Next up: Authoritarian kleptocracy and predatory swindleism.

Wow! A really good piece, Charles, until you got to the predictions at the end. But, how can I be annoyed given your deft, if dramatically stripped down, explanation of neoliberalism?

Regrettably, I find I have to be sober to read Charles. Otherwise, the velocity of ideas blows my doors off. You're prodding me from the slough of despond to a place where I might be able to think rationally about next steps.

Sadly inaccurate and with no information about neoconservatism and how it became neoliberlism

it's not that good

@4

So fix it. That is why there are comments.

I would like to be as smart as Charles. True story.

@5 it's not my job to educate the masses. If you want to spend the time learning feel free

Start with all 3 parts of A Very Heavy Agenda.

http://averyheavyagenda.blogspot.com/

Charles didn't even bother getting half the story right; he doesn't mention the Kagans ... how they were George W Bush's role model as well as Obama's..

How Obama appointed a Kagan to the UN ... and how it's hurt us with Russia over the Ukraine

I'm sadly thankful that Hillary didn't win; because a break from the kagans will hopefully stop World War III from happening.

So how does Seattle have anything to do with this? There was a lot of blathering about neoliberalism and zzzz

Its not very good

Good work Charles.

Jimmy Carter (US) and James Callaghan (UK), leaders on the left.

One cannot be a neoliberal and on the left. It's a contradiction in terms.

Neoliberalism is nothing more than unfettered capitalism ideology applied to the age of globalization. Besides his would be populist rhetoric, Trump represents no significant departure from this laissez faire model. If anything, he is only a more blatant, ruthless expression of government by economic elites. How you get from the above to neoliberalism is dead is not clear.

With the death of neoliberalism and rise of neofascism, the latter of which tends to be self-limiting in duration due in large part to its intrinsic nihilism, an optimistic person might posit that a rich soil is accumulating for planting the seeds of democratic socialism.

@12 "With the death of neoliberalism and rise of neofascism"

neoliberalsim and neofascism aren't incompatible, search Hayek, Chile, Mount Pelerin Society, Milton Friedman

Good Morning Charles,
Good piece, by & large. This morning, I was dwelling on the historical importance of the year, 1914. What made me think about that year in particular was reading Pres. Donald Trump's Inauguration speech and his exhortation, "America First!". Clearly, he wants to make the USA a producer again. That's a tall order all right considering the rise of China as the "factory of the world" over the past 40 years or roughly the time Jimmy Carter assumed office as POTUS. We'll see if Pres. Trump delivers.

Still, I believe America is on the decline. It most certainly didn't begin with Obama's Administration. But, his Administration didn't stop it. After reading this morning about Russia acquiring military bases in Syria on the Mediterranean Sea, I too thought the US is losing its military hegemony as well.

The reason I reference 1914, is because that was the beginning of the end of the British Empire, the world's superpower at the time. From then on until 1945, it was in major decline with the US eclipsing it.

Tectonic changes don't happen in the immediate. I too, have some anxiety of the Trump Administration. But it is way too early to pass any judgement. Like former President Obama, I wish Pres. Trump, Good Luck.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fny99f8…

I'm pretty sure that this is when it died for me.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/02/08/us…

I flipped out. It was so dumb. That followed up by it being somebody's "turn". Turn? No Warren? No Sanders? WTF?

That was last Spring I'm having a not so silent meltdown that most everybody I know is having after the November election.
Win or lose, the party broke, so I started planning to get more active last Spring, a Close Encounters of the Third Kind unexplainable manic undertone.
I don't know why I'm doing this, but things are fucked up, and I have to do something.

@ 14 (lark2):

After reading this morning about Russia acquiring military bases in Syria on the Mediterranean Sea, I too thought the US is losing its military hegemony as well.

I'm no expert, but according to what I've read, (1) Russia has had military bases in Syria for quite some time, and (2) they are Russia's only foreign military bases outside of the former USSR. Compare that to the US, which has somewhere on the order of 700 foreign military bases and which spends around ten times as much on defense as Russia does.

The reason I reference 1914, is because that was the beginning of the end of the British Empire, the world's superpower at the time. From then on until 1945, it was in major decline with the US eclipsing it.

Really? I was aware that that the US began eclipsing Britain economically at around that time, but the British Empire didn't fall apart until after World War II. For all his public friendliness with Churchill, FDR loathed (envied?) British imperialism, and I suspect that he deliberately engineered American support of Britain during the early years of the war with a view to bleeding them dry (but not quite dry enough to capitulate) and forcing them to dismantle the Empire when the war was over. The US would then supplant British political imperialism with American economic and military imperialism. And as it turns out, that's exactly what happened.

