I think the key quote is the end:
``Wherever it ends up, though, the family will have to make do with less, just like millions of other people across Germany.''
It is inevidable like a tsunami after an earthquake, nothing can be done...because the market forces are natural phenomenon. We can try to make it a little easier for some willing to struggle, tighten their belts, chin-up, and stop whining.
I totally agree with Wojtek and Schalit (sounds like an academic duo). The neoliberal propaganda machine is much more effective than the blatant Nazis, Soviet, (and Allied WWII media) because it is more subtle. It can afford to be since there is an entire bottom to top conceptual system that is already in place. The center is not the NYT, but the vast policy think tank apparatus that generates reams of free market nonsense developed by highly credentialed objective experts who have studied economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, history, government, and even philosophy for decades and know their business as well as teach it.
After all we know that central planning, social welfare systems, and government supported industries are all dismal failures and only markets work. They are mostly for the greater good, but sometimes not, nevertheless we must live with them or give up our democratic way of life.
Yes,
``The poison that feeds neoliberal propaganda is the idea that choice is the same as freedom. If you can get rid of that, you have a chance. But even lefties are enslaved by it. Think, for example, of the `pro-choice' Planned Parenthood meme.'' (Joanna)
For those who don't know Planned Parenthood has an interesting history outlined on wiki. Margaret Sanger is also worth reading about---with era bound qualifications.
In more general terms neoliberalism is an in-depth world view and just as difficult to dislodge as religion. I keep believing that there is a magic key, a snap out of it thing like there was for me, so that the society comes to its senses. Don't bother to note that I have my own delusions too.
People like Michael Moore and David Harvey must also believe and act on that belief in their different ways. We certainly need them all. But most of all, we need to address concrete experience where most people live. Occupy, Moore, Harvey, and Chomski, even Amy Goodman, all work on different domains to peel back the onion skin layers of delusion. Operation Iraqi Freedom sure worked great, didn't it? The reign of Viceroy Bremer was just a wonderful example of how well the neoliberal world plan worked to reform and liberate society.
Unfortunately, Iraq, the IMF, and the EU were also a lesson to global capital. These were just the latest (and short list) examples which add up to the idea that to really work global capital must strip away the independent sovereignty of nation states. That can be done by simply buying the state apparatus as in the US or crushing nation state independence and response to their public as in the EU, or by a total war and conquest as in Iraq.
But wait, a new opportunity has arrived. Currently, in the wave of Middle East revolutions, are further examples where the people weaken the state to overthrow and reform it, only to find they will be co-opted by a global elite of overlapping interests in natural and human resources: oil, minerals, and unlimited access to the labor forces who carried out work of the picadores. That's become the trade off. We will allow you a revolution as long as we (some collection of global power elites) have easy access to your treasure. If you don't go along with this bargin, you will labeled terrorists and treated accordingly by mobilizing the military industrial complex against you. Libya took the bargin when it traded its future for NATO and French support.
This bargin was pretty much exactly what Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks faced during the spring and summer of 1917. The western powers principally England, France, and the US would continue loans, keep payments to a minimum to keep a bourgeois government in power, so long as Kerensky et al. continued the war on the eastern front. The Germans would accept a cease fire only if they didn't withdraw and were given the rest of the Ukraine and other territories. With most of the loan money going to war industries, the Russian bourgeois of course supported the war.
The concept of an international socialism was prefaced in part to weaken the western allies, and Germany in particular. But the German elites smartly supported the war on nationalist grounds to protect the German way of life, its culture and history. It was a propaganda that worked with everyone including the socialists. Only the most hard bitten of communtist held out and they were jailed or shot as traitors.
This story has been repeated over and over through out the 20thC.
CG