Pandora Papers ! .

[Tony 10]

15 hours ago, Staunton said:

...furthermore, those basic features of neoliberal doctrine: hostility to taxation; hostility towards the public sector; privatisation; and deregulation are mutually dependent.

 

For example, privatisation depends upon deregulation. Contractors that take over public services require deregulatory action from government - they wish only to generate private profit, and providing services threatens that primary intention. As is apparent from consideration of any number of privatisations, standards are immediately driven down once a public service is put in private hands. Competent personnel (expensive) are swiftly replaced with unskilled or semi-skilled (cheaper) workers, and irresponsible savings sought at every level of provision. This leads to service failure, which requires a mechanism for escaping responsibility - hence legislative requirements are revised downwards or abolished by compliant governments - deregulation - so that contractors are provided with an effective way to evade accountability as standards slip and the inevitable failures occur.

 

Add to this factor the neoliberal insistence that free provision of essential public services distort the 'market' by frustrating competition.

 

The privatisation of public services leads to the rapid erosion of standards, provision compromised and service users (now redefined as 'customers') rendered powerless when promised services are not delivered.

☝️Simply not true.

 

A healthy economy requires minimum friction which means better and appropriate regulation, not more, and not always less for that matter. Just better and appropriate. 

 

Customers also have a part to play and with better and appropriate regulation it removes the space for poor and unnecessary regulation which I firmly believe will be rewarded by at the ballot box with a happier and more fulfilled populace. As a group, people aren't stupid but you wouldn't think so by listening to the interventionists who confuse knowledge and expertise with the crystal ball they are gazing into.

 

 

 

 

  -------

On 10/10/2021 at 16:56, Tony said:

Really. Can you think of something that government does well at the moment? 

 

On 10/10/2021 at 19:51, tinfoilhat said:

Nothing really. They underfund alot and that makes a difference. I've seen things that have been run by the public sector and seen it farmed out to sodexo et al and it's much worse. Do you think utilities would be better or worse under state ownership?  Railways? Put it this way if you looked at the most reliable/most value for money railways across the globe - where would we come? And we invented the bloody things!

 

Better question would be, why can't our government run things properly.

Can you think of a government that "runs things properly"? 

 

(We could carry on playing this game until the penny drops :) )  

Edited October 12, 2021 by Tony

[Staunton 18]

There are lots of other things that neoliberal governments do, for example: limit state education (to training and skills, preventing pupils developing interpretative and analytical skills); limit opportunity; capture media and erode meaningful journalism, suppressing any attempts to inform people in a fair and balanced manner on political matters, promoting instead distraction (celebrity, sensation, scandal, sexualised content, royalty-watching and sport);  manage perceptions (P. R.); attack community-oriented and cooperative institutions; outlaw union activity; criminalise protest; promote individualistic behaviours;  fund and organise ideologically motivated lobbying; weaponise bureaucracy.

 

Nevertheless, those four crude factors of the neoliberal project - hostility towards taxation, resentment at the very existence of a public sector - which they seek to abolish (with any potentially profitable services being privatised), and deregulation (i.e. the eliminaton of laws and therefore accountability) are the hallmarks of an ideology dedicated to the further enrichment the rich at the expense of the poor everywhere.

[Tony 10]

☝️ what @Staunton just described there is every single "Peoples' Republic Of [insert despotic regime of choice]".

 

Perhaps this "neoliberal" thing is really just an artificial construct made up of ideas that certain groups of grumpy disaffected people don't like.  Basically, it's a conspiracy theory for latter-day Marxixts.

[Anna B 1,414]

4 hours ago, Tony said:

☝️Simply not true.

 

A healthy economy requires minimum friction which means better and appropriate regulation, not more, and not always less for that matter. Just better and appropriate. 

 

Customers also have a part to play and with better and appropriate regulation it removes the space for poor and unnecessary regulation which I firmly believe will be rewarded by at the ballot box with a happier and more fulfilled populace. As a group, people aren't stupid but you wouldn't think so by listening to the interventionists who confuse knowledge and expertise with the crystal ball they are gazing into.

 

 -------

 

Can you think of a government that "runs things properly"? 

 

(We could carry on playing this game until the penny drops :) )  

It was the deregulation of the banking industry that directly caused the 2008 financial crash.

It was Thatcher who deregulated in the UK.

Yet the Conservatives managed to pass the blame onto Labour ('...who caused this financial mess.')

 

Such is the power of the simple soundbite when supported by the media, that the Tories managed to make it stick in the minds of the electorate, it lost Labour the next election, and gave the Tories an excuse to impose years and years of 'Austerity' cuts on the population. This in turn created untold misery in deregulated employment, housing, health, and exacerbated the Covid pandemic and caused the deaths of thousands of people.

 

Deregulation in the hands of the Tories does not end well....  

[Tony 10]

1 minute ago, Anna B said:

It was the deregulation of the banking industry that directly caused the 2008 financial crash.

It was Thatcher who deregulated in the UK.

Yet the Conservatives managed to pass the blame onto Labour ('...who caused this financial mess.')

 

Such is the power of the simple soundbite when supported by the media, that the Tories managed to make it stick in the minds of the electorate, it lost Labour the next election, and gave the Tories an excuse to impose years and years of 'Austerity' cuts on the population. This in turn created untold misery in deregulated employment, housing, health, and exacerbated the Covid pandemic and caused the deaths of thousands of people.

