#neoliberalism — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #neoliberalism, aggregated by home.social.
-
A call has been launched to participate in large scale strikes at the beginning of september to fight against the further destruction of social security by the current government. On September 4th dock workers in #Rotterdam, #Amsterdam and #Zeeland will lay down the work throughout the day. The following Wednesday, September 9th, the whole country will be shut down by a public transport and railway strike. The strikes are a response to the government plans to impose cuts on unemployment benefits (WW), disability benefits (WIA) and to raise the retirement age.
Strikes going on the offensive
These #strike actions are more conflictive than before in a number of ways. Previously actions only took place in a part of the day: public transport stopped only in the morning rush hours and the ports only during the night shift. Now the dock #workers won’t work all day and the public transport and rail strike lasts a full 24 hours. The entire rail sector and transportation services will stop at the same time. Buses in both cities and country side will not run, trams and subways will stop and all trains will be stationary. But also technicians and other logistical and infrastructural support staff from ProRail and DB-cargo will lay down their work. The entire rail service and infrastructure will be shut down.
Such a coordinated action has not occurred in the #Netherlands in a long time. What has not happened in the past decade is that the trade unions are calling for strike as a form of protest against government policy. Strikes are usually mainly about sector Collective Labour Agreements and not about political decisions. A choice has now been made to intervene in political decisions, something that has been put forward above all by the members of the unions themselves. It shows that people start to realise their class position and power and use it as a form of in it as counter-power.
Austerity politics is war
The austerity politics of the Jetten government is directly linked to the rising #military expenditures. Former Prime Minister Rutte, now #NATO Chief, announced without shame that #Europe should #finance the increased military budgets with money from people's pensions and by cutting into social security. The Netherlands obliged immediately. These cuts are a further attack on the working class and an offensive in a war waged against us from above.
The strikes on September 4th and 9th are a first active move to fight back. Not only are workers in ports and railways indirectly protesting the increase in military expenditures, they also directly – be it or not knowingly, wanting or explicitly - shut down the weakest link in the military logistics of the war machine in the Netherlands. What activist groups have been trying for years to achieve the workers can do in less than 36 hours. The quality of the actions themselves demonstrates the importance of mobilised workers and the ability of workers' organisation to counter-power and subversion.
Spread, support, agitate!
Let’s actively support the strikes of September 4th and 9th! By joining and spreading the strike itself to other sectors and services. By organising agitation and disturbances in the daily life that will do its best to keep going out like nothing's wrong. By actively supporting the strikers politically and morally. By attacking the institutions of the war machine and capital. By organising ourselves not only to defend our WW, WIA and AOW, but above all to reverse the war waged from above. Let us transform the #war of the bosses and politicians into war against bosses and politicians!
Against (austerity)politics – against the war machine!
Class war now!
https://acties.todon.nl/event/4-and-9-september-steun-de-staking-dolacz-do-strajku-grevi-destekle-support-the-strike#GeneralStrikeNow #generalstrike #WorkersRights #ClassWar #AusterityIsClassWar #NoWarButCalssWar #eupol EU #austerityPolitics #neoliberalism #capitalism #EatTheRich #FuckTheMilitary #FuckWarmongers #warmongers #workingClass
-
Victorians please bombard your MP to NOT privatise public water.
#auspol #neoliberalism #politics #water
Labor is truly a right wing neoliberal stooge party.
https://archive.md/7jNh6 -
You rarely get anywhere simply by renaming things. All you do is lose the historical thread, then recreate the same mess under a new name.
This is one of the sins of liberalism and the “post-politics” crew: #stupidindividualism, where everyone reinvents the wheel instead of building on shared history and community.
The #deathcult is simply a metaphor for the invisible power of #neoliberalism. These metaphors and hashtags are ways of making mainstream thinking visible and making it dirty.
But they only work if a community or affinity group uses them together, consistently and collectively.
Otherwise, we just fall back into the same old #stupidindividualism we are trying to change and challenge.
#OMN #OpenWeb #Commons #4opens #Mainstreaming #Neoliberalism
-
“Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhuman”*…
Why are health care costs so high in the U.S.? Harvard public health scholar John McDonough chalks it up to a “wrong turn” in 1980, and the consequences that have ensued…
“What happened in 1980?” John McDonough wondered every time he looked at the numbers.
