The neoliberal model means profits without investments. This is true for Germany, Europe and especially the US (cf. Nikolaus Kowall). Profit-making is different than profit-maximizing. Studying economics today is like brainwashing (cf. Ulrich Thielemann). Economics must be embedded in society; society must not be embedded in economics. Economization or privatization threatens to narrow and emascuilate, turning the wonder of liberating education into the pablum of corporate training (cf. Peter Ulrich).
While the average holding time for stocks was 10 years in the 1960s, the time now is not nine months but 22 seconds. (cf. Gunter Grzega http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2014/04/426892.shtml “The state is consciously weakened to speed up the redistribution from bottom to top because that corresponds to the dogmas of the neoliberal ideology. “Our state was systematically weakened in the last 15 years by extensive tax cuts. I remember the lowering of the top income tax rate.”)
Finance capitalism or casino capitalism must be criticized like shareholder value orientation and profit maximization. Future necessities must not be sacrificed to short-term constraints. The future could be full of reduced working hours, community centers, person-oriented work, investment in the infrastructure, cloud workers, free Internet books and soft power!
You can read or download the 20-page “Alternative Trade Mandate” at www.alternativetrademandate.org and read Joseph Stiglitz’ “Why Inequality Matters” at www.nextnewdeal.net. Professor Stiglitz tried to explain this to the Senate. Hopefully the millionaire’s club was not entirely asleep, oblivious to future necessities and caught by short-term constraints!
States should be able to defend themselves against financial deregulation, chlorinated chicken, genetic corn and salmon, investor-state sovereignty-grabbing courts and non-transparent negotiations.
Spring returns like a child who knows poetry! (Rilke)
The old gives way to the new as the snow gives way to the spring! (Rilke)
The swan that floats and doesn’t sink represents the intransitory in the transitory. (Heidegger)
more at www.freembtranslations.net, www.therealnews.com, www.steadystate.org, www.submedia.tv, www.citizen.org, www.worklessparty.org and www.onthecommons.org
