Naked Capitalism is rapidly becoming my favorite blog on economics & finance issues. Yves Smith (pseudonym) and her fellow bloggers always bring insights and clarity to the post-2008 financial crisis world. Even though I read it almost daily, I missed this article (no doubt due to the title), and only became aware of it via the Dollars & Sense blog.
It succinctly expresses my own views of the world that our plutocrats and their supporters envision for us and have been working since the 1970s to achieve bit by bit. Throw in increasing government and corporate surveillance, laws like SOPA & CISPA and corporations increasing attempts to enclose the internet commons for their private profit, and we have a vision of a future where all but a few are slaves. A future that may not be all that different than the ancient Roman Republic during the Servile Wars, only with means of control that are totalitarian in all but name.
I need to go support Naked Capitalism, but I hope you will find that Yves Smith's words clarify the reality we all face.
“My sense is that the widespread sense of gloom, the increased level
of aggression in many walks of life (and on the Internet) isn’t just due
to the lousy state of the economy, although that certainly isn’t
helping. In the last year, it has become increasingly evident that a
very ugly set of changes that will have broad social impact is moving
forward with surprising speed.
“We are in the midst of a finance-led counterrevolution. The long
standing effort to roll back New Deal reforms has moved from triumph to
triumph. The foundation was laid via increasingly effective public
relations efforts to sell the Ayn Randian world view that granting
individuals unfettered freedom of action would produce only virtuous
outcomes, since the talented would flourish and the rest would
deservedly be left in the dust. In fact, societies that have moved
strongly in that direction such as Pinochet’s Chile and Russia under
Yeltsin, have seen plutocratic land grabs, declining standards of living
(and even lifespans), and a rise in authoritarianism or (in the case of
Colombia) organized crime. Those who won these brawls did flourish, but
at tremendous cost to society as a whole.
“In the US, the first step was making taxation less progressive. A
second, parallel measure was deregulation, particularly in financial
services. Together, they fostered the growth of an uber wealthy cohort
that increasingly lives apart from middle class and poor citizens. The
rich can thus tell themselves they have little to gain from the success
of ordinary people. And, perversely, the global financial crisis has
worked to the advantage of the financial elite. As former IMF chief
economist Simon Johnson described in a May 2009 Atlantic article,
the US instead suffered a quiet coup, with the top end of the financial
services industry becoming more concentrated, and more firmly in charge
of the political apparatus. And you see more vivid evidence of the
financial takeover in Europe, where technocrats are stripping countries
of their sovereignty and breaking them on the rack via failing austerity
programs, so as to avoid exposing the insolvency of French and German
banks. In the US, the events of the last year are less dramatic but no
less telling, including a coordinated 17-city paramilitary crackdown on
Occupy Wall Street, a “get out of jail almost free” settlement for the
mortgage-industrial complex, and an election where the two candidates
are indistinguishable in their enthusiasm for cutting Medicare and
Social Security, and murder by drone.
“The implications of gutting social protections are far more serious
than they might appear. Dial the clock back eighty years, and most
people lived in or near the communities they grew up in. They could turn
to extended family, or other members of the community for support if
they suffered a serious setback. Informal social safety nets stood in
the place of the government provided ones we have now.
“Broadly shared prosperity and government safety nets are essential
underpinnings of a modern, mobile society. The American nuclear family
isn’t just an outgrowth of the automobile era; it’s also the result of
union jobs in an industrial economy helping create a wage foundation,
and the high confidence most men (in those days, it was men) had in
continued employment, and the existence of social protections if
something bad happened (Social Security’s disability programs have
raised entire families, for instance) made it viable to move far from
one’s hometown in pursuit of opportunity.
“But as the population has become more mobile, the role of community,
and their local support mechanisms, has faded. Yes, when people get
desperate, they might still move in with a parent or child. But
anecdotally, that seems far less common today than it was a few
generations ago. So when government provided social insurance programs
are gutted, the broader social impact is much greater than taking us
back to the era right before they were implemented. Michael Hudson has described
the changes under way as neo-feudalism. We are moving towards the sort
of stratified society we had not in the 1920s, but in the early
Industrial Revolution with a landed aristocracy, a small haute
bourgoisie, some well remunerated craftsmen, and a large
agricultural/servant class. In other words, the effort to roll back the
New Deal is in fact going much further, in terms of reinstitutionalizing
class stratification, lack of mobility, and a resulting large new
“lower order” that will live in stress and often squalor. A new, more
brutal society is being created before our eyes, and it seems such an
incredible development that many people are still in denial about what
is happening.”
From: Launching the NC 2012 Fundraiser
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