[lbo-talk] Transport deregulation

[Alan Rudy]

> And, what was the point for all this de-regulation crap? Or any of the
> other neoliberal nonsense---which from my view was counter to common
> sense business practice in the first place.
>
> It just goes on and on. You don't need to study Marx to understand that
> giving the rich more billions who just gambled away billions, is a bad
> business plan. So what the fuck?
>
> CG
>
>
I think the key is to start somewhere else.  As always, the "de-regulatory"
nature of neoliberalism is simply crap, and it is so in two ways.  On the
one hand, the idea was not to de-regulate markets, it was to re-regulate
them so that different interests were favored - as often as possible this
was to be capital over labor and otherwise banking, infotech and services
over industrial, infrastructural and mom-and-pop shops.  On the other hand,
my sense is that neoliberalism's shock troops were less an American public
committed no neoliberalism and more an American public committed to
neoconservatism - and even here you have a split between patrician, back to
basics and classical standards neocons and plebian, back-to-God and
traditional values neocons.  Thomas Frank was partially correct that the
latter group of neocons have been taken for a ride by the first group and
the neolibs.  AND, per our ever-rising-from-the-ashes discussions of
prisons, where all three groups DO overlap is on law and order to stop
"crime" and other immoral activities.

By the time "we" gave billions to those who'd just gambled away billions -
and utterly screwed over all the rest of us - the neolibs had so trumped the
patrician and populist neocons that their ideology could serve as a trope
for even populist neocon fury... Where the world's gotten so screwed up is
in reifiying neoliberalism as if it were one thing... there are too many
common senses here for any of it to make any sense.  But I'm surely not
saying anything new...