The Wake of Destruction Caused by Fundamentalist Capitalism

Monbiot summarizes the effects of our religiously-flavored free-market devotion:

By the mid-1990s, the doctrine of market fundamentalism – also known as neoliberalism – had almost all governments by the throat. Any politicians who tried to protect the weak from the powerful or the natural world from industrial destruction were punished by the corporate media or the markets. This extreme political doctrine – that governments must cease to govern – has made direct, uncomplicated action almost unthinkable. Just as the extent of humankind’s greatest crisis – climate breakdown – became clear, governments willing to address it were everywhere being disciplined or purged. Since then, this doctrine has caused financial crises and economic collapse, the destruction of livelihoods, mountainous debt, insecurity and the devastation of the living planet. It has, as Thomas Piketty demonstrates, replaced enterprise with patrimonial capitalism: neoliberal economies rapidly become dominated by rent and inherited wealth, in which social mobility stalls. But despite these evident failures, despite the fact that the claims of market fundamentalism have been disproven as dramatically as those of state communism, somehow this zombie ideology staggers on.

And the problems are going to get worse. When corporations and the rich control so much of our government, the problems affecting the majority of us are ignored for the problems that directly affect the rich and powerful. As more and more cash flows directly from the wealthy to the government, and Republicans work harder to pry open those floodgates a little more each day, it will accelerate the decay.