![[Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books)] [By: Mark Fisher] [November, 2009]](https://images-eu.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51kl16oDV4L._AC_UL160_SR160,160_.jpg)
In these sarcastic, but also angry, comments Francis Wheen denounces the actual assault on reason as a menace to civilization and defends staunchly the progressive ideas of the Enlightenment against those who argue that `ignorance is bliss'.
Voodoo economics
The slogan of the supply-siders, `make the well-to-do prosperous and it will leak down through those below' was a hoax in order to cut taxes for the rich. Scarcely anything trickled down.
Some found even a solution for the squaring of the circle: cut taxes, increase defense spending and balance the budget.
Liberalization would do wonders, but the S & L industry generated a loss of $1.4 trillion to be covered by the government (the taxpayer).
`Free markets' was the cry of the day, but not for the media and certainly not for defense spending programs.
Businesses didn't make products anymore, but deals (Enron).
US international policies
The US intervention in the Middle East provoked further setbacks in the cause of secularism and democracy.
In the name of national sovereignty, the US government didn't sign international treaties on land mines, global warming or an international criminal court.
A. Blair, S, Huntington, R. Murdoch, T.L. Friedman, post-modernism
As a Labour PM, A. Blair adopted all the measures proposed by M. Thatcher for privatizations or lower taxes for the rich. He even defended the teaching of creationism in British schools.
There is no clash of civilizations, as S. Huntington writes, but clashes within civilizations for reasons of hunger, lust for power, religious zeal or economic desperation.
The staunch defender of liberalism, R. Murdoch, kowtowed shamelessly to China's autocrats in order to clinch commercial deals.
For T.L. Friedman, the 1.3 billion human beings who subsist on less than one dollar a day are not important. Those who own billions of dollars can trample over entire continents without a care for social dislocation, economic insecurity and environmental devastation. For him, `the hidden hand of the market needs a hidden fist, called US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps'. As F. Wheen remarks, `people ought to understand that they are being pulverized for their own good.'
The post-modernist apostles believe that `facts are a chimera'.
Francis Wheen derides astrology (in the White House), the UFO scares, the com(motion) after the death of Princess Diana and the management, get-rich and self-help book industry (`The only way to get rich from a get-rich book is to write one', says Brother Ty.)
This most necessary book is a must read for all those who want to understand the world we live in. As Charles Mackay already wrote in the 19th century, `people go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.'
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