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PETRUS

(3,678 posts)
Tue Apr 9, 2013, 02:45 PM Apr 2013

"a financialized and poorly regulated predator economy" (thanks Thatcher/Reagan!) - Where We Are Now

From http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2013/04/where-we-are-now.html

by Dan Kervick

Margaret Thatcher is dead.

Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were seminal conservative politicians who came to power in 1979 and 1980 at the end of a period of profound transformation in the Anglo-American world. A postwar system forged in war, and built on a broad foundation of industrial labor, rising middle class prosperity, and an active government hand in economic development was transforming itself socially and economically into something quite different.

Many of the increasingly well-educated and aspirational children of the postwar workforce were moving out of industrial labor and into a variety of non-labor services and professions, seeding the new social antagonisms and divisions these kinds of class shifts always entail. With a globalizing economy, industrial production moved toward cheaper and less protected labor abroad, and the labor security that had once been so prized by the public came to be seen by many as something standing in the way of low consumer prices and economic dynamism. An unpopular American war brought the era of universal male draft registration to an end, further widening the social gap between those with multiple economic options and those for whom military service was one of the few available escapes from a bleak economic future. At the same time, the prosperous and mobile economies of the developed world, with their ravenous hunger for fossil fuels, had become dependent for their energy resources on politically unstable regimes outside their borders, making them vulnerable to costly energy supply shocks. By the time Thatcher and Reagan came along, the postwar egalitarian and labor-centered order was moribund, and the two conservative leaders were able to tip it over. The equality-minded left found itself without a programmatic alternative to the old consensus framework that had built a prosperous, deep and secure middle class on the wreckage of the depression and the industrial foundation laid down by the war. To some extent that vacuum on the left still exists.

Now, in 2008, we’re at the end of a similar cycle. But this time what is ending is the political order that Thatcher and Reagan themselves helped build. The collapse of 2008 has shown us a nakedly bankrupt and dysfunctional neoliberal system: a financialized and poorly regulated predator economy organized to funnel money to parasites collecting rents on the output of others whose aspirations are systematically squashed. The system has given us unprecedented social inequality along with prolonged and seemingly permanent unemployment at levels that would once have been considered an appalling national scandal for all but the most incompetently run banana republics. The system is loosely supervised by political elites who are alienated from their electorates and who rarely even pretend to serve the voters anymore. These politicians are often little more than rent collecting bag men for the ownership class they work for. A laughably unpopular US Congress occupies itself with performing obstructionist services for its paymasters and positively revels in its unresponsiveness to national needs. The major media personalities and channels, employees of the small percentage of people who own the country, try to spread a veneer of normality over the gathering debacle, and distract the masses with pseudo-reality entertainments aimed at inculcating feelings of inferiority, humiliation and subordination...

(Read more: http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2013/04/where-we-are-now.html)

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"a financialized and poorly regulated predator economy" (thanks Thatcher/Reagan!) - Where We Are Now (Original Post) PETRUS Apr 2013 OP
This is full of insights. Such as... cbrer Apr 2013 #1
 

cbrer

(1,831 posts)
1. This is full of insights. Such as...
Tue Apr 9, 2013, 05:26 PM
Apr 2013

"financialized and poorly regulated predator economy organized to funnel money to parasites collecting rents on the output of others whose aspirations are systematically squashed".

"politicians are often little more than rent collecting bag men for the ownership class they work for."

"A laughably unpopular US Congress occupies itself with performing obstructionist services for its paymasters and positively revels in its unresponsiveness to national needs."

These are ubiquitous truths that have no single political party, party philosophy, or social definition.

Thanks!

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