Another Side to Economic Policies
“Median Wage Trails Former Peak, Study Says” [Sept. 7] reveals the Achilles’ heel of the technocratic, neoliberal policies of the 1990s. The article confines its analysis to the United States, but the impact of these policies in the rest of the world has been even more marked and detrimental.
Supremely disdainful of cultural traditions, neoliberalism has ruthlessly disrupted the lives of people from Asia and the former Soviet Union to Latin America. Neoliberalism’s oblivion in regard to the understanding of history has made it unable to articulate a sound response to its present crisis.
The failure to realize that economic systems do not exist in a vacuum, but are a part of a delicately interwoven pattern of life that societies have taken hundreds if not thousands of years to construct, stands at the root of neoliberalism’s inability to recognize its own role in the development of “crony capitalism” from Moscow to Mexico City and the subsequent crime wave and chaos that are its inevitable companions.
RAMON OCEGUERA
San Diego
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