ABSTRACT
As the ticker-tape parades on Wall Street subside, and as the ideological smokescreen of free market fundamentalism finally clears, we find ourselves bearing witness to the “shock and awe” of the worst economic and financial crisis since the Great Depression. All this comes after three decades of unprecedented record-breaking corporate profits engineered by neoliberal social and economic reforms that included deregulation, privatization, anti-labor and anti-union legislations, outsourcing, and downsizing of labor. The outcome of these economic reforms has been the upward redistribution of wealth for the richest 1% of Americans and the downward distribution of consumer and financial debt for the working men and women whose wages have remained stagnant since the late 1970s. As we all know by now, capitalism does not come equipped with airbags, not even for an A-list of real-estate magnates, private investors, and foundations who were recently defrauded of millions of dollars by Bernard Madoff ’s $50 billion Ponzi-scheme scandal.
