Privatization Keeps Failing, Will We Learn Government Can Be Better than Business?

How many tax dollars must we pay before we question the conservative Gospel that business knows better than bureaucrats? Friends of political leaders owe fortunes to the public’s buy-in to private sector superiority – and its lust for wads of upfront money. We ... Read more

How capital captured politics

In June, WikiLeaks made public the secret draft text of the agreement. It covers 50 countries and most of the world's trade in services. It sets rules that would assist the expansion of financial multinationals into other nations by preventing regulatory barriers. It prohibits more regulation of financial ... Read more

Workers and environmentalists of the world, unite!

Breaking out of the multiple crises that afflict the world today — both in the domains of the economy and work as well as in the domain of ecology and public health — requires no lesser effort than completely abandoning the “treadmill of production”, including the politics, economics and ... Read more

Gary Becker and the Neoliberal Subject

Gary Becker, University Professor of Economics and Sociology at the University of Chicago, has died at the age of eighty three. I am certainly not going to attempt an obituary or assessment. But something Tim Carmody said on Twitter caught my eye: “People sometimes talk about ‘neoliberalism’ as a kind of ... Read more

No Choice but Freedom

When people claim that the “free market” system outproduced Soviet Communism, what they are saying is that markets more effectively produced discipline. It was more successful at imposing patterns of human action and restriction conducive to military and economic production than a command economy was capable of imposing. ... Read more

Our Neoliberal President

President Obama’s 2015 budget request last month revived his abortive 2014 budget proposal to privatize the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). What are we to make of a Democratic president repeatedly proposing to sell off the publicly financed and administered redevelopment program, widely seen as one of the great ... Read more

The Era of Financialization, An Interview with Costas Lapavitsas: Parts 1 and 2

These are the first two parts of a four-part interview with Costas Lapavitsas focusing on the Era of Financialization and the transformations at the “molecular” level of capitalism that are driving changes in economic performance and policy in both high-income and ... Read more

When Public Goods Come Under Attack

Canada provides an instructive case. While struggling to secure democratic ownership and management of a variety of public goods and services (such as the healthcare system and education) helped forge the country as a people, neoliberalism is making some disturbing headway in the privatization of what was ... Read more

The Schizophrenic State

The real Eliot Ness wasn’t nearly as cool as De Palma made him out to be in The Untouchables. But no matter, Neil Barofsky was still pretty chuffed when Treasury officials likened him to the Prohibition agent. Barofsky felt like Ness during his twenty-seven months in the DC swamp, where “bullshit, ego, politics, turf, ... Read more