"Random selection in decision-making over public finance – in other words, lottocracy – is not widespread. However, there are some examples outside the United States. Take Costa Rica, for instance. The Banco Popular, the country's main public bank, is governed by a Worker’s Assembly of 290 members, all chosen from various occupational sectors. This board determines the strategic vision of the bank, shaping the programs the bank offers. That said, research and the historical record show that deliberative processes work best when there’s a clear set of issues for people to address. They don’t work as well when the question is too broad. For example, it would be too open-ended to simply gather 290 people in a room and ask them, “What should the bank do?” These processes need clear parameters to guide them.

We can think about workers establishing democratic control over their pension investments in a similar way. Though we often think of European countries as having large state-run retirement plans, like those in France or Italy, the Netherlands relies more heavily on employer-based pension plans, with one of the largest covering all retail workers. Recently, the retail workers' pension fund, the pensioenfonds detailhandel, which has nearly $35 billion in assets under management, decided to experiment with democratic governance. Even though this fund already follows progressive investment principles – such as avoiding investments in oil or weapons manufacturers – the beneficiaries, who include current and future retirees, came together over three separate days to deliberate on the fund’s investments. After a discussion, they decided to prioritize social good over maximizing returns.

The beneficiaries didn’t just care about financial returns; they saw their financial interests intertwined with the public good."

https://www.hpeproject.org/blog/democratizing-finance-to-defeat-the-far-right

"It’s a myth to think of the US as uniquely free from monetary and fiscal constraints. The US has special powers to issue debt and find willing purchasers, of course, but freedom to issue debt is not the same as freedom to spend. In 1978, the world’s central banks were prepared to abandon their dollar reserves if the US continued to pursue an inflationary politics, as it did under Carter. So in the supply-side view, the US as dollar hegemon is quite limited in the kinds of spending it can support. Off the table is anything that’s too redistributive or liberating—welfare, or investment in free education and health care—because these empower labor and the poor.

By contrast, spending on defense, police, and prisons was fine, as were so-called tax cuts, which are really tax expenditures. The supply siders proposed a budget that was extremely generous in subsidizing financial wealth holders—creating these government-subsidized markets for capital gains—and extremely austere in subsidizing wages or spending on the poor. I think this captures the real motives behind the business revolt of the 1970s. Despite appearances, supply siders weren’t screaming for less government; they were screaming for government to subsidize capital income on a new basis. Hence this shift from industrial profits to capital gains."

https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/against-the-people/

"Over the past two decades, the self-avowed libertarian’s melding of genetic pronouncements with bootstrapping family-values talk has served as the bridge spanning divergent factions of the racialist right, from its IQ-obsessed, DEI-hating Silicon Valley wing to its white nationalist fringes.

Far from rejecting the dynamic of market competition, this new formation deepens it. From the United States and Britain to Hungary and Argentina, so-called populists on the right have not rejected global capitalism as such. Rather, they have rejected the 1990s model of governing global capitalism that revolved around large multilateral trade agreements—opting instead for unilateral action, as in Trump’s use of tariffs as leverage to open markets for U.S. investors and U.S. products and services. In general, the leaders of this right offer few plans to rein in finance, re-industrialize, or restore a Golden Age of job security. On the contrary, their calls to privatize, deregulate, and slash taxes come straight from the playbook shared by the world’s leaders for the past thirty years.

In other words, this new right does not really reject globalism but advances a new strain of it—one that accepts an international division of labor while tightening controls on certain kinds of migration. It assigns intelligence averages to countries in a way that collectivizes and renders innate the concept of “human capital.” It appeals to values and traditions that cannot be captured statistically, shading into a language of national essences and national character. The fix it finds in race, culture, and nation is but the most recent iteration of a pro-market philosophy based not on the idea that we are all the same but that we are in a fundamental, and perhaps permanent way, different."

https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/free-markets-and-fixed-natures/

#Oligarchs want a recession because it crushes #labor and gives them more power.

While workers need a stable #economy, the rich profit off fire sales, surplus labor, and cheap assets. Tariffs and recessions tighten their grip, allowing them to stack wealth through speculation, privatization, and government handouts. For them, the economy doesn't need to grow—just stay broken enough to keep wages low and profits high.

