Reprinted from hartmannreport.com
? As the world watches its 40-year experiment with neoliberalism collapse, Republicans in the US and Putin in Russia are facing a crisis they once thought would be an opportunity
There's a reckoning coming. The kind of oligarchy that neoliberalism has brought to both America and Russia is so unstable it will not hold. Both nations are thus confronting dramatic transitions over the next few years.
As Russia has suffered substantial defeats in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin may be looking at the end of his reign. There's similar tough stuff facing Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, and their GOP buddies.
As the world watches its 40-year-old experiment with neoliberalism collapse, Republicans in the US and Putin in Russia are facing a crisis they once thought would be an opportunity.
Neoliberalism was brought to America in 1981 by Ronald Reagan with his "Reagan Revolution," and brought to Russia in the 90s by the IMF.
It's an economic and political system where regulation of the economy of a nation is largely taken away from government and handed to the largest, wealthiest, and most powerful economic actors, be they billionaires, corporations, or both.
It accomplishes this by:
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*Diminishing government's role in protecting consumers, communities, and small business (deregulation);
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*Gutting the power of labor (destroying union movements and letting corporations go anywhere in the world to find the cheapest labor available, aka "free trade");
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*Allowing virtually unlimited acquisition of wealth by the top 1% (massive tax cuts);
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*Privatizing the essential functions of government, handing them off to private corporations (for example, fully half of Medicare is now privatized through George W. Bush's Medicare Advantage scam, and half the electric systems of America have been privatized); and
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*Promoting the formation of monopolies and oligopolies by refusing to enforce anti-trust and other anti-predation laws (as Reagan did in 1983).
Neoliberalism has now been tried, in a big way, in Chile, Russia, Iraq, and the United States, as I document in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America.
In each case, the result was a total or near-total shift to oligarchy or rule by a small handful of the morbidly rich and their corporations.
The problem with oligarchy, as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy: Reclaiming Our Democracy from the Ruling Class, is that it's an inherently unstable and essentially transitional form of government.
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