Stiglitz - Neoliberalism has Gutted the Middle Class

Nobel laureate and former World Bank chief economist, Joe Stiglitz, contends we urgently need to replace neoliberalism with progressive capitalism.

Three years ago, President Donald Trump’s election and the United Kingdom’s Brexit referendum confirmed what those of us who have long studied income statistics already knew: in most advanced countries, the market economy has been failing large swaths of society. 

Nowhere is this truer than in the United States. Long regarded as a poster child for the promise of free-market individualism, America today has higher inequality and less upward social mobility than most other developed countries.

After rising for a century, average life expectancy in the U.S. is now declining. And for those in the bottom 90% of the income distribution, real (inflation-adjusted) wages have stagnated: the income of a typical male worker today is around where it was 40 years ago. 

Meanwhile, many European countries have sought to emulate America, and those that succeeded, particularly the U.K., are now suffering similar political and social consequences.

Contrary to what many in the financial sector would like to think, the problem was not too much state involvement in the economy, but too little. Both crises were the direct result of an under-regulated financial sector.

Now, the middle class is being hollowed out on both sides of the Atlantic. 

...Reversing this malaise requires that we figure out what went wrong and chart a new course forward, by embracing progressive capitalism, which, while acknowledging the virtues of the market, also recognizes its limitations and ensures that the economy works for the benefit of everyone. 

We cannot simply return to the golden age of Western capitalism in the decades after World War II, when a middle-class lifestyle seemed within reach of a majority of citizens. Nor would we necessarily want to. After all, the “American dream” during this period was mostly reserved for a privileged minority: white males. 

We can thank former President Ronald Reagan and former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher for our current state of affairs. The neoliberal reforms of the 1980s were based on the idea that unfettered markets would bring shared prosperity through a mystical trickle-down process.

...We were told that lowering tax rates on the rich, financialization, and globalization would result in higher standards of living for everybody. 

Instead, the U.S. growth rate fell to around two-thirds of its level in the post-war era — a period of tight financial regulations and a top marginal tax rate consistently above 70% — and a greater share of the wealth and income from this limited growth was funneled to the top 1%. 

Instead of the promised prosperity, we got deindustrialization, polarization, and a shrinking middle class. Unless we change the script, these patterns will continue — or worsen. 

Fortunately, there is an alternative to market fundamentalism. 

Through a pragmatic rebalancing of power between government, markets, and civil society, we can move toward a freer, fairer, and more productive system. Progressive capitalism means forging a new social contract between voters and elected officials, workers and corporations, rich and poor.

Stiglitz spared Mulroney, as much a champion of the "new economy" as Thatcher or Reagan.  Those three genuinely did drink the KoolAid of von Mises, Hayek and Friedman. They drove us into the ditch and none of their successors has had the vision, the courage and the strength to pull us back out.

Today we have Team Trudeau/Morneau and they're avowed disciples of market fundamentalism. Neither has shown the inclination much less the vision to pry us loose from neoliberalism's grip. After all, that's been the source of their considerable riches.

As Good a Take as Any. The Roots of America's Malaise.

His book is, "Tailspin - The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall - and Those Fighting to Reverse It." He is Steven Brill, founder of American Lawyer magazine and, gulp, Court TV.

In a remarkable essay, Brill outlines the culture that put America into a nose dive, how the country went from meritocracy to aristocracy, and some recent efforts being made to pull America back before it ends as most tailspins end.

Lately, most Americans, regardless of their political leanings, have been asking themselves some version of the same question: How did we get here? How did the world’s greatest democracy and economy become a land of crumbling roads, galloping income inequality, bitter polarization and dysfunctional government? 

...About five decades ago, the core values that make America great began to bring America down. The First Amendment became a tool for the wealthy to put a thumb on the scales of democracy. America’s rightly celebrated dedication to due process was used as an instrument to block government from enforcing job-safety rules, holding corporate criminals accountable and otherwise protecting the unprotected. Election reforms meant to enhance democracy wound up undercutting democracy. Ingenious financial and legal engineering turned our economy from an engine of long-term growth and shared prosperity into a casino with only a few big winners.

...Income inequality has soared: inflation-adjusted middle-class wages have been nearly frozen for the last four decades, while earnings of the top 1% have nearly tripled. The recovery from the crash of 2008 – which saw banks and bankers bailed out while millions lost their homes, savings and jobs – was reserved almost exclusively for the wealthiest. Their incomes in the three years following the crash went up by nearly a third, while the bottom 99% saw an uptick of less than half of 1%. Only a democracy and an economy that has discarded its basic mission of holding the community together, or failed at it, would produce those results.

...Although the U.S. remains the world’s richest country, it has the third-highest poverty rate among the 35 nations in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), behind only Turkey and Israel. Nearly 1 in 5 American children lives in a household that the government classifies as “food insecure,” meaning they are without “access to enough food for active, healthy living.” 

Beyond that, too few basic services seem to work as they should. America’s airports are an embarrassment, and a modern air-traffic control system is more than 25 years behind its original schedule. The power grid, roads and rails are crumbling, pushing the U.S. far down international rankings for infrastructure quality. Despite spending more on health care and K-12 education per capita than most other developed countries, health care outcomes and student achievement also rank in the middle or worse globally. Among the 35 OECD countries, American children rank 30th in math proficiency and 19th in science.

