Euroliberalism: A Preliminary Postmortem

Since I'm based in the US, most of my critiques of neoliberalism, a.k.a. market fundamentalism, a.k.a. the freedom of plutocrats to steal trillions from debt slaves, have been focused on Wall Street. But it should be recognized neoliberalism is and always was a transnational system.

This is most obvious in Wall Street's leading overseas subsidiary, euroliberalism, a.k.a. the plundering of Europe and its Middle Eastern, North African and Eurasian peripheries for the benefit of a few plutobanksters.

Ordinary Europeans, though, are starting to fight back. Example: an eye-opening article in Finnish newszine Taskamura which investigates the meltdown of Nokia. Nokia was once a competitive firm which excelled in delivering products customers wanted, but the virus of euroliberalism has begun to rot the place from inside. Here's one key citation:

There were a lot of problems, it was difficult to keep hold of the quality of the subcontractors’ work and the contracts weren’t supervised properly. The subcontractors could cheat in the contracts by changing the best experts, who were there in the beginning, to less qualified people. Examples given included bad code written in India and the communication problems with the Chinese and the Japanese because of their poor English skills. All this resulted in more additional work and delays for the project managers in Finland, when they had to take measures to repair the errors and poor quality.At the same time the team size grew and so did the bureaucracy with it. This caused lessening of agility in the software development, which slowed down the development. 

Outsourcing is a polite way of saying, crushing Finland's unionized workforce and sweating its workers for more surplus (never mind Nokia had 30% profit margins during the early 2000s -- too much excess is never enough for the plutocrats). The result was a predictable debacle, as short-term greed destroyed the company's long-term position. The full article is available here.