After 1980, U.S. healthcare became far more expensive than care in peer nations such as France and Germany. In 1980, the U.S. was at the top of a tight pack of industrialized democracies. After that, the cost of American healthcare soared. By 2024, U.S. spending as a percentage of GDP was about 50 percent higher than that of peer nations.
“In the early 1980s, we can see a significant upsurge,” McDonough, professor of the practice of public health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said in an interview. “All of a sudden, we jumped from the rest of the crowd and were now in a category by ourselves. Over the following 40, 45 years, the distance kept growing.”
McDonough knew what he could rule out: Any suggestion that Americans get more for their money. On the contrary, millions of U.S. citizens are uninsured; out-of-pocket costs and medical debt are high; and even people with insurance have trouble getting appointments. Meanwhile, physician satisfaction is low, leading to early retirements and migration to nontraditional models like concierge care.
When the pandemic hit, McDonough had time for a deep dive into the issue. This month, after a five-year “labor of love,” he’s presenting his answer in a new book, America’s Wrong Turn: US Health Care in the Neoliberal Era [here]. In it, McDonough links increases in healthcare costs to a new political and economic era dominated by a belief in an unfettered free market, tax cuts, deregulation, privatization, smaller government, increased immigration, and free trade.
This trend in U.S. policy — “Reaganomics” before it became “neoliberalism” — included tax, spending, and regulatory overhauls instituted during President Ronald Reagan’s eight years in the White House. But McDonough, a Democrat who served 13 years in the Massachusetts House of Representatives, isn’t just interested in Reagan. Over the next 40 years, some presidents adhered to neoliberalism’s tenets but even those who didn’t were influenced by its deep penetration into the nation’s political and economic ecosystem, he says.
McDonough found a guide in the writings of Yale University political scientist Stephen Skowronek, who suggests that presidents should be measured by the durability and influence of their ideas and values well beyond their terms in office. Skowronek identified only five singular and decades-long eras in U.S. history, those of Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan.
While Reagan was the first president to espouse neoliberal political and economic philosophy, the core ideas date back decades, fostered by Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, who became a key economic adviser to Reagan.
“There was a New Deal-FDR era between 1933 and 1980,” McDonough said. “The neoliberal era that Reagan kicked off saw itself as the corrective to the pro-government prior era. Important dynamic consistencies persisted among Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and even Barack Obama. There were sets of beliefs with a Republican conservative flavor and with a Democratic flavor that were surprisingly consistent.”
When describing the U.S. healthcare system under neoliberalism, McDonough, who worked with U.S. senators on the Affordable Care Act, cites several major effects, chief among them a permissiveness toward corporate mergers and consolidations that reduces competition, and an unleashing of private equity.
Since the 1980s, U.S. healthcare has become increasingly consolidated, dominated by fewer and larger organizations. The two largest dialysis centers have 92 percent of the U.S. market, for example, while the two largest providers of intravenous solutions control 75 percent of the market. The two largest syringe manufacturers have a 69 percent market share.
Consolidation extends to physician and hospital markets, with 90 percent of hospital markets, 65 percent of physician specialist markets, and 74 percent of health insurance markets considered highly concentrated, McDonough writes.
One argument for larger organizations is the potential for cost saving through both efficiencies and a greater ability to negotiate savings, but the cost-saving record of larger organizations in healthcare is poor, McDonough says. He cites a 2022 RAND study that indicates that price increases of between 3 percent and 65 percent accompany hospital mergers.
Private equity’s focus on generating profits to maximize shareholder value conflicts with improving patient care, McDonough argues. When private equity firms target businesses, enhance their operations, and quickly resell them at a profit, critics say the value extraction from the deals creates harmful operating cuts and dismantling rather than business improvement.
McDonough reviews other key forces in the evolution of U.S. healthcare in recent decades, including fragmentation leading to high administrative costs, low spending on public health and preventive care, unequal access and uneven quality of care, and cost shifts onto consumers via copays, coinsurance and other cost-sharing mechanisms, which result in high levels of medical debt.