...there is a theme that threads through and ties together all the strands: many of the most talented, driven Americans used what makes America great–the First Amendment, due process, financial and legal ingenuity, free markets and free trade, meritocracy, even democracy itself–to chase the American Dream. And they won it, for themselves. Then, in a way unprecedented in history, they were able to consolidate their winnings, outsmart and co-opt the forces that might have reined them in, and pull up the ladder so more could not share in their success or challenge their primacy. 

By continuing to get better at what they do, by knocking away the guardrails limiting their winnings, aggressively engineering changes in the political landscape, and by dint of the often unanticipated consequences of their innovations, they created a nation of moats that protected them from accountability and from the damage their triumphs caused in the larger community. Most of the time, our elected and appointed representatives were no match for these overachievers. As a result of their savvy, their drive and their resources (and a certain degree of privilege, as these strivers may have come from humble circumstances but are mostly white men), America all but abandoned its most ambitious and proudest ideal: the never perfect, always debated and perpetually sought after balance between the energizing inequality of achievement in a competitive economy and the community-binding equality promised by democracy. In a battle that began a half-century ago, the achievers won.

It's a fine essay if not too much of a giveaway. Read it and you might decide you don't need the book.

It May Be Legal, Barely, But It's Not Victimless. You Oughta Know Better.

Rich folks see themselves as victims. It's just not fair that they should have to cough up a sizeable chunk of their hard-earned cash to the government. That's why so many stash that cash in tax havens, all within the letter of some very accommodating laws.

Not many little people get to shelter their equally hard-earned cash. It goes on food, clothing and shelter for the family and, yes, a chunk to the taxman.  It doesn't compare to what the rich guy pays the taxman. He pays loads more. And there's the argument for tax shelters.

However if you follow that scenario through just a bit more you'll see how much more, as a percentage of overall income, the rich guy has to spare. It's enough that the three richest Americans - Gates, Bezos and Buffet - have amassed more wealth in their lifetimes than the bottom 180-million of their countrymen.  That's the cash that goes into those carpet bags that winds up within spitting distance of some tropical beach, way beyond the reach of the taxman.

It's not just money shielded from taxes, it's a different sort of money. It's money that fuels inequality in all its forms - inequality of income, inequality of wealth, inequality of opportunity. The taxes not paid on that money become taxes levied on those of more modest means who cannot shelter their minuscule incomes.  Tax havens may be legal but they are not victimless - assuming you accept that we're all equal citizens of this same country.

Teddy Roosevelt explained the difference between ordinary money and what today has become tax haven money.

In every wise struggle for human betterment one of the main objects, and often the only object, has been to achieve in large measure equality of opportunity. In the struggle for this great end, nations rise from barbarism to civilization, and through it people press forward from one stage of enlightenment to the next. One of the chief factors in progress is the destruction of special privilege. The essence of any struggle for healthy liberty has always been, and must always be, to take from some one man or class of men the right to enjoy power, or wealth, or position, or immunity, which has not been earned by service to his or their fellows.

At many stages in the advance of humanity, this conflict between the men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess is the central condition of progress. In our day it appears as the struggle of freemen to gain and hold the right of self-government as against the special interests, who twist the methods of free government into machinery for defeating the popular will. At every stage, and under all circumstances, the essence of the struggle is to equalize opportunity, destroy privilege, and give to the life and citizenship of every individual the highest possible value both to himself and to the commonwealth.

Did you catch that last part, how equalizing opportunity is essential to enabling the nation to get the "highest possible value" from its citizens. It's about building a stronger, better, more prosperous country.

Practical equality of opportunity for all citizens, when we achieve it, will have two great results. First, every man will have a fair chance to make of himself all that in him lies; to reach the highest point to which his capacities, unassisted by special privilege of his own and unhampered by the special privilege of others, can carry him, and to get for himself and his family substantially what he has earned. Second, equality of opportunity means that the commonwealth will get from every citizen the highest service of which he is capable. No man who carries the burden of the special privileges of another can give to the commonwealth that service to which it is fairly entitled.

Roosevelt knew that not all money is equal.

We grudge no man a fortune in civil life if it is honorably obtained and well used. It is not even enough that it should have been gained without doing damage to the community. We should permit it to be gained only so long as the gaining represents benefit to the community. This, I know, implies a policy of a far more active governmental interference with social and economic conditions in this country than we have yet had, but I think we have got to face the fact that such an increase in governmental control is now necessary.

No man should receive a dollar unless that dollar has been fairly earned. Every dollar received should represent a dollar’s worth of service rendered — not gambling in stocks, but service rendered. The really big fortune, the swollen fortune, by the mere fact of its size acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is possessed by men of relatively small means. Therefore, I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes, and in another tax which is far more easily collected and far more effective — a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion, and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate.

And then there's this. Not from Marx or Lenin or Trotsky but from the guy who led the charge of the Roughriders up San Juan hill.

Nothing is more true than that excess of every kind is followed by reaction; a fact which should be pondered by reformer and reactionary alike. We are face to face with new conceptions of the relations of property to human welfare, chiefly because certain advocates of the rights of property as against the rights of men have been pushing their claims too far. The man who wrongly holds that every human right is secondary to his profit must now give way to the advocate of human welfare, who rightly maintains that every man holds his property subject to the general right of the community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public welfare may require it.

