Image of the Day

By
George Monbiot
Greenpeace activists and supporters along with other non-governmental
organizations protest outside the Global Business Day conference in Durban.
World talks on climate change struggled to overcome a rift on the future of
the Kyoto Protocol with less than three days left to secure a deal.
Humankind’s greatest crisis coincides with the rise of an ideology
that makes it impossible to address. By the late 1980s, when it became
clear that manmade climate change endangered the living planet and its
people, the world was in the grip of an extreme political doctrine, whose
tenets forbid the kind of intervention required to arrest it.
Neoliberalism, also known as market fundamentalism or laissez-faire
economics, purports to liberate the market from political interference. The
state, it asserts, should do little but defend the realm, protect private
property and remove barriers to business. In practice it looks nothing like
this. What neoliberal theorists call shrinking the state looks more like
shrinking democracy: reducing the means by which citizens can restrain
the power of the elite. What they call “the market” looks more like the
interests of corporations and the ultra-rich(1). Neoliberalism appears to be
little more than a justification for plutocracy.
The doctrine was first applied in Chile in 1973, as former students of
the University of Chicago, schooled in Milton Friedman’s extreme
prescriptions and funded by the CIA, worked alongside General Pinochet
to impose a programme that would have been impossible in a democratic