The economy exists for people, not vice versa. The economy should be a part of life, not a steamroller crushing self-determination and creativity. The economy should be embedded in society; society should not be embedded in the economy. Social and ecological reality should not be externalized or factored out but included in discussion and future planning. Thomas Piketty and alternative economics emphasize inequality and mass unemployment as dangers in late stage capitalism.
As lessons from the 2008 financial crisis, the financial sector must be shriveled and the public sector expanded. Market failure and state failure must be identified and confessed so errors are not repeated in the future. Profit and shareholder interest must be supplemented by sustainability and stakeholder interest. Quantitative growth must give way to qualitative growth, excess must yield to access and more to enough.
to read the translated articles “The Inheritance of Inequality and Rethinking Growth,” click on
http://la.indymedia.org/news/2014/10/266204.php
Comment by drc2 on www.thomhartmann.com
What I noticed even in the midst of CAPITAL was the way the yarnball was being pulled apart by threads that could not just be trimmed to keep what we have going.
The Social State is really democracy. It requires wealth to serve the economy that serves a democracy rather than running a plutocracy over us in the name of ‘freedom.’ What it takes to get the wealth glut punctured so we can have our money back is not a reform, it is a revolution.
The fact that this establishment of encrusted wealth and power must yield has been denied by those inside it for a long time. They have had loads of clever theories to prove that more for them would result in some more for us so we should be grateful rather than resentful of them. And, as the established encrusted of the past, they have presumed a right to feast while others starve and to live while others die in a society, much less one that pretends to be about “liberty and justice, for all.”
The incentives within the bubble to believe in the bubble are as strong as ever, but the signs of wear and tear or downright delusion are showing up inside the bubble and not just from outside “the ideology.” We shall see, of course, because we are in this larger boat and have been working on our swimming skills for a while.
