The social state is the future and isn’t “Bolshevism”! The state should fulfill the public interest and fight poverty
Trickle-down neoliberal economic theory is rife with lies and myths and leads to exploding inequality and precarious labor
Around 1980, wages and productivity began to diverge and workers relied on credits to survive the time of outsourcing and downsizing
Once 90% of investment was productive and 10% was speculative. Now that is reversed. States and communities suffer from revenue shortfalls. In the 1960s, 40% of Federal revenue came from corporations. In 2016, that fell to 8%
Markets are not self-healing or intrinsically ethical.
Financial markets aren’t efficient and are kept alive by injections of taxpayer money.
Corporations are kept alive by stock-buybacks and profit-shifting to tax havens
Fair tax policy must involve closing tax havens and ending tax competition.
Imagine a future with reduced working hours, respecting the rights of nature, exchanging roles, expanding the public sector and shriveling the financial sector!
Imagine a country without Wall Street and the Pentagon!
more at www.citizen.org, www.openculture.com, www.grin.com, www.truth-out.org, www.commondreams.org, www.onthecommons.org, and www.therealnews.com
From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump – and Beyond
by Nancy Fraser, American Affairs 4/2017
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2017/11/progressive-neoliberalism-trump-beyond/?fbclid=IwAR1BBQt6HM8oWZNBnPjWgKdONma7Ne4nEMksVW1GZgywE2R6Hw8-_mXlCl4#.XDowaasOj5o.facebook
whoever speaks of “crisis” today risks being dismissed as a bloviator, given the term’s banalization through endless loose talk. But there is a precise sense in which we do face a crisis today. If we characterize it precisely and identify its distinctive dynamics, we can better determine what is needed to resolve it. On that basis, too, we might glimpse a path that leads beyond the current impasse—through political realignment to societal transformation.
At first sight, today’s crisis appears to be political. Its most spectacular expression is right here, in the United States: Donald Trump—his election, his presidency, and the contention surrounding it. But there is no shortage of analogues elsewhere: the UK’s Brexit debacle; the waning legitimacy of the European Union and the disintegration of the social-democratic and center-right parties that championed it; the waxing fortunes of racist, anti-immigrant parties throughout northern and east-central Europe; and the upsurge of authoritarian forces, some qualifying as proto-fascist, in Latin America, Asia, and the Pacific. Our political crisis, if that’s what it is, is not just American, but global.
What makes that claim plausible is that, notwithstanding their differences, all these phenomena share a common feature. All involve a dramatic weakening, if not a simple breakdown, of the authority of the established political classes and political parties. It is as if masses of people throughout the world had stopped believing in the reigning common sense that underpinned political domination for the last several decades. It is as if they had lost confidence in the bona fides of the elites and were searching for new ideologies, organizations, and leadership. Given the scale of the breakdown, it’s unlikely that this is a coincidence. Let us assume, accordingly, that we face a global political crisis.
As big as that sounds, it is only part of the story. The phenomena just evoked constitute the specifically political strand of a broader, multifaceted crisis, which also has other strands—economic, ecological, and social—all of which, taken together, add up to a general crisis. Far from being merely sectoral, the political crisis cannot be understood apart from the blockages to which it is responding in other, ostensibly nonpolitical, institutions. In the United States, those blockages include the metastasization of finance; the proliferation of precarious service-sector McJobs; ballooning consumer debt to enable the purchase of cheap stuff produced elsewhere; conjoint increases in carbon emissions, extreme weather, and climate denialism; racialized mass incarceration and systemic police violence; and mounting stresses on family and community life thanks in part to lengthened working hours and diminished social supports. Together, these forces have been grinding away at our social order for quite some time without producing a political earthquake. Now, however, all bets are off. In today’s widespread rejection of politics as usual, an objective systemwide crisis has found its subjective political voice. The political strand of our general crisis is a crisis of hegemony.
A cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. (Oscar Wilde) It’s hard to teach someone the value of something when his job depends on his not knowing.. (Upton Sinclair)
Americans seem to be in a prospering economy since foreign capital surges. Portland seems to be a prospering city since the country has become a dustbowl with people only living on the coasts. The stock market seems prospering and inflated because states and communities suffer from revenue shortfalls amid corporate wealth and tax avoidance.
In truth, economic and political elites narrow discussion and make their wealth immune from criticism. In truth, hypocrisy triumphs when wealth is concentrated, when political parties implode and the corporate media subverts the will of the majority, the desire of the people for Bernie Sanders and a New Deal!
more at http://www.kickitover.org, http://www.submedia.tv, http://www.grin.com, http://www.openculture.com
Hearts of stone can become hearts of flesh!
Lies, vulgarities, and spinelessness are the rotten fruits of narcissism, nihilism and illiteracy. Public policy is worlds away from sledgehammers and wrecking balls.
Trump attacks the poor, seniors, disabled, children and students and mocks democracy, separation of powers, human rights and language. His two GOP budgets gave $8 trillion to corporations and wealthy with over one million dollars. There were no hearings, compromises, concessions or countermeasures and were “hearing-free” for the first time! Procedural justice fell by the wayside as though we were already an authoritarian government!
Trump is a clear and present danger who is totally unfit to be president. Trump is a humiliation of America, a clear and present danger intent only on personal enrichment and destroying trust and cooperation.
Endogenous crises come from enriching the super-rich and ignoring everyone who is not super-rich. Exogenous crises come from outside and are used as scapegoats while the real causes are made taboo.
more at http://www.citizen.org, http://www.openculture.com, http://www.grin.com, http://www.therealnews, and http://www.onthecommons.org