Search results for tag #neoliberalism
"cities like Seattle, Minneapolis, and Chicago have passed minimum wage laws, renter protections, and public banking initiatives that directly challenge the neoliberal consensus their state and federal representatives still enforce.
"These politicians and movements are called radical by the media the neoliberalists own. But they are not radical for anyone but the 0.00000031 percent. They are fairness, freedom and a decent life for the rest of us.
"Jeffrey Epstein is dead. But the neoliberalist system he served is not. It is operating right now, and not just in kompromat operations. It operates in the halls of Congress, in the IMF, in the private equity firms buying your hospital and your apartment building and your local newspaper. It operates in your retirement fund that invests in the private prisons the neoliberal media tells you we need for all the immigrants. It operates in every trade agreement negotiated in secret and presented to the public as inevitable."
"The transnational financial class does not have a country. Its members hold passports from multiple nations, park their wealth in jurisdictions chosen for tax convenience, move between properties on multiple continents, and owe their primary loyalty to capital itself. They are the first true citizens of the neoliberal order they built.
When we ask “which country ran Epstein,” we hand them their most effective defense. Because the real answer — no country, just Neoliberal capitalism — sounds like exoneration. It is a description of something more dangerous than any nation-state: a class of people with the resources of nations, the mobility of stateless actors, and the political reach of an empire — accountable to no electorate, no constitution, no border."
#epsteinClass #politics #neoliberalism
https://alisav.substack.com/p/what-country-did-epstein-answer-to
"Around the world, leaders have looked at the neoliberal machine, named it plainly, and built something different. Their success stories are real, documented, and almost entirely absent from American corporate media. That absence is not an accident.
"The clearest current example is Mexico’s president Claudia Sheinbaum, elected in 2024 with 59 percent of the vote — the largest electoral margin in Mexican history. She is a climate scientist and the direct political heir of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, whose government spent six years dismantling the neoliberal architecture that had governed Mexico since the 1980s. Under their movement, called the Fourth Transformation, Mexico renationalized its lithium reserves, expanded public pensions, raised the minimum wage dramatically, and refused to hand its energy infrastructure to foreign private capital. The transnational financial press called it populism. The Mexican people called it governance."
"Bolivia under Evo Morales nationalized its natural gas industry and used the revenues to cut extreme poverty in half. Colombia’s Gustavo Petro, a former urban guerrilla and the country’s first left-wing president, has pushed to end coal extraction, tax the wealthy, and rebuild a social safety net gutted by decades of IMF-directed austerity. Brazil’s Lula da Silva returned to the presidency in 2022 explicitly on a platform of reversing the privatization and deregulation his predecessor had accelerated on behalf of transnational capital.
"In Europe the resistance looks different but points the same direction. Portugal’s left coalition government, which governed from 2015 to 2022, rejected austerity, raised wages, and restored public services — and outperformed its austerity-following neighbors economically."
"Bernie Sanders has spent decades naming the billionaire class itself as the problem — not foreign enemies, not cultural grievances — and built the largest small-donor fundraising operation in American political history. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has explained repeatedly and clearly how financial deregulation, private equity, and the capture of democratic institutions by capital are not separate scandals but one system. Ro Khanna has pushed for industrial policy that rebuilds domestic manufacturing rather than surrendering it to global capital mobility. Rashida Tlaib has connected the financialization of housing to the same class whose money funds the think tanks that write the policies that keep it legal."
Here's a question I'd love an answer to. How does everyone else cope with the rage? The rage with how shitty life is under neoliberalism, how much friction there is to trying to live a good life without destroying the environment or helping sustain the billionaires who are screwing everything. How do you cope? I'm not coping, I'm just almost perpetually angry, which doesn't feel like a healthy way to life.
#neoliberalism #adulting
We intentionally under fund the healthcare system (at all levels) and the education system necessary to train health care workers under the guise of of 'fiscal responsibility' when in reality politicians have been kicking the can down the road for decades to provide tax cuts to the rich... now those chickens are coming home to roost.
