8 points for a global agenda of structural change in the COVID-19 pandemic
by Jens Martens, Oct 27, 2020
https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2021/01/13/18839377.php
“We can have democracy or concentration of wealth, not both,” said Justice Louis Brandeis, the longest-serving Supreme Court justice.
No, immigrants didn’t take our jobs and then our pensions. Selfish profit maximization, trickle-down prosperity, the invisible hand, shareholder value, NAFTA, corporate welfare, neoliberal myths and endless wars led to plutocracy and elite democracy. Poverty returns with misguided policy.
With banks “too big to fail,” we anchor our identity to an economy in collapse. Robert McChesney has urged a “Marshall Plan for Journalism.” The state makes itself poor by giving trillions to Wall Street banks. Authoritarian neoliberalism chooses ignoring and marginalizing instead of compromise. The state steals away from feeding and housing its people while corporations steal away from fair taxes. The misanthrope Trump magnifies the contradictions and unfairness in late-stage finance capitalism.
Covid reveals the self-destruction of capitalism. Making the poor invisible is the reverse side of corporate enrichment.
To millenials and non-millenials, Trump was the bull rampaging through the china shop Watchers of mainstream TV cannot tolerate criticism of conventional economics. One of fascism’s structures of insurgency, the centrality of the myth of a great national spirit undermined, stays intact – to keep a lid on things. Weimar beckons.
