Latest news with #neoliberalism
New York Times
4 days ago
- Politics
- New York Times
Progressives and the Third-Party Question
To the Editor: Re 'Viable Third Party in '28? Conditions Are Right, but Odds Are Still Long,' by Nate Cohn (The Upshot, June 15): The opening for a third party is not where Mr. Cohn thinks it is. It is not with his 'new neoliberals.' Most of the wealthy donors, professional politicians and party operatives who run the two major parties still promote the neoliberal policies that Mr. Cohn claims provide the recipe for a successful third party: 'deficit reduction, deregulation, free trade and high-skilled immigration.' Mr. Cohn promotes the trendy 'abundance agenda' that is simply rebranding the old nostrum of growth, not redistribution that neoliberals have been running on since they began displacing New Deal liberals in the 1970s. Mr. Cohn fantasizes that a third party could emerge from an 'establishment-friendly campaign' with 'the support of wealthy elites.' But disaffected voters are anti-establishment and disgusted at billionaires buying elections. Polling consistently shows majority support for progressive reforms that the major parties won't support, including Medicare for all, a Green New Deal, free public child care and education through college, and taxing the rich to fund such reforms. The opening is for a progressive third party. Howie HawkinsSyracuse, writer was the Green Party candidate for president in 2020. To the Editor: Nate Cohn argues that conditions for a third party could be coming into place. As the founder of the kind of party he describes, I can tell you this: Third parties don't work. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The Guardian
4 days ago
- Business
- The Guardian
Labour could find the money it wants without raising taxes. This is austerity by amnesia
This summer's 'rebuild, rebuild, rebuild' campaign by the government feels less like a policy programme than a seance. Promising renewal, Keir Starmer instead channels the ghosts of governments past. As Karl Marx put it, people make history but not in circumstances of their own choosing; they do so haunted by dead ideas, dressing the future in secondhand costume. Labour wears what was fashionable in 1997 and 2010: Gordon Brown's technocratic reverence for central bank independence and George Osborne's devotion to fiscal rectitude. But we are no longer living in the world those policies were designed for. The global order that sustained Britain's post-1979 model is cracking. International trade peaked in 2008. The promise of seamless globalisation – of frictionless finance and footloose production – has faded. Donald Trump's rise marked the terminal contradiction of neoliberalism: the moment its hegemon turned against it. As the US embraces a form of economic nationalism, Britain – which is dependent on capital inflows, asset bubbles and open markets – faces a historic reckoning. It needs a new economic settlement. It needs imagination. But Starmer and his chancellor Rachel Reeves remain stuck in a paradigm whose time has passed. Take Reeves's fiscal stance. Despite promises of transformation, departmental budgets will grow more slowly than under the last parliament. This isn't mere prudence; it's the codification of a false scarcity – engineered not by inflation or investor panic, but by a Treasury framework that treats self-imposed constraints as natural laws. The most telling example? The silent havoc wrought by quantitative tightening (QT). While other G7 central banks tread cautiously, the Bank of England has embarked on the most aggressive QT programme in the developed world. To understand what's going on, you have to go back to the 2010s. When the economy crashed, the Bank of England created money out of thin air to buy government debt. This was called quantitative easing (QE) – and the idea was to pump money into the financial system to keep the City running. It worked but it also meant the Bank ended up owning a huge pile of government bonds. Now, the Bank is doing the reverse: QT. That means the Bank is selling those bonds or letting them mature without replacing them. The goal is to shrink its balance sheet to 'undo' QE. The problem? It's reversing course in a more dramatic way than any other major central bank. Why does that matter? Because when those bonds were first bought, they were expensive. Now they're being sold for less – so the Bank is making a loss. The trouble is that the Treasury (ie the state) has promised to cover those losses. On top of that, because QE created a lot of bank reserves (money that commercial banks hold at the Bank of England), the Bank is now paying billions in interest to those same commercial banks – at today's much higher rates. This means QT sees the Treasury handing over public money to cover bond losses and top up the profits of commercial banks. It's a quiet and alarming transfer of wealth to the financial sector. The cost to the Treasury? About £40bn per year – money that could have paid for social care reform or scrapping the two-child benefit cap. These aren't marginal technicalities. They are central political choices. And Reeves has chosen to uphold the orthodoxy – locking in monetary contraction while binding herself to fiscal rules that treat these giveaways to the financial sector as sacrosanct, but deny cash to local councils and legal aid. The result: a paradoxical state that both invests and cuts – that spends on nuclear reactors and tram lines but won't supply the cash required to run them in the future. This is not rebuilding. It is auto-cannibalism. Worse still, the justification isn't even compelling. Asked by former financier and Liberal Democrat MP Chris Coghlan why the Bank doesn't just abandon QT, its governor, Andrew Bailey, replied that it keeps markets 'efficient'. Efficient for whom? Certainly not for the disabled person reliant on benefits, the underfunded headteacher or the hospital trust closing down services. The British state is not broke; it is being deliberately starved, not by financial markets, but by its own managers. A rerouting of QT cash would go a long way to restoring the state's capacity to genuinely improve services, undoing some of the pandemic setbacks and austerity-era neglect. It would mark a first step toward coherent fiscal policy and honest political economics. Nigel Farage masquerades as the voters' friend by hijacking this policy – but that shouldn't deter Labour from doing what's right. Instead of intervening, Reeves prefers the