Crisis? What crisis? Aristocratic terrorism

Every dogma has its day

– Anthony Burgess

Most of the lumpenproletariat wandering through our city shopping malls and thoroughfares are invariably glued to smartphones and indoctrinated by passive vicarious entertainment. After several decades of rampant unfettered neoliberalism, the brainwashed canaille remains blissfully unaware of this opaque and sinister doctrine and its pernicious political impact. Many of the inculcated zombies would instinctively assume Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, George Stigler and Milton Friedman were professional footballers in the English Premier League with the Mont Pelerin Society.

The ideology initially emerged from the Austrian School of Economics just before the start of World War II and gained substantial traction through persistent propaganda and several editions of persuasive literature. This included books such as The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek and Bureaucracy by Ludwig von Mises, which were published in 1944. More recently, The Constitution of Liberty also by Hayek was released in 1960 and reinforced the Tory party manifesto under its illegitimate daughter of Satan in the United Kingdom.

During the 1960s, neoliberalism’s popularity in the USA rapidly intensified following the publication of Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman and involved collaboration with several notable academics and other fiscal racketeers from the notorious Chicago School of Economics.

Back in the Roaring Twenties another Windy City mobster embarked on a professional career of extortion and terror. He was subsequently jailed for tax evasion and eventually died from heart failure. His death was attributed to complications arising from syphilitic paresis and the faith-love-hope-justice dialectic prevailed accordingly.

This relentless neoliberal crusade embraced the Friedman doctrine or shareholder theory and George Stigler’s malevolent concept of regulatory capture, which encouraged tenacious lobbying. Meanwhile, the coercive ideology enriched corporate brigands at the expense of impoverished consumers.

The callous campaign coincided with global stagflation and the decline of Keynesian economics. Substantial discounts on winter tents did very little to assuage widespread vagrancy or panhandling and left a disenchanted and exhausted electorate feeling twitter and bisted. Amidst a miasma of ideological inertia, it favoured authoritarian populism and opted for the low road of sloganeering. Sometimes there is no alternative but we should always be wary of catchy advertising jingles masquerading as solutions.

Thatcher and Reagan

In the early 1980s, Margaret Thatcher, the United Kingdom’s prime minister formed a consanguineous relationship with US president, Ronald Reagan. This involved unequivocal support for neoliberalism with its sophism of trickle-down economics and the rising tide lifts all boats ideology became a political manifesto that rapidly transformed into corporate socialism. It promised freedom of choice but only variety absorbs variety and even the birds are now chained to the sky.

Neoliberalism is frequently described as capitalism on steroids although this curious colloquialism cunningly disguises many of its malignant ganglions. The Breitbart News Network and the Murdochracy with its red top rags both embrace capitalism and it is venerated as an irrefutable or axiomatic dogma.

Substantial evidence over many years indicates it is nothing more than organised spivvery. It consists of feasting, fucking and fraud, which is founded on colonial looting and embezzlement. Its most repellent features include privatisation, deregulation and the diminution of trade unions to crush any form of collective dissent or protest. Additional unsavoury aspects involve outsourcing with the franchising or subcontracting of essential public services, which encourages rent-seeking.

Its modus operandi is underpinned by a brutal boom, bust and quit cycle, which is tempered using relentless propaganda and promulgates an allegory that hard work or blood, sweat and tears generate prosperity. If the fable included any skerrick of truth, the individual wealth of many women in most developing nations would exceed the combined fortunes of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Stephen Allen Schwarzman.

Transforming this neoliberal ideology into a political manifesto was easily accomplished and involved explicit support from a plethora of renowned predators and extremely powerful corporate brigands across every industrial and commercial sector. These included: Alcoa, Anglo American, Archer Daniels Midland, BHP, Boeing, Cargill, Coca-Cola, ConocoPhillips, Coors Brewing, Dupont, ExxonMobil, General Electric, Glencore, Johnson & Johnson, Koch Industries, Nestle, Nike, Peabody Coal, Pfizer, Rio Tinto and Shell.

Meanwhile, a gallimaufry of fawning neoliberal think tanks, industry associations and other arms-length bodies amplified or attenuated the risk to reflect and align with the neoliberal agenda. This required cunning assistance from Bernaysian bedbugs who ensured any inflammatory narrative was befittingly tailored for public consumption.

The never had it so good propaganda disguised many unpalatable neoliberal objectives, which included privatising profit and socialising debt. The woeful reality of neoliberalism is that it is merely perpetual aristocratic terrorism, which expedites transfer of wealth from the underclass to the nobility and establishes who dominates whom.

These stealthy institutions often masquerade as independent analysts or business consultants providing impartial commentary but they are just treacherous corporate lobbyists engaged in regulatory or policy capture. A rapacious culture and commercial intent is conveniently camouflaged using virtuous monograms and impressive iconography.

The barbaric strategy involved many unimpeachable fellowships such as the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Bryce Harlow Foundation, the Adam Smith Institute, the Centre for Policy Studies and the Cato Institute.

The “Big Four”

Additional renowned buccaneers included the Boston Consulting Group and the infamous McKinsey & Company whose fingerprints can often be found amongst the rubble in some of the most egregious corporate disasters and financial catastrophes over recent decades. The shameful OxyContin opioid scandal involving Purdue Pharma and the notorious Sackler family with its empire of pain provides sufficient substantive evidence.

The big four cavalier accounting firms Deloitte, EY, KPMG, and PwC soon jumped on board the neoliberal gravy train and became embroiled in several high profile corporate scandals. These included multinational tax avoidance schemes and dubious business ethics, which emasculated the integrity of audits. Following the catastrophic collapse of Carillion in the United Kingdom one of several parliamentary inquiries revealed the company’s annual reports were reminiscent of a fairy tale and failed to provide a genuine statement covering the company’s dire financial predicament.

It soon transpired the KPMG audit team was unaware whether Carillion was owed £200m or vice versa. A Labour MP on the parliamentary inquiry committee categorically declared he would not hire KPMG to audit the contents of his fridge. Several of these major accounting firms were engaged in the development and implementation of Australia’s cataclysmic  home insulation program under the egregious leadership of Kevin Rudd.

The most extraordinary facet of this enigmatic doctrine was its gullible acceptance by many of our progressive democratic leaders. They bought the snake oil and imbibed in plenty of the neoliberal Kool Aid from Ayn Rand’s fountain of objectivism. These included Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and Kevin Rudd. A distinct deficit of any critical analysis or discernment from these inveigled show ponies confirmed it is far easier to fool somebody than to convince them that they have been hoodwinked.

Blair and Clinton

During his stint in the White House, US president Bill Clinton declared the era of big government was over. The bloviating tenure revealed many classic neoliberal traits with the deregulation of financial and telecommunications sectors, emasculating organised labour and eviscerating public welfare structures. Following the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression, Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal involved implementation of the Glass-Steagall Act. This legislation separated commercial and financial banking roles and restricted the accretion of overwhelming power across the US financial sector.

Almost seven decades later Bill Clinton repealed the legislation, which enabled substantial consolidation of financial services. It opened the neoliberal floodgates and directly contributed to the great financial crisis in 2008, which almost tanked the global economy. In 2016, Hilary Clinton embarked on an ambitious US presidential campaign but Donald Trump did not scupper its failure; it floundered because of her husband’s impulsive and imprudent activities and with a little help from his friends.

Meanwhile across the Atlantic over in Little Britain, Tony Blair trashed the UK Labour Party’s constitution and dabbled with Anthony Giddens’ ambitious Third Way. It required assistance from several notorious spin doctors including the gregarious but slippery Alastair Campbell and Mandy Mandelson. This nefarious prince of the dark arts recently resigned from the UK Labour Party and the House of Lords following serious allegations of malfeasance, which included collaboration and clandestine dealings with the late Jeffrey Epstein.

The Third Way promised a healthy compromise between Hayek and Keynesian economics but rapidly degenerated into dancing on a pinhead and eventually capitulated to the powerful and plundering neoliberal crusade. Much of the free market rhetoric was replicated in Australia through the Hawke, Keating, Rudd and Gillard governments. However, rejecting this inhumane ideology and replacing it with an authentic democratic socialist society is much more imperative today than it was since voting was first granted in Australia over a century ago.

It is disconcerting that over many decades most of our progressive governments have done very little or absolutely nothing to achieve their fundamental aims and objectives. This requires using the authority bestowed by the franchise to represent organised labour and reduce inequality between the rich and poor or the powerful and the powerless. In the past, many egalitarian parliamentarians used to apologise for this abject failure but nowadays our elected representatives often boast about the inconsistency and their mediocre achievements.

