#neoliberalism — Public Fediverse posts

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

@2legged So, #Burnham is a #liar, like #Starmer is (was) a liar, & Blair was a liar & #Trump is a liar. We are so used to #liars in #politics, now, just like we're used to #neoliberalism. Many of us are heartily sick & tired of it!

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."

#AuDHD #ActuallyAutistic #Neoliberalism

"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

#FillingTheZoneWithShit

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.

Neoliberalism and the Gospel
https://khanya.wordpress.com/2014/10/02/neoliberalism-and-the-gospel/
#neoliberalism #ChristianValues #economics #theology

“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.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/south-keys-metro-to-be-replaced-by-food-basics-costing-employees-jobs-9.7302247

#neoliberalism #labour #Metro #FoodBasics #Ottawa #UFCW #groceries #ndp

Public conversation about public problems

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.

#neoliberalism #AusPol #Substack

“Island where it constantly rains is experiencing another drought”

by Laura and Normal Island News on Substack

@uk_politics

“When Margaret Thatcher made England and Wales the only countries in the world with fully privatised water, the naysayers argued it was a terrible idea. Today, everyone agrees privatisation has been a roaring success.

It has delivered an impressive rise in customer bills which has coincided with an equally impressive rise in shareholder profits. These improvements were delivered through efficiency savings, such as not building any reservoirs since 1992 and forgetting about silly ideas like sewage treatment. Thanks to neoliberalism, turds are now a common sight at our beaches and marine life is not”

https://open.substack.com/pub/normalislandnews/p/island-where-it-constantly-rains

#Press #SocialMedia #UK #Drought #WaterPrivatization #ShareholderValue #NeoLiberalism #Thatcher

“No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which by far the greater part of the numbers are poor and miserable”*…

Progressives have been fighting on the neoliberals’ terms. Nick Hanauer and Eric Beinhocker propose a flip, an approach that is more humane– and that promises a far more prosperous country…

In 1962, the historian of science Thomas Kuhn published a short book that changed how educated people think about intellectual progress. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions argued that knowledge does not advance through the steady accumulation of better facts. It advances through ruptures—moments when a prevailing framework, or paradigm, collapses under the weight of anomalies it cannot explain, and a new one takes its place. The Ptolemaic model of the solar system gave way to the Copernican. Newtonian mechanics gave way to relativity. The shift is rarely smooth or purely rational. People resist. Institutions resist. The old framework doesn’t simply yield to better evidence; it has to be displaced by an alternative that can explain not just the anomalies but everything the old model explained, plus more.

We are living through one of those moments now. The prevailing economic paradigm—the neoliberal consensus that dominated policymaking across the Western world from roughly the mid-1970 to 2020—has collapsed. It has not collapsed quietly, in the pages of academic journals, where it was already in serious disrepute. It has collapsed loudly, publicly, and catastrophically, in the lived experience of hundreds of millions of people who were told the model would deliver prosperity. Instead, they watched it deliver stagnation and insecurity and drew the obvious conclusion: The people running the system either do not know what they’re doing or do not care about them, or both. The democratic consequences of that conclusion are now visible everywhere.

This essay argues three points. First, that the democratic emergency we face—the rise of authoritarian populism across the developed world—is not primarily a political failure but an economic one. It is the result of a failed set of economic ideas: When the neoliberal paradigm lost its intellectual and popular support after the 2008 crisis, there was no credible alternative, and the resulting vacuum was filled by populism. Second, progressive responses—while valuable—have not filled the paradigm vacuum because they have operated largely within the neoliberal frame rather than replacing it. Third, that an emerging modern economic consensus we call Market Humanism has the potential to replace neoliberalism—not by proposing a new set of policies, but by constructing a new paradigm grounded in twenty-first-century science. This new paradigm can not only to help us create an economy that is fair, prosperous, and sustainable, but also repair our broken democracy…

[The authors explain how neoliberalism broke the social contract (and democracy) and why the progressive response has failed. They explain the “scientific revolutions” that set the stage for Market Humanism: “From Selfish Homo Economicus to Cooperative Homo Sapiens,” “From Markets as Efficient Allocators to Markets as Evolutionary Innovators,” “From Value Is Market Price to Value Is Solutions to Human Problems,” and “From Inequality Is Meritocratic to Inequality Is Created by Structure and Power.” They then outline the steps necessary– the four imperatives of Market Humanism: “Grow the economy by making it fairer,” “Grow the economy by supporting the middle class,” “Measure what matters—human flourishing,” and “Make the state a partner in prosperity.” And they explain how Market Humanism can help democracy succeed. They conclude…}

… It is useful to recall what happened during a previous time a major paradigm changed. For most of recorded history—thousands of generations—people looked up at the sky and saw what seemed obvious: the sun moved, the earth stood still. Entire systems of knowledge, theology, and political authority were built on that foundation. Then, in the early seventeenth century, Galileo Galilei perfected the telescope and turned it on the heavens. What he saw—moons rotating around Jupiter and the phases of Venus—was inconsistent with a universe organized around a stationary earth at the center of the universe. Galileo’s theory actually had evidence you could see with your own eyes.

