Dermott Hayes's Blog: Postcard from a Pigeon, page 55

It’s Complicated

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/complicated/

50 word stories

‘Let me get this straight, you didn’t want her to know you were scared of heights, so you arranged to meet her on the viewing deck of the Empire State and she agreed to meet you even though she’s chronically agoraphobic? You’re either insane or madly in love.’ ‘It’s complicated.’

Slightly More Than 100 Exceptional Works of Journalism

This fantastic nonfiction from 2015 is still worth discovering and pondering today.

The Atlantic’s compilation of 100 pieces of journalism of distinction from 2015
read more

Fractured Lands: How the Arab World Came Apart

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/08/11/magazine/isis-middle-east-arab-spring-fractured-lands.html?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits&_r=0
Photo credit:
Civilians fleeing Basra, Iraq, March 2003. Paolo Pellegrin/Magnum Photos

 

Fractured Lands: How the Arab World Came Apart














PART I: ORIGINS
PART II: THE IRAQ WAR
PART III: ARAB SPRING
PART IV: ISIS RISING
PART V: EXODUS





By Scott Anderson
Photographs by Paolo Pellegrin

This is a story unlike any we have previously published. It is much longer than the typical New York Times Magazine feature story; in print, it occupies an entire issue. The product of some 18 months of reporting, it tells the story of the catastrophe that has fractured the Arab world since the invasion of Iraq 13 years ago, leading to the rise of ISIS and the global refugee crisis. The geography of this catastrophe is broad and its causes are many, but its consequences — war and uncertainty throughout the world — are familiar to us all. Scott Anderson’s story gives the reader a visceral sense of how it all unfolded, through the eyes of six characters in Egypt, Libya, Syria, Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan. Accompanying Anderson’s text are 10 portfolios by the photographer Paolo Pellegrin, drawn from his extensive travels across the region over the last 14 years, as well as a landmark virtual-reality experience that embeds the viewer with the Iraqi fighting forces during the battle to retake Falluja.

read more

Take it Back for Paying it Forward

http://www.digitaltrends.com/web/ways-to-decentralize-the-web/?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits


















Home > Web > How the father of the World Wide Web plans to…





How the father of the World Wide Web plans to reclaim it from Facebook and Google
By David Weinberger — August 10, 2016 3:00 AM




 

When the World Wide Web first took off in the mid 1990s, the dream wasn’t just big, it was distributed: Everyone would have their own home page, everyone would post their thoughts – they weren’t called “blogs” until 1999 – and everyone would own their own data, for there was no one around offering to own it for us. The web consisted of nodes joined by links, with no center.

Oh, how times have changed.

Now a handful of companies own vast swaths of web activity – Facebook for social networking, Google for searching, eBay for auctions – and quite literally own the data their users have provided and generated. This gives these companies unprecedented power over us, and gives them such a competitive advantage that it’s pretty silly to think you’re going to start up a business that’s going to beat them at their own game. The fact that Facebook already has the data in 1.7 billion users’ profiles and, more important, the history of its users’ interactions means that you’re probably not going to attract a lot of savvy investors. Plus that’s where all your friend are already. Vendor lock-in is real.

Solid could make the web’s information noticeably smarter.

This has inspired an effort to re-decentralize the web. Two of the more important efforts – some would count blockchain as a third contributor – are architecturally very promising. The question is whether architecture will be enough.

Related:  The Internet is not a human right, FCC says

The first comes from Tim Berners-Lee who invented the web and gave it to us as a gift, without patents, copyrights, or trademarks. Berners-Lee’s new project, underway at his MIT lab, is called Solid (“social linked data”), a way for you to own your own data while making it available to the applications that you want to be able to use it.

With Solid, you store your data in “pods” (personal online data stores) that are hosted wherever you would like. But Solid isn’t just a storage system: It lets other applications ask for data. If Solid authenticates the apps and — importantly — if you’ve given permission for them to access that data, Solid delivers it.

