What does the term 'Neoliberal' mean to you?

[HFRN]

Last edited Sat Jul 18, 2015, 11:20 PM - Edit history (2)

Let's stay away from people's names, but just discuss the concept and the idea

EDIT: Some good answers here

Edit Again: by 'people's names', I mean politician's names (to avoid the primary season 'food fight'). People like Milton Friedman, (who someone mentioned) are just fine, as they are associated with the schools of thought. Any names that illustrate, but aren't connected to any current inter or intra partisan cause, are fine

[PotatoChip]

1. Unfettered, unregulated, laissez-faire economics.

Basically what we have happening now.

[ChisolmTrailDem]

2. This ^^^^, to the letter. nt

[brooklynite]

29. And why isn't that conservative?

Name a neo-liberal Democrat who has opposed progressive taxation, all regulation, etc.

[Betty Karlson]

30. Neo-liberal = neo-conservative.

In fact, the difference is that the same ideology is predominantly called neo-liberal in Europe, and called neo-conservative at the other side of the ocean. Those who espouse a different degree of the same mindset will call themselves whichever lable is not predominantly used on the continent they live in.

[PotatoChip]

36. Who said it isn't conservative?

What an odd conclusion to draw from what I said.

Neoliberalism is an economic philosophy whose practices could conceivably be condoned by anyone. Historically it's mostly been associated with the right.

[JHB]

44. Do you know the history of the term? It doesn't mean "liberal"..,

...it' an economic term referring to "liberalization" of markets, i.e., deregulation, lowering barriers to trade, and cutting excessive taxes.

[HFRN]

46. ^^Yes

it mean economically liberal, in terms of what large corporate entities are allowed to do

it's not what people normally think of as 'politically liberal' - at all

[TexasProgresive]

3. Potato Chip has it right. n/t

[ram2008]

4. I'll let this picture explain what it means to me

[img][img]

[MelungeonWoman]

5. I would consider him a neocon.

Some people may think they are the same but there are some social differences.

[tblue37]

14. No. Neocons are "neo" (new) about their "con" (conservative) positions

because they were prominent intellectuals who used to be vocally, even aggressively, liberal.

Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, and David Horowitz are neocons. Like the militaristic conservative Republicans (e.g., Jeb and his ilk), neocons are all about spreading a debased version of "democracy" at the point of a gun, but unlike Jeb, et al., neocons used to be vocal proponents of at least FDR liberalism, and in many cases, even more leftist views than that.

[pampango]

6. Privatization, deregulation, tax cuts and austerity. n/t

[HooptieWagon]

7. An economic theory originating from "Chicago school" economists.

They were in favor of free-rein capitalism, with little government interference. What govt involvement there is is to protect capital interests. Small government, privatizing usual govt roles like education and such.
It's the economic theory advocated by Libertarians / Randians, but also the GOP Reaganomics/trickle-down borrows heavily from neo-liberal school of thought. The DLC/Third Way also borrows from the neo-liberal school, but at least includes a minimal amount of economic oversight by govt, and somewhat of a safety-net for people falling through the cracks.
Where and whenever neo-liberal economics have been applied, they have failed miserably.

[hifiguy]

20. Someday, assuming that our species survives the next century,

an even-handed history of this era will be written.

The hottest question will be whether Milton Friedman or Adolf Hitler was the Worst and Most Destructive human being that existed during that time. You can make a solid case for Stalin and Mao, but MF and AH stand above them, IMO.

Personally, I would opt for Friedman. Hitlerism died with Hitler. The indescribable misery inflicted on hundreds of millions of people now and in the future by Friedman's amoral insanity rolls merrily along as far as one can imagine.

[leveymg]

27. The Neo-liberal human laboratory for Chicago School economics was post-coup Chile.

After the Left-wing Allende government was elected in Chile in 1970, most large companies and agricultural estates were nationalized and turned over to worker control. The response of the CIA under the Nixon Administration, US-based multinational corporations and international banks was to put a squeeze on Chile and "make it's economy scream", isolating it from trade, engineering a climate of shortage, political violence and psychological tension. On September 11, 1973, a military coup led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet killed President Allende and rounded up tens of thousands of his officials and supporters. More than 30,000 Chileans and international supporters were tortured, and one-in-ten of the detainees was executed without trial.

A team of US economists and social scientists, many of them from the University of Chicago, were brought in to restructure Chilean economy and society. Social services and goods were slashed. Everything possible was privatized and sold off. Most national assets were sold at cut-rate prices to conservative crony capitalists and multinational corporations, with the surprising exception of copper, which remained a state enterprise that supported the much expanded military industrial complex - in this sense, the Neo-liberal economy supported a proto-fascist state.