It’s all about control, not growth. #neoliberalism

https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/viewpoint-why-oligarchs-want-a-recession/

An interesting talk on neo-liberalism, the war economy, and where does the Left go from here?

(Note: the video image is sometimes jerky but the audio is good)

#Marxism #capitalism #neoliberalism #Europe #politics #economy

https://youtu.be/NZQrd3hNz3M?si=CPXcPnqS0CR9fuoF

Thoughts on the #FarRight and building the alternatives https://angrysampoetry.wordpress.com/2025/04/09/opposing-the-right-building-the-alternative/

"The US doesn't have enough qualified tool-and-die makers and other skilled tradespeople to produce the machines that will make the goods that Americans want to buy. New tradespeople can be trained, but acquiring these skilled trades is a process of many years. For the US to reshore its manufacturing, it needs substantial, sustained public investment in capacity-building: loans and grants to train workers and investment in basic research and other non-market goods needed to recover the US manufacturing base.

America should do all that, but if it wants to try, it needs a robust, predictable, orderly system of government to build upon. It needs the kind of reliable and orderly processes that make people feel safe about changing trades and going back to school. It needs imports of goods from overseas that can be used to restart the US manufacturing capacity that can replace those imports.

But in a market like this one, dominated by monopolies who needn't fear the Trump-gutted FTC, DOJ and CFPB; where cartels have captured their regulators; where Doge-style chaos spreads existential terror about the future, tariffs will only raise prices, without any significant re-shoring or capacity building. The Trump tariffs are a gift to giants like Nike, who have the logistics sophistication to exploit loopholes, demand preferential rates from shippers and brokers, and to pass on costs to their customers. Any domestic company that seeks to compete with Nike will not have these advantages. For Nike – and other dominant companies – the Trump tariffs are just another moat, another obstacle which they can hurdle, but which stops smaller competitors dead in their tracks:"

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/07/it-matters-how-you-slice-it/#too-big-to-care

Bill Gates is the same guy who has, under the pretense of philanthropy, turned Africa and India into a huge neo-liberal lab for "experimental" medicines and "disease-prevention" measures - at a cheap price of...FUCK YOU.

We are all toys to this piece of shit.

If there's any good news to take from all this it's that there's no longer any doubt that #neoliberalism is dead.

#Neoliberalism leads to internally untenable levels of #inequality such that it ultimately gives way to either fascism or #socialism. The Democratic Party did its best to make sure socialism would never appear to be a real alternative. As a consequence, we're now getting the fascism treatment.

"Trump’s erratic tariff actions, alongside his reversal of the former bipartisan policy on Ukraine, has already had indirect results. In alleged defense against the American turn, Europe and Canada have both donned the nationalist mantle of sovereignty and given Trump one of the main changes he has called for: an increase in their military expenditures so as to correct America’s disproportionate share of NATO’s military costs. Since American firms will also get a good share of the increased military expenditures abroad, the bloated US military-industrial complex will get a further boost.

As well, it may be that the uncertainty created over access to the US market likewise has method in its madness: corporations may now bias future global investments and supply chains to locate in the US “just-in-case.” This is of general concern but hits home especially in Canada since it is so close, so already integrated, and with costs relatively comparable.

Underlying all this lies the primary question at the core of Trump’s agenda. Paraphrased, it asks: “Why, if America is the world’s dominant power, does it accept such a disproportionate share of globalization’s burdens and receive such an unfair share of the benefits?” The framing of America’s status in these over-wrought terms adds a further method-in-madness: misdirection."

https://socialistproject.ca/2025/04/man-who-would-be-king/

The only sane response to an insane world is to be insane yourself.

Thats life in the second quarter of the 21st century of the common era for you. War, genocide, neo-liberal / late stage capitalism, mass extinction, global heating, climate catastrophes, fascists, bigots... The list goes on and on.

If that doesn't make you depressed and anxious there is something wrong in your head.

