Robert

“In the longer term, business itself will be harmed by shifting from R&D to financial manipulations. In earlier days, that might have been a concern. But managerial ethic has shifted from the time when viability of the firm was a serious concern to today’s focus on gain tomorrow. The long-term prospects for the firm become lesser considerations—or for human society generally. Nothing could reveal this shift with more brilliant clarity than a matter already discussed: the virtually reflexive decisions to race toward destruction, with eyes open, if it yields short-term gain. Right now profits are spectacular and CEO salaries have skyrocketed to the stratosphere, dragging other managerial rewards with them, while for the general population, real wages stagnate, social spending is meager, unions and other interferences with “sound economics” are dismantled. The best of all possible worlds. So why care if my firm will go under after I’ve moved to greener pastures, or for that matter, why care if I leave to my grandchildren a world in which they have some chance for decent survival? Capitalist mentality gone insane. There is, of course, the usual problem. The rascal multitude. They’re not too happy about the undermining of functioning democracy and basic rights. I should add the same is true in Europe. In fact, even more so. The attack on democracy in Europe is even sharper than here. Significant decisions about society and politics are out of the hands of the population. They’re made by unelected bureaucrats in Brussels: the IMF, the Central Bank, the European Commission. All of this, all over the world, is leading to anger, resentment, and bitterness. You see it right now in the Yellow Vest movement in France, but it’s everywhere. In election after election, the centrist parties are collapsing. It’s happening here, too. Parties happen to be keeping their names in our rigid two-party system, but the centrist elements are losing their grip.”
― Noam Chomsky, Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance

“At its heart, neoliberalism is a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual—not collective, please note—individual entrepreneurial freedoms defined in very particular ways, and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, so-called “free markets,” and so-called “free” trade. If I could just have my hands doing air quotes, I’d be doing it continuously, but you can see that in your imagination. The role of the state under neoliberal philosophy is to create and preserve an institutional framework that’s appropriate to these kinds of practices. It must guarantee the quality and integrity of money. Also set up those military defense, police, and legal structures and functions required to secure private property rights, and to guarantee, by force if need be (and we’ve seen some of this already in the conversation about militarism; we’ll see more of it), by force if need be, the proper functioning of markets. That’s the role of the state. If markets do not exist in areas such as land, water, education, health care, social security, or environmental pollution, then they must be created by state action if necessary. You can see these things immediately as either prior public goods or public resources, these are all to be brought under the rubrics of the market through privatization, an essential feature of neoliberalism. Any other actions by the state are deemed then to be illegitimate, but you can tell already that the state has a very significant role to play here, even though proponents of neoliberalism and their rhetoric constantly downplay both the role and the necessity of the state. It should also be quite clear, immediately and despite this rhetoric, that neoliberalism is not really an unencumbered, non-state-mediated enterprise.”
― Noam Chomsky, Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance

“Thinking in an anxious state, scientists have found, leads to a pessimistic cognitive bias; when an anxious brain processes ambiguous information, it tends to choose the more pessimistic from among the likely interpretations. Your brain becomes overactive in perceiving threats and tends to predict dire outcomes when faced with uncertainty. It’s easy to understand why brains might be designed that way; being in a punishing environment, one would be wise to interpret ambiguous data as being more threatening, or less desirable, than one might if the surroundings were safe and pleasant.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, Emotional: How Feelings Shape Our Thinking

“History teaches us that all ruling elites try to portray themselves as the natural and durable social order, even ones that are in serious crisis, that threaten to devour their environmental base in order to continually recreate their hierarchal structure of power and privilege. And all ruling elites are scornful and intolerant of alternative viewpoints.”
― Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism