May the source be with you, but remember the KISS principle ;-) Skepticism and critical thinking is not panacea, but can help to understand the world better

Introduction to Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism = Casino Capitalism = "Transnational elites, Unite!"

(It is a neoTrotskyism with the word "proletarians" substituted by the word "elites"

in famous "Proletarians of all countries, Unite!" slogan

and "Color revolutions" instead of Communist "Permanent revolution" )

Introduction

Ideology that does not dare to speak its name

Expansionist ideology with global ambitions

Redistribution of wealth up as a social goal. Destruction of the New Deal capitalism

Role of deception under neoliberalism: elevating deception into a vital political tool

Quite Coup: Neoliberal revolution as an internal color revolution in the USA

Extremism of Neoliberalism, Neoconservatives as militant faction of neoliberals

Neoliberalism and Christianity

Ideology of Financial Elite: how neoliberal lie became hegemonic despite being a lie

Perverted definition of freedom

Three principal dimensions of neoliberalism – political, ideological and cultural

Trotskyism for the rich; neoliberalism as the replacement of both Marxism and state capitalism

Neoliberalism as a strategy of class struggle for transnational elite

Idolatry of money and finance; "Greed is good" as the key ethical principle of neoliberalism

Neoliberalism leads to neo-fascism: Neoliberal globalization as a catalyst for the rise of ultra-nationalism and neo-fascism

Neoliberalism as an integral part of American Messianism

Redistribution of income and lowering the standard of living of the bottom 80% of population

Elite and the second and third world countries

Neoliberalism, cheap hydrocarbons, and economic crisis of 2008

US neoliberal empire and the stages of development of neoliberalism

A Decade Long Triumph of Neoliberalism after the Dissolution of the USSR

Fear of the population and establishment of "National Security State" to protect the interest of transnational elite

Criminogenic effects of neoliberalism

Neoliberalism as a key contributor to growth of amorality and economic crimes

Neoliberalism and propaganda of amorality

Moral relativism and concept of "Justice for some"

Legal arbitrage

The Consequences of Neoliberalism in Third World Countries and xUSSR space: stagnation instead of growth

Disaster for the lower social classes: pushing poor people into crime

Neoliberal globalization as a catalyst for the rise of ultra-nationalism and neo-fascism

Conclusions

Supplement: Neoliberalism Bulletin

The current issue

Neoliberalism Bulletin, 2016

Neoliberalism Bulletin, 2015

Neoliberalism Bulletin, 2014

Neoliberalism Bulletin, 2013

Neoliberalism Bulletin, 2011

Neoliberalism Bulletin 2009

Neoliberalism Bulletin 2008

>>10527644

Neoliberalism Bulletin 2016

http://casinocapitalism.info/Skeptics/Political_skeptic/Neoliberalism/Bulletin/neoliberalism_bulletin2016.shtml

Shanajackson Osager , 2016-04-15 15:07:42

Monbiot is the best journalist the Guardian has, he can actually make a logical fact based argument unlike the majority of Guardian journalist.

Read also:

How a corporate cult captures and destroys our best graduates (June 3, 2015)

'Wealth creators' are robbing our most productive people

Growth: the destructive god that can never be appeased Nov 18, 2014)

Taming corporate power: the key political issue of our age (Dec 8, 2014)

The rich want us to believe their wealth is good for us all (July 29, 2014)

Sick of this market-driven world? You should be Aug 5, 2014

The real enemies of press freedom are in the newsroom Jun 30, 2014

How have these corporations colonised our public life? Apr 8, 2016

The lies behind this transatlantic trade deal

This transatlantic trade deal is a full-frontal assault on democracy

When the rich are born to rule, the results can be fatal

When corporations bankroll politics, we all pay the price

Mitt Romney and the myth of self-created millionaires

How Ayn Rand became the new right's version of Marx

We need to know who funds these thinktank lobbyists

This bastardised libertarianism makes 'freedom' an instrument of oppression

Secretive thinktanks are crushing our democracy

Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist

Almost everyone condemns naked short selling. But not the British Treasury

Curb the banks? The government has propped them up at every opportunity

These astroturf libertarians are the real threat to internet democracy

This state-hating free marketeer ignores his own failed experiment

New Labour is a parasite. A vote for them is born of fear, not hope

[May 30, 2016] New IMF Paper Challenges Neoliberal Orthodoxy

Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems

Financial meltdown, environmental disaster and even the rise of Donald Trump – neoliberalism has played its part in them all. Why has the left failed to come up with an alternative?

