Neoliberalism | Political Research Associates

Epicenter: Chicago

Reclaiming a City from Neoliberalism

Introduction In many ways, all eyes are on Chicago. The city increasingly finds itself at the epicenter of multiple discourses of violence and safety – from hubristic Presidential tweets claiming federal intervention is necessary to address Chicago’…

The Road to Flint

The Right’s 50-Year Anti-City Agenda

It’s not by chance that the U.S. is full of hollowed-out urban centers. Residents are disproportionately poor and people of color, surrounded by wealthier and Whiter suburbs. It traces back to the Great Migration, which brought great numbers of…

Dismantling Public Education One Brick at a Time

The Privatization Strategy of Pioneer Institute and Betsy Devos

President Donald Trump and U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos poses for a photo with students of Saint Andrew Catholic School on March 3, 2017.

On Wednesday, September 12 a federal judge ruled Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s delay of Obama-era regulation of for-profit colleges as “unlawful.” The regulations forgive federal student loans from “misleading, deceitful, and predatory” lending…

Captive Audience

How Prison Ministries Prioritize Salvation Over Justice

As bipartisan reform efforts have steadily drifted rightward, the heavy hand of evangelicals in prison reform efforts has created new kinds of problems. In the eight years I spent researching my book, God In Captivity: The Rise of Faith-Based Prison…

California's Prop 47 Savings in Context

On June 8, 2017, the California Board of State and Community Corrections announced the reallocation of $103 million in savings resulting from the passage of 2014’s Proposition 47 criminal justice sentencing reforms to drug treatment, mental health…

Endgame

How “Bipartisan Criminal Justice Reform” Institutionalizes a Right-Wing, Neoliberal Agenda

More than an actual means of improving policy, “bipartisan criminal justice reform” has become a mantra signifying hope: that people of good will can come together across ideological divides and partisan gridlock to end our country’s overreliance on…

#First100Days Crash Course: Week 5

Neoliberalism and Privatization

Neoliberalism is the economic, social, and political analysis that best describes the startlingly unequal distribution of wealth and power in the U.S. today. Neoliberalism, and the policies it undergirds, results from the triumph of capitalism and…

Survivors' Village at St. Bernard Projects, New Orleans.

It’s been ten years since the Category 3 hurricane named Katrina came ashore in Louisiana, causing over 1,800 deaths and billions of dollars in property damage. Five years after the storm, Political Research Associates published the below piece in…

Neo-Confederate South Loses Again – This Time to Free-Market Neoliberalism

After nine Black churchgoers were gunned down in Charleston, South Carolina, the Confederate battle flag is driving a wedge between neo-Confederates and free-market neoliberals.

Lincoln, Slave Narratives, and Hollywood’s Neoliberal Agenda

Why does Hollywood keep distorting history to portray exceptional individuals rescuing America from collective problems?

(Editorial note: This essay has been revised and updated from a previous version. 11/5/2014.) Recently, a number of acclaimed films focusing on the life of Abraham Lincoln, slavery, and the Civil War have distorted historical reality to suggest that…

Neoliberal Language Lessons

How right-wing power—along with free-market ideas—shifted from conservative Christians to the Tea Party

In his book A Brief History of Neoliberalism, political geographer David Harvey traces the triumph of neoliberalism back to a “revolutionary turning-point” in the late 1970s. In the United States, Harvey notes, Ronald Reagan participated in this…

Neoliberalism, Higher Education, and the Rise of Contingent Faculty Labor

Higher education is under attack by the neoliberal enterprise. While most colleges and universities are still nonprofit institutions, they have been overtaken by the neoliberal agenda.

Friedrich von Hayek, Thomas Piketty, and the Search for Political Economy

Seventy years after the Right embraced von Hayek’s manifesto, does Piketty’s rock-star reception portend a new revolution?

The response to Piketty from liberal audiences, eager to find an analysis deeper than a Paul Krugman column, reflects not only the economic politics of our own time. It also indicates a longing, however tentative, to bring these economic questions…

Globalization and NAFTA Caused Migration from Mexico

When NAFTA was passed two decades ago, its boosters promised it would bring “First World” status for the Mexican people. Instead, it prompted a great migration north.

An Uncharitable Choice

The Faith-Based Takeover of Federal Programs

Two presidents in a row have increasingly steered federal grants and contracts to conservative Christian groups—including houses of worship.

Beyond Prisons, Mental Health Clinics

When Austerity Opens Cages, Where Do the Services Go?

Neoliberal policies that result in institutional closures carry a cost, too. Could communities seize the moment to redirect resources toward self-determination and liberation?

How Colorblindness Co-Evolved with Free-Market Thinking

As White supremacists shifted tactics in response to mass social movements, they needed a mass electoral base. Neoliberals helped build it for them—and colorblindness helped wipe out some inconvenient historical truths.

From the New Right to Neoliberalism

The Threat to Democracy Has Grown

The U.S. is in the grip of an unprecedented dominance of right-wing ideologies and policies. Many progressive commentators see that the same band of New Right actors that have long pushed a conservative agenda are up to their old tricks, trying to…

Manufactured Emergency

The Neoliberal Assault on Michigan

Those who want to privatize public services and destroy unions have made some successful incursions into the once union-friendly state. Whether Michiganders can mount an effective resistance remains to be seen.

Neoliberal Feminists Don’t Want Women to Organize

To say that Sheryl Sandberg ruined my life would be to make the same mistake that Sandberg herself makes—it would be to assume that the successes or failures of an individual woman, feminist or no, equal the successes or failures of feminism.…

The Shell Game of Contingent Employment

In 2011, Host Hotels & Resorts, Inc., a corporate partner of the Marriott hotel chain, used a general contractor that it had hired to renovate guest rooms at the Host-owned Copley Marriott in Boston. A convoluted web of subcontractors emerged…

Neoliberalizing Public Higher Ed

The Threat of Free Market Ideology

The current crisis within higher ed is often discussed primarily in terms of rising tuition and student debt, but the debt crisis is just one particularly ugly manifestation of a larger trend involving increased corporate investment in college…