we are "individualized" - separated from each other, made to compete with each other, and ultimately reduced in power by not being a part of a larger force. (Like unions used to be.)

Good morning, GG.

Hoping for a good day for everyone!

Larry Summers will long be remembered as saying that Africa is under-polluted. Well, neoliberalism will fix that. In Africa, the USA has a military presence in most countries and the displacement of sustainable agriculture by the neoliberal plantation model of large monoculture produce for export is underway. Many sub-Saharan countries are food secure but after Monsanto et al. gets its way, that will change, farmers of small plots will be displaced and changed into seasonal laborers at near starvation wages.

Neoliberalism no more accurately describes the world's economy than the monetarist model. There is no cause and effect; merely the powerful becoming more powerful with a veneer of ersatz ideology.

I look forward to your writing more on the subject as I look forward to your diaries in general. I think as the neoliberal ACA fails, we will have a stark contrast with the successful Canadian model of health care. Since the majority of Americans prefer a single payer perhaps it will rise from the ashes of Obamacare.

This is very important stuff for us all. You help us become more conscious of what is really going on. Knowing we have a problem, as they say, is the first step in recovery. Have a great day today,

Just a quick note to say that I am really enjoying this series of essays on the BS that is Neoliberalism. My take is a simple one. The big idea underpinning neoliberalism is that the unfettered market always finds the best solution for the maximum number of people. Therefore if this is disproven in any case the whole philosophy unravels. Well, the unfettered market obviously does not provide the best solution for the most people with regard to education or to healthcare among many other things therefore the whole philosophy is a complete sham.

In the seventies we used to call it by the much more accurate name name -ultra-capitalism.

are more equal than others. Meritocracy in a nutshell. Just remember, the Democratic Party wasn't 'the party of the people', before it was. And it was only temporarily expedient.

Chris Hayes' book of several years ago, Twilight of the Elites, discusses meritocracy, and is pretty good imho. He talks about the failure of elites - Wall Street, Congress, the Catholic Church, Major League Baseball, Colleges (Penn State), etc.

Here are parts of an interview at Rolling Stone.

In an excellent new book, Twilight of the Elites, journalist Chris Hayes argues that what happened is this: Our ruling class failed us. Behind the seemingly haphazard pile-up of recent calamities he sees a pattern: In each case, a cadre of Very Important People succumbed to some combination of blinkered groupthink, deception, self-dealing, fraud, smugness, and self-delusion. And in virtually every case, they escaped accountability. Or, as Hayes puts it: "All the smart people fucked up, and no one seems willing to take responsibility."

RS: But social mobility, by most counts, is on the decline. How can that be true in a functioning meritocracy?

CH: The mechanisms of mobility and of equal opportunity are inevitably subverted by unequal power and wealth. We want to make a neat division between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome, but in practice, we can't. I use my high school, Hunter College in New York City, as an example. It's a public school, free, open to students from all five boroughs, but it's highly selective. When I went there, in the 1990s, you took one test to get in, in sixth grade. If you scored high enough you got in, if not, not. And if you were the mayor’s kid and you didn't score high enough, you didn't get in. That's the kind of democratizing promise of the meritocracy.

RS: But that was then ...

CH: Right. What's happened over time is you've seen a decline in black and Latino students in the school -- who were always underrepresented, but are even more so now -- at the same time as there's been this growth of a test prep industry. Parents are paying thousands of dollars for cram schools to prepare their kids for the test, and now the majority of kids getting in are products of the test-prep regime. So the test prep industry has been this perfect parable: You have this scarce resource -- a spot at an elite school -- and people with money in a very unequal city have a clear advantage over those who don't.

...
RS: Toward the end of the book, you write that "if you want meritocracy, work for equality" -- because inequality of wealth is at the root of inequality of power and opportunity. How different would American society look if we did that?

CH: The underlying premise in all of this is the idea that there's this scarce, small set of good jobs and fulfilling lives to be had, and everyone is going to compete for those. One alternative is a vision of society where everyone who's willing to work can have a good job and a fulfilling life, which is what it should be. That's a far superior social model. And it's also in stark contrast to the one we have now.

Good morning gg and 99ers,

The almighty dollar reigns supreme...sadly. The fatal flaw with our economic system is it seeks profit over people, society, and the environment. We may reap its rewards. New climate studies show an air bridge over Mexico rapidly warming the Atlantic. It may be a bad hurricane season. So sad about the fires in Alberta too.

