> There is no such thing as "neo-liberalism."
Oh yes there is. Neoliberalism is the ideology of global finance capitalism. It's a heavily Anglo-Saxon thing, mostly, fuelled by Reaganomics and later the Wall Street Bubble. There are plenty of other capitalist ideologies out there, like East Asia's neonational mercantilism, Latin American comprador liberalization, Russia's market Stalinism, and the EU's Maastricht monetarism, but only neoliberalism -- in the form of the IMF, GATT, NAFTA, the WTO, and the MAI -- can be said to be globally hegemonic. This is why the Asian meltdown is so significant: one-third of the capitalist world-economy is literally breaking down/out of the neoliberal Big Chill, kind of like an iceberg being calved from one of the polar caps, after an overaccumulation of snow and ice (an event which also displaces a lot of sea-water; come to think of it, Wall Street has experienced certain, ah, tidal fluctuations as of late). Neoliberalism -- not the capitalist world-system -- is self-destructing before our very eyes.
-- Dennis