monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

If the EPA grants Syngenta's wish, it will spur catastrophic declines of aquatic invertebrates and pollinator populations that are already in serious trouble," said Lori Ann Burd, director of the Center for Biological Diversity's environmental health program. "You know the pesticide-approval process is broken when the EPA announces it will consider expanding the use of this dangerous pesticide on the same day its own scientists reveal that the chemical kills birds and aquatic invertebrates."

(...)

"For years the EPA and pesticide companies bragged that by using treated seeds they were avoiding spraying insecticides, and despite the science showing that these treated seeds were deadly to birds, claimed that they were environmentally beneficial," said Burd. "But we can expect the Trump EPA to now ignore the risks to birds and bees and approve these ultra-toxic pesticides to be sprayed across hundreds of millions of U.S. acres."

The difference between modern neoliberalism and liberalism is that neoliberalism advocates an idealized "hands-off" free-market system while modern economic liberalism calls for government regulation to control the excesses of free-market capitalism. Modern liberalism, or the "Keynesian school" of economics, named for its main proponent John Maynard Keynes and differing from classical liberalism, developed in the aftermath of the 1930s failure of the free-market system known as the Great Depression. Neoliberalism, sometimes referred to as the "Chicago school" of economics and named after the University of Chicago, rose to prominence in response to the breakdown of the international money system and the fiscal contradictions viewed as inherent in the welfare system.

For someone living lifelong in a system with more than two parties in the parliament (and sometimes even in the government) it isn't so easy to understand. Loosing candidates are fast forgotten, the family of politicans (still) is private.

Besides that, we still aren't at the level of insults and slander, false accusations and suspicions of political opponents and their followers as is done in the USA (quite a bit of that would [still] be punishable here).

Neoliberal. (maximum social freedom, moderate economic control)

I’d say neoliberalism is essentially the extension of market dominance to all spheres of social life, fostered and enforced by the state. In economic policy, this means deregulation and privatization. In culture, it means untrammeled marketing and the commoditization of everyday life, including the intimate sphere. In law, it means consumer sovereignty, non-discrimination (which is after all economically irrational), and a restrictive conception of the public interest. In education, it means the replacement of public by private (i.e., business) support for schools, universities, and research, with a concomitant shift of influence over curriculum and research topics. In civil society, it means private control over the media and private funding of political parties, with the resultant control of both by business. In international relations, it means investor rights agreements masquerading as “free trade” and constraining the rights of governments to protect their own workers, environments, and currencies.

Financial meltdown, environmental disaster and even the rise of Donald Trump – neoliberalism has played its part in them all. Why has the left failed to come up with an alternative?

I'm wondering if your definition of "neoliberal" isn't a bit too, well, liberal, as the term was coined by Hayek and von Mises and connotes something more like Milton Friedman

I'm wondering if your definition of "neoliberal" isn't a bit too, well, liberal,