neoliberal ideology

Mass Education and the Climate Crisis: Lessons from the Pandemic (Part 2)

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A profit-maximizing economy creates unnecessary suffering that is entrenched and exacerbated by the ruling class it simultaneously empowers. The public must recognize that systems of concentrated power are the reason why workers were forced back to their jobs amidst an expanding plague–with sufficient government funding, it didn’t have to be that way. Serious responses to any major crisis depend on fundamental system change.

Tory Privatisation is at the Heart of the UK’s Disastrous Coronavirus Response

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There is a consistent reason for the multiple, systemic failures the pandemic has exposed: the intrusion of corporate power into public policy. Privatisation, outsourcing and offshoring have severely compromised the UK’s ability to respond to a crisis.

Corporations as Private Sovereign Powers: The Case of Total

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Having studied, written on and engaged in public discussion about transnational corporations (TNCs), I have reached the conclusion that we are not collectively equipped to think about the kind of power that they represent, the silent way they exercise their specific form of sovereignty and the numerous mechanisms that allow them to circumvent the law wherever they operate.

Charming Psychopaths: The Modern Corporation

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We need to see ourselves as political actors, citizens, obliged to take part in and contribute to creating good and just societies. We need to accept that democratic governance is messy and uncertain, that it’s as much about the process of participation as it is about the resulting policies, and that it can only flourish in social conditions that nurture empathy and solidarity among citizens.

The Insidious Ideology Pushing us Towards a Brexit Cliff-Edge

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At first sight it’s incomprehensible. Why risk everything for a no-deal Brexit? Breaking up their own party, losing their parliamentary majority, dismantling the UK, trashing the economy, triggering shortages of food and medicine: how could any objective, for the Conservative and Unionist party, be worth this? What good does it do them?

On Sacrifice

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Raising the spectre of sacrifice is the all the vogue in current climate denier and delayer circles: it is representative of our current moment in time. Having comprehensively been routed on the denial of science, the minions of fossil fuel lobbies have moved on to delay the onset and diminish the scope of action.

Britain’s Infrastructure is Breaking Down. And Here’s Why No One’s Fixing It

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The spirit we need is that summed up by the librarian who rhapsodises to Klinenberg about his branch: “The library really is a palace. It bestows nobility on people who can’t otherwise afford a shred of it. People need to have nobility and dignity in their lives. And, you know, they need other people to recognise it in them too.”