To turn this ship around we need to:
1) Build all the healthcare infrastructure we've neglected
2) Build the education infrastructure (because without an education system we can't train the health care workers we need)
And we needed to start yesterday
#healthcare #cdnpoli #abpoli #neoliberalism
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/canada-hospitals-wait-times-9.7123684
PRX Series — The Possible World:
· S6 E38 — The Good Wolf We Keep Starving
· S6 E43 — We Already Live in Utopia. So Why Are We So Miserable?
· S6 E44 — The Print Shop Rebels ← this episode
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
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Breathe easy. We go deep and lightly surface the big ideas.
You know what bugs me? When people says something along the lines "The price for wind and solar in the last 10 years has come down x-fold." And then pretend that this was a magic market mechanism or that it simply was The Right Time for renewable tech to emerge victorious/competitive over fossil fuels.
Just as an example, the Energy speaker at UK's National Emergency Briefing does it too
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cD1HY5e1H8
But this isn't market magic. The price for solar has plummeted bc of China's subsidies in general. And then, due to COVID, China's real estate crisis had provinces struggle to counter lost revenue. They then lowered biz tax – which attracted new companies – and new companies are mainly those who make or sell new tech, eg PV panels.
And because so many new factories sprung up, PV get sold for a dime a dozen.
WE, our nations, could have done that 10 years ago already. We, our nations, SHOULD have heavily subsidised PV and wind turbine manufacturing and R&D 10 years ago.
It's not market magic. And it's not because This Is Simply The Right Time. No. It's subsidies, subsidies, subsidies, and it's 10 years too late!! 😡
#ClimateChange #Renewables #Economics #Neoliberalism #China #SolarEnergy #WindEnergy
One of the faults of neoliberalism is the idea that if the private sector can do something cheaper than the public, then the public doesn't need to exist. This concept is flawed because the role of a publicly owned entity isn't just to do things cheaper it is also to:
1) Provide services across the nation, even when services in a location are not profitable
2) It acts as a price 'anchor'. If the private sector becomes a monopoly or oligopoly (as it tends to do) having a public entity offering stable pricing inhibits the private sector's ability to price gouge consumers since they can just turn back to the the public option.
RE: https://mastodon.scot/@andrewducker/116165249353781655
#Canada would be an ideal country for a train network like this, especially in places like the prairies, but decades of failed leadership beholden to O&G along with a fanatical adherence to #neoliberalism has prevented us from matching #China
But it is not too late! Canada needs to pivot and redirect the billions in O&G subsidies into a publicly owned crown corporation that will design and build both the trains and the network for them to run on.
As a bonus a high speed rail network could be built in conjunction with an HVDC transmission grid to move #renewableenergy around the country.
#green #trains #HighSpeedRail #NoMorePipelines
Link Post: China’s 450km/h bullet train is the fastest ever built https://www.executivetraveller.com/news/china-cr450-world-s-fastest-bullet-train
Canadian Politics Debate Statement of the Day
— The Liberal Party of Canada stopped being a chiefly progressive party after Pierre Trudeau’s ministry —
Preface your reply with “FOR:” or “AGAINST:”
Please feel free to post replies/statements that argue for or against the statement without addressing me, or any other person in the replies.
Include one or two justifications for your argument.
#canpoli #cdnpoli #canada #liberalism #neoliberalism #conservatism #cpc #lpc #ndp #politicaldebate
Academic dishonesty (fraud) - Irish economist Brian M. Lucey
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_M._Lucey
Elsevier’s elite paper mill exposed: Shuts Down Its Finance Journal Citation Cartel
https://www.chrisbrunet.com/p/elsevier-shuts-down-its-finance-journal
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47119530
* 12 papers retracted
* 7 editor positions removed
* common thread: Brian M. Lucey
#capitalism #neoliberalism #fraud #AcademicDishonsty #Elsevier #economists
Alt...
Academic dishonesty (fraud) - Irish economist Brian M. Lucey
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_M._Lucey
Elsevier Shuts Down Its Finance Journal Citation Cartel
12 papers retracted, 7 editor positions removed, and the "open secret" of Elsevier’s elite paper mill exposed
#capitalism #neoliberalism #fraud #AcademicDishonsty #Elsevier #economists
#CanadaPost could be playing a critical role in reasserting #Canadian #Sovereignty if only our "leaders" would take action rather then sacrificing it on the alter of #neoliberalism
I believe that there are two changes that need to occur to make Canada Post serve Canadians again:
1) Expand postal services to include banking. Too many banks are reducing their service offerings and making Canadians jump through hoops to get banking, in an era when access to banking is more critical than ever.
