Neo-liberalism has been a monumental failure. The evidence of that failure is piling up all over the world. Paul Street writes:
Nearly three-fourths (71 percent) of the world’s population is poor, living on $10 a day or less, and 11 percent (767 million people, including 385 million children) live in what the World Bank calls “extreme poverty” (less than a $1.90 a day). Meanwhile, Oxfam reliably reports that, surreal as it sounds, the world’s eight richest people possess among themselves as much wealth as the poorest half of the entire human race.
The ravages of neo-liberalism are most evident in the United States, where the virus was first unleashed by those who fervently believed that Milton Friedman was a wise man:
The United States, self-described homeland and headquarters of freedom and democracy, is no exception to the harshly unequal global reality. Six of the world’s eight most absurdly rich people are U.S. citizens: Bill Gates (whose net worth of $426 billion equals the wealth of 3.6 billion people), Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Larry Ellison (Oracle) and Michael Bloomberg (former mayor of New York City). As Bernie Sanders said repeatedly on the campaign trail in 2016, the top 10th of the upper 1 percent in the U.S. has nearly as much wealth as the nation’s bottom 90 percent. Seven heirs of the Walton family’s Walmart fortune have among them a net worth equal to that of the nation’s poorest 40 percent. Half the U.S. population is poor or near-poor, and half lacks any savings.
Just over a fifth of the nation’s children, including more than a third of black and Native American children, live below the federal government’s notoriously inadequate poverty level, while parasitic financiers and other capitalist overlords enjoy unimaginable hyper-opulence. One in seven U.S. citizens relies on food banks in “the world’s richest country.” Many of them are in families with full-time wage-earners—a reflection of the fact that wages have stagnated even as U.S. labor productivity consistently has risen for more than four decades.
And, now, Donald Trump is that nation's president. He is the omega -- what you get when you slavishly follow the advice of Friedman and his acolytes. Trump -- and the ideas he personifies -- represent failure by design:
As Joshua Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute showed in his important 2011 study, “Failure by Design,” the following interrelated, bipartisan and not-so-public policies across the long neoliberal era have brought us to a level of inequality that rivals the Gilded Age of the late 19th-century robber barons era. These policies include:
● Letting the value of the minimum wage be eroded by inflation.
● Slashing labor standards for overtime, safety and health.
● Tilting the laws governing union organizing and collective bargaining strongly in favor of employers.
● Weakening the social safety net.
● Privatizing public services.
● Accelerating the integration of the U.S. economy with the world economy without adequately protecting workers from global competition.
● Shredding government oversight of international trade, currency, investment and lending.
● Deregulating the financial sector and financial markets.
● Valuing low inflation over full employment and abandoning the latter as a worthy goal of fiscal and economic policy.
The evidence is indisputable. As the planet heats up, the blind march proudly to their undoing.
Image: Another Angry Voice
6 comments:
What puzzles me so much is that so many people truly hurt by Neo-liberalism keep supporting it.
I have been reading Naomi Klein of late, Owen, and she is of the opinion that all it will take is a crisis, either induceded or natural, to unleash even more of the forces of neoliberalism, despite its manifest failures. This is what happened in Louisiana after Katrina, enabling essentially the privatization of education through vouchers and charters, and it will likely happen, I suspect, in the rebuilding of Puerto Rico's electrical system after Irma.
That puzzles me, too, Toby. It seems to me that they're easily conned.
They keep following Friedman's advice, Lorne. Disaster is neo-liberalism's entree.
John Ralston Saul reminds us that neoliberalism, like every economic paradigm that preceded it, is inherently ideological. It's a belief-based construct that in many ways resembles and operates like a religion. He also contends that economic models seem to have a limited shelf life of 30 to 40 years.
Neoliberalism has run that standard lifespan. It reached the point where Friedman repudiated it as a failure prior to this death. The IMF and the World Bank have likewise pronounced it a dangerous, damaging failure. So, why is it still here in many ways as strong as ever?
In my view neoliberalism is not just another, here today/gone tomorrow economic model. It introduced an added dimension of political capture - legislative, regulatory and, increasingly, executive-level power. This neoliberal dynamic didn't seek to shrink government but to control it, to own it, and it's been wildly successful. Our political caste, beginning with Reagan, Thatcher and Mulroney, was induced to surrender critical elements of our national sovereignty in the belief that the free and unrestrained market knew best. With the rump of powers that were left to them, we needed only technocrats, administrators, not leaders and certainly not visionaries as we once knew them.
That Liberal shill, John Manley, recently whined that Trudeau's tax changes are driving Big Money out of Canada. The government, it seems, is powerless to deal with that although the way they allowed the Bronfmans to stage their financial exodus from Canada speaks volumes for Ottawa's willingness to intervene. As a nation we've become akin to the city that regularly is blackmailed by its football or hockey franchise threatening to move elsewhere if the taxpayer doesn't build them a new stadium/arena. This is the fruition of political capture.
It's not going to change, we're not going to get out from under neoliberalism, until we realize that our own political system and our economic system must be scrapped and then only if we act in time. There is some chance, not great but real nonetheless, that this could get a lot worse. The worst possible scenario would be the ascendancy of an oligarchy (as exists in the state) leading to a neo-feudal society.
That is the ultimate omega, Mound -- the neo-feudal state. And we're well on our way to getting there.
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