from New York Sun
The piece on the current crisis that catches our eye runs on the Times op-ed page today under the headline “The Neoliberal Looting of America.” It’s by a law professor on the Coast, Mehrsa Baradaran. It’s about how, as she puts it, “the health of the finance industry and stock market are completely disconnected from the actual financial health of the American people.” By our lights, it’s a fabulous issue.
Professor Baradaran lays the problem to what she calls an “ideological coup” that has “quietly transformed our society over the last 50 years, raising the fortunes of the financial economy — and its agents like private equity firms — at the expense of the real economy experienced by most Americans.” The roots of the “intellectual takeover,” she reckons, lie in a “backlash against socialism in Cold War Europe.”