It was not easy for an Argentinean to go vegan when barbecue is at the center of every family event. Then again, Neoliberalism destroyed my country when I was a kid in 2001 and I had to move thousands of miles away from everyone I love. Today, Argentina is the third largest producer of Monsanto’s GMO soybeans. More than 80% of deforestation that takes place in the world is caused by the meat industry. My neighbors in Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia have also been largely deforested to grow poisoned crops. Going vegan is my personal revolution because Monsanto, which got it start producing bombs for the Vietnam War, displaced me from my home and poisoned my land.

I would be insulting other vegans if I said I’m fully vegan when about 95% of my diet is now vegan. I went vegan for one year and then it was very difficult when I went back home, so I ate meat with my family and now I’m about 95% of my diet is vegan (or plant-based) here in Toronto. I can’t call myself fully vegan because other vegans get angry and say I misrepresent them, but I’m happy to eat 95% of my diet vegan because the food is delicious and it is a big change when I used to eat meat every meal of every single day.  I still eat cheese about 4 or 5 times a month when I’m in a rush and vegetarian pizza is the best option, and I eat meat on my holidays when I visit my family to share a meal with them.  If everyone could go from eating animal products every day to at least 50% vegan meals, there will be a huge shift in the marketplace, which is crucial for reverting the environmental and social damage that we are experiencing today.

How Can Your Food Choices Help End Neoliberalism?

As shown in Neoliberalism on Trial, How Dictators and IMF Programs Created an Inefficient Global Monopoly, the meat industry is one of the most centralized sectors in the world. For example, only 4 companies control approximately 90% of the beef market in the United States today, up from 28% in the 1980′s. Similar proportions exist everywhere else in Canada and Europe. Furthermore, the meat industry is vertically integrated with the corporate cartel in the grain processing and seed sector, where 6 companies control about 90% of the global market and they are also highly integrated with the pesticide sector, including Monsanto.

The centralization of the food industry started in the early 90’s, as it was also the case in many other industrial sectors, including media, automotive, electronics, energy, and basically everything that is essential for our daily lives. Bankrupt countries forced to pay odious debts liberalized their economies and exported their resources for very cheap through IMF structural adjustment programs. Local businesses were acquired for pennies on the dollar by multinational corporations. This level global centralization is the main reason for the levels of environmental destruction and the widening income gap that exist today in the world.

As it is common in any communist-led economy, a market monopoly or cartel in the food industry is detrimental for the consumer. Today, more than 400,000 Americans die every year from obesity related diseases. In a world run by fear and terror, there hasn’t been any attempt to regulate the food cartel and not one platoon of soldiers has been deployed to deter this silent killer. That is because the corporate cartel in the food sector has a serious impact on our democracies through rampant lobbying, campaign financing, and revolving doors, as shown in Tax and Regulate the One Percent, so every dollar that Monsanto and Cargill earn is money that goes to buy the politicians who are supposed to make and enforce laws for the well being and evolution of all.

Go Organic. Go Vegan.

Organic is healthier and tastier. Period. End of discussion. It is true that organic is more expensive on a product by product comparison, but being vegan-organic allows you to stay on the same budget as before. $8 yogurt packs, that $10 rectangular block that looks like cheese, and meats rack up your bill.

I did the test and went to affordable supermarkets such as No Frills, FreshCo, and Food Basics many times to see what the person in front of me was buying and compare to what I buy in what other people say is an overpriced hipster organic store. I found people spending more than $80 for 7 or 8 things that merely consisted of condiments, cheap pork chops, cheese, and a few fructose-uraninum filled snacks. There is no way a person can eat for a week with that basket, nevertheless a family of 4. When I spend $80 with vegan-organic food, me and my partner eat for almost a week. Do the test yourself and compare a block of organic tofu ($3), tempeh ($3.5), or a can of organic beans ($2.5) to the cheapest meat available. Then you will be able to afford more organic veggies.

Everyone probably cannot go fully organic because a lot of people struggle economically, but if most of the middle class goes vegan-organic, even if they can do it 50% of the time, then the economy would transform in a remarkable way. There will better paid jobs in food production and food retail because fruits and vegetables is a sector that still remains largely decentralized and local.