Roosevelt's words stand as an indictment of our current government and previous regimes going back decades, generations. They lost sight of these essential truths and our nation is the poorer because of it. They went along to get along. They accommodated the "swollen fortune" and sacrificed equality of opportunity in the process.

Yes it's legal that Paul Martin's fortune be offshored, first to low-tax haven Barbados and then on to no-tax haven Bermuda. But is it right? Are we to be the doormat of the Paul Martins of this world? It's all the worse that much of this wealth is, in one form or another, gifted from mentor to apprentice, from father to son, the very foundation to perpetuate oligarchy. We're seeing entire generations who, by accident of birth, come into wealth they have not earned, a class of men who "have been pushing their claims too far."

It's time to push back.

What Worries Billionaires? You and Me, Us.

Not since the time of the Carnegies, Rockefellers and Vanderbilts

 at the turn of the 20th century was so much owned by so few 

I'm pretty sure I've never spent time with a billionaire.  I've never had the chance to hear them out, what makes them tick, what troubles them, their deepest worries. It can't be easy, tossing around at night with dreams of guillotines, gilded of course.

Billionaires increased their combined global wealth by almost a fifth last year to a record $6tn (£4.5tn) – more than twice the GDP of the UK. There are now 1,542 dollar billionaires across the world, after 145 multi-millionaires saw their wealth tick over into nine-zero fortunes last year, according to the UBS / PwC Billionaires report.

Josef Stadler, lead author of the report and UBS’s head of global ultra high net worth, said his billionaire clients are concerned that growing inequality between rich and poor could lead to a “strike back”.

“We’re at an inflection point,” Stadler said. “Wealth concentration is as high as in 1905, this is something billionaires are concerned about.

“The problem is the power of interest on interest – that makes big money bigger and, the question is to what extent is that sustainable and at what point will society intervene and strike back?”

Stadler added: “We are now two years into the peak of the second Gilded Age.”

It's not like they're feeling much love these days from the International Monetary Fund that recently prescribed what is essentially confiscatory taxation to relieve billionaires of the burden of their excess wealth and use it to diminish the scourge of inequality.

Billionaires’ fortunes increased by 17% on average last year due to the strong performance of their companies and investments, particularly in technology and commodities. The billionaires’ average return was double that achieved by the world’s stock markets and far more than the average interest rates of just 0.35% offered by UK instant-access high street bank accounts.

And now for something, well, not entirely different.

Toasted, Roasted and Grilled. - Lagarde

IMF chief Christine Legard has added her voice to the call for urgent action on climate change - and growing inequality.

"As I've said before, if we don't do anything about climate change now, in 50 years' time we will be toasted, roasted and grilled."

Both climate change and inequality were "two key issues" that would drive us to either utopia or dystopia, Lagarde stated. "If we don't address those two issues — of climate change and growing inequalities — we will be moving towards a dark 50 years from now," she said.

Legard chose a conference on future investment held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to deliver her remarks. She was somewhat countered by Amin Nasser, CEO of Saudi Aramco, who observed, perhaps ironically, that oil isn't going anywhere anytime soon. 

"Alternatives, electric cars and renewables, are definitely gaining market share, making a lot of progress and we are witnessing that," he said. "However, it will be decades before they take a major share of the global energy supply."

Has Equality Become a Quaint, Obsolete Vestige of the Past?

I know, I know, you're probably saying "what equality?" When did we ever live in a world of equality? We didn't but we did at least once treat equality in some things as a desirable ideal. That we embraced equality as a value is evident today in the angst many suffer at our rapidly growing inequality. According to a piece from BBC, inequality could soon get far worse and very quickly. In fact, your existence might be treated as redundant.

[In the 19th and 20th centuries] equality became a dominant value in human culture, almost all over the world. Why?

It was partly down to the rise of new ideologies such as humanism, liberalism and socialism.

But it was also about technological and economic change - which was connected to those new ideologies, of course.

Suddenly the elite needed large numbers of healthy, educated people to serve as soldiers in the army and as workers in the factories.

Governments didn't educate and vaccinate to be nice.

They needed the masses to be useful.

But now that's changing again.

[Robotics-driven automation]  is one reason why we might - in the not-too-distant future - see the creation of the most unequal societies that have ever existed in human history.

And there are other reasons to fear such a future.

With rapid improvements in biotechnology and bioengineering, we may reach a point where, for the first time in history, economic inequality becomes biological inequality.

Until now, humans had control of the world outside them.

They could control the rivers, forests, animals and plants.

But they had very little control of the world inside them.

They had limited ability to manipulate and engineer their own bodies, brains and minds.

They couldn't cheat death.

That might not always be the case.
...

The rich - through purchasing ...biological enhancements - could become, literally, better than the rest; more intelligent, healthier and with far greater life-spans.

At that point, it will make sense to cede power to this "enhanced" class.

Think about it like this.

In the past, the nobility tried to convince the masses that they were superior to everyone else and so should hold power.

In the future I am describing, they really will be superior to the masses.

And because they will be better than us, it will make sense to cede power and decision-making to them.

...

We might also find that the rise of artificial intelligence - and not just automation - will mean that huge numbers of people, in all kinds of jobs, simply lose their economic usefulness.

The two processes together - human enhancement and the rise of AI - may result in the separation of humankind into a very small class of super-humans and a massive underclass of "useless" people.

