... Sadly for the UK, once famed for its aerospace, its automobile makers, manufacturing too has shrunk. It’s not just Brexit but the dismal failure of neo-liberal policy. As Prem Sikka puts it in this piece.

“The elites have transformed the state. Instead, of an entrepreneurial state which once invested in biotechnology, aerospace, information technology and other emerging industries, it now guarantees corporate profits to enrich a few.

“Private Finance Initiative (PFI) and outsourcing of state functions was an early bonanza. Successive governments have handed publicly-owned industries to corporations at knock-down prices. This includes, oil, gas, railways, ports, prisons, mail, aerospace, information technology, biotechnology, shipping, mining, steel, automobiles, social care and large parts of the National Health Service. Yet there has been no economic renaissance.

“The homeless and poor can’t be housed because council houses sold by the government have not been replaced by affordable homes. There isn’t much left to sell to feed rentier capitalism.”

 

READ MORE:

https://michaelwest.com.au/brexit-britains-political-tragedy-poses-a-dire-warning-for-australia/

 

NEO-LIBERALISM IN AMERICA RUNS ON THE CORRUPT PRACTICE OF GOVERNMENT GOING INTO DEBT, WITH BUDGETS THAT COULD NEVER BE REPAID, TO FINANCE PRIVATE ARMAMENT MANUFACTURING.... THIS IS ONE OF THE MANY TENTACLES OF NEO-LIBERALISM. BANKS OR COMPANIES THAT ARE TOO BIG TO FAIL ARE ALSO CORRUPTING THE ALREADY ROTTEN SPIRIT OF NEO-LIBERALISM. SOMEONE LIKE ELON MUSK COULD NOT DROP $200 BILLION OF HIS "FORTUNE" WITHOUT PIGGY CONTRACTS WITH THE GOVERNMENT AGENCIES FUNDING SOME OF HIS VENTURES.

MY GUESS HERE IS THAT SINCE BUYING "TWITTER" AND MAKING IT ACCOUNTABLE TO A "BETTER TRUTH" BY COUNTERING DISINFORMATION BY ALLOWING COUNTER-DISINFORMATION, OR ALLOWING TRUMP — THE NEMESIS OF THE FBI, THE CIA, THE US MILITARY AND THE WASHINGTONIAN SWAMP — BACK IN THE TWITTER FOLD, SOME (NEO-LIBERALS WHO HATE THE DONALD) INVESTORS HAVE DECIDED TO HURT ELON. ONE COULD SEE THIS COMING...

MEANWHILE, SOME PEOPLE SWEAR BY THE VALUE OF NEO-LIBERALISM AND GLOBALISM WHILE OTHER POINT OUT THAT THESE HAVE BEEN SOMEWHAT CATASTROPHIC TO THE GREATER HUMAN COMMUNITY.

 

HERE IS THE (TIRED AND DELUDED) MISE INSTITUTE:

Capitalism means free enterprise, sovereignty of the consumers in economic matters, and sovereignty of the voters in political matters. Socialism means full government control of every sphere of the individual’s life and the unrestricted supremacy of the government in its capacity as central board of production management. There is no compromise possible between these two systems.

 

THIS IS QUITE FASCIST/AUTHORITARIAN IN IYS OWN BELIEF — AS IF IF YOU'RE NOT PART OF THIS SYSTEM, YOU ARE A PROBLEM... AND YOU WILL BECOME POOR, WHILE THE OTHERS WILL BECOME CORRUPTLY RICH.

 

MEANWHILE, OTHERS SEE NEOLIBERALISM AS A PLAGUE:

 

Neoliberalism Was a Counterrevolution Against Democracy

AN INTERVIEW WITH QUINN SLOBODIAN

A group of 20th-century intellectuals saw the democratic nation-state as a threat to private property. Their solution: shifting power to unaccountable international bodies like the WTO, helping pave the way to what we now call “neoliberalism.”

 

The neoliberal era is often characterized as one of deregulation, of the unfettering or freeing of market forces that had been reined in, or “embedded,” during the postwar decades. In his book Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, historian Quinn Slobodian argues against this understanding of neoliberalism. Instead, Slobodian claims, the neoliberal turn was about “encasing” or protecting markets from democratic control and establishing an international order that ensured capital’s ability to flow freely across borders.

Daniel Denvir interviewed Slobodian about his book for the Jacobin Radio podcast The Dig. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

DANIEL DENVIR

I want you to explain this idea that’s at the core of the Geneva School, which is the proposed division between economic governance and the governance of other matters, what they envisioned as a double government. Why did they think that the economy needed to be protected from national governments? And how did they think that could happen?

QUINN SLOBODIAN

In the story I’m telling, the twentieth century is marked by two events in particular. The first is the end of empire, and then associated with that is the generalization of universal suffrage, or one person–one vote democracy. And this, in a way, gets to the core of what is “neo” about the neoliberalism I’m looking at: they’re approaching a terrain on which there is this universalization of an assumption that people should have a particular territory inhabited by people that look like them or speak like them, and that territory should somehow reflect the shared destiny or the shared aspirations of that community of like-minded ethnic or national people.

That principle, that idea of national self-determination, doesn’t always but can run directly against the notion of global economic interdependence. So, what the neoliberals that I’m looking at in my book saw was that as people were given votes at a mass level, as they organized into nations split off from the original large European empires, they started to make decisions that interrupted the free flow of goods, the free flow of capital, and the certainty that capitalists had enjoyed through much of the nineteenth century that if they owned property in one part of the world that was not their own country they could nevertheless rely on its security in the long term, or that its security would be guaranteed by home financial institutions, the intervention of gunships, and so on.

So, the rise of democracy and the rise of national self-determination in the twentieth century produces a whole new set of dilemmas for neoliberals who are trying to imagine an institutional framework that can protect global capitalism.

DANIEL DENVIR

This is specifically what you call the human right to capital flight.

QUINN SLOBODIAN

That is one of the things that I discuss in the book, this notion that the freedom of capital to be able to leave when it wants and come back when it wants is essential to the reproduction of the system as a whole. As it turns out, that very right was being infringed on in what we call the Bretton Woods system that was created after World War II and lasted until the 1970s.

This was a period where, unlike today, capital wasn’t entirely free to go from country to country. There was a kind of normalization of what are called capital controls. Even though this was often a project that was failing, nevertheless there was a kind of a norm that nations should have as part of their repertoire of tools and of sovereignty the right to control the flow of money in and out of their countries. That’s something that presents for the neoliberals as a major problem immediately after World War II and one that one can see as kind of being solved by the move to a more flexible exchange rate system by the 1970s and then the general discrediting of the idea of capital controls.

DANIEL DENVIR

So, they proposed this division between a global order that protects the economy from the interference of nation-state governments. And then the other part of that division is what you describe, or they describe, as “culture,” which would still be in the purview of the nation-state. What is it precisely that the neoliberals wanted to leave to the nation-state? Because it doesn’t seem like very much. And why did they want the nation-state to maintain its ornamental sovereignty?

 

READ MORE:

https://jacobin.com/2022/11/neoliberalism-geneva-school-nationalism-mises-hayek

 

SEE ALSO:

dangerous sociopathic fascist delusions of dystopian chosen-people grandeur......

 

 

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