Neoliberal myths and fictions like the self-healing market, trickle-down prosperity and corporate beneficence have long accompanied and justified exploding inequality, environmental destruction and generalized insecurity.
Trillions for the banks is against all market rules of competition, risk and liability.
Eurozine articles could help us resist Newspeak, double speak and double standards. Egalitarian economics is different from plantation- and slave labor economics based on the ball and chain, the hamster wheel and conspicuous consumption.. Short-term constraints eclipse long-term necessities. We feel the shirt and not the coat.
Economic problems are often trivialized and distorted as personality or motivational problems to divert from systemic and structural problems and contradictions. Capital needs labor and yet capital reduces labor. We have reached the stage of total incompetence when the Senate and House both voted down the 2012 Summer Jobs bill, when tuition in Oregon has soared 400% in 30 years and corporate taxes fell from 60% in the 1960s to 14% today and the top tax rate was slashed from 70% to 35%!
Labor-intensive investment, person-oriented work, access over excess, community centers, reduced working hours and qualitative growth over quantitative growth could be new paradigms for a sustainable alternative economics that safeguards nature and worker rights!
03.02.2012
Daniel Daianu
When high finance cripples the economy and corrodes democracy
The current financial crisis is not confined to economies, writes former Romanian finance minister Daniel Daianu. The erosion of the middle class, the spread of extremism and the threat to democracy are some of the more obvious social effects demanding attention.
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2011-07-21-daianu-en.html
"Managed" v "market capitalism": The record
The thirty-year long experiment in market capitalism has failed to unleash a new era of enterprise, entrepreneurialism and dynamism, argues Stewart Lansley. Examining key areas in which the market model was supposed to deliver, he finds that, on almost every count, post-war "managed capitalism" outperformed it successor.
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2011-12-07-lansley-en.html
Comments
The issue is democracy, and the economic flim flam is how to divert attention away from the broad and inclusive participation in power that a democratic economy requires.