2) Facilitate domestic trade. Right now it's easier and cheaper for Canadians to make purchases on Amazon or Temu than it is from a Canadian merchant. If domestic parcel services (domestic in this case meaning the entire transaction and resulting shipment originates and concludes in Canada) where free (as in publicly funded) and you could search for products on a single site where merchants are verified it would make it harder for foreign entities to put Canadians out of business
@cabinradio Seriously? In the #NWT with high rates of #poverty, #inequality, #foodinsecurity, #homelessness this is what #Canada chooses to invest in. Shameful!
the failure of the right exposes the shared #neoliberalism of the establishment left as having no other answers
"Mainstream politics, from the left and right, has run out of road. What's next?"
'Have you heard of the Overton window? It's an important concept.
It's something think tanks try to manipulate.'
#hayek #atlasnetwork #MontPelerinSociety #neoliberalism #australia #economics #society
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-26/atlas-network-mont-pelerin-society-neoliberal-think-tanks/105700628
This is an essential read from @pluralistic – well worth your time to understand the points he’s making fully as he’s spot on and the excellent analogies will make it easier for you to discuss the topic with others.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/18/tech-ai-bubble-burst-reverse-centaur
@kcarruthers
Finally, someone's connecting the dots. This is a crucial piece of journalism that explains why, for decades, it's felt like we're fighting the same uphill battle against privatisation, deregulation, and climate inaction—no matter which major party is in power.
The ABC is right to expose the Atlas Network and its roots in Hayek's Mont Pelerin Society. This isn't just academic history; it's the playbook. It shows how a small, well-funded group of ideologues made it their mission to shift the Overton Window—to make radical free-market ideas seem "common sense" and public ownership seem naive.
They succeeded brilliantly here. Think about it: the relentless push to sell off our public assets, the demonisation of unions, the framing of tax cuts for the wealthy as economic reform, and the decades of delay and doubt sown around climate science. These aren't random events. As this article lays out, they're the outcomes of a disciplined, long-term project to reshape society to serve private profit, dressed up in the language of freedom.
The fact that a federal parliamentary inquiry is now looking into how this network fuels climate disinformation is telling. It's the same playbook: target the "intellectuals" and media to manufacture doubt and protect fossil fuel interests, while ordinary Australians pay the price through worse fires, higher costs, and a degraded public sphere.
This is the architecture behind the hollowing out of our shared prosperity. It explains why inequality has soared while corporate profits break records. It’s not an accident; it's by design. Understanding this network is the first step to dismantling its influence and fighting for an economy that works for people, not just plutocrats.
Dear (neo)liberals,
I’m not here to make you feel better about yourselves and gloss over your hypocrisies that are at the heart of the mess that we find ourselves in. I’m not here to pat you on the back when you write a strongly-worded letter to a fascist asking him to limit his persecution to the Other. I’m here to remind you that your willingness to perpetuate an unjust system as long as you benefit from it personally IS the reason the problem exists in the first place.
THE KEY WORD IS INTEGRATION
❝ Which brings me back to Havel.
What would it mean for middle powers to "live the truth"?
First it means naming reality. Stop invoking "rules-based international order" as though it still functions as advertised. Call it what it is: a system of intensifying great power rivalry where THE MOST POWERFUL PURSUE THEIR INTERESTS USING ECONOMIC INTEGRATION AS A WEAPON OF COERCION. ❞
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/mark-carney-speech-davos-rules-based-order-9.7053350
#Canada #Davos #globalization #Clintonism #neoliberalism
/🧵
So, with #Firefox becoming a slop browser, I think I can see where we're going. We are going to have 2 internets;
1 internet that is corporate, AI-filled, without privacy, browseable only with Chrome and Firefox;
1 internet that exists of stuff like the Fediverse, personal websites, and is usable with FF forks and older browsers.
