12-27-2016, 02:23 PM
(This post was last modified: 12-27-2016, 02:41 PM by Eric the Green.)
Thanks Teach. Occupy Wall Street was a challenge to neo-liberalism, although ineffective because it was not politically organized. The Tea Party as it quickly evolved is a fanatical expression of it, and financed by it. Brexit is not necessarily a challenge nor a bulwark of it, but it is not what we need. Nativism and nationalism are not the successors to neo-liberalism that we need.
Our presidents have embraced neo-liberalism in varying degrees. The Democrats less, the Republicans more. But it has remained dominant for 37 years. In the past, Bernie Sanders might have been considered a liberal Republican. But now politics has swung far to the right, in spite of the progressive movements of the sixties that promised a new genuinely liberal era. That's the opposite of the way things should be.
The sixties movements brought more social justice and a peace and ecology movement. These are essential advances that must be continued, and in many ways still have far to go. In alliance with these, progressives must overthrow the Established ideology, which enables and justifies resistance to all progressive movements; the neo-liberal ideology (libertarian economics) that allows business interests to enrich themselves at everyone else's expense, justified with deceptive slogans of freedom, must be overturned, and replaced with a democratic neo-socialism that installs a truly mixed economy.
The article rightly points out that most people are not fully aware that there's an ideology that has been installed in power that dominates their lives. That's one reason I have been so insistent here these last 20 years in pointing it out. You can't deal with what you can't name or recognize. And I especially appreciated the late George Carlin's summary.
https://youtu.be/rsL6mKxtOlQ
http://philosopherswheel.com/freemarket.html
Our presidents have embraced neo-liberalism in varying degrees. The Democrats less, the Republicans more. But it has remained dominant for 37 years. In the past, Bernie Sanders might have been considered a liberal Republican. But now politics has swung far to the right, in spite of the progressive movements of the sixties that promised a new genuinely liberal era. That's the opposite of the way things should be.
The sixties movements brought more social justice and a peace and ecology movement. These are essential advances that must be continued, and in many ways still have far to go. In alliance with these, progressives must overthrow the Established ideology, which enables and justifies resistance to all progressive movements; the neo-liberal ideology (libertarian economics) that allows business interests to enrich themselves at everyone else's expense, justified with deceptive slogans of freedom, must be overturned, and replaced with a democratic neo-socialism that installs a truly mixed economy.
The article rightly points out that most people are not fully aware that there's an ideology that has been installed in power that dominates their lives. That's one reason I have been so insistent here these last 20 years in pointing it out. You can't deal with what you can't name or recognize. And I especially appreciated the late George Carlin's summary.
https://youtu.be/rsL6mKxtOlQ
http://philosopherswheel.com/freemarket.html