...

Once you lose your economic importance, the state loses at least some of the incentive to invest in your health, education and welfare.
It's very dangerous to be redundant.

Your future depends on the goodwill of some small elite.

Maybe there is goodwill.

But in a time of crisis - like climate catastrophe - it would be very easy to toss you overboard.

Dismiss this if you like but I think we can all agree that it poses serious questions that we need to ask, issues that we need to discuss. Unfortunately it comes at a point where governments seem to have no great interest in discussing serious issues with us. Maybe they already see this writing on the wall.

An Impassioned Plea to Tear Down the Walls of Inequality from Stephen Hawking.

The neoliberals who have driven the western world into the ditch over the past three decades need to decide whether to rehabilitate liberal democracy or allow themselves to be erased from memory by generations of strongman rule.

Yeah, Justin - you too.

First up, theoretical physicist extraordinaire, Stephen Hawking. In an opinion piece in The Guardian, "This Is the Most Dangerous Time for our planet," Hawking warns, "We can’t go on ignoring inequality, because we have the means to destroy our world but not to escape it."

Referring to Brexit and the Trump victory, he writes it was, "the moment when the forgotten spoke, finding their voices to reject the advice and guidance of experts and the elite everywhere."

The concerns underlying these votes about the economic consequences of globalisation and accelerating technological change are absolutely understandable. The automation of factories has already decimated jobs in traditional manufacturing, and the rise of artificial intelligence is likely to extend this job destruction deep into the middle classes, with only the most caring, creative or supervisory roles remaining.

...We need to put this alongside the financial crash, which brought home to people that a very few individuals working in the financial sector can accrue huge rewards and that the rest of us underwrite that success and pick up the bill when their greed leads us astray. So taken together we are living in a world of widening, not diminishing, financial inequality, in which many people can see not just their standard of living, but their ability to earn a living at all, disappearing. It is no wonder then that they are searching for a new deal, which Trump and Brexit might have appeared to represent.

...It is also the case that another unintended consequence of the global spread of the internet and social media is that the stark nature of these inequalities is far more apparent than it has been in the past. For me, the ability to use technology to communicate has been a liberating and positive experience. Without it, I would not have been able to continue working these many years past.

But it also means that the lives of the richest people in the most prosperous parts of the world are agonisingly visible to anyone, however poor, who has access to a phone. And since there are now more people with a telephone than access to clean water in sub-Saharan Africa, this will shortly mean nearly everyone on our increasingly crowded planet will not be able to escape the inequality.

...For me, the really concerning aspect of this is that now, more than at any time in our history, our species needs to work together. We face awesome environmental challenges: climate change, food production, overpopulation, the decimation of other species, epidemic disease, acidification of the oceans.

Together, they are a reminder that we are at the most dangerous moment in the development of humanity. We now have the technology to destroy the planet on which we live, but have not yet developed the ability to escape it. Perhaps in a few hundred years, we will have established human colonies amid the stars, but right now we only have one planet, and we need to work together to protect it.

Be honest. Does it sound to you as though your government was on this course, resolved to save liberal democracy, humanity and the environment, or on another course fretting about spreading as much bitumen as conceivably possible to every Third World-grade power generation technology that demonstrates how completely oblivious they are to the reality setting in today, now.

And we and our governments should wake up to the decline of liberal democracy and what that may hold in store for us. Former London mayor and now the UK's foreign minister, Boris Johnson, writes of the defeat of democracy.

There is no doubt that the neoliberal order still fervently perpetuated by our "new" prime minister has driven a wedge between the populace and those they choose to govern on their behalf. It fails to adequately defend state sovereignty and, in the process, leaves the working classes, blue and white collar, in a state of precarity.  Until we do what the political caste will not - until we even the keel again - this will only worsen and become more intractable.

Monbiot Tackles Neoliberalism's Death Grip on the West

Neoliberalism has been the default operating system of western governments, Canada included, since it was ushered in during the Thatcher/Reagan/Mulroney era.

Justin Trudeau is a neoliberal as were his predecessors over the last three decades.  Canada remains in the clutches of neoliberalism and no one, no leader, no party is putting forward an alternative vision.

We see the muddy footprints of neoliberalism in the latest news about how most of the new jobs in Canada are low wage, real precariat stuff and how huge our monthly trade deficits have become. We make increasingly less of the stuff we want to buy and foreign demand for the stuff we do make isn't great enough to even the books. No wonder Slick is so desperate to build bitumen pipelines to the coast. Silly bugger.

In today's Guardian, George Monbiot argues that neoliberalism is what has put America's democracy in such dire peril.

The events that led to Donald Trump’s election started in England in 1975. At a meeting a few months after Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservative party, one of her colleagues, or so the story goes, was explaining what he saw as the core beliefs of conservatism. She snapped open her handbag, pulled out a dog-eared book, and slammed it on the table. “This is what we believe,” she said. A political revolution that would sweep the world had begun.

The book was The Constitution of Liberty by Frederick Hayek. Its publication, in 1960, marked the transition from an honest, if extreme, philosophy to an outright racket. The philosophy was called neoliberalism. It saw competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. The market would discover a natural hierarchy of winners and losers, creating a more efficient system than could ever be devised through planning or by design. Anything that impeded this process, such as significant tax, regulation, trade union activity or state provision, was counter-productive. Unrestricted entrepreneurs would create the wealth that would trickle down to everyone.

