Neoliberalism - perspectives... What if democracy is just an illusion? New Haven, CT - Karl Marx never visited the United States, but he nevertheless understood the country, because he understood capitalism. As you know, there's no American ideology that's mightier than capitalism. Equality, justice and the rule of law are nice and all, but money talks. In their 1846 book The German Ideology, Marx and co-author Frederick Engels took a look at human history and made a plain but controversial observation. In any given historical period, the ideas that people generally think are the best and most important ideas are usually the ideas of the people in charge.
If you have a lot of money and own a lot of property, then you have the power to propagandise your worldview and you have incentive to avoid appearing as if you're propagandising your worldview. The ideas of the one per cent become the dominant ideas because the one per cent convinces the 99 per cent that its ideas are the only rational and universally valid ideas. And perhaps there's the real problem. 9/11 and the makers of history - CISAC.
After 9/11, the administration of US President George W Bush initiated the era of the global war on terror. For many, this was a misguided response to terror attacks. But before the decade was over, US forces invaded two countries and are now fighting shadow wars in Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan, while an air war continues in Libya. Pentagon commands cover the entire planet, and US military assistance programmes are active in almost every country. Wars reorder politics and values. They remake that which is taken to be true and right. It is useful to begin by recalling some of what seemed true on September 10, 2001. Today, each of these verities lies broken. Renewed global military commitments have hastened an inevitable US decline. How is it that the received wisdom about the nature of world politics was so badly wrong? The great conceit that blinds us is the idea that the powerful make history just as they please. 'Like cowboys at the rodeo' The fall of the left Blinkered worldview.
Neoconservatism - perspectives... Mainstream Economics as Ideology: I. Rod Hill and Tony Myatt are Professors of Economics at the University of New Brunswick in Saint John and Fredericton (respectively). Their new book, The Economics Anti-Textbook is available from Amazon. They also run a blog at www.economics-antitextbook.com.
Interview conducted by Philip Pilkington. Philip Pilkington: Your book seems to me a much needed antidote to the mainstream economics textbooks and can either be read alone or together with them. I think that’s a great approach because it allows students to become familiar with what is being taught in the classroom but also allows them to take a critical perspective on this material. So, let’s start with the format of these textbooks. Tony Myatt: That’s correct. Delightfully for us, Mankiw replied to these students in his New York Times column, saying “I don’t view the study of economics as laden with ideology…It is a method rather than a doctrine….a technique for thinking, which helps the possessor to draw correct conclusions.”
Mainstream Economics as Ideology: II. Rod Hill and Tony Myatt are Professors of Economics at the University of New Brunswick in Saint John and Fredericton (respectively). Their new book, The Economics Anti-Textbook is available from Amazon. They also run a blog at www.economics-antitextbook.com. Interview conducted by Philip Pilkington Philip Pilkington: I think it was Joan Robinson who said something along the lines of “while we may have to teach a limited amount of material, we could at least teach that which is useful”. I’ve often encountered economics students who, frankly, seem to me to have a very tenuous grasp of the important aspects of economics. I recall one in particular who graduated from a very prestigious university not understanding what I meant when I said that I thought the chronic unemployment in Ireland was due to a lack of effective demand triggered by the bursting of the housing bubble. Tony Myatt: We could compare economics to other professions.
Macroeconomics has been in a real mess for quite a while. The second death of politics. The recent rise of technocratic governments in Italy and Greece is the culmination of a process that has been unfolding in Europe over the last 20 years. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent triumph of neoliberal ideology, there has been a trend toward de-politicisation, a wholehearted embrace of the neoliberal order apparently devoid of a viable and promising alternative. Politics died its first death in celebrations of a growing consensus that communism was a thing of the past, sealed by Francis Fukuyama's diagnosis of the end of history. Apparently lacking a clear enemy, neoliberalism was ready solemnly to declare its worldwide hegemony. To be sure, we also observed flashes of political polarisation in the post-9/11 world. It is, in the first instance, this crisis of ideology that explains much of what is going on in Europe (and, to a lesser extent, in the United States) today.
Technocratic regimes 'Politics without politics'
Reality. Hopeless but not Serious | Grover Norquist. Norquist is just another opportunistic parasite in Washington, the host for so many parasites. Most of them don’t rise as high and have less influence, but they all have the same quality — an avaricious greed, which they claim to be an expression of ‘public interest’. And people like Norquist (or like Abramoff, Rove, Reed, DeLay, Gingrich) have worked to change the game in Washington. There’s always been “enlightened self-interest” and corruption in centers of power, but a certain amount of ‘People’s Business’ had to be conducted. Now, the game is more about seizing all the power, and money, that one can… all while loudly claiming your efforts are for the benefit of others. Liars and thieves love misdirection — except now, unlike the pre-Rupert era, they have an entire media empire ready to repeat their messages and throw sand in everyone’s eyes.
Somewhere, the Gods are laughing, fit to bust. The Power of Nightmares Volume 1 Part 1 of 6. The Ideological Animal. Cinnamon Stillwell never thought she'd be the founder of a political organization. She certainly never expected to start a group for conservatives, most of whom became conservatives on the same day—September 11, 2001.
She organized the group, the 911 Neocons, as a haven for people like her—"former lefties" who did political 180s after 9/11. Stillwell, now a conservative columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle , had been a liberal her whole life, writing off all Republicans as "ignorant, intolerant yahoos. " Yet on 9/11, everything changed for her, as it did for so many. Disgusted, she looked elsewhere. In 2005, she wrote a column called "The Making of a 9/11 Republican. " We tend to believe our political views have evolved by a process of rational thought, as we consider arguments, weigh evidence, and draw conclusions.
Twenty years later, they decided to compare the subjects' childhood personalities with their political preferences as adults. The Ideological Crisis of Western Capitalism - Joseph E. Stiglitz. Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space NEW YORK – Just a few years ago, a powerful ideology – the belief in free and unfettered markets – brought the world to the brink of ruin.
Even in its hey-day, from the early 1980’s until 2007, American-style deregulated capitalism brought greater material well-being only to the very richest in the richest country of the world. Indeed, over the course of this ideology’s 30-year ascendance, most Americans saw their incomes decline or stagnate year after year. Moreover, output growth in the United States was not economically sustainable.
I was among those who hoped that, somehow, the financial crisis would teach Americans (and others) a lesson about the need for greater equality, stronger regulation, and a better balance between the market and government. In the US, this right-wing resurgence, whose adherents evidently seek to repeal the basic laws of math and economics, is threatening to force a default on the national debt. Age of Fracture - Daniel T. Rodgers.
In the last quarter of the twentieth century, the ideas that most Americans lived by started to fragment. Mid-century concepts of national consensus, managed markets, gender and racial identities, citizen obligation, and historical memory became more fluid. Flexible markets pushed aside Keynesian macroeconomic structures. Racial and gender solidarity divided into multiple identities; community responsibility shrank to smaller circles. In this wide-ranging narrative, Daniel T. Rodgers shows how the collective purposes and meanings that had framed social debate became unhinged and uncertain. Age of Fracture offers a powerful reinterpretation of the ways in which the decades surrounding the 1980s changed America.
The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology. Few concepts have been so intensively discussed or so widely sponsored as that of “ideology.” Whether read as the expression of social classes or attributed a material independence and efficacy, whether devalued as false and non-scientific or asserted as the necessary element of social practice, “ideology” has become an ineluctable conceptual reference across a range of works dealing with subjects as varied as science and politics, gender and cultural production. In this book, Göran Therborn makes a decisive contribution to the contemporary debate. Beginning with some critical reflections on Louis Althusser’s influential writings in the late sixties, Therborn develops a theory of the formation of human subjects. He then goes on to consider the material matrix of ideologies and the problem of ideological change, the ideological constitution of classes and the characteristics of the discursive order that regulates it.
The Sublime Object of Ideology. After the success of The Pervert's Guide to Cinema, director Sophie Fiennes and the only philosopher-turned-film-star Slavoj Žižek return with The Pervert's Guide to Ideology. Tonight marks the premiere of the film at the TIFF, with both Žižek and Fiennes in attendance. Bringing his unique style and "penetrating insights" to popular and obscure cinema alike, Žižek is at once captivating and clownish, bringing unique knowledge and interpretation- as well as a deep love of cinema- to a host of films. In this edition, Žižek examines film for a deeper ideological implication, both obvious and undiscovered, and questions these outcomes for our own time. Through skillful editing, Fiennes weaves Žižek into the narrative and histories of films as diverse as Jaws, The Triumph of Will, Brazil and The Sound of Music.
Not many films can tackle capitalism, consumerism, left-wing radicalism and philosophy among other things. Ideoloogical Bias and Antitrust Law. Apparently some judges refuse to enforce antritrust law because "Such judges just do not like antitrust laws for ideological reasons. " That attitude -- which is not confined to judges -- explains a lot about detrimental the rise of economic and political power in recent decades. This is Shane Greenstein discussing the proposed merger between AT&T and T-Mobile: Lawyers invariably ... launch into comments about the uncertain state of antitrust law in the United States, observing that many judges today do not think there is any valid reason to enforce any antitrust law, irrespective of the facts of the case.
Such judges just do not like antitrust laws for ideological reasons. Recently such friends have gotten more specific, commenting on the odds of getting past the particular judge assigned to hear the from Department of Justice, as it tries to block the merger. The point he is making, however, is that in this particular instance economics did seem to matter: And therefore: