R_P wrote:
Start here.

 
The wiki page is not bad.  It certainly is sufficiently exhaustive to let the critical reader know that 'Neo-liberalism' unless carefully defined and put into context is rather vague and meaningless.

Take the introductory pasted here:  

Neoliberalism (neo-liberalism) refers primarily to the 20th-century resurgence of 19th-century ideas associated with laissez-faire economic liberalism.^:7 These include extensive economic liberalization policies such as privatization, fiscal austerity, deregulation, free trade, and reductions in government spending in order to increase the role of the private sector in the economy and society. These market-based ideas and the policies they inspired constitute a paradigm shift away from the post-war Keynesian consensus which lasted from 1945 to 1980. 

 
westslope continues:  There are several problems with the introductory paragraph.  First, most of those ideas can be simply attributed to Classical Liberalism.  There is no need to invent a new moniker.    

Then there are the things that are simply wrong.  Fiscal austerity is not unique to 'Liberals'.  Social democrats, who also embrace many liberal ideas, are also big proponents of fiscal austerity.  

Deregulation is a red herring.  Deregulation never happens.  Things are re-regulated or regulations are reduced.   Should we conclude that critics of so-called neo-liberal changes to regulations vigorously oppose all changes to regulations?   Sounds like 'fundamentalist reasoning' to me.  

As for the Keynesian consensus....  for the most part it is still here in macroeconomic terms.  Unless some of you would like to point how macroeconomic policy consensus has changed relative to the Keynesian consensus.  

Sure, there were so-called Keynesian proponents who called for permanent deficits but that never constituted a consensus within economic policy circles.   

The conservative Keynesian consensus on macroeconomic policy favours passive economic stabilizers for a whole series of well argued reasons.  These are expenditures and taxes that automatically adjust through macroeconomic fluctuations (the business cycle).  

 It is a confusing world these days.  Why are the Nordic social democracies so successful?  Because they do freemarket capitalism so well.

"We are all socialists now."   Even Americans though American social priorities often do strike outsiders as 'strange'.  Are not the CAFE rules for automobile emissions similar to Soviet style regulation?  Recall the US has the lowest excise taxes on fossil fuels among the rich OECD countries despite the COPD and obesity epidemics.  In fact Americans appeared to be willing to kill innocent civilians for the cheap energy entitlement just a few years ago (the invasion and occupation of Iraq).

The US socialist system chooses to heavily subsidy the agricultural sector despite the obesity epidemic.  The US socialist system chooses to support the Israeli nation building project with almost US$4B in annual military aid and the US socialist system has gone to extreme, costly lengths to protect the Israeli regional monopoly on nuclear weapons.  Despite the obvious blow back and cost in dead Americans.  

Out of the Chicago school came a number of writers who focused on the role of secure economic property rights.   Secure economic property rights are viewed as necessary condition for sustainable economic development.  These writings can be used to motivate to re-establishing First Nation rights over resources in Canada, for example.  Or critique US support for the Israeli Nuclear-weapons backed affirmative action ethnic-cleansing program.  

Please note that in the post-war period, the violent takings promoted by Israel and the USA are the exception not the rule in democratic capitalism family.   

Brazil:   Brazilians keep stealing from each other.  Brazilians cannot control their special interest groups.  The Brazilians vote for myopic populist policy (e.g., fuel subsidies) like many other developing economies.  

The problem with Brazil is that it is still a semi-feudal Kleptocracy.  Contrary to the Nordic social democracies, the Brazilians do not do capitalism very well.  Not yet.  

Brazilian Goalie Who Fed His Lover to His Dogs Is Now Free, Signed to a Team, and Wants Custody of Their Child

 westslope wrote:
 
When you can take the pebble from my hand, it will be time for you to leave.

 westslope wrote:
Start here.

 rhahl wrote: 
Ad hoc nonsense.  
Similar:  I do not like your policy proposal, therefore you are a Neo-Liberal...... 

 westslope wrote:
"...basically the idea of the neo-liberals who are trying to prevent the government from spending money is to say, "Well, if the government can't run a deficit then it can't spend money on roads and infrastructure and schools, they'll have to privatize it."

