for corporate-friendly candidates.</div><div>
</div><div>Conservatives argue for less government intervention—except when it comes to subsidies. Leading the pack of favor-seeking lobbyist groups is the pharmaceutical industry. Few companies have benefited more than Pfizer, whose former CEO Ian Read once complained that U.S. taxes had his company fighting "with one hand tied behind our back." In 2019 Pfizer made nearly half of its $17.7 billion in profits in the U.S., yet the company claimed $1.8 billion in federal and state tax refunds. And it takes from America in another way. In recent years Pfizer has increased the prices of dozens of prescription drugs at over ten times the rate of inflation.</div><div>
</div><div>Now Pfizer is basking in the glow of media coverage for the so-called "Pfizer Vaccine." The company deserves credit for its all-out efforts to distribute the medication to millions of people. But the vaccine was created by the Turkish/German founders of BioNTech, Ugur Sahin and Ozlem Tureci, who guided the development of the messenger RNA process that triggers an immune reaction against Covid. The groundwork for the relatively rapid production of the vaccine was laid in place at the National Institutes of Health and the University of Pennsylvania by research on the prior SARS and MERS outbreaks. More expertise came from the taxpayer-funded Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and Centers for Disease Control (CDC). According to Dr. Anthony Fauci, "The speed is a reflection of years of work that went before." Indeed, a successful vaccine is the product of long-term social cooperation, not individualism.</div><div>
</div><div>Inequality: Going Viral</div><div>
</div><div>Thanks to the insidious conservative-minded 50-year-old "trickle-down" philosophy—which astoundingly continues to be preached by many of the super-rich—inequality has stretched our nation nearly to the breaking point.</div><div>
</div><div>At one end, the 25 million adults who make up the richest 10% of America increased their wealth in this pandemic year by an average of $200,000 each.</div><div>
</div><div>At the other end: it is estimated by Moody's Analytics that nearly 12 million American renters will owe an average of $5,850 in back rent and utilities by the beginning of 2021. Little of America's surging income and wealth since the 1970s has gone to the poorest 50%.</div><div>
</div><div>Some Hope?</div><div>
</div><div>Philosopher and political economist John Stuart Mill once said, "Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives."</div><div>
</div><div>As Mill made clear, smart people have also gravitated to the conservative side. Among them were the aforementioned anti-government crusaders Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, who expressed support for a Universal Basic Income. In fact, the UBI concept has been promoted by both political parties over the years. But it will take the will and fortitude of Congress to make it a reality. And Congress is overflowing with John Stuart Mill's conservatives.</div><div>
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</div><div>aha yikes herd idiocy is all we have left when freeDUMB rules, plus // w/ darwin libtard reductionist BS</div><div>
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</div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/trump-and-the-right-share-a-darwinist-herd-mentality-and-preference-for-sacrificing-the-weak-to-capitalism/</div><div>
</div><div>carl pope salon</div><div>
</div><div>Donald Trump's promise in an ABC News town hall last month that the United States would soon achieve herd immunity for the coronavirus, and conflating that with herd mentality, may be explained because Trump is counting on the latter to rescue his second term. It's otherwise impossible to imagine a campaign whose endgame is to recover the lost loyalty of voters over 65 selecting as its closing argument, "Not enough of you have died yet."</div><div>
</div><div>It's a safe bet that none of his 2016 Republican primary challengers would have embraced the idea that the solution to the pandemic was more American casualties than the Civil War and World War II combined. But many of Trump's Republican comrades-in-arms have embraced, often eagerly, a default preference for herd immunity — harkening back to the harsh social Darwinism that underlies much of modern conservatism. Early on in the pandemic there were Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, Rep. Trey Hollingsworth of Indiana and radio host Glenn Beck, all of whom argued that the loss of more American lives was preferable to scaling back the economy. Then, when the issue became wearing masks, some opponents argued "if I'm going to get COVID and die from it, so be it …" Of course they really meant, "If you are going to get COVID ..." Wearing masks was a deprivation of freedom — although this argument seems never to have been extended by Republicans to the prohibition on public nudity.</div><div>
</div><div>As the pandemic surged again, by October Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin was referring to "unjustified hysteria" about covid, and asked, after he became infected, ""Why do we think we actually can stop the progression of a contagious disease?" (The obvious answer is that we have been doing so, with increasing success, since the 1854 cholera pump moment. That is rejected by many on the right, because stopping a pandemic may require the government to prevent citizens from endangering others.)</div><div>
</div><div>Herd immunity can sometimes reduce mortality from a disease, but over the centuries has failed to end the curse of influenza, tuberculosis, smallpox, polio, rabies or dengue fever. It fits neatly, however, into a social Darwinist framework. Those who die are the "weak" — the poorest, the youngest and the oldest young — or can at any rate be classified as weak and deserving to die, because they died. Survival of the fittest requires discarding the weak. Remember the "let them die" hecklers who populated some of the 2011 Republican debates on health care.</div><div>
</div><div>This underlying value distortion — my personal freedom extends to my right to endanger you — spreads out across a range of other issues. Today's Republican reluctance to curb pollution even when it is demonstrably is killing a power plant's neighbors, to keep pesticides that kill farm workers out of the fields or to do anything at all about the climate crisis, which conservatives have privately conceded for years was real and caused by carbon pollution, are all illustrations of how the toxin of social Darwinism still contaminates much of the right's thinking about freedom.</div><div>
</div><div>So Trump's response to the COVID crisis — and the willingness of the Republican congressional establishment to enable it — illustrates a deep-rooted flaw in the American right. In a world in which we are, like it or not, all bound together, a tolerable conservatism is one that is willing to protect me from irresponsible neighbors, whether those are COVID-risking teenagers, irresponsible gun owners or multinational chemical companies.</div><div>
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</div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/governance-by-fox-news-the-right-wing-cable-outlet-has-propped-up-dr-scott-atlas-at-the-expense-of-experts-like-fauci</div><div>
</div><div>Dr. Sanjay Gupta, chief medical correspondent for CNN, has stressed that if the United States took a "herd immunity" approach to the coronavirus pandemic, millions would die. But over at Fox News, Dr. Scott Atlas — a major proponent of the "herd immunity" argument — has received a lot of favorable coverage. And Media Matters' Matt Gertz, this week, argues that Fox News has endangered the public's health by encouraging President Donald Trump to make Atlas more prominent on the White House's coronavirus task force.</div><div>"Atlas seized control from Dr. Anthony Fauci and other government experts on public health and infectious diseases, and he has derailed their efforts to slow the spread of the virus," Gertz explains. "This is what governance by Fox News looks like. The White House plucked a purveyor of the network's coronavirus happy talk from its green room, and his view has overwhelmed those who have actual expertise on the subject — with potentially disastrous results."</div><div>
</div><div>Hosts at Fox News, Gertz notes, have "denounced public health officials like Fauci" but "propped up Atlas" — who, Gertz stresses, now "dominates" the White House coronavirus task force despite his "lack of qualifications in public health or infectious diseases." Atlas, who joined the task force in August, is a neuroradiologist. But unlike Fauci, he isn't an immunologist. Fauci is one of the United States' leading experts on infectious diseases.</div><div>
</div><div>Gertz quotes a report from the Washington Post, noting that Atlas "has pushed a baseless theory inside the task force that the U.S. population is close to herd immunity — the point at which enough people become immune to a disease either by becoming infected or getting vaccinated that its spread slows — despite a scientific consensus that the United States is nowhere close."</div><div>
</div><div>Atlas, Gertz points out, has argued against social distancing measures, saying, "All restrictions should be lifted, schools should be opened and only the most vulnerable populations, such as nursing home residents, should be sheltered." And when Fox hosts praise Atlas, according to Gertz, Trump is paying close attention.</div><div>
</div><div>"Fox hosts dictated the pandemic response through their shows and in meetings with Trump and his top advisers, until they finally managed to place one of their own within his ranks," Gertz explains. "The result has been a calamity: hundreds of thousands of Americans are dead, the economy is in shambles, and the virus is still out of control."</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div>=</div><div>withpod on keynes says this BS discred in 2008 crash, but now even more by covid] but not this pow:</div><div>cover for mcconn inaction on heroes?&nbsp; bad economy trump covid in gen'l?</div><div>
</div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/trumps-millionaire-economic-adviser-celebrates-gales-of-creative-destruction-as-millions-lose-their-jobs-and-go-hungry/</div><div>
</div><div>no lnx twt</div><div>
</div><div>With millions of Americans out of work, struggling to afford food for themselves and their children, and facing the possibility of losing their homes, President Donald Trump's top economic adviser on Friday celebrated what he described as the "gales of creative destruction" supposedly unleashed by the U.S. economic system in the midst of the pandemic-induced recession.</div><div>
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</div><div>"The talk is that a lot of folks who became unemployed, alright, most regrettably—but, they're sticking with it and they're going out and starting new businesses," Larry Kudlow, director of the National Economic Council, said in an appearance on Fox Business. "They're going to be small businesses."</div><div>
</div><div>"But that's the great part of American capitalism, gales of creative destruction," Kudlow continued, deploying a phrase popularized in the 1940s by economist Joseph Schumpeter. "I just love that new business start-up story."</div><div>
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</div><div>Watch: fox biz</div><div>
</div><div>Critics immediately noted that the millions of people across the U.S. who are teetering on the brink of complete financial ruin are likely not impressed by the so-called "creative destruction" praised by Kudlow, who in June complained that the $600-per-week federal unemployment insurance boost many jobless workers were receiving at the time was excessive.</div><div>
</div><div>"Wonder how the 14% of households with kids who reported that they didn't get enough food to eat in the last seven days or the 32% of adults who are having trouble paying for usual household expenses feel about the 'gales of creative destruction,'" tweeted Washington Post reporter Jacqueline Alemany, pointing to data from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.</div><div>
</div><div>Kudlow's comments came a day after the Labor Department reported that an additional 1.3 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits, yet another indication that the strong economic recovery Kudlow has repeatedly predicted in recent weeks is not materializing.</div><div>
</div><div>"As American capitalism becomes even crueler, the rhetoric of its apologists will only grow more explicit," Jacobin's Luke Savage tweeted in response to Kudlow's remarks.</div><div>
</div><div>On top of being cold comfort for Americans struggling to get by as the prospect of another federal relief package before the November election remains uncertain, Kudlow's rosy insistence that the economic turmoil caused by the Covid-19 pandemic spurred a major new wave of entrepreneurship was also likely factually dubious.</div><div>
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</div><div>"Self-employment is absolutely helping us to adapt to the pandemic," Adam Ozimek, chief economist at freelancing platform Upwork, told the Post's Jeff Stein. "But it's really nowhere near enough to make up for the massive shortfall in overall employment that we still have. Not even close."</div><div>
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</div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/study-reveals-how-stakeholder-capitalism-fails-to-live-up-to-promises-as-corporations-continue-putting-profits-over-people/</div><div>
</div><div>no linx twt</div><div>
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</div><div>Study reveals how ‘stakeholder capitalism’ fails to live up to promises as corporations continue putting profits over people</div><div>
</div><div>Written by Kenny Stancil / Common Dreams September 23, 2020</div><div>
</div><div>When the Business Roundtable issued a statement on corporate purpose and promised to “deliver value to all of… our stakeholders” in 2019, some applauded the attention paid to social and environmental concerns by 181 CEOs as a significant improvement from neoliberal economist Milton Friedman’s 1970 dictate that “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits,” which marked the beginning of an era of shareholder primacy.</div><div>
</div><div>But a study (pdf) published Tuesday by the Test of Corporate Purpose (TCP) initiative showed that amid 2020’s disastrous public health, economic, social, and environmental challenges—the coronavirus pandemic, massive unemployment and worsening inequality, persistent police violence and racial injustice, and intensified climate crisis—”stakeholder capitalism” has failed to follow through on its promises to do more to benefit workers and communities, continuing to “put profits ahead of people” instead.</div><div>
</div><div>Joshua Bolten, president of the Business Roundtable (BRT), told the New York Times that he thinks corporations “have done exceptionally well” in supporting employees during the unprecedented crisis set in motion by Covid-19.</div><div>
</div><div>But Times reporter Peter Goodman painted a different picture. When large technology company Salesforce “celebrated more than $5 billion in quarterly sales… in late August,” its chief executive, Marc Benioff—a self-styled “evangelist for stakeholder capitalism”—declared victory, explained Goodman. “The next day, in the midst of the pandemic, Salesforce informed 1,000 employees that their jobs were no longer needed.”</div><div>
</div><div>In March, Arne Sorenson—president and CEO of Marriott International and co-chairman of a BRT task force convened to address Covid-19—”announced that he was furloughing tens of thousands of employees, asserting that his hand had been forced by the swift deterioration of the business,” wrote Goodman. “Less than two weeks later, Marriott paid out $160 million in dividends to shareholders.”</div><div>
</div><div>TCP’s study, which was conducted with KKS Advisors and supported by the Ford Foundation, summarized the “conundrum” this way: “The interests of stockholders and other stakeholders will not always align.”</div><div>
</div><div>The analysis showed that U.S. companies that signed the BRT statement “performed no better than their nonsignatory counterparts through the 2020 crises.”</div><div>
</div><div>Researchers pointed to stock buybacks, political spending, tax evasion, and unchecked pollution as additional examples of practices reflecting the continued prioritization of shareholder interests despite pledges to pursue “inclusive prosperity” for all stakeholders.</div><div>
</div><div>In the words of the report’s authors, many companies still “campaign for one world while publicly proclaiming a vision of another.”</div><div>
</div><div>The report noted that only a handful of the signatories to the BRT statement even submitted it to their companies for approval, which is why some scholars have argued that the promises made by proponents of “stakeholder capitalism” are a public relations gimmick that will not improve social welfare.</div><div>
</div><div>On social media, commentators such as Krystal Ball and Bharat Ramamurti concurred. Ramamurti, the managing director of the Roosevelt Institute’s Corporate Power Program, wrote: “The way to change corporate behavior is with new laws. Press releases won’t cut it.”</div><div>
</div><div>According to Goodman, “The study enhances doubts that corporations can be depended upon to moderate their quest for profits to pursue solutions to challenges like climate change, racial injustice, and economic inequality.”</div><div>
</div><div>Proponents of a genuinely just and sustainable society like Marjorie Kelly, executive vice president of The Democracy Collaborative, have criticized the BRT statement while arguing that what’s known as the triple-bottom-line approach to business—people, planet, and prosperity—is a step in the right direction.</div><div>
</div><div>Kelly cautioned against viewing companies’ simultaneous pursuit of multiple interests as inherently disingenuous, pointing to “national brands as diverse as Ben & Jerry’s, Amalgamated Bank, and King Arthur Baking” that govern themselves according to formal commitments giving “social and environmental benefits equal standing with profit goals.”</div><div>
</div><div>One key to differentiating the mission-driven enterprises truly committed to the creation of an equitable and ecological economy from those corporations for whom social responsibility is a marketing ploy is to analyze the gap between rhetoric and practice, Kelly argued.</div><div>
</div><div>The study noted: “Given the enormous influence major corporations have over the trajectory of policy and regulation, no analysis of corporate purpose and its alignment with a stakeholder primacy model would be complete without incorporating an evaluation of companies’ lobbying and political spending activities,” which often contradict the information coming from marketing departments.</div><div>
</div><div>Fidelity to progressive economic and environmental policies, or lack thereof, provides another clue. In addition to well-known instances of greenwashing and pinkwashing, political scientist Cedric Johnson has called attention to the ‘blackwashing‘ at play when, for example, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos adamantly pledged his support for Black Lives Matter even though “the company fired Chris Smalls, a black Amazon worker who led a walkout at the end of March demanding more protective gear and hazard pay.”</div><div>
</div><div>Economists Emily Kawano, former director of the Center for Popular Economics, and Julie Matthaei, co-founder of the U.S. Solidarity Economy Network, argued that profit-maximization is intrinsic to capitalism and the privately owned corporations that characterize it, so even the “stakeholder” variety is incapable of balancing moneymaking with competing objectives like greater equality and sustainability.</div><div>
</div><div>According to Kawano, Matthaei, and other proponents of public goods and a cooperative model of social wealth-building, successfully prioritizing human and environmental well-being will require moving toward a non-capitalist economy based around democratic ownership.</div><div>
</div><div>Now “would be a great time to push for real reforms,” Chuck Collins, director of the Institute for Policy Studies’ Program on Inequality, told Common Dreams. “Why shouldn’t Amazon or any of the hundreds of companies that are benefiting from pandemic conditions share their ownership with employees?”</div><div>
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</div><div>“Any talk of corporations being responsive to a broad spectrum of stakeholders is just that—talk—as long as stakeholders don’t have power,” said Kelly. “And power means ownership.”</div><div>
</div><div></div><div>=</div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/team-trumps-response-is-now-a-worldwide-embarrassment</div><div>
</div><div>hunter kos</div><div>
</div><div>stats --> They’re laughing at us, Donald. Well, they’re laughing at you. Well, actually nobody’s laughing, there’s 200,000 Americans dead and in the ground right now and, still, the only pandemic “plans” coming out all members of Republican leadership combined ended up abandoned because they left it to Jared Kushner, and Jared Kushner got bored.</div><div>=</div><div></div><div>
</div><div>920 an</div><div>
</div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/we-were-flabbergasted-new-report-says-jared-kushners-conduct-stunned-attendees-at-a-19-meeting/</div><div>
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</div><div>when Jared Kushner was grilled by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer earlier this week, the White House senior adviser vigorously defended President Donald Trump on a range of issues — including the president’s widely criticized response to the coronavirus pandemic. Kushner has played a key role in that response: he was put in a charge of a private sector-oriented coronavirus task force that was separate from the White House task force with Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx.</div><div>
</div><div>And in a lengthy, in-depth article for Vanity Fair, Katherine Eban revealed some explosive details of Kushner’s coronavirus response, focusing heavily on a meeting on Friday, March 20.</div><div>
</div><div>Kushner was present at that meeting, which was attended by “a large group of officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency — people one attendee described as ‘the doers’ — to strategize how best to replenish the nation’s depleted reserves of PPE.”</div><div>
</div><div>Kushner, Eban reports, had a “confrontational tone” when he told attendees, “The federal government is not going to lead this response,” he announced. “It’s up to the states to figure out what they want to do."&nbsp; When one of the attendees expressed concerns about PPE shortages, Kushner said, “Free markets will solve this. That is not the role of government.”</div><div>
</div><div>New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Eban notes, was desperate for supplies — and Kushner’s response was, “Cuomo didn’t pound the phones hard enough to get PPE for his state…. His people are going to suffer, and that’s their problem.” And one of the attendees told Vanity Fair, “That’s when I was like, ‘We’re screwed.’”</div><div>
</div><div>According to Eban, “What actually transpired in the room stunned a number of those in attendance. Vanity Fair has reconstructed the details of the meeting for the first time, based on recollections, notes, and calendar entries from three people who attended the meeting. All quotations are based on the recollections of one or more individual attendees.”</div><div>
</div><div>Kushner, according to one of the attendees Vanity Fair interviewed, became “very aggressive” and told the group they “only understood how entrepreneurship works, but didn’t understand how government worked.”</div><div>
</div><div>Another attendee told Vanity Fair it was “very clear” that Kushner wasn’t interested in finding a solution to the shortages because in March, COVID-19 was primarily hurting blue states. According to that attendee, “We were flabbergasted. I basically had an out-of-body experience: where am I, and what happened to America?”</div><div>
</div><div>Eban goes on to describe some of the subsequent problems with Kushner’s coronavirus response, including plans for Eastman Kodak to manufacture drugs needed during the pandemic.</div><div>
</div><div>“Of all the aborted efforts to secure America’s supply chain of essential lifesaving supplies,” Eban writes, “no deal has blown up more spectacularly than the one to turn an aging camera film company, Eastman Kodak, into an American manufacturer of ingredients for low-cost generic drugs.”</div><div>
</div><div>According to Eban, “Vanity Fair has learned, Eastman Kodak was so untested when it came to making drug ingredients that the company’s head of government relations, Kristin Calabrese Williams, wrote to a government health official in March saying that the company would need a ‘waiver from the FDA’s requirements’ to ensure drug safety.”</div><div>
</div><div></div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;=</div><div>
</div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/how-a-con-artist-scammed-the-u-s-government-from-the-shadows/</div><div>
</div><div>no lnx</div><div>
</div><div>Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly September 17, 2020</div><div>
</div><div>On October 23rd, Garrison Courtney will be sentenced in court after pleading guilty to an elaborate fraud scheme that raked in at least $4.4 million from federal contractors. The tale reads like a Hollywood script. Courtney had a relatively undistinguished career as a spokesperson for the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Department of Homeland Security. But apparently he studied up on spycraft and, as his high school drama teacher suggested, “Sometimes I think I trained him too well as an actor.”</div><div>
</div><div>Courtney presented himself to unwitting private companies as a CIA agent who could steer contracts their way if they gave him a salary and an office. To back up his story, Courtney produced memos on the letterhead of various federal agencies spelling out authorization for what he was doing and containing the forged signatures of high-level government officials. He also recruited current and former military leaders to a task force he named “Alpha214” and used them as unwitting props to validate his claims.</div><div>
</div><div>Incredibly, the now 44-year-old&nbsp; built enough of a reputation to actually place himself inside the National Institutes of Health as a watchdog over the allocation of no-bid contracts. What you have at that point is the proverbial fox inside the henhouse. But by that time, the scheme had started to unravel.</div><div>
</div><div>Some of the heroes of this story were lawyers at the companies Courtney swindled who began asking why they weren’t being paid under the contracts they had signed.</div><div>
</div><div>Navid Keshavarz-Nia was another hero. He had done cybersecurity and technical counterintelligence work for the C.I.A., N.S.A. and F.B.I. After several months of working with Courtney, he&nbsp; fired off a resignation letter from Alpha214, distributed to its members, and addressed Courtney directly: “It is clear that I have been deliberately deceived, lied to and criminally victimized by you based on your numerous false statements.” At about the same time, the Justice Department began an investigation.</div><div>
</div><div>It’s not hard to figure out how this fraud could work. You take a skilled con artist and add it to the feeding frenzy for government contracts. Combine that toxic mix with something my colleague Gilad Edelman wrote for the Washington Monthly three years ago.</div><div>
</div><div>While the number of federal employees has basically flatlined for a half-century, the government has ballooned if you include another group in your tally: private contractors. As the size and scope of federal programs grew, but the number of civil servants stayed fixed, that labor had to get done by someone. Congress’s answer has increasingly been to contract with the private sector…</div><div>
</div><div>Very few Americans realize that this exact trend—using contractors to hide the true size and cost of a government mission—is not even close to being limited to the military. It’s ubiquitous. There has been a de facto political cap on federal workers since the 1970s, and every administration since at least Jimmy Carter’s has used contractors to get around it. Bill Clinton, who announced that “the era of big government is over,” harvested the end of the Cold War to cut 400,000 federal jobs, mostly in defense. But big government was only over if you ignored the contracting workforce, which kept rising by the hundreds of thousands. The Bush administration took things to another level, as contracting morphed from a way to sneakily expand government to an ideological goal in itself.</div><div>