[Hayek] begins the book by advancing the narrowest possible conception of liberty: an absence of coercion. He rejects such notions as political freedom, universal rights, human equality and the distribution of wealth, all of which, by restricting the behaviour of the wealthy and powerful, intrude on the absolute freedom from coercion he demands.

Democracy, by contrast, “is not an ultimate or absolute value”. In fact, liberty depends on preventing the majority from exercising choice over the direction that politics and society might take.

...Thatcherism and Reaganism were not ideologies in their own right: they were just two faces of neoliberalism. Their massive tax cuts for the rich, crushing of trade unions, reduction in public housing, deregulation, privatisation, outsourcing and competition in public services were all proposed by Hayek and his disciples. But the real triumph of this network was not its capture of the right, but its colonisation of parties that once stood for everything Hayek detested.

Bill Clinton and Tony Blair did not possess a narrative of their own. Rather than develop a new political story, they thought it was sufficient to triangulate. In other words, they extracted a few elements of what their parties had once believed, mixed them with elements of what their opponents believed, and developed from this unlikely combination a “third way”.

...As I warned in April, the result is first disempowerment then disenfranchisement. If the dominant ideology stops governments from changing social outcomes, they can no longer respond to the needs of the electorate. Politics becomes irrelevant to people’s lives; debate is reduced to the jabber of a remote elite. The disenfranchised turn instead to a virulent anti-politics in which facts and arguments are replaced by slogans, symbols and sensation. The man who sank Hillary Clinton’s bid for the presidency was not Donald Trump. It was her husband.

The paradoxical result is that the backlash against neoliberalism’s crushing of political choice has elevated just the kind of man that Hayek worshipped. Trump, who has no coherent politics, is not a classic neoliberal. But he is the perfect representation of Hayek’s “independent”; the beneficiary of inherited wealth, unconstrained by common morality, whose gross predilections strike a new path that others may follow. The neoliberal thinktankers are now swarming round this hollow man, this empty vessel waiting to be filled by those who know what they want. The likely result is the demolition of our remaining decencies, beginning with the agreement to limit global warming.

Where Is the Exit Door?

How long will Canada remain under the boot of market fundamentalism? This is the laissez faire face of modern neoliberalism that has taken hold throughout the developed world, Canada included.

It manifests itself most directly in free trade agreements and associated institutions such as the IMF, the World Trade Organization, and the World Bank. Rarely seen is its presence in parallel or "deep government."

Neoliberalism is an ideology and, like most ideologies, it's anchored in both fact and plenty of belief. It's sort of faith-based. Its disciples believe neoliberalism is itself an ethic, in fact the best and preferred ethic to achieve solutions to our problems using the power of the marketplace. It holds that many of the functions ordinarily associated with government can be better undertaken through market forces.

Whether you realize it or not, we've been eating, sleeping and breathing this stuff for forty years. That's been long enough to realize that a lot of the promise of neoliberalism has been hogwash.

Neoliberalism often works at cross purposes to the public interest. Income stagnation is a function of market fundamentalism. Inequality of wealth, income and opportunity is likewise the outcome of adherence to market fundamentalism. It is the engine for transferring wealth from the many to the few and, as so plainly demonstrated by the United States, with that wholesale shift in economic power comes a commensurate shift in political power. This is the rise of illiberal democracy which, unfortunately, is not an outcome but merely an early onset symptom of a darker order to follow.

The problem with illiberal democracy is that many of us see it as genuine democracy. We don't see it for what it is, democracy with a potentially terminal disease. If we did we might be less tolerant of market fundamentalism, globalization and free trade that demand the surrendering of various incidents of our national sovereignty. We might reject the rise of state corporatism.

When your highest court holds that a corporation, itself a "legal fiction", is a person with political rights - you have a real problem. When that same top court holds that corporations cannot be restrained from dominating the political process with massive infusions of money for election advertising and campaign contributions - you have a real problem.

As Stiglitz powerfully chronicles in "The Price of Inequality" the great preponderance of inequality in the U.S. is neither merit- nor market-based. It is legislated, enacted by the people elected to represent the people but instead serving the contrary interests of the few and their corporations. This sort of inequality takes many forms - tax breaks and outright exemptions, subsidies, grants, deferrals and, quite regularly, the transfer of national assets such as water either for free or far below value.  This is a "trickle up" economy where wealth finally crystallizes in the accounts of the investor or rentier class.

America has been our laboratory for this experiment in free market fundamentalism, neoliberalism. What are the observed results? A gutted middle class no longer empowered economically or politically; wage stagnation; inequality of all forms; the collapse of social mobility; the rise of the precariat; the formation of the narrowly held, corporate media cartel becoming an instrument of conditioning and distracting the populace; transactional governance (the "bought and paid for" Congress) and illiberal democracy; and the wholesale, unearned transfer of wealth from the many and from the state, to the few.

So, remind me why Canadians want to go down this road? Make no mistake, that is what we are doing.

We're trapped and so long as we submit to political leadership in thrall to market fundamentalism, we'll become ever more tightly trapped. Tom Mulcair caught hell for his support of both Thatcherism and the Canada-Europe free trade deal, the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA). One NDP apologist came to Mulcair's defence saying it was preferrable that we trade with Europe because of its social democracy. Oh I know - they're thinking of old Klaus with his alpine hat and lederhosen toiling away in the Black Forest banging out cuckoo clocks.

I guess that person didn't notice that Europe is on fire with discontent triggering uprisings from Athens to London. There's not a lot of social democracy on display in the U.K. and it's being ruthlessly suppressed in Greece with Spain, Portugal and Italy soon to follow. They didn't notice the rise of fascism in Britain, France, Germany and as far east as Hungary where it actually holds power. Neo-nationalism is on the march and it is very angry.

Is there no way out? Sure there is but we'll never find the exit door until we get up and look for it, something for which our political caste shows no appetite.

We need motivation to demand something better.  That begins by recognizing everything we're giving up and what's being steadily drained from us in every context - economically, socially, politically, democratically - through free market fundamentalism. This is not theoretical. It is not hypothetical. It is real. We are living it and we all know that we're feeling it.

A good way to start is to read a few books.  Here are some I would recommend.


David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism.

Joseph Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality.

Gar Alperovitz, What Then Must We Do?

Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything.

Thomas Prugh, Natural Capital and Human Economic Survival.

Paul Craig Roberts, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism.

Herman Daly, Beyond Growth.

Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad.

Roubini and Mihm, Crisis Economics.

Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine.

If you read those ten books you'll see market fundamentalism in the raw and you'll grasp what will befall us, and especially our kids and grandkids, if we don't get out from under it.

It all begins by understanding what we're up against.


* I just checked and, with the exception of Natural Capital and Human Economic Survival (which I still think is an essential read) all of the titles listed above are available in e-book format from Amazon.

The Struggle Ahead for a Decent Future for our Youth

It's sometimes hard to read a Henry Giroux essay without coming away feeling like you've been dragged into a dark alley and bludgeoned.  In his latest essay, this American intellectual explores what we've allowed ourselves to become, how we've been complicit in our own orchestrated economic, social and political degradation.  Brace yourself.

"The danger is that a global, universally interrelated civilization may produce barbarians from its own midst by forcing millions of people into conditions which, despite all appearances, are the conditions of savages."

- Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)

Following Hannah Arendt, a dark cloud of political and ethical ignorance has descended on the United States. Thoughtlessness has become something that now occupies a privileged, if not celebrated, place in the political landscape and the mainstream cultural apparatuses. A new kind of infantilism now shapes daily life as adults gleefully take on the role of unthinking children and children are taught to be adults, stripped of their innocence and subject to a range of disciplinary pressures designed to cripple their ability to be imaginative.

Under such circumstances, agency devolves into a kind of anti-intellectual cretinism evident in the babble of banality produced by Fox News, celebrity culture, schools modeled after prisons and politicians who support creationism, argue against climate change and denounce almost any form of reason. The citizen now becomes a consumer; the politician, a slave to corporate money and power; and the burgeoning army of anti-public intellectuals in the mainstream media present themselves as unapologetic enemies of anything that suggests compassion, a respect for the commons and democracy itself.

Education is no longer a public good but a private right, just as critical thinking is no longer a fundamental necessity for creating an engaged and socially responsible citizenship. Neoliberalism's disdain for the social is no longer a quote made famous by Margaret Thatcher. The public sphere is now replaced by private interests, and unbridled individualism rails against any viable notion of solidarity that might inform the vibrancy of struggle, change, and an expansion of an enlightened and democratic body politic.

...Under market fundamentalism, there is a separation of market values, behavior and practices from ethical considerations and social costs giving rise to a growing theater of cruelty and abuse throughout North America. Public spheres that once encouraged progressive ideas, enlightened social policies, democratic values, critical dialogue and exchange have been increasingly commercialized. Or, they have been replaced by corporate settings whose ultimate fidelity is to increasing profit margins and producing a vast commercial and celebrity culture "that tends to function so as to erase everything that matters." Since the 1980s, the scale of human suffering, immiseration and hardship has intensified, accompanied by a theater of cruelty in which violence, especially the daily spectacle of Black men being brutalized or killed by the police, feeds the 24-hour news cycle. The tentacles of barbarism appear to be reaching into every aspect of daily life. Domestic terrorism has come home and it increasingly targets the young.

Given these conditions, an overwhelming catalogue of evidence has come into view that indicates that nation-states organized by neoliberal priorities have implicitly declared war on their children, offering a disturbing index of societies in the midst of a deep moral and political catastrophe. Too many young people today live in an era of foreclosed hope, an era in which it is difficult either to imagine a life beyond the dictates of a market-driven society or to transcend the fear that any attempt to do so can only result in a more dreadful nightmare.

Youth today are not only plagued by the fragility and uncertainty of the present; they are "the first post war generation facing the prospect of downward mobility [in which the] plight of the outcast stretches to embrace a generation as a whole." It is little wonder that "these youngsters are called Generation Zero: A generation with Zero opportunities, Zero future" and Zero expectations. Or to use Guy Standing's term, "the precariat," which he defines as "a growing proportion of our total society" forced to "accept a life of unstable labour and unstable living."