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot

Imagine if the people of the Soviet Union had never heard of communism. The ideology that dominates our lives has, for most of us, no name. Mention it in conversation and you’ll be rewarded with a shrug. Even if your listeners have heard the term before, they will struggle to define it. Neoliberalism: do you know what it is?

Its anonymity is both a symptom and cause of its power. It has played a major role in a remarkable variety of crises: the financial meltdown of 2007‑8, the offshoring of wealth and power, of which the Panama Papers offer us merely a glimpse, the slow collapse of public health and education, resurgent child poverty, the epidemic of loneliness, the collapse of ecosystems, the rise of Donald Trump. But we respond to these crises as if they emerge in isolation, apparently unaware that they have all been either catalysed or exacerbated by the same coherent philosophy; a philosophy that has – or had – a name. What greater power can there be than to operate namelessly?

So pervasive has neoliberalism become that we seldom even recognise it as an ideology. We appear to accept the proposition that this utopian, millenarian faith describes a neutral force; a kind of biological law, like Darwin’s theory of evolution. But the philosophy arose as a conscious attempt to reshape human life and shift the locus of power.

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.

We internalise and reproduce its creeds. The rich persuade themselves that they acquired their wealth through merit, ignoring the advantages – such as education, inheritance and class – that may have helped to secure it. The poor begin to blame themselves for their failures, even when they can do little to change their circumstances.

Never mind structural unemployment: if you don’t have a job it’s because you are unenterprising. Never mind the impossible costs of housing: if your credit card is maxed out, you’re feckless and improvident. Never mind that your children no longer have a school playing field: if they get fat, it’s your fault. In a world governed by competition, those who fall behind become defined and self-defined as losers.

Neoliberalism has brought out the worst in us

Paul Verhaeghe

Read more

Among the results, as Paul Verhaeghe documents in his book What About Me? are epidemics of self-harm, eating disorders, depression, loneliness, performance anxiety and social phobia. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that Britain, in which neoliberal ideology has been most rigorously applied, is the loneliness capital of Europe. We are all neoliberals now.

(continued…)

>>10527689

(…continued)

The term neoliberalism was coined at a meeting in Paris in 1938. Among the delegates were two men who came to define the ideology, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Both exiles from Austria, they saw social democracy, exemplified by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and the gradual development of Britain’s welfare state, as manifestations of a collectivism that occupied the same spectrum as nazism and communism.

In The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, Hayek argued that government planning, by crushing individualism, would lead inexorably to totalitarian control. Like Mises’s book Bureaucracy, The Road to Serfdom was widely read. It came to the attention of some very wealthy people, who saw in the philosophy an opportunity to free themselves from regulation and tax. When, in 1947, Hayek founded the first organisation that would spread the doctrine of neoliberalism – the Mont Pelerin Society – it was supported financially by millionaires and their foundations.

With their help, he began to create what Daniel Stedman Jones describes in Masters of the Universe as “a kind of neoliberal international”: a transatlantic network of academics, businessmen, journalists and activists. The movement’s rich backers funded a series of thinktanks which would refine and promote the ideology. Among them were the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Centre for Policy Studies and the Adam Smith Institute. They also financed academic positions and departments, particularly at the universities of Chicago and Virginia.

As it evolved, neoliberalism became more strident. Hayek’s view that governments should regulate competition to prevent monopolies from forming gave way – among American apostles such as Milton Friedman – to the belief that monopoly power could be seen as a reward for efficiency.

Something else happened during this transition: the movement lost its name. In 1951, Friedman was happy to describe himself as a neoliberal. But soon after that, the term began to disappear. Stranger still, even as the ideology became crisper and the movement more coherent, the lost name was not replaced by any common alternative.

At first, despite its lavish funding, neoliberalism remained at the margins. The postwar consensus was almost universal: John Maynard Keynes’s economic prescriptions were widely applied, full employment and the relief of poverty were common goals in the US and much of western Europe, top rates of tax were high and governments sought social outcomes without embarrassment, developing new public services and safety nets.

But in the 1970s, when Keynesian policies began to fall apart and economic crises struck on both sides of the Atlantic, neoliberal ideas began to enter the mainstream. As Friedman remarked, “when the time came that you had to change … there was an alternative ready there to be picked up”. With the help of sympathetic journalists and political advisers, elements of neoliberalism, especially its prescriptions for monetary policy, were adopted by Jimmy Carter’s administration in the US and Jim Callaghan’s government in Britain.