He brought that evidence to the most powerful institution of his day. He showed the Church’s leaders what the telescope revealed. They looked. They understood what they were seeing. And then they told Galileo to shove his telescope where the sun did not shine. He was tried by the Inquisition and spent the rest of his life under house arrest.

Why? Not because they couldn’t see the evidence. But because if the earth was diminished, so were they. The geocentric paradigm was not just a theory of astronomy. It was a foundation of institutional authority, and the people whose power rested on that foundation were not interested in whether it was true. They were interested in whether it was useful—to them.

This is the situation we are in now. The evidence against the neoliberal paradigm is not ambiguous—we can see it right in front of our eyes. But the paradigm has made a small number of people very wealthy, and they have spent decades building the infrastructure that keeps it alive in policy long after it died in the academy. They will not abandon it. They will call the alternative radical, un-American, dangerous. The rich and powerful will circle the wagons and spend whatever it takes.

They will still lose. Not because they suddenly see the light. Because a paradigm that is empirically wrong cannot indefinitely outrun one that is empirically right—not when ordinary people are the ones living the difference and noticing it. The defenders of the old paradigm will lose because stagnant wages, predatory healthcare, and hollowed-out communities are not abstract to the Americans paying their costs. They will lose because ordinary people pick up the telescope, look through it, and refuse to look away.

That is what Market Humanism is. It is not the property of the academics who built it or the policymakers who will implement it. It belongs to the people whose lives it describes—workers, small business owners, teachers, nurses, scientists, young people told their whole lives that the rules of the neoliberal economy are incontestable facts of nature, and who now are beginning to suspect, rightly, that they were scammed.

This paradigm does not need permission from the people in power to take hold. It needs only to be claimed by the people who have been waiting for it. That is how every paradigm that ever displaced a wrong one has won—not because the powerful changed their minds, but because enough ordinary people stopped accepting a story that no longer matched the world they lived in.

That is what is being asked of us now. The telescope is pointing at the sky. The evidence is clear. The alternative is built. What remains is the work of ordinary people, in extraordinary numbers, refusing to live inside a story that no longer explains the world. The people told for 50 years there is no alternative are about to discover that there is—and that it has been theirs all along.

Fascinating, provocative, and eminently worth reading in full: “Market Humanism: A New Paradigm for a New Era,” from @nickhanauer.bsky.social and @ericbeinhocker.bsky.social.

* Adam Smith, Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1776

###

As we cultivate change, we might recall that it was on this date in 1991 that Nickelodeon premiered its first three original animated series– “Nicktoons“– Doug, Rugrats, and Ren & Stimpy. One of these was not like the other two.

Ren & Stimpy follows the misadventures of Ren Höek, an emotionally unstable (indeed, psychotic) chihuahua; and Stimpy, a good-natured and dimwitted Manx cat. But while Doug and Rugrats were clearly family fare, Ren & Stimpy featured a surreal blend of dark humor, sexual innuendo, violence, and shock. It’s producers had trouble with Standards and Practices; it’s creator was fired after the first year… but kids loved it. It ran for five seasons and 52 episodes (93 segments).

https://youtu.be/dlEqWvFH9Jg?si=i17ySxC5uqtm8IBs

Why #neoliberalism is a fucking joke

#BoldPolitics with#ZackPolanski

Guest: #ThomasPiketty

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=d_83pFubGvQ&pp=ygUhdGhlIGJvbGQgcG9saXRpY3MsIFRob21hcyBQaWtrZXR5

“… the moment you privatise a public service is also the day you should set the date for the Royal Commission into the failures and abuses of the system.”
@ocratato @InsurgoFormica @anne_twain @aj
#AusPol #inequality #TotalitarianCapitalism #privatisation #neoliberalism

What can I say… I like the cut of his jib. All that remains is to see how #Burnham will sail. He is certainly saying all of the right things to society at large and especially to those whose anger and frutrations require outlets, a safety valve to let off some steam, before *Repairs* begin. #AlboPM, *take note* if you value your legacy.

“In his first speech as prime minister on July 17, Burnham promised “good growth in every postcode”, saying his victory in the Makerfield by-election, which returned him to Westminster, was a call “on behalf of forgotten places everywhere up and down this country, for a return of the Labour they once knew”.

“We must recognise that this generation of politicians, myself included, have failed to challenge a political culture and an economic model that simply doesn’t work well enough for ordinary people.”

Burnham charts that failure to “a series of wrong-turns in the 1980s”.

“Four decades of the neoliberalism that began in the 1980s have not been kind to the places that built our party, nor to the communities across the UK in rural and coastal areas,” he said.

“Political power was centralised and economic power was privatised.”
Source: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-09/burnham-farage-grievance-politics-hanson-uk-prime-minister/107004586

#UKPol #AusPol #Economics #NeoLIberalism #StateCapture #PublicInfrastructure #UKLabour. #AusLabor

“When #finance dominates an #economy instead of serving, the whole country pays the price”
#Banksters #insurers #shadowbanks #neoliberalism #capitalism
#TaxResearchOrgUk