Forum Post: Neoliberalism: 30 fucking years.

http://www.readersupportednews.org/opinion2/279-82/8120-thirty-years-of-unleashed-greed

And here's the Stiglitz article Scheer mentions:

http://www.vanityfair.com/society/features/2011/05/top-one-percent-201105

Everyone needs to read. Then stop blaming liberals and Keynes, please. We haven't had the reins for 30 years. Obama is just another neoliberal like every president since Reagan.

Update:

This thread has terribly agitated a wee troll - the right-wing hateful type that doesn't know the difference between Keynes and Marx. He keeps acting as if he hasn't received an explanation for how Milton Friedman is a statist. He has ignored every reasonable explanation and is just obsessed with Naomi Klein, for whatever reason. I strongly recommend people do their own research into:

1.) Neoliberalism and its greatest advocate, Milton Friedman. 2.) How neoliberal policies are implemented, through coercion, by anti-democratic dictators like Pinochet, or anti-democratic globalist organizations like the IMF, or anti-democratic usurpation of the democratic process here at home. The widely accepted position is this: Neoliberalism is the usage of the state to force "free market" reforms (privatization, selective deregulation, etc) on desperate populations and governments, and maintain the ideal conditions (subsidies, tax breaks, bailouts, anti-labor laws, no welfare, etc) for large multinational corporations to extract wealth unfettered by any government protections for the welfare of the people.

Re-posting the definition:

ne·o·lib·er·al - Adjective: Relating to or denoting a modified form of liberalism tending to favor free-market capitalism.

It's basically Milton Friedman's free market Chicago/Austrian economics melded to the power of the state to force its implementation (domestically and internationally) down peoples' throats and also to prop-up "free market" powers like banks and large corporations.

It's the worst of both worlds. It's the underlying ideology that produces privatized profits and socialized losses. Another way I saw it put recently: "Under neoliberalism, the state tilts more acutely in favour of capital: tax-breaks and bailouts for the rich and harsh market discipline for others."

Supply-side/trickle-down economics fits within the umbrella.

Update 2: Chomsky agrees with my view on neoliberalism as statism:

It's been going on for some time, first in the South -- India, Brazil, South Africa,... -- and since Seattle primarily, the North has joined in. But all of this is some years back, in the South, decades (which is why the World Social Forum has been held in Brazil and India). The MST and Zapatistas are important components, but only components of much larger protests against the investor-rights version of international economic integration absurdly called "globalization." There's good literature on neoliberal globalization (the so-called "Washington consensus"). I've written about it too, for quite a few years. Profits over People to mention one of a number of books, and many articles, including talks at the WSF that have appeared here and there. The rules of the game were more or less formalized in the Uruguay round that set up the WTO, in NAFTA, and other such mislabelled "free trade agreements." They are a mixture of liberalization and protectionism, designed -- not surprisingly -- in the interests of the designers: mainly MNCs, financial institutions, the investor/lender class generally, the powerful states that cater to their interests, etc. The rights and interests of people are incidental. The extreme protectionism of the WTO and NAFTA goes far beyond earlier forms of protectionism. The outrageous patent principles, for example, designed to grant monopoly pricing privileges to immense private tyrannies, far in the future, and to stifle innovation and development, in their interests. Concentrated private power strongly resists exposure to market forces, unless it's confident it can win in the competition. That goes back centuries. There's a huge literature on this (I've written about it too) and can't summarize in a letter. Protectionist devices, such as those of NAFTA and the WTO, are only a fraction of the means by which the wealthy and powerful protect themselves from market forces. In fact, the core of the "new economy" is based on the principle that cost and risk should be socialized, and profit privatized (often after decades in the dynamic state sector). Just to take the obvious example, consider what you and I are now using: computers and the internet. Textbook examples of this process.

Also, more from Stiglitz: http://dailystaregypt.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=14905

"This mixture of free-market rhetoric and government intervention has worked particularly badly for developing countries."

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NEW: Please read Naomi Klein's brilliant article in The Nation:

http://www.thenation.com/article/164497/capitalism-vs-climate