J is for Junk Economics: Michael Hudson on TRNN (4/5)

Somebody explain to me what Neo-Liberal means, please. 

With few exceptions to appears to mean that the author dislikes contemporary capitalism.  Many appear to be Neo-Marxists.  Most appear to have little or no understanding of how modern democratic capitalism actually works.  
 
I believe most Neo-Marxists want to keep developing countries poor so their children can enjoy an authentic experience in a poor, messed up 3rd world country.   The record of Neo-Marxist guided populism has been absolutely abysmal.  The outcomes have been even worse than those of the former state socialist countries.

Os Mutantes’s Psychedelic Subversion
In nineteen-sixties Brazil, the band challenged the military class with experimental art. Now it has found relevance with a new generation.

Brazil’s Democracy to Suffer Grievous Blow as Unelectable, Corrupt Neoliberal Is Installed  / Greenwald

In 2002, Brazil’s left-of-center Workers’ Party (PT) ascended to the presidency when Lula da Silva won in a landslide over the candidate of the center-right PSDB party (throughout 2002, “markets” were indignant at the mere prospect of PT’s victory). The PT remained in power when Lula, in 2006, was re-elected in another landslide against a different PSDB candidate. PT’s enemies thought they had their chance to get rid of PT in 2010, when Lula was barred by term limits from running again, but their hopes were crushed when Lula’s handpicked successor, the previously unknown Dilma Rousseff, won by 12 points over the same PSDB candidate who lost to Lula in 2002. In 2014, PT’s enemies poured huge amounts of money and resources into defeating her, believing that she was vulnerable and they had finally found a star PSDB candidate, but they lost again, this time narrowly, as Dilma was re-elected with 54 million votes.

In sum, PT has won four straight national elections — the last one occurring just 18 months ago. Its opponents have vigorously tried — and failed — to defeat it at the ballot box, largely due to PT’s support among Brazil’s poor and working classes.

So if you’re a plutocrat with ownership of the nation’s largest and most influential media outlets, what do you do? You dispense with democracy altogether — after all, it keeps empowering candidates and policies you dislike — by exploiting your media outlets to incite unrest and then install a candidate who could never get elected on his own, yet will faithfully serve your political agenda and ideology.

That’s exactly what Brazil is going to do today. The Brazilian Senate will vote later today to agree to a trial on the lower House’s impeachment charges, which will automatically result in Dilma’s suspension from the presidency pending the end of the trial.

Her successor will be Vice President Michel Temer of the PMDB party (pictured above). So unlike impeachment in most other countries with a presidential system, impeachment here will empower a person from a different party than that of the elected president. In this particular case, the person to be installed is awash in corruption: He is accused by informants of involvement in an illegal ethanol-purchasing scheme; he was just found guilty of, and fined for, election-spending violations and faces an eight-year ban on running for any office. He’s deeply unpopular; only 2 percent would support him for president and almost 60 percent wants him impeached (the same number that favors Dilma’s impeachment). But he will faithfully serve the interests of Brazil’s richest: He’s planning to appoint Goldman Sachs and IMF officials to run the economy and otherwise install a totally unrepresentative, neoliberal team (composed in part of the same party — PSDB — that has lost four straight elections to the PT).

None of this is a defense of PT. That party — as even Lula acknowledged to me in my interview with him — is filled with serious corruption. Dilma, in many critical ways, has been a failed president, and she is deeply unpopular. They have often aligned with and served the country’s elite at the expense of their base of poor supporters. The country is suffering economically and in almost every other way.

