If Biden administration were truly concerned about climate, they wouldn't have released the largest ever amount of methane (50 times more potent than CO2) in the atmosphere by blowing up Nord Stream 1 & 2. Europe burning more coal and buying expensive fracked gas, while forced to arm and dismantle its social safety net is not conducive to a long term viable green policy. The authoritarian "green liberalism" emerging in Europe will end up blowing up due to a less tamed population.
Alas, the plutocratic US republic that grows by leaps and bounds, while destroying any semblance of democratic process and considerations is fated to loose, because it has undermined valuable characteristics of a successful society.
As someone who has developed business model innovations in the solar/clean energy sectors over the past 20 years, missing from this piece is the psycho-social/ cultural impacts of various policy, in both form and substance. I’ve spent a lot of time on the ground working with various organizational and institutional players translating such policies in order to move them towards procuring/building clean energy projects and providing early, vocal support for such policies with their constituents ( mostly in “red” areas. In my experience, the IRA has been constructed and communicated more effectively than any previous federal or state policy I’ve had to work with in both its pragmatism and its hopefulness.
Enlightenment needed: my (limited!) understanding of neoliberalism is that, in the first instance, the state frees private interests to accumulate wealth -- no restraints. In the second instance, it is a project by which private interests corrupt the state into serving only them and their interests.
Am I correct there? If so, what do claims that neoliberalism has reached an endpoint mean? If I have it wrong, please correct me.
There are all sorts of definitions of neoliberalism but the prevailing one for this purpose is the belief that market forces should dominate or at least be applied to all domains of human existence including the state. The stuff you describe is an obvious consequence but not the intention. One of the most prominent ways market dominance manifested was in the erosion of borders allowing for free movement of business, capital and in some cases people throughout the world.
In the modern context, claims that neoliberalism has reached an endpoint really refer to the withdrawal of our faith in market forces to guide human interactions and the imposition of a powerful state whether that's by enforcing borders again or directing investment.
Obviously abandoning all to amoral market forces misses out on a lot of stuff. For some it meant the destruction of communities (often race based...) but it also means the destruction of the climate because the liberal/market economics on which the philosophy is based makes no account for the natural environment or for CO2 emissions.
I believe that Tooze has made the point before that the entire modern discipline of economics has had the benefit of assuming a stable and unchanging environment. Not so anymore... One more reason to abandon neoliberalism.
The Biden Administration promises to build a foreign policy for the middle class. So the war in Ukraine is for the middle class? Would a "big green state" look anything like that which we see in Germany today? i.e. German tanks in Ukraine, burning coal again and green leaders like Anna lena Baerbock. I agree that domestic and global hegemony is "an absolutely overriding preoccupation of the Biden Ad." Is this also "for the middle class?"
The end of the "Fed Put" has been registered by the bond market, which is ruled by math. But it has not been registered by the equity market,. which in the short term is ruled by emotion. The greatest risk to Biden's re-election may in fact be that the equity markets cease to defy gravity (to use your term) and crash causing a recession (wealth effect and various financial crises transmitted to the real economy.)
This is an interesting argument. The frame of the political state being realized and created versus the post Cold War neoliberal hegemony that reduced or limited the state for most. It is exciting to think that we are living in a time when there will be a pluralistic political order that will act and create; new creations and codes most likely will emerge. New contradictions, new logic, new industrial policy, new security creations, new popular political realizations.
Unless an acronym is universally known (like NATO), it is useful to give the full name and a capsule description of what it is.
IRA? Individual Retirement account? Irish Republican Army? Say the term Inflation Reduction Act and describe it as Biden administration legislation involving infrastructural and green energy projects financed by direct government spending and tax breaks, and its rough order of magnitude compared to the economy as a whole.
"we have to imagine a shift in the balance of class power". Yes, a massive increase in the power of technocratic leadership. That has nothing to do with democracy, which is why China leads the green transition.
The EU was designed by an elite playing lip service to democracy while feeding itself, liberals believing their own lies while the poor and the periphery suffer. The leaders of the PRC have no interest in democracy but they like stability, and they worry about the people they rule. Honest realism carries a moral weight; idealism and hypocrisy not so much.
You criticize Streeck for saying things you oppose for reasons of your own wishful thinking, but he has a better understanding of this than you do.
I realized I should have just posted Streeck's reply:
"Adam Tooze’s outpouring is material for a future anatomy of the class rhetoric of faux cosmopolitanism as it flourishes among a soul-searching urban-academic middle class in the post-Brexit moment (LRB, 5 January). Those of us who do not meet the demanding standards of universalist utopianism can find solace in the fact that when it comes to earthly matters, even the inhabitants of the moral high ground have in the past shown a sense of healthy pragmatism, for example by abstaining from calling for Britain to join the European Monetary Union or the Dublin or Schengen agreements, making one suspect that they, too, distinguish between different institutional constructions of Europeanism or globalism, and between different national needs and interests in relation to them."
A tour de force! Raises so many important questions that I'm very much looking forward to mulling over during the coming months. I certainly hope that you and your interlocutors will keep mining this rich vein, Adam!
If Biden administration were truly concerned about climate, they wouldn't have released the largest ever amount of methane (50 times more potent than CO2) in the atmosphere by blowing up Nord Stream 1 & 2. Europe burning more coal and buying expensive fracked gas, while forced to arm and dismantle its social safety net is not conducive to a long term viable green policy. The authoritarian "green liberalism" emerging in Europe will end up blowing up due to a less tamed population.