</div><div>There are lessons from this tale that go beyond the importance of holding an individual like Courtney accountable for his crimes. Here’s how Edleman summarized the situation:</div><div>
</div><div>The key is to transcend the false choice of big government versus small government. The real choice is between a transparent and relatively competent big government of civil servants and a dysfunctional shadow big government of private contractors.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Whenever our government operates in the shadows, exploitation by con artists like Courtney is possible.</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;=</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div>WHEELER BS FIX EJ:</div><div>
</div><div>one upon a time, LBJ was able to harness the pressure of CRM, and maybe 60's ctr-culture, and perhaps the martyrdom of JFK, MLK and RFK to jam thru civil rights and voter rights acts, as well the the Great Society, oft wrongly seen as a failure; it did affirmative/ active programs that gave poor ppl money, education, job training...[RR cut housing 80? rick p WITH pod 920)</div><div>
</div><div>Later affirm action lost in ct? Bakke? UC? 187? RR attack mythical welfare queen, so direct assistance became taboo [BC did welfare reform, 3 strikes superpredators?]</div><div>
</div><div>But must at least be seen to do something for inner city POC, so we get opportunity/empowerment zone, tax breaks for real estate dev in crappy parts of town;&nbsp;</div><div>so not giving cash to poor ppl, but only a tax/break incentive to competent rich white guys, then the benefits will tricke down on poor ppl.&nbsp; // urban renewal?&nbsp; gentrification?&nbsp; sports stadiums?</div><div>
</div><div>NOW 920 Wheeler needs cover because the massive EPA rollback on regs clearly hurt POC, especially kids, so extends paul driessen&nbsp; Green blk death energy poverty BS&nbsp; or maybe more generally and slightly less cynically, cut red tape will allow economy to thrive, blk ppl will get some of that $, and can then afford to move away from toxins?</div><div>
</div><div>...“Communities that deal with the worst pollution in this country—and tend to be low-income and minority—face multiple environmental problems that need solving,” Wheeler said. He suggested President Donald Trump’s “opportunity zones” plan—recognized by experts as a giveaway to the rich—as a remedy to environmental injustice....</div><div>=</div><div>=</div><div>
</div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/noam-chomsky-decades-of-the-neoliberal-plague-left-us-unprepared-for-19/</div><div>
</div><div>NOAM CHOMSKY We should understand the roots of this pandemic. If we do not understand the roots and extirpate them, there is going to be another and worse one coming. So far we have been kind of lucky. The coronavirus, pandemics, epidemics are very serious, and there are many possibilities. So far, all the ones that have happened in the last ten or 15 years, either the virus has been very deadly but not very contagious, like Ebola, or very contagious but not very deadly, like COVID-19. What happens when the next one comes along that is both very contagious and very deadly? We are in deep trouble. Deep. Much worse than this. Much worse than the so-called “Spanish flu,” which ought to be called the Kansas flu by Trump’s logic. It originated in Kansas the century ago. We may be facing something much worse than that.</div><div>
</div><div>There are ways of dealing with it. After the SARS epidemic in 2003, scientists knew that another one is very likely. They warned against it. They presented policies that could be carried out. They weren’t implemented, in part because of deep institutional pathologies. The drug companies who are the obvious candidates for dealing with it can’t, by straight capitalist logic. You don’t spend money to try to prevent a catastrophe ten years from now. What you do is try to make money tomorrow. That is the logic of the system. So the pharmaceutical companies were ruled out by capitalist logic.</div><div>
</div><div>The government could step in. The government, in any event, does most of the basic research for vaccines and drugs, almost all of them. So they could have stepped in, create laboratories, and plenty of unlimited resources. But they are blocked by the neoliberal plague. Remember Ronald Reagan—that government is the problem, not the solution, which means we have to take decision-making and action out of the hands of government, which has a flaw; it’s somewhat responsive to the population. We have to shift it to unaccountable, private tyrannies, which are totally unaccountable to the population. That is the meaning of Reagan’s slogan. That is the fundamental principle of neoliberalism. We’ve been suffering—the world has been suffering from it for 40 years, except for the tiny percentage who have become super rich and extremely powerful. Well, that blocks the government.</div><div>
</div><div>Nevertheless, there were things that the government could do. When the Obama administration took office, in the first few days, Obama called the presidential scientific advisory board, which had been established by George H.W. Bush, the first Bush, who had some respect for science. Obama called it. He requested that they put together a pandemic reaction program, a way to deal with a pandemic if it comes. They came up with a report a couple weeks later. It was implemented. It was in place until January 2017.</div><div>
</div><div>Trump came into office, the first few days, dismantled the whole system. Nothing. That’s part of the general wrecking ball. “We have to destroy everything that Obama did. We have to wreck everything.” Because it is the only way to look like you are doing something. Happening all over. So that went.</div><div>
</div><div>There were programs of U.S. scientists working in China with Chinese colleagues to try to detect and identify coronaviruses. Most of them are deep in caves. It’s very dangerous work. Some have been killed, Chinese scientists. But they were finding them and identifying them and testing them. The Wuhan Institute of Virology is the main center for investigating this. Trump canceled the program.</div><div>
</div><div>There were simulations run of a pandemic as late as October 2019 warning of what would happen. No attention. The Trump administration isn’t interested. So when the epidemic finally hit, the United States was singularly unprepared. After that comes a series of grotesque inactions and actions. For a couple of months, Trump refused to admit that it was happening.</div><div>
</div><div>Other countries were doing things. In Asia, Oceania, Australia, New Zealand, they were reacting. Some of it, South Korea, which was one of the first places hit, never had to go to a lockdown because they dealt with it rationally. They identified the places that were hot spots, controlled them, tested, traced people for contacts. Countries pretty much functioned. Vietnam has reported zero deaths, and apparently that is taken quite seriously by leading U.S. specialists. The Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, which monitors the international situation, records zero deaths from Vietnam, which has a 1,400-mile border with China. South Korea, Taiwan, New Zealand, Australia are doing quite well. And Europe, they delayed in quite a way, but they did finally act. As you mentioned, the curve has sharply reduced since March for most of Europe. Some of them, like Norway, Germany, doing quite well in this respect. People are traveling through southern Italy almost like normal.</div><div>
</div><div>It has gotten so extreme that, as you know, Europe has banned American visitors. The United States is such a pariah state that Americans are not permitted to go to other countries. Other countries won’t allow them in. This is kind of mimicked in a horrible way in Brazil. Bolsonaro just denies that it’s happening. “It’s just a mild flu. Don’t worry about it. Brazilians are strong. We don’t care.” So big meetings of right-wing Bolsonaro supporters dancing in the streets and spreading the virus, and Bolsonaro says fine.</div><div>
</div><div>And one of the really world-shaking crimes that is being carried out is the destruction of the Amazon. That affects the whole world, not just Brazil. It’s basically genocide to the indigenous populations. Scientific predictions are that on our current course, the Amazon will shift in about 15 years from being a net sink of carbon dioxide to a net emitter of carbon dioxide, sometimes called the lungs of the Earth. The forest absorbs huge amounts of carbon dioxide. It will start emitting them instead. A little further down the road, the Amazon, under the current course, will just turn into savanna, no forest anymore. Devastating for Brazil and the other Amazonian countries. Devastating for the world. It’s one of the main oxygen producers of the world.</div><div>
</div><div>At every level, we are racing madly towards total catastrophe under the leadership of sociopathic fanatics. It is as if some evil demon decided to take over the human species and drive them to self-destruction. Much of the world is trying to counter it, almost all of the world, but the United States and Brazil are the extreme cases of racing with dedication towards disaster.</div><div>
</div><div>Going back to this election, that is the reason why it is the most dangerous, the most significant election in history. Why Trump is, in fact—this may sound outrageous, but it’s true—Trump is the most dangerous figure in human history. The Republican Party today is the most dangerous organization in human history. You can compare Trump to, say, Hitler, the Wannsee declaration in 1942, called for killing all the Jews, tens of millions of Slavs, not destroying humanized society. There has been nothing like this. Nothing.</div><div>
</div><div>The Republican Party, we know how they shifted. You go back just a decade or so, John McCain, 2008, was running for president. His program had some pretty weak, but some policies directed to global warming. The Republican Congress was beginning to contemplate global warming, policies to restrict global warming. The Koch brothers, a superrich energy corporation, got wind of this. They had been working for years to prevent it. David Koch, one of the Koch brothers who died recently, launched an incredible campaign to make sure that the Republican Party would turn to denialism. They bribed senators, intimidated others with the threat of running counter-campaigns against them. Huge lobbying campaign. Astroturf campaigns. A massive juggernaut. The party shifted, dropped all of its efforts to deal with climate change. It’s now a party led by denialists.</div><div>
</div><div>AMY GOODMAN: As you talk about this denialism and the science denialism, first dealing with the climate crisis and then extending to the pandemic, both threatening life on Earth, with President Trump now holding a daily coronavirus press briefing without the scientists, you have Anthony Fauci throwing out the first ball at the Washington Nationals game, the chief infectious disease scientist, who won’t play ball exactly with the White House, so he is not in the coronavirus briefing. You have Dr. Birx. President Trump says she’s right outside, but she is not a part of this news conference. Do you think reporters who are sitting in the White House briefing room should refuse to be there unless scientists are there and unless President Trump wears a mask?</div><div>
</div><div>NOAM CHOMSKY: Yes, I think so, and I think they should do much more. They should be pointing out constantly what I just said: we’re dealing with the most dangerous figure in human history, backed by the most dangerous organization in human history, and give the facts. Not only the pandemic, but the much more serious threat of environmental disaster and the growing, very severe threat of nuclear war.</div><div>
</div><div>In my opinion, every newspaper should have on the front page an image of the Doomsday Clock. You know all about this, but every January, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists gathers—the main scientific journal dealing with these issues—gathers scientists, political analysts to try to give an estimate of the security, the state of the world security. Started shortly after the atom bomb, it has been going on for 75 years. The minute hand is moved closer or farther—it oscillates—closer or farther to midnight, depending how dangerous the world situation is. Midnight means we are finished.</div><div>
</div><div>Every year that Trump has been in office, the minute hand has moved closer to midnight. Two years ago, it reached the closest it had ever been. This last January, the analysts gave up minutes; they moved to seconds. A hundred seconds to midnight. Since January, Trump has made every one of the issues that they have brought up worse. There were three major issues. One is of course the threat of nuclear war, second the threat of environmental catastrophe, the third the deterioration of democracy. Which does belong, because it is only with a vibrant democracy of informed, engaged public that we can have any hope of escaping from the two existential crises.</div><div>
</div><div>Since January, Trump has succeeded in making all three crises worse. I mention the nuclear weapons issue, considerably worse thanks to Trump’s actions. The environmental crisis of course getting worse, as he continues to press for maximization of the use of the most dangerous fossil fuels, cuts back through his EPA representatives and others, cuts back on the efforts to mitigate the crisis through regulatory means. And democracy, it’s pretty obvious; the executive branch has been essentially cleansed of independent voices. Nothing but sycophants of Pompeo variety. “We were sent by God to save Israel.”</div><div>
</div><div>The Inspectors General who were imposed by Congress, by the Republican Congress to monitor malfeasance of the executive branches, purged. Trump in fact went out of his way to humiliate the senior Republican senator, Charles Grassley, who had spent much of his career imposing these monitors. The attorney for the Southern District of New York looked into the Trump swamp; fired. Congress, turned by McConnell, used to be called the greatest deliberative body in the world. Now it is a joke. Doesn’t do any deliberation. It does essentially nothing except try to race through as many appointments of young, ultra-right judges as possible so they can pack the judiciary for a generation. The only other thing it does is figure out ways to pour money into the—dollars into the pockets of the rich, like the tax scam. That’s the Senate, the greatest deliberative body. Proposals come from the House for legislation; McConnell just cans them. Don’t look at them. That is not the role of the Senate.</div><div>
</div><div>Going back, that’s why they should be putting the Doomsday Clock on the front of every newspaper. Show us what the United States is doing to the world. To itself and the world. That should be in front of everyone’s attention. And there are many other things that should be done. There should be major protests now, everywhere, against the use of military force to occupy American cities and to crush peaceful dissidents. This is intolerable in a functioning democracy. We can’t sit by and let it happen, just let it proceed step by step until we reach real catastrophe.</div><div>
</div><div></div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div>useful cognitive short-cut: for anything i do not like/want to do:</div><div>
</div><div>see free freedom, liberty etc god term ~ tyranny</div><div>
</div><div>aha: recall that magical invis hand converts all my selfish act into the common good = $ = prosperity= life = up good=god</div><div>
</div><div>ainsly earh F&F [something sensible ] =a plot to take away our freedom</div><div>
</div><div>gadsen presumably big in TP ~ stay at home covid protest eg gadsen flags</div><div>=</div><div>=</div><div>a bunch like this: including game-over libtard cf nial f</div><div>
</div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/the-failures-and-inadequacies-of-neoliberalism-are-now-on-stark-display/</div><div>
</div><div>no lnx</div><div>
</div><div>The failures and inadequacies of neoliberalism are now on stark display</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Written by Subin Dennis / Independent Media Institute April 10, 2020</div><div>
</div><div>It is a sign of how bad things are when the editorial board of the Financial Times, the world’s leading business newspaper, carries an editorial calling for “radical reforms… reversing the prevailing policy direction of the last four decades.” The FT editorial of April 3 has advocated, among other things, a more active role for governments in the economy, ways to make labor markets less insecure, and wealth taxes. The FT’s editorial board, increasingly concerned about saving capitalism from itself, had written about the need for “state planning” and a “worker-led economy” last year in August. But the April 3 editorial has garnered much more attention since it comes amidst a massive crisis.</div><div>
</div><div>By now it has become obvious that substantial state intervention in the economy—frowned upon by the apostles of neoliberal economics—is back to the center stage across the world.</div><div>
</div><div>The situation is such that the public sector, long maligned by neoliberal economists and weakened by governments beholden to neoliberalism, is playing a major role in the fight against coronavirus. Its role would have been much more effective and wide-ranging if it hadn’t been hit hard by decades of fund cuts and waves of privatization. Nevertheless, with the ineffectiveness of private production with profit motive as its driving force to handle a crisis becoming more evident, the public sector, production with state direction, and some amount of planning are making a major comeback.</div><div>
</div><div>Public Health Care</div><div>
</div><div>The case of the sectors that are directly concerned with health care provision is the most conspicuous, with the inadequacies of private health care during a crisis becoming evident to even right-wing leaders.</div><div>
</div><div>We see Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister of the UK, repeatedly talking about the need to protect the National Health Service (Britain’s publicly funded health care system). He even said, “there really is such a thing as society,” contradicting Margaret Thatcher, his conservative predecessor who batted for pure individualism in 1987 by saying “There is no such thing as society.”</div><div>
</div><div>Britain and many other countries in Western Europe have had relatively robust public health care systems. In many of these countries, such as Italy, Spain and the UK, public health care systems have suffered in recent years because of fund cuts and privatization of public facilities. Apart from the policy vision of the leaders of these countries themselves, they also came under pressure from the technocrats of the European Commission, who repeatedly demanded spending cuts on health care. Along with the easy-going attitude displayed by many of the Western governments in the early weeks of the coronavirus outbreak, such weakening of the public health care systems have made their response to the coronavirus outbreak a more arduous task. For now, the governments of Spain and Ireland have temporarily taken over their private hospitals to deal with the crisis.</div><div>
</div><div>The case of the United States, with its private, insurance-based health care system, is far worse. Not only was a sufficient number of testing kits unavailable in the United States for months, but the costs of testing and treatment remain prohibitive for a large section of the population, particularly to the 30 million uninsured and 44 million underinsured. This means that many people simply wouldn’t be able to afford to get tested and treated, endangering the health and lives of themselves and others.</div><div>
</div><div>The difference between the United States on the one hand, and China and South Korea on the other, comes readily into the picture here. Testing and treatment for coronavirus is free in China, which was crucial in the country’s success in bringing the epidemic under control. South Korea has done extensive testing, which was made available for free. Treatment costs were covered by the government and the insurance companies.</div><div>
</div><div>The Importance of the Public Sector, However, Goes Much Further</div><div>
</div><div>In times of crises such as the present one, which is comparable to war, the ability of economies to produce (or at least source) and distribute things becomes critical. Two kinds of things assume particular importance:</div><div>
</div><div>Essential things that are necessary for the immediate sustenance of the people. These include food and medicines, and in turn, the things necessary to produce them. If there are large gaps in the supply and distribution of these things, there would be a famine. If the gap is smaller, there would still be many unnecessary deaths. Even leaders who are otherwise callous about starvation deaths would be concerned about such an eventuality during a crisis, because social tensions that could rise as a result of this would make it even more difficult to tide over the crisis, whether it is a war or a pandemic. During the Second World War, Britain resorted to rationing to solve this problem. The people of India were squeezed to finance the Allies’ war in South Asia with Japan, and the result was the Bengal Famine, which took the lives of 3 million people.</div><div>
</div><div>The kind of things that are necessary to tide over the crisis. During times of war, armaments would be the most crucial among these. In the case of the coronavirus crisis, the main things would be items like ventilators, masks, hand sanitizer, gloves and medicines to treat the symptoms. Large gaps in the supply of these things would be disastrous. In the case of a war, such gaps could lead to defeat in war. In the case of a lethal pandemic, people would die in huge numbers, as we see right now. We could say this is an industrial famine of sorts contributing to the casualties, with countries unable to make ICUs, ventilators and masks fast enough in adequate quantities, and in many cases, to set up hospitals and quarantine facilities quickly enough.</div><div>
</div><div>It is in this context that leaders of government who ideologically disagree with state intervention in the economy are seen taking direct action in commandeering private companies to produce necessary things.</div><div>
</div><div>Thus we see Donald Trump, who had initially resisted the pressure to use the Defense Production Act—a wartime law—to mobilize private industry, finally using the law to direct General Motors to produce ventilators.</div><div>
</div><div>The government of Italy directed its only producer of ventilators, Siare Engineering, to ramp up the production of ventilators for the country, and sent engineers and other staff members from the Ministry of Defense to help with production. The company canceled all its orders from abroad to produce for the country.</div><div>
</div><div>Countries with a large public sector, robust industrial capacity, and the ability to effectively intervene in the market would be at a considerable advantage here. That is the case with China, which put the state-owned China State Construction Engineering to work to construct two emergency quarantine hospitals at breath-taking speed. The state ensured the flow of products such as grain, meat and eggs into the Hubei province while it was under lockdown, and coordinated the production and distribution of masks and other medical products. Once the outbreak within the country was under control, it began supplying masks and ICU equipment to other countries in need.</div><div>
</div><div>India, a large country with a poor health care system, does not have enough masks and Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) for its health workers. The number of ICU beds and ventilators available in the country is very low. For a population of 1.34 billion, it only has 31,900 ICU beds available for COVID-19 patients, according to the country’s Health Ministry officials. To compare, Germany, with 82.8 million people, had 28,000 ICU beds as of mid-March.</div><div>
</div><div>If the number of COVID-19 patients in India surges, hospitals and their critical care facilities will be overwhelmed. The public sector Bharat Electronics Limited has been asked to produce 30,000 ventilators to meet the urgent need. Hindustan Lifecare (another public sector company) and the Rail Coach Factory under the Indian Railways are going to manufacture ventilators. The public sector Ordnance Factory Board (OFB), which the government has tried continuously to weaken in the recent years, is now producing masks, sanitizer and coveralls for Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). It has also developed a ventilator prototype and is preparing for production.</div><div>
</div><div>Within India, it is the state of Kerala that has dealt with the pandemic in the most effective manner. In the Left-ruled state, which has resisted the policy of privatization pushed by successive central governments, public sector companies are manufacturing hand sanitizer and gloves, and have raised the production of essential medicines. Kudumbashree, a massive government-backed organization of women’s collectives with 4.5 million members, is making masks, which the public sector is helping distribute. Mass organizations of youth and popular science activists are pitching in by making hand sanitizer. Volunteers supported by a state-led initiative have developed a respiratory apparatus that could free up ventilators.</div><div>
</div><div>It is not as if making masks, sanitizers and gloves requires advanced technology. But industrial capacity is needed to churn them out in large numbers, or at least large mass organizations, class organizations or collectives that can mobilize people to manufacture them. The inability of the United States to even ensure the supply of such items stands out in this regard. Four decades of neoliberalism seem to have led not only to the undermining of industrial capacity useful for public purposes, but also to the hollowing out of collective energies.</div><div>
</div><div>Need for Production Capabilities and Societal Control Over Them</div><div>
</div><div>In short, the lesson is that in times such as these, a society needs two things.</div><div>
</div><div>It needs production capabilities. During a time of crisis, if a country doesn’t have the necessary industrial capacity, it will be in trouble even if it has money to buy if the other countries that do have the production capabilities block the export of the required goods. This is what is happening right now to so many countries, such as Italy and Serbia. (In the mad scramble for resources, there have even been reports of countries offering higher amounts to buy masks ordered by other countries, and of some countries even seizing shipments for themselves.) Not only is industrial capacity needed, but some excess capacity is also required in some crucial areas. As the public health expert T. Sundararaman pointed out recently, the public health care system needs to have unused capacity, which will allow it to expand and take on the extra load when there is an emergency.&nbsp;</div><div>Excess industrial capacity in China, which is often seen as a problem (including by sympathetic observers), turned out to be useful, with the country being able to manufacture essential goods to not just meet its own demands, but also that of other countries.But relying on market forces doesn’t give any guarantee of industrial capacity being built up. The kind of production capabilities built without planning would be haphazard, and may not cover the needs of an emergency when it presents itself. India, which adopted a strategy of substantial economic planning during the first few decades after independence, only to abandon it in the recent decades, is witnessing this to its peril right now.</div><div>
