Muristek
The systemic crisis holding the "West” in an ever tighter grip is leaving a trail of destruction. Evidently, it is the wholesale adoption of Neoliberalism which has caused the crisis in the first place. It is Neoliberalism that has prompted "Western” governments to engage in the massive privatization of utilities, transportation, education and health care, causing prices for gas, water, electricity, train tickets, college education and medical treatments to rise and rise. Needless to say, it was only a matter of time before science (including scientific and scholarly research) would also be made to enjoy the benefits of Neoliberalism. As governments began to withdraw most of the funding for research (traditionally done in Europe through Academies of Science and organizations such as the French CNRS), the doors were thrown open for corporate funding. As anybody can imagine, when a company decides to pay for research, it wants to have a say in the way research is conducted. Moreover, when the results should run counter to the expectations or wishes of the company, it would be bad for business to publish these. This consideration puts constraints on the research, which thus becomes compromised. The next step is predictably that corporations will turn the research around: they will want the research to fit the results that are needed for business. Today, most research in the "West” is being conducted according to these corrupt tenets. The outside world, however, is made to believe that everything is fine and dandy and that there is nothing wrong with the prevalent research practices. In a broader sense, the advent of Neoliberalism has brought a power to the business world that it had only enjoyed in countries like Germany and Italy during a dark period of history. What we are seeing today in the "West” is again the total subservience of the state to the interests of big business. To be sure, this state of affairs has also been familiar to the citizens of Argentina, Chile and some other Latin American nations since the days of neoliberal military dictatorship in the 1970s.
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