• The International Monetary Fund had been created at the end of World War II as a means to regulate currencies to forestall competitive devaluation and allow nations to pursue full employment policies on the basis of Keynesian monetary and fiscal policies and/or pubic ownership and control of economic enterprise. The neoliberal transformation of the IMF turned it into the enforcer to impose austerity on poorer countries through structural adjustment. It retained the unsustainable role of the dollar as the world's reserve currency while dismantling the regulatory regime that supported stable economic growth and provided a way to counteract crises.

• The post-World War II international economic system included the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) as a vehicle for negotiating trade agreements on a the basis of the Most Favored Nation principle. This allowed a steady movement toward freer trade while allowing nations to manage their trade policies in accord with national economic development needs. The neoliberal offensive gutted the GATT-based negotiated trade agreements and replaced them with the WTO, which imposed neoliberal policies that made it necessary for all countries to turn themselves into export platforms, rather developing production for an internal market focused on the needs of their own people.

• At a national level, countries came out of the Great Depression with systems of financial regulation to ward against the speculative binges and banking failures that had contributed so much to the Depression. The neoliberal era saw unremitting and ultimately successful efforts to eliminate such regulation. The result has been the succession of speculative bubbles, explosion of financial assets with no relation to the real economy, and crashes, most notably but not solely the one in 2008 that initiated the Great Recession.

• The period after World War II saw significant moves toward equality between and within countries. More than one hundred former colonies won their independence. Many of them saw significant economic growth. Trade and aid policies gave at least token support to development. Within countries, progressive taxation and social welfare led to greater equality even in countries with very different economic systems. The neoliberal era saw the competitive gutting of these social protections, ranging from the destruction of the employer-based pension and healthcare systems in the US to the elimination of the "iron rice bowl" in China, to the reduction of social welfare and public employment in poor countries by the structural adjustment programs of the IMF and World Bank.

• The 1930s and 1940s were marked by a great expansion of labor protections and labor organization in countries with very different economic systems. The neoliberal era saw the dismantling of such labor protections and a full-scale attack on the rights and power of organized labor. In the United States, less than eight percent of workers in the private sector are now represented by unions and workers right to join unions is systematically denied.

• The 1960s saw a rapidly expanding awareness of threats to the natural environment, the emergence of the modern environmental movement, and the development of governmental policies for environmental protection. With the rise of neoliberalism, these became defined as impediments to economic growth and competitive disadvantages for the countries and other jurisdictions that adopted them.    This approach has led not only to escalating emission of greenhouse gasses but to a national and global failure to regulate the -- manifested at the Copenhagen climate conference -- even though the failure to do so threatens the well-being and even the survival of people and natons worldwide.

• A global climate protection agreement should be the spearhead of new global environmental protection regime, creating the basis for green jobs-based full employment in a new global full employment regime.

• Neoliberal export platform models of development need to be replaced by a new global Keynesianism in which each country and the world as a whole can pursue full employment of its human and material resources to meet its people's needs.

• This full employment model can be constructed initially around the need for every country to mobilize its human and material resources to reconstruct and develop its economy on the basis of a sharp reduction in greenhouse gasses.

• In order to move the world toward greater equality, this must be complemented by a new regulatory regime that protects labor and social rights around the world and that rewards rather than punishes countries for implementing such rights.

• Nations should establish a globally coordinated regime of financial re- regulation, leading to a new public purpose financial system.

• WTO rules should be revised to provide for mutually managed trade and green development based on global full employment for the green transition.

• The New International Economic Order strategy for global redistribution should be updated in the context of a global "grand bargain" that combines rapid greenhouse gas reduction with sustainable development.

Economic transformation can not be left to the 'invisible hand' of the market. Government-driven investments, innovation and skills development, social protection and consultation with social partners (unions and employers) are essential if we want to make change happen. 
As the Stern Review reminds us, climate change represents the biggest market failure in history. We cannot risk the same failed market mechanisms to successfully steer out of this crisis. The problem has to be solved through regulation, democratically- decided and implemented public policies and most importantly political leadership.