script of necessary sacrifice, in which there is no money for transforming the public realm but seemingly unlimited room for interest transfers to the banking sector. The deeper irony is that this deference to the Bank – and the belief that QT is untouchable – is a New Labour inheritance. The original sin was granting the Bank of England operational independence in 1997. Brown sacrificed policy control over interest rates to reassure the City that New Labour's monetary policy would be governed by unaccountable experts rather than political whims. But before New Labour turned central bank independence into holy writ, Tory chancellor Ken Clarke, hardly a socialist firebrand, regularly overruled the Bank of England on interest rates. Monetary discretion wasn't always heresy; it was governance. Yet this insulation was always a fiction. The Treasury still indemnifies Bank losses. The government could pause QT, rework reserve interest payments or end the indemnity altogether. Other countries do. With a commanding Commons majority, ministers can easily force such a change. The Bank of England may be operationally independent, but ministers can take control of it in 'extreme economic circumstances'. If £150bn of Treasury spending to needlessly cover central bank losses doesn't qualify, what does? But in Starmer's Britain, policy remains trapped in the costume drama of the late 1990s – where credibility meant sounding like the bond market, and success meant keeping one's hands off the steering wheel. And so we drift. Labour cannot fund the transformation it promises, because it refuses to rewrite the rules that make transformation impossible. This is austerity by amnesia. A government elected to change Britain instead parrots the scripts of decline. It is reported that Reeves is looking to tax banks. That's not a bad idea but it avoids the far larger prize: reforming the policies that funnel billions into their coffers in the first place. And in so doing, she repeats the fatalism of Philip Snowden, Labour's first chancellor, who insisted in the 1930s that there was no alternative to cuts. That path led to economic stagnation and Labour's near-destruction. It may do so again. Randeep Ramesh is chief leader writer for the Guardian
RNZ News
16-06-2025
- Business
- RNZ News
Greens release fiscal strategy that calls for more public investment
Party co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick says 40 years of bad fiscal programming have produced "devastating real-world results". Photo: RNZ / Samuel Rillstone The Greens have made a case for more public investment, as they releases the party's fiscal strategy on Tuesday, saying the Finance Minister's "fiscal straight-jacket is junk". Green Party co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick said the current government was "fixated on self-made constraints, while the real world crumbles around us". Following the release of its Green Budget last month, which was ridiculed by the coalition , the party has released a discussion document outlining its case for a "transformed approach" to fiscal management it says would prioritise "real fiscal sustainability". The co-leaders' foreword in the report said "if balancing the books can only be achieved by reducing our real economic capacity, then the books need to be rewritten". Swarbrick said the party's fiscal strategy unpicked the daft 'computer says no' argument standing in the way of this critical investment. "We show how 40 years of bad fiscal programming have produced devastating real-world results, as our hospitals, schools and infrastructure fall apart." The document "demands recognition" that both excessive debt and insufficient investment are "equally unsustainable". It also said a "neoliberal logic" was embedded throughout New Zealand's fiscal management framework. "However, the neoliberal prescription of privatisation, public-private partnerships and market liberalisation isn't just outdated - it's actively harming our ability to meet long-term needs." It referenced the fiscal responsibility rules introduced in the 1980s as serving a legitimate purpose then, where constraints on borrowing and spending were an "urgent necessity", because the government had come close to defaulting on its debts. "However, our emergency response to that debt crisis has become permanent policy and, for over 40 years, our fiscal culture has focused solely on the prevention of one type of crisis, while systematically creating others through chronic underinvestment." The strategy document said political leaders called for ever-tighter fiscal restraint, and reminded voters of "rainy days" to come and the vulnerability of New Zealand's small open economy to natural disasters. "However, investment to mitigate these vulnerabilities is only ever seen as a cost, while the vulnerabilities created by weakened public services are made to appear inevitable, rather than as political decisions." The party argued public investment could enhance economic development, productivity and resilience, that would then improve, rather than undermine the country's long-term fiscal sustainability. It also said the costs of underinvestment in things like infrastructure, climate resilience and human capital posed risks "as significant" as excessive debt. "Both debt in excess of our real economic capacity to deliver investment and chronic underinvestment are failures of fiscal responsibility," the report said. It said real economic constraints should guide investment decisions, rather than financial targets "divorced from their economic implications". Responsible increases in public debt should be supported by "funding strategies", the paper went on, that "strengthen domestic financial institutions to hold that debt". "We need to ensure that productive borrowing serves Aotearoa New Zealand's development, while maintaining greater economic sovereignty." It argued this framework would enable the country to build enduring resilience to growing economic and environmental shocks, and create truly sustainable prosperity. The party believed the current accounting-driven approach failed to acknowledge public investment in human, social and natural capital. Swarbrick welcomed criticism, saying "let the government's latest round of name-calling ensue", but said the Greens were providing the most "comprehensive, real-world, evidence-based economic policy" of any party in parliament. "They constitute the only serious plan to actually improve our economic and climate resilience, and create tens of thousands of good green jobs." Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
