Dirty methods using which neo-liberal ideology maintains its hegemony

Across Europe, political leaders have lost the trust of their people

 Will Hutton

I have been impressed with how fast "left-leaning" economists who went to work in industry and finance became pro-business, anti-labor, and politically right wing. I think that what got to them was not only the impact of association with businesspeople, but the fact that business profitability became central to their own worldview and enumeration. From the point of view of  corporate shill wage increases would seem bad — as encroaching on profitability as well as threatening inflation and business growth (and by extension stock prices).

Tough environmental rules would also hamper profitability; their relaxation by law or friendly (non-)enforcement would enhance it. So they pretty quickly slide to what is called  “bottom-feeders morality,” with positions on key issues dictated by bottom line effects, but of course rationalized with an ideology that made this despicable behavior looks benevolent, which these bottom-feeders into Good Samaritans as they collected their fat salaries and bonuses while the vast majority waited for trickle-down.  That mean that phony "free market ideology" of neoliberalism has a lot of eager customers. On the fraudulence of this ideology, see David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, and Ha-Joon Chang, Bad Samaritans.)

With the steady increase in business’s economic and political power over the past 30 years and the parallel decline of organized labor, neoliberal (market-can-do-it-all) ideology has become even more firmly entrenched in establishment thought and practice. The novelist Ayn Rand, most famously the author of Atlas Shrugged, was an extreme proponent of so called positivism -- an far right individualist, "free enterprise", anti-government ideology, and it is no coincidence that one of her cult admirers and associates, Alan Greenspan, became a leading member of the policy-making elite in the 1980s and into 2006.

The morality of this elite became essentially a slight variation of mob morality. And in most case the difference is fairly superficial (Mob movie lessons American Gangster):

Plot: American Gangster tells the true story of Frank Lucas (played by Denzel Washington), the bad-ass gangster who hijacked the New York drug trade in the 1960s and 1970s. He inherits Harlem territory from his mentor Bumpy Johnson, the man he used to chauffeur.

Once in power, he ingeniously cuts out the middlemen and flies to the Golden Triangle of southeast Asia to personally form contacts with opium growers there. He then devises a brilliant, if somewhat brash, system of transporting the illegal cargo back to the U.S. in the coffins of dead American soldiers. He amasses a fortune in the process, but the authorities — both crooked and straight —are out to get him, as are rival drug dealers, once they figure out who he is. He eventually goes down, but not before cutting a deal to expose over three quarters of the NYPD’s drug squad as corrupt. 

Mob lessons learned:

Let them underestimate you

When Frank takes over for Bumpy, nobody knows who the guy is, which is fine for Frank because he’s more interested in making huge amounts of money than in making a name for himself. Foolish pride never factors into Frank’s way of doing things, so he flies under the radar of the authorities for years. When it finally emerges that a new player has taken over the entire New York heroin trade, everyone thinks it must be the wiseguys behind it. They think there’s no way anyone other than the mob who could pull off such a feat. By the time they realize that it’s Lucas who’s responsible — a black man from Harlem, of all people — he’s already turned the trade on its head and created an empire.

Stay off the radar

“The loudest one in the room is the weakest one in the room,” Frank informs his younger brother Huey, who shows up to his party dressed like a pimp. He offers this advice very earnestly, since it’s a code by which he himself lives. When Frank goes out, he goes to his own club and surrounds himself with his own people. No gold medallions or spinning hubcaps on display, and absolutely no unwanted attention.

Cut out the middleman

Many of the lessons we learn from Frank can be applied directly to basic capitalist business practices. Before Bumpy dies, he hints at the state of affairs in the American world of commerce. He speaks of the lack of customer service and “pride of ownership.” Franks knows what he has to do, and brazenly takes the necessary steps to set up his very own cartel, even if it means taking on the Mafia.

Brand your product

In another scene (which could be taken straight from a Harvard Business School class), Frank speaks of the importance of creating a recognized product or a “brand.” A conversation takes place with rival gangster Nicky Barnes in which Frank warns the strung-out dealer not to tamper with his product, which he refers to as the “Pepsi of smack” or “blue magic.” It soon becomes so widely coveted that he’s making $1 million per day on drug sales alone.

More mob movies lessons from American Gangster...
 

The nest result is that both in Europe and the USA , political leaders have lost the trust of their people. I´d go further and say that the people despise their politicians, who are lying, greedy, self-serving morons doing the bidding of their masters, the bankers, rather than the people they pretend to serve.

grumpyoldman

We are mired in cheating and lying, and massive hypocrisy on the part of the rich and the technocrats who serve them, because that is the only way in which neo-liberal ideology can maintain its hegemony.

Fortunately for the self-serving and self perpetuating aristocracy of money, there exists an overwhelmingly servile media pumping out Chicago School propaganda 24/7.

Welcome to the world of financial fascism.

Last modified: December 31, 2019