Comment by b00ty4breakfast
5 days ago
neoliberal deregulation and regulatory capture, not necessarily in that order, has basically killed federal consumer protection in the US.
5 days ago
neoliberal deregulation and regulatory capture, not necessarily in that order, has basically killed federal consumer protection in the US.
And it can get worse. Over shooting right (left) invariably leads to overshoot left (right) which we absolutely do not need either.
The American sense (when we get off our butts and do it) is common sense, slowly changing law that always apportions control in equal parts to accountability.
It's the last part that is more galling (because increasingly we've failed) and ultimately will be the more decisive in any future inflection point.
When we “overshot left” it was by electing a centrist cishet man who identified as Christian and had different colored skin from the prior presidents.
Overshooting right has us building concentration camps.
We overshot so far to the left on the ACA that it was a Republican proposal a decade prior. We overshot on the right and just stripped health care away from 12 million people who can't afford it to pay for tax cuts for the rich
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The dyad left-v-right is just stupid. The issues are complex. We must move under and out of the political bs of conservative v. liberal if we're gonna get anywhere.
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Surely you're joking, right? The current administration building concentration camps and cutting medicare for 12 millions people is just balancing... what? Obamacare? Don't be ridiculous.
Take the stupid of the far right and idiots like Trump, then multiply through by -1. It presents differently but it'll still screw stuff up keeping the idiocy in cycle. There's morons on left too!
The middle ground is far, far preferred. Instiutional competency is much preferred. Course correction is preferred. Equal justice under law is preferred.
But as I say under the political noise is a larger problem: failure to balance control with accountability. Congress isn't checking Trump in any substantive way. The DOJ probably took too long to prosecute Trump. And on the right the housing crisis booked no jail time after a run of deregulation. Failure to respect due process or judges orders is another problem on the right. Forget outrage: where are the real world consequences?
Congress time and time again is directly implicated in many of these issues. If Congress was doing its job instead of pretty boys shadow boxing twaddle wedge issues for complex problems on TV, there'd be less of a power vacuum that Trump ultimately filled.
I think one would have to be nieve in thinking the left did not play a major part in its own demise 2016 and 2024.
When has the US actually overshot left though? There was a short period of social justice awareness, but that didn't translate to actual leftwing economic legislation. Even protests and movements with left wing goals were co-opted by the nominally center-right establishment and neutered.
This both-sides stuff gets me, man. Our history is by and large very right wing and every time there's a flutter of left leaning ideas, people chalk it up to some far-left political success and therefore the far right backlash is deserved, as if things ever actually went left in the first place.
They’re talking about those times we let women vote, implemented social security and got rid of Jim Crow. Really overshot lol.
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I think the century of American dominance is probably over. Maybe we can fight our way back to having a functional government, maybe not. I think either way our position in the world order is already diminished and will steadily diminish further. I can see a future where America is a strange backwater, reliant on resource extraction and rules over by a grubby and constantly shifting mafia state.
As an American, I would welcome the world without American domination. Or without any single country domination for that matter. Competition of systems is good for the world.
It doesn't need to turn the US into some grubby mafia state. It could, but I think it is unlikely. But the road for both the US and the world IMO goes down before it goes up as many systems and alliances around the world that depend on US domination shift or crumble. My 2c.
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And who would supersede the states by picking up the mantle?
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Did you read TFA? This had nothing to do with neoliberalism or whatever.
Everyone agreed with the spirit of the rule, even the two republican appointees who voted against it.
They voted against it because the FTC cheated and broke their own rule making process, they believed it would be struck down by the courts because of this.
They were right. The courts sympathized with the rule, but held that the FTC cheated it's process, and that if left unchecked it could create a tyrannical FTC issuing rules at their whim, ignoring the true economic impact of their rule.
All this court ruling said is that the FTC needs to follow the law and their own defined process for rule making.
They are free to implement this rule, they just need to do it the right way.
While we may not be happy with the short term effect, this was a good ruling. The FTC will go back and do this properly, and hopefully next time will follow the law when making rules.
I don't see the neoliberal deregulation you're talking about, so I'll bite.
Regulatory capture I have seen too often e.g. net neutrality getting killed by a Verizon cronie masquerading as a public servant in the FCC. However, from my perspective, it's been mostly conservative powers undoing consumer protections. Unless you mean liberalism in the more European sense, in which case I agree.
The Asian Financial Crisis in 1997: deregulated capital flows allowed speculators to rapidly pull money out of countries like Thailand, causing their currencies to collapse. The IMF stepped in, but their 'rescue' packages demanded strict conditions- forced privatization, and further deregulation, which often made things worse. And let's not forget Black Wednesday, when speculators broke the Bank of England. This was called "a textbook case of a speculative attack enabled by capital mobility" which is a core neoliberal policy. Just like all politics: never trust the meaning or identity of something derived from it's headline, title, name, or label- those are always the first lies we are told.
"Neoliberal" means free markets. Most US conservatives insisted on free markets from 1980 until 2016. They claimed it would benefit the overall US economy (and maybe it has). They claimed those benefits would be shared by all Americans (which listen to them now).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism