ABSTRACT
Discourse shapes our worldview, imparts meaning, and helps make understandable the intuited, the incoherent. Discourse is ideological, as are all utterances, perhaps none more so than those described as “neutral” (Schiller, 1973). The neoliberal globalization discourse, following the market crashes of 2008/9, has been primarily concerned with the ills of debt and deficits, prescribing austerity as the cure. This “economic crisis” has been used to promote what Naomi Klein (2008) describes as the neoliberal “shock doctrine” of the Chicago School economists, a doctrine that utilizes crisis/shocks (or fabricates them) in order to impose extreme austerity and privatization programs. The most recent example she provides in the United States is New Orleans following Katrina, where minimum wage laws were “suspended” and school privatization became an “experiment” in charter school education. Neoliberal globalization is the application of neoliberal capitalism on the global stage (Chossudovsky and Marshall, 2012). Tabb (2001) argues that neoliberalism has replaced Keynesianism as the national and global economic project. He suggests:
Where national Keynesianism reflected the capacity of working people (in the United States and Europe) to resist the domination of corporate interests, neoliberalism can be seen as the imposition of the most powerful state-the United States-to overcome this resistance and impose its will on others.