Linking Open Data cloud diagram 2014, by Max Schmachtenberg, Christian Bizer, Anja Jentzsch and Richard Cyganiak.

For example, you might keep your personal information in one or several pods: the sort of data about yourself that you put into your Facebook profile; a list of your friends, family, and colleagues; your banking information; maps of where you’ve traveled; some health information. That way if someone built a new social networking application—perhaps to compete head-on with Facebook, or, more likely, to offer specialized services to people with shared interests—you could join by giving it permission to access the appropriate information in your pod. Your data in your pod would remain your own in every sense of the word: completely under your control, stored where you prefer, and usable only by apps that you’ve given permission to.

Solid is designed from the bottom up to enable the discovery and sharing of information. That’s why there’s “linked data” in the “LID” part of its name. Linked Data is another Berners-Lee invention, a way of expressing data that makes it easy to, well, link up across repositories. While Linked Data can be tough to master, Solid could make the web’s information noticeably smarter. For example, if you wanted to, you could give permission to a travel site or to a climate action group to access the information in your pods about your demographics and the trips you’ve taken. That group could mash that information up with data from other people’s pods to get an updated picture of where people are traveling and how that’s affecting local economies, carbon emissions, and perhaps national attitudes toward foreigners.

Will Solid and IPFS re-decentralize the Web?

Solid does all this without having to centralize information in hands that we may not—and often should not—fully trust.

The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) takes a different approach. It starts from the conviction that even having web pages identified by a pointer to the server that stores them is too centralized. Why not instead go the way of BitTorrent and let multiple computers supply parts of a page all at the same time? That way, if a web server goes down, it won’t take all of the pages on it with it. IPFS should make the web more resilient, and less subject to censorship.

Related:  Why isn’t the digital economy making life better? Douglas Rushkoff has an answer

To use IPFS at this point, you can install extensions to Chrome and Firefox, or resort to the more techie command-line approach. IPFS hopes, though, that its standards will be accepted by the W3C and IETF, the groups that decide what counts as an official part of the web and internet. That would help motivate the browsers to build in native support for the new protocol.

Will Solid and IPFS re-decentralize the Web? It comes down to demand: Are people going to care enough that they’ll put up with what may feel like a temporary step back? For example, it’s unlikely that new social networking apps based on Solid are going to launch with all of the sophistication and polish of Facebook. On the other hand, social networking services better designed for particular types of people – scientists, researchers, collaborative artists – might find it easier to get started. And it seems quite plausible that organizations that care about the long-term preservation of their web materials will find IPFS quite attractive, as might people sharing content that takes too long to load over the normal Web.

So, there’s some hope. These short-term scenarios do not have to displace the current giant hubs, just provide some alternatives to them. Ultimately the question is whether the forces that caused the web to become a series of centralized hubs will be pushed back by architectures and protocols that enable it to re-decentralize itself. The answer I suspect is no — unless we, the users of the web, demand it.

SINISTER

I didn’t find out ’til late but here’s wishing all my fellow southpaws a fruitful, creative future

Morbid Obsession

50 word stories.

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/obsessed/

‘It moved. I’m telling you, it moved.’ Everyone in the room exchanges a look, some openly doubtful, others disdainful, a few, surreptitiously, and still others with that look that hovers between tolerance and irritation. Finally, someone speaks, first, nudging the squished daddy-long-legs’ carcass before saying, dismissively, ‘You’re obsessed, it’s dead.’

Southern or Soul

Reblogged from michaelwtwitty at Afroculinaria.com

The only thing I enjoy more than reading about food, is eating it. I came across this story by Michawl W. Twitty and the photo stopped me, mid-scroll, so I dived in and read it, partly because the dish in the first photo reminded me, vaguely, of a dish with which I am familiar, in my own country.

Maybe someone can tell me, is that a pot of boiled ham with collard greens, on top? I ask, because it’s a dish I identify with, as an Irish person except we know it, or understand a similar culinary construction, as bacon and cabbage. Whatever way you shake it down, it was about using the cheapest cuts to go the longest way.

“What’s the difference between Southern food and soul food?” is perhaps the number one question we African American food writers get from the media.

“Ours just tastes better,” jokes Toni-Tipton Martin, author of award-winning The Jemima Code.  Adrian Miller,author of the also award-winning Soul Food, chalks it up to spicier, saltier, fattier, more sugary extremes in terms of palate.  I have been known to hit an audience with “one is flavored with oppression, the other with liberation–you decide which one.” All facts, figures and quips aside, we are no closer to the answer.  It would perhaps behoove us to ask a better question.  Why do we care?  Why even acknowledge a distinction between “Southern,” and “Soul,” at all?  What will it tell us about ourselves—the question tells us more about who we are than does the answer.

I have consistently said that soul food is the memory cuisine of the great and great-great-grandchildren of enslaved people.  Soul is the descendant looking back on an edible text that supposedly defines his shell and accounts for her essence.  It is the vernacular meal, the country bits, the funkiness of Blackness, the gastronomic equivalent to the visual, aural and oral elements of being colored in America.  Soul is not a reaction to the world from without, rather it is a consolidation of the narrative from within African American civilization, a necessary and expedient reduction of the complexity of our story into a repeatable, reliable, sustainable menu that dances between the Big House and the quarters, weekday miseries and holiday treasures.  Soul food is a condensed version–1619-to maybe 1960–a survey of everything that came before the moment we could wait no longer to be—American.

Southern is often code or short hand for white folks, or less often said but equally true, the rest of the South’s understanding of food with a flexible “door,” by which we enter and exit.  I have often found problematic that Southern-not only in the white mind but the black mind–which is to say just more plainly–human minds with different facades–perceive Southernness as something that can be compartmentalized.  Don’t get me wrong–our experience of the Southern narrative has never been completely the same and it was never intended to be.  When white people say “Southern,” it seems to be a fixed geography, a stance, a box, an otherness and perhaps a different species of nationlism.  When black people say Southern it seems to be a calling card, a reference to our “Old Country,” a nod to tradition.

But Southern and Soul are not cultural antipodes.  They are reference points in the cloud of memory.  The Southern soul was shaped by the African presence and following it, the Afri-Creole world and its colored, Negro, Black and African American  descendant selves.  Racial caste, a non-delight imposed on us rather than self-engendered made assumptions about the inherent difference of these close cousins–we were and are blood relatives–and always will be.  This perhaps renders the distinction moot–but we haven’t really understood this until now, that the white Southerner was a creation not just of the melding and meddling that happened long before he or she was a thought; but merely a product of the oppositional stance history granted said person.  As long as the white Southerner was the opposite of all that was not white, the white Southerner’s sense of “Southern” would be trapped in the amber of false power, a sense that he was Adam and she was Eve and the naming of creation belonged to them.

Meanwhile black Southerners were not only above in numbers and beyond in reach  in relation to Anglo America, they were products of an Atlantic World that essentially represented their expansion into the Western hemisphere long before the Americas were conceived as a “New Europe.”  In our blood remain the codes for the building blocks of Las Americas.  The Caribbean, Brazil, South and Central America, Mexico—all of it kissed with the touch or unending embrace of West, Central and Southeastern Africa.  Because of this, the supposed dichotomy of Southern vs. Soul cannot be read as a stand alone debate.  After all, could not the same be said about Cuba or Brazil or other places where the integration of Africa into the national mind is non-negotiable even if race, class and power are ever-shifting and frustratingly  murky.  As old an varnished as the term may be, the United States’ claim to Melting Pots and Salad Bowls has failed its place among the “Mulatto States of the Americas,” where it is clear something happened here that was not the replication of Western Europe or the British Isles, and even the navigation of native/indigenous selves was sausaged into the castings of salt vs. pepper, or in our case, Southern vs. Soul.