The average student debt in 2017 is $37,172 while the total U.S. student debt stands at $1.4 trillion. In what only can be described as crazy, Americans are paying $38 to collect $1 of student debt. As we immersed ourselves in the student debt literature, it became clear that our book inaugurates student loan debt as a “neoliberal” crisis in U.S. higher education. This crisis did not come to be because a certain dollar amount of debt was reached and/or because student debt has surpassed credit card debt and is looming as the next asset bubble. Rather, college debt has been a problem since the 1970s and 1980s, coinciding with the birth of neoliberalism in the United States and the 1972 creation of recently privatized Sallie Mae. Lawrence Gladieux’s edited Radical Reform or Incremental Change? Student Loan Policy Alternatives for the Federal Government identified the escalating numbers of students becoming entrapped in debt already during the 1970s. In that book he wrote, “No federal policy ever decreed that students and families should rely increasingly on debt to finance college costs in the 1980s. The reliance on debt grew, beginning in the late 1970s, from a confluence of legislative amendments and market conditions” (p. 1) that, we argue, arise from the inherent logic or force that drives capitalism itself—namely private-interest-driven debt-based money. Only recently have scholars such as Best and Best, Collinge, and Johannsen argued that there is a student debt crisis, and that it is a neoliberal scam or at least resultant from a flaw inherent in neoliberalism itself.

Question: What’s the contractionary economic impact of student debt on the US economy?

Dr. Hartlep: The entrenched human capitalistic belief that greater investments (funded by loans) will yield greater returns (higher resultant salaries and economic status after graduation) fuels their behavior. Yet borrowing is no simple task. A preponderance of research indicates that the student loan industry is overly complicated and confusing for borrowers. Students lose track of the amount of debt they are accumulating. Student debt is different from other forms of debt because it is not dischargeable, even in bankruptcy or death. Meanwhile, according to the National Employment Law Center (2014), “Today, there are nearly two million fewer jobs in mid- and higher-wage industries than there were before the recession took hold, while there are 1.85 million more jobs in lower-wage industries” (p. 2). Students who accumulate student debt are Ninjas—they have No Income and No Jobs or Assets.

Question: Who are the groups in the 1% that profit from student debt? What’s their relationship with the government?

Dr. Hartlep: Alan Collinge points out in the book’s foreword:

The American student loan system is an exemplar of unchecked neoliberal policy gone horribly awry. When Richard Nixon created the Student Loan Marketing Association in 1972, the proposition was simple: encourage private banks to make student loans by making it more profitable and risk-free for them to do so. Over time, however, the profit potential was strong enough that, by the 1990s, there was pressure on the government to take back the power to issue federal student loans and issue them directly, as it had done at first (1958–1965). With the writing on the wall, the managing executives of Sallie Mae compelled the board to push through a transition for the company from a quasi-governmental entity to a wholly for-profit enterprise.

As Sallie Mae’s transition to being two private corporations was underway, executives at the company wasted no time in leveraging the company’s overwhelming clout on Capitol Hill to push through amendments to the Higher Education Act (HEA) that essentially removed standard consumer protections (mentioned above) that exist for every other type of loan. By 1998, these were signed into law, and the now-private Sallie Mae was in an overwhelmingly strong position. Not only was it lending something like 40% of all student loans in the country; the federal government guaranteed these loans while the company was paid 99%—100% of the book value of loans that defaulted.

Question: What are some of the alternatives to tuition and debt relief that you propose and can you elaborate a little?

Dr. Hartlep: We organized this book around a topic—student loan debt—that no previously published text connected explicitly with neoliberalism. Initially, we planned to document alternatives to the neoliberal model of higher education financing. But, even in the face of the scathing critiques and staggering student debt statistics we cite in the volume, very little of the existing research is non-neoliberal. That is, much of the research on the student debt problem is ironically undergirded by neoliberal moorings and assumptions. As we immersed ourselves in the student debt literature, it became clear that our book inaugurates student loan debt as a “neoliberal” crisis in U.S. higher education.

We share scholarship that documents how neoliberalism has a negative impact on higher education and students. The major way is that it has altered the reason people attend college in the first place. In times past, individuals attended college to learn for learning’s sake. The motivation was intrinsic and intertwined with the idea of becoming a more informed, well rounded person through the liberal arts. However, neoliberalism has altered motivations toward the extrinsic, or the economic.

Purchase the Hardcover or Kindle version for more on the alternatives.

