On 8/30/07, Peter Hollings <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Source: http://business.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2157199,00.html > > How the neoliberals stitched up the wealth of nations for themselves
Monbiot leans too heavily toward philosophical idealism here (with an overemphasis on neoliberal ideas) and even toward conspiracy theory (that stuff about the Mont Pelerin group). I thought that he was against that kind of theory. (If I remember correctly, he's also recycling a lot from one of his old columns.) Hey, the rise of neoliberal policies is not that hard to understand. The old system for running the advanced capitalist countries (the warfare-welfare state in the US, social democracy in W. Europe, etc.) stopped working as well as it had. Profit rates fell, causing stagflation to hit. Those in power and their ideologues sought a solution -- what to do? why not go back to 19th century ideas? Millionaires thought it was a cool idea. The weakness of the opposition -- the labor movements -- allowed this. The collapse of the USSR -- the main competing mode of production -- also meant there was less need to legitimate the system, so voilà: a neoliberal policy revolution. In the US, in comes Volcker in August 1979 and the rest is history. of course, the first neoliberal revolution that I know of happened even earlier, in 1973, when General Pinochet took over Chile. -- Jim Devine / "In the years since the phrase became a cliché, I have received any number of compliments for my supposed ability to 'think outside the box.' Actually, it has been a struggle for me to perceive just what these 'boxes' were — why they were there, why other people regarded them as important, where their borderlines might be, how to live safely within and without them." -- Tim Page (THE NEW YORKER, August 20, 2007).
