Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Luke Savage responds to the attempt by neoliberals to escape growing discontent with corporate control and individual atomization by denying they actually represent a distinct position capable of being opposed:

The ubiquity of a particular phenomenon does not make discrete analysis of it useless; if anything, such omnipresence makes identifying it a more urgent and critical task. A phenomenon so diffuse that it seems manifest throughout politics, economics, and culture is hardly a chimera, and the apparent reticence of many commentators to recognize or even acknowledge its valence as a term can only be viewed as a symptom of neoliberalism’s continued stranglehold on our political, cultural, and intellectual life.

The longer something is a part of your reality, the more it tends to fade from your field of focus. Put another way: the more pervasive a particular object or phenomenon, the easier it can be to take its presence for granted. After its initially disruptive incursion in the 1980s, neoliberalism fast became a feature of our collective existence, so indelible many now seem unable to recall a time before it existed, let alone conceive a future that goes beyond it. An ideology secures hegemony at precisely the point it ceases to be considered an ideology: its claims transform into axioms; its theories harden into dogma; its abstruse vernacular becomes the lingua franca; its assumptions are subsumed under “common sense.”

That neoliberalism remains so poorly understood in the very political mainstream whose frontiers it now circumscribes is a testament to both the breathtaking scope of its counterrevolution, and the daunting task facing those of us who desire its overthrow. It is everywhere and therefore nowhere: at once so diaphanous it seems invisible; so internalized it appears inescapable.

- Cameron Fenton hopes that a minority Parliament will give rise to a Canadian Green New Deal. And Judy Rebick discusses what the NDP accomplished during the election campaign despite a disappointing outcome in terms of votes and seats.

- Desmond Brown reports on Toronto's continued lack of sufficient shelter spaces to ensure that homeless residents have safe places to sleep through the winter. And Robert Tibbo calls out Justin Trudeau for choosing to separate refugee families.

-Rob Ferguson reports on Doug Ford's plan to gift polluters with a low, one-time fee to dump hazardous substances wherever they want for as long as they want. And Matt Elliott notes that Ford's refrain about finding "government waste" has consistently been followed by a failure to find anything of the sort.

- Finally, Clifford Krauss discusses the flood of oil which looms as a potentially decisive threat to any hope of preserving a habitable climate.