The Real News Network has published 40% of Profits Buys A Lot of Politicians – Costas Lapavitsas on Reality Asserts Itself (6/8).

LAPAVITSAS: That’s it. And this ideology is very, very powerful, and in the United States it’s exceptionally powerful compared to other countries. A very powerful ideology. And that is–you find it in the policy-making field. You find it in the academic departments. You find it in think tanks. There’s a vast array of institutions and mechanisms across the United States and elsewhere that produce and reproduce this kind of thinking and this kind of approach to the economy and society.

Now, I don’t want to go into a deep debate of it. I think it’s a great lot of nonsense, if you really want to go into the substance of it. What I want to stress is something else. This image they present of we are for the market and the free interaction of agents because that produces the best results, and the state is problematic, and we are against the state and we want to limit the state because that’s the way to get progress and welfare and so on, this is actually not true in terms of what they want, in terms of committed, sophisticated neoliberals truly want. And that became very clear over the last two years. These people understand very well what the role of the state is, and they know that the state isn’t really an enemy of financialization or an enemy of free-market capitalism or anything like that. Actually, it’s the tool you need in order to put all these policies in place. And neoliberals have a clear aim and a clear strategy to capture the state. There’s no doubt at all about it.

So there’s been a neoliberal capture of the state and a sort of–it’s almost like self-censorship or self-limitation of thought and options within the ruling elite, within the ruling class about what might be feasible. And anything that goes outside the neoliberal box is not even considered.

Now we are really getting down to the nitty gritty of what this is all about. I haven’t heard it expressed this clearly before.

Part 7 of the series has been published, and I am off to look at it. I can hardly wait to see what other insights Lapavitsas has in store.