Neoliberal Authoritarian Greece: A Nation for Sale & Death of Democracy

According to Henry A. Giroux (2005/6), 'neoliberal authoritarianism' is the process by which upper capitalist class interests reinvent the past, present, & future in the image of a crude exercise of power that unleashes unimaginable human suffering, in order to maximize wealth and influence in social, political & economic affairs at whatever social costs. From Truthout:

When the European Union (EU) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) came to Greece's rescue in May 2010 with a 110 billion euro bailout loan in order to avoid the default of a euro-zone member state (a second bailout loan worth 130 billion euros was activated in March 2012), the intentions of the rescue plan were mult-ifold. First, the EU-IMF duo (with the IMF in the role of junior partner) wanted to protect the interests of the foreign banks and the financial institutions that had loaned Greece billions of euros. Greece's gross foreign debt amounted to over 410 billion euros by the end of 2009, so a default would have led to substantial losses for foreign banks and bondholders, but also to the collapse of the Greek banking system itself as the European Central Bank (ECB) would be obliged in such an event to refuse to fund Greek banks.

Read rest here.

Giroux, Henry A. 2005. “The Terror of Neoliberalism: Rethinking the Significance of Cultural Politics.” College Literature 32(1):1-19.

Giroux, Henry A., and Susan Searls Giroux. 2006. “Challenging Neoliberalism’s New World Order: The Promise of Critical Pedagogy.” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 6(1):21–32.

America’s Education Deficit and the War on Youth

New book from Monthly Review Press by Henry Giroux exposes the grim reality of how our nation's educational, social, and economic institutions continually fail young people by way of what Giroux identifies as the “four fundamentalisms”: market deregulation, patriotic and religious fervor, the instrumentalization/commodification of education, and the militarization of society. We see the consequences, as Bowles & Gintis manifested in their classic 'Schooling in Capitalist America', most plainly in the decaying school system, which is increasingly designed to churn out drone-like future employees, imbued with authoritarian values, inured to violence, and destined to serve corporate feudal lords (more on this, see here and "Violence, USA" by Giroux).