 

Deregulation in the hands of the Tories does not end well....  

I think you will find it was the exposure of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mack to subprime lending and poor hedging decisions, but don't let facts get in the way that it was poor regulation, not deregulation that contributed to the 2008 event.

 

Incidentally, Labour had been running the UK for 11 years by 2008, not the Tories. 

[Anna B 1,414]

40 minutes ago, Tony said:

I think you will find it was the exposure of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mack to subprime lending and poor hedging decisions, but don't let facts get in the way that it was poor regulation, not deregulation that contributed to the 2008 event.

 

Incidentally, Labour had been running the UK for 11 years by 2008, not the Tories. 

Disagree. You are resorting to semantics.

Thatcher made great headlines out of the deregulation of the financial industry as part of her move to Free Market Economics, which has morphed now into worldwide Neoliberalism, and has caused many of the world's current problems.

Sure, there may have been some regulation in place, but the subsequent free- for- all meant the rules could be bent/ ignored/ manipulated, couldn't they,  and were encouraged to be thus if meant the banks turned an even greater profit. 

 

The fact that Blair's government did little to redress the balance (from which Blair personally profited mightily) is one of the reasons he is despised by many Labour voters, but he did not preside over the cause, and did not cause the crash. And anyway look what happened to Corbyn when he tried to make changes. 

 

After 40 years the chickens are now coming home to roost, and we are seeing the long term results of letting the system roam free and get out of hand.

 

For years I have been trying to raise people's awareness of this and how it will cripple the world and divide it into a divided society with a handful of winners in control, and millions of losers scrambling for the scraps. The pandemic has simply accelerated the inevitable and highlighted the problems, and in the eyes of some, been used to great effect to subdue and control the population in our 'new normal' world.   

Edited October 12, 2021 by Anna B

[Tony 10]

☝️ Wrong, followed by weapons grade Socialist Worker conspiracy stuff.

Edited October 12, 2021 by Tony

[Anna B 1,414]

2 minutes ago, Tony said:

☝️ Wrong, followed by weapons grade Socialist Worker conspiracy stuff.

That the best you can do...?

[Tony 10]

It deserves no more.

[Staunton 18]

Neoliberalism intends to bring about the disintegration of reality and it does so at a cultural level via the deployment of ideology, by orchestrating interventions intended to help create the kind of world they say it already is, to pretend that neoliberalism is the natural condition, and that its claims are scientific. It is not, they are not.

 

For example, when a series of scientific experiments demonstrate conclusively that a theory is incorrect a scientist will abandon the theory. However, when a neoliberal claim is demonstrably false there follows an attempt to change the world to fit the theory, through press campaigns, government lobbying, and funding ideologically oriented think tanks to reorient government and public beliefs towards a position favourable to neoliberal doctrine. And as with attempts to discredit the link between tobacco and cancer, and that between pollution and the climate crisis, neoliberals will also pay pliable scientists huge sums to encourage their refutation of established scientific research, not with any hope of victory within the science community, but simply to erode the confidence of ordinary people in relation to the findings of qualified professionals.

 

Neoliberalism is a bogus but effective project, deployed for and on behalf of wealth to consolidate advantage and drain resources (financial, cultural and political) from ordinary people.

 

We must recall that the theme of this thread is the astonishing proportions of tax abuse revealed in the Pandora Papers (as did the Panama Papers (2016) and the Paradise Papers (2017) before them). It is surely a mystery that here on this forum there are voices championing tax abuse, a technique specifically designed and deployed to drain resources (money) from local communities like Sheffield and concentrate wealth offshore, elsewhere, in the sheltered bank accounts of the rich, powerful and privileged few.

 

Baudelaire's proclamation that the Devil's best trick is to persuade us that he does not exist applies equally to the neoliberal project. Those at the heart of the neoliberal project (the Mont Pelerin Society; the Washington and London think-tanks; the right-wing media platforms such as Fox News, The Sun and the Daily Mail; and captured political parties (especially but not only the US Republican Party and the Conservative Party here in the UK), and their self-selecting supporters will always bluster, distract, seek to ridicule critics, and/or simply deny the reality of neoliberalism.

 

What the neoliberal project has structured is a world of astonishing inequality (do we really believe Johnson's levelling up nonsense - are we all to be millionaires?), exploitation (zero-hour contracts; essential workers on or below the minimum wage and requiring top-up from Universal Credit to survive), unaccountable private sector abuse of public revenue (for example the shocking £multi-billion scandals of the PPE and Test & Trace debacle here in the UK) and political paralysis (the effectively dismantled HMRC; the criminalisation of protest). Are these issues a reality or nothing more than conspiracy theories? They have all been covered by the BBC which, incidentally this very minute as I write, is reporting the utter disaster of the government's response to the coronavirus pandemic. We must not allow ourselves to be distracted by spin, ridicule or abuse.

Edited October 12, 2021 by Staunton
Typo correction

[Tony 10]

☝️ Got to love a big helping of word soup - the last refuge of intellectual incomitance. 

[Anna B 1,414]

44 minutes ago, Tony said:

☝️ Got to love a big helping of word soup - the last refuge of intellectual incomitance. 

You seem to be running out of arguments. Maybe you had better just accept what's happening.