But on the positive side, the election is looking better this morning. We're still down 290 delegates. Here's what's left of the democratic primary season (and the delegates available):

5/7 Guam 07

5/10 WV 29

5/17 KY 55
OR 61

6/4 Virgin Is 07

6/5 P. Rico 60

6/7 CA 475
MT 21
NM 34
NJ 126
ND 18
SD 20

6/14 DC 20

Interesting that Puerto Rico offers about as many delegates as OR. Hope you all have a great day. Enjoy spring if you can get outside, or if anyone is in the S. hemisphere? have a nice fall day.

"morality". It provides cover for class warfare, and tragically, convinces those warred upon to blame themselves. More people need to read Marx and Lenin.

Meritocracy theoretically rewards individuals with power and wealth based upon their merit only while ignoring the structural reasons why some individuals can more easily succeed due to family wealth and or connections. Such connections can result in legacy appointments to the right schools and family connections to facilitate success.

I believed in meritocracy growing up. I attended a high school that had started up only a few years earlier as a magnet for academically motivated students, and I was naive enough to think that if I worked hard and attended a good college, that would be the road to my future success. This view of the world was challenged when I went to college, where fraternities, sororities and cliques on campus were prominent. Since this was in the 1980s, the dividing line was about money and legacy connections to the college. It was not until I attended an alumni weekend last year that I found out that one fraternity essentially had a "means test"-- if your family had the means, you could get in. I remember all the times during the Bill Clinton years when he used the phrase "people who work hard and play by the rules (ought to be rewarded)" while he actually worked to sell out the middle class and undercut those who worked hard and played by the rules. I went from being a Republican in my high school and college years to being a Democrat, and now a democratic socialist, largely based on the belief that both political parties and most politicians don't give a damn about the average citizen.

I'd also rec Frank's book, not only as astute analysis of the current scene, but also as documenting the consequences of the trend first noted by Thomas Byrne Edsall in his book The New Politics of Inequality, wherein the veteran journalist reports on the early efforts of Democratic party elites to give up on the base (i.e. working people, women, people of color, anti-war protesters -- you know the real progressives or "hippies", their new term-of-art for us, and which label we wear proudly) and go for the money, obsequiously Osric-like, and fuck the history of the party from FDR on -- well, except for the war part. They love that. Feeds other aspects of the beast don't you know.

Also, on meritocracy, Chris Hayes wrote a fine book on the failure of that particular idea, coining the term "the iron law of meritocracy", that is, in any meritocratic system the inequality produced thereunder will result in greater inequality and less mobility as the elites seek to protect their perch.

Accelerating pace of whistleblowing

After Daniel Ellsberg's astonishingly courageous release of the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, he waited 40 years to meet someone like Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning, someone else inside who risked everything to expose the wrongdoing they had sworn to oppose.
But Snowden only had to wait a matter of months before he learned of another leak of equal profundity: a still-anonymous insider leaked the details of the US government's secret drone assassination program in 2015, the full story of which is told in The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government's Secret Drone Warfare Program , a new book by Jeremy Scahill and his colleagues from The Intercept.
In his introduction to The Assassination Complex, Snowden reflects on his own decision to come forward as a whistleblower, and on what the accelerating pace of principled, public leaks (for example, the Panama Papers) means for official secrecy and for the corruption and groupthink that festers where secrecy is the order of the day.

Snowden sues Norway

Edward Snowden has been invited to Norway to be awarded for outstanding contribution to freedom of expression, and attorneys for the former NSA contractor want a court to guarantee he can pick it up in person without being extradited upon arrival.
The Norwegian branch of the PEN Club, an international free expression group, has chosen to award its annual Ossietzky Prize to Mr. Snowden for revealing “questionable, extensive global surveillance” through the NSA disclosures that made him a wanted man in the United States. The honor is named for Carl von Ossietzky, a German winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, and will be handed out during a ceremony in Oslo on November 18. The former NSA analyst hasn’t left Russia since he was granted asylum in 2013, however, and risks arrest if he travels most anywhere to answer to espionage charges at home.
Along with Schjødt, a Norwegian law firm, PEN has filed a petition in Oslo City Court in order to allow Mr. Snowden to personally attend the ceremony without fear of extradition, his attorneys said Thursday.
“A prosecution against Snowden under the U.S. Espionage Act constitutes a political offense within the meaning of Norwegian and international law,” the firm said in a statement. “Accordingly, the lawsuit asserts that extradition of [Edward Snowden] would be contrary to law, and that the court should so declare. The Espionage Act prohibits [him], or any whistleblower in his position, from raising any defense that he acted in the public interest, that the disclosures benefited society, or that the disclosed information had been improperly withheld by the government. Therefore, Snowden’s conviction under the Espionage Act would be a foregone conclusion, and he would face decades in prison in isolating conditions.”