The Guardian
10-06-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Against Identity by Alexander Douglas review – a superb critique of contemporary self-obsession
Identity is something socially negotiated, both claimed and given. I cannot be French if that nation does not exist; I can't be a doctor if no one will grant me a medical degree. Social media, however, promises that we can don or doff identities like so many digital masks. We may become persuaded that identities are private goods over which we have rights of ownership and choice, that we can freely select what we 'identify as'. The heightened salience of identity in modern political discourse thus represents an unwitting internalisation of the neoliberal view of humans as atomised individuals who navigate life purely by expressing consumer preferences. The idea that the identity of the speaker should count when assessing his or her argument is what the right used to denounce as 'identity politics' (now subsumed under the general concept of 'wokeness'), though it is in this way a logical outcome of Thatcherite and Reaganite economics. One strong critique of the critique of identity politics, on the other hand, points out that privileged white males, of the sort who make such complaints, don't have to worry about their identity because theirs is the default one of power and influence – whereas for various minorities identity might matter much more, not least in how it influences the ways in which privileged white males will treat them. Philosopher Alexander Douglas's deeply interesting book diagnoses our malaise, ecumenically, as a universal enslavement to identity. An alt-right rabble rouser who denounces identity politics is just as wedded to his identity as a leftwing 'activist' is wedded to theirs. And this, Douglas argues persuasively, explains the polarised viciousness of much present argument. People respond to criticisms of their views as though their very identity is being attacked. The response is visceral and emotional. That's why factchecking conspiracy theories doesn't work. And it's not just a social media problem; it's far worse than that. 'If you define yourself by your ethnicity or your taste in music,' Douglas argues, 'then you ipso facto demarcate yourself against others who do not share in that identity. Here we have the basis for division and intergroup conflict.' The escape route Douglas recommends is nothing so banal, then, as policing misinformation or even just being nicer to one another; no, we should strive to abandon identity all together. He deploys close readings of three thinkers from wildly differing epochs and cultures: the ancient Chinese sage Zhuangzi, the 17th-century Dutch philosopher Benedict Spinoza, and the 20th-century historian-critic René Girard. Each of them, he argues, hints at a similar ideal of enlightenment: to abandon our attachment to identity and become one with the undifferentiated flow of all things. This sounds fluffy and improbable in precis, but we should begin by noticing how fragile our own sense of self really is. Douglas says of his three thinkers: 'Look within, they would say, and you will find a mess. Introspection reveals only a confusion of qualities.' Oddly, the author doesn't mention the great Scottish philosopher David Hume, though his is probably the most famous expression of this idea: that what we call the self is, per Hume, 'nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement'. If so, it follows that what we think of as our identity must have been drawn from the example of others. This is the meaning of 'mimetic desire' as theorised by Girard: that we choose an admired person to imitate and so teach ourselves to want similar things. 'Individualism,' Douglas concludes, 'is really conformism to a model.' What we think of as our own special identity is just a suit of borrowed clothes. What, then, is the alternative? It is somehow to psychically merge with the 'superdeterminate' nature of Spinoza's concept of God, who exists everywhere and in every thing. Has any human being achieved such a feat? Perhaps, Douglas suggests, Jesus. Another model for us is Hundun, an emperor with no face in an old Chinese fable. His friends drilled holes into his head in an attempt to give him human features, and thereby killed him. Against Identity is a powerfully strange book, melding such matters with enjoyable references to Evelyn Waugh and Jean-Paul Sartre, and a strongly aphoristic turn of phrase. 'The 'inner voice',' he writes, 'is just the noise of others echoing inside your own emptiness.' To the 'romantic lie' that says you can be what you want to be, Douglas counterposes the bracing challenge: Don't be yourself. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Here, then, is a superb counterblast to modern identity fetishism. Whether readers will agree with its proposed solution is more doubtful. It warns against 'making value judgments', but we should make some value judgments, for example about murderers. And Douglas relays the Taoist advice he finds in Zhuangzi like this: 'We would be happier and more peaceful letting things flow, vanish, transform, be indistinct, be ambiguous' – which is all very well, but terrible advice if you're trying to build a bridge. Against Identity: The Wisdom of Escaping the Self by Alexander Douglas is published by Allen Lane (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Bloomberg
06-06-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Harvard, McKinsey and Davos Are Paying for Neoliberalism's Sins
Three institutions stood at the heart of the neoliberal regime that ran the world from the 1980s onward: Harvard University, McKinsey & Co. and the World Economic Forum (WEF). Harvard and McKinsey were the premier training grounds for the emerging global elite. The WEF's annual meeting at Davos was the annual meet-and-greet party for the people who had made it (and their journalistic chroniclers). All three institutions reinforced each other during the glory years of neoliberalism. And all three are currently in crisis. Their travails tell us a great deal about what was wrong with an idea that once delivered a necessary shock to a sclerotic Keynesian regime but was corrupted by its crude celebration of success. They can only recover their former vitality if they reflect seriously on what went wrong during the rah-rah years — and on their own central role in creating our current malaise.