No Globalization Without Representation: U.S. Activists and World Inequality
Paul Adler
University of Pennsylvania Press

"How consumer and environmental activists became significant players in U.S. and world politics

Amid the mass protests of the 1960s, another, less heralded political force arose: public interest progressivism. Led by activists like Ralph Nader, organizations of lawyers and experts worked "inside the system." They confronted corporate power and helped win major consumer and environmental protections. By the late 1970s, some public interest groups moved beyond U.S. borders to challenge multinational corporations. This happened at the same time that neoliberalism, a politics of empowerment for big business, gained strength in the U.S. and around the world.

No Globalization Without Representation is the story of how consumer and environmental activists became significant players in U.S. and world politics at the twentieth century's close. NGOs like Friends of the Earth and Public Citizen helped forge a progressive coalition that lobbied against the emerging neoliberal world order and in favor of what they called "fair globalization." From boycotting Nestlé in the 1970s to lobbying against NAFTA to the "Battle of Seattle" protests against the World Trade Organization in the 1990s, these groups have made a profound mark.

This book tells their stories while showing how public interest groups helped ensure that a version of liberalism willing to challenge corporate power did not vanish from U.S. politics. Public interest groups believed that preserving liberalism at home meant confronting attempts to perpetuate conservative policies through global economic rules. No Globalization Without Representation also illuminates how professionalized organizations became such a critical part of liberal activism..."

#Globalization #Activism #Inequality #Neoliberalism #AlternativeGlobalization #NAFTA #WTO

https://www.pennpress.org/9780812253177/no-globalization-without-representation/

"The output of new fusionism was and continues to be virulently, nauseatingly racist. One prominent figure in the movement gleefully recalled watching a peer tell “a black intellectual that his race’s problems might be caused by an hereditary IQ deficiency.” Another, Richard J. Herrnstein, a co-author of the notorious “The Bell Curve,” wrote in a letter to a friend: “It continually amazes me that even biologists deny having eugenic sentiments, as if they were shameful.”

The end goal of such a noxious politics was to enshrine racial and gendered inequalities as inevitable, to outsource the difficult work of democratic dispute to pseudoscientists, and to appeal to the ostensible authority of biology to quash dissent. (Never mind that virtually all credible biologists rejected its assertions.) It was a political movement that aspired to eliminate politics altogether, replacing disagreement in the public sphere with the fatalism of genetics.

“Hayek’s Bastards” can be dense — a risk for any serious work of intellectual history — but it can also be entertaining. Slobodian’s wry commentary offers welcome respite from both the difficulty and the moral odiousness of his subject: He describes a neoliberal economist’s choice to live in an artists loft as “off-brand” and decries the “punitive neo-Victorian tone” of new fusionist books with titles like “The Loss of Virtue.”"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2025/04/04/hayeks-bastards-quinn-slobodian-review/

"What the two of them so effusively believe about growth is more or less what I think about redistribution. Which is to say: when you redistribute wealth, you in fact hasten a present that is radically different from the one we currently know.

In an unequal society where the majority must invest the lion’s share of their time and energy into the labour required to obtain the bare necessities of life, individuals lose much in the way of personal freedom and life satisfaction. But we also collectively sacrifice unfathomable quantities of human creativity and potential. There might be abundant growth, but that can matter very little if its fruits aren’t broadly shared.

Redistribution does not equal, as Klein and Thompson assert, a mere “parceling out of the present.” In a very difference sense than theirs, it represents its own agenda of abundance — one reflecting the richest egalitarian ideas of the 19th and 20th centuries. The liberalism of the 21st might reject those ideas, but many of us on the left still see them as indispensable. Socialism, contrary to what many of its critics have historically claimed, is first and foremost concerned with human freedom: freedom to think, freedom to dream, freedom to create, freedom to live unburdened by toil
(...)
Klein and Thompson appear to believe distributional questions can be mostly elided if enough new technology is invented and a sufficient quantity of stuff is built and produced. Contentious debates about degrowth aside, I find this assertion vastly more improbable and utopian than the project of universal social welfare or the realization of social and economic rights. Scientific and technological innovations can be hugely beneficial, but until we live in the world of Star Trek: The Next Generation it’s unlikely they will ever compensate for the dearth of social and economic justice."

https://www.lukewsavage.com/p/the-paucity-of-abundance