Alas, the plutocratic US republic that grows by leaps and bounds, while destroying any semblance of democratic process and considerations is fated to loose, because it has undermined valuable characteristics of a successful society.
As someone who has developed business model innovations in the solar/clean energy sectors over the past 20 years, missing from this piece is the psycho-social/ cultural impacts of various policy, in both form and substance. I’ve spent a lot of time on the ground working with various organizational and institutional players translating such policies in order to move them towards procuring/building clean energy projects and providing early, vocal support for such policies with their constituents ( mostly in “red” areas. In my experience, the IRA has been constructed and communicated more effectively than any previous federal or state policy I’ve had to work with in both its pragmatism and its hopefulness.
Enlightenment needed: my (limited!) understanding of neoliberalism is that, in the first instance, the state frees private interests to accumulate wealth -- no restraints. In the second instance, it is a project by which private interests corrupt the state into serving only them and their interests.
Am I correct there? If so, what do claims that neoliberalism has reached an endpoint mean? If I have it wrong, please correct me.
There are all sorts of definitions of neoliberalism but the prevailing one for this purpose is the belief that market forces should dominate or at least be applied to all domains of human existence including the state. The stuff you describe is an obvious consequence but not the intention. One of the most prominent ways market dominance manifested was in the erosion of borders allowing for free movement of business, capital and in some cases people throughout the world.
In the modern context, claims that neoliberalism has reached an endpoint really refer to the withdrawal of our faith in market forces to guide human interactions and the imposition of a powerful state whether that's by enforcing borders again or directing investment.
Obviously abandoning all to amoral market forces misses out on a lot of stuff. For some it meant the destruction of communities (often race based...) but it also means the destruction of the climate because the liberal/market economics on which the philosophy is based makes no account for the natural environment or for CO2 emissions.
I believe that Tooze has made the point before that the entire modern discipline of economics has had the benefit of assuming a stable and unchanging environment. Not so anymore... One more reason to abandon neoliberalism.
The Biden Administration promises to build a foreign policy for the middle class. So the war in Ukraine is for the middle class? Would a "big green state" look anything like that which we see in Germany today? i.e. German tanks in Ukraine, burning coal again and green leaders like Anna lena Baerbock. I agree that domestic and global hegemony is "an absolutely overriding preoccupation of the Biden Ad." Is this also "for the middle class?"
If we are declaring war on climate change, the US military is the biggest emitter of greenhouse gasses on the planet.
Have a look at Ukraine; NATO is gaining fast
??
um, depleted uranium, bombs, missiles , floods : NATO in Ukraine - not good.
Got it. NATO cares nothing for actual Ukrainians.
A textbook liberal bourgeois like Adam Tooze criticizing Riley and talking about class. Not sure if that is hubris or just a joke
The end of the "Fed Put" has been registered by the bond market, which is ruled by math. But it has not been registered by the equity market,. which in the short term is ruled by emotion. The greatest risk to Biden's re-election may in fact be that the equity markets cease to defy gravity (to use your term) and crash causing a recession (wealth effect and various financial crises transmitted to the real economy.)
This is an interesting argument. The frame of the political state being realized and created versus the post Cold War neoliberal hegemony that reduced or limited the state for most. It is exciting to think that we are living in a time when there will be a pluralistic political order that will act and create; new creations and codes most likely will emerge. New contradictions, new logic, new industrial policy, new security creations, new popular political realizations.
Unless an acronym is universally known (like NATO), it is useful to give the full name and a capsule description of what it is.
IRA? Individual Retirement account? Irish Republican Army? Say the term Inflation Reduction Act and describe it as Biden administration legislation involving infrastructural and green energy projects financed by direct government spending and tax breaks, and its rough order of magnitude compared to the economy as a whole.
"we have to imagine a shift in the balance of class power". Yes, a massive increase in the power of technocratic leadership. That has nothing to do with democracy, which is why China leads the green transition.
The EU was designed by an elite playing lip service to democracy while feeding itself, liberals believing their own lies while the poor and the periphery suffer. The leaders of the PRC have no interest in democracy but they like stability, and they worry about the people they rule. Honest realism carries a moral weight; idealism and hypocrisy not so much.
You criticize Streeck for saying things you oppose for reasons of your own wishful thinking, but he has a better understanding of this than you do.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n01/adam-tooze/a-general-logic-of-crisis
I realized I should have just posted Streeck's reply:
"Adam Tooze’s outpouring is material for a future anatomy of the class rhetoric of faux cosmopolitanism as it flourishes among a soul-searching urban-academic middle class in the post-Brexit moment (LRB, 5 January). Those of us who do not meet the demanding standards of universalist utopianism can find solace in the fact that when it comes to earthly matters, even the inhabitants of the moral high ground have in the past shown a sense of healthy pragmatism, for example by abstaining from calling for Britain to join the European Monetary Union or the Dublin or Schengen agreements, making one suspect that they, too, distinguish between different institutional constructions of Europeanism or globalism, and between different national needs and interests in relation to them."
A tour de force! Raises so many important questions that I'm very much looking forward to mulling over during the coming months. I certainly hope that you and your interlocutors will keep mining this rich vein, Adam!