These worlds will grow apart over time, and with the second category of browser, we will not be able to visit the corporate sphere anymore; the big platforms, online stores, maybe also things like WordPress sites, and notably, this will also include governmental sites and banking sites.
In the corporate browsers, we are always identified, logged, tracked. VPN and ad blockers will be banned. In short, government and corporations (which is becoming the same thing in the west, yay #neoliberalism ) will have full control here.
Most people will fall in line and reluctantly keep using the corporate browsers, while a smaller group will move to the "alternative internet" altogether, on which #enshittification and #ensloppification doesn't take place. (we're already here! yay!)
We end up being forced to use the corporate browser for some stuff that you can hardly get around - government, banking, contact with normies - not unlike how living without smartphone feels today.
So, just like it is living without a smartphone, I see us non-compliant people using some second device with the corporate browser, to manage that kind of stuff, while steering clear from it in daily life. (at most workplaces though, people will have no choice.)
These are my thoughts on which direction the internet seems to be going. At one hand, I wouldn't mind the internet splitting into two, so I can evade the corporate part.
But my problem lies with the part where we kinda can't get around having to go into the corporate sphere regularly, forced by majority culture as well as governments, which will be all too happy to have everyone nicely identifiable and compliant.
It can get really bad if the good part of the internet becomes outlawed, and that might well happen if we keep living under corporate/neolib/authoritarian governments. (talking about "the west" in general, not just the US)
2.
With the Powell Memo & Rockefeller's Trilateral Commission in the 1970s, major US living trends abruptly shifted, even reversed, eg:
Top 1% income skyrocketed, while worker pay stagnated;
Cost of living skyrocketed;
Rates of incarceration & school shootings skyrocketed.
The Reagan presidency reinforced the new trends.
Ref WTFHappenedIn1971.com
#Neoliberalism #USPol #1970s #Inequality .
Alt...
In this May 8, 1984 file photo, David Rockefeller, left, chairman of the Council Americas,
shakes hands with President Ronald Reagan at the State Department in Washington.
Ira Schwarz, ASSOCIATED PRESS
Why & how this fascist takeover?
US oligarchs had always existed, but, until the 1970s, they tolerated some democracy.
The four simultaneous uprisings of the 60s gave them nightmares involving guillotines, so they launched this now culminating fascist project.
The Powell memo of 1971 was the launch pad. Rockefeller founded TriCom to dismantle the "excess of democracy" of the 1960s.
#PowellMemo #Neoliberalism #USPol #Europol #TrilateralCommission #USFascism .
Alt...
The oligarchs were terrified by the mobilization of the left
in the 1960s: Huntington's so-called “excess of democracy”.
They planned counter-institutions to delegitimize &
marginalize critics of capitalism & imperialism.
They bought the allegiances of the two ruling political
parties. They imposed obedience to neoliberalism within
academia, government agencies & the press.
They neutered the liberal class & crushed popular
movements. They set the FBI on anti-war protestors, civil
rights, Black Panthers, American Indian Movement, Young
Lords & other groups that empowered the disempowered.
They broke labor unions, leaving 90% of the workforce
without union protections. Critics of capitalism &
imperialism, eg, Chomsky & Ralph Nader, were blacklisted.
The campaign, laid out by Lewis Powell Jr in his
1971 memorandum titled “Attack on American Free
Enterprise System,” set into motion the creeping corporate
coup d'etat, which five decades later, is complete.
The differences between the two ruling parties on
substantive issues — such as war, tax cuts, trade deals &
austerity — has become indistinguishable.
Chris Hedges Nov 04, 2025
https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/trumps-greatest-ally-is-the-democratic
Why & how this fascist takeover?
US oligarchs had always existed, but, until the 1970s, they tolerated some democracy.
The four simultaneous uprisings of the 60s gave them nightmares involving guillotines, so they launched this now culminating fascist project.
The Powell memo of 1971 was the launch pad. Rockefeller founded TriCom to dismantle the "excess of democracy" of the 1960s.
#PowellMemo #Neoliberalism #USPol #Europol #TrilateralCommission #USFascism .
Alt...
The oligarchs were terrified by the mobilization of the left
in the 1960s: Huntington's so-called “excess of democracy”.