We are powerfully divided by concepts even though we are together in many ways, namely in spirit.  It is ironic that the burden of claiming and associating with unity has been consistently yoked to the Black man and woman rather than those whose sense of whiteness and the poisonous notion of “race,” can be traced back to the unholy marriage of chattel slavery and mercantilism and empire of the 17th century.  Black people are left with the job of dismantling prescriptions we had no hand in creating to assuage the just returns of those prescriptions–emotional and cultural dregs of anger, resentment, retarded growth an arrested or limited power that stain and imbue our lens, leaving us wrestling Dixie.

I suggest that we abandon the need to bring peace through ambiguity.  We want lines to melt and meld and its  not “all the same food,” food is not divisible by open claims of ownership but rather by necessary texts of meaning. Soul is the dialogue between past and present in search of a sustaining culinary narrative, Southern is an exercise in quasi-national cultural identity built on distinctions and oppositional character–these notions don’t emerge from the same place nor do they sound the same tone.  The conversation in which they are often both rather carelessly bandied about has the same end–to discern place, to account for the “location” of cook and eater, and to organize communities of eaters into manageable boxes.

These boxes–are the problem.  Look, kalach and paska is braided eggy Easter and holiday bread, it is not challah–which is also eggy braided bread.  They are cousins but they are not the same even if they have similar cultural functions and have a similar taste.  The relationship between Eastern Europe and its Ashkenazi Jewish minority is a tortuous journey, but the language, food, music, aesthetics and genes of Ashkenazi Jews are full of reminders that the Slavs among whom they found one thousand years of sojourn did not remain aloof.  The Shoah erased the unutterable truth that separations imposed by centuries of West meets East anti-Semitism could not halt the interpenetration of civilizations.  Despite all of this we remain addicted to the boxes that say there was once a true “us,” and a true “them.”

Come back to the South.  We know it was a confluence of cultures and people meeting and mixing up and down the ladders of caste, racial power, social capital and cultural bleeding. Is there room outside of our boxes that will allow us to re-imagine Southern and Soul as ideas that are less cognate than they are complimentary?  We can acknowledge a common family tree,  give nod to “the world they made together,” to similarity of contexts and even of forms, but to suggest a notion of Southern vs. Soul or Southern or Soul is missing the point.  This is a dialogue and dialectic of Southern and Soul.  Southern is soul and soul even outside of the South is Southern.  White folks who testify to love of okra do not nullify the original transactions that led to the Africanization of European Americans beneath the Mason-Dixon as the adoption of breads and macaroni and cheese and many other foods do not negate the power dynamic occupied by white culture on the American plantation.

Okra and Macaroni and Cheese–without a great dissertation, are good examples.  Okra is something northwest Europeans found on the way to being American.  It is something that tells me that I am not just American, but I have a story before America.  Macaroni and cheese (aka macaroni pie) tells me that I am incomplete without my American and before that continental European story even while I am the latest chapter of Africa’s move across the globe and into time and across boxes.  That my white Southern cousins can choose or deny our desire to serve these foods at the same restaurant or occasion is a matter of preference, but when they sit side by side on their plates or mine, they tell different stories about our journeys to the plate. These journeys are Southern and Soul and beyond–they are Western and African Diaspora, they are Atlantic World and Las Americas, they are Afro-Atlantic and Anglo-American.  It is our ability to perceive and appreciate the layers of history and self that spice our food that makes it so, not whether or not it can be neatly boxed and labeled as Southern or Soul.

 

ORGANIC, story of a fire

This a poem I wrote last year related to a fire that happened in the narrow streets of The Liberties, Dublin, my own neighbourhood and the oldest part of this ancient city. The fire was caused by an explosion in a malt house that caused a blaze when it spread to the casks of whiskey stored there. This soon spread to the building next door, a bonded warehouse, where more barrels of whiskey and raw spirit were stored. The fire soon spread through the heavily populated, narrow streets. The Dublin fire brigade tried to put the fire out with water but this only caused it to spread as the flaming whiskey was carried along by the water, through the narrow laneways. A disaster was averted when the chief fire officer, an Irishman, James Robert Ingram, who was first trained in the fledgling New York Fire Department (NYFD) dispatched men and carts to the local city depots where they gathered cartloads of horse manure. He instructed his men to shovel the horse manure onto the flaming whiskey, halting its advance and preventing a major disaster. There were four fatalities and a number of people suffered injuries but neither the fatalities nor the injuries were caused by fire but by the ingestion of the flaming whiskey.

