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Not only does neoliberalism undermine both civic education and public values and confuse education with training, it also treats knowledge as a product, promoting a neoliberal logic that views schools as malls, students as consumers, and faculty as entrepreneurs. Henry Giroux
Neoliberalization has meant, in short, the financialization of everything. There was unquestionably a power shift away from production to the world of finance. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism
Neoliberalization has not been very effective in revitalizing global capital accumulation, but it has succeeded remarkably well in restoring, or in some instances (as in Russia and China) creating, the power of an economic elite. The theoretical utopianism of neoliberal argument has, I conclude, primarily worked as a system of justification and legitimation for whatever needed to be done to achieve this goal. ibid.
Neoliberal theorists are, however, profoundly suspicious of democracy. Governance by majority rule is seen as a potential threat to individual rights and constitutional liberties. Democracy is viewed as a luxury, only possible under conditions of relative affluence coupled with a strong middle-class presence to guarantee political stability. Neoliberals therefore tend to favour governance by experts and elites. ibid.
The rich bakers hired police analysts, economists, academics, legal experts, and public-relations spectialists to create a series of ‘think tanks’ that would refine and promote the doctrine. These institutions, many of which still operate today, tended to disguise their purposes with grand and respectable names, such as the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprises Institute, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Centre for Policy Studies, and the Adam Smith Institute. George Monbiot & Peter Hutchison, Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism
To handle the greatly increased scope and scale of transactions, the colonial nations established new financial systems that would eventually come to dominate their economies – instruments of extraction whose use has intensified. It continues today with ever-increasing sophistication, assisted by offshore banking networks. ibid.
Freedom from trade unions and collective bargaining means freedom for bosses to suppress wages. Freedom from regulation means the freedom to exploit and endanger workers, to poison rivers, to adulterate food, to design exotic financial instruments, to charge exorbitant rates of interest. ibid.
Neoliberalism: The means by which capitalism seeks to solve its biggest problem – democracy. George Monbiot, interview Chris Hedges, The Secret History of Neoliberalism, Youtube 2024
What new liberalism involves is the stripping away of all impediments to capital. ibid.
Of course one of the main impediments to capital is unions. ibid.
An international network of organisations supported by some of the richest people in the world. ibid.
He [Friedrich Hayek] was telling these very rich people exactly what they wanted to hear. ibid.
What the so-called think tanks, or junk tanks as I prefer to call them, was to turn these often outrageous proposals into what sounded like common sense. ibid.
Neoliberalism inverts traditional social, cultural and religious values: the market is God. Chris Hedges, introduction to interview George Monbiot, The Secret History of Neoliberalism, Youtube 2024
For the past thirty years politicians in Britain have tried to build a new prosperity. They wanted to make an old nation that had fallen behind in the world recapture the glories of its past. They turned for help to what they believed was a science of money. One after another Labour and Conservative governments became that if they followed what they thought were a set of scientific laws, the economy would grow faster. The perceived tide of decline could be reversed. Adam Curtis, Pandora’s Box: A Fable from the Age of Science III: The League of Gentlemen, BBC 1992
Politicians came to believe there was a technical way to make Britain great again. ibid.
In 1961 the Conservative government set up NEDDY, the National Economic Development Council, in what had been a gentlemen’s club in Westminster. It was advised by young economists convinced they could make the economy grow much faster. ibid.
They saw themselves as followers of the economist Maynard Keynes. He had shown how to manage an economy by increasing or decreasing demand. ibid.
Labour promised a national plan run by a separate department of economic affairs under George Brown. It would make Britain grow by a quarter in just six years … But Labour had come to power just as the boom the Conservatives had begun was overheating. Imports were flooding in and wages were rising. ibid.
The economists who had began to realise the economy was far beyond their control; they were being used. ibid.
The attempt to plan growth had failed. Britain was left with little expansion and political disaster. Most economists blamed it on the government’s failure to devalue. ibid.
In the early 1970s many economists began to find they no longer understood how money behaved … Prices and unemployment began to rise together: people called it stagflation. ibid.
Monetarism offered an attractive technical explanation for the problem of inflation but from it would come in less than ten years another scheme for Britain’s salvation: a set of scientific rules which if the politicians followed them correctly would create the right conditions for economic growth … The time was right for the monetarists. ibid.
Then in March 1976 Britain fell into the abyss. Foreign investors led by American bankers panicked. The Pound began to slide against the Dollar and nothing would stop it. Britain faced bankruptcy. In desperation Labour turned to the International Monetary Fund for a loan. An IMF team came to London. ibid.
The supply of money was to be reduced by increasing interest rates and cutting public spending. Inflation would fall and enterprise flourish. ibid.
But the economy did not behave in the way the monetarists had predicted … Even more mystifying was the behaviour of the money supply. ibid.
In the budget of 1981 public borrowing was cut by a fifth; 364 leading economists wrote to The Times and the prime minister accusing her of virtually destroying the economy. That summer there were riots in English cities. ibid.
In the 1950s Britain was dominated by a small group of men – the captains of industry. They were eminent industrialists and bankers who met together at the court of the Bank of England. Men like these were powerful because of the vast industrial empire they controlled. They worked in partnership with the politicians to shape the future of the nation. What these men did not realise was that within fifteen years their whole world would be destroyed. Their power would be taken away from them and their factories torn down and sold off. And the man who began their destruction was a suburban accountant called Jim Slater. To do it Slater awoke a force that had been dormant since before the war: the Stock Market. And as he grew powerful, Slater became an ally of politicians, but what neither he nor they realised was that the force he had awoken would overwhelm all of them. Adam Curtis, The Mayfair Set II: Entrepreneur Spelt S.P.I.V ***** BBC 1999
The stock market was something that frightened both the politicians and industrialists because it was unpredictable and threatened their control over the economy. Both lived with the terrible memory of the crash of 1929 and the unemployment it had caused. And as the boom continued to grow and excite the public interest, the Bank of England became worried. ibid.
He [Jim Slater] decided to try and work out a way of predicting which shares would go up and which would go down. ibid.
In 1964 Slater formed a company with a young Tory MP called Peter Walker. Slater-Walker was an investment company, and as the market continued to boom, Slater became rich managing other people’s money. ibid.
Jim Slater had discovered that the Coote family no longer had a majority shareholding [Cork Manufacturing]. And he decided to try and take the company over. He [Slater] made a hostile takeover. ibid.
He [Slater] immediately sold off large parts of the land and the factories: they were demolished for property development. Slater had invented a formula which he now repeated. The sales of assets from each takeaway were then used to fund the next and bigger one. ibid.
A group of takeover men grew up who began to break up the old paternalist world that had dominated British industry. The social centre for the takeover men was the Clermont Club, a gambling club in Berkeley Square in Mayfair. It was run by a right-wing aristocrat called John Aspinall; he was a ferocious professional gambler, and those he admired and let into his club were those he described as risk takers. ibid.