Trump Takes Share Of US Company Profits & Pentagon Guarantees Rare Earth Prices

I don’t know what you mean by “neoliberalism is dying” as a definition of neoliberalism in practice I just heard was “the state is organized to support and enrich capitalists”. It’s not laissez-faire or free market, it’s giving the rich lots of government-backed goodies and also bailing them out when they screw up.

And that is also consistent with fascist economies. Libertoons seem to think that the capitalist class has some devotion to free markets and no government and laissez-faire. They don’t, they’re perfectly fine with an activist government that organizes things so that they always get richer even if they screw up. They don’t mind the government organizing things to and giving them orders as long as profits are guaranteed.

Saying neoliberalism is just whatever guarantees the highest profits for capitalists is pointless. We have a name for that already: It’s called “capitalism”. That’s the whole point of capitalists and capitalism at all times. For neoliberalism to be worth having as a term at all, it has to refer to some sub-ideology, some at least somewhat coherent strategy within capitalism. And it does.

True, Neoliberalism is not genuinely about laissez-faire, but it’s about stuff that resembles laissez faire. So for instance, as Dean Baker never tires of pointing out, free trade was never about free trade, given that half of it was about extending massive patent and copyright protection regimes. But still, it was about free trade for some in some ways. Neoliberalism is about making sure corporations have no restraints or responsibilities, but still have tons of rights, particularly property rights. The dictator grabbing 10% of the shares and telling companies what to do is putting restraints on corporations; it’s not a neoliberal thing. And elements of Trumpism (not all–like all fascism, it’s incoherent) are not even about maximizing profit, except maybe in a quite indirect way–they’re about nationalism, albeit approached really stupidly.

The mind-numbing cliché, “free market economy”, is a key component of neoliberal rhetoric, but not neoliberal ideology, which is embodied by the Washington Consensus idea of institutionalizing a rules-based order to which there can be no alternative. The EU regime, based theoretically on the principles of “free movement” — free movement of capital, free movement of goods and services and free movement of people — implemented by a self-governing bureaucracy issuing endless complex rules and directives is the embodiment of neoliberalism.

The “democratic deficit” is conspicuous in the structure and operation of the EU. There is a European Parliament — a ceremonial debating society and a parking structure for minor politicians taking a time-out — has very little responsibility and no power in the complex overall structure, where the executive Commission, the Courts (endowed with a right of “judicial review” similar to the U.S. concept with all the anti-democratic power that implies) and the Central Bank do all the work and have all the discretion.

When you try to conjure in your mind what “neoliberalism” as a political program aspires to ultimately, I think you should think of the EU as the embodiment of that program: a powerful and vigorous bureaucratic state impartially administering a set of rules implementing principles empowering private capital and private enterprise, but constraining and limiting sharply the scope and reach of popular democratic impulses and use of state power: no deficit spending to support social programs or national industrial planning, for example.

When you associate “neoliberalism” with Reagan-Thatcher/Clinton-Blair as we do in the Anglosphere, we see it as “deregulation” and the pervasive political corruption of “markets-in-everything”, where the Speaker of the House makes a fortune trading stocks. For us, it is the disabling of public purpose in the exercise of public power. Neoliberalism has been implemented in “software” so to speak. For the Europeans, neoliberalism has been implemented in the “hardware” of the “constitution” of the European Union, in the structure of the supranational state. In the latter context, it is easier to see how neoliberalism seeks a strong, post-democratic state, the better to suppress and constrain populist nationalist movements that might oppose the exercise of private bourgeois power and conservation of wealth. This is the neoliberalism that Quinn Slobodian has chronicled.

Historically, the neoliberalism of Hayek and Friedman, of the Mont Pelerin Society, was born in the heady experience of the Hapsburg twilight, when Franz-Joseph signed his truce with the liberals in Hungary and his anachronistic Empire experienced an economic and cultural renaissance of nearly 45 years duration of dazzling proportions, that gave the world, Klimt, Mahler, Wittgenstein, Freud, Tesla et cetera. That “et cetera” includes the First World War and Hitler, but why find fault in a dazzling gem?

From the idealization of that emergent historical circumstance, neoliberalism inherits both its cosmopolitanism and faith in the beneficence of the limited but absolutist state as well as its mission to suppress populist nationalism.

“Now I don’t think America’s oligarchy going to go Sultanistic, in the sense of one ruling oligarch. The only way that happens is if Trump manages to turn the Presidency into a Trump family matter, and that seems unlikely.”

A basic question: are we sure that someone named Trump is actually ruling the country as opposed to simply announcing to the public the decisions made through a process and by individuals we know nothing about?

A country run by one charismatic leader is inherently unstable — just take the leader down and done. We have seen a decapitation strategy implemented recently — but it mostly failed, because the leadership was dispersed. Nonetheless, the weakness of this leadership was that it was visible.

A country run by a motley crew of individuals, each for a very short time selected by a process akin to a carnival is also inherently unstable. Any country that is run like that is asking for being color revolutioned. Take Georgia , a country in the Caucasus, it has a carnival-like system, and the wealthy Western countries controlled it by equipping the most attractive horse that won the carnival competition. But then somehow a local wealthy individual with independent interest and the will to power emerged. He took control of the carnivals and had his horse win. The Western forces were unhappy, but could not do much. Georgia now has an independent policy, the policy of its wealthy ruler.

Oligarchy is inherently unstable, even more unstable than direct democracy. The Athenian oligarchies were short lived. It is a pit stop before the next tyrant. How do we know that a single oligarch, a family or a clan has not already won in the US and is running the place from the comfort of their mansion unburden by the attention of the masses and threat of the adversaries?

Black holes can be only found out through the effects they have on the visible objects. No one has every seen a black hole by definition. The visible around a black hole behaves in a certain nonrandom way, and so the best explanation is that an invisible super massive object controls it. But — hey — we could also argue that the visible behaves the it does out of its own volition, no need for the black hole conspiracy.

To the extent that Nvidia is partnering with Intel, the word has been out for a while that Intel blew it’s future by spending a decade purchasing its own stocks instead of making any effort at all to innovate and stay at the front of the industry. Now they are so far behind they will never catch up. Don’t know how this effects its partnership with Nvidia, but it can’t be good. Several months ago when I had to replace the CPU that runs the desktop system I am using to post this comment right now, I made a point of getting the one unit at Best Buy that did NOT have an Intel core. So the word about Intel had been out there for a while.