Neoliberalism has come to both govern and constrain our lives in its domination of the political and economic agenda of the West. In this timely and gripping documentary essay, author George Monbiot deconstructs the roots, secretive propagation and deep impact of a little-understood doctrine that has played a profound role in transforming our economics, politics and environment, driving many of the crises we face today.
via Adbusters
Greek farmers block borders, airport and roads in protest at delayed EU funds
Greek farmers face a 600 million euro ($700 million) shortfall in EU aid and other payments after a corruption scandal in which some farmers, aided by state employees, faked land ownership to qualify for payouts. Ongoing audits have slowed subsequent disbursements.
The delays to funding come just as farmers and stock breeders struggle with an outbreak of sheep pox that has led to hundreds of thousands of sheep and goats being culled.
“We don’t have help, climate change has influenced production a great deal, all of this with the (corruption) scandal – people who have nothing to do with the profession are getting enormous amounts,” said one farmer, Prokopis Bandzis, who protested on the island of Lesbos.
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Farmers’ protest turns nasty in Brussels
Farmers from across the continent of Europe have gathered in Brussels to protest against a free trade agreement with the Mercosur nations of South America. They fear that Europe will be swamped by cheap farm products. When protesters hurled stones, Belgian police deployed water cannon.
As AI speeds up capitalist society’s collapse, the hinterland is where we must look to find our way out
Something critical to understand about the proletariat’s relationship to AI is that AI isn’t the worker’s enemy, despite the efforts of the “creative class” to convince us as such. AI is simply a part of humanity’s evolution, one we cannot and should not wish away; and it’s the proletariat that’s capable of building the socialist system which can maximize AI’s usefulness, unlike the creative class which doesn’t know how to coherently respond to AI. Civilization’s progression is making the boutique labor aristocrats outmoded; for those who drive the means of production, this progress will bring unprecedented strength.
When the working class becomes in control of the state, and therefore in control of AI, it will make AI more fully embody the progressive role that it already has; this follows the revolutionary principle Marx described in Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: “By heralding the dissolution of the hereto existing world order, the proletariat merely proclaims the secret of its own existence, for it is the factual dissolution of that world order. By demanding the negation of private property, the proletariat merely raises to the rank of a principle of society what society has raised to the rank of its principle, what is already incorporated in it as the negative result of society without its own participation.” This is the vital piece of context behind all the ways AI is right now being used to hurt the working class: by its nature, AI is actually an ally of the workers.
When we understand this, we can figure out how to locate the counter-forces against our techno-dystopia, and to make allies out of these forces. Under our financial capitalist dictatorship, AI is being used to accelerate the rise in unemployment, a crisis which the big banks have explicitly desired to engineer; thanks to AI, companies can trap job-seekers in an endless cycle of fake applications, designed to grow the reserve army of labor and let employers reduce head count. This has countless domino effects; greater unemployment means fewer career prospects, most of all within the rural. The “youth drain” from the rural to the metropole increases, while poverty grows in both the countryside and the cities. Social cohesion becomes even more damaged, and the birth rate further drops.
The Great Digital Dollar Switcheroo
The stablecoin, in effect, is becoming the “New Digital Dollar.” That is, a private-sector tokenized liability that is globally liquid and instantly settled yet remains tethered to the sovereign credit of the U.S. government through the Treasury reserve requirement. It’s fiat money on steroids, reinforced by digital demand.
It should also be noted that this “new dollar” is not a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) issued by the Federal Reserve. Instead, it is the private sector’s tokenized, regulated, and dollar-backed stablecoin.
In this scenario, the “old dollar” (physical cash and traditional bank deposits) begins a long, slow decline. Physical currency (cash dollars) will become a niche product, still legal tender but used mostly for small, private, or ceremonial transactions.
At the same time, the vast mountain of old debt (current national debt) doesn’t disappear. Instead, its refinancing and management will become significantly easier. The stablecoin ecosystem will act as a colossal, passive, non-taxpayer funding source for the Treasury, injecting stability and liquidity that reduces political stress around government borrowing.
This digital dollar transition paves the way for the complete tokenization of finance. All assets – stocks, real estate, commodities, and art – will be represented by tokens on a blockchain. Transactions will use stablecoins for instant, 24/7/365 settlement, eliminating the multi-day lag of legacy banking systems. Thus, the world’s finance will move from the slow, segmented rails of the 20th century to the lightning-fast, transparent rails of the 21st.