</div><div>The society, or the state as the representative of society, needs to be able to control the production facilities. When a crisis hits a country with production capabilities in the private sector, the state can invoke emergency powers to bring them under control. But it would be a painful process, especially in countries where the private corporate sector is not used to submit to discipline. Given the enormous influence that the corporates have over the state itself, the state might try to prolong having to invoke such emergency powers, as was seen in the United States, and that could have disastrous consequences. India has the worst of all possible worlds—cronyism is rampant, industrialization has not taken off (whether it is because of cronyism or in spite of it need not detain us here), and the public sector has been undermined.Even when the state is trying to play a more active role, its efforts could be undermined by private firms acting in their own self-interest of maximizing profits. This was seen in the United States, where private companies were engaging in price gouging, by selling masks that are normally sold for 85 cents for $7, leading to the New York state governor to call upon the federal government to nationalize the acquisition of medical supplies. He said that the U.S. government should order factories to produce masks, gowns and ventilators; otherwise the situation would be impossible to manage. The state using private facilities can be costly as well, as was seen in Britain, where the National Health Service is paying 2.4 million pounds per day as rent to private hospitals for 8,000 beds.</div><div>
</div><div>Does calling for more domestic production capabilities that the state can control mean that every country should be left to fend for itself? Certainly not—every country cannot produce everything; smaller countries would find it particularly difficult. International trade would be needed for countries to procure things that they cannot produce for themselves. But as the developments of the recent months show, today’s trade regime has nothing to do with solidarity, and it provides no guarantee of countries being able to access goods during an emergency. This is no accident. Lack of solidarity is embedded in the way capitalism has developed, with the bulk of the world’s wealth concentrated in the hands of a few countries, and within countries, in the hands of the super-rich. This system has to be overhauled for a regime of solidarity to emerge. Production and its fruits becoming less concentrated in some regions of the world and in the hands of a minority would pave the way for power relations to be less unequal, which is a precondition for real solidarity among people and societies.</div><div>
</div><div>Along with socialized health care, an immediate stop to privatization, and a stronger, expanded public sector should become part of the transitional demands of the left as we search for an exit from the pandemic crisis.</div><div>
</div><div>Subin Dennis is an economist and a researcher at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He was the Delhi State vice president of the Students’ Federation of India.</div><div>
</div><div>This article was produced by Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div></div><div></div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/heres-how-fox-news-is-badly-misinterpreting-the-coronavirus-science</div><div>
</div><div>no lnx</div><div>
</div><div>Here’s how Fox News is badly misinterpreting the coronavirus science</div><div>
</div><div>Written by Alex Henderson April 10, 2020</div><div>
</div><div>While MSNBC and CNN have offered more than their share of high-quality, informative reporting during the coronavirus pandemic, one cannot say the same about Fox News — which seriously downplayed the pandemic’s severity back in January and February. Fox News’ tone has shifted considerably since then, and its hosts are no longer claiming that the pandemic doesn’t pose a major threat to the United States. But as Media Matters’ Eric Kleefeld explains in an article published this week, some Fox News hosts are calling for a premature end to social distancing — despite evidence that it is slowing the spread of COVID-19 and lowering the number of deaths.</div><div>
</div><div>“Fox News is continuing its effort to declare victory in the country’s struggle to get through the coronavirus pandemic, pointing to continued downward revisions in the projected death count to argue that the regular economy should be reopened,” Kleefeld writes. “In fact, those downward revisions are happening precisely because of the social distancing measures that Fox commentators want to start peeling back.”</div><div>
</div><div>Members of Trump’s coronavirus task force, including Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx, have warned that based on some models, coronavirus could eventually kill 100,000-240,000 people in the United States. But on Wednesday, Kleefeld notes, CNN reported a more optimistic model of around 60,000 coronavirus-related deaths in the U.S. over the next four months.</div><div>
</div><div>The more optimistic projections, Kleefeld stresses, indicate that social distancing is working — and underscore a need for the U.S. to double down on social distancing, not let up on it. But some Fox News hosts, according to Kleefeld, want to let up on it.</div><div>
</div><div>One of the Fox pundits who is badly misinterpreting the 60,000 projection, Kleefeld reports, is Sean Hannity — who told his viewers, “No state has experienced a surge anywhere near what was told and expected. … Now, while we continue to fight COVID-19, this country must also harness its ingenuity, its brilliance, the free market system — and figure a way to get Americans safely back to work as soon as possible, where they want to be. You can’t allow America’s businesses to wither on the vine and die.”</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Kleefeld points out that other Fox News pundits, including Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson, have been insisting that the 100,000-240,000 projection was wrong from the beginning. But the more optimistic 60,000 projection, according to Kleefeld, doesn’t show that the 100,000-240,000 projection was inherently flawed — it shows that social distancing is a success and is helping the U.S. to avoid the deadlier scenario.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div></div><div></div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/how-a-basic-economic-principle-could-derail-our-ability-to-combat-the-coronavirus/</div><div>
</div><div>no lnx</div><div>
</div><div>How a basic economic principle could derail our ability to combat the coronavirus</div><div>
</div><div>Written by Leigh Osofsky, The Conversation April 7, 2020</div><div>by Leigh Osofsky, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill</div><div>
</div><div>A series of recent protests by the workers preparing and delivering our essential foods and other goods highlights a key risk to our ability to combat the coronavirus.</div><div>
</div><div>Some employees at an Amazon warehouse and Instacart “shoppers” briefly walked off the job on March 30, citing inadequate health protections and compensation. And Whole Foods workers organized a national “sick out” protest to pressure the grocery chain for hazard pay and more protections.</div><div>
</div><div>With most Americans sheltering in place, these workers are among the millions of individuals who face heightened risks as they continue to do their jobs keeping our refrigerators and pantries stocked during the pandemic. But because of an economic theory I study known as “positive externalities,” most of them aren’t being adequately compensated for it.</div><div>
</div><div>Creating positive externalities</div><div>
</div><div>A positive externality is created when someone’s private behavior leads to broader social benefits. Common examples include when someone buys a hybrid car, gets vaccinated or stops smoking. In each of these examples, someone’s private behavior reduces risks for everyone.</div><div>
</div><div>A negative externality, on the other hand, is when private behavior leads to a public harm, such as pollution from a factory.</div><div>
</div><div>By delivering food and other supplies, workers at Instacart, Whole Foods and hundreds of other companies are reducing the need for people to congregate and thus lowering the systemic risk of COVID-19 for everyone.</div><div>
</div><div>This is an essential public health benefit at a critical time in the pandemic. Without them, it would be much harder to fulfill government stay-in-place orders and slow the spread of COVID-19.</div><div>
</div><div>But in general they perform jobs that pay relatively little, and the workers say they lack basic protective gear such as hand sanitizer and masks that would keep them safe.</div><div>
</div><div>Paying for an externality</div><div>
</div><div>Unfortunately, the free market isn’t very good at dealing with positive externalities like this – or compensating those who bear the cost. As a result, there’s a risk the people creating the public benefit will not provide enough of it.</div><div>
</div><div>This is easiest to understand by way of example.</div><div>
</div><div>Imagine a “shopper” for Instacart – the app-based food delivery platform – delivers groceries to someone with COVID-19. It begins as a private transaction: The worker gets paid, and the sick customer gets food delivered in a time of need. But there is an additional benefit to the rest of us – the positive externality – from the delivery. Everyone is safer because the sick consumer doesn’t have to go to the grocery store.</div><div>
</div><div>Then there is the extra cost. The Instacart worker faces a heightened health risk by spending more time outside of home and delivering groceries to the sick customer. While the customer may pay a higher tip as a measure of her gratitude, it is unlikely to be enough to take into account the value of the broader benefit to society or the concentrated risk that the Instacart worker faces in producing this benefit.</div><div>
</div><div>And that means the undercompensated worker may decide it’s in her interest to stop putting herself at risk – and stop delivering food.</div><div>
</div><div>Now consider that this is happening countless times and in countless ways across the country as millions of workers keep putting themselves at risk so that others can stay at home.</div><div>
</div><div>Who should pay the workers enough to compensate them for their extra risk and ensure we all continue to enjoy this broad public benefit?</div><div>
</div><div>Instacart and other companies, of course, are the ones paying these workers, along with fees or tips paid by consumers. The surging demand for these companies’ services suggests they should be able to afford to offer higher wages and provide the kinds of protective gear like masks and hand sanitizer that the workers need.</div><div>
</div><div>Some companies are doing that. Target, Amazon and Whole Foods have said they will provide their workers temporary “hazard pay.” And Instacart responded to the protest by providing its gig workers with health and safety kits.</div><div>
</div><div>A government response</div><div>
</div><div>But a few companies stepping up to compensate their own workers slightly more isn’t enough to compensate the workers for the great benefits they are providing to the public at large.</div><div>
</div><div>In economics, widely shared public benefits such as large parks and clean lakes tend to require public – that is government – support. Similarly, the production of a good that is costly but has a large positive externality, like the efforts of all these workers, needs a government response.</div><div>
</div><div>Essentially, the government could compensate these workers for the benefits to the public through something like a hazard subsidy and a supply of protective gear, thereby ensuring an ample supply of these workers and the services they provide during this time of crisis.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>To be sure, this isn’t a perfect solution. For instance, absent some sort of market forces dictating how much the government subsidizes, the government may pay too much. And there would be questions about which workers are truly essential to creating the public health benefits and should receive the higher pay – should liquor employees be included?</div><div>
</div><div>But in a time in which the government is already offering large, unqualified aid packages to the public, such costs are not insurmountable. To get close to the right solution, I believe we first need to recognize how these workers create a large public benefit for us all.</div><div>
</div><div>[You need to understand the coronavirus pandemic, and we can help. Read The Conversation’s newsletter.]The Conversation</div><div>Leigh Osofsky, Professor of Law, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill</div><div>
</div><div>This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.</div><div>
</div><div></div><div>
</div><div></div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/trumps-death-cult-finally-says-it-time-to-kill-the-useless-eaters-for-capitalism/</div><div>
</div><div>no lnx</div><div>
</div><div>Trump’s death cult finally says it: Time to kill the ‘useless eaters’ for capitalism</div><div>Brit Hume Fox News Screengrab</div><div>Written by Chauncey DeVega / Salon March 27, 2020</div><div>435</div><div>Donald Trump has given the Democrats a gift — if they are brave enough to use it.</div><div>
</div><div>Last Sunday, Donald Trump declared on Twitter: “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF. AT THE END OF THE 15 DAY PERIOD, WE WILL MAKE A DECISION AS TO WHICH WAY WE WANT TO GO!”</div><div>
</div><div>This slogan, imported from the libertarian far right, signaled an important shift toward ending social distancing and “reopening” the economy, even as the coronavirus pandemic continues to spread Trump’s mouthpieces at Fox News and elsewhere then began to parrot the same macabre and disturbing argument.</div><div>
</div><div>Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a Republican, told Fox News: “Let’s get back to living… And those of us that are 70-plus, we’ll take care of ourselves.”</div><div>
</div><div>Right-wing propagandist Glenn Beck told viewers of his BlazeTV show that Americans who are older should just go back to work and prepare to die: “Even if we all get sick, I would rather die than kill the country.”</div><div>
</div><div>Brit Hume of Fox News told Tucker Carlson that he supported Dan Patrick’s view of this potentially lethal transaction:</div><div>
</div><div>What we’re living in now, this circumstance as we try to beat this virus, is not sustainable — that the utter collapse of the country’s economy, which many think will happen if this goes on much longer, is an intolerable result… [H]e is saying, for his own part, that he’d be willing to take a risk of getting the disease if that’s what it took to allow the economy to move forward. And he said that because he’s late in life, you know, that he would be perhaps more willing then he might’ve been at a younger age, which seems to me to be an entirely reasonable viewpoint.</div><div>
</div><div>What are they really saying? Donald Trump and the Republican Party are now openly willing to sacrifice those Americans they consider to be “useless eaters” — in this case older people, people with pre-existing health conditions and anyone else who may die from the coronavirus pandemic.</div><div>
</div><div>On Wednesday, Trump said the quiet part loud, basically admitting on Twitter that his electoral fortunes are tied to the pandemic’s impact on the American economy:</div><div>
</div><div>The LameStream Media is the dominant force in trying to get me to keep our Country closed as long as possible in the hope that it will be detrimental to my election success. The real people want to get back to work ASAP.&nbsp; We will be stronger than ever before!</div><div>
</div><div>To paraphrase the character Ivan Drago in the movie “Rocky IV”: “If they die, they die”. Or as another famous Russian, Joseph Stalin, is reported to have said: “One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.”</div><div>
</div><div>For Trump and his allies, worsening the coronavirus pandemic, even at the risk of many lives, is of little importance compared to keeping him in office to continue a regime of looting, extortion and massive corruption.</div><div>
</div><div>The Democratic Party needs new slogans for the 2020 presidential election, I would suggest these:</div><div>
</div><div>Trump wants you to die — so he can stay in office forever.</div><div>
</div><div>Trump and the Republicans are trying to kill you — for money.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>Are you 60 or older? Have a pre-existing health condition? Donald Trump and his Republican Party don’t care if you die from the coronavirus.</div><div>
</div><div>Donald Trump could have stopped the coronavirus. He lied, and people died.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>Yes Trump and the right are embracing and celebrating death. It is ghoulish. It is also one more illustration that the Age of Trump is an American dystopia where what was previously unimaginable (for most decent people) has become “normal.”</div><div>
</div><div>Yes, Trump and his movement’s death impulses are part of a natural progression in which an authoritarian regime maximizes its power by terrorizing the public.</div><div>
</div><div>These calls by Trump and his allies for millions of Americans to sacrifice themselves for such abstractions as “the country,” “the economy” and “the market” should not be a surprise. Such madness and cruelty are the logical and inevitable result of decades of right-wing strategy and policies.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>These plans were never hidden. Indeed, they were clumsily obvious. Since the 1970s, predatory gangster capitalism has been accepted as either “normal” or “inevitable” in the United States (as well as the United Kingdom and elsewhere). To that end, the “free market” was presented by the news media, many Democrats and virtually all Republicans, and most of the educational system as somehow synonymous or interchangeable with “freedom” and “democracy.”</div><div>
</div><div>This form of predatory gangster capitalism, now often called “neoliberalism,” rests upon several basic tenets:</div><div>
</div><div>Profits are more important than people.</div><div>Every part of human life and existence should become a commodity or a financial instrument.</div><div>Society should be organized around the “survival of the fittest,” in Malthusian or social-Darwinist terms: Those who cannot survive and prosper under “free markets” will be abandoned, quite likely to die.</div><div>Notions of the collective good, the commons, the social safety net and other aspects of social democracy, as well as the very idea of government and collective action, are to be undermined and eventually eliminated in service to “freedom” and “individual liberty.”</div><div>There should be few if any restrictions on the behavior of corporations, banks and the ultra-rich, or on the financier class.</div><div>There are “winners” and “losers” in society, “makers” and “takers” in society. These are natural and almost inexorable categories. The winners are to be subsidized by the state and the public. The losers are to be punished, and if possible eliminated.</div><div>Capitalism and democracy are the same thing.</div><div>Of course the harsh realities and negative consequences of predatory gangster capitalism have been effectively concealed from the public, which has come to accept this ideology through the use of anodyne language like “entrepreneurship,” “efficiency,” “transparency,” “accountability,” “public-private” and “opportunity.”</div><div>
</div><div>All claims that this system has been successful are dubious. Serious economists and other intellectually honest policy experts have repeatedly proven that its premises are fundamentally incorrect.</div><div>
</div><div>Gangster capitalists exploit system shocks and other crises (sometimes crises they themselves have caused) as a means of advancing their agenda.</div><div>
</div><div>Consider the coronavirus relief bill as originally submitted by the Republicans, which proposed creating a $500 billion slush fund to subsidize the richest corporations and wealthiest Americans, with no accountability and no oversight – a fund that Donald Trump and his vassals could loot at will — while handing out much smaller sums to ordinary Americans who are struggling to survive in a moment of economic calamity.</div><div>
</div><div>The moral obscenity of that bill even included petty cruelty: The poorest Americans would receive little if any money in direct payments, while money flowed to corporations and the ultra-rich by the billions.</div><div>
</div><div>These disparities have been somewhat painted over in the Democrats’ counterproposals in the House and Senate. But on a grand scale, the picture is not that different: The largest corporations will still receive at least $500 billion — with minor oversight and a few insignificant restraints — that they will inevitably use to enrich their shareholders at the expense of their employees and the public.</div><div>
</div><div>In practice, neoliberalism amounts to socialism for the rich and the powerful and the harsh medicine of the “free market” for everyone else. The coronavirus relief bill is more proof of that fact.</div><div>
</div><div>This is the logic of “too big to fail.” It’s also a function of the moral hazard that allows a plutocrat like Donald Trump to gain control over a so-called democracy with the goal of funneling resources (through tax policies, government subsidies and other laws) to themselves and other members of his class, while denying resources and opportunities to the vast majority of Americans.</div><div>
</div><div>Donald Trump’s proposed 2021 federal budget is a statement of values. As with the coronavirus relief bill, it punishes the poor and vulnerable by gutting the social safety net and transferring more money, both in the form of tax cuts and direct subsidies, to huge corporations and the richest Americans.</div><div>
</div><div>As documented by Dr. James Gilligan in his book “Why Some Politicians Are More Dangerous Than Others” the policies of the Republican Party on issues ranging from health care to guns, the environment and tax policy have shortened the American people’s lifespans and caused other forms of physical harm.</div><div>
</div><div>Predatory gangster capitalism needs agents and other actors to advance its goals. The corporation is one of the primary means through which this form of capitalism wages its “revolutionary” struggle against a humane and democratic society.</div><div>
</div><div>As has been widely noted, if the corporation was a person, it would be a sociopath. This makes the corporation an indispensable part of Donald Trump’s coronavirus death cult.</div><div>
</div><div>James Gamble, a retired corporate attorney who is now director of the National Center for Access to Justice, offered a warning, in a recent article at Medium, about “the extraordinary power of corporate ‘persons’ who are legally obligated to act like sociopaths”:</div><div>
</div><div>Sociopath? Yes. The corporate entity is obligated to care only about itself and to define what is good as what makes it more money. Pretty close to a textbook case of antisocial personality disorder. And corporate persons are the most powerful people in our world.</div><div>
</div><div>The “maximize rule” does its damage in two ways. Corporate entities are direct actors in the world. A decision to build a factory in a place with weak environmental laws, low wages and poor worker protection matters. Preferring share buybacks to increased wages or lower prices matters. Lobbying for taxpayer subsidies that transfer wealth from poor to rich matters. They contribute to the problems listed in paragraph one in obvious ways. More damaging: the maximize rule infects real people with tragic faith in the magic of markets.</div><div>
</div><div>A recent Business Insider article sheds further light on the corporation as sociopath:</div><div>
</div><div>The coronavirus crisis in the United States is only just beginning. But it’s not too early for some Americans to flout social distancing and isolation guidelines and return to work, according to some executives.</div><div>
</div><div>Dick Kovacevich, the former CEO and chairman of Wells Fargo, told Bloomberg News that healthy workers under the age of 55 should return to work in April if the outbreak is controlled, saying that “some may even die” with his plan.</div><div>
</div><div>“We’ll gradually bring those people back and see what happens. Some of them will get sick, some may even die, I don’t know,” said Kovacevich, a current executive at Cisco and Cargill. “Do you want to suffer more economically or take some risk that you’ll get flu-like symptoms and a flu-like experience? Do you want to take an economic risk or a health risk? You get to choose.”</div><div>
</div><div>While this iteration of capitalism sells itself to the public as indispensable to “liberty” and “freedom,” its ultimate tendency is authoritarian and fascistic. Such traits and goals make it a natural tool and weapon for Trump and his allies.</div><div>
</div><div>While the American people and the world are paralyzed the coronavirus pandemic, Attorney General William Barr is refusing to let a good crisis go to waste. As reported by Betsy Woodruff Swan for Politico, the Trump regime wants to use the coronavirus to enact a de facto state of martial law where basic legal rights are suspended:</div><div>
</div><div>The Justice Department has quietly asked Congress for the ability to ask chief judges to detain people indefinitely without trial during emergencies — part of a push for new powers that comes as the novel coronavirus spreads throughout the United States….</div><div>
</div><div>The move has tapped into a broader fear among civil liberties advocates and Donald Trump’s critics — that the president will use a moment of crisis to push for controversial policy changes. Already, he has cited the pandemic as a reason for heightening border restrictions and restricting asylum claims. He has also pushed for further tax cuts as the economy withers, arguing it would soften the financial blow to Americans. And even without policy changes, Trump has vast emergency powers that he could deploy right now to try to slow the coronavirus outbreak.</div><div>
</div><div>Swan explains that these Justice Department requests “span several stages of the legal process, from initial arrest to how cases are processed and investigated,” and appear to have important implications for habeas corpus, “the constitutional right to appear before a judge after arrest and seek release.”</div><div>
</div><div>According to Norman L. Reimer, executive director of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, this means that “you could be arrested and never brought before a judge until they decide that the emergency or the civil disobedience is over. I find it absolutely terrifying. Especially in a time of emergency, we should be very careful about granting new powers to the government. … That is something that should not happen in a democracy.”</div><div>
</div><div>This union of neoliberal gangster capitalism and authoritarianism can result in a society ruled by “inverted totalitarianism.” In his seminal book “Democracy Incorporated,” philosopher Sheldon Wolin explains how this happens:</div><div>
</div><div>Antidemocracy, executive predominance, and elite rule are basic elements of inverted totalitarianism. Antidemocracy does not take the form of overt attacks upon the idea of government by the people. Instead, politically it means encouraging what I have earlier dubbed “civic demobilization,” conditioning an electorate to being aroused for a brief spell, controlling its attention span, and then encouraging distraction or apathy. The intense pace of work and the extended working day, combined with job insecurity, is a formula for political demobilization, for privatizing the citizenry. …</div><div>
</div><div>It works indirectly.</div><div>
</div><div>Citizens are encouraged to distrust their government and politicians; to concentrate upon their own interests; to begrudge their taxes; and to exchange active involvement for symbolic gratifications of patriotism, collective self-righteousness, and military prowess. Above all, depoliticization is promoted through society’s being enveloped in an atmosphere of collective fear and of individual powerlessness: fear of terrorists, loss of jobs, the uncertainties of pension plans, soaring health costs, and rising educational expenses.</div><div>
</div><div>Will the American people follow the commands of Donald Trump’s coronavirus death cult? Are they willing to sacrifice their lives on the altar of “the economy” and Trump’s re-election campaign by returning to work, ending social distancing and ignoring the warnings of scientists and public health experts?</div><div>
</div><div>Some will. Trump’s cult members will follow his commands without question. They have been systematically programmed by Trump’s cult and its disinformation machine. They understand that protecting and defending the cult leader must always come first.</div><div>
</div><div>Many Americans who do not have sufficient savings, live on stagnant wages, have little if any job security, are not union members, cannot work from home and are otherwise stuck in a precarious economic conditions may well be coerced into risking their lives, because they lack other options.</div><div>
</div><div>If public opinion polls are correct, Trump is becoming more popular because of the coronavirus pandemic and the accompanying stagecraft and spectacle of his lie-filled “daily briefings.” Despite his incompetence, a new Gallup poll reports that 60 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s response to the pandemic. (Including nearly all Republicans, of course.)</div><div>
</div><div>This evidence suggests that Trump, the Republican Party, the right-wing media and their corporate allies are effectively leveraging decades of programming in which most Americans have been taught to believe that patriotism, capitalism, freedom and consumerism are inexorably connected, if not in fact the same thing. In the Age of Trump and his pandemic, such beliefs can kill.</div><div>
</div><div></div><div></div><div>
</div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/how-conservatism-could-kill-us-all/</div><div>
</div><div>no lnx</div><div>
</div><div>How ‘conservatism’ could kill us all</div><div>
</div><div>Written by Joe Conason February 28, 2020</div><div>
</div><div>Nothing confirms the human need for strong, honest and competent government like a looming pandemic. The possibility that thousands, or even millions, could die from a randomly transmitted virus reminds us of our species’ vulnerability — and why society cannot exist without institutions that can protect us from such staggering existential threats.</div><div>
</div><div>Only government can impose quarantines and precautions when necessary. Only government can trace contacts, control transportation and monitor communities. Only government can ensure that drugs, medical devices and care will be adequately distributed — and that sufficient resources will be directed toward production of a vaccine as soon as possible, without regard to profit.</div><div>
</div><div>At a moment like this, it suddenly becomes clear that every problem — indeed, the most pressing problems — cannot and will not be solved by “the private sector.” If that seems blazingly obvious, please inform the Republicans who constantly tell us they want to “shrink government down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” Facing a potential catastrophe, those old jeers from the right sound utterly mindless.</div><div>
</div><div>But that is precisely the outlook that has undermined our social defenses against a global pandemic, despite many warnings over the years from experts and academics that it was coming. President Donald Trump personifies the impulse to ignore the peril while insisting on prejudice, rather than science. It is exactly the same posture that he and his enablers take toward climate change. When he put on a stunning display of ignorance at a press conference meant to reassure us about the coronavirus, it was because he is capable of nothing more.</div><div>
</div><div>Trump alone isn’t responsible for the attitudes that undermine our response to the pandemic danger, of course. What passes for conservatism now is more akin to nihilism, promoting attacks on government and spending no matter what essential purpose they may serve. (Only the military, that mammoth of unconscionable waste, is exempt from right-wing dogma.) In the service of tax cuts for the ultra-rich, no vital program can be assured of adequate funding.</div><div>
</div><div>So the Trump budget actually aims to reduce funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — an idiotic proposal released just before the arrival of the coronavirus. The timing was perfect. And in fact, Trump and his minions have repeatedly vandalized the nation’s bulwarks against pandemic disease.</div><div>
</div><div>Exactly two years ago, the money budgeted by former President Barack Obama’s administration to deal with the Ebola outbreak in 2014 began to run out, and the Trump White House allowed that to occur, even though it meant reducing efforts to prevent a pandemic in most of the countries where we should be keeping watch.</div><div>
</div><div>The aim of that program was to stop any disease outbreak at the source, rather than allow it to leap oceans into the U.S. homeland. Among the 39 hotspot countries that saw this program eliminated were Congo, Pakistan, Rwanda — and China. Remember that the next time you hear a Republican politician barking about “wasteful” foreign aid. The simple truth is that a minimal investment in global health could have provided substantial insurance against the kind of menace we now confront.</div><div>
</div><div>The politicians who hate government also tend to be remarkably incapable of executing the most important government functions. Obviously, this is true of Trump and his gang, who have left an extraordinary number of posts vacant simply because they don’t understand why it is necessary to fill them. In other instances, their empty-headed disregard for the purposes of government has led to the abolition of indispensable agencies and offices — notably, the National Security Council global health security division.</div><div>
</div><div>For the past three years, Trump and the Republicans have busied themselves with attacks on our government’s intelligence capabilities, our health systems, even the health coverage that would enable Americans to cope with an epidemic like coronavirus might become. They railed against “the deep state”; they sabotaged fundamental services; they behaved as if society needs no sentinels or guard posts; and now they pretend to be able to protect us.</div><div>
</div><div>If America escapes tragedy this time, it must be taken as a warning: Never entrust the future to these numbskulls again.</div><div>
</div><div>To find out more about Joe Conason and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.</div><div>
</div><div>COPYRIGHT 2020 CREATORS.COM</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div>=</div><div>ref3</div><div>
</div><div>https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/undoing-demos</div><div>book</div><div>Undoing the Demos</div><div>Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution</div><div>By Wendy Brown UCB?</div><div>
</div><div>Tracing neoliberalism's devastating erosions of democratic principles, practices, and cultures</div><div>
</div><div>summary</div><div>
</div><div>Tracing neoliberalism's devastating erosions of democratic principles, practices, and cultures.</div><div>
</div><div>Neoliberal rationality—ubiquitous today in statecraft and the workplace, in jurisprudence, education, and culture—remakes everything and everyone in the image of homo oeconomicus. What happens when this rationality transposes the constituent elements of democracy into an economic register? In Undoing the Demos, Wendy Brown explains how democracy itself is imperiled. The demos disintegrates into bits of human capital; concerns with justice bow to the mandates of growth rates, credit ratings, and investment climates; liberty submits to the imperative of human capital appreciation; equality dissolves into market competition; and popular sovereignty grows incoherent. Liberal democratic practices may not survive these transformations. Radical democratic dreams may not either.</div><div>
</div><div>In an original and compelling argument, Brown explains how and why neoliberal reason undoes the political form and political imaginary it falsely promises to secure and reinvigorate. Through meticulous analyses of neoliberalized law, political practices, governance, and education, she charts the new common sense. Undoing the Demos makes clear that for democracy to have a future, it must become an object of struggle and rethinking.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div></div><div>
</div><div>America will keep losing its middle class as long as ‘free market’ propaganda dominates the economic debate</div><div>Marshall Auerback / Independent Media Institute</div><div>National industrial policy was once something you might read about in today’s equivalent of a friend’s Facebook post, as hard as that might sound to believe.</div><div>
</div><div></div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/joker-a-harsh-indictment-of-neoliberalism-and-gangster-capitalism/</div><div>
</div><div>no lnx</div><div>...</div><div>Neoliberalism as a form of gangster capitalism sells the lie that destroying the Commons, the social safety net, social democracy and a sense of shared human obligation — and cutting taxes on the rich — will somehow create economic growth, prosperity and “freedom” for all people. After several decades of failed experiments, such economic and social policies have been disproved. In reality, neoliberalism is “socialism” and “welfare” for the richest individuals and largest corporations — and “survival of the fittest” for everyone else.</div><div>
</div><div>To maintain control of a public that is often despondent, suffering, at times near rebellion but also cowed by learned helplessness – neoliberal policymakers and other elites use the punitive and punishing power of the state to quell dissent.</div><div>
</div><div>Precarious economic circumstances also help to suppress resistance and even the act of imagining alternative, more democratic political possibilities and outcomes. Mass media, schools, and other agents of political socialization have convinced many Americans (and other people around the world) that consumerism, capitalism and democracy are the same thing. People who live in societies dominated by neoliberalism and gangster capitalism are told that they are ultimately responsible for their own suffering and lack of success, even as income and wealth inequality soar, life chances are truncated, and meritocracy is exposed as a sham.</div><div>
</div><div>But perhaps the greatest power of neoliberalism and gangster capitalism is the control they assert over people’s emotional lives. Neoliberal elites must create emotionally self-regulating subjects if “the system” is to remain stable and not collapse into chaos. Achieving that goal is advanced through various means, including “narco-capitalism” and the dopamine hits delivered by the internet and social media, whose success is predicated on loneliness and social atomization. The technology of “mindfulness” also does the work of enforcing neoliberalism’s need for emotionally self-regulating subjects.</div><div>
</div><div>...</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>... Phoenix’s Joker character rejects that order of things. Indeed, he rejects the entire regime of training and discipline demanded by neoliberalism.</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;In their new book “Manufacturing Happy Citizens,” Edgar Cabanas and Eve Illouz explain the role of “happiness scientists” in enforcing neoliberalism’s power over its subjects:</div><div>
</div><div>Questioning the existing state of affairs, defamiliarizing the familiar, and inquiring in the processes, meanings and practices that shape our identities and everyday behaviour are fundamental endeavours of social critical thinking…."</div><div>
</div><div>That happiness scientists have often been belligerent towards critical social thinking is no secret, calling it negative, deceptive, and even dishonest. These scientists believe that we should get rid of this kind of negativity because it only fuels pointless and fruitless claims for social and political change.</div><div>
</div><div>The character of the Joker is forced into being by neoliberalism’s assault on public services and its indifference to real human needs — and also by the way neoliberalism and gangster capitalism create a feeling of social isolation and loneliness among people around the world.</div><div>
</div><div>In the film, Arthur Fleck is denied mental health care by public hospitals and other programs, which are being “downsized” or terminated. Fleck is economically insecure. He is not paid a living wage for his work as a clown. He has no health insurance or other benefits. His mother is in dire need of medical assistance.</div><div>
</div><div>The city of Gotham is suffering through a sanitation workers strike, events that were relatively common in the 1970s and ’80s, as sanitation and other public workers were engaged in collective action to fight for a living wage and safe working conditions. Neoliberalism, of course, views unions and collective action as wasteful and unproductive.</div><div>
</div><div>The incidents of emotional stress and physical assault that turn Arthur Fleck into the Joker take place on dilapidated public transit, on dirty streets and in under-resourced public hospitals and mental health care facilities. There are few if any visible police officers, except those who victimize and abuse the public. Neoliberalism’s gutting of public services and neglect of public spaces creates the literal “spaces of encounter” where Arthur is traumatically forced along his journey of transformation.</div><div>
</div><div>Neoliberalism even attempts to regulate happiness itself. Arthur genuinely wants to make people happy, internalizing his mother’s wish that he should “smile and put on a happy face.” But Arthur is not allowed that form of self-actualization. This horrible state of frustration, disappointment and futility is described by cultural theorist Lauren Berlant as a state of “cruel optimism”.</div><div>
</div><div>Here is Berlant in an interview from The Point:</div><div>
</div><div>One of the things that excites me about comedy is the comic disturbance of the shared object. Like, you think you know what it is but you don’t, and you get to delight in that. It allows in the room a multiplicity of kinds of possible effects and affects, and that flooding itself is funny. …"</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>I’m also interested in thinking about politics as comedic, by which I don’t mean delightful or funny in the easy Schadenfreude sense. I’m interested in the comedic dictum, which is that disturbance doesn’t kill you, it forces you to live on. The thing about trauma, as I always say to my [Literature of] Trauma students, is that it doesn’t kill you and you have to live with it. And that’s the thing about comedy, too. The comedy is that you get up again after you fall off the cliff, and have to keep moving. You have to live with the brokenness, and you have to live with surprise, and you have to live with contingency. And you have to live with the pleasure of not knowing, if you can bear it. But how you have to live with it is another story.</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>Comedy is a lot about the question of whether you can bear it, in a way that tragedy isn’t. Because in tragedy the world can’t bear you.</div><div>
</div><div>Later in that interview, Berlant argues that “America tries to be a comedic force, in the sense that it tries to organize a kind of optimism about living politically. About a greatness, about a transcendence, about the practical or concrete utopia.” Our “constant disappointment” about that failure, she concludes, “is a lot like the constant repetition in a comic sequence of a slapstick event. Except the violence of the disappointment is not funny! And it has really bad, painful effects on people’s lives.”</div><div>
</div><div>Arthur Fleck, after his transformation into the Joker, speaks to this futility when he tells his mother, while smothering her to death, “I used to think my life was a tragedy. But now I realize, it’s a comedy.”</div><div>
</div><div>For decades, neoliberal elites and other policy makers have tried to create “healthy” self-regulating subjects. They have failed. The Joker is the representation of that outcome — and also the story of Arthur Fleck’s “liberation” as a villain.</div><div>
</div><div>In many ways, neoliberalism and gangster capitalism are making the individuals and groups who suffer under their rule literally mad.</div><div>
</div><div>Because the color line intersects all areas of American life, racism and racial animus were and continue to be used as a tool for creating the neoliberal nightmare. Reagan and other conservatives used the image of the black “welfare queen” to convince the American public that cutting food stamps, welfare and other public assistance for the neediest Americans was good public policy.</div><div>
</div><div>Stereotypes of “lazy” black people who could only get jobs with the federal government continues to prime white hostility to the very idea of government itself and the safety net. This reaches back to racist associations from the Civil War and Reconstruction, where “big government” was imagined as protecting black people by “stealing” from “self-reliant” and “disciplined” white Americans.</div><div>
</div><div>In America, black women have been special targets of the neoliberal war on democracy and the public sphere, because they are strongly associated with government jobs and the bureaucracy. Black Americans, in the White American imagination, are still seen as anti-citizens who are not “self-reliant” or “productive.”</div><div>
</div><div>The Joker, however, is “race neutral” and “colorblind” (in his own twisted way). The Joker’s mob of protesters is interracial. Black people seem omnipresent, even hyper-visible in the Joker’s world. Why? This is the neoliberal reality of Gotham and the social and political moment it represents.</div><div>
</div><div>Arthur’s social worker is a black woman. On the bus, he tries to entertain a black child by doing his clown routine. The child’s mother tells Fleck to leave her child alone. The medical clerk (Brian Tyree Henry) who has Fleck’s mother’s medical records is a black man. Black and Latino street ruffians assault Arthur, stealing his placard, robbing him and leaving him laid out in an alley. The psychiatrist questioning the Joker at the end of the film — whom he apparently kills — is a black woman.</div><div>
</div><div>Yet the Joker never summons racial invective or other signs that he is angry that black people have caused him harm. His real enemies are the rich, white authority figures like Thomas Wayne who rule over Gotham and the world.</div><div>
</div><div>Phillips blunts the accusation that the Joker is somehow “racist” through the character of Arthur’s neighbor Sophie played by Zazie Beetz. He imagines them having a whirlwind romance, but he is actually stalking and terrorizing Sophie:</div><div>...</div><div></div><div>Eudaimonia and Co</div><div>
</div><div>THE STORY</div><div>EUDAIMONICS</div><div>THE FUNDAMENTALS</div><div>THE PRINCIPLES</div><div>WORKING TOGETHER</div><div>
</div><div>How Capitalist Utopia Became Everyone Else’s Dystopia</div><div>How American Elites Ruined Their Society in a Way the World Hasn’t Seen Since Weimar Germany</div><div>umair haque</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Jul 30, 2018 · 8 min read</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Take a good, hard look at the chart above. I don’t usually write essays about charts— but this one’s different. It’s American collapse in four lines. It says that American elites mismanaged their economy so badly, so…</div><div></div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/punishing-the-poor-for-being-hungry/</div><div>
</div><div>no lnx</div><div>
</div><div>Punishing the poor for being hungry</div><div>
</div><div>Written by David K. Shipler / Washington Monthly October 11, 2019</div><div>
</div><div>The United States might be the only country in the world where poverty is considered a moral failing—on the part of the victims, not the society. When conservatives are in charge of government, this judgment infiltrates policy. Republicans move repeatedly to twist regulations around an assumption that the poor don’t want to work and don’t make sound decisions. And when this bias affects children’s nutrition, it can cause lifelong impairment.</div><div>
</div><div>In the last year alone, the Trump administration has taken multiple shots at food stamps, now called SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), which helped feed about 40 million people last year. The latest change, one week ago, would cut benefits by $4.5 billion over five years. Even in a booming economy, one in seven households with children were considered “food insecure” last year, according to the Department of Agriculture’s 2018 survey, meaning that they weren’t sure of having enough food for everyone.</div><div>
</div><div>Research in the rapidly advancing field of neuroscience has documented the severe biological assaults caused by inadequate nutrition during sensitive phases of brain development. Numerous studies, compiled in a lengthy National Academy of Sciences report, From Neurons to Neighborhoods, portray a devastating landscape of cognitive deficiency resulting from nutritional deprivation. The insufficiency of healthy food during a pregnant woman’s second trimester can reduce the creation of neurons, the brain’s impulse-conducting cells. Malnutrition in the third trimester restricts their maturation and retards the production of branched cells called glia.</div><div>
</div><div>Iron is essential to promote the growth of the brain in size and the creation of the nerve-transmitting myelin sheath around the brain’s nerve fibers. The impact of iron deficiency in a baby, therefore, never disappears, even once the deficiency is eliminated. One longitudinal studythat followed children from infancy through adolescence found that they scored lower “in arithmetic achievement and written expression, motor functioning, and some specific cognitive processes such as spatial memory and selective recall.”</div><div>
</div><div>Teachers reported that such children displayed “more anxiety or depression, social problems, and attention problems.” It is no great leap of logic to see learning disabilities as one result of malnutrition. And a child who can’t do decently in school, who can’t follow half of what a teacher is saying, is more inclined to drop out.</div><div>
</div><div>For those Republicans who are moved more by self-interest than empathy, it’s worth noting that high school dropouts earn less that those with degrees, pay less in taxes, have more serious medical problems, and are at higher risk of ending up in jail.</div><div>
</div><div>Yet Trump’s people have sought to saddle the $68 billion-a-year SNAP program with&nbsp; &nbsp;restrictions and cuts to the monthly benefits, which now come on debit cards with declining balances, and typically last a family only two or three weeks. Certain regulations that the Trump administration has either enacted or has openly considered would treat needy Americans with suspicion and distrust. For instance:</div><div>
</div><div>Officials have considered imposing a drug-testing regime on SNAP recipients (although not on farmers who receive huge federal subsidies as part of the same legislation).</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>The Agriculture Department, which administers the program, published a rule in July to eliminate states’ option to raise eligibility limits above the federal ceiling, which is 130 percent of the poverty line.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Previously, states could get waivers to enroll families earning more if their housing and child-care expenses soaked up a big percentage of their income. More generous housing subsidies would help, because in many parts of the country, where rent can consume 50 percent or more of a family’s budget, the money for food gets squeezed. The comment period on the rule change ended in September; once adopted, it will cut off about 3 million recipients.</div><div>
</div><div>In last week’s action, the administration effectively took away $75 in benefits from one out of every five families by recalculating how housing and utilities costs are figured.</div><div>
</div><div>The Trump administration tried to tighten work requirements in this year’s budget, Congress refused, and officials have gone ahead anyway to partially evade the legislative intent. Since 1996, single able-bodied adults with no dependents, up to age 49, could get SNAP benefits for only three months in a three-year period unless they worked or were in job training at least 80 hours a month. States could waive the rule in areas with acute joblessness. Trump wanted to expand the requirement to age 59 and, more harmfully, apply it to those with children over six years old. That was rejected by Republicans and Democrats in Congress. So last December the Agriculture Department did what it could administratively by making it much harder for states to get waivers.</div><div>
</div><div>In his 2019 budget, Trump proposed replacing half of a family’s cash grants with a food package of cereal, pasta, peanut butter, canned fruit and vegetables, meat, poultry, and other items deemed good for them. Sending such packages to 40 million people would have been so costly and impractical that the idea collapsed of its own weight. But the notion seemed borne of a patronizing attitude toward the poor, who suffer from a disparaging stereotype that they do not act responsibly.</div><div>
</div><div>Clinics treating childhood malnutrition see a broad array of causes. Lack of money is the centerpiece, but lack of knowledge about healthy eating can also contribute to some cases. Health providers find that some parents don’t know how to cook with relatively inexpensive ingredients. New immigrants unfamiliar with American food can be fooled by ads into thinking that Coke and Cheetos are healthy. So can Americans themselves. Lots of junk food is cheap and filling, hence the nation’s epidemic of obesity, which can be a sign of malnutrition.</div><div>
</div><div>Supermarkets with fresh, healthy food are scarce in many low-income neighborhoods. A child’s food allergies can be baffling without the funds and information required to have a large assortment of choices on hand. Single parents doing shift work can’t keep track of what their kids are being fed by multiple caregivers. Nor do they usually have the orderly life that allows them to sit children down calmly to feed them, or have a regular family meal.</div><div>
</div><div>In other words, childhood malnutrition is created at the confluence of problems and disabilities that magnify and reinforce one another. They must all be addressed. The cognitive impairment that results cannot be attacked by a country that keeps electing officials who entangle the safety net in a set of punitive impulses.</div><div>
</div><div>David K. Shipler is a Washington Monthly contributing writer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author of seven books, and a former foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He blogs at The Shipler Report.</div><div>&nbsp;=</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/the-failure-of-militarized-neoliberalism-is-laid-bare-in-iraq-and-haiti/</div><div>
</div><div>no lnx</div><div>
</div><div>The failure of militarized neoliberalism is laid bare in Iraq and Haiti&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>Written by Medea Benjamin, Nicolas J. S. Davies October 10, 2019</div><div>
</div><div>This season could be called the Autumn of Discontent, as people from the Middle East to Latin America and the Caribbean have been rising up against corrupt neoliberal governments. Two of the countries in crisis, Haiti and Iraq, are on opposite ends of the earth but have something important in common. Not only are they reeling from protests against government corruption and austerity programs, like Ecuador and Algeria, but in both Haiti and Iraq, their corrupt neoliberal governments were imposed on them by the use of U.S. military force.</div><div>
</div><div>In 2003 and 2004 respectively, U.S. forces illegally invaded Iraq and Haiti, removed their internationally recognized governments from power and replaced them with U.S.-backed regimes. Both countries have since been governed in line with the dominant neoliberal ideology that the U.S. and its allies have imposed on most of the world since the 1980s. The protests and savage repression in Iraq and Haiti today are only the latest evidence of the utter failure of neoliberalism and the extraordinary human cost of U.S. efforts to impose it by military force on countries that resist.</div><div>
