The price of electricity has risen astronomically in Europe over the last two years: by four times over the previous year and 10 times over the last two
Source: Why Our Electricity Prices Can’t Be Left to Bogus ‘Free Markets’ – CounterPunch.org
Tag: free markets
Free Markets, Besieged Citizens | Robert Kuttner | The New York Review of Books
Beginning with the presidency of Jimmy Carter, a succession of Democratic presidents joined Republicans in turning away from the New Deal model of
Source: Free Markets, Besieged Citizens | Robert Kuttner | The New York Review of Books
Bill Clinton Did More To Sell Neoliberalism Than Milton Friedman
In recent years, the term “neoliberalism” has reverberated across academia, Twitter, and major media outlets. It has increasingly become shorthand for describing and dismissing the centrist and corporatist bent of the Democratic Party, symbolized by Bill and Hillary Clinton. This popularization has also stretched it thin. Broadly, neoliberalism describes the theory of political economy that free markets and government austerity are the best way to create individual freedom and choice.
Source: Bill Clinton Did More To Sell Neoliberalism Than Milton Friedman | Portside
Our Future vs. Neoliberalism –
Since the 1970s, Western political and corporate leaders have peddled a quasi-religious belief in the power of “free” markets and unbridled capitalism to solve all the world’s problems. This new “neoliberal” orthodoxy is a thinly disguised reversion to the systematic injustice of 19th-century laissez-faire capitalism, which led to gross inequality and poverty even in wealthy countries, famines that killed tens of millions of people in India and China, and horrific exploitation of the poor and vulnerable worldwide
Free markets?
What is a free market?To the classical economists, the objective of 19th-century reform was to replace the rentier class’s political power with democratic power to create state policies to either tax away land rent and other economic rent, or to take (return) land, natural resources and natural monopolies such as transportation, communications and other basic infrastructure needs to the public domain. A free market was defined as one free from economic rent – the land rent imposed by heirs of the feudal warlord landlord class, whose economic role was purely extractive, not productive. Natural resource rent was said to belong to the public domain as national patrimony, and monopoly rent was to be prevented by keeping natural monopolies in the public domain, or firmly regulating them if privatized.The 20th century’s anti-classical reaction has inverted the concept of a free market, Orwellian Doublethink style, to create one “free” for rent-seekers to carve out free-lunch rent income. The result is a rentier economy in which land, natural resources and natural monopolies are privatized and, in due course, financialized to turn rent into a flow of interest payments to the financial sector as the economy is driven into debt to afford the rentier overhead and debt-financed asset-price inflation for rent-yielding assets.The “freedom” of such markets is freedom from governments to tax away economic rent and regulate prices to limit rent extraction. An exponential growth of unearned rentier income and wealth in the hands of a sector diverts income away from the “real” production-and-consumption economy.
Source: The Vocabulary of Neoliberal Diplomacy in Today’s New Cold War – CounterPunch.org
Capitalism in the United States and in Europe
I want to start by thanking Luigi Chiaro and President Valenti of Progetto Formazione Continua for the opportunity to be here this evening to speak and exchan
Our DMNC model exposes the inefficient incompetence of capitalist corporations…
Reading this account of GM’s incompetent and venal management it suddenly becomes obvious that, we won’t just throw out the term ‘socialist’ but stick to our renamed version, and after the endless diatribes against inefficient socialism, something like our ‘democratic market neo-communism’ could easily resolve the problems of a prime capitalist corporation. The capitalists have lost the ability to ‘do their own thing’ and are floundering in pseudo-capitalist degenerations of the genre.
Our DMNC would allow several possibilities: a planned version, but better yet a ‘market’ version but one in the context of a Commons: such an entity could be run by a neo-communist entrepreneur using licensed resources and/or a managerial group, with mixed planning interactions, it would have any number of labor resolutions from socialist unions to a cooperative subset and would carefully mediate the issue of layoffs, if any, giving guarantees of transitional subsistence and guarantees of future employment. The result would fulfill all the characteristics of a capitalist version but in a far more intelligent version that would be subject to ecological law. And so on: this portrait of GM is revealing. Socialists with half a brain could to this as well as the capitalists. This is not state capitalist or bureaucratic command socialism, but a hybrid of the DMNC type.
Note: marxists would be unable to carry out this project and would immeditely override the the subtle difference from conventional socialist nonesense. Marxist have not done their homework, are confused about planning and markets and would immediately induce failure in the above….
1848+: The End(s) of History 