by
Jason Hirthler
Part
3 - A False Promise
This
‘Washington Consensus’ is the false promise promoted by the West.
The reality is quite different. The crux of neoliberalism is to
eliminate democratic government by downsizing, privatizing, and
deregulating it. Proponents of neoliberalism recognize that the state
is the last bulwark of protection for the common people against the
predations of capital. Remove the state and they’ll be left
defenseless.
Think
about it. Deregulation eliminates the laws. Downsizing eliminates
departments and their funding. Privatizing eliminates the very
purpose of the state by having the private sector take over its
traditional responsibilities.
Ultimately,
nation-states would dissolve except perhaps for armies and tax
systems. A large, open-border global free market would be left, not
subject to popular control but managed by a globally dispersed,
transnational one percent. And the whole process of making this
happen would be camouflaged beneath the altruistic stylings of a
benign humanitarianism.
Globalists,
as neoliberal capitalists are often called, also understood that
democracy, defined by a smattering of individual rights and a voting
booth, was the ideal vehicle to usher neoliberalism into the emerging
world. Namely because democracy, as commonly practiced, makes no
demands in the economic sphere. Socialism does. Communism does. These
models directly address ownership of the means of production. Not so
democratic capitalism. This permits the globalists to continue to own
the means of production while proclaiming human rights triumphant in
nations where interventions are staged. The enduring lie is that
there is no democracy without economic democracy.
What
matters to the one percent and the media conglomerates that
disseminate their worldview is that the official definitions are
accepted by the masses. The real effects need never be known. The
neoliberal ideology (theory) thus conceals the neoliberal reality
(practice). And for the masses to accept it, it must be mass
produced. Then it becomes more or less invisible by virtue of its
universality.
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