</div><div>In the first week of October, more than 100 people were killed and 6,000 wounded in Baghdad, Nasiriyah and other Iraqi cities, as the Iraqi Army and police fired into large demonstrations. Young Iraqis have risen up against government corruption, unemployment and poverty that leave them with dismal prospects, even as record oil production fills the pockets of the ruling elite in Baghdad’s Green Zone.</div><div>
</div><div>Meanwhile, at least 17 people have been killed in the Haitian government’s repression of protests calling for the resignation of U.S.-backed President Jovenel Moise. Public anger has boiled over into the streets as Moise faces credible charges of embezzlement and corruption. His government has utterly failed to improve the lives of most Haitians. Haiti remains the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, with a per capita GDP of only $870 per year and 60 percent of the population living below a poverty line of $2.41 per day.</div><div>
</div><div>In a Foreign Affairs article in January 2019, Senator Elizabeth Warren explained how the U.S.:</div><div>
</div><div>began to export a particular brand of capitalism, one that involved weak regulations, low taxes on the wealthy, and policies favoring multinational corporations. And the United States took on a series of seemingly endless wars, engaging in conflicts with mistaken or uncertain objectives and no obvious path to completion.</div><div>
</div><div>The impact of these policy changes has been devastating.</div><div>
</div><div>What Senator Warren skated over, without connecting the dots, was that the real objective of those wars, coups and other regime change operations was precisely to impose the “particular brand of capitalism” she described, and, if necessary, to do so by the illegal and deadly use of military force.</div><div>
</div><div>While Mikhail Gorbachev dissolved the Soviet empire and made peace with the West, the U.S. exported neoliberal capitalism to Eastern Europe without needing to use its war machine it had squandered our country’s wealth for 45 years to build.</div><div>
</div><div>Instead, Western political and economic experts like Jeffrey Sachs fanned out across the region reciting Margaret Thatcher’s dictum that “there is no alternative” to neoliberalism. They convinced Eastern European leaders to surrender their countries and their people to the “shock therapy” of corporate conquest, privatization, drastic cuts in public services and plutocratic oligarchy, superficially legitimized by Western-style multi-party elections.</div><div>
</div><div>But the U.S. and its allies then faced two thorny dilemmas. What should they do about countries that remained obstinately independent from their neoliberal empire, countries like Iraq, Iran, Libya, Cuba and North Korea? And what should they do with the U.S. and NATO war machine that Gorbachev’s peacemaking had rendered redundant?</div><div>
</div><div>U.S. officials of both major parties, from neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz to “humanitarian interventionists” like Madeleine Albright, peddled the simplistic notion that the U.S. war machine could be repurposed to impose neoliberalism by force on dissident countries around the world. Twenty years on, the results of those policies have been universally catastrophic.</div><div>
</div><div>Even in the U.S., at the very heart of the neoliberal empire, a new generation raised on the myths of neoliberalism now rejects its absurdities: trickle-down economics; the magic of the market; union-busting; privatized health care and education; the best Congress money can buy; the shrinking middle class; the rampant destruction of the natural world; and so on. As British economist J.M. Keynes reportedly said in the 1930s, “Laissez-faire capitalism is the absurd idea that the worst people, for the worst reasons, will do what is best for all of us.”</div><div>
</div><div>But as corrosive as neoliberalism has been to working people in the U.S., it has been far more destructive wherever the U.S. and its allies have tried to impose it by military force.</div><div>
</div><div>Afghanistan and Iraq</div><div>
</div><div>In Afghanistan, after 18 years of war, 80,000 U.S. bombs and missiles dropped in U.S.-led airstrikes, and hundreds of thousands of violent deaths, the Afghan people are so disillusioned with the U.S.-sponsored “democratic system” that only 25 percent turned out to vote in the September presidential elections, a record low. The unending violence and the unbridled corruption of successive U.S.-backed governments have enabled the Taliban to make a comeback and set up a viable shadow government across more and more of the country.</div><div>
</div><div>In Iraq, 16 years after the U.S. invasion, a succession of corrupt U.S.-backed governments has boosted oil production to about 4.6 million barrels per day, the second-highest production in OPEC. But in line with U.S. neoliberal orthodoxy, the profits have been pocketed by Iraq’s new U.S.-installed ruling class, not redistributed to provide universal health care, education, housing and other public services as they were under Iraq’s nationalist and Baathist governments between 1958 and 2003, including under Saddam Hussein’s brutal dictatorship.</div><div>
</div><div>Iraq was plunged back into full-scale war in 2014, as the alienated population in the north and west of the country fell under the sway of the Islamic State. The U.S. military responded with a campaign of air and artillery bombardment that destroyed most of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, and many other towns and cities across Iraq and Syria, killing tens of thousands of civilians in Mosul alone.</div><div>
</div><div>The U.S. invasion and the unending waves of violence and chaos it unleashed have destroyed Iraq. The U.S.-imposed neoliberal model has empowered a series of corrupt governments to steal and squander Iraq’s oil wealth, while the rest of the population still struggles to recover from this unending “Made in the U.S.A.” national trauma. Voter turnout in Iraqi elections declined from 80 percent in 2005 to 45 percent in 2018. Now a desperate and angry new generation of Iraqis is taking to the streets to demand a government that will finally share their country’s wealth with its people.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>The Tragedy of Haiti</div><div>
</div><div>In 2000, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti’s first democratically elected president, was elected for a second term on a platform that explicitly rejected the neoliberal “free market,” debt and austerity policies imposed on Haiti by the U.S., the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.</div><div>
</div><div>The U.S. responded to Aristide’s reelection by cutting off foreign aid to Haiti and setting up training camps in the Dominican Republic, where up to 200 U.S. special operations forces trained Haitian death squads to cross the border, assassinate Aristide’s supporters and terrorize the population.</div><div>
</div><div>In February 2004, these U.S.-trained death squads joined forces with a militia called the Cannibal Army in Gonaives, where they sacked the police station and took control of the city. Two weeks later, they seized Cap Haitien, Haiti’s second-largest city.</div><div>
</div><div>As the U.S.-trained death squads threatened to march on the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince, a U.S. embassy official and U.S. special operations forces entered the Presidential Palace and “persuaded” Aristide and his family to leave with them. A thousand U.S. Marines, plus French, Canadian and Chilean troops, invaded and occupied Haiti.</div><div>
</div><div>The U.S. flew Aristide to Antigua and then to the Central African Republic (CAR), where General Francois Bozize had just seized power in a Western-backed military coup. The Jamaican government rescued Aristide and his family from the CAR and brought them to Jamaica for a few months until they were granted permanent sanctuary in South Africa. Aristide was finally allowed to return to Haiti in 2011, and he is still widely seen as the only popular democratic leader Haiti has ever had.</div><div>
</div><div>Since 2004, when Aristide’s Fanmi Lavalas party was banned, elections in Haiti have been so obviously rigged and illegitimate that voter turnout has declined from at least 50 percent in 2000 (despite an opposition boycott), when Aristide won 92 percent of the votes, to 22 percent in 2011, 29 percent in 2015 and 18 percent in 2016, allowing every election to be won by openly corrupt U.S.-backed right-wing politicians and parties.</div><div>
</div><div>After the devastating 2010 earthquake, the 2011 election was won by Michel Martelly, a Haitian pop singer supported by Bill and Hillary Clinton. He was quickly mired in scandal over a $2.6 million bribe from a Dominican construction firm to whom he awarded $200 million in no-bid contracts for post-earthquake rebuilding work, triggering large anti-corruption protests in 2013, 2014 and 2015.</div><div>
</div><div>The latest election in 2016 was another fiasco. Evidence of massive election fraud triggered huge anti-government demonstrations before Jovenel Moise, the declared winner, even took office. Exit polls showed Moise only winning 6 percent of the votes in the first round, a small fraction of his official 33 percent share that won him a place in the run-off.</div><div>
</div><div>Now Haitian government auditors have released a 600-page report detailing how Moise has embezzled millions of dollars, mainly from the PetroCaribe fund. Under this program, Venezuela supplied Haiti with oil but deferred payment for 25 years so that Haiti could spend the money on badly needed infrastructure, hospitals and social programs. The audit revealed how Moise siphoned millions of dollars from these funds into his own personal bank accounts.</div><div>
</div><div>Haiti remains under UN military occupation to this day. UN troops have used force against the public and unleashed a cholera epidemic. The UN mandate for the remaining 1,275-member UN police force, supported by about 300 Indian troops, finally expires on October 15, when it is due to be replaced by a 30-member UN political mission.</div><div>
</div><div>Neoliberalism Begets Resistance</div><div>
</div><div>Neoliberalism is an inherently corrupt system. It creates a vicious circle in which ruling classes can leverage their wealth to gain dominant political power and then use that power to cut taxes and rewrite laws to further enrich themselves. This is a powerful engine to generate ever more concentrated wealth and political power for the 1 percent, with impoverishment and political marginalization for everybody else.</div><div>
</div><div>Neoliberalism reduces politics mainly to a choice between politicians and parties who represent factions of the same corrupt ruling class, which retains a monopoly on power whichever party wins. But the fatal flaw in the neoliberal view of the world is the presumption that ruling classes can safely ignore the 99 percent of the population they disenfranchise, exploit or even kill.</div><div>
</div><div>This idea that only the elites in each country matter has led directly to the U.S. policy of “regime change,” in which leaders who resist neoliberalism are overthrown by whatever means necessary. It should be no surprise that the new governments installed by all these U.S. wars and coups are among the most corrupt regimes on earth.</div><div>
</div><div>But as U.S.-led occupation armies have discovered in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, and as we can see right now in Iraq and Haiti, ordinary people still insist on having their say about the future of the world we all live in. U.S. policy is largely responsible for the life or death predicaments now facing young people in these countries, so they deserve our solidarity as they rise up to resist.</div><div>
</div><div>Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CODEPINK for Peace, is the author of Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran and Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the U.S.-Saudi Connection.</div><div>
</div><div>Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher for CODEPINK, and the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.</div><div>
</div><div>This article was produced by Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.</div><div></div><div></div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/the-sacrificial-rites-of-capitalism-we-dont-talk-about/</div><div>
</div><div>no lnx</div><div>
</div><div>The sacrificial rites of capitalism we don’t talk about</div><div>
</div><div>Written by Lynn Parramore, Institutefor NewEconomicThinking September 5, 2019</div><div>
</div><div>Every society has at least one dominant story. Think of it as the official line: Here’s who we are, what we’re doing and why. But if you pay attention, you may notice other stories, too. Stories that circulate below the radar — and sometimes right out in the open — contradicting the official narrative. Most people don’t openly acknowledge them, but the signs are everywhere.</div><div>
</div><div>Think of Catholic saints beaming their polytheistic, atavistic messages on brightly colored church windows. See the majestic Mary, whose exaltation helps to hold at bay the tensions of a monotheistic, father-centered religion officially in denial of the divine feminine. The Queen of Heaven papers over gaps in the main story, making it more appealing, more workable.</div><div>
</div><div>The Church needs Mary. Without her, the dominant story might fall apart.</div><div>
</div><div>So deployed, counter-narratives are not necessarily a threat, but can serve to constrain a system’s instabilities, balance its tensions. Supritha Rajan, an English professor at the University of Rochester, sees the dominant story of capitalism working in this way. Part of a wave of humanities scholars taking a closer look at the meaning and history of capitalism, her book, A Tale of Two Capitalisms, reveals how the fields of anthropology and economics, along with the literary form of the novel, which developed together in the late 18th and 19th centuries, cross-pollinated each other and worked in tandem to investigate and offer new theories about human nature and culture. Together, they helped create a new story for the citizens of an emerging world.</div><div>
</div><div>Rajan was born in India and emigrated with her family to Massachusetts at the age of seven. She is attuned to how the dominant narrative of capitalism appeared at the height of Britain’s colonial power, a time when major thinkers often looked to far-flung countries like India as sites of static, superstition-ridden, “primitive” cultures that the capitalist system would render obsolete.</div><div>
</div><div>Capitalism’s official story, Rajan explains, charts a linear progression from magical-thinking hunter-gatherers doing their “trucking and bartering,” as Adam Smith would have it, to today’s rational global capitalists engaged in free competition. This story insists — and here we come to a tricky part — that when individuals act in their own interest, the best results occur for everybody. Millions of self-centered actions add up to create an equilibrium that gives birth to a society that is fairer and more stable, creative, and abundant than ever before.</div><div>
</div><div>Quite a tale! But far from the whole story, says Rajan. She warns that accepting it at face value blinds us to the ways it damages our lives.</div><div>
</div><div>Rational Agents, Ritual Actions</div><div>
</div><div>Rajan charts the development of anthropology as a distinct field of study at a time when practitioners tended to separate things like ritual and magic — often performed communally — from the main flow of modern life. By then this stuff belonged on the periphery, contained, perhaps, within a few hours at church on Sunday or in entertainment halls. Anthropologists held that the relegation of the “irrational” to the margins was what distinguished advanced societies from the backward places where such activities remained central to life.</div><div>
</div><div>Rajan started with a hunch that magical rites, sacrificial rituals, and sacred values were not just relics of a pre-modern past, but actually woven right into the story of capitalism from the beginning. They exist everywhere under our noses, popping up in everyday economic activities and permeating even the high-tech exchanges of the global marketplace. What we are taught to think of as irrational and rational are actually mobile, flexible categories that continuously overlap.</div><div>
</div><div>To test her hunch, Rajan revisits the time when capitalist speculation and credit was replacing Britain’s traditional land-based economy. Technologies like the telegraph were collapsing time and space, and social life was morphing from extended kinship models to the nuclear family we know today. At this time, anthropologists were shaping a story that human society developed from a focus on primitive religion to the embrace of scientific rationalism. Any pre-modern ideas that might appear in the new forms were supposed to be merely fading ghosts.</div><div>
</div><div>Political economists, she notes, went even further: They insisted that the capitalist economy had exorcised these ghosts altogether. The new human being was hailed as “homo economicus” — a rational person who pursues wealth for self-interested motives. He, for such a being was imagined to be male, belonged strictly to the realm of the profane.</div><div>
</div><div>The great Victorian novelists, who were very much engaged with these developments, sensed that something was not quite right in the story. They noticed that capitalism was producing not just abundance and stability, but inequality, alienation and misery. Yet in criticizing the new system, they tended to accept and even buttress the separation of categories of experience insisted upon by social scientists. Thomas Carlyle’s famous condemnation of the “cash-payment” as “the sole nexus” of capitalism, for example, posited an economic realm as one in which ethical and religious values hold no sway.</div><div>
</div><div>But was it really so?</div><div>
</div><div>Rajan takes up the case of Charles Dickens, often viewed as the great anti-capitalist of Victorian literature, who observed that a society of self-interested economic actors could produce tremendous horror. Ideologically opposed to various aspects of capitalism, he turned to sacred ideas like sacrifice and ritual to imagine a community invested in values like disinterestedness, reciprocity, and communality — the very values endangered by the capitalist model of self-interest.</div><div>
</div><div>In A Tale of Two Cities, whose plot begins in year 1775, Dickens depicts Paris as a city stuck in backward economic and social modes in contrast to the more productive, modern city of London. But in order for capitalism to work harmoniously in London, something of the religious sphere had to be added to the sauce. Dickens casts a woman, Lucie, as the person who takes the stink away from all the selfish business conducted by the men — a Victorian “angel in the house,” an emblem of all the non-utilitarian values that homo economicus supposedly had no use for. Lucie, like many other female characters in Victorian novels, is supremely compassionate and sacrifices for the greater good: she is homo communis....</div><div></div><div>
</div><div>no lnx</div><div>
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</div><div>Neoliberalism: Political success, economic failure</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;Inauguration parade (January 20, 1981). As Reagan read his inauguration address, 52 U.S. hostages (held by Iran for 444 days) were set free. Wikipedia image</div><div>
</div><div>Written by Robert Kuttner / The American Prospect August 3, 2019</div><div>
</div><div>Since the late 1970s, we’ve had a grand experiment to test the claim that free markets really do work best. This resurrection occurred despite the practical failure of laissez-faire in the 1930s, the resulting humiliation of free-market theory, and the contrasting success of managed capitalism during the three-decade postwar boom.</div><div>
</div><div>Yet when growth faltered in the 1970s, libertarian economic theory got another turn at bat. This revival proved extremely convenient for the conservatives who came to power in the 1980s. The neoliberal counterrevolution, in theory and policy, has reversed or undermined nearly every aspect of managed capitalism—from progressive taxation, welfare transfers, and antitrust, to the empowerment of workers and the regulation of banks and other major industries.</div><div>
</div><div>Neoliberalism’s premise is that free markets can regulate themselves; that government is inherently incompetent, captive to special interests, and an intrusion on the efficiency of the market; that in distributive terms, market outcomes are basically deserved; and that redistribution creates perverse incentives by punishing the economy’s winners and rewarding its losers. So government should get out of the market’s way.</div><div>
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</div><div>By the 1990s, even moderate liberals had been converted to the belief that social objectives can be achieved by harnessing the power of markets. Intermittent periods of governance by Democratic presidents slowed but did not reverse the slide to neoliberal policy and doctrine. The corporate wing of the Democratic Party approved.</div><div>
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</div><div>Now, after nearly half a century, the verdict is in. Virtually every one of these policies has failed, even on their own terms. Enterprise has been richly rewarded, taxes have been cut, and regulation reduced or privatized. The economy is vastly more unequal, yet economic growth is slower and more chaotic than during the era of managed capitalism. Deregulation has produced not salutary competition, but market concentration. Economic power has resulted in feedback loops of political power, in which elites make rules that bolster further concentration.</div><div>
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</div><div>The culprit isn’t just “markets”—some impersonal force that somehow got loose again. This is a story of power using theory. The mixed economy was undone by economic elites, who revised rules for their own benefit. They invested heavily in friendly theorists to bless this shift as sound and necessary economics, and friendly politicians to put those theories into practice.</div><div>
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</div><div>Recent years have seen two spectacular cases of market mispricing with devastating consequences: the near-depression of 2008 and irreversible climate change. The economic collapse of 2008 was the result of the deregulation of finance. It cost the real U.S. economy upwards of $15 trillion (and vastly more globally), depending on how you count, far more than any conceivable efficiency gain that might be credited to financial innovation. Free-market theory presumes that innovation is necessarily benign. But much of the financial engineering of the deregulatory era was self-serving, opaque, and corrupt—the opposite of an efficient and transparent market.</div><div>
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</div><div>The existential threat of global climate change reflects the incompetence of markets to accurately price carbon and the escalating costs of pollution. The British economist Nicholas Stern has aptly termed the worsening climate catastrophe history’s greatest case of market failure. Here again, this is not just the result of failed theory. The entrenched political power of extractive industries and their political allies influences the rules and the market price of carbon. This is less an invisible hand than a thumb on the scale. The premise of efficient markets provides useful cover.</div><div>
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</div><div>The grand neoliberal experiment of the past 40 years has demonstrated that markets in fact do not regulate themselves. Managed markets turn out to be more equitable and more efficient. Yet the theory and practical influence of neoliberalism marches splendidly on, because it is so useful to society’s most powerful people—as a scholarly veneer to what would otherwise be a raw power grab. The British political economist Colin Crouch captured this anomaly in a book nicely titled The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism. Why did neoliberalism not die? As Crouch observed, neoliberalism failed both as theory and as policy, but succeeded superbly as power politics for economic elites.</div><div>
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</div><div>The neoliberal ascendance has had another calamitous cost—to democratic legitimacy. As government ceased to buffer market forces, daily life has become more of a struggle for ordinary people. The elements of a decent middle-class life are elusive—reliable jobs and careers, adequate pensions, secure medical care, affordable housing, and college that doesn’t require a lifetime of debt. Meanwhile, life has become ever sweeter for economic elites, whose income and wealth have pulled away and whose loyalty to place, neighbor, and nation has become more contingent and less reliable.</div><div>
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</div><div>Large numbers of people, in turn, have given up on the promise of affirmative government, and on democracy itself. After the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, ours was widely billed as an era when triumphant liberal capitalism would march hand in hand with liberal democracy. But in a few brief decades, the ostensibly secure regime of liberal democracy has collapsed in nation after nation, with echoes of the 1930s.</div><div>
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</div><div>As the great political historian Karl Polanyi warned, when markets overwhelm society, ordinary people often turn to tyrants. In regimes that border on neofascist, klepto-capitalists get along just fine with dictators, undermining the neoliberal premise of capitalism and democracy as complements. Several authoritarian thugs, playing on tribal nationalism as the antidote to capitalist cosmopolitanism, are surprisingly popular.</div><div>
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</div><div>It’s also important to appreciate that neoliberalism is not laissez-faire. Classically, the premise of a “free market” is that government simply gets out of the way. This is nonsensical, since all markets are creatures of rules, most fundamentally rules defining property, but also rules defining credit, debt, and bankruptcy; rules defining patents, trademarks, and copyrights; rules defining terms of labor; and so on. Even deregulation requires rules. In Polanyi’s words, “laissez-faire was planned.”</div><div>
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</div><div>The political question is who gets to make the rules, and for whose benefit. The neoliberalism of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman invoked free markets, but in practice the neoliberal regime has promoted rules created by and for private owners of capital, to keep democratic government from asserting rules of fair competition or countervailing social interests. The regime has rules protecting pharmaceutical giants from the right of consumers to import prescription drugs or to benefit from generics. The rules of competition and intellectual property generally have been tilted to protect incumbents. Rules of bankruptcy have been tilted in favor of creditors. Deceptive mortgages require elaborate rules, written by the financial sector and then enforced by government. Patent rules have allowed agribusiness and giant chemical companies like Monsanto to take over much of agriculture—the opposite of open markets. Industry has invented rules requiring employees and consumers to submit to binding arbitration and to relinquish a range of statutory and common-law rights.</div><div>
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</div><div>Neoliberalism as Theory, Policy, and Power</div><div>
</div><div>It’s worth taking a moment to unpack the term “neoliberalism.” The coinage can be confusing to American ears because the “liberal” part refers not to the word’s ordinary American usage, meaning moderately left-of-center, but to classical economic liberalism otherwise known as free-market economics. The “neo” part refers to the reassertion of the claim that the laissez-faire model of the economy was basically correct after all.</div><div>
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</div><div>Few proponents of these views embraced the term neoliberal. Mostly, they called themselves free-market conservatives. “Neoliberal” was a coinage used mainly by their critics, sometimes as a neutral descriptive term, sometimes as an epithet. The use became widespread in the era of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.</div><div>
