Status Updates From Never Let a Serious Crisis ...

NTC strat for privatization of climate change solutions:

Short term: climate change denial as the market and think tanks come up with solutions. Doubt lays the ground for the market to determine a solution

Mid term market solution: carbon permit trading

Long term: Geoengineering ("not really about saving the planet; it is instead mostly about laying claim to privatization of the global troposphere")

Role of the neoliberal state is 3-fold:

1. to becalm & mollify the restive public, provoked to constrain/neutralize the market in response to problems

2. to reiterate & deploy the Neolib panacea that addressing any (falsely) perceived market failures requires more markets

3. to facilitate the market in discovering its own eventual transformations of nature/society which will transcend any biosphere crisis.

"... the core of the neoliberal critique of socialism: no human intelligence could ever understand itself, much less the roiling appearance of chaos which constitutes its natural environment, to a degree sufficient to plan the economy, because the reasons it musters are always less complex than the phenomena it would wish to master" (ch 6).

One neoliberal myth the NTC protected post-2008 was the idea that prices reflected all information available to the "supercomputer" that is the market.

Of course, the NTC had to argue that the market was not at fault and it still is that super information processor the NTC believed it to be

"The signal characteristic of agnotology is that it makes use of ... journalistic inclinations to venture beyond ... difference of opinion ... to promulgate artificial “authorities” & calculated deception, ... to foster the widespread attitude that there is so much unfocused controversy rattling around ... that the poor average citizen might as well believe whatever he pleases."

aka "but it's complicated!"

"The advance of agnotology beyond propaganda is lodged in the fact that its hallmark
techniques thrive off a hermeneutics of suspicion, with the result that the populace can
maintain the comfortable fiction that it is not being manipulated by the obscure interests
funding the initiatives" (ch 4).

Purpose of mainstream neoclassical economists (heavy sway w/in financial institution, both private [think tanks, banks, etc] & public [govt policy, Fed]) produce ignorance. The public's trust of economists AND market (which came under question post-2008). response from the neoclassical economists was to foment confusion.

Enter: "the postmodern phenomenon of agnotology" (ch 4)

Code of ethics for the economics profession? 🤔

Big theme of the book here seems to be: neoclassical orthodoxy/economics =/= "economic theory"

"As in so many other instances, what the neoliberal self loses in continuity, it gains in convenience" (153). re exchange of body parts, enhancements to self (brain), and gametes

no continuity to the neolib self because the neoliberal self is only a collection of isolated fragments, a reflection of Thatcher's claim that there is no society, only "individual men and women & there are families"

"As religion took on more of the trappings of just-in-time provision of entertainment services, and "values" assumed the mix-and-match character of Do It Yourself bricolage, the materiality of rock-solif "interests" melted into thin air" (104).

"The NTC has demonstrated that true political power resides in the ability to make the decision to 'suspend' the market in order to save the market" (85).

From Carl Schmitt (per Hayek "Hitler's crown jurist): "only a strong state can preserve and enhance a free-market economy"

I was waiting for the author to describe the Mont Pelerin Society of the neoliberals as Leninist!

"The major ambition of [what the author calls] the Neoliberal Thought Collective is to sow doubt and ignorance among the populace" (83).

* double truths in the MPS: from the outside (exoteric) the 2007 crisis is a bad thing. From the inside (esoteric), the financial crisis is a good thing. The double truth reconciles this difference

Seems like the only difference reactionaries (specifically neoliberals in this case) tolerate is that difference born out of inequality.

You've heard of the Communist International, now brace yourself for the Liberal International 😨😱😰

Also didnt know a Liberal International existed 😂 the idea sounds hilarious to me bc what do they even organize for lmao liberal internationalism? 🤮

(pg 41)

"The most likely reason the doctrine that precipitated the [North Atlantic Financial] crisis has evaded responsibility and the renunciation indefinitely postponed is that neoliberalism as worldview has sunk its roots deep into everyday life, almost to the point of passing as the "ideology of no ideology" (28).

Ive heard neoliberalism be described this way before. Perhaps a more apt name for it is capitalist realism

"Economics, seemingly so powerful because so ubiquitous, parlously teeters on the edge of fragmentation into a pointless succession of whatever turns out to be fashionable in other scientific disciplines, which at least possess the virtue of having intellectual agendas that spawn novel practices and techniques" (24).

"Ideas may be retailed, but they are not simply marketed, whatever the neoliberals insist otherwise" (13).

In other words, Mirowski argues the marketplace of ideas is bs