OF THE
TIMES
After dinner, "Larry leaned back in his chair and offered me some advice," Ms. Warren writes. "I had a choice. I could be an insider or I could be an outsider. Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don't listen to them. Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. People - powerful people - listen to what they have to say. But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: They don't criticize other insiders.What is so incredible about the quote above is that it essentially proves correct everything I and many others have been saying about how "things work" in America these days.
It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.Four decades of neoliberal policies have resulted in an economic Darwinism that promotes privatization, commodification, free trade, and deregulation. It privileges personal responsibility over larger social forces, reinforces the gap between the rich and poor by redistributing wealth to the most powerful and wealthy individuals and groups, and it fosters a mode of public pedagogy that privileges the entrepreneurial subject while encouraging a value system that promotes self-interest, if not an unchecked selfishness.[1] Since the 1970s, neoliberalism or free-market fundamentalism has become not only a much-vaunted ideology that now shapes all aspects of life in the United States but also a predatory global phenomenon "that drives the practices and principles of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and World Trade Organization, trans-national institutions which largely determine the economic policies of developing countries and the rules of international trade."[2]
- James Baldwin
Comment: The United States is clearly pursuing a self-defeating course in the Ukraine. The question is why? Is the foreign policy of the United States controlled by forces that do not have the best interests of the United States at heart? If so, whose interests? And what are those interests?