The experiment didn't work well and by the late 1980s, its creators -- the CIA, the NY Rockefeller banks, and the Ford Foundation -- reinstated a more conventional liberal parliamentary democracy that has remained since.

Chile was a social laboratory for Thatcher's UK and Reagan's America that followed.

[HooptieWagon]

28. Yes. A friend of mine was a student of Victor Jara's.

He escaped on foot across the Andes into Brazil. Only recently has he been able to talk about the horrors of the coup. Hillarys good friend and mentor Henry Kissinger was the mastermind of the coup overthrowing democratically elected Allende.

[leveymg]

33. Here's Springstein's opus to Victor Jara, singing "Manifesto" (2013)

"Pardon mi espanol":

[hifiguy]

41. Yep.

The original implementation of the Shock Doctrine.

Which is now in Greece and barreling our way.

[Hoyt]

8. Derisive term for Democrats that think differently.

[HooptieWagon]

12. Bill Clinton was mostly neo-liberal.

[hifiguy]

19. "Mostly????"

Dyed in the wool; Obama is only about 85%. But a neoliberal nonetheless.

[pnwmom]

37. How so? He doesn't believe in "unfettered, unregulated" capitalism.

So how do you define neoliberal?

[stevenleser]

55. Agreed. Obama is not a Laissez-Fairist. Even a fair amount of Republicans aren't Laissez-Fairists nt

[LordGlenconner]

24. +1

[Marr]

54. Correction-- for Democrats who think *like Ronald Reagan*.

'Neoliberal' describes an extreme form of 1%er economics (deregulation, cuts to social services, lower taxes for the rich, etc.) that really took off in the US with Reagan, and has been the predominant position among our political elite, Democrat and Republican alike, ever since.

"Democrats who think differently", lol. What a fucking pant load. Differently to whom, exactly? Their constituents?

[hobbit709]

9. Neocon, neoliberal, two different names for the same kind of crap.

Protect the interests of the 1% and screw everyone else attitudes.

[HooptieWagon]

10. Here:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism

[Zorra]

11. In a nutshell...

Wealthy private interests must be free to own our
governments and our cultures! Submit and obey.

[Freelancer]

13. Neoliberal was the first caveman to paint a donkey on a cave wall...

and say "Hey guys -- let's share the fire and the food. Who can eat a whole mammoth by themselves, anyway?"

Then they killed him.

[Zorra]

15. Neoliberalism as a puzzle: the useless global unity which fragments and destroys nations

http://struggle.ws/mexico/ezln/1997/jigsaw.html

The global power of the financial centers is so great, that they can afford not to worry about the political tendency of those who hold power in a nation, if the economic program (in other words, the role that nation has in the global economic megaprogram) remains unaltered. The financial disciplines impose themselves upon the different colors of the world political spectrum in regards to the government of any nation. he great world power can tolerate a leftist government in any part of the world, as long as the government does not take measures that go against the needs of the world financial centers. But in no way will it tolerate that an alternative economic, political and social organization consolidate. For the megapolitics, the national politics are dwarfed and submit to the dict ates of the financial centers. It will be this way until the dwarfs rebel...

[DFW]

16. To keep it short:

Nothing whatsoever. Just like "corporatist." Useless babble to take other people down.

All the labels in the world don't mean squat to me, only specifically stated policies.

I remember my friend from England who one visited the southern USA, got into a political discussion, and got called a "liberal" by the right-wingers she was talking to. Considering the nasty tone they were taking with her, she was surprised and pleased with the sudden compliment. They were equally baffled that she considered it a compliment. But all she spoke was English, where her hosts were speaking Foxese.

All the labeling and individual interpretation of such mean zip to me. I care where you're walking, not what you're talking.

[hifiguy]

17. Economic feudalism married to high-tech surveillance state fascism.

[bemildred]

18. Dumb ass belligerent policy in international affairs.

The latest incarnation of the War Party.
And the cause of American decline and decadence.

[MicaelS]

21. Someone who overtly supports Social Justice issues...

But is totally against Economic Justice.

[hifiguy]

23. I see what you did there.

[StopTheNeoCons]

22. I am a Progressive, I wont use the liberal word to describe myself

for fear of getting mixed up with the neoliberals

[Freelancer]

34. So, to you, the word liberal is stigma -- 'the L word'? I don't get that at all.

I tip liberally. I apply liberal amounts of salad dressing washed down with liberal quantities of wine. If I had a pool, I'd fill it with liberal and do a cannonball. I am liberal in every respect -- even by the most liberal interpretation.

Liberal, Liberal, Liberal!

[Octafish]

25. University of Chicago School of Economics bringing democracy to Chile by overthrowing its democracy.

"The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves... l don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people."

-- Henry Kissinger on the US-backed coup d'etat in Chile.

Neoliberals at work in Chile, where they perfected the art of turning the screws through austerity:

"The Chicago Boys in Chile: Economic Freedom's Awful Toll"

Orlando Letelier
August 28, 1976

It would seem to be a common-sensical sort of observation that economic policies are conditioned by and at the same time modify the social and political situation where they are put into practice. Economic policies, therefore, are introduced in order to alter social structures.

If I dwell on these considerations, therefore, it is because the necessary connection between economic policy and its sociopolitical setting appears to be absent from many analyses of the current situation in Chile. To put it briefly, the violation of human rights, the system of institutionalized brutality, the drastic control and suppression of every form of meaningful dissent is discussed (and often condemned) as a phenomenon only indirectly linked, or indeed entirely unrelated, to the classical unrestrained free market policies that have been enforced by the military junta. This failure to connect has been particularly characteristic of private and public financial institutions, which have publicly praised and supported the economic policies adopted by the Pinochet government, while regretting the bad international image the junta has gained from its incomprehensible persistence in torturing, jailing and persecuting all its critics. A recent World Bank decision to grant a $33 million loan to the junta was justified by its President, Robert McNamara, as based on purely technical criteria, implying no particular relationship to the present political and social conditions in the country. The same line of justification has been followed by American private banks which, in the words of a spokesman for a business consulting firm, have been falling all over one another to make loans. (See Ann Crittenden: 'Loans from Abroad Flow to Chile's Rightist Junta', (The New York Times, February 20.) But probably no one has expressed this attitude better than the US Secretary of the Treasury. After a visit to Chile, during which he discussed human rights violations by the military government, William Simon congratulated Pinochet for bringing economic freedom to the Chilean people (The Times, May 17). This particularly convenient concept of a social system in which economic freedom and political terror coexist without touching each other, allows these financial spokesmen to support their concept of freedom while exercising their verbal muscles in defense of human rights.

The usefulness of the distinction has been particularly appreciated by those who have generated the economic policies now being carried out in Chile. In Newsweek of June 14, Milton Friedman, who is the intellectual architect and unofficial adviser for the team of economists now running the Chilean economy, stated: In spite of my profound disagreement with the authoritarian political system of Chile, I do not consider it as evil for an economist to render technical economic advice to the Chilean Government, any more than I would regard it as evil for a physician to give technical medical advice to the Chilean Government to help end a medical plague.

It is curious that the man who wrote a book, Capitalism and Freedom, to drive home the argument that only classical economic liberalism can support political democracy can now so easily disentangle economics from politics when the economic theories he advocates coincide with an absolute restriction of every type of democratic freedom. One would logically expect that if those who curtail private enterprise are held responsible for the effects of their measures in the political sphere, those who impose unrestrained economic freedom would also be held responsible when the imposition of this policy is inevitably accompanied by massive repression, hunger, unemployment and the permanence of a brutal police state.

SNIP...

An International Monetary Fund Report of May 1976 points out: The process of returning to the private sector the vast majority of the enterprises which over the previous fifteen years, but especially in 1971-73, had become part of the public sector continued (during 1975) ... At the end of 1973 the Public Development Corporation (CORFO) had a total of 492 enterprises, including eighteen commercial banks ... Of this total, 253 enterprises ... have been returned to their former owners. Among the other 239 enterprises ... 104 (among them ten banks) have been sold; sixteen (including two banks) have already been adjudicated, with the completion of the transfer procedure being a matter of weeks; the sale of another twenty-one is being negotiated bilaterally with groups of potential buyers... Competitive bidding is still to be solicited for the remaining enterprises. Obviously the buyers are always a small number of powerful economic interests who have been adding these enterprises to the monopolistic or oligopolistic structures within which they operate. At the same time, a considerable number of industries have been sold to transnational corporations, among them the national tire industry (INSA), bought by Firestone for an undisclosed sum, and one of the main paper pulp industries (Celulosa Forestal Arauco), bought by Parsons & Whittemore.

SNIP...

Although the economic policies have more mercilessly affected the working classes, the general debacle has significantly touched the middle class as well. At the same time, medium-size national enterprises have had their expectations destroyed by the reduction in demand, and have been engulfed and destroyed by the monopolies against which they were supposed to compete. Because of the collapse of the automobile industry, hundreds of machine shops and small industries which acted as subcontractors have faced bankruptcy. Three major textile firms (FIAD, Tomé Oveja and Bellavista) are working three days a week; several shoe companies, among them Calzados Bata, have had to close. Ferriloza, one of the main producers of consumer durables, recently declared itself bankrupt. Facing this situation, Raul Sahli, the new president of the Chilean Industrialists' Association and himself linked to big monopolies, declared earlier in the year: The social market economy should be applied in all its breadth. If there are industrialists who complain because of this, let them go to hell. I won't defend them. He is so quoted by André Gunder Frank in a Second Open Letter to Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger, April 1976.