It’s strange how the mind works and the associations made in a creative burst. I was doing my weekly shopping in an organic market in The Liberties on a square called Newmarket where a new distillery was being constructed. The previous evening I had sampled a new drink called ‘Flaming Pig’ which celebrated the Dublin whiskey fire of 1875. So there I was in an organic market, beside a whiskey distillery, in the Liberties and the fire of 1875 sprang to mind. So I bought a coffee and a croissant, took out a pen and paper, sat down and wrote this poem.

Indelible Echoes

 

Indelible Echoes

A harbour breeze,

a mountain spring,

rain, the scent of heather,

a hazel copse,

freshly cut turf,

crickets in the thatch,

laughing spuds,

sizzling mackerel

and periwinkles,

sand in your toes

and the salty brine

of seaweed,

a sunburst

of glorious colour

in my mind.

Indelible echoes

of a life

tread with memories

without footprints

The Faith that does not Speak its Name- Signs of the Time#15

Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems

Financial meltdown, environmental disaster and even the rise of Donald Trump – neoliberalism has played its part in them all. Why has the left failed to come up with an alternative?

By George Monbiot, THE GUARDIAN

Imagine if the people of the Soviet Union had never heard of communism. The ideology that dominates our lives has, for most of us, no name. Mention it in conversation and you’ll be rewarded with a shrug. Even if your listeners have heard the term before, they will struggle to define it. Neoliberalism: do you know what it is?

Its anonymity is both a symptom and cause of its power. It has played a major role in a remarkable variety of crises: the financial meltdown of 2007‑8, the offshoring of wealth and power, of which the Panama Papers offer us merely a glimpse, the slow collapse of public health and education, resurgent child poverty, the epidemic of loneliness, the collapse of ecosystems, the rise of Donald Trump. But we respond to these crises as if they emerge in isolation, apparently unaware that they have all been either catalysed or exacerbated by the same coherent philosophy; a philosophy that has – or had – a name. What greater power can there be than to operate namelessly?

Inequality is recast as virtuous. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve.

So pervasive has neoliberalism become that we seldom even recognise it as an ideology. We appear to accept the proposition that this utopian, millenarian faith describes a neutral force; a kind of biological law, like Darwin’s theory of evolution. But the philosophy arose as a conscious attempt to reshape human life and shift the locus of power.

Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.

Sign up to our Bookmarks newsletter

Read more

Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and regulation should be minimised, public services should be privatised. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve.

We internalise and reproduce its creeds. The rich persuade themselves that they acquired their wealth through merit, ignoring the advantages – such as education, inheritance and class – that may have helped to secure it. The poor begin to blame themselves for their failures, even when they can do little to change their circumstances.

Never mind structural unemployment: if you don’t have a job it’s because you are unenterprising. Never mind the impossible costs of housing: if your credit card is maxed out, you’re feckless and improvident. Never mind that your children no longer have a school playing field: if they get fat, it’s your fault. In a world governed by competition, those who fall behind become defined and self-defined as losers.

Among the results, as Paul Verhaeghe documents in his book What About Me? are epidemics of self-harm, eating disorders, depression, loneliness, performance anxiety and social phobia. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that Britain, in which neoliberal ideology has been most rigorously applied, is the loneliness capital of Europe. We are all neoliberals now.

***

The term neoliberalism was coined at a meeting in Paris in 1938. Among the delegates were two men who came to define the ideology, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Both exiles from Austria, they saw social democracy, exemplified by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and the gradual development of Britain’s welfare state, as manifestations of a collectivism that occupied the same spectrum as nazism and communism.

