Archive for December 2022

Neoliberalism, that catch-phrase of our time, is one of those squishy words that resists a simple definition, but everyone feels its meaning as they struggle to pay the rent, put off going to the doctor, gasp for breath in rotten air or see their sons and daughters shipped off to fight distant wars for oil or lithium. Neoliberalism is nothing less than capitalism’s latest and perhaps cruelest manifestation. It arrived stealthily in America under the seemingly benign grin of Jimmy Carter, kicked into gear under Reagan, and reached maximum speed during the Clinton era, when the legacy of FDR was dismantled and its government pastures were sown with deregulationist salt so it would never take root again. Cockburn and St. Clair were there to cover this economic warfare from the frontlines—from NAFTA to the gutting of welfare, the drug war to the Wall Street bailouts. These dispatches from the wreckage document how a generation of political do-gooders cut the cords of the social safety net, letting millions fall into destitution “for their own good,” as the wealthiest among us fattened their bank accounts in a frenzy of accumulation, an orgy of thieves.