(continued…)

>>10527704

(…continued)

After Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan took power, the rest of the package soon followed: massive tax cuts for the rich, the crushing of trade unions, deregulation, privatisation, outsourcing and competition in public services. Through the IMF, the World Bank, the Maastricht treaty and the World Trade Organisation, neoliberal policies were imposed – often without democratic consent – on much of the world. Most remarkable was its adoption among parties that once belonged to the left: Labour and the Democrats, for example. As Stedman Jones notes, “it is hard to think of another utopia to have been as fully realised.”

***

It may seem strange that a doctrine promising choice and freedom should have been promoted with the slogan “there is no alternative”. But, as Hayek remarked on a visit to Pinochet’s Chile – one of the first nations in which the programme was comprehensively applied – “my personal preference leans toward a liberal dictatorship rather than toward a democratic government devoid of liberalism”. The freedom that neoliberalism offers, which sounds so beguiling when expressed in general terms, turns out to mean freedom for the pike, not for the minnows.

Freedom from trade unions and collective bargaining means the freedom to suppress wages. Freedom from regulation means the freedom to poison rivers, endanger workers, charge iniquitous rates of interest and design exotic financial instruments. Freedom from tax means freedom from the distribution of wealth that lifts people out of poverty.

As Naomi Klein documents in The Shock Doctrine, neoliberal theorists advocated the use of crises to impose unpopular policies while people were distracted: for example, in the aftermath of Pinochet’s coup, the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina, which Friedman described as “an opportunity to radically reform the educational system” in New Orleans.

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Where neoliberal policies cannot be imposed domestically, they are imposed internationally, through trade treaties incorporating “investor-state dispute settlement”: offshore tribunals in which corporations can press for the removal of social and environmental protections. When parliaments have voted to restrict sales of cigarettes, protect water supplies from mining companies, freeze energy bills or prevent pharmaceutical firms from ripping off the state, corporations have sued, often successfully. Democracy is reduced to theatre.

Another paradox of neoliberalism is that universal competition relies upon universal quantification and comparison. The result is that workers, job-seekers and public services of every kind are subject to a pettifogging, stifling regime of assessment and monitoring, designed to identify the winners and punish the losers. The doctrine that Von Mises proposed would free us from the bureaucratic nightmare of central planning has instead created one.

Neoliberalism was not conceived as a self-serving racket, but it rapidly became one. Economic growth has been markedly slower in the neoliberal era (since 1980 in Britain and the US) than it was in the preceding decades; but not for the very rich. Inequality in the distribution of both income and wealth, after 60 years of decline, rose rapidly in this era, due to the smashing of trade unions, tax reductions, rising rents, privatisation and deregulation.

The privatisation or marketisation of public services such as energy, water, trains, health, education, roads and prisons has enabled corporations to set up tollbooths in front of essential assets and charge rent, either to citizens or to government, for their use. Rent is another term for unearned income. When you pay an inflated price for a train ticket, only part of the fare compensates the operators for the money they spend on fuel, wages, rolling stock and other outlays. The rest reflects the fact that they have you over a barrel.

The end of the world as we know it

Naomi Klein's critique of neo-liberalism, The Shock Doctrine, is both timely and devastating, says John Gray

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/sep/15/politics

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

by Naomi Klein

Over the past few decades, many of the ideas of the far left have found new homes on the right. Lenin believed that it was in conditions of catastrophic upheaval that humanity advances most rapidly, and the idea that economic progress can be achieved through the devastation of entire societies has been a key part of the neo-liberal cult of the free market. Soviet-style economies left an inheritance of human and ecological devastation, while neo-liberal policies have had results that are not radically dissimilar in many countries. Yet, while the Marxist faith in central planning is now confined to a few dingy sects, a quasi-religious belief in free markets continues to shape the policies of governments.

• • • • *

Klein believes that neo-liberalism belongs among "the closed, fundamentalist doctrines that cannot co-exist with other belief-systems … The world as it is must be erased to make way for their purist invention. Rooted in biblical fantasies of great floods and great fires, it is a logic that leads ineluctably towards violence." As Klein sees it, the social breakdowns that have accompanied neo-liberal economic policies are not the result of incompetence or mismanagement. They are integral to the free-market project, which can only advance against a background of disasters. At times, writing in a populist vein that echoes her first book No Logo, published seven years ago, Klein seems to suggest that these disasters are manufactured as part of a deliberate policy framed by corporations with hidden influence in government. Her more considered view, which is also more plausible, is that disaster is part of the normal functioning of the type of capitalism we have today: "An economic system that requires constant growth, while bucking almost all serious attempts at environmental regulation, generates a steady stream of disasters all on its own, whether military, ecological or financial. The appetite for easy, short-term profits offered by purely speculative investment has turned the stock, currency and real estate markets into crisis-creation machines, as the Asian financial crisis, the Mexican peso crisis and the dotcom collapse all demonstrate."