But the solution to that is to defeat them at the ballot box, not simply remove them and replace them with someone more suitable to the nation’s richest. Whatever damage PT is doing to Brazil, the plutocrats and their journalist-propagandists and the band of thieves in Brasilia engineering this travesty are far more dangerous. They are literally dismantling — crushing — democracy in the world’s fifth-largest country. Even The Economist — which is hostile to even the most moderate left-wing parties, hates PT, and wants Dilma to resign — has denounced impeachment as “a pretext for ousting an unpopular president” and just two weeks ago warned that “what is alarming is that those who are working for her removal are in many ways worse.” Before he became an active plotter in his own empowerment, Temer himself said last year that “impeachment is unthinkable, would create an institutional crisis. There is no judicial or political basis for it.”

The biggest scam of all is that Brazilian media elites are justifying all of this in the name of “corruption” and “democracy.” How can anyone who is minimally rational believe this is about “corruption” when they’re about to install as president someone far more implicated in corruption than the person they’re removing, and when the factions to be empowered are corrupt beyond what can be described? And if they were really concerned with “democracy,” why wouldn’t they also impeach Temer and hold new elections, letting voters decide who should replace Dilma? The answer is obvious: New elections would almost certainly result in a victory for Lula or other candidates they dislike, so what they fear most is letting the Brazilian population decide who will govern them. That is the very definition of the destruction of democracy.

Beyond obvious global significance, the reason I’ve spent so much time and energy writing about these events is because it’s been astonishing — and unnerving — to watch it all unfold, particularly given how the country’s dominant media, owned by a tiny handful of rich families, allow almost no plurality of opinion. Instead, as Reporters Without Borders put it earlier this month: “In a barely veiled manner, the leading national media have urged the public to help bring down President Dilma Rousseff. The journalists working for these media groups are clearly subject to the influence of private and partisan interests, and these permanent conflicts of interests are clearly very detrimental to the quality of their reporting.”

As someone who has lived in Brazil for 11 years, it’s been inspiring and invigorating to watch a country of 200 million people throw off the shackles of a 21-year-old right-wing (U.S./U.K. supported) military dictatorship and mature into a young, vibrant democracy and then thrive under it. To see how quickly and easily that can be reversed — abolished in all but name only — is both sad and frightening to watch. It’s also an important lesson for those, in countries all over the world, who blithely assume that things will continue as is or that they’re guaranteed stability and ongoing progress.

 davisenra wrote: 
Hello!

I'm a 15 years old boy from Brazil, Vitória (ES).

 RichardPrins wrote: 
I see silicone is as much in demand down there as it is up here. ew.

Rio Carnival 2014: Hottest Pictures of Beautiful Brazilian Samba Dancers on Parade

 oldviolin wrote: 
What??

 wagner_sc wrote: 
it's variably an existential meander to begin with; after that, before something else. If there's pastry involved, all bets are off. I didn't say that. I wasn't here...

What??

 winter wrote: 
I try to only deal in big dots.

We have the NSA for the tiny little ones ...

The NSA is itself a big dot ...

 kurtster wrote: 
Whereas "connecting the dots" is ... ?

 

 sirdroseph wrote: 

And there are those who are assuming the intent of the author ...

Perhaps they were trying to relate the situation to Western Civilized Cultures.  Would a picture of the Chief dancing naked around a fire in war paint been more appropriate ? 

People who will get hung up on minutiae (?), would in my mind, take a gift horse to the dentist ...

 winter wrote: 
Maybe so, just seems unnecessary and a poor decision mainly because it hurts the pride of the Chief on a personal level.  When I found out the picture was falsely represented, my thought was wonder why they did that, hope that it does not turn people off so they don't actually try to assist in the fight. Then I think of the Dam and the injustice, seems kinda petty to get hung up on one person's poor decision to misrepresent a photo. Again, whoever originally represented that photo used poor judgment, bad person, I fart in your general direction bad person.  Now, hopefully you signed the petition.
BTW, I removed the picture out of respect for the Chief.