Starting in the 1970s, however, in a movement that would become known as neoliberalism, economic elites in these countries began mobilizing politically to lower taxes for the rich and corporations, to eviscerate democratic decision-making both in the workplace as well as at the ballot box, to slash spending on essential social services such as education and social security, to deregulate industries across the economy and to open up flows of capital across national borders. These “reforms” enabled corporations to evade virtually all forms of accountability either to the workers they employed or to the communities in which they operated. In the United States, neoliberalism was aided by racialized attacks on social service provision in which African American and Latino recipients of welfare and other anti-poverty programs were portrayed as an “undeserving poor” whose lifestyle was being subsidized by (white) taxpayers (even though whites constituted the largest group of welfare beneficiaries).
The success of neoliberalism across the United States and Europe differed based upon the relative strength or weakness of left-wing political parties and trade unions – leaving working people in traditional bastions of social democracy such as Sweden relatively better off than working people in countries such the United States where trade unions and the Left have been weak historically. But by the early 2000s, the historic gains made across these countries in the post-World War Two period had been rolled back dramatically. This, combined with the fall of Soviet and East European Communism and the marketization of the Chinese economy by the early 1990s, led most pundits and politicians to proclaim the ultimate triumph of neoliberalism: “There is no alternative” to the free market became the mantra of policymakers around the world.
In doing all this, many countries were pulled out of severe poverty, not all, but in trading with China and Russia, we fed Communism on the back of Capitalism. Now here we are with the wrong leadership in Xi and Putin.For now, Xi, Putin and the Ayatollah will do anything to stay in power, reboot WW3/