McDonough offers prescriptions, but recognizes that change will require political buy-in for things such as strengthened antitrust action to break up megacompanies and stronger regulation of prescription drug pricing, both difficult in an era of sharply divided politics. Government, along with industry, needs to reaffirm a commitment to patient care as the center of its efforts, he says, while also foregrounding equity, access, affordability, and population health.
“The damage to U.S. health and medical care from the 40-year neoliberal era has left considerable harm for patients and consumers, for medical workers at all levels, and for public/population health,” McDonough said. “It will take radical action to reinvigorate the values and principles of our health system that have been lost and eroded. An essential way to do this is to understand how we got to this position in the first place.”…
How we got here and how to respond: “How to fix U.S. healthcare? ‘Radical action’,” from @harvardmagazine.bsky.social.
For a case in point, see David Oks‘ “Why American ambulance rides are so expensive” (source of the image at the top).
And for a more straightforward, but somewhat more “radical” prescription than McDonough’s, see: “Universal Health Coverage Could Save $1 Trillion and 114,000 Lives Every Year, Yale Study Projects,” from the Yale School of Public Health: “A single-payer universal health care system could cover every American, save more than 100,000 lives a year, and still cost $1 trillion less than the system it would replace…”
Finally: this is the third (R)D in a row that focuses on (some of) the consequences of the unholy infection of government by business, largely in the U.S. (though, of course, we can see the phenomenon all over the world). The focus shifts with tomorrow’s post. But before we go, Dylan Riley‘s pithy diagnosis of “the chaotic obscenity of our current moment”: “The Thesis of Political Capitalism.”
* Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
###
As we actually make America healthy again, we might recall that it was on this date in 1793 that prominent Philadelphia physician (and Declaration of Independence signatory) Benjamin Rush alerted the city’s mayor that an epidemic of mosquito-borne yellow fever was fast emerging.
In the summer of that year, refugees from a yellow fever epidemic in the Caribbean fled to Philadelphia. Within weeks, people throughout the city were experiencing symptoms. By the middle of October, around 100 people were dying from the virus daily. Caring for the victims so strained public services that the local city government collapsed. Philadelphia was also the seat of the United States government at the time, but federal authorities simply evacuated the city in the face of the raging epidemic. Eventually, a cold front eliminated Philadelphia’s mosquito population, and the death toll fell to 20 per day by late October. By the time the epidemic ended, roughly 5,000 people had died.
Today, a vaccine prevents yellow fever in much of the world, though thousands of unvaccinated people still die every year from the disease.
The Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793 (source) #ambulance #BenjaminRush #culture #health #healthCare #history #JohnMcDonough #medicine #neoliberalism #Philadelphia #privateEquity #publicHealth #Science #singlePayer #singlePayerHealthCoverage #universalHealthCare #universalHealthCoverage #YellowFever -
#ChristianNationalism, #ProsperityGospel - an alliance between economic #neoliberalism, #political #ultraconservatism, and #ChristianFundamentalism -, and #AmericanExceptionalism are the foundation of the #indoctrination machine that fuels the #WhiteSupremacist cult in the #US, the tragic reason why so many Americans are delusional and detached from reality.
-
Sixty-nine-year-old Wynd Kaufmyn, a retired teacher from #Berkeley, #California, is believed to be the first person imprisoned for protesting the development of artificial intelligence, after she and other members of the group StopAI were arrested during a sit-in protest at the headquarters of OpenAI.
#Ai #OpenAI #Science #Ethics #DirectAction #Neoliberalism #Capitalism #Oligarchy #StateViolence #AlgorithmicViolence #ExtinctionEvent
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v99DkPP6LVY -
Ideology can become invisible. #Neoliberalism doesn't usually present itself as an ideology; it presents itself as “common sense”, “human nature”, “the economy”, or simply “the way things are”.
That makes it difficult to challenge because people are arguing from inside the framework without seeing the framework itself. You can point to inequality, climate destruction, exploitation or social fragmentation, but the assumptions producing those things remain largely unquestioned.
#eoliberalism's superpower is pretending it doesn't exist. And #mainstreaming reinforces that invisibility by constantly narrowing what is considered reasonable or realistic.
So perhaps the first step is making the invisible visible: learning to recognise the assumptions shaping our thinking, naming them, and creating spaces where we can think outside them.
That is part of what #OMN and the #4opens are trying to do - build practical social structures where different ways of organising, communicating and making decisions can actually be experienced rather than merely argued about.
We are not completely fucked. But we do need to start seeing the cage before we can find the way out.
-
The remains of unthinking #neoliberalism are a #deathcult. #mainstreaming makes it feel like “normal life” while embedding harm, inequality and exploitation deep into our economic and social structures.
The hardest part is that the ideology becomes invisible. It gets inside how we think, so deeply that we stop seeing it as ideology at all. That invisibility is what makes the #deathcult so difficult to challenge.
-
@mpjgregoire When freedom is sold, it is always universal, which is fatuous.
Freedom is a two-way street, as demonstrated by conflicts between/among two or more people. Your freedom to strike me ends at my nose, as it were.
When freedom is sold, what is overlooked is imbalances of power. We constantly fail to account for the accumulation of power.
Freedom from is just as important as freedom to.
#neoliberalism -
Yes, @rmblaber1956. Labour is a neoliberal project.
But given Burnham's stated rejection of #neoliberalism and his generally canny communications, I was surprised by the crassness of declaring that had let a billionaire write policy. I had expected that care would be taken to avoid exposing such a direct link.
-
RE: https://mastodon.scot/@simon_brooke/117115279590977166
Wonderful essay by @RichardJMurphy! 👏
"People learn what respectable opinion sounds like. They learn which questions serious people are permitted to ask. They learn which ideas are described as credible and which are dismissed before discussion begins. They adjust what I call their priors to match these expectations. Most importantly, they learn what they are not supposed to notice.
This is why neurodivergent thinking might be much more politically significant than neoliberal accounts of neurodivergence allow.
Someone who does not process social conformity in the expected way can be difficult to discipline intellectually.
The person who notices the contradiction cannot necessarily be persuaded to ignore it simply because everyone else does.
The person who becomes intensely interested in the problem may spend years examining it."
-
"What if some of the differences we call #neurodivergence are not products of #neoliberalism at all, but are instead amongst the cognitive differences that make resistance to neoliberalism possible?"
An extraordinarily well expressed and interesting essay from @RichardJMurphy (which, obviously, I strongly agree with) on the role of #ActuallyAutistc people in social change and resistance.
https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2026/08/18/neoliberalism-noise-and-hearing-the-signal/#gsc.tab=0
-
"creating noise can be an extraordinarily effective way to exercise power. You do not have to suppress inconvenient information if you can overwhelm it. You do not have to demonstrate that an alternative is wrong if you can fill the available space with claims that it is impossible, unaffordable, dangerous or absurd. This is one of the ways in which #neoliberalism maintains its power." -- @RichardJMurphy
https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2026/08/18/neoliberalism-noise-and-hearing-the-signal/#gsc.tab=0
-
@drrimmer
#Fleecing #Raping #Nepo #Grifters were ever so callous in their business dealings. Left *unchecked* they would bring down democratic govts… oh,oh… look… it’s happening in the $US already.#Warnings #Antifa #UnfettedCapitalism #UnregulatedFinancialMarkets #NeoLiberalism #NeoClassicalEconomics #TaxTheRich #BanPoliticalDonations #AusPol #NationalizeCriticalInfrastructure #SocialDemocracy #MMT #RegulateMarkets #NoMoreBillionaires #BanLobbyism (there should be no privileged access to political leaders or govt officials)
-
#Money, the interesting thing about it is if you #exist in #poverty, you desperately need it for your day to day survival, then if your on the opposite end as in being a multi million or billionaire in reality money means nothing, because everything you own and do is leveraged off of debt that you one don't actually own and second can never actually satisfy, and the rules of the game are very different for those in poverty, and the rules are slightly different if your in the middle, but if your on top, the rules don't apply to you unless somehow your generation and hoarding of wealth imposes upon another top income holder, basically if your in poverty all the way to the bottom end of double digit millions, your beholden to the entire state if it where, and beyond that the entire state apparently is beholden to you and your ability to leverage debt, it is a rigged system of epic inequality and strongly embraces prejudice against the rest of us whom simply would appreciate the basics in life to be readily available without so much turmoil, and stress to our mental and physical wellbeing, money is an illusion of power and has left far to many of us going hungry, literally;