The 1% loves the idea of Basic Income because it will guarantee their profits from continuing planned obsolesce and higher automation (Elon Musk: Robots will Take Your Jobs and the Government Will Pay Your Salary). The left loves Basic Income because, as always, it doesn’t matter to them if you are producing Monsanto’s GMO soy (as in Argentina), or oil (as in Venezuela or the NDP party accepting more pipeline construction in Canada) as long as they get a slice of the cake.

The economy needs to keep profit growth to avoid a collapse and the next profit growth will come from Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things. Basic Income is a subsidy for the next industries, which are terrible for the environment because of the level of energy and planned obsolescence required to keep competitiveness (and continuous growth). It will also continue to subsidize the artificially high Real Estate values.

Another problem is that the costs of Basic Income will not be covered by the 1% because they will continue to pay fewer taxes, so the middle-class who are the true innovators and entrepreneurs will face higher costs, which in turn makes the multinational corporations even more competitive and the economy more centralized.

‘Basic Income is Morally Corrupt and Totalitarian’

Basic Income is another form of corporate imperialism because subsidizing the new technologies to provide a minority (Rich populations in North America and Europe) with products from centralized factories (Only rich corporations can afford these machines) will require more dependency on resources from poor regions.

When the economy needs more oil to keep all these machines or minerals to build them, they will just go and grab it with unmanned machines, and everyone will remain silent because they depend on the government to provide for their needs. Basic income will lead to more totalitarianism, not less.

I heard a lot of people say that Basic Income is a great thing, especially those who love doing art and follow their dreams, but it’s morally corrupt because it depends on increasing profits from an economic system that should grow less, not more.

What we need to do is fund entrepreneurs, green technologies, art, and education directly, so each economy produces what it needs more locally and reuses materials through closed loop systems, and fund the whole thing by taxing pollution and social externalities (Read: Tax and Regulate the One Percent).

The report shows that the military, banking, agri-business, and oil sectors received the largest handouts.

Tax & Regulate The One Percent! E-book $2.99

Eliminating the Bush Tax Cut – a 4% tax cut- on the One Percent would do little as the Super Rich earn the lion’s share of their income from stocks. Summers argued that “last year’s stock market growth represented an increase in wealth of about $6 trillion. It is unlikely that the government will collect as much as 10 percent of this given the capital gains exemption, the ability to defer unrealized capital gains and the absence of any tax on gains on assets passed on at death”.

Read Tax & Regulate The One Percent – By End Neoliberalism.
Picture credit: World Economic Forum CC by 2.0

The UK start-up will grow food next to the hundreds of restaurants that serve it. A special Eco-friendly benefit of growing produce underground is that temperature remains stable all year round, thus reducing energy use and costs.

Learn more about how green entrepreneurs battle Neoliberal corporations. Read Occupy The Market, how Green Entrepeneuship Makes Multinational Corporations and Their Governments Obsolete.

Picture credit: Zero Carbon Foods.

How much of a role did ALEC play? In 2013 alone, lazy and corrupt state legislators who get paid by ALEC to introduce laws written by corporations introduced 77 laws for big oil. In 2014, ALEC will look to tax homeowners who install solar panels.

Senator Ted Cruz said on Monday that he will fight to deregulate fracking, approve Keystone XL, and increase drilling on Native Lands because the energy revolution “came from entrepreneurs”. Big Government works for Big Oil by providing billions in subsidies, deregulating environmental and safety regulations, and also preventing innovators in the green energy sector from creating an economy that pays good wages and protects the resources for our future generations.

It baffles my mind that US Senators, whose sole job is to base their decisions on scientific and economic intelligence, are making such ignorant statements. According to The Progressive, a coalition of US Senators will wage a big fight against EPA regulations during 2014. The coalition is led by Republican Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri, who received $1.8 million in campaign financing from dirty energy sector over the course of his career. Ted Cruz has received $800,000 from oil & gas, according to Open Secrets.

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Back in March 2013, End Neoliberalism published an article about inventors who were using their machines to turn plastic back to oil at a competitive price ($1.5 a litre) to that of the heavily subsidized oil cartel.

Plastic2Oil is listed on the NASDAQ -currently priced at 8 cents a share

Occupy The Market with Green Entrepeneurship – Ebook $2.99!

Picture credit: Donkeyhotey cc by 2.0

Picture credit: cc by 2.0