Of course, this complete digitization of money comes with full system surveillance and tracking. There are some sinister predictions that a person’s spending will be tracked and tied to their social credit score, and even their health metrics.
There Should Be No Debate. Corporations Should Pay More Taxes.
My students have noted similarities between our current moment and the Gilded Age — the late-19th century period characterized by high tariffs, labor exploitation, political corruption, anti-immigrant policies, anti-Blackness, industry-linked environmental catastrophes, and extreme economic inequality. Sound familiar? History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does echo and rhyme.
In Gilded Age and Progressive Era Chicago, workers and Hull-House reformers exposed robber barons and organized for public services and government regulations to reign in economic inequality. The first federal corporate income tax was enacted in 1909 to regulate corporations and generate new revenue for public services. However, that 1% tax couldn’t remedy extreme inequality. Government needed to do more. And it did.
In 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared that “the people in the mass have inevitably helped to make large fortunes possible,” insisting that, “the duty rests upon the government to restrict such incomes by very high taxes.” During the New Deal era, higher corporate taxes funded a social safety net for Americans through Social Security, emergency loans, and cash assistance. These programs provided jobs for Chicagoans —expanding Lake Shore Drive, creating public art, and building new public schools and housing. Federal revenues also funded 1960s Great Society programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps. The welfare state’s social contract insisted that corporations pay taxes so the government could provide for, and protect, the public good.
Unfortunately, that social contract disintegrated over the last 50 years. Since the 1960s, the top corporate tax rate was cut from 52% to 21%. Simultaneously, the federal government provided large-scale subsidies to corporations. Bucking this trend, in 1973, Chicago passed the corporate head tax. Although it generated progressive revenue to support the city budget and public services, it ended under Mayor Rahm Emanuel in 2014. Emanuel, who called the tax “a job killer,” embraced prevailing, bipartisan, “cut-to-grow” policies that rejected progressive revenue and cut taxes for corporations, while privatizing and slashing public services.
The Roosevelt Institute documented how these policies resulted in “increased relative tax burdens on low- and middle-income households.” Our society asks low- and middle-income families to take on a greater tax burden and receive diminished public services, while those with the ability to pay more – the wealthy and corporations – receive unprecedented tax breaks and see their stocks and profits soar.
Data center deals hit record $61 billion in 2025 amid construction frenzy
The pace of growth in the U.S. is leaving Europe “in the dust” according to a recent report from ING which predicted data center investment in the U.S. could be fivefold higher. Growth is also increasingly coming from the Middle East, as the wealthy Gulf States look to position themselves as the next global AI hub.
Debt issuance nearly doubles in 2025
Debt issuance nearly doubled to $182 billion in 2025, up from $92 billion last year, according to the data from S&P. It noted that Meta and Google were among the most active issuers, with Facebook’s owner raising $62 billion in debt since 2022 — nearly half of that total was issued in 2025 alone.
Google and Amazonraised $29 billion and $15 billion, respectively, according to the report, which noted that hyperscalers are increasingly working with AI labs to buy assets to finance construction in an “unusual arrangement” that underscores the significant capital required to meet demand.
How US manufacturing was gutted with a smile
Few management theories have been as influential as the Smile Curve. And few have been as destructive. The influence of the Smile Curve has been profound, embedding itself in the strategies of global corporations for over three decades. While the curve may have “worked”, it was always measuring the wrong thing, misleading America into its current de-industrialized and de-skilled predicament.
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Through its various business lines, Shih discovered that most of the value was captured in R&D/branding, which differentiated products, and marketing/service, which drove revenue. The least value was captured by the company’s manufacturing arm, where competition compressed margins and capex requirements diluted returns.
With globalization – especially after China joined the WTO in 2001 – few business models were uncorrupted by the Smile Curve. Western companies (Japan and Korea included) crawled all over each other to divest manufacturing operations, become asset light and “move up the value curve.” Research, branding and design were sexy. Marketing and sales were rock and roll. Manufacturing was for hopeless bores with paunches and comb-overs.
Apple famously does not manufacture any of its products. Manufacturing had long ago been outsourced to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) like Foxconn.
Economic Sentiment Collapses to All-Time Lows, Why? — A new consumer sentiment survey suggests things are worse than 2008, how is that possible?
