Re: [Pen-l] Current Economic Crisis

["Jim Devine" <jdevine03@xxxxxxxxx>]

> Democratic President Jimmy Carter nominated Volcker—a former Chase Manhattan Bank executive—to head the Federal Reserve in August 1979, at a turning point for the American ruling class and world capitalism as a whole. The coming to power of Margaret Thatcher in Britain three months earlier first  signaled the drastic shift to the right internationally on the part of big business. The selection of Volcker initiated a similar shift within the United States, which culminated in November 1980 when Ronald Reagan defeated Carter for reelection.<

Stretching a little, we could date the beginning of the neoliberal
policy revolution to Sept. 11, 1973, when Pinochet grabbed the reins
in Chile and imposed "moneterrorism" on that country. Of course, in
England and the U.S., overt military dictatorship was politically
infeasible, so the neoliberalism there had to be more moderate in its
means. But as in Chile, a central component involved the atomization
of previously more solid working-class organizations and communities.
This fundamentally shifted the political landscape to the right.

Maybe the overthrow of Indonesia's Sukarno in 1965 could be seen in
the same light. But the political-economic context in England and the
U.S. was very different. These countries were still wedded to
welfare-state and/or mild social-democratic policy regimes. Suharto's
free-market policies went against the main political grain at the
time.

-- 
Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own
way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
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