Neo-liberalism has been the subject of intense discussion among various left intellectuals within the last few decades, and rightly so (Aronowitz 2006; Giroux 2004; Grossberg, 2005; Hardt and Negri 2004; Harvey, 2005; Ong, 2006; Saad-Filho and Johnston 2005; Smith 2005). As a diverse political, economic and educational project, neo-liberalism has constructed a grim alignment among the state, finance capital and transnational corporations while embracing the “market as the arbiter of social destiny” (Rule 1998, 31). By extending the domain of economics into politics, neo-liberal market rationality now organizes, regulates and defines the basic principles and workings of the state. Gone are the days when the state “assumed responsibility for a range of social needs” (Steinmetz 2003, 337). Instead, the state now pursues a wide range of " ‘deregulations, ' privatizations, and abdications of responsibility to the market and private philanthropy” (Steinmetz 2003, 337). As Wendy Brown points out, “when deployed as a form of governmentality, neoliberalism reaches from the soul of the citizen-subject to educational policy to practices of empire” (Brown 2005, 40). Throughout the globe, the forces of neo-liberalism are on the march, dismantling the historically guaranteed social provisions provided by the welfare state, defining profit-making as the essence of democracy, imposing rapacious free-trade agreements, saturating non-economic spheres with market rationalities and equating freedom with the unrestricted ability of markets to “govern economic relations free of government regulation” (Aronowitz 2003, 101). Transnational in scope, neo-liberalism now imposes its economic regime and market values on developing weaker nations through the heavy-handed policies of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). Western financial and commercial interests now manage and transfer resources and wealth from the poor and less developed nations to the richest and most powerful nation-states as well as wealthy corporate defenders of capitalism.