Advertisement

In The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, Hayek argued that government planning, by crushing individualism, would lead inexorably to totalitarian control. Like Mises’s book Bureaucracy, The Road to Serfdom was widely read. It came to the attention of some very wealthy people, who saw in the philosophy an opportunity to free themselves from regulation and tax. When, in 1947, Hayek founded the first organisation that would spread the doctrine of neoliberalism – the Mont Pelerin Society – it was supported financially by millionaires and their foundations.

With their help, he began to create what Daniel Stedman Jones describes in Masters of the Universe as “a kind of neoliberal international”: a transatlantic network of academics, businessmen, journalists and activists. The movement’s rich backers funded a series of thinktanks which would refine and promote the ideology. Among them were the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Centre for Policy Studies and the Adam Smith Institute. They also financed academic positions and departments, particularly at the universities of Chicago and Virginia.

As it evolved, neoliberalism became more strident. Hayek’s view that governments should regulate competition to prevent monopolies from forming gave way – among American apostles such as Milton Friedman – to the belief that monopoly power could be seen as a reward for efficiency.

Something else happened during this transition: the movement lost its name. In 1951, Friedman was happy to describe himself as a neoliberal. But soon after that, the term began to disappear. Stranger still, even as the ideology became crisper and the movement more coherent, the lost name was not replaced by any common alternative.

At first, despite its lavish funding, neoliberalism remained at the margins. The postwar consensus was almost universal: John Maynard Keynes’s economic prescriptions were widely applied, full employment and the relief of poverty were common goals in the US and much of western Europe, top rates of tax were high and governments sought social outcomes without embarrassment, developing new public services and safety nets.

But in the 1970s, when Keynesian policies began to fall apart and economic crises struck on both sides of the Atlantic, neoliberal ideas began to enter the mainstream. As Friedman remarked, “when the time came that you had to change … there was an alternative ready there to be picked up”. With the help of sympathetic journalists and political advisers, elements of neoliberalism, especially its prescriptions for monetary policy, were adopted by Jimmy Carter’s administration in the US and Jim Callaghan’s government in Britain.

It may seem strange that a doctrine promising choice should have been promoted with the slogan ‘there is no alternative’

After Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan took power, the rest of the package soon followed: massive tax cuts for the rich, the crushing of trade unions, deregulation, privatisation, outsourcing and competition in public services. Through the IMF, the World Bank, the Maastricht treaty and the World Trade Organisation, neoliberal policies were imposed – often without democratic consent – on much of the world. Most remarkable was its adoption among parties that once belonged to the left: Labour and the Democrats, for example. As Stedman Jones notes, “it is hard to think of another utopia to have been as fully realised.”

***

It may seem strange that a doctrine promising choice and freedom should have been promoted with the slogan “there is no alternative”. But, as Hayek remarked on a visit to Pinochet’s Chile – one of the first nations in which the programme was comprehensively applied – “my personal preference leans toward a liberal dictatorship rather than toward a democratic government devoid of liberalism”. The freedom that neoliberalism offers, which sounds so beguiling when expressed in general terms, turns out to mean freedom for the pike, not for the minnows.

Freedom from trade unions and collective bargaining means the freedom to suppress wages. Freedom from regulation means the freedom to poison rivers, endanger workers, charge iniquitous rates of interest and design exotic financial instruments. Freedom from tax means freedom from the distribution of wealth that lifts people out of poverty.

As Naomi Klein documents in The Shock Doctrine, neoliberal theorists advocated the use of crises to impose unpopular policies while people were distracted: for example, in the aftermath of Pinochet’s coup, the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina, which Friedman described as “an opportunity to radically reform the educational system” in New Orleans.

