Of course, “neoliberal” is really not much different from conservative, and is definitely right wing. But for some reason they failed and then the left got blamed, and the right is winning.
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Both the GOP and the Democrats were rightfully blamed, because both of them enthusiastically embraced neoliberal economics.
Neither of those groups are “the left”. The US doesn’t have a major left wing party.
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I find the hype around ‘soylent’ vastly weirder than the objectives of the actual product(though it appears to be several revisions away from prime time; if the consistent reports of ‘gastrointestinal mayhem’ are anything to go by).
I know I find the logistics of keeping the food supply lined up to be stressful, tedious, and deeply unrewarding; and eating out/takeout as a daily solution is a dubious plan; this definitely leads to me sometimes eating suboptimal things because they are available when I’m hungry. In that context, something designed to actually be suitable for the purpose, rather than a snack carefully engineered to promote overindulgence or mediocre but freezer-hardened replicas of food, doesn’t seem like such a bad idea.
Nor is it one without plenty of historical precedent. Pretty much everybody ever has come up with some selection of foods chosen for a combination of speed of use and reasonably low rate of spoilage for use when labor-intensive cuisine isn’t an option. Aside from its still-rather-beta development status, I can’t really say anything mean about ‘soylent’(specifically the product, not the company or the hype) that I couldn’t about pemmican, biltong, protein shakes, trail mix, virtually anything designed for military use, etc.
The just plain weird part is the slightly cultish ‘until I can #hackdiet #postfood and subsist entirely on apps and JSON objects, #soylent!’ types.
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That’s the part to which I was referring. I doubt you’d find many sane military veterans who’d eat MREs once they return to civilian life, camping buffs who eat only trail mix at home, or (sensible) fitness-conscious people who consume nothing but shakes. And for the small number who do, they’re not ingesting beta-stage IBS vectors.
As regards food supply, keep in mind that a lot of these dudes have nutritious and high-quality meals catered to them at all hours by their employers or delivered to them by services like Seamless or Blue Apron, but those options just don’t do enough to prove that one is an iron-man brogrammer who’s above such petty concerns as food.
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This article also discussed Brexit and Britain, where the same thing happened – the left was pushed farther out while the right took more power.
And while the Democrats are certainly not “the left” they have plenty of elected officials – including in Congress – who are not neoliberals and are quite lefty. If there is a party that could be the left wing party, it would be the Democrats.
Of course, we won’t have one like they have in Europe because our system doesn’t work like a parliamentary system. A purely one-wing party can’t sustain winning long enough here to be a major party, despite the recent pure rightward shift off the Republicans.
And I dispute that European countries have any “major” left wing parties, in the sense that they can cobble together a majority to gain control of a country’s government. The Greens and other true leftish parties are always minorities in a governing coalition, much like Sherrod Brown, Al Franken, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and other liberals/progressives are the minority in the Democratic governing coalition.
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Pretty much by redistribution, which is the socialist solution.
The problem is that they have done this with people’s retirement money.
Assuming you are in the UK, can you say how much social security currently
owes for pensions? Just past payments, current value. I wouldn’t want the
figure inflated to scare people.
“State pensions are not like private pension funds”.
You mean they aren’t run like private pensions. They are. The key problem
like the BHS pension fund comes about when assets < liabilities. There’s no
difference between state and private pensions.
*** And my (UK) payslip does not purport that any tax deducted is
hypothecated for old age support.
Yes it does. NI is hypothecated.
That’s a link to the fund accounts.
Income and expenses listed. “assets” listed. No liabilities.
**** So if your point is “actually it’s all the fault of governments”
It is, because they run a socialist redistribution scheme. Hence no wealth.
You obviously don’t care about wealth inequality do you?
So civil service pensions. Not a debt. Why not stop paying? Save lots of
money use it for services. Same for the state pension.
It’s not a debt? Really? Puh-leaze.
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Just wait until someone comes up with a soylent/‘bulletproof coffee’ crossover; so that you can indulge your post-food brogrammer and your jerkass ‘alpha male’ executive at the same time… That’ll be the cultural equivalent of a criticality accident.