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</div><div>To add to the confusion, a different and partly overlapping usage was advanced in the 1970s by the group around the Washington Monthly magazine. They used “neoliberal” to mean a new, less statist form of American liberalism. Around the same time, the term neoconservative was used as a self-description by former liberals who embraced conservatism, on cultural, racial, economic, and foreign-policy grounds. Neoconservatives were neoliberals in economics.</div><div>
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</div><div>Beginning in the 1970s, resurrected free-market theory was interwoven with both conservative politics and significant investments in the production of theorists and policy intellectuals. This occurred not just in well-known conservative think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute, Heritage, Cato, and the Manhattan Institute, but through more insidious investments in academia. Lavishly funded centers and tenured chairs were underwritten by the Olin, Scaife, Bradley, and other far-right foundations to promote such variants of free-market theory as law and economics, public choice, rational choice, cost-benefit analysis, maximize-shareholder-value, and kindred schools of thought. These theories colonized several academic disciplines. All were variations on the claim that markets worked and that government should get out of the way.</div><div>
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</div><div>Each of these bodies of sub-theory relied upon its own variant of neoliberal ideology. An intensified version of the theory of comparative advantage was used not just to cut tariffs but to use globalization as all-purpose deregulation. The theory of maximizing shareholder value was deployed to undermine the entire range of financial regulation and workers’ rights. Cost-benefit analysis, emphasizing costs and discounting benefits, was used to discredit a good deal of health, safety, and environmental regulation. Public choice theory, associated with the economist James Buchanan and an entire ensuing school of economics and political science, was used to impeach democracy itself, on the premise that policies were hopelessly afflicted by “rent-seekers” and “free-riders.”</div><div>
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</div><div>Click here to read how Robert Kuttner has been unmasking the fallacies of neoliberalism for decades</div><div>
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</div><div>Market failure was dismissed as a rare special case; government failure was said to be ubiquitous. Theorists worked hand in glove with lobbyists and with public officials. But in every major case where neoliberal theory generated policy, the result was political success and economic failure.</div><div>
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</div><div>For example, supply-side economics became the justification for tax cuts, on the premise that taxes punished enterprise. Supposedly, if taxes were cut, especially taxes on capital and on income from capital, the resulting spur to economic activity would be so potent that deficits would be far less than predicted by “static” economic projections, and perhaps even pay for themselves. There have been six rounds of this experiment, from the tax cuts sponsored by Jimmy Carter in 1978 to the immense 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act signed by Donald Trump. In every case some economic stimulus did result, mainly from the Keynesian jolt to demand, but in every case deficits increased significantly. Conservatives simply stopped caring about deficits. The tax cuts were often inefficient as well as inequitable, since the loopholes steered investment to tax-favored uses rather than the most economically logical ones. Dozens of America’s most profitable corporations paid no taxes.</div><div>
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</div><div>Robert Bork’s “antitrust paradox,” holding that antitrust enforcement actually weakened competition, was used as the doctrine to sideline the Sherman and Clayton Acts. Supposedly, if government just got out of the way, market forces would remain more competitive because monopoly pricing would invite innovation and new entrants to the market. In practice, industry after industry became more heavily concentrated. Incumbents got in the habit of buying out innovators or using their market power to crush them. This pattern is especially insidious in the tech economy of platform monopolies, where giants that provide platforms, such as Google and Amazon, use their market power and superior access to customer data to out-compete rivals who use their platforms. Markets, once again, require rules beyond the benign competence of the market actors themselves. Only democratic government can set equitable rules. And when democracy falters, undemocratic governments in cahoots with corrupt private plutocrats will make the rules.</div><div>
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</div><div>Human capital theory, another variant of neoliberal application of markets to partly social questions, justified deregulating labor markets and crushing labor unions. Unions supposedly used their power to get workers paid more than their market worth. Likewise minimum wage laws. But the era of depressed wages has actually seen a decline in rates of productivity growth. Conversely, does any serious person think that the inflated pay of the financial moguls who crashed the economy accurately reflects their contribution to economic activity? In the case of hedge funds and private equity, the high incomes of fund sponsors are the result of transfers of wealth and income from employees, other stakeholders, and operating companies to the fund managers, not the fruits of more efficient management.</div><div>
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</div><div>There is a broad literature discrediting this body of pseudo-scholarly work in great detail. Much of neoliberalism represents the ever-reliable victory of assumption over evidence. Yet neoliberal theory lived on because it was so convenient for elites, and because of the inertial power of the intellectual capital that had been created. The well-funded neoliberal habitat has provided comfortable careers for two generations of scholars and pseudo-scholars who migrate between academia, think tanks, K Street, op-ed pages, government, Wall Street, and back again. So even if the theory has been demolished both by scholarly rebuttal and by events, it thrives in powerful institutions and among their political allies.</div><div>
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</div><div>The Practical Failure of Neoliberal Policies</div><div>
</div><div>Financial deregulation is neoliberalism’s most palpable deregulatory failure, but far from the only one. Electricity deregulation on balance has increased monopoly power and raised costs to consumers, but has failed to offer meaningful “shopping around” opportunities to bring down prices. We have gone from regulated monopolies with predictable earnings, costs, wages, and consumer protections to deregulated monopolies or oligopolies with substantial pricing power. Since the Bell breakup, the telephone system tells a similar story of re-concentration, dwindling competition, price-gouging, and union-bashing.</div><div>
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</div><div>Air travel has been a poster child for advocates of deregulation, but the actual record is mixed at best. Airline deregulation produced serial bankruptcies of every major U.S. airline, often at the cost of worker pay and pension funds. Ticket prices have declined on average over the past two decades, but the traveling public suffers from a crazy quilt of fares, declining service, shrinking seats and legroom, and exorbitant penalties for the perfectly normal sin of having to change plans. Studies have shown that fares actually declined at a faster rate in the 20 years before deregulation in 1978 than in the 20 years afterward, because the prime source of greater efficiency in airline travel is the introduction of more fuel-efficient planes. The roller-coaster experience of airline profits and losses has reduced the capacity of airlines to purchase more fuel-efficient aircraft, and the average age of the fleet keeps increasing. The use of “fortress hubs” to defend market pricing power has reduced the percentage of nonstop flights, the most efficient way to fly from one point to another.</div><div>
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</div><div>Robert Bork’s spurious arguments that antitrust enforcement hurt competition became the basis for dismantling antitrust. Massive concentration resulted.</div><div>
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</div><div>In addition to deregulation, three prime areas of practical neoliberal policies are the use of vouchers as “market-like” means to social goals, the privatization of public services, and the use of tax subsides rather than direct outlays. In every case, government revenues are involved, so this is far from a free market to begin with. But the premise is that market disciplines can achieve public purposes more efficiently than direct public provision.</div><div>
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</div><div>The evidence provides small comfort for these claims. One core problem is that the programs invariably give too much to the for-profit middlemen at the expense of the intended beneficiaries. A related problem is that the process of using vouchers and contracts invites corruption. It is a different form of “rent-seeking”—pursuit of monopoly profits—than that attributed to government by public choice theorists, but corruption nonetheless. Often, direct public provision is far more transparent and accountable than a web of contractors.</div><div>
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</div><div>A further problem is that in practice there is often far less competition than imagined, because of oligopoly power, vendor lock-in, and vendor political influence. These experiments in marketization to serve social goals do not operate in some Platonic policy laboratory, where the only objective is true market efficiency yoked to the public good. They operate in the grubby world of practical politics, where the vendors are closely allied with conservative politicians whose purposes may be to discredit social transfers entirely, or to reward corporate allies, or to benefit from kickbacks either directly or as campaign contributions.</div><div>
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</div><div>Privatized prisons are a case in point. A few large, scandal-ridden companies have gotten most of the contracts, often through political influence. Far from bringing better quality and management efficiency, they have profited by diverting operating funds and worsening conditions that were already deplorable, and finding new ways to charge inmates higher fees for necessary services such as phone calls. To the extent that money was actually saved, most of the savings came from reducing the pay and professionalism of guards, increasing overcrowding, and decreasing already inadequate budgets for food and medical care.</div><div>
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</div><div>A similar example is the privatization of transportation services such as highways and even parking meters. In several Midwestern states, toll roads have been sold to private vendors. The governor who makes the deal gains a temporary fiscal windfall, while drivers end up paying higher tolls often for decades. Investment bankers who broker the deal also take their cut. Some of the money does go into highway improvements, but that could have been done more efficiently in the traditional way via direct public ownership and competitive bidding.</div><div>
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</div><div>Housing vouchers substantially reward landlords who use the vouchers to fill empty houses with poor people until the neighborhood gentrifies, at which point the owner is free to quit the program and charge market rentals. Thus public funds are used to underwrite a privately owned, quasi-social housing sector—whose social character is only temporary. No permanent social housing is produced despite the extensive public outlay. The companion use of tax incentives to attract passive investment in affordable housing promotes economically inefficient tax shelters, and shunts public funds into the pockets of the investors—money that might otherwise have gone directly to the housing.</div><div>
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</div><div>The Affordable Care Act is a form of voucher. But the regulated private insurance markets in the ACA have not fully lived up to their promise, in part because of the extensive market power retained by private insurers and in part because the right has relentlessly sought to sabotage the program—another political feedback loop. The sponsors assumed that competition would lower costs and increase consumer choice. But in too many counties, there are three or fewer competing plans, and in some cases just one.</div><div>
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</div><div>As more insurance plans and hospital systems become for-profit, massive investment goes into such wasteful activities as manipulation of billing, “risk selection,” and other gaming of the rules. Our mixed-market system of health care requires massive regulation to work with tolerable efficiency. In practice, this degenerates into an infinite regress of regulator versus commercial profit-maximizer, reminiscent of Mad magazine’s “Spy versus Spy,” with the industry doing end runs to Congress to further rig the rules. Straight-ahead public insurance such as Medicare is generally far more efficient.</div><div>
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</div><div>An extensive literature has demonstrated that for-profit voucher schools do no better and often do worse than comparable public schools, and are vulnerable to multiple forms of gaming and corruption. Proprietors of voucher schools are superb at finding ways of excluding costly special-needs students, so that those costs are imposed on what remains of public schools; they excel at gaming test results. While some voucher and charter schools, especially nonprofit ones, sometimes improve on average school performance, so do many public schools. The record is also muddied by the fact that many ostensibly nonprofit schools contract out management to for-profit companies.</div><div>
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</div><div>Tax preferences have long been used ostensibly to serve social goals. The Earned Income Tax Credit is considered one of the more successful cases of using market-like measures—in this case a refundable tax credit—to achieve the social goal of increasing worker take-home pay. It has also been touted as the rare case of bipartisan collaboration. Liberals get more money for workers. Conservatives get to reward the deserving poor, since the EITC is conditioned on employment. Conservatives get a further ideological win, since the EITC is effectively a wage subsidy from the government, but is experienced as a tax refund rather than a benefit of government.</div><div>
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</div><div>Recent research, however, shows that the EITC is primarily a subsidy of low-wage employers, who are able to pay their workers a lot less than a market-clearing wage. In industries such as nursing homes or warehouses, where many workers qualified for the EITC work side by side with ones not eligible, the non-EITC workers get substandard wages. The existence of the EITC depresses the level of the wages that have to come out of the employer’s pocket.</div><div>
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</div><div>Neoliberalism’s Influence on Liberals</div><div>
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</div><div>As free-market theory resurged, many moderate liberals embraced these policies. In the inflationary 1970s, regulation became a scapegoat that supposedly deterred salutary price competition. Some, such as economist Alfred Kahn, President Carter’s adviser on deregulation, supported deregulation on what he saw as the merits. Other moderates supported neoliberal policies opportunistically, to curry favor with powerful industries and donors. Market-like policies were also embraced by liberals as a tactical way to find common ground with conservatives.</div><div>
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</div><div>Several forms of deregulation—of airlines, trucking, and electric power—began not under Reagan but under Carter. Financial deregulation took off under Bill Clinton. Democratic presidents, as much as Republicans, promoted trade deals that undermined social standards. Cost-benefit analysis by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) was more of a choke point under Barack Obama than under George W. Bush.</div><div>
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</div><div>“Command and control” became an all-purpose pejorative for disparaging perfectly sensible and efficient regulation. “Market-like” became a fashionable concept, not just on the free-market right but on the moderate left. Cass Sunstein, who served as Obama’s anti-regulation czar,uses the example of “nudges” as a more market-like and hence superior alternative to direct regulation, though with rare exceptions their impact is trivial. Moreover, nudges only work in tandem with regulation.</div><div>
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</div><div>There are indeed some interventionist policies that use market incentives to serve social goals. But contrary to free-market theory, the market-like incentives first require substantial regulation and are not a substitute for it. A good example is the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, which used tradable emission rights to cut the output of sulfur dioxide, the cause of acid rain. This was supported by both the George H.W. Bush administration and by leading Democrats. But before the trading regime could work, Congress first had to establish permissible ceilings on sulfur dioxide output—pure command and control.</div><div>
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</div><div>There are many other instances, such as nutrition labeling, truth-in-lending, and disclosure of EPA gas mileage results, where the market-like premise of a better-informed consumer complements command regulation but is no substitute for it. Nearly all of the increase in fuel efficiency, for example, is the result of command regulations that require auto fleets to hit a gas mileage target. The fact that EPA gas mileage figures are prominently disclosed on new car stickers may have modest influence, but motor fuels are so underpriced that car companies have success selling gas-guzzlers despite the consumer labeling.</div><div>
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</div><div>Bill Clinton and his Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin, were big promoters of financial deregulation.</div><div>
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</div><div>
</div><div>Politically, whatever rationale there was for liberals to make common ground with libertarians is now largely gone. The authors of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act made no attempt to meet Democrats partway; they excluded the opposition from the legislative process entirely. This was opportunistic tax cutting for elites, pure and simple. The right today also abandoned the quest for a middle ground on environmental policy, on anti-poverty policy, on health policy—on virtually everything. Neoliberal ideology did its historic job of weakening intellectual and popular support for the proposition that affirmative government can better the lives of citizens and that the Democratic Party is a reliable steward of that social compact. Since Reagan, the right’s embrace of the free market has evolved from partly principled idealism into pure opportunism and obstruction.</div><div>
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</div><div>
</div><div>Neoliberalism and Hyper-Globalism</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>The post-1990 rules of globalization, supported by conservatives and moderate liberals alike, are the quintessence of neoliberalism. At Bretton Woods in 1944, the use of fixed exchange rates and controls on speculative private capital, plus the creation of the IMFand World Bank, were intended to allow member countries to practice national forms of managed capitalism, insulated from the destructive and deflationary influences of short-term speculative private capital flows. As doctrine and power shifted in the 1970s, the IMF, the World Bank, and later the WTO, which replaced the old GATT, mutated into their ideological opposite. Rather than instruments of support for mixed national economies, they became enforcers of neoliberal policies.</div><div>
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</div><div>The standard package of the “Washington Consensus” of approved policies for developing nations included demands that they open their capital markets to speculative private finance, as well as cutting taxes on capital, weakening social transfers, and gutting labor regulation and public ownership. But private capital investment in poor countries proved to be fickle. The result was often excessive inflows during the boom part of the cycle and punitive withdrawals during the bust—the opposite of the patient, long-term development capital that these countries needed and that was provided by the World Bank of an earlier era. During the bust phase, the IMFtypically imposes even more stringent neoliberal demands as the price of financial bailouts, including perverse budgetary austerity, supposedly to restore the confidence of the very speculative capital markets responsible for the boom-bust cycle.</div><div>
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</div><div>
</div><div>Dozens of nations, from Latin America to East Asia, went through this cycle of boom, bust, and then IMF pile-on. Greece is still suffering the impact. After 1990, hyper-globalism also included trade treaties whose terms favored multinational corporations. Traditionally, trade agreements had been mainly about reciprocal reductions of tariffs. Nations were free to have whatever brand of regulation, public investment, or social policies they chose. With the advent of the WTO, many policies other than tariffs were branded as trade distorting, even as takings without compensation. Trade deals were used to give foreign capital free access and to dismantle national regulation and public ownership. Special courts were created in which foreign corporations and investors could do end runs around national authorities to challenge regulation for impeding commerce.</div><div>
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</div><div>
</div><div>At first, the sponsors of the new trade regime tried to claim the successful economies of East Asia as evidence of the success of the neoliberal recipe. Supposedly, these nations had succeeded by pursuing “export-led growth,” exposing their domestic economies to salutary competition. But these claims were soon exposed as the opposite of what had actually occurred. In fact, Japan, South Korea, smaller Asian nations, and above all China had thrived by rejecting every major tenet of neoliberalism. Their capital markets were tightly regulated and insulated from foreign speculative capital. They developed world-class industries as state-led cartels that favored domestic production and supply. East Asia got into trouble only when it followed IMFdictates to throw open capital markets, and in the aftermath they recovered by closing those markets and assembling war chests of hard currency so that they’d never again have to go begging to the IMF. Enthusiasts of hyper-globalization also claimed that it benefited poor countries by increasing export opportunities, but as the success of East Asia shows, there is more than one way to boost exports—and many poorer countries suffered under the terms of the global neoliberal regime.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Nor was the damage confined to the developing world. As the work of Harvard economist Dani Rodrik has demonstrated, democracy requires a polity. For better or for worse, the polity and democratic citizenship are national. By enhancing the global market at the expense of the democratic state, the current brand of hyper-globalization deliberately weakens the capacity of states to regulate markets, and weakens democracy itself.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>When Do Markets Work?</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>The failure of neoliberalism as economic and social policy does not mean that markets never work. A command economy is even more utopian and perverse than a neoliberal one. The practical quest is for an efficient and equitable middle ground.</div><div>
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</div><div>
</div><div>The neoliberal story of how the economy operates assumes a largely frictionless marketplace, where prices are set by supply and demand, and the price mechanism allocates resources to their optimal use in the economy as a whole. For this discipline to work as advertised, however, there can be no market power, competition must be plentiful, sellers and buyers must have roughly equal information, and there can be no significant externalities. Much of the 20th century was practical proof that these conditions did not describe a good part of the actual economy. And if markets priced things wrong, the market system did not aggregate to an efficient equilibrium, and depressions could become self-deepening. As Keynes demonstrated, only a massive jolt of government spending could restart the engines, even if market pricing was partly violated in the process.</div><div>
</div><div>
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</div><div>Nonetheless, in many sectors of the economy, the process of buying and selling is close enough to the textbook conditions of perfect competition that the price system works tolerably well. Supermarkets, for instance, deliver roughly accurate prices because of the consumer’s freedom and knowledge to shop around. Likewise much of retailing. However, when we get into major realms of the economy with positive or negative externalities, such as education and health, markets are not sufficient. And in other major realms, such as pharmaceuticals, where corporations use their political power to rig the terms of patents, the market doesn’t produce a cure.</div><div>
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</div><div>The basic argument of neoliberalism can fit on a bumper sticker. Markets work; governments don’t. If you want to embellish that story, there are two corollaries: Markets embody human freedom. And with markets, people basically get what they deserve; to alter market outcomes is to spoil the poor and punish the productive. That conclusion logically flows from the premise that markets are efficient. Milton Friedman became rich, famous, and influential by teasing out the several implications of these simple premises.</div><div>
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</div><div>It is much harder to articulate the case for a mixed economy than the case for free markets, precisely because the mixed economy is mixed. The rebuttal takes several paragraphs. The more complex story holds that markets are substantially efficient in some realms but far from efficient in others, because of positive and negative externalities, the tendency of financial markets to create cycles of boom and bust, the intersection of self-interest and corruption, the asymmetry of information between company and consumer, the asymmetry of power between corporation and employee, the power of the powerful to rig the rules, and the fact that there are realms of human life (the right to vote, human liberty, security of one’s person) that should not be marketized.</div><div>
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</div><div>And if markets are not perfectly efficient, then distributive questions are partly political choices. Some societies pay pre-K teachers the minimum wage as glorified babysitters. Others educate and compensate them as professionals. There is no “correct” market-derived wage, because pre-kindergarten is a social good and the issue of how to train and compensate teachers is a social choice, not a market choice. The same is true of the other human services, including medicine. Nor is there a theoretically correct set of rules for patents, trademarks, and copyrights. These are politically derived, either balancing the interests of innovation with those of diffusion—or being politically captured by incumbent industries.</div><div>
