Neoliberalism is an insidious form of class warfare. Just ask the middle class how they feel about their fragile economic state while the 1% keep amassing more and more wealth. Society is supposed to function to improve the lot of everyone, not just a tiny minority at the very top of the financial food-chain. I mean, if you’re already a billionaire, how much more do you really need, anyway?

The problem with neoliberalism is that it espouses the completely fraudulent concept of “trickle-down economics” which was simply a ruse for redistributing wealth to the super-rich at the expense of everyone else.

The neocons are hell-bent on creating a new paradigm for America, eliminating the middle class altogether and creating a society of Haves and Have Nots. In the meantime, the elite pile more and more debt onto the poor and middle class. Debt is the 21st century version of slavery.

Their relentless assault on unions, healthcare, the social safety net and public education (to name a few examples) are designed to create an underclass of desperate, uneducated people who will do anything they are told just to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table.

Beginning in the early twentieth century, labor movements around the world began gaining strength – to the extent of forming legitimate political parties which actually had a realistic chance of taking power. In Russia, the Bolsheviks were creating an alternative economic model that – at least before Stalin came along – looked promising. And the massive armies mustered in two world wars spawned millions of working-class veterans returning home with families to feed and mortgages to pay.

The financial elite looked at all of this and said, “Shit, we’d better throw them some crumbs before they wise up and take it all.” Out of that, working people got pensions, health care, collective bargaining, public housing, university education, minimum wage laws, a five-day, 40-hour week, parental leave, and lots more. Life was relatively good for ordinary people. For a little while, at least.

But by the 1980s, the old war veterans were dying off and communism was a teetering fiasco about to crash and burn. The elite said, “The danger is fading. We can start taking it all back again…”

Neoliberalism is a failed ideology that puts the interests of the rich above everyone else. The neocons have always yearned for some moral justification for their unbridled greed and their desire to impose a hierarchical society – with them at the very top.

The reason we keep seeing jobs being outsourced, the environment systematically destroyed, stagnant wages and rising inequality is due to the influence of neoliberal ideology. It is pure greed rationalized by faux-economists paid to push lies in the New York Times and Wall St. Journal.

The only reason neoliberalism hasn’t been totally discredited by now is because the rich don’t want it to be discredited. Period. That’s the only reason it ever existed in the first place: to justify their heartless greed.