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It’s certainly a global phenomenon; the Blairites in the UK, etc. Centre-left mainstream parties across the world sold out their working class bases in pursuit of corporate money.
Australia didn’t go as far on this as the UK, but we got in early; the Hawke/Keating governments of the 1980’s brought a wave of deregulation and privatisation to the Australian economy and delivered the union movement bound and gagged for the conservatives to destroy in the 1990’s.
The US Dems aren’t a centre-left party, though; they’re centre-right. Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren would be mainstream centre-left politicians over here (albeit somewhat more honest than most). Our centre-right (grudgingly) supports socialised medicine and the welfare state; our actual leftists are unabashed socialists and hardcore environmentalists.
You can argue about where “centre” is, of course, but I’d argue that even by the standards of the US population, the Dems are centre-right.
When you look at polling on the issues (instead of just tribal affiliation), the centre of US political opinion is slightly to the left of the Democrats.
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This discussion is centered on developed countries in a way that seems very incomplete. That may not make it ultimately wrong, but something central is missing. If you look at the world as a whole, absolute poverty has declined dramatically, and and much of the decline is quite recent. Here’s a graph that shows what I’m discussing. (I’m not particularly vouching for this source, but I don’t there’s any controversy about the trend line.) Something similar has happened with hunger.
Now, a huge chunk of that has occurred in India and China, and they haven’t always been part of the market consensus. Still, if you’re going to talk about the success of the global economic system–again, maybe not exactly identical with neoliberalism–you have to talk about what’s happened in poor countries. It’s not all wonderful, but I doubt that an average Malaysian, say would talk about things in the terms of the article.
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Ex-fucking-scuse me?! Those “rent-seeking entitled seniors” PAID for those benefits, under force of law!
Your response is exactly as ignorant as bitching about people who receive unemployment insurance benefits (which they paid for under force of law in that case, as well). You, sir, are part of the problem.
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The problem for America is that the “left” party is actually, by civilized standards, pretty conservative, and has been moving further to the right since the '80s. There aren’t (m)any “moderate” voices to oppose neoliberalism. Now we’ve got tRump and his cronies describing even conservatives as “far left,” when they disagree with him, as a way of dismissing them. As a result, the Overton window and the “center” is going to see another hard move to the right, I suspect. Which means conservatives and their neoliberal economic policies will be even harder to dislodge as anyone who challenges it will be seen as a leftie extremist. And the people most impacted will still be the most likely to continue voting for those advancing the neoliberal agenda.
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I agree completely, except that conservatives embrace “neoconservatism”.
Think of it this way: Neoliberals want the Senate to rule, while neoconservatives prefer an emperor, but both insist on EMPIRE, in the most classic sense of the word.
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Different things, not opposites.
Neoconservatism was about a post Cold War enthusiasm for military adventurism by the US right; neoliberalism is about economics. The Bush-era GOP was both neoliberal and neoconservative.
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I didn’t say they were opposites =) . Their emphasis differs on some points, but they’re largely the same.
I’m afraid that’s a category error: “neoliberalism” is not the ideology of “neoliberals” in the way that neoconservatism is the ideology of neoconservatives. It’s the economic policy of (paleo- and neo-) conservatives - Reagan was the one that really got neoliberalist policies going in the US*. My point was the Democrats in the US have moved so far right that even they now lionize Reagan; the left that opposes neoliberalism has been marginalized. Neoliberalism is basically unopposed.
*The Guardian article mentioned up top describes it here - this is the Republican party economic worldview in a nutshell:
Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.
Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and regulation should be minimised, public services should be privatised. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve.
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Everyone knows this. That’s why they voted for Trump and his cabinet of robber barons.
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Up to the point where they have received everything they paid in, plus a reasonable compound interest.
After that, it’s all welfare. Paid for by your kids, and everyone else’s.
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Typical ignorance of the US-centric. The rest of the world is fucked in the same way, and does not share your Constitution.
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not necessarily. if taxes were decently progressive in the usa, it’d be paid for out of the income and interest of the top 1% - equitably redistributing capital that the whole of society made possible in the first place.
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“Black lung disease smells like… freedom.”
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