Where neoliberal policies cannot be imposed domestically, they are imposed internationally, through trade treaties incorporating “investor-state dispute settlement”: offshore tribunals in which corporations can press for the removal of social and environmental protections. When parliaments have voted to restrict sales of cigarettes, protect water supplies from mining companies, freeze energy bills or prevent pharmaceutical firms from ripping off the state, corporations have sued, often successfully. Democracy is reduced to theatre.

Neoliberalism was not conceived as a self-serving racket, but it rapidly became one

Another paradox of neoliberalism is that universal competition relies upon universal quantification and comparison. The result is that workers, job-seekers and public services of every kind are subject to a pettifogging, stifling regime of assessment and monitoring, designed to identify the winners and punish the losers. The doctrine that Von Mises proposed would free us from the bureaucratic nightmare of central planning has instead created one.

Neoliberalism was not conceived as a self-serving racket, but it rapidly became one. Economic growth has been markedly slower in the neoliberal era (since 1980 in Britain and the US) than it was in the preceding decades; but not for the very rich. Inequality in the distribution of both income and wealth, after 60 years of decline, rose rapidly in this era, due to the smashing of trade unions, tax reductions, rising rents, privatisation and deregulation.

The privatisation or marketisation of public services such as energy, water, trains, health, education, roads and prisons has enabled corporations to set up tollbooths in front of essential assets and charge rent, either to citizens or to government, for their use. Rent is another term for unearned income. When you pay an inflated price for a train ticket, only part of the fare compensates the operators for the money they spend on fuel, wages, rolling stock and other outlays. The rest reflects the fact that they have you over a barrel.

Those who own and run the UK’s privatised or semi-privatised services make stupendous fortunes by investing little and charging much. In Russia and India, oligarchs acquired state assets through firesales. In Mexico, Carlos Slim was granted control of almost all landline and mobile phone services and soon became the world’s richest man.

Financialisation, as Andrew Sayer notes in Why We Can’t Afford the Rich, has had a similar impact. “Like rent,” he argues, “interest is … unearned income that accrues without any effort”. As the poor become poorer and the rich become richer, the rich acquire increasing control over another crucial asset: money. Interest payments, overwhelmingly, are a transfer of money from the poor to the rich. As property prices and the withdrawal of state funding load people with debt (think of the switch from student grants to student loans), the banks and their executives clean up.

Sayer argues that the past four decades have been characterised by a transfer of wealth not only from the poor to the rich, but within the ranks of the wealthy: from those who make their money by producing new goods or services to those who make their money by controlling existing assets and harvesting rent, interest or capital gains. Earned income has been supplanted by unearned income.

Neoliberal policies are everywhere beset by market failures. Not only are the banks too big to fail, but so are the corporations now charged with delivering public services. As Tony Judt pointed out in Ill Fares the Land, Hayek forgot that vital national services cannot be allowed to collapse, which means that competition cannot run its course. Business takes the profits, the state keeps the risk.

The greater the failure, the more extreme the ideology becomes. Governments use neoliberal crises as both excuse and opportunity to cut taxes, privatise remaining public services, rip holes in the social safety net, deregulate corporations and re-regulate citizens. The self-hating state now sinks its teeth into every organ of the public sector.

Perhaps the most dangerous impact of neoliberalism is not the economic crises it has caused, but the political crisis. As the domain of the state is reduced, our ability to change the course of our lives through voting also contracts. Instead, neoliberal theory asserts, people can exercise choice through spending. But some have more to spend than others: in the great consumer or shareholder democracy, votes are not equally distributed. The result is a disempowerment of the poor and middle. As parties of the right and former left adopt similar neoliberal policies, disempowerment turns to disenfranchisement. Large numbers of people have been shed from politics.

Chris Hedges remarks that “fascist movements build their base not from the politically active but the politically inactive, the ‘losers’ who feel, often correctly, they have no voice or role to play in the political establishment”. When political debate no longer speaks to us, people become responsive instead to slogans, symbols and sensation. To the admirers of Trump, for example, facts and arguments appear irrelevant.