The nature of the economic prescription and its results can be most vividly stated by citing the pattern of domestic income distribution. In 1972, the Popular Unity Government employees and workers received 62.9% of the total national income; 37.1% went to the propertied sector. By 1974 the share of the wage earners had been reduced to 38.2%, while the participation of property had increased to 61.8%. During 1975, 16 average real wages are estimated to have declined by almost 8%, according to the International Monetary Fund. lt is probable that these regressive trends in income distribution have continued during 1976. What it means is that during the last three years several billions of dollars were taken from the pockets of wage earners and placed in those of capitalists and landowners. These are the economic results of the application in Chile of the prescription proposed by Friedman and his group.

CONTINUED...

http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/letelierchicagoboys.html

Less than a month after this is published, Orlando Letelier is assassinated on the orders of the Chilean secret police.

Yeah, see? All your stuff belongs to us, see? Yeah!



FWIW: Poppy Bush knew all about Operation Condor and didn't stop them killing Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffit. He even told Ed Koch, "Sorry if you get killed. Nothing we can do."

And we wonder why the US keeps moving to the right, even when we vote in leaders who promise to move things to the left.

[Katashi_itto]

26. The current front runner in the Dem Race.

[pnwmom]

38. She isn't neoliberal. She doesn't believe in "unfettered, unregulated" capitalism.

She's a liberal; not quite as progressive as Sanders, but more on the left than O'Malley.

ontheissues.org

[CharlotteVale]

31. "Republican."

[redstateblues]

32. What's next? Neosocialist for those who aren't Puritopians

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

35. Conservatives who advertise themselves as "not as bad" as Republicans.

And, ring up a NO SALE in the voting booth for me.

[arely staircase]

39. Free trade liberals nt

[Drunken Irishman]

42. So FDR and JFK liberals?

[gollygee]

40. Milton Friedman, laissez-faire economics, etc.

I am not a fan. We'll leave it at that.

Oh whoops, you said no names. Ok, then "Chicago School of Economics" instead of Milton Friedman.

[HFRN]

45. 'Oh whoops, you said no names'--> i should have clarified, I meant no politician names

academic s such as friedman are just fine, as they are directly connected to 'schools of thought'

i just wanted this to be more a definition of terms thread rather than a 'your candidates is a this or that' thread

[Atman]

43. A bullshit term invented because NeoCons didn't like being called names.

It's like everything that happened under Bush the Dim; they had to turn all of the terminology around to try to beat down Liberals. Just read any thread on our parallel-universe sites. Anything negative about GWB and his puppet masters is simply turned around and said exactly the same way now, just replacing "liberal" with "conservative."

I think they're both worthless, confusing terms which the vast majority of Americans don't understand. "Neo-liberals" as described above are just Blue Dogs. Neo-conservatives are just pulling the same old con, different day, but the same old playbook.

[gollygee]

47. I think the term might have started in the UK

where "liberal" means liberal economics = free market economics. We use the word "liberal" differently in the US, obviously.

[Puzzledtraveller]

48. Corporatism

as demonstrated by our current president, and the one before him, and the one before that...

[romanic]

49. Hypocritical overly sensitive version of a liberal

who champions for fringe social issues but knows nothing of economics or the way the world works.

[eridani]

50. I don't think I'd include "warmonger" here

Neoliberals may want to fuck the 99% over economically, but may be OK on other issues. Neoconservatives are warmongers and crappy on social justice issues also.

[restorefreedom]

51. to me a neoliberal

is what we used to call a conservative.

a neocon is what used to be conservative on steroids, in other words, a wacko.

[roamer65]

52. DLC Democrat.

The DLC is the neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party.

[MADem]

58. The DLC folded their tent years ago. That meme is getting lame.

Might as well start shaking your fist at the Whigs.

[Marr]

53. It has nothing to do with Republicans or Democrats.

'Neoliberal' refers to a top-down economic ideal; deregulation, lower taxes on the wealthy, privatization of government functions, austerity, etc.

Since Reagan, it's been the predominant position amongst our political elite, Democrat and Republican alike. It's the single biggest reason the middle class has evaporated in this country.

[Populist_Prole]

56. Corporate jerk offs

Or more succinctly: corporate jerk offs that try to diffuse their ill effects via feel-good abstract/macro theory.

[Warpy]

57. "Stick 'em up, sucker!"

Same thing "privatization" and "free trade" mean.