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.
"There is a reason for these broken promises and dysfunctions, which explains why the UK suffers more from them than most comparable nations. It’s called neoliberalism.|
"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.
"Don’t get me wrong. I am not nostalgic for the past. There were attitudes we thought once thought were acceptable that I am delighted to have seen the back of – strapping and caning children, imprisoning gay men, denying work, promotional and aspirational opportunities to women simply on the basis of gender."
"But I do think that since the introduction of the Neoliberal “economic reforms” of the 1980s and 90s, New Zealand has forgotten that the purpose of an economy is not to make a few people very wealthy at the expense of the many, but to create the greatest good, for the greatest number of its citizens over the longest period of time."
"breaking Scotland from the shackles of #neoliberal thinking should be very high on its agenda, and yet it keeps getting leaders who seem more than happy to embrace that approach, and make Scotland suffer for it" – @RichardJMurphy
Mastodon becoming a US entity with a neoliberal board of directors and the goal of growth über alles is the issue here folks, not whether Eugen and company are compensated for their work. Of course they should be and well too. Or is that a privilege reserved only for the mediocre yes-people at the Googles and the Facebooks of the world?
If, on the other hand, maybe we’d like more folks to contribute to the commons and maybe not even be captured by Silicon Valley how about this radical idea: Fund them so they can live (at least as well) as any mediocre yes-person at a mainstream tech company.
#Neoliberalism#Economy#PoliticalEconomy#Freedom: "As an economist accustomed to thinking in theoretical terms, Stiglitz conceived of freedom as expanding “opportunity sets”—the range of options that people can choose from—which are usually bounded, in the final analysis, by individuals’ incomes. Once you reframe freedom in this more positive sense, anything that reduces a person’s range of choices, such as poverty, joblessness, or illness, is a grave restriction on liberty. Conversely, policies that expand people’s opportunities to make choices, such as income-support payments and subsidies for worker training or higher education, enhance freedom.
Adopting this framework in “The Road to Freedom,” Stiglitz reserves his harshest criticisms for the free-market economists, conservative politicians, and business lobbying groups, who, over the past couple of generations, have used arguments about expanding freedom to promote policies that have benefitted rich and powerful interests at the expense of society at large. These policies have included giving tax cuts to wealthy individuals and big corporations, cutting social programs, starving public projects of investment, and liberating industrial and financial corporations from regulatory oversight. Among the ills that have resulted from this conservative agenda, Stiglitz identifies soaring inequality, environmental degradation, the entrenchment of corporate monopolies, the 2008 financial crisis, and the rise of dangerous right-wing populists like Donald Trump. These baleful outcomes weren’t ordained by any laws of nature or laws of economics, he says. Rather, they were “a matter of choice, a result of the rules and regulations that had governed our economy. They had been shaped by decades of neoliberalism, and it was neoliberalism that was at fault.”"
#EU#Neoliberalism#Neoiliberalism#Censorship#Surveillance#DSA: "Despite the significance of digitalisation in mediating these political-economic shifts, mainstream platform regulation scholarship remains largely disconnected from these wider trends. EU laws are predominantly analysed using normative framings aligned with ‘progressive neoliberalism’, as efforts to balance growth and innovation against fundamental rights and ‘public values’. Schematically, EU regulation is distinguished on this basis from a free-market US approach and authoritarian, state-capitalist Chinese approach.
Against this, the paper makes two key claims. First, EU platform regulation can more helpfully be framed as manifesting an ongoing shift away from progressive neoliberalism and towards neo-illiberalism. Fundamental rights and liberal-democratic norms which previously legitimised EU policy are increasingly sacrificed in favour of unrestrained state surveillance and private-sector-led innovation. Second, methodologically, researchers should not only consider how these laws are being implemented currently, but also look ahead to an increasingly-plausible ‘far-right Europe’.
To demonstrate this framework’s analytical value, the paper examines the 2022 Digital Services Act, arguing that its overall regulatory approach is characteristically neo-illiberal: economically, it embraces marketised media governance and corporate power, while politically, it creates extensive possibilities for state censorship. Broadly, it seeks to strengthen platforms’ accountability in three main ways: individual consumer rights; empowering civil society via transparency and consultation; and technocratic risk management procedures."
"I get sick every time I go to the doctor that I still get subsidised and I can't opt out of the system. Now that's wrong. I was trying to take the welfare state off the middle class."
What this atomised mindset misses is that it's not her being subsidised, it's the doctor's surgery. If you want to contribute more according to your means, you do that by raising taxes, in ways that target those on higher incomes.
L'idea che il neoliberismo si sia imposto grazie ad una manciata di figure chiave (Reagan, Thatcher, Pinochet) è a sua volta una fantasia neoliberale, perché rinforza l'idea che gli individui da soli (grazie al loro carisma e alle loro abilità) riescano a cambiare il mondo.
In realtà l'ideologia neoliberale si è imposta (e continua ad imporsi) grazie ai think-thank e alle fondazioni degli ultra-miliardari (e a tutto un reticolo di centri di potere). Dietro singoli rappresentanti ci sono sempre grandi gruppi.
Quando dite di voler pisciare sulla tomba di Margareth Thatcher, lei vi sorride dall'aldilà, perché è riuscita a colonizzare anche il vostro dissenso. È quello il segnale: hanno vinto loro.
#UK#London#Goldsmiths#Universities#Humanities#HigherEd#Neoliberalism#Austerity: "The most immediate and seemingly tangible rationale for these closures and reductions in provision is falling student numbers. But to focus on this is as if it was just a matter of student ‘choices’, market forces and the ebb and flow of fashionable and unfashionable subjects, is to obfuscate a series of interrelated factors that have made so many institutions and departments vulnerable to cuts. Turning to my own institution (where I am an active emeritus professor), there is a poignancy running through the words that follow. Quite independent of the intricacies of managerial decision making, Goldsmiths, University of London exemplifies all the admirable strengths and now the fragilities of the sector. It is not so much that Goldsmiths is such an exceptional case that it deserves singling out for special support (though that would be welcome). But rather, with a large number of compulsory redundancies announced in the last week alone, we not only need to pay critical attention with people’s livelihoods and family lives on the line, but we also need to take stock of what the future of higher education looks like in this increasingly bleak landscape. It is shocking news to us all, as the management are looking to lose 130 full-time equivalent positions across 11 departments. With so much at stake there must surely be other ways to secure financial stability. The reality is that Goldsmiths is a microcosm. It has always been something of an experiment in higher education (in the best possible sense) and now it stands to lose much of its identity and of the wider value it has delivered as an egalitarian institution dedicated to combining international research with a socially inclusive education." https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/a-goldsmiths-diary
#EU#EC#Neoliberalism#Antitrust#Competition#BigTech: "In 2019, a year after the GDPR came into force, Johnny Ryan appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee and told them that “things I think are looking very bleak for our colleagues at Google and at Facebook … it is highly likely that they will be forced to change how they do business.” At the time, he was working for Brave, a privacy-focused web browser founded by the author of the Javascript programming language.
I asked Ryan what happened. “I was a naïve young man,” he chuckled. In fairness, at the time he added the caveat that the Europeans had yet to enforce their own policy. The Commission shipped out enforcement to member states’ data protection authorities, without much pressure to apply the law as written. Tech platforms quickly realized that if they headquartered in one EU country, they could funnel all GDPR regulatory enforcement there. Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Meta set up shop in Ireland, and Amazon in Luxembourg; both are notorious tax havens with incentives to be friendly to Big Tech. Ryan made a public records request asking how many Irish investigators were working on GDPR, and was told the agency didn’t even have records to find out who was investigating.
“If you have free movement within the EU but strong national state authorities in their territories, it’s obvious that corporates will play them against each other,” said Repasi, and that’s what happened. A parallel problem is that the GDPR didn’t focus enforcement toward the biggest purveyors of data, meaning that the smallest website operators—“local sports clubs and dentists,” Ryan said—felt the biggest relative impact.
“When a member state doesn’t enforce European law,” Ryan added, “the European Commission is the guardian of the treaties of the EU and they should take that state to court … [but] 10 to 15 years ago the Commission stopped taking cases against member states. It’s love instead of power.”" https://prospect.org/world/2024-04-03-eurocrats-on-the-brink/
"Governments since 1979 have either promoted neoliberalism and austerity (Thatcher, Cameron), or promoted neoliberalism and increased spending (Blair). Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour offered an end to neoliberalism, and more spending. Keir Starmer’s Labour is offering something radically new: a turn against neoliberalism, combined with a worsening of austerity. Nothing like this has been seen before in Britain"
James Meadway
"...we backtracked on our election pledge to remove the surtax on superannuation. Because morally I couldn't justify to myself that we would give a tax concession to the wealthy retirees - which removing the surtax would do - while we were taking some off those who were in much poorer circumstances."
@CarolynStirling
> How quickly could they implement Neo Liberal economics. It was brutal
Alister Barry made a series of documentaries about this period. Someone Else's Country covers the Rogernomics Labour government and In a Land of Plenty covers the Ruthenasia Nat government that followed it.
Both are essential viewing for anyone under 50 who wants to understand how #neoliberalism changed Aotearoa. Folks over 50 may remember pre-1984 NZ, but might still find these docos insightful.
Half thinking of starting an #AcademicVenting hashtag here, about the dire, dire state of UK (global?) higher education. Sharing nuggets of senior management decisions, neoliberal language, and overall slow collapse.
Won’t work of course because most of us can’t risk honesty, but honestly: the everyday reality of what is happening deserves recording in all its depressing and damning detail. #Universities#AcademicChatter#neoliberalism
“I am sick of higher education leaders, I am sick of neoliberal thinking, I am sick of scarcity mindsets, I am sick of austerity, I am sick of senior management lacking morals, I am sick of education being decimated, I don’t know how we hang on + do important work for students”