If you only looked at the gold standard(?) Michigan Consumer Sentiment survey’s new report, you would think we were in the midst of a generational economic crash surpassing the scale of the 2008 Great Financial Crisis or the stagflationary malaise of the 1970s where the Misery Index hit all-time highs. A new survey is out today, and it reveals a populace with incredibly negative forward-looking views on the economy. This certainly is related to Trump, who per a recent AP-NORC poll, had his lowest approval rating ever on the economy (31%), which surely helped prompt president sundown to rant to the country on primetime TV this week. But the fact that the 2025 line is digging down as deep as the 2022 line proves that this is not a Trump-centric dynamic, and people feel bad about the economy for reasons that go beyond tariffs and all his other ineffectual bullshit.
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I wrote about this revelation from Moody’s Analytics earlier this year, and how connected it is to the stock market creating a wealth effect fueling this spending. “Affluent people also found themselves with assets, such as stocks, that suddenly were worth far more,” wrote the Wall Street Journal back in February. “The net worth of the top 20% of earners has risen by more than $35 trillion, or 45%, since the end of 2019, according to Federal Reserve data. Net worth grew at a similar rate for everyone else, but it translated to a lot less money: an increase of $14 trillion for the bottom 80%.”
Many Stancilites will point to the fact that wage growth for the lowest earners has outpaced those of higher earners, but fail to recognize the facts of a rate of change metric. Look at those charts I screenshotted above, measuring from 2020 is measuring from a complete collapse, and while ten steps back and seven steps forward does give you a pretty good rate of change result, you’re still down a net of three steps from where you started. That’s the employment situation a lot of low wage earners are dealing with these days in our cooling job market, and jobs like cashiers that once were some of the most prevalent in America are now being replaced by robots. The same is true for entry level college graduates, as the bottom layer of many organizational charts is being replaced with AI as we speak. That may help the company save money and aid executives’ spending fueled by their stock-based compensation that makes topline economic figures look good, but it doesn’t do much for the low wage worker whose job is being replaced and isn’t seeing the benefits of the broader economy. In many ways, AI is the poster child for the K-shaped economy. Executives like Elon Musk are openly plotting to kill our jobs, and are promising us a future utopia with “universal high income” at an undetermined later date.
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The Great Financial Crisis
Perhaps it is because I graduated into the job market in 2009, a year where we began losing 800,000 jobs a month, and thus have a bias about 2008, but I think it is the central fault line in our present age. It is where both the capitalist backlash on the left and the reactionary fascism on the right have sprung from, and where fervent modern distrust of the establishment was born. The Iraq War was our generation’s Vietnam, but the widespread age of distrust began when a bunch of criminals defrauded the world and came within days of completely nuking the entire global economy. The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) is wrongly looked back at negatively for many reasons—a lot of leftists falsely attribute the bailout to Obama, but a simple recap of the nature of linear time will reveal this was a Bush bailout—and it is reviled by many for being a handout, but that is wrong too. We got paid back. The best critique of TARP was that it wasn’t big enough and Congress chickened out because they didn’t want to vote for something with a trillion-dollar price tag even though the scale of the crisis could only be measured in the trillions.
A gigantic hole got blown in the economy by fraudulent financial schemes orchestrated by the uber-elite, upending millions if not billions of people’s lives for a generation. We know that those like me who graduated in its wake have had their professional prospects harmed relative to people who did not graduate into the genesis of ZIRP, while professions like lawyers and academics suffered, and the economy changed in a very fundamental way. The bitterness around TARP is that in 2008, Wall Street got bailed out but Main Street didn’t, which is a valid criticism, but Wall Street had to get bailed out. We had no choice; we’d be using bottle caps for currency right now if we hadn’t.
But instead of fixing the fundamental economic problems in our age of inequality revealed by 2008, we just flooded the zone with cheap debt which jacked up asset prices and made inequality exponentially worse. What once was viewed as a policy only to be utilized in emergencies now became a decade-plus of a wildly distorted and anomalous status quo. We didn’t fix what 2008 broke, we just built a land of unsustainable burrito taxis and increasing financialization hacking the magic of zero percent interest rates. When 2020 rolled around and we were forced to enact emergency ZIRP measures again, this didn’t spawn another wave of affordable burrito taxis, but dog coins and inflation, proving the limits of this policy.
The Rothschilds: The richest family in the world
“…Dive into the intriguing world of the Rothschild family, often dubbed the richest family on the planet. Discover their fascinating history, influence, and the whispers of power that surround their legacy. This eye-opening short reveals how they shaped economies and cultures across the globe!…”