Judt explained that when the thick mesh of interactions between people and the state has been reduced to nothing but authority and obedience, the only remaining force that binds us is state power. The totalitarianism Hayek feared is more likely to emerge when governments, having lost the moral authority that arises from the delivery of public services, are reduced to “cajoling, threatening and ultimately coercing people to obey them”.

***

Like communism, neoliberalism is the God that failed. But the zombie doctrine staggers on, and one of the reasons is its anonymity. Or rather, a cluster of anonymities.

The invisible doctrine of the invisible hand is promoted by invisible backers. Slowly, very slowly, we have begun to discover the names of a few of them. We find that the Institute of Economic Affairs, which has argued forcefully in the media against the further regulation of the tobacco industry, has been secretly funded by British American Tobacco since 1963. We discover that Charles and David Koch, two of the richest men in the world, founded the institute that set up the Tea Party movement. We find that Charles Koch, in establishing one of his thinktanks, noted that “in order to avoid undesirable criticism, how the organisation is controlled and directed should not be widely advertised”.

The nouveau riche were once disparaged by those who had inherited their money. Today, the relationship has been reversed

The words used by neoliberalism often conceal more than they elucidate. “The market” sounds like a natural system that might bear upon us equally, like gravity or atmospheric pressure. But it is fraught with power relations. What “the market wants” tends to mean what corporations and their bosses want. “Investment”, as Sayer notes, means two quite different things. One is the funding of productive and socially useful activities, the other is the purchase of existing assets to milk them for rent, interest, dividends and capital gains. Using the same word for different activities “camouflages the sources of wealth”, leading us to confuse wealth extraction with wealth creation.

A century ago, the nouveau riche were disparaged by those who had inherited their money. Entrepreneurs sought social acceptance by passing themselves off as rentiers. Today, the relationship has been reversed: the rentiers and inheritors style themselves entre preneurs. They claim to have earned their unearned income.

These anonymities and confusions mesh with the namelessness and placelessness of modern capitalism: the franchise model which ensures that workers do not know for whom they toil; the companies registered through a network of offshore secrecy regimes so complex that even the police cannot discover the beneficial owners; the tax arrangements that bamboozle governments; the financial products no one understands.

The anonymity of neoliberalism is fiercely guarded. Those who are influenced by Hayek, Mises and Friedman tend to reject the term, maintaining – with some justice – that it is used today only pejoratively. But they offer us no substitute. Some describe themselves as classical liberals or libertarians, but these descriptions are both misleading and curiously self-effacing, as they suggest that there is nothing novel about The Road to Serfdom, Bureaucracy or Friedman’s classic work, Capitalism and Freedom.

***

For all that, there is something admirable about the neoliberal project, at least in its early stages. It was a distinctive, innovative philosophy promoted by a coherent network of thinkers and activists with a clear plan of action. It was patient and persistent. The Road to Serfdom became the path to power.

Neoliberalism’s triumph also reflects the failure of the left. When laissez-faire economics led to catastrophe in 1929, Keynes devised a comprehensive economic theory to replace it. When Keynesian demand management hit the buffers in the 70s, there was an alternative ready. But when neoliberalism fell apart in 2008 there was … nothing. This is why the zombie walks. The left and centre have produced no new general framework of economic thought for 80 years.

Every invocation of Lord Keynes is an admission of failure. To propose Keynesian solutions to the crises of the 21st century is to ignore three obvious problems. It is hard to mobilise people around old ideas; the flaws exposed in the 70s have not gone away; and, most importantly, they have nothing to say about our gravest predicament: the environmental crisis. Keynesianism works by stimulating consumer demand to promote economic growth. Consumer demand and economic growth are the motors of environmental destruction.

What the history of both Keynesianism and neoliberalism show is that it’s not enough to oppose a broken system. A coherent alternative has to be proposed. For Labour, the Democrats and the wider left, the central task should be to develop an economic Apollo programme, a conscious attempt to design a new system, tailored to the demands of the 21st century.