They planned counter-institutions to delegitimize &
marginalize critics of capitalism & imperialism.
They bought the allegiances of the two ruling political
parties. They imposed obedience to neoliberalism within
academia, government agencies & the press.
They neutered the liberal class & crushed popular
movements. They set the FBI on anti-war protestors, civil
rights, Black Panthers, American Indian Movement, Young
Lords & other groups that empowered the disempowered.
They broke labor unions, leaving 90% of the workforce
without union protections. Critics of capitalism &
imperialism, eg, Chomsky & Ralph Nader, were blacklisted.
The campaign, laid out by Lewis Powell Jr in his
1971 memorandum titled “Attack on American Free
Enterprise System,” set into motion the creeping corporate
coup d'etat, which five decades later, is complete.
The differences between the two ruling parties on
substantive issues — such as war, tax cuts, trade deals &
austerity — has become indistinguishable.
Chris Hedges Nov 04, 2025
https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/trumps-greatest-ally-is-the-democratic
Think it through. If you don't accept the use of climate-destroying, electricity-and-fresh-water-sapping, job-destroying, economy-thrashing--and yet mediocre or poorly performing!--technology created by multi-trillion-dollar sociopathic entities, then you are preventing people with less privilege than you have from living their best lives. You are preventing them from learning how to code. You are preventing them from obtaining coveted jobs in the tech sector. You are preventing them from having access to information. You, personally, are responsible for all this. Not the multi-trillion-dollar sociopathic entities who've not only created this technology and forced it on us but contributed to creating the less-privileged conditions of the people you are supposedly responsible for with your individual choices. Not the governments that neglected to enforce existing laws that would have prevented such multi-trillion-dollar sociopathic entities from forming in the first place, let alone creating such a technology--while also creating the conditions that led to people being less privileged. No, they are not responsible. You are. I am.
That doesn't make any sense.
Neoliberalism's greatest trick has been to shift responsibility for any problems away from the powerful and onto individuals who are not empowered to fix anything, all while convincing everyone that this is right and proper. Large corporations do not cause a plastic pollution problem; you and I do, by not separating our recycling. Large corporations, governments and militaries do not cause CO2 pollution and climate damage; you and I do, by using incandescent lightbulbs and non-electric/non-hybrid cars or eating meat. Lack of regulation and large agribusiness practices are not to blame for poor food quality; you and I are, for buying what they sell instead of going organic and joining a CSA. Etc. ad infinitum. Large, powerful entities routinely generate a problem, then tell you and me that we are responsible for the problem as well as for fixing it. Never mind that these entities could nudge their own behavior a bit and move the needle on the problem far more than masses of people could no matter how organized they were. Never mind that these entities could be constrained from causing such problems in the first place.
We are watching a new variation of this pattern come into being right in front of our eyes with AI. We should stop accepting these fictions. You are neither ableist nor a gatekeeper for resisting AI. You are, instead, attempting to forestall the further degradation of conditions for everyone, which starts this same cycle anew.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #DiffusionModels #neoliberalism #depoliticization
It looks likely that Google will be treated the way Microsoft was in their famous antitrust loss in the late 1990s, and not be broken up in any significant way. Google absolutely should be broken up, just like AT&T and Standard Oil (and countless other large US monopolists) were before it. Google's wealth and power derives from illegal behavior; this is not in question anymore. Why should they be permitted to keep what courts have decided they stole? 100 years of antitrust law and precedent says that it should not be permitted to keep the spoils of its illegal behavior.
It sounds to me like the hesitation to break up Google is largely ideological on the part of the judges and lawyers involved. The failure to break up Microsoft after its antitrust loss is arguably one of the main reasons the US economy is such a monopolized, consolidated mess today, and why so many things are "enshittifying". Breaking up Google and changing that pattern would obviously not cure all ills, but it'd almost surely make a number of things in the economy better for a whole lot of people.
In any case, one thing we can all do is look at Google as a bad actor, a law-breaking entity whose power is illegitimate.
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/why-is-google-still-in-one-piece
#Google #Microsoft #antitrust #monopoly #USEconomy #neoliberalism