Neoliberalism with its merger of corporate and state interests and deification of shareholder theory provides many global corporate brigands and their socially autistic executives with impunity and a malevolent freedom to harm. Meanwhile, the faceless infantry of industrialisation suffers the horrific consequences and when the rich make war, it’s the poor who die (viz RoboDebt and Boeing 737 Max).

The malaise has infiltrated every structural level of government and despite an alleged separation of powers, it has even usurped the judiciary. Regulatory capture has tempered corporations law and other statutory legislation, which encourages and even rewards entrepreneurial chicanery or commercial thuggery. Corporate mobsters are bestowed with an order of chivalry and its hierarchical status is inversely proportional to the recipient’s emotional intelligence.

Cherished public services are outsourced and privatised and its most beneficial components are expropriated and stripped to the bone. Any essential but unprofitable features are typically left to rot or dumped. The boom, bust and quit cycle merely delivers private opulence and public squalor. It undermines democracy and all that remains are the most undesirable aspects of state power, which include coercion, corruption and oppression. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, vigilante security patrols and paramilitary policing for public safety and military prowess for national security.

Education vs Catastrophe

Civilisation is a race between education and catastrophe but government funding for universities and other tertiary education institutions is ruthlessly slashed without any consideration of the social consequences. These establishments inevitably turn to the corporate world and its many swashbuckling brigands for sponsorship and financial assistance. This eventually distorts the curriculum to reflect and align with the benefactor’s business objectives, which typically worship the Friedman doctrine to quench the ravenous maws of its shareholders.

Even our revered red-brick universities have degenerated into ideological battlegrounds and merely deliver degrees of decline supplemented by an astronomical and irrevocable Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS) debt. Recent scandals involving the Australian National University (ANU) and the Charles Sturt University corroborate many of these detrimental and unattractive traits. The only courses of any concern for the extravagant and embattled ANU chancellor are entrée, main and dessert and the skeleton of Richard Stanley Peters will be rattling in the chancellery.

Back in 1961, the English philosopher was the visiting professor at the ANU in Canberra. He was renowned for extensive research into the philosophy of education, which included publication of the influential Ethics and Education. During adolescence, his private tutor was none other than Eric Blair (aka George Orwell).

Meanwhile aboard a carousel of culpability, social welfare is reduced to warfare and speaking the truth in a climate of universal deception becomes a revolutionary act. Government of, by and for the people turns into a dystopian nightmare and the antagonistic state becomes an enemy in a raging battle between the government and its citizens. The cruel Robodebt debacle in Australia under its sanctimonious mooncalf provided plenty of substantive evidence. It was an extraordinary saga of venality, incompetence and cowardice yet the Australian Taxation Office remains reluctant to tackle multinational corporations over income tax evasion.

Paving a Path for Fascism

The neoliberal framework created a fertile environment for fascism that induced many sleepless nights for Friedrich Hayek and his indoctrinated free market fundamentalists. After countless years of gazing into Nietzsche’s abyss and chasing communist monsters such as Josef Stalin and Nicolae Ceaușescu, a modern but different version of totalitarianism has emerged, which was expedited by his ouroborosic doctrine. The serpent is eating its tail.

Neoliberal concepts and policies have insidiously influenced global financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which impose the ideology on many indebted countries. Numerous developing nations in Africa, Latin America, Asia and the South Pacific have been exploited through coercive structural adjustment programs.

These often demand deregulation, privatisation and abandonment of capital controls as a quid pro quo for debt relief or loans. State funding for critical public services including health and education is subsequently slashed and fiscal austerity prevails. Most of these undemocratic decisions are imposed unilaterally without any consultation or input from its citizens.

Situations often arise where neoliberal policies cannot be implemented domestically for political reasons. This forces multinational corporations to open a war chest and achieve their objectives internationally through the Investor State Dispute Settlement scheme, which enables aggrieved businesses to indict specific countries. If the nation loses, democratic decisions are revoked and national sovereignty is undermined accordingly.

Back in April 1938, President Franklin D Roosevelt sent the US Congress a vatic and ominous warning. It proclaimed the liberty of democracy is insecure if people tolerate the growth of private power and enable it to become stronger than its democratic state.