“For those who do not work there, the City of London can seem a strange land, operating by rules that have little to do with life as it is lived in the rest of Britain,” intoned a Guardian leader column on Tuesday.
Not as strange as life inside the Guardian editorial bubble.
The paper splashed its front page with news that City bonuses jumped by 30 per cent this year, with £14bn earned by the 1m people in the financial services sector. This has fuelled unprecedented demand for luxury goods and high-end property:
The waiting list for a new Rolls-Royce is now five years and there is a shortage of crew members for superyachts. Worldwide, 688 yachts measuring more than 80ft were launched and there will be 250 more this year.
Who can we blame for this?
In a leap to somewhere beyond parody, Guardian columnist George Monbiot pins it on Friedrich von Hayek and the founding of his evil Mont Pelerin Society in 1947.
For it was Hayek and co who laid the foundations for a philosophy of government, neoliberalism, that in practice “is little but an elaborate disguise for a wealth grab,” says Monbiot.
US oligarchs and their foundations – Coors, Olin, Scaife, Pew and others – have poured hundreds of millions into setting up thinktanks, founding business schools and transforming university economics departments into bastions of almost totalitarian neoliberal thinking.
Monbiot says that the first neoliberal programme of all was implemented in Chile following Pinochet’s coup, with the backing of the US government and economists taught by Milton Friedman.
Drumming up support for the project was easy: if you disagreed, you got shot. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank used their power over developing nations to demand the same policies.
But it is also important to note that the most powerful promoter of this programme was the media.
Most of it is owned by multimillionaires who use it to project the ideas that support their interests. Those ideas which threaten their interests are either ignored or ridiculed. It is through the newspapers and TV channels that the socially destructive notions of a small group of extremists have come to look like common sense…
Nowadays I hear even my progressive friends using terms like wealth creators, tax relief, big government, consumer democracy, red tape, compensation culture, job seekers and benefit cheats. These terms, all invented or promoted by neoliberals, have become so commonplace that they now seem almost neutral…
Neoliberalism, if unchecked, will catalyse crisis after crisis, all of which can be solved only by greater intervention on the part of the state. In confronting it, we must recognise that we will never be able to mobilise the resources its exponents have been given. But as the disasters they have caused unfold, the public will need ever less persuading that it has been misled.
On the Guardian website, englishhermit appends a comment to Monbiot’s column:
As we enter into the pre-apocalypse economy, the mottoes are simple. ‘Buy now because you won’t be around to pay later…
Me? I won’t be around either so I will say it now. Hahahahehehohohoho. Bye bye planetfuckers.