Since Reagan/Thatcher and the neoliberal "markets over democracy" propaganda campaign a massive, massive, massive amount of wealth has been transferred from the public to a few wealthy people.
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
An excellent video about the problems with many Kurzgesagt videos and the economy-first approach to #ClimateChange that states we solve it with even more consumption and relying exclusively on the development of new technology. It points out how Their videos insidiously belittle and undermine the #Degrowth movement. It also pulls in #Modernism, #Neoliberalism, and #GreenWashing.
I won't spoil the big reveal at the end, but it really shows where Kurzgesagt's values lie.
"Conservative" economics (neoliberalism), since Reagan and Thatcher, is really about asset stripping. Force everything that benefits the public to be privatized so they benefit only the wealthiest and their corporations.
Reagan/Thatcher tax cuts meant you could make & keep a fortune overnight This made instant money & asset stripping the business model. Planning & investing long term became a chump's game.
Now corporations are forced to push for quarterly gains at the expense of long-term stability.
Turns out that the people who love capitalism the most and want to protect it at all costs don't think that it inevitably leads to democracy. In fact they think too much democracy leads inevitably to socialism, and sought (often successfully) to encase capitalism within the protection of national and international law in order to fend off democratic attacks on "economic freedom," aka, the right of a small slice of humanity to take their piles of money wherever they want and be assured of finding desperate low-wage workers wherever they go.
MMT economist Bill Mitchell on job guarantees, basic income, and how the Indian National Rural Employment Guarantee Act is being corrupted by BJP neoliberalism.
Not trusting our political class is no reason to avoid introducing progressive policies – William Mitchell – Modern Monetary Theory https://billmitchell.org/blog/?p=61624
A new Boston Consulting report on #infrastructure costs has found that while UK build costs for infrastructure are around the same as the US, they are well above comparable projects in #Europe (but interestingly less expensive than #Australia).
Is there something about the #business model (or type of #capitalism) in these three countries that makes such project more expensive than in Europe?
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.
I don't like the term #neoliberalism (its imprecise use renders it a weak criticism), but the UK's malaise is clearly linked to the domination of a mindset dominated by the construction of #markets as a general social panacea, the instrumentalisation of public life, the privileging of #corporate interests & the domination of a thin understanding of the good life....
if this is neoliberalism, then that is the the problem.
Whatever; the UK needs a major rethink about its socio-economic model(s)
If you're an abled cyclist/urbanist and wonder why many disabled people hate mobility share, stuff like this is why.
Spin was allowed into both City of Davis and UC Davis with neither place holding Spin to any strong standard as far as designing deterrents to behavior like this.
That cross-hatch is a no parking zone - for anything. It's the loading area needed for a ramp, for mobility devices, for an attendant... #Urbanism#Ableism#Neoliberalism#DavisCA
As long as the middle is more concerned with keeping the left out than about having the right in, the right will remain in power. And at some point the middle will cease to be relevant.
Eighty years ago Frederick Hayek published the Road to Serfdom.... & to some extent is been misunderstood & misrepresented ever since.
Here's Conor O'Kane (BournemouthU) setting out some of these debates & concluding that Hayek 'was certainly no statist, but his vision for how best to run an economy was not as uncompromising as many would have us believe'!
"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.
"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.|