...The war on youth emerged when the social contract, however compromised and feeble, came crashing to the ground around the time Margaret Thatcher "married" Ronald Reagan. Both were hard-line advocates of a market fundamentalism, and announced respectively that there was no such thing as society and that government was the problem, not the solution to citizens' woes. Within a short time, democracy and the political process were hijacked by corporations and the call for austerity policies became cheap copy for weakening the welfare state, public values and public goods. The results of this emerging neoliberal regime included a widening gap between the rich and the poor, a growing culture of cruelty and the dismantling of social provisions. One result has been that the promise of youth has given way to an age of market-induced angst, and a view of many young people as a threat to short-term investments, privatization, untrammeled self-interest and quick profits.

Under such circumstances, all bets are off regarding the future of democracy. Besides a growing inability to translate private troubles into social issues, what is also being lost in the current historical conjuncture is the very idea of the public good, the notion of connecting learning to social change and developing modes of civic courage infused by the principles of social justice. Under the regime of a ruthless economic Darwinism, we are witnessing the crumbling of social bonds and the triumph of individual desires over social rights, nowhere more exemplified than in the gated communities, gated intellectuals and gated values that have become symptomatic of a society that has lost all claims to democracy or for that matter any modestly progressive vision for the future.

Giroux continues with a discourse on the "soft" and "hard" war being waged by neoliberals on North American youth.

In Canada, one child in six lives in poverty, but for Aboriginal and immigrant children that figure rises to 25 percent or more, respectively. By all accounts, the rate of incarceration for Aboriginal youth - already eight times higher than for non-Aboriginal youth - will continue to skyrocket as a result of the Harper government's so-called Safe Streets and Community Act, which emulates the failed policies of the US system by, among other things, strengthening requirements to detain and sentence more youth to custody in juvenile detention centers. Surely one conclusion that can be drawn from the inquest into the tragic suicide of 19-year-old Ashley Smith, who spent five years of her life in and out of detention facilities, is that incarceration for young people can be equivalent to a death sentence.

...Politics and power are now on the side of lawlessness as is obvious in the state's endless violations of civil liberties, freedom of speech and most constitutional rights, mostly done in the name of national security. Lawlessness now wraps itself in government dictates. In Canada, it is evident in Prime Minister Stephen Harper's support for Bill C-51, an anti-terrorist bill that further limits civil rights through a pedagogy of fear and racist demonization. It is also apparent in the United Sates in such policies as the Patriot Act, the National Defense Authorization Act, the Military Commissions Act and a host of other legal illegalities. These would include the right of the president "to order the assassination of any citizen whom he considers allied with terrorists."

...Current protests among young people in the United States, Canada and elsewhere in the world make clear that demonstrations are not - indeed, cannot be - only a short-term project for reform. Young people need to enlist all generations to develop a truly global political movement that is accompanied by the reclaiming of public spaces, the progressive use of digital technologies, the development of new public spheres, the production of new modes of education and the safeguarding of places where democratic expression, new civic values, democratic public spheres, new modes of identification and collective hope can be nurtured and developed. A formative culture must be put in place pedagogically and institutionally in a variety of spheres extending from churches and public and higher education to all those cultural apparatuses engaged in the production of collective knowledge, desire, identities and democratic values.

The struggles here are myriad and urgent and point to the call for a living wage, food security, accessible education, jobs programs (especially for the young), the democratization of power, economic equality and a massive shift in funds away from the machinery of war and big banks. Any collective struggle that matters has to embrace education as the center of politics and the source of an embryonic vision of the good life outside of the imperatives of unfettered "free-market" capitalism. In addition, too many progressives and people on the left are stuck in the discourse of foreclosure and cynicism and need to develop what Stuart Hall calls a "sense of politics being educative, of politics changing the way people see things."

...The issue of who gets to define the future, share in the nation's wealth, shape the parameters of the social state, steward and protect the globe's resources and create a formative culture for producing engaged and socially responsible citizens is no longer a rhetorical issue. This challenge offers up new categories for defining how matters of representation, education, economic justice and politics are to be defined and fought over. This is a difficult task, but what we are seeing in cities such as Chicago, Athens, Quebec, Paris, Madrid and other sites of massive inequality throughout the world is the beginning of a long struggle for the institutions, values and infrastructures that make communities the center of a robust, radical democracy. I realize this sounds a bit utopian, but we have few choices if we are going to struggle for a future that does a great deal more than endlessly repeat the present. We may live in dark times, but as Slavoj Žižek rightly insists, "The only realist option is to do what appears impossible within this system. This is how the impossible becomes possible."

Taking Stock

Most of us just don't want to know.  Most of the rest are coming to feel the same way a lot of the time.

Interesting op-ed by Quincy Saul, "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse."  It deserves a read.

Ecology: The global climate is officially destabilized. Major tipping points have passed, and while the struggle to remain within others must continue, we have already lost the battle to preserve life on earth as we know it. Rising seas will reshape continents and spreading deserts will drive mass migrations. Climate change will redraw the world map and will literally shake the earth.

...We are in the middle of a mass extinction, which all accounts and reports indicate will continue to accelerate. If current rates of extinction continue, by the middle of this century, between one- and two-thirds of all living species on the planet may disappear. While superstorms and melting ice caps may be more dramatic, this accelerating loss of biological diversity in the long run is even more catastrophic. In the early 1980s, biologist E.O. Wilson compared this threat to others facing the world at that time;

"Energy depletion, economic collapse, limited nuclear war or conquest by a totalitarian government. . . . As terrible as those catastrophes would be for us, they could be repaired within a few generations. The one process ongoing in the 1980s that will take millions of years to correct is the loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats. This is the folly that our descendants are least likely to forgive us."

