“Neoliberalism” is neither. It is not attached to liberty, but to slavery. And it is nothing new. Plutocracy is the cancer of civilizations, and kills them readily. But this time, the entire biosphere is going down.



A better name for “Neoliberalism” would be “plutophilia”, the love of the darkest passions, the love of plutocracy, which is etymologically and in reality, the rule of evil (as this is exactly what pluto-kratia means: the rule of wealth being a particular case of Pluto’s propensities).



“Neoliberalism”, was initially called “trickle down”. One of its axioms was as professor Stiglitz says: “the credibility of neoliberalism’s faith in unfettered markets as the surest road to shared prosperity”. However, by “markets” one really meant “merchants”.



Indeed, what is a market? Who dominates a market? Well, those with enough capital to do so. In other words, the wealthy, or those that banks have decided to lend to… typically, again, those with collateral, namely the wealthy. So the banking system, if it looks for a profit, makes the wealthy wealthier. Hence the so-called “unfettered markets” were, in truth, the unfettered wealthiest, while the fetters were put on everybody else.



But, unfettered, wealth grows exponentially (as the wealthiest have nearly all the money and lend it, leveraged, to the wealthiest, namely themselves).



This is exactly what happened: the wealthy got wealthier. And what is wealth? It is power onto others. So the powers of a few grew, onto most people, helped along by a government by “representatives” which learned to act in its own best interest, serving power, that is, wealth.



“Neoliberalism” fostered, in turn, other myths, first of which was that, unfettered globalization, worldwide, was good for the Republic. Actually, globalization was a disaster: it undermined social rights and taxation.



The last spectacular example of the disaster engineered by unfettered globalization was the Roman Republic. The Roman REPUBLIC, which lasted 5 centuries, had an absolute wealth limit. And it lasted 5 centuries because it had an absolute wealth limit. The Florence Republic fell to plutocrats, the Medicis, within three centuries, precisely because it had no wealth limit.



There was an absolute wealth limit, because the wealth tax, during the Roman Republic, was 100% above a threshold (the threshold was pretty low, at most 30 million 2019 dollars, and maybe as low as ten million).



However, after 200 BCE, and the Second Punic war, having had to fight in Greece, Spain, Africa, the Roman republic became global. Yet, taxation was still local, so wealthy Romans were able to escape the wealth limit, and Roman billionaires appeared. They immediately started to plot against the Republic. The best way to do that was to corrupt it, by buying politicians. It took many generations, but the Republic declined and collapsed, in spite of the life endangering efforts of many heroes, including the Gracchi brothers, Marius, and his nephew Caesar (Caesar passed a wealth distribution law in 59 BCE).



Plutocracy expects We The People to believe that a few know best, and deserve all the wealth, all the powers. As a result calamitous policies are engaged into, because only a few brains, without debate, devoured by greed, don’t think too well. Moreover, plutocratic policies look accidentally bad, but they are actually so by design: the worse things get, the more the worst gets going.



A particular example of these satanic policies is the climate catastrophe, which is part of a mass extinction, the likes of which have not been seen in 70 million years. There were technologies, at the ready already in 1990, to prevent the CO2 catastrophe: in 2019, France pollutes 5 tons of CO2 per capita (the world average), California 9.2 tons, the USA 16 tons, Canada and Australia more than 16… So France knows how to do it, and the others chose not to (the UK, Spain and Italy are around 6 tons; whereas hysterically pro-coal Germany is at 10 tons...) The mood in France is more ecological, more egalitarian, more social... All this is related: respect the environment, just as, and because, you respect your neighbor. Disrespect the environment, as countries like the US, Australia and Canada do, disrespect the neighbor.



The global plutocracy is indeed intensely related to its fossil fuel component: fossil fuel money is recycled through Wall Street. US President FD Roosevelt set-up that system, meeting with Ibn Saud on the Great Bitter lake in Egypt, shortly before his death. Similarly, when Obama became president, he presented fracking as “the bridge fuel to the future”, and Wall Street, applauding, made massive fracking investments on the lands and water Obama put at its disposal. Thus, once again, the US is the world’s greatest fossil fuel producer: alleluia, say the “America First” crowd, and one expects them to make dark secret masses to their hero Obama, who made fracking into the lifeblood of the US.



Plutocracy rules through minds. Careful disinformation, and lack of significant information needs to be fed to the masses. Here is an example:



The New York Times just woke up to the fact that climate scientists systematically underestimated the gravity of the climate crisis we are in. The paper couldn’t explain why this happened, but showed with great clarity how much it happened. I sent a comment basically explaining that the “Neoliberal” regime paid the salaries of those scientists, so they couldn’t be too alarmist, if they wanted to be employed.



The New York Times apparently found my explanation alarming, and refused to publish it. Just as, over the years, much of the MainStream Media has found any discourse against the “Neoliberal” order deranged and alarming (and censored thousands of my comments). Here my comment explaining why scientists were not too alarmed by the climate catastrophe:



The problem has been that scientists are paid by governments which are manipulated by plutocrats, most of them part of the establishment… And the establishment is fossil fuel plutocracy dependent (say, Wall Street, as an example).



So scientists do not want to bite the hand that feed them. And this is still true. The real truth is that the giant masses of ice of Antarctica will melt with a warming of just a few more degrees. I have explained the exact mechanism in essays on my site, in great detail, for more than a decade. The reason is that half of Antarctica is under water… And the densest water is at 4 degrees Centigrade (roughly 40 Fahrenheit)…



Thus a hyper catastrophic melting is entirely possible… Millennia before what the old, baseless, “scientific” analyses pretended.

Also a serious diminution of the oxygen content of the atmosphere, ridiculed by well-fed scientists, is actually entirely possible under very plausible (yet complex) scenarios. And so on.



The plutocracy which rules over us is mostly fossil-fuel based. Any plutocracy knows that it needs to control the minds. Nowadays this means controlling the scientists. The gross attack, “climate denier” style, are there only to confuse us.



The real danger is the subtle disinformation that the situation is not dire, that we have time, it’s a question for the grandchildren. I have lived in smoke for weeks on end in the tech metropolis of the San Francisco Bay Area: the burning climate catastrophe is upon us now. One can see it very clearly when one looks outside, and all one sees is smoke.



To free ourselves from “Neoliberalism”, which is economic neofascism by another name, will require a great intellectual effort. I don’t see our schools, including universities, committed to it. Yet. Thank, prof. Stiglitz, for the effort!

Patrice Ayme