http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/04/opinion/04krugman.html?hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1299247324-qY69g5vMZ3Ol6t4VJ/nY8w
It's columns like these that make Krugman such a valuable voice in the national media. Here, he looks specifically at the date about austerity programs and notes that they have failed.
I'm teaching about Nigeria currently in Comparative Government, and we've also discussed Mexico and Russia this year. All three have undergone some form of IMF based austerity program or neo-liberal reform of their markets.
The end result for the peoples of those countries has almost uniformly been painful. Babandgida's structural reforms devastated the Nigerian economy and set the stage for the deprivations of Sani Abacha.
Mexico's neo-liberal reforms - imposed at least in part by the IMF and World Bank - have created a huge number of millionaires, a band of relative working class wealth close to the American border, crushing poverty in the South (see Chiapas) and a continued flight of Mexican workers to find a living wage in the US (interrupted currently by our own economic weakness).
Russia's "shock therapy" led to insider privatization, the rise of the oligarchs, the discrediting of democracy as a form of government and the rise of Putin's authoritarian nationalism.
Liberal Democracy and economic liberalism are assumed to be similar systems, mutually reinforcing each other. In fact, we need to acknowledge that it is increasingly the opposite. Liberal Democracy requires the idea that "all men and women are created equal". Economic liberalism requires that a few people win and a lot of people lose. In many ways, capitalism and democracy are antithetical.
It's becoming increasingly clear we live in a capitalist society, but not a democracy. When did that change?
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