"The ECA massively deregulated the labour market, and can be seen as part of a continuum of [Rogernomics] reforms started by the previous Labour government...
The ECA swept away the system of “national awards” that had previously governed employment. Under the awards, whole industries would have the same baseline pay and conditions, which were hammered out every year by union and employer representatives."
#Capitalism#PoliticalEconomy#Competition#Neoliberalism#Antitrust: "40 years later, nearly every industry is dominated by a handful of companies, and these companies price-gouge us with abandon. Worse, they use their gigantic ripoff winnings to fill war-chests that fund the corruption of democracy, capturing regulators so that they can rip us off even more, while ignoring labor, privacy and environmental law and ducking taxes.
It turns out that keeping gigantic, opaque, complex corporations honest is really hard. They have so many ways to shuffle money around that it's nearly impossible to figure out what they're doing. Digitalization makes things a million times worse, because computers allow businesses to alter their processes so they operate differently for every customer, and even for every interaction.
This is Dieselgate times a billion: VW rigged its cars to detect when they were undergoing emissions testing and switch to a less polluting, more compliant mode. But when they were on the open road, they spewed lethal quantities of toxic gas, killing people by the thousands. Computers don't make corporate leaders more evil, but they let evil corporate leaders execute far more complex and nefarious plans. Digitalization is a corporate moral hazard, making it just too easy and tempting to rig the game."
Neoliberal economics is killing the arts
By Tim Lutton, originally published by Red Pepper May 28, 2024
"...As a society, we must resist art-as-capital, where it is reduced to pure exchange value in a market of commodities. There, any politically-charged and counter-hegemonic content is rendered powerless, constituted as a stable harmonisation of the dominant socio-political order and drowning out all contradictions.
...In the present era, the tendency towards total marketisation of artistic production accompanies perpetual austerity and an atomised rentier economy that is shrinking public and social life. Without a rupture from neoliberal capitalism in general, the means to make new, generative and disruptive art disappears, and much else that is meaningful in our lives will follow after. The rest is silence."
“France’s President Emmanuel Macron said Tuesday that recognition of a Palestinian state was not a ‘taboo subject’ but that it should take place at a ‘useful moment’.
Not enough swear words for how I feel about the US #genocide accomplice government & folks dumb enough to place all blame at #Netanyahu feet - when this genocide of #Palestinians has been the fucking goal of #Israel government for several decades & far before Bibi-Bloodbather had any influence in Israel.
Your country #USA fucking created #Trump. Your country ignored #neoliberalism leading up to Trump. Your country is focused on Trump, when he'll just be replaced by another poster #fascist face.
‘Everybody has not won’: trickle-down economics was an idiotic idea. How do we fix the inequality it causes?
"Forty years of the neoliberal experiment have created a world of vast and increasing inequality rationalised by the false promises of a global free market. But this can change, and it should change."
Reading about #NarrativeTherapy, of which I knew very little and am learning much, but never expected to end up reading about #Foucault and #neoliberalism as the theoretical underpinnings of this practice. It makes me hopeful for my future as a #MentalHealth therapist.
Quote from #JohnWinslade: Neoliberalism transforms people into less #democratic, more governable, docile, more consuming, neoliberal subjects who nevertheless believe themselves to be free because they have consumer “choice.”
The documentary was not broadcast in #Canada. Hansen said the reason B.C.’s wood pellet industry is a focus in #UnitedKingdom is the #Drax Power Station in #England.
#BCNDP#ChiefForester Diane Nicholls attended a #WoodPellet#TradeShow in 2019. After supporting the industry’s controversial growth in BC, she left the ministry of forests for a job with the UK company that now dominates the new industry in #BritishColumbia.
#Students#Universities#HigherEd#Neoliberalism#Capitalism#EffectiveAltruism: "Some faculty see the influence of effective altruism among this generation: In the last five years, Roosevelt Montás, a senior lecturer at Columbia University and the former director of its Center for the Core Curriculum, has noticed a new trend when he asks students in his American Political Thought classes to consider their future.
“Almost every discussion, someone will come in and say, ‘Well, I can go and make a lot of money and do more good with that money than I could by doing some kind of charitable or service profession,’” Mr. Montás said. “It’s there constantly — a way of justifying a career that is organized around making money.”
Mr. Desai said all of this logic goes, “‘Make the bag so you can do good in the world, make the bag so you can go into retirement, make the bag so you can then go do what you really want to do.’”
But this “really underestimates how important work is to people’s lives,” he said. “What it gets wrong is, you spend 15 years at the hedge fund, you’re going to be a different person. You don’t just go work and make a lot of money, you go work and you become a different person.”"
(Some) ignorant leftbros: "Class first! No idpol!"
Scholars of right wing politics/economics: "All these right-wing thinkers are much more comfortable thinking about the blurred lines between sexual and economic politics than many thinkers on the left. And they understand that Keynesianism rests on a certain kind of sexual contract. Any challenge to this order—whether it be an escalation of wage or benefit claims, or the flight from sexual normativity, or unmarried women claiming welfare benefits—disrupts the fiscal and monetary calculus on which Keynesianism rests."
Above remark from "The Extravagances of Neoliberalism", an interview of Melinda Cooper (author of "Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance") by Benjamin Kunkel, in The Baffler.
Jonathan Chait is real mad that leftists aren't taking liberal shit anymore. I got the link from archive.is to avoid giving his BS any extra clicks. It's way longer than it needs to be. This paragraph caught my attention though because it's at least an attempt at clarifying what liberals see as leftism and why they're wrong (which is why they should shut the fuck up, because they have been proven so very fucking wrong, so often, and for so long):
I don’t want to bore you...
lol
by attempting the umpteenth definition of liberalism,
Funny how liberals hate defining liberalism
so I will lay out the distinction as briefly as possible. On economic questions, leftists have an overwhelming bias for state action over markets, while liberals are more selective.
This is incorrect. Leftists differ radically on how much state action over markets is needed. What unites leftists is the belief that we need democracy in economic realms as well as political ones. (I personally don't accept fully authoritarian MLs as leftists, one can debate that, but that's where I stand.) Liberals think it's just fine for us to have democratic politics but for most people to work for institutions that are run as dictatorships.
...On politics, liberals take very seriously notions of individual rights and universally applicable principles, while leftists tend to criticize political liberalism as a recipe for maintaining inequalities of power between the privileged and the oppressed.
Sort of true, but Chait tellingly leaves out the substance of the leftist critique, the reason why they think that political liberalism is a recipe for maintaining inequality, to wit: the lack of democracy in most people's workplaces. If economic power is concentrated while political power is distributed, then inevitably political power will become concentrated as well. Because money is power.
Anyway, Chait hates "Solidarity" the book and he also hates solidarity the concept. Of course he gets paid to represent left-of-center thought at major USA publications. Feel free to discuss your disgust for this type of guy further in replies.
"We're also competing against a lot of people in politics who come along and say... it's those rich people's fault, we'll just take even more money off them and give it to you."
This is the fundamental lie of neoliberal politics. A total inversion of the truth, which is that neoliberal parties say 'it's those poor people's fault, we'll just take the money off them and give it to you', and they do.
"...one of the biggest supporters of extra regulation is big business. If you're a big business, more regulations are a pain, but they're going to hurt and maybe wipe out your competitors and stop any upstarts coming and competing with you."