EP 05 - Neoliberalism: lunatics take over the asylum

Neoliberalism: lunatics take over the asylum

- Episode 05-

Smears, imprisonment, assassination

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Smears, imprisonment, assassination

4 December 2024

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NEW SERIES Lunatics take over the asylum: Neoliberalism uncut

'This is the credit card... everything maxed out'

Speaking about the size of the national debt on Politics Live, Kuenssberg said 'this is the credit card, the national mortgage, everything absolutely maxed out'

The beguiling rhetoric

Most of us don’t ever use the word neoliberalism, let alone understand it.

The historian David Kotz has accurately summed neoliberal economics up in a series of aphorisms.
‘You can’t ask workers to be paid less so that bosses take more. But you can argue that
Union bosses are violating the rights of individuals.
You can’t cut welfare so that top tax-payers are better off. But you can argue that
welfare disincentivises people from working.
You can’t defend environmental destruction, unsafe workplaces or dangerous products, but you can argue that
government is hamstringing business with red tape.’

The rhetoric is everything, a way to obscure the social reality.

After the systematic destruction of Britain’s National Health Service, we could now add another of these dangerously homely neoliberal metaphors.
You can’t convince people that they are better off under expensive private health care and scandalously inefficient privatised utilities, but you can apparently tell them
‘the government has maxed its credit card. There really is no money.’

And if – as we saw right at the start of this series - you can persuade the BBC’s chief political correspondent Laura Kuenssberg to mouth this nonsense, then people who know nothing at all about economics will believe it. [23 Professors wrote to the BBC in 2022 to complain]

Thatcher's 'Household Fallacy' led to austerity and killed thousands

TINA and Maggie Thatcher's handbag

Kotz continues with more examples and anyone familiar with the rhetoric of British political parties since Thatcher’s time will recognise them all.

'Conservative women bring common sense to Government,' Thatcher told the Tory Women’s Conference in 1988. 'I can’t help reflecting that it’s taken a Government headed by a housewife, to balance the books for the first time in 20 years – with a little left over for a rainy day.’

Thatcher did not invent the so-called ‘household fallacy’ but she used it mercilessly to mislead the public. Governments never balance books like old-fashioned housewives and their handbags. Most of the money governments deal with does not exist except in complex financial fictions.

The success of Keynesianism gives us a different aphorism –
the more governments spend, the richer they usually are.

The political scientist Terry Hathaway has recently pointed out that neoliberalism serves up ‘ready-made, reality-distorting’ ideas.

Its genius is that it uses economic hokum to shut down debate. TINA – ‘there is no alternative’ - has turned out to be one of the most powerful political myths of modern times.

#105 Smears, imprisonment, assassination - Ep 5 Lunatics take over the asylum: Neoliberalism uncut

Neutralize the lefties. Smears, imprisonment, assassination

J Edgar Hoover (r) and Clyde Tolson (l) were such close friends that they were widely believed by FBI agents to be lovers. For half a century, the FBI director waged war on homosexuals, black people and communists

Sound like Nazi Germany?

After the New York Times investigative journalist Seymour Hersch broke the news in 1974 that the US government had been systematically spying on its own citizens, a Select Committee of the US Senate was set up under Senator Frank Church.

The so-called ‘Church Committee’ reported on the recent activity of the FBI and the CIA between the 1940s and the 1970s. Six volumes of evidence revealed how intelligence and law enforcement had investigated more than half a million Americans who had never been accused of any crime.

The CIA had been opening and photographing private mail.
The FBI had broken into the offices of political groups, including many student groups, tapped their phones and infiltrated their meetings.
The FBI’s Counter Intelligence Programme – known as COINTELPRO – had been heavily targeted against left-wing and Civil Rights groups since at least the mid-1950s. By targeted we mean an organised programme of smears, arson, harassment, imprisonment and assassination.

At one point the FBI had a list of 26 000 Americans it would arrest in the event of a ‘national emergency’ - just like Nazi Germany. They included writers, scientists, lawyers and, of course, trades union leaders.

Now none of this is in any historical doubt. At the heart of this web of spies had been J Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI and its forerunner, from 1924 until his death in 1972. Such was Hoover’s extraordinary hold on intelligence that, before Hoover’s death, the Select Committee investigation under Senator Frank Church would not have been conceivable.

The FBI’s Counter Intelligence Programme – known as COINTELPRO – had been heavily targeted against left-wing and Civil Rights groups since at least the mid-1950s. By targeted we mean an organised programme of smears, arson, harassment, imprisonment and assassination.

The strongly right-wing rhetoric of Milton Friedman and the neoliberals fitted exactly with the aims of COINTELPRO. It leaves you wondering whether neoliberalism's unexpected rise to prominence in the 1970s had something to do with the atmosphere of collapse and disorder that American intelligence was then so carefully working to create. Did they use Friedman for their own ends?

COINTELPRO memo showing intention to 'neutralize' actress Jean Seberg - Her crime? giving money to the Black Panther Party

'Why in the dickens didn't they just shoot her?'

Jean Seberg appeared in 34 films including Saint Joan, Bonjour Tristesse, Lilith, The Mouse That Roared, Breathless, Moment to Moment, A Fine Madness, Paint Your Wagon, Airport, Macho Callahan, and Gang War in Naples. She was François Truffaut's first choice for the central role of Julie in Day for Night. She’s been linked romantically with Clint Eastwood, Warren Beatty and novelist Carlos Fuentes.

To 'neutralize' her, the FBI created a false story from a San Francisco-based informant that the child Seberg was carrying was not fathered by her ex-husband, novelist and WW2 aviator, Romain Gary, but by Raymond Hewitt, a member of the Black Panther Party. Seberg went into premature labor and, on August 23, 1970, gave birth to a 4 lb (1.8 kg) baby girl. Nina Hart Gary died two days later. [Much later student revolutionary Carlos Ornelas Navarra was named as Nina’s father].

Seberg committed suicide aged 40. Her second ex-husband , Romain Gary, stated that Seberg had repeatedly attempted suicide on the anniversary of Nina’s death. He blamed the FBI for making her psychotic.

Six days after the discovery of Seberg's body, the FBI released documents admitting its defamation of Seberg, while making statements attempting to distance the agency from the practices of the Hoover era.

Seberg's father, Edward, a pharmacist of Swedish descent, reacted strongly to the story of FBI abuse of his daughter. He said 'if this is true, why in the dickens didn't they just shoot her, instead of having all this travail that's gone on? I have this flag in the corner, that I used to put out every morning, and I haven't put it out since.'

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