@17,
I'm no expert either. I didn't know the US had so many overseas military bases. However from what I read in the Seattle Times yesterday, Russia acquired a 50 year lease for a warship accommodating port at Tarturus, Syria. That plus Russia's airstrike interventions on behalf of Syria in that same country's war against ISIS signals to me slightly more hegemony on the part of Russia and less of ours, the USA in the Near East. Granted that Russian hegemony is tiny but it is something. Also, no real headway was made at all regarding a permanent Israeli-Palestinian peace. Again, that signals to me a decline in US influence in the vicinity.

Regarding your second contention, I don't believe we're quibbling too much. I do believe Churchill definitely wanted America to participate in WWI early. Britain was bleeding men by 1915. Read Eric Larson's excellent "Dead Wake" and you will find the British Admiralty (of which Churchill was first Lord of) essentially "allowed" the American ocean liner, Lusitania to be torpedoed by a German U-Boat. Interwar Britain was weak, hence the appeasement to Nazi Germany with the Munich Agreement in 1938. After Britain went to war with Nazi Germany again Churchill (this time PM) desperately wanted American intervention. America did enter the war but only after Pearl Harbor.

My point was between 1914 and 1945 was the BEGINNING of the end of the British Empire. It was probably completed by 1962. I believe Sec. of State Dean Acheson noted that. But one could argue it officially ended when Hong Kong was ceded to China in 1997. Yes, I could have qualified the years. But, I don't believe Britain in 1945 was the major Imperial power it was in 1914.

This piece underscores Charles' point about Carter being the start of Neo-Liberalism. He's been a great ex-president, but he definitely screwed some stuff up while in office. But for his fiscal austerity posturing, this piece argues, we might have passed single-payer health care back in the 1970s.

http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2…

Jesus fucking christ! Okay, let's do this again.

Obama...Like Hillary...is not a neoliberal. Neoliberalism is not an ideology. It's a political project to shrink government spending and deregulate the economy.

Obama didn't enact any significant deregulation. In fact he expanded government regulations in practically every policy area you can name: healthcare, finance, energy, etc etc etc.

Obama didn't support (or do) any privatization of government services.

Obama didn't shrink the size of government. In fact he created new agencies. CFPB comes to immediate mind.

Obama didn't enact austerity measures, unless you count the deal to automatically start slashing the military budget.

I don't really know why Obama was such a TPP fan. But there are good compassion based reasons to favor international trade, least of which is the falling global poverty rate that liberals run the risk of looking like know-nothing egg-heads by simply ignoring! Our solutions to what we find objectionable about free-trade (for me it's how we pressure other countries into patent and trademark rules that don't really serve their needs) shouldn't impoverish southeast Asia, "populists" on the left need to show some passing interest in the welfare of globe when the denounce globalism.

You know who IS a NEOLIBERAL? Everyone in Trump's cabinet. His minimum-wage-opposing Labor Secretary nominee, his school-privatizing Education Secretary, his spend-slashing, regulation-busting Treasury and Energy nominees, his regulation-busting, privatizing, spend-slashing HHS nominee! Trump is putting up the most neoliberal batch of asshats we've ever seen.

Please remember the difference, so next time you're tempted to divide our party at game time by slandering the most qualified presidential candidate we ever had the privileged of voting for you have some context to think back on and hopefully make better choices.

Sad to say that Trump, despite whatever bullshit he says or does about NAFTA, is not our a post-neoliberal president. He's the neoliberal project on steroids.

Good article, but there's no mention of Clinton's Third Way and how it combined the face values of Liberal Progressives with the financial values of globalist banks like Goldman-Sachs, creating what's now referred to as Progressive Neoliberalism. This ugly form of elitist pro-globalization thinking uses cultural identity politics to effectively neuter the political discourse of the working class -- e.g., if you're against your neoliberal president sending your job overseas, then you must be a racist. Cultural Neoliberalism is the vessel through which politicians accomplish Wall Street's goal of true market-state Neoliberalism in the economy. It's a scam perpetrated against the working class led by elitist Democrats like Inslee, the Murrays, and Delbene. I'm not seeing how Seattle is "leading the way" at all. We're a sanctuary city for god's sake! Dissolution of borders is like goal #2 on the Neoliberal wish list.