You can encourage my continued useless #poetry, creativity and expression of self, #commentary, random thoughts, #philosophy and ideas, and by doing so your helping to feed, house and clothe a #disabled man living in #poverty, $5-10-15 It All Helps, via #cashapp at $woctxphotog or via #paypal at paypal.com/donate?campaign_id=…
#Austerity #Awareness #BrokenSystem #Capitalism #Change #ChronicPoverty #CorporateGreed #CriticalThinking #DailyStruggle #DebtSlavery #DisabledVoices #DisabilityJustice #EconomicInequality #EconomicJustice #EconomicViolence #Economics #Education #ExistentialThought #Financial #FinancialTrauma #FinanciallyDistressed #FoodInsecurity #Hunger #Homelessness #HumanCost #IllusionOfWealth #Inequality #Justice #LateStageCapitalism #MarginalizedVoices #MentalHealthMatters #MutualAid #Neoliberalism #Oligarchy #PhilosophyOfMoney #Plutocracy #Politics #PovertyAwareness #PowerAndControl #PowerDynamics #RealTalk #Reform #RiggedSystem #SocialCommentary #SocialEconomicWarfare #SocialJustice #Society #Solidarity #SpeakTruth #StatusQuo #SupportDisabled #Survival #SystemicOppression #SystemicPoverty #TaxTheRich #TruthBomb #TruthToPower #WakeUpCall #WealthGap #WealthInequality #WorkingClass #WorkingPoor
-
“When we start using #prices as value in #politics, the question of what is #valuable gets removed from #democracy, from #policy and gets moved into #bureaucracy where we can not discuss what is valuable and important.”
#Tegenlicht #Healthcare #neoliberalism
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Wi54Bpwavns -
Hashtags are for organising - an antidote to #stupidindividualism.
Use some unusual tags when they add meaning. #deathcult, for example, is a useful description of #neoliberalism in the era of #XR and a bit of history too, from “classical liberalism” to the Irish famine.
The rest can add value and tell a story when a group of people actually uses them.
-
“Deep Unlearning”: Timnit Gebru on AI Hype, Ethics & Algorithmic Racial Bias
#DemocracyNow #Internet #Culture #CulturalHegemony #Ai #History #Ethics #Policy #Law #Economics #Capitalism #Neoliberalism #Patriarchy #Ethnocentrism #ColonialViolence #AlgorithmicViolence #WhiteSupremacy
@timnitGebru
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCB-NQtsKrs -
Unbelievable! Recent amputee was discharged to a shelter in North Bay as hospital copes with its lack of available beds.
Under Doug Ford, Ontario the country’s richest province has the fewest hospital beds and staff per capita in Canada.
#onpoli #DougFord #healthcare #neoliberalism #privatization #Capitalism
https://www.baytoday.ca/local-news/recent-amputee-moved-to-low-barrier-shelter-by-nbrhc-12527241 -
A Metro grocery store in Ottawa is planning to convert to a Food Basics grocery store ("Food Basics" being Metro's discount grocery store). In doing so, most of the employees are laid off, meaning they'll have to reapply. Potentially the union, UFCW, could "file a grievance challenging a company's claim of a work shortage". Such things take time, and won't be much help to the workers now.
#neoliberalism #labour #Metro #FoodBasics #Ottawa #UFCW #groceries #ndp
-
Public conversation about public problems
Our current working models of “governance” in #opensource are mostly: Monarchy - the dictator for life.Aristocracy - the devs.Oligarchy - NGOs/funders.And way out on the edge: Democracy - the users. We need better governance native to the #openweb. Let's look at this at a more personal level before the normal wider social view. Yes, in #FOSS development the devs doing the work deserve respect, and #OMN isn't arguing that users should simply demand things from volunteers. The point […]https://hamishcampbell.com/public-conversation-about-public-problems/
-
@gnoll110 tossing up which is worse:
a) article from DeepCutNews on nazi lovin' substack:
https://karlbode.com/substack-still-has-a-nazi-problem-and-doesnt-care/
b) It's written by Greg Jericho, an economist who is the very embodiment of neoliberalism, encouraging us to have a tax, funded by gas, which means more gas, which enables Andrew Forrest, a billionaire who funds Greg Jericho via The Australia Institute and Forrest's Minderoo Foundation.