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</div><div>Governments can in principle improve on market outcomes via regulation, but that fact is complicated by the risk of regulatory capture. So another issue that arises is market failure versus polity failure, which brings us back to the urgency of strong democracy and effective government.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>After Neoliberalism</div><div>
</div><div>The political reversal of neoliberalism can only come through practical politics and policies that demonstrate how government often can serve citizens more equitably and efficiently than markets. Revision of theory will take care of itself. There is no shortage of dissenting theorists and empirical policy researchers whose scholarly work has been vindicated by events. What they need is not more theory but more influence, both in the academy and in the corridors of power. They are available to advise a new progressive administration, ifthat administration can get elected and if it refrains from hiring neoliberal advisers.</div><div>
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</div><div>There are also some relatively new areas that invite policy innovation. These include regulation of privacy rights versus entrepreneurial liberties in the digital realm; how to think of the internet as a common carrier; how to update competition and antitrust policy as platform monopolies exert new forms of market power; how to modernize labor-market policy in the era of the gig economy; and the role of deeper income supplements as machines replace human workers.</div><div>
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</div><div>The failed neoliberal experiment also makes the case not just for better-regulated capitalism but for direct public alternatives as well. Banking, done properly, especially the provision of mortgage finance, is close to a public utility. Much of it could be public. A great deal of research is done more honestly and more cost-effectively in public, peer-reviewed institutions such as the NIHthan by a substantially corrupt private pharmaceutical industry. Social housing often is more cost-effective than so-called public-private partnerships. Public power is more efficient to generate, less prone to monopolistic price-gouging, and friendlier to the needed green transition than private power. The public option in health care is far more efficient than the current crazy quilt in which each layer of complexity adds opacity and cost. Public provision does require public oversight, but that is more straightforward and transparent than the byzantine dance of regulation and counter-regulation.</div><div>
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</div><div>The two other benefits of direct public provision are that the public gets direct evidence of government delivering something of value, and that the countervailing power of democracy to harness markets is enhanced. A mixed economy depends above all on a strong democracy—one even stronger than the democracy that succumbed to the corrupting influence of economic elites and their neoliberal intellectual allies beginning half a century ago. The antidote to the resurrected neoliberal fable is the resurrection of democracy—strong enough to tame the market in a way that tames it for keeps.</div><div>
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</div><div>hypocrisy: ff corps buy them off</div><div>
</div><div>aha: transparency lowers corruption, info is a signal that allows us to react/ compensate to restore balance; use invisible hand mkt to make smarter decsions</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>https://www.climateliabilitynews.org/2019/07/17/sec-climate-risks-disclosure/</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;Karen Savage</div><div>
</div><div>A bill that would require public companies to disclose the risks posed to their business by climate change passed a crucial committee vote in the House on Wednesday.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>The House Financial Services Committee passed the Climate Risk Disclosure Act of 2019, which was introduced by Illinois Rep. Sean Casten in 2018. The bill would require the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to develop and implement guidelines for companies on disclosing climate risks. The SEC would be required to make the information available to the public on its website.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>“Climate change is a risk to the stability of the global financial system,” Casten said. “This bill presents a market-based solution to understand the impact of a changing climate on companies and provide investors, lenders, and insurers with better information.”</div><div>
</div><div>The bill now moves on to a vote by the full House, and if it passes, on to the Senate. With the Senate still controlled by Republicans, it is unlikely to have enough support.[odd given fundamentalist mkt faith]</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div>TC is full of shit: on meritocracy</div><div>
</div><div>https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/06/what-matters-inequality-or-opportuniy/393272/</div><div>
</div><div>no lnx</div><div>
</div><div>Lately, one argument that’s been making the rounds is that people should worry less about inequality and more about opportunity. Arthur Brooks, head of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said, “I don’t care about income inequality per se; I care about opportunity inequality.” Senator and presidential candidate Marco Rubio believes that inequality is but a symptom of immobility and constrained opportunity. Tyler Cowen argued in the New York Times that what matters is not the fact that the top 1 percent is capturing a much larger share of total income growth than they used to, but that the poor are stuck in poverty.</div><div>
</div><div>These individuals have identified a worthy goal. Unequal access to opportunity offends deeply held American values, and poverty is not only a matter of near-term material deprivation—too often, it also robs low-income children of the chance to realize their intellectual and economic potential.</div><div>
</div><div>But it’s not possible to effectively address either poverty or inadequate opportunity if America hives off its opportunity concerns from the broader problem of inequality (nor, as Senator Rubio intimates, can America reduce inequality by focusing solely on increasing mobility). Boosting mobility will require reductions in wage, income, and wealth inequalities.</div><div>
</div><div>For many in the opportunity-not-inequality camp, the relationship between the two concepts is an inconvenient truth. Concerns about inequality smack of “class warfare,” of “going after” the top 1 percent and Wall Street. Cowen is revealing in this regard: “The inequality focus tends to draw us to redistribution, whereas a mobility focus is more conducive to ideas for wealth creation.”</div><div>
</div><div>Many politicians and analysts would rather not address the power imbalances that have channeled so much of our economic growth to the highest-income families. They are much more comfortable focusing on the benign-sounding theme of “wealth creation” or insisting that economic growth alone can improve mobility without any redistribution of resources or political power, as if “a rising tide can lift all boats” matters when a few people are in yachts and many are stuck in dinghies.</div><div>
</div><div>But a growing body of research shows strong links among inequality, poverty, and opportunity. For example, new research by Elise Gould of the Economic Policy Institute reveals that of the factors most commonly cited as driving poverty in America—education, family structure, race and more (see chart below)—the number-one factor by far is the growth in inequality, which added seven percentage points to the poverty rate since the late 1970s.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>So why is that? How is it that inequality reduces mobility and deepens poverty?</div><div>
</div><div>* * </div><div>
</div><div>The relationship between childhood family income and life outcomes is well-established. Socioeconomic status is unfortunately the strongest predictor of a child’s academic achievement, as decades of social science research have found. A child’s income rank—her family’s income relative to the household income of other families—makes a difference for that child’s future adult-income rank as well. Research by Raj Chetty of Harvard and his colleagues links every 10-percentile-point gain in childhood income rank with a 3.4-percentile-point gain in income rank as an adult. Since inequality by definition means that less income will reach poor and middle class Americans for any given rate of economic growth, these facts alone highlight inequality’s relevance to mobility discussions.</div><div>
</div><div>In addition, a large and growing body of evidence, recently reviewed by Katharine Bradbury and Robert Triest of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, directly connects inequality of outcomes to inequality of opportunity. As shown in the figure below, Bradbury and Triest find a significant, negative relationship between living in an area with greater income inequality and children’s expected upward mobility.</div><div>
</div><div>The Relationship Between Inequality and Mobility</div><div>[no grafs]</div><div>
</div><div>Commuting zones with greater inequality have reduced expected upward mobility for low-income children (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities)]</div><div>
</div><div>It’s critical to understand the fundamental difference between these findings and the Cowen, Rubio, et al. view that America can address poverty without addressing inequality. As just noted, rising inequality implies that the income and wealth generated by GDP and productivity growth increasingly flow to those at the very top of the scale. As a result, relatively fewer resources reach everyone else. One thus would expect to see low-income families less able (relative to the wealthy ones) to invest in children’s futures, more indebted if they tried to go to college, more likely to be stuck in neighborhoods that lack opportunity, and more likely to experience the stressors that do permanent damage to children’s later educational and earnings outcomes.</div><div>
</div><div>And that’s exactly what happens.</div><div>
</div><div>Research indicates at least three causal pathways via which inequality constrains opportunity for those at the lower end of the economic spectrum.</div><div>
</div><div>First, inequality is driving increasing residential segregation by income. The shares of families in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty and neighborhoods of concentrated wealth both more than doubled between 1970 and 2009, while the share of families in middle-income neighborhoods declined from 65 percent to 42 percent. Those high-poverty neighborhoods—where more and more families are living—create lasting disadvantages for many who grow up there: If a family with young children (less than age 13) relocates from a high- to a low-poverty neighborhood, the kids achieve better academic and economic outcomes later in life, as new work by Chetty et al. indicates.</div><div>
</div><div>Second, inequality leads to unequal access to quality educational experiences throughout a child’s lifetime. Over the period of growing inequality, these disparities have increased. In 1995, for example, families with education debt in the bottom half of the net worth distribution (a broader definition of income, including assets minus liabilities) had a mean debt-to-income ratio of around 0.26, meaning that for every dollar of their income, they owed 26 cents in college debt. For families in the top 5 percent, that ratio was eight cents on the dollar. But by 2013, the debt-to-income ratio had more than doubled to 0.58 for the bottom half (some of whom are poor but many of whom are middle class) while remaining unchanged for those at the top.</div><div>
</div><div>Third, and most importantly, inequality directly undermines equality of opportunity, likely through a variety of mechanisms. As the gap between the rich and poor widens, lower-income families have less ability relative to their rich counterparts to invest in enrichment goods for their children. Children from families with less income have relatively less extensive and privileged social networks and, compared to their rich peers, are more likely to experience the type of "toxic" stress that can hamper brain development and long term academic, health, and economic outcomes.</div><div>
</div><div>In short, inequality entrenches immobility not just by enabling increasingly unequal transfers of wealth from one generation to the next, but also through a number of more subtle pathways that affect opportunity on a daily basis. It may not yet be possible to explain all of these subtle pathways with great certainty, but the fact that “rich and poor children score very differently on school readiness tests before they enter kindergarten” should be viewed as an unsurprising consequence of the high levels of inequality American society currently tolerates.</div><div>
</div><div>Members of the “don’t-mess-with-the-rich-to-help-the-poor” crowd also ignore the political dimension of inequality. While Rubio, Paul Ryan, and others are professing their concern for the poor, they’re busy trying to repeal the estate tax (at a cost of $270 billion over 10 years) and writing budgets that gut the safety net. These policies restrict mobility at both the bottom and top by exacerbating the burdens of being poor, increasing the privilege of being born into riches, and eliminating revenue sources for investments that might begin to reverse the inequality of opportunity. Why do politicians pursue such policies? Because they are nudged along by the interests of wealthy donors. Inequality begets greater inequality.</div><div>
</div><div>In other words, disadvantages faced by children in low- and middle-income families and advantages held by their wealthy peers are two sides of the same coin. The lack of opportunity for those in poverty is not some separate problem from the unequal distribution of wealth and income across society.</div><div>
</div><div> * </div><div>
</div><div>Boosting mobility therefore requires directly addressing residential segregation, educational access, and other barriers described above. Here are some ideas that hold promise:</div><div>
</div><div>One conclusion that stems from the Chetty et al. findings regarding the benefits of moving from high- to low-poverty areas is to improve the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Housing Choice Vouchers (HCV) program. Housing analysts Barbara Sard and Doug Rice recently detailed a number of specific, straightforward changes that could eliminate barriers for voucher recipients to move into low-poverty areas, including tying voucher subsidies to rent in specific zip codes instead of entire metropolitan areas. Importantly, such a change could be implemented without significant funding or even congressional action, and HUD has just announced that it is considering doing so.</div><div>...</div><div>=</div><div></div><div>https://kpfa.org/episode/the-ralph-nader-radio-hour-june-24-2019/</div><div>
</div><div>distortion of adam smith</div><div>
</div><div>predistribution vs re-</div><div>
</div><div>free mkt pretend that mkt/invis hand only rational/objective sys, but author says myth, only exists in law of jungle, strong wins;</div><div>apple tech created by govt, stolen/used by apple, $ stashed in ireland no/3 ppl (citizens of no cty?) to hide 9b$ from tax 2012.</div><div>
</div><div>opportunity is&nbsp; based on genetic lottery and class (ie the number of words your parent reads /says to you)</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Can American Capitalism Survive?: Why Greed Is Not Good ...</div><div>https://www.amazon.com/Can-American-Capitalism-Survive.../dp/125018598X</div><div>
</div><div>As a result, Americans are losing faith that a free market economy is the best system. In Can American Capitalism Survive?, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Steven Pearlstein chronicles our descent and challenges the theories being taught in business schools and exercised in boardrooms around the country.</div><div></div><div>
</div><div>AHA! THE SOLUTION IS TO RESTORE THE COMMONS</div><div>
</div><div>AHA:&nbsp; REDUCTIONISM KILLS/ ENSLAVES/ EXTRACTS</div><div>VS SYSTEMS HEAL, CONNECT, FREE</div><div>I/THOU VS I/IT ME v WE</div><div>
</div><div>triggered by</div><div>
</div><div>wicked smart henry g</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/our-culture-of-ignorance-has-made-possible-the-rise-of-a-terrible-new-political-blend-neoliberal-fascism/</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div>
</div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/how-neoliberalism-enabled-restrictions-on-free-speech-by-allowing-facebook-to-do-the-us-governments-dirty-work/</div><div>
</div><div>As the largest player in a multi-billion-dollar industry, Facebook increasingly faces complaints that it has illegally censored content and has violated users’ constitutional rights to freedom of speech.</div><div>Facebook purged hundreds of political pages and accounts last fall when responding to criticism that it too easily allowed the spread of “fake news.” It’s removed posts about racism and about breastfeeding. It’s blocked content at Russia’s demand. Now it’s taking on the anti-vaxxers and political extremists. Users who post questionable items or material that otherwise violates Facebook’s rules can find themselves in “Facebook Jail.”</div><div>
</div><div>As the largest player in a multi-billion-dollar industry, Facebook increasingly faces complaints that it has illegally censored content and has violated users’ constitutional rights to freedom of speech. Free speech protections only apply to governmental bodies and not businesses, people argue back. While such is currently law, political realities demand that free speech protections evolve.</div><div>
</div><div>First some background.</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div>
</div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/how-this-1971-memo-from-a-conservative-supreme-court-justice-infiltrated-every-institution-in-us-society-and-hoodwinked-american-citizens/</div><div>
</div><div>The powers-that-be have progressively neutered Americans politically. They brainwashed them into believing that the government was some third entity instead of the reality that it is we-the-people. This misguidance was a well-orchestrated attack by those who feared Americans were getting too smart, thus putting their wealth supremacy at risk.</div><div>The Powell Manifesto was instrumental in the hoodwinking of our citizens. They infiltrated every institution in our society, including schools, churches, and private sector entities. But most importantly it created purported think tanks like the Heritage Foundation that released studies that had the semblance of objectivity, reality, and gravitas that was all but a mirage.</div><div>
</div><div>In a recent rant on Politics Done Right, I pointed out that the Plutocracy intends that we see government as some abstract evil entity. Their intent is clear and systematic.</div><div>
</div><div>Convince Americans that the government is a separate entity.</div><div>They demonize the government by implying it is a separate entity and as such, are without concern that it will alienate we the people since in effect in people’s mind government is no longer we the people.</div><div>Make government so unbearably bad that people clamor to privatize all government functions.</div><div>Please listen to the entire video.</div><div>
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</div><div>=</div><div></div><div>
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</div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/time-for-a-change-can-2020-democrats-break-free-from-the-failures-of-neoliberalism/</div><div>
</div><div>One of the most striking things about the blossoming 2020 Democratic primary campaign is how much the candidates have broken with the party’s defensive, neoliberal posture of the past quarter-century — a period of time in which Republicans have only won the popular vote for president once, but have nonetheless dominated the parameters of debate. Now, all that has changed. In 2016, Bernie Sanders’ advocacy of Medicare for All was read as a fringe position by a fringe candidate. Heading into 2020, it has polled as high as 70 percent support, and is now a mainstream candidate position, embraced by his Senate colleagues Kirsten Gillibrand, Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris, as well as former HUD Secretary Julián Castro and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard.</div><div>
</div><div>The dramatic health care shift is just one facet of a much broader transformation that a younger, increasingly diverse electorate is demanding — a transformation leading away from the Democrats’ decades-long infatuation with neoliberalism, with a similar expansion of support for ideas like a $15 minimum wage, debt-free college education, taxing the wealthy, a federal jobs guarantee and a Green New Deal.</div><div>
</div><div>Up until 2016, leading Democrats had accepted the basic premises of conservatives (“The era of big government is over,” Bill Clinton famously proclaimed), while still claiming continuity with traditions they had largely abandoned. Typically, as exemplified by “welfare reform” (my 2010 critique here), means-testing would replace universal programs, with success defined by reducing costs and the number of people served, rather than by improving people’s lives. Clinton’s presidency followed a path laid out by Charles Peters, founder and editor of the Washington Monthly, in his influential 1983 essay, “A Neoliberal’s Manifesto,” where he put it thus:</div><div>
</div><div>We still believe in liberty and justice for all, in mercy for the afflicted and help for the down and out. But we no longer automatically favor unions and big government or oppose the military and big business. Indeed, in our search for solutions that work, we have to distrust all automatic responses, liberal or conservative.</div><div>
</div><div>In short, neoliberals argued they shared liberal/left values, but favored “more practical solutions.”</div><div>
</div><div>But time has shown them not to be more practical after all, as Democratic activists and base voters have increasingly come to realize. The question in 2020 is how the party as a whole evolves, how it honestly comes to terms with its past. It’s a question that all the presidential hopefuls must grapple with — and their supporters as well.</div><div>
</div><div>Economic policies like NAFTA and Wall Street deregulation represent core neoliberal failures in the economic realm that stretch back long before Peters, as described by economic historian Philip Mirowski (“Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste”) and colleagues (“The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective”). But the economic vision has profound social consequences, as Mirowski elsewhere notes: “While neoliberal think tanks are busy riling up the groundlings with debt clocks and boogeyman statistics of ratios of government expenditure to GDP, neoliberal politicians organize to extravagantly increase incarceration and policing of those whom they deem unfit for the marketplace.”</div><div>
</div><div>A whole host of such offshoot policies incubated by Peters, his colleagues and funders — mass incarceration, school privatization, welfare reform, etc. — have likewise been discredited as well, with profound impacts on the unfolding 2020 presidential primary race. A growing awareness of how these failures are linked, and what’s required to replace them, ought to play a significant part in that race. If it does not, Democrats risk needlessly repeating past failures and handing Republicans yet another chance to make things dramatically worse.</div><div>
</div><div>Republicans are doing that right now, imposing work requirements to roll back Medicaid expansion, even as new research shows welfare reform had significant negative impacts on children: The “intergenerational effects of welfare reform on adolescent behaviors were unfavorable, particularly for boys, and do not support longstanding arguments that limiting cash assistance leads to responsible behavior in the next generation.”</div><div>
</div><div>In sharp contrast, a recent New York Times Magazine article documents how much the living wage delivers: “A living wage is an antidepressant. It is a sleep aid. A diet. A stress reliever. It is a contraceptive, preventing teenage pregnancy. It prevents premature death. It shields children from neglect.”</div><div>
</div><div>The choice couldn’t be more clear between what works and what doesn’t. But the need to break decisively with past failures poses challenges for potential 2020 candidates. As a former chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Joe Biden faces a difficult task explaining his key role in helping to expand federal mass incarceration policies — just one of several now-dormant topics that may play a role in keeping him out of the race, so far.</div><div>
</div><div>Similarly, as former prosecutors, Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Kamala Harris perfectly fit the neoliberal formula for combating conservative attacks against “soft-on-crime bleeding-heart liberals,” but that creates significant tension with the growing momentum of criminal justice reformers, whose bipartisan appeal is reflected in the recently-passed FIRST STEP Act, even as Democratic-aligned activists — Black Lives Matter and others — push for much more.</div><div>
</div><div>Klobuchar and Harris aren’t alone. Every potential 2020 candidate has undergone, or is undergoing some sort of evolution — Elizabeth Warren was a Republican for most of her life, for example. Sen. Cory Booker has strong Wall Street ties, including a long affiliation with the hedge fund group, Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), described by Justin Miller in 2016 as established “with a mission to break the teacher unions’ stranglehold over the Democratic Party.” As Miller noted:</div><div>
</div><div>Early on, DFER identified then-Senator Barack Obama and then–Newark Mayor Cory Booker as promising politicians willing to break with teachers unions. DFER was instrumental in convincing Obama to appoint charter-friendly Chicago Superintendent Arne Duncan as secretary of education, and it spent a lot of time and money lobbying the administration to pursue reformist education policies like Race to the Top and Common Core.</div><div>
</div><div>This style of top-down education reform — supported by elites in both parties — has angered parents, students, teachers and whole communities across the political spectrum, not least because it’s served to both help fuel and distract from massive disinvestments in public education. This in turn helped fuel last year’s wave of red-state teacher walkouts, which clearly fed into midterm victories, This is part of a larger pattern of anti-privatization victories described by Jeff Bryant of the Independent Media Institute. Booker’s record — including his past ties to Betsy DeVos — could be a problem for him, Chalkbeat noted, “sure to draw a skeptical eye from unions and public school advocates.”</div><div>
</div><div>My purpose here is not to single out any candidates for their past positions. Every candidate could be attacked for some aspect of their past, which would only serve to make Donald Trump’s day.&nbsp; What voters care most about is the future — what candidates promise to do, and why — and the past matters most for making sense of what they say, for showing they saw things in the past, how they came to change, and how they see us all moving forward in the future.</div><div>
</div><div>Evolution, learning from our past mistakes — is good. We need to encourage more of it, not endlessly get mired down in refighting old battles. At the same time, we need an honest accounting of the past in order to have confidence in politicians’ pledges for the future. And we also need a much more broadly shared sense of what was wrong in the neoliberal agenda, and how that plays out in a multitude of different forms. To do that, it helps to take a step back from looking at specific issues, in order to see more clearly how they all fit together. Recognizing three main mistakes around neoliberalism can help go a long way toward helping to make sense of the way forward.</div><div>
