On Apr 13, 2007, at 2:42 AM, Patrick Bond wrote:
> de Rato/Wolfowitz fuse neocon backgrounds/interests with BWI
> neoliberalism
How? They don't seem terribly active or coherent, compared to the Clinton years. Neocons have historically not shown much interest in economics - and I mean that going back to the 70s, when Irving Kristol et al were inventing neoliberalism, not just in the more recent, PNAC sense. I'm reading Sidney Blumenthal's excellent book, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment - just read the Kristol section last night, in fact. Kristol says the problem with businessmen (his gendering, not mine) was that they thought economically, not politically - the mission of the new right was to recruit big biz to its cause, and Kristol was in the lead. Blumenthal attributed that insight to Kristol's old Trot days, citing Lenin on trade-union consciousness. (Blumenthal reads like someone who spent some time on the left.) The promotion of the political over the economic still seems characteristic of neocon thought. So what's neocon about the BWIs today? And de Rato is Spanish - they don't have Kristols in Spain, do they?
Doug