• • • *

Employing electroshock therapy, sensory deprivation and drug-induced comas, these experiments helped develop some of the "coercive interrogation techniques" that have been practised in Guantánamo Bay. Klein uses torture as a metaphor, and does not claim any cause-and-effect link between its re-emergence and the rise of neo-liberal shock therapy; but she does point to some disquieting similarities. Individuals and societies have been "de-patterned" with the aim of remaking them on a better, more rational model. In each case, the experiments have failed, while inflicting lasting and often irreparable damage on those who were subjected to them.

The neo-liberal order is already facing intractable problems. The Iraq war may have allowed another experiment in shock therapy, but a failed state has been created as a result of which Gulf oil - which a former chair of the US joint chiefs of staff accurately described as "the jugular vein of global capitalism" - is less secure than before. Faced with defeat in Iraq, the Bush administration seems to be gearing up for an assault on Iran - a desperate move that would magnify the existing catastrophe many times over. At the same time financial crisis has reached into the American heartland as an implosion in speculation-driven credit markets has started to spread throughout the system. It is impossible to know how these crises will develop, but it is hard to resist the suspicion that disaster capitalism is now creating disasters larger than it can handle.

Neoconservatism

http://casinocapitalism.info/Skeptics/Political_skeptic/Neocons/index.shtml

Neocons are attack dogs of neoliberalism and lobbyists for MIC: "national security parasites".

"Being a neoconservative should receive at least as much vitriolic societal rejection as being a Ku Klux Klan member or a child molester" Caitlin Johnstone

"There is no instance of a nation benefitting from prolonged warfare." ~Sun Tzu

Due to the size an introduction was converted to a separate page Neoconservatism, an introduction

Introduction

Neoconservatism and F-word

Neocon postulates

9/11 hysteria and subsequent attack of Iraq as triumph of Neoconservatism and its zenith in the US foreign policy

National Security State and the only state that corresponds to neocon vision of the state

The key postulate of neocons is that the global dominance of the USA is beneficial to mankind

The key problem with vision of a single dominant state on the globe

The distinctions between Neoconservatism and neoliberalism are fuzzy

Neo-conservatism as perverted Trotskyism

History

Neoconservatism as an ideology; connection to Zionism

Despite quest for the USA global domination, the strategic interests of Israel for neocons are superior to strategic interests of the USA

Neoconservatism and fascism

Media Dominance

Does Russia represent an alternative to the current western economic/social model?

Conclusions

The Power Of Nightmares: Part 1 Baby Its Cold Outside (2004)

Part 1 of 3 parts

The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear is a BBC television documentary series by Adam Curtis.

>>10528062

Don't worry!!

(((THEY)))will rescue us from those horrible threats that we cannot see.

Tremble in fear while(((THEY)))deal with the Invisible Enemy that is lurking around every corner.

Legacy of Islamic revolutionary’s hate haunts Greeley

https://www.denverpost.com/2011/02/05/legacy-of-islamic-revolutionarys-hate-haunts-greeley/

GREELEY — The story of Sayyid Qutb is one of homegrown jihad and international intrigue that has occupied Greeley historian Peggy Ford Waldo for a decade.

The Egyptian bureaucrat is considered the most influential thinker of fundamentalist Islam, the brains of the Muslim Brotherhood, the harshest critic of the West and the most effective advocate of a pan-Islam revival. And he settled into his career as an implacable foe of the U.S. during his now-infamous six-month stay in Greeley in 1949.

The Qutb saga rises to the surface again with social unrest in Egypt and fears that the country could become an Islamist state led by the Muslim Brotherhood or a religious regime of the type Qutb conceptualized.

Qutb, educator turned revolutionary, was hung by the Egyptian government in 1966. His followers are credited with the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981. His disciples include convicted terrorist Omar Abdel Rahman and leaders of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and al-Qaeda.

“Greeley supposedly turned him against America,” Waldo said. “I have fielded so many questions about this.”

The strange story of Qutb in Greeley was all but forgotten there until the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The Greeley History Museum was flooded with calls from national and international media who had found Qutb’s writings on the town, programming curator Waldo said.

Waldo quickly studied up on Qutb, and he has been something of a side job for her ever since.

She still receives calls inquiring about how a quiet Colorado agricultural community helped to create the father of the anti-Western jihad.

“I think it was a forgotten chapter,” Waldo said, “but it came to light as historians looked for the roots of 9/11.”

Who did this Egyptian academic idolize?