Neoliberalism’s “ quiet coup “

Book review

Can neoliberalism explain everything?

neoliberalism continues to thrive on a steady diet of scholarship, commentary, and invective. In The Quiet Coup: Neoliberalism and the Looting of America, Mehrsa Baradaran is the latest to anatomize the neoliberal octopus. Baradaran, the author of pathbreaking books on systemic inequality in the United States’ banking system, limns a bleak history of modern American politics. Since the 1960s, she argues, American law and public policy has been reshaped around corporate interests – a transformation that has rippled out into U.S. society and culture.

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the sweep and breadth of Baradaran’s account—touching on everything from empire to civil rights to campaign finance and antitrust—raises the question of whether neoliberalism can explain everything. Is there a unitary system of political, legal, and economic thought, crafted into laws and public policies by a set of ideological actors, that explains our world since the 1960s? It’s a seductive prospect: master this one equation, and you render perfectly legible six tumultuous decades of history.

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For every green industrial strategy, there is a crypto bubble. Moreover, for all that left-leaning and liberal commentators now critique the conditions of neoliberalism, it is unclear whether these critiques are rooted in durable political coalitions. Baradaran makes the provocative, highly astute point that if the 2020s are a decade of transition, it is worrying that figures on the Right traffic in “utopian” appeals far more fluently than do liberals or the Left, from emergent post-Trump populists to Silicon Valley’s sinister philosopher-king Peter Thiel.

Money, economy, why no one knows anything…. MMT adjacent

Doug Lamont goes on a rant.

What is happening today, as a series of unexpected events and crises have unfolded, is that people have been unable to cope in an emergency - especially an extended one. It drives people around the bend. Uncertainty means fear eats away at hope and reason.

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Neoliberal / Neoclassical ideas.

These fundamentally libertarian ideas - which include assumptions and mathematical models of different parts of the economy, claim to describe how the mechanics of the economy work. They don’t.

The fundamental assumption that neoclassical / neoliberal economics gets wrong is related to the creation of new money in an economy.

Institutionalized slavery as the “cure” for homelessness

Business wins with cheap prison labor

In the 1970s, the US began loosening restrictions on prison labor while simultaneously starting to attribute homelessness to mental illness and addiction (and ignoring economic factors). Forty-plus years later and those two parallel tracks of neoliberalism are merging and resurrecting the 19th century Victorian workhouse.

With the number of homeless continuing to rise in the US, municipalities, states, and the national government are faced with the task of doing something about a problem that’s apparently just too hard to solve. As with most any response to the fallout from neoliberalism here in the land of the free, the US comes equipped with a hammer in search of a nail that will profit the powerful and well-connected. And so it is with the “homeless problem” as we see the outlines of consensus beginning to form around solutions that involve incarceration — and therefore forced labor.

Ukraine issues discussed

CNN interview

Russia’s Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergei Ryabkov 

This interview is outstanding in every way. It is especially valuable for explaining Russia’s disparagement of what we know of Trump’s plans for ending the war very quickly by use of threats and blandishments to the leaders of Russia and Ukraine. Per this official Russian position, a settlement is possible only if the core security concerns of Russia are addressed, meaning a settlement addressing the European security architecture and not merely a ceasefire, a frozen conflict, and other nonsense contained so far in what the Trump entourage is touting.

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Ryabkov is the official who crafted and presented the ultimatum to NATO in December 2021 over the need to roll back the NATO European presence to what it was at the end of the Cold War, before the alliance expanded eastward under Bill Clinton. The refusal early in the new year by Washington and Brussels to enter into negotiations over the Russian demands led directly to the launch of the Special Military Operation and invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, with Russia determined to win by force of arms what it could not achieve by diplomacy.