Friday, September 19, 2008
Wealthy of the World Unite! - The Neoliberal Swindle
Bush's Iraq invasion is costing an estimated 1 trillion dollars. The current estimated cost of bailing out Wall Street is now at one-half trillion dollars. The Bush presidency is costing American 2.5 trillion dollars.
When do people wake up to the con game? Democrats, Republicans, transnational corporations, media conglomerates (TV, radio, newspapers), and much of academia, are responsible for pumping massive sums of money out of the pockets of the poor and middle class, into the pockets of the rich and super-rich.
Obama is not the answer. He's a Margaret Thatcher; a right-wing Democrat. We remember Thatcher for her attack on labor unions and imperial ambitions in South America. Being the first fill-in-the-blank isn't enough. First woman, first black, first left-handed lesbian vegetarian...is irrelevant to social policy, and is now a calculated, cynical political strategy.
Such is the neoliberal legacy. Profess free markets and free trade, but deliver public funds to fix a fundamentally flawed economic system. Capitalism is an economically and ecologically dysfunctional system. Capitalism concentrates money in the pockets of the rich as it oscillates within a cycle of expansion and collapse. Capitalism collapses by design.
David Harvey speaks-- Neoliberal Economics: Robbing the Middle Class and Plundering Natural Resources.
Rather than characterizing the economic dynamics as class warfare, I prefer to think of the past thirty years as a class con game. There is no war. The poor are powerless and thus irrelevant. The middle class gets a con game crafted by transnational corporations and fed to us by corporate media. The media feed from the money trough slopped in their pens by corporate advertisers. The major news media outlets work for the advertisers,, not for you and me. We are fed massive doses of propaganda about the wonders of the marketplace: free markets, free trade, means freedom and prosperity. Markets are managed by the government--for the rich. Regulations protecting buyers and protecting health are eliminated, while government bails out the greedy. For whom?
Bad education + bad news media = bad public awareness = weak public power + exploitation of the masses.
When do people wake up to the con game? Democrats, Republicans, transnational corporations, media conglomerates (TV, radio, newspapers), and much of academia, are responsible for pumping massive sums of money out of the pockets of the poor and middle class, into the pockets of the rich and super-rich.
Obama is not the answer. He's a Margaret Thatcher; a right-wing Democrat. We remember Thatcher for her attack on labor unions and imperial ambitions in South America. Being the first fill-in-the-blank isn't enough. First woman, first black, first left-handed lesbian vegetarian...is irrelevant to social policy, and is now a calculated, cynical political strategy.
Such is the neoliberal legacy. Profess free markets and free trade, but deliver public funds to fix a fundamentally flawed economic system. Capitalism is an economically and ecologically dysfunctional system. Capitalism concentrates money in the pockets of the rich as it oscillates within a cycle of expansion and collapse. Capitalism collapses by design.
David Harvey speaks-- Neoliberal Economics: Robbing the Middle Class and Plundering Natural Resources.
Rather than characterizing the economic dynamics as class warfare, I prefer to think of the past thirty years as a class con game. There is no war. The poor are powerless and thus irrelevant. The middle class gets a con game crafted by transnational corporations and fed to us by corporate media. The media feed from the money trough slopped in their pens by corporate advertisers. The major news media outlets work for the advertisers,, not for you and me. We are fed massive doses of propaganda about the wonders of the marketplace: free markets, free trade, means freedom and prosperity. Markets are managed by the government--for the rich. Regulations protecting buyers and protecting health are eliminated, while government bails out the greedy. For whom?
Bad education + bad news media = bad public awareness = weak public power + exploitation of the masses.