</div><div>The first mistaken belief about neoliberalism is that there’s nothing “neo” about it, it’s just plain old-fashioned Lockean liberalism. Jonathan Chait has made this mistake most loudly (“How ‘Neoliberalism’ Became the Left’s Favorite Insult of Liberals”), but Mirowski makes it clear how mistaken that is.</div><div>
</div><div>“In a nutshell, classical liberalism imagined a night watchman state that would set the boundaries for the natural growth of the market, like a shepherd tending his flock. Markets were born, not made,” and they existed to serve human society. “The Neoliberals were having none of that,” Mirowski wrote. Markets were to be the master:</div><div>
</div><div>Far from trying to preserve society against the unintended consequences of the operations of markets … neoliberal doctrine instead set out actively … to reshape it in the market’s image.</div><div>
</div><div>In short, neoliberalism is a technocratic perversion of classical liberalism, rather than an evolutionary advancement of it.</div><div>
</div><div>A second mistake is to conflate neoliberalism with the mask of economics that it wears. “Neoliberalism — or market fetishism — is not the consistent application of modern economics, but its primitive, simplistic perversion,”as economists Suresh Naidu, Dani Rodrik and Gabriel Zucman recently wrote at the Boston Review. Their article, “Economics After Neoliberalism,” introduced the work of a new group, the Economics for Inclusive Prosperity (EfIP) network. As they explain:</div><div>
</div><div>The tools of economics are critical to developing a policy framework for what we call “inclusive prosperity.” While prosperity is the traditional concern of economists, the “inclusive” modifier demands both that we consider the whole distribution of outcomes, not simply the average (the “middle class”), and that we consider human prosperity broadly, including non-pecuniary sources of well-being, from health to climate change to political rights.</div><div>
</div><div>To bring things down to earth, one of the policy briefs they introduce is “An Expanded View of Government’s Role in Providing Social Insurance and Investing in Children” by Sandra E. Black and Jesse Rothstein.&nbsp; The summary explains:</div><div>
</div><div>While private provision of goods often yields the efficient outcome, there are a number of goods that are not efficiently provided in the private market. Here, we outline two such situations: investments in child care and education, and insurance against risks created by business cycles, poor health, and old age. Because private markets work poorly for these goods, and the costs of market failure are large, standard economic reasoning implies a significant role for government provision …. We first discuss childhood investments, including expenses relating to child care and early education as well as post-secondary education.</div><div>
</div><div>They go on to discuss specific reasons that illuminate why the neoliberal argument for charter schools and other forms of privatization are profoundly flawed, not just from an egalitarian justice perspective, but in straightforward economic terms as well.</div><div>
</div><div>Similar kinds of arguments could surely be made around issues of criminal justice reform as, for example. The purported “rationality” of the private prison-industrial complex could hardly withstand such an analysis.</div><div>
</div><div>What’s more, this broader framework of “inclusive prosperity” not only serves to clarify the arbitrary, constricted nature of the neoliberal outlook, it fits into an broader framework that elucidates a third mistake: Failing to distinguish how neoliberalism fits into a larger political context, which produces different incarnations, as described by New School professor Nancy Fraser in the article “From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump and Beyond,” which I cited last year.</div><div>
</div><div>Fraser speaks in terms of ‘hegemonic blocs,’ a term developed by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, which she develops further as involving two aspects:</div><div>
</div><div>The distributive aspect conveys a view about how society should allocate divisible goods, especially income. This aspect speaks to the economic structure of society and, however obliquely, to its class divisions. The recognition aspect expresses a sense of how society should apportion respect and esteem, the moral marks of membership and belonging. Focused on the status order of society, this aspect refers to its status hierarchies.</div><div>
</div><div>“Progressive neoliberalism” might sound self-contradictory, she notes, but it “combined an expropriative, plutocratic economic program with a liberal-meritocratic politics of recognition,” such that:</div><div>
</div><div>Protecting the environment meant carbon trading. Promoting home ownership meant subprime loans bundled together and resold as mortgage-backed securities. Equality meant meritocracy.</div><div>
</div><div>In contrast, progressive populism calls for something different:</div><div>
</div><div>Combining egalitarian redistribution with nonhierarchical recognition, this option has at least a fighting chance of uniting the whole working class. More than that, it could position that class, understood expansively, as the leading force in an alliance that also includes substantial segments of youth, the middle class, and the professional-managerial stratum.</div><div>
</div><div>The two aspects — recognition and redistribution — can be viewed as more complementary frameworks for developing the full meaning of the “inclusive” modifier that Naidu, Rodrik and Zucman introduced.</div><div>
</div><div>Ideally, the Democrats’ 2020 primary campaign could and should involve a full-throated debate about the best ways to realize the full meaning of inclusive growth, including all the non-economic dimensions of recognition as well. It should flesh out specific aspects of what progressive populism means, and how to achieve its goals. It should promote sound policies to advance inclusive growth. And it should reclaim the once commonsense idea that while the market can be a good servant, it makes a terrible, tyrannical master.</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/heres-why-capitalism-vs-socialism-is-a-false-choice/</div><div>
</div><div>Economic power is—and always has been—the foundation of political power. Those who control the peoples’ means of living rule.</div><div>
</div><div>In a democracy, however, each person must have a voice in the control and management of the means of their living. That requires more than a vote expressing a preference for which establishment-vetted candidate will be in power for the next few years.</div><div>
</div><div>My previous column, “Confronting the Great American Myth,” distinguished true democracy from government by the wealthy, a plutocracy. Contrary to popular belief, the U.S. Constitution was written by representatives of the new nation’s wealthy class to keep people like themselves in power.</div><div>
</div><div>On Jan. 4, the newly elected Democratic majority in the U.S. House of Representatives introduced HR1, the For the People Act of 2019. Its aim is to make voting easier, reduce the influence of big money, and curtail gerrymandering. Even before it was introduced, the champions of having rich people rule were falsely characterizing it as an attack on the freedom of speech of ordinary Americans.</div><div>
</div><div>The provisions of HR1 represent an important step in a transition from the plutocracy we have to the democracy most Americans want. Unfortunately, political gridlock assures that HR1 has no chance of becoming law until at least after the 2020 election. Yet the popular yearning for democracy reflected in that bill makes this a propitious moment for a serious conversation about what a true democracy might look like and why it would be a good idea.</div><div>
</div><div>We stand at an epic choice point for our nation and for humanity. The plutocracy now in place has put us on a path to self-extinction—a future with no winners, rich or poor. We must now seek a path that restores the health of Earth’s regenerative systems while securing equity, material sufficiency, peace, and spiritual abundance for all—exactly the opposite of the plutocrats’ drive to secure the power, privilege, and material excess for themselves. This makes democracy far more than just a good idea; it is now an imperative.</div><div>
</div><div>The power of plutocracy depends on keeping the people divided against each other along gender, racial, religious, or other fault lines. The goal is to divert our attention from themselves so that they can maintain their power and continue to amass wealth.</div><div>
</div><div>Champions of plutocracy would also have us believe that we must choose between two options: capitalism (private ownership and management) or socialism (government ownership and management). They prefer we not notice that in their most familiar forms, both capitalism and socialism feature an undemocratic concentration of control over the means of living in the hands of the few. Democracy is essential for either to work effectively for the benefit of all.</div><div>
</div><div>Plutocrats generally favor capitalism, because in the extreme form we now experience, it supports virtually unlimited concentrations of wealth and power. Its practitioners are also drawn by capitalism’s ideological claim that unregulated markets will assure that the presumed benefits of a growing economy will be shared by everyone, and so the rich need not bear any personal responsibility beyond maximizing their personal financial gain.</div><div>
</div><div>The critical economic and political question for humanity is not whether our means of living will be controlled by corporations or government, but whether control will be concentrated for the benefit of the few or dispersed, with benefits shared by everyone.</div><div>
</div><div>Support for the needed economic transition can come from many places. Just as people are not necessarily racist because they are White or misogynistic because they are male, people do not necessarily become plutocrats just because they are rich. Many wealthy people work actively for economic and political democracy and support radical wealth redistribution, including through support of progressive taxation and significant taxing of inherited wealth.</div><div>
</div><div>The political and economic democracy we seek cannot be easily characterized as either capitalist or socialist. It is a system of substantially self-reliant local economies composed of locally owned enterprises and community-secured safety nets with responsibilities shared by families, charities, and governments. Such a system facilitates self-organizing to create healthy, happy, and productive communities.</div><div>
</div><div>In our complex and interconnected world, this system will require national and global institutions responsive to the people’s will and well-being to support cooperation and sharing among communities, but the real power will be dispersed locally. There would be ample room for competition among local communities to be the most beautiful, healthy, democratic, creative, and generous. There is no place for colonizing the resources of others or for predatory corporations.</div><div>
</div><div>These communities will most likely feature cooperative and family ownership of businesses. They will also recognize the rights of nature and their shared responsibility to care for the commons and to share its gifts.</div><div>
</div><div>The rules of plutocracy evolved over thousands of years. We have far less time to come up with suitable rules for democratic alternatives. That search must quickly become a centerpiece of public discussion.</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div>
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</div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/a-glossary-of-exploitive-economics-lean-in-and-8-other-bad-business-buzzwords-that-should-be-phased-out/</div><div>
</div><div>eg</div><div>
</div><div>...Moral Hazard:? The cynical belief that you will automatically behave irresponsibly if not held accountable for your actions, especially in terms of financial responsibility; a moral pretext for demolishing the public sphere; the belief that everyone is a feckless opportunist.</div><div>
</div><div>The concept of moral hazard originated in insurance economics. It argues that once people are protected by insurance (say home and contents) they’ll automatically engage in riskier behavior than normal (leaving their homes unlocked, for example). The theory assumes that people are not only stupid but have no sense of civic responsibility. The rationale has been deployed by neocons to lay ruin to the welfare state. Unemployment insurance incentivizes work avoidance. Public health care encourages unhealthy lifestyle choices, etc. We could follow the rationale reductio ad absurdum: public fire brigades shouldn’t be funded because they inadvertently encourage people to be careless in the kitchen, and might result in them burning down their homes.</div><div>
</div><div>Office Email: An electronic communication system that has become ubiquitous among the modern workforce; an instrument for spreading wage-theft and unpaid overtime; something 50 percent of the workforce now “check” outside of office hours.?</div><div>
</div><div>What is colloquially called the “tyranny of email,” started life as a cool invention by Ray Tomlinson in 1971</div><div>
</div><div>...</div><div>
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</div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/how-free-markets-killed-capitalism-ayn-rand-ronald-reagan-walmart-amazon-and-the-1-percents-sick-triumph-over-us-all/</div><div>
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</div><div>How free markets killed capitalism: Ayn Rand, Ronald Reagan, Walmart, Amazon and the 1 percent’s sick triumph over us all</div><div>
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</div><div>1/14</div><div>
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</div><div>https://www.c-span.org/video/?454686-2/the-curse-bigness</div><div>
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</div><div>Tim Wu talks about his book, The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age, in which he questioned whether “big tech,” big pharma," and other corporations that are “too big to fail” should be broken apart.&nbsp;</div><div>
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</div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/mass-production-and-market-models-are-ruining-our-medical-and-education-fields/</div><div>
</div><div>wrong model for med and ed</div><div>
</div><div>The young doctor was desperate. ‘I need to talk to my patients,’ she said, ‘and give them time to ask questions. Some of them are foreign-born and struggle with the language, and all of them are in distress! But I hardly have the time to explain the essentials to them. There’s all the paperwork, and we’re constantly understaffed.’</div><div>
</div><div>Such grievances have become sadly familiar – not only in medicine, but also in education and care-work. Even in more commercial environments, you’re liable to hear similar objections: the engineer who wants to deliver quality but is told to focus on efficiency only; the gardener who wants to give the plants time to grow, but is told to focus on speed. The imperatives of productivity, profitability and the market rule.</div><div>
</div><div>Complaints come from the other side of the table as well. As patients and students, we want to be treated with care and responsibility, rather than as mere numbers. Wasn’t there a time when professionals still knew how to serve us – a cosy, well-ordered world of responsible doctors, wise teachers and caring nurses? In this world, bakers still cared about the quality of their bread, and builders were proud of their constructions. One could trust these professionals; they knew what they were doing and were reliable guardians of their knowledge. Because people poured their souls into it, work was still meaningful – or was it?</div><div>
</div><div>In the grip of nostalgia, it’s easy to overlook the dark sides of this old vocational model. On top of the fact that professional jobs were structured around hierarchies of gender and race, laypeople were expected to obey expert judgment without even asking questions. Deference to authority was the norm, and there were few ways of holding professionals to account. In Germany, for example, doctors were colloquially called ‘demigods in white’ because of their status vis-à-vis patients and other staff members. This is not exactly how we might think that citizens of democratic societies should relate to one other now.</div><div>
</div><div>Against this backdrop, the call for more autonomy, for more ‘choice’, seems hard to resist. This is precisely what happened with the rise of neoliberalism after the 1970s, when the advocates of ‘New Public Management’ promoted the idea that hard-nosed market thinking should be used to structure healthcare, education and other areas that typically belonged to the slow and complicated world of public red tape. In this way, neoliberalism undermined not only public institutions but the very idea of professionalism.</div><div>
</div><div>This attack was the culmination of two powerful agendas. The first was an economic argument about the alleged inefficiency of public services or the other non-market structures in which professional knowledge was hosted. Long queues, no choice, no competition, no exit options – that’s the chorus that critics of public healthcare systems repeat to this day. The second was an argument about autonomy, about equal status, about liberation – ‘Think for yourself!’ instead of relying on experts. The advent of the internet seemed to offer perfect conditions for finding information and comparing offers: in short, for acting like a fully informed customer. These two imperatives – the economic and the individualistic – meshed extremely well under neoliberalism. The shift from addressing the needs of citizens to serving the demands of customers or consumers was complete.</div><div>
</div><div>We are all customers now; we are all supposed to be kings. But what if ‘being a customer’ is the wrong model for healthcare, education, and even highly specialised crafts and trades?</div><div>
</div><div>What the market-based model overlooks is hyperspecialisation, as the philosopher Elijah Millgram argues in The Great Endarkenment (2015). We depend on other people’s knowledge and expertise, because we can learn and study only so many things in our lifetimes. Whenever specialist knowledge is at stake, we are the opposite of a well-informed customer. Often we don’t want to have to do our own research, which would be patchy at best; sometimes, we are simply unable to do it, even if we tried. It’s much more efficient (yes, efficient!) if we can trust those already in the know.</div><div>
</div><div>But it can be hard to trust professionals forced to work in neoliberal regimes. As the political scientist Wendy Brown argued in Undoing the Demos (2015), market logic turns everything, including one’s own life, into a question of portfolio management: a series of projects in which you try to maximise the return on investment. By contrast, responsible professionalism imagines work-life as a series of relationships with individuals who are entrusted to you, along with the ethical standards and commitments you uphold as a member of a professional community. But marketisation threatens this collegiality, by introducing competitiveness among workers and undermining the trust that’s needed to do a good job.</div><div>
</div><div>Is there a way out of this conundrum? Could professionalism be revived? If so, can we avoid its old problems of hierarchy while preserving space for equality and autonomy?</div><div>
</div><div>There are some promising proposals and real-life examples of such a revival. In his account of ‘civic professionalism’, Work and Integrity (2nd ed, 2004), the American education scholar William Sullivan argued that professionals need to be aware of the moral dimensions of their role. They need to be ‘experts and citizens alike’, and ‘learn to think and act cooperatively with us’, the non-experts. Similarly, the political theorist Albert Dzur argued in Democratic Professionalism (2008) for a revival of a more self-aware version of ‘old’ professionalism – one committed to democratic values, and an ongoing dialogue with laypeople. Dzur describes, for example, how experts in the field of bioethics have opened up their discussions to non-experts, reacting to public criticisms, and finding formats for bringing doctors, ethics consultants and laypeople into conversation.</div><div>
</div><div>Similar practices could be introduced in many other professions – as well as areas not traditionally understood as specialist vocations, but in which decisionmakers need to draw on highly specialised knowledge. Ideally, this could lead to trust in professionals being not blind, but justified: a trust based on a grasp of the institutional frameworks that hold them accountable, and on an awareness of mechanisms for double-checking and getting additional opinions within the profession.</div><div>
</div><div>But in many areas, the pressures of markets or quasi-markets prevail. This leaves our front-line professionals in a difficult spot, as Bernardo Zacka describes in When the State Meets the Street (2017): they are overworked, exhausted, pulled in different directions, and unsure about the whole point of their job. Highly motivated individuals, such as the young doctor I mentioned at the outset, are likely to leave the fields in which they could contribute most. Perhaps this is a price worth paying if it brings huge benefits elsewhere. But that doesn’t seem to be happening, and it makes all of us non-experts vulnerable, too. We cannot be informed customers because we know too little – but we can’t rely on being simply citizens any longer, either.</div><div>
</div><div>Up to a point, professionalisation is built on the persistence of ignorance: specialised knowledge is a form of power, and a form that’s rather difficult to control. Yet it’s clear that markets and quasi-markets are flawed strategies for dealing with this problem. By continuing to accept them as the only possible models, we forgo the opportunity to imagine and explore alternatives. We must be able to rely on other people’s expertise. And for that, as the political philosopher Onora O’Neill argued in her 2002 Reith Lectures, we must be able to trust them.</div><div>
</div><div>The young doctor I interviewed had long considered leaving her job – so when the opportunity to get a research-based position came up, she jumped ship. ‘The system was forcing me to act against my own best judgment, again and again,’ she said. ‘It was the opposite of what I thought being a doctor was all about.’ Now is the time to help reimagine a system in which she can recover that sense of purpose, to everyone’s benefit.</div><div>
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</div><div>https://www.alternet.org/donald-trump-brett-kavanaugh-and-path-neoliberal-fascism</div><div>
</div><div>no lnx</div><div>
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</div><div>Donald Trump, Brett Kavanaugh and the Path to Neoliberal Fascism</div><div>
</div><div>Even in the darkest of times we have the right to some illumination. -- Hannah Arendt</div><div>By Henry A. Giroux / Salon October 10, 2018, 2:10 AM GMT</div><div>...</div><div>=</div><div>https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/neoliberalism-taking-steep-toll-entire-generations-mental-health-study</div><div>
</div><div>Are you a millennial prone to self-criticism? Is your sense of worth inextricably bound to your professional standing and achievements? Do you suffer from acute social anxiety or are otherwise fearful of being judged by your peers?</div><div>
</div><div>The source of your unhappiness may not be chemical or emotional but a product of our economic system. According to a study from Psychological Bulletin, neoliberalism is producing generations of young people who are increasingly demanding, both of each other and themselves.</div><div>
</div><div>So what is neoliberalism, anyway? Despite what the pundit class might have you believe, it's more than a glib pejorative for the policies of corporate Democrats and the GOP, although both parties have embraced a neoliberal model to varying degrees. Mike Konczal offers the following definition at Vox:</div><div>
</div><div>"'Neoliberalism' encompasses market supremacy—or the extension of markets or market-like logic to more and more spheres of life. This, in turn, has a significant influence on our subjectivity: how we view ourselves, our society, and our roles in it. One insight here is that markets don’t occur naturally but are instead constructed through law and practices, and those practices can be extended into realms well beyond traditional markets."</div><div>
</div><div>As Meagan Day points out in Jacobin, meritocracy and neoliberalism often go hand in hand. If the whole of society can be reduced to a series of market transactions, then individuals become commodities in direct competition with one another.</div><div>
</div><div>"Since the mid-1970s, neoliberal political-economic regimes have systematically replaced things like public ownership and collective bargaining with deregulation and privatization, promoting the individual over the group in the very fabric of society," Day notes. "Meanwhile, meritocracy—the idea that social and professional status are the direct outcomes of individual intelligence, virtue, and hard work—convinces isolated individuals that failure to ascend is a sign of inherent worthlessness."</div><div>
</div><div>Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill, the authors of the study, attribute these feelings of inadequacy to a rise in perfectionism across the culture. While perfectionism is generally understood as the rejection of anything that fails to meet one's own exacting standards, Curran and Hill assign the term distinct categories: self-oriented (holding unrealistic expectations of oneself), other-oriented (unrealistic expectations of others), and socially prescribed, the "most debilitating of the three dimensions." Day describes the latter as "the feeling of paranoia and anxiety engendered by the persistent—and not entirely unfounded—sensation that everyone is waiting for you to make a mistake so they can write you off forever."</div><div>
</div><div>For those born in the United Kingdom, Canada and the U.S. after 1989, Curran and Hill observe a marked rise in each category, but especially in socially prescribed perfectionism, which has become twice as prevalent as it was a generation ago. This can manifest itself in a variety of ways, including anxiety, depression, eating disorders and suicidal ideation, not to mention an increased dependence on social media.</div><div>
</div><div>"[Curran and Hill] cite data showing that young people today are less interested in engaging in group activities for fun, attending instead to individual endeavors that make them feel productive or fill them with a sense of achievement," Day continues. "When the world is demanding that you prove yourself worthy at every turn, and you can’t shake the suspicion that the respect of your peers is highly conditional, hanging out with friends can seem less compelling than staying in to meticulously curate your social media profiles."</div><div>
</div><div>Ironically, social media itself tends to produce feelings of anxiety and alienation. A wealth of research has linked an overreliance on Facebook to depression, so the pressures of neoliberalism and the stresses of social media appear to work in concert with one another, if they're not one and the same. (What are these sites, after all, if not platforms for personal branding?) Either way, the results are deeply troubling.</div><div>
</div><div>"Even young people without diagnosable mental illnesses tend to feel bad more often, since heightened other-oriented perfectionism creates a group climate of hostility, suspicion, and dismissiveness—in which the jury is always out on everyone, pending group appraisal—and socially prescribed perfectionism involves an acute recognition of that alienation," Meagan Day adds ruefully. "In short, the repercussions of rising perfectionism range from emotionally painful to literally deadly."</div><div>
</div><div>Until we can begin to imagine an alternative, the destructive cycle seems destined to repeat itself.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>H/T Jacobin</div><div>
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