If we live in times of prophecy, then ecological catastrophe is the black horseman of the apocalypse, carrying the scales of a radically unbalanced earth system, leaving famine in its wake.

Economy: The world economic system is in a structural crisis from which it will not recover. The morbid symptoms of its demise are increasingly evident. It is now mainstream knowledge that the major banks of the world routinely launder moneyfor the drug and arms trade.

Furthermore, the so-called middle class is at an end, even if the working class has not yet stepped up to replace it. Inequality is at an all-time high, with rates of poverty and affluence, malnutrition and obesity, reaching ever more epidemic proportions.

One-third of all food is wasted. Women own only 1 percent of the world's property. The absurdities of our economic system are increasingly well known and recognized. An article by Matt Taibbi in the Rolling Stone had a comprehensive title: "Everything is Rigged:"


"Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. . . . Forget the Illuminati - this is the real thing, and it's no secret. . . . The idea that prices in a $379 trillion market could be dependent on a desk of about 20 guys in New Jersey should tell you a lot about the absurdity of our financial infrastructure."

The economy is the white horseman of the apocalypse, representing both evil and righteousness, wearing a crown and armed for conquest.

War: Former US Vice President Dick Cheney promised the world "a war that will not end in our lifetimes," and we are now beginning to see the form it will take. Resource wars in the Middle East and North Africa are now joined by wars born of political turmoil. Global military expenditure is currently soaring at $1.6 trillion per year, an increase of 53 percent over 14 years ago.

Today in Egypt and Syria, we witness the seeds of a bloody and tangled future, where mass social movements for national liberation and self-determination are converted into proxy wars between the global potentates. Collapsing ecosystems and economies together fan the flames of war higher. In these geopolitical nightmares, carried to a fevered pitch by the society of the spectacle, nothing is true and everything is permitted.

War rides the red horse of the apocalypse.

Surveillance States: 1984 has arrived, only 30 years after Orwell predicted. The revelations brought to us by Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden show us a world in which everything is under surveillance. Julian Assange has written with great eloquence about the death of civil society overseen by the surveillance state. (1) Today in the United States alone there are more than 5 million people working under security clearances - more than the population of Norway. The mirror image of this army of spies is the enormous number of people in prison, including more African Americans under state control than there were slaves prior to the Civil War.

This is the last stage of the state, the totalitarianism that is the last gasp of every totality. The surveillance state has the capacity for not only genocide, but also extinction: It is capable of repressing and destroying the revolutionary movements that still have hope to fight for life.

The surveillance state rides the pale horse of the apocalypse, representing death.
It's at this point that Saul offers us a glimmer of hope.

...in the ancient Greek, apocalypse and revelation are the same word. What is the tipping point between the end of the world and the beginning of the world?

You are. We are. It's time to realize it. Time to seize the day and never let go.

What Neoliberalism Has in Store For You

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From Le Monde, a timely explanation of how disastrous neoliberalism continues to thrive despite an endless string of economic disasters and what it holds in store for you even as you continue to vote for those who inflict it.  Hint. Neoliberalism is class warfare and it's being waged in our own Parliament against us.

Even neoliberal proponents recognize that it is a crisis-ridden system. In his popular book Why Globalisation Works, Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf writes: “Between 1945 and 1971, in what might be called the “age of financial repression”, there had been only thirty-eight crises in all.... Then, between 1973 and 1997, there were 139 crises. The age of financial liberation has, in short, been an age of financial crisis” (3).

Neoliberal policies have been implemented from 1973 in Pinochet’s Chile, in the UK and US under Thatcher and Reagan in the 1980s and then across increasing swathes of the world. These policies include, privatization, the de-regulation of the financial sector, increasing openness to foreign trade and investment, and cuts to public welfare spending. Supporters of neoliberal policies argue that these will increase economic efficiency as state regulation of the economy is replaced by more accurate ‘market signals’. These are held to be better at encouraging and allocating investment, which in turn leads to higher economic growth and greater benefits for the economy and population as a whole.

So why do so many Western governments, including your own, embrace neoliberal, market-fundamentalist policies?  That's because it's actually successful only not in promoting a healthy economy to benefit all.  Its success lies in the quiet transfer of economic and political power out of your pocket and into the pocket of those it's actually intended to benefit.

Can it be said that neoliberalism is a success? And why are crises and austerity policies part of this success? One clue was provided by Andy Haldane, chief economist at the Bank of England, in a speech in early October 2014 where he noted how real wages in the UK are around 10% lower than in 2007.

In his film Inequality for All, Robert Reich, who was Bill Clinton’s labour secretary between 1993 and 1997, documents the collapse of US wages over the last four decades. In the late 1970s the typical male US worker was earning $48,000 a year (inflation adjusted). By 2010, the average wage had fallen to $33,000 a year. Over the same period the average annual income of someone in the top 1% of US society rose from $390,000 to $1,100,000.

Neoliberal policies aim to reduce wages to the bare minimum and to maximize the returns to capital and management. They also aim to demobilise workers’ organisations and reduce workers to carriers of labour power — a commodity to be bought and sold on the market for its lowest price. Neoliberalism is about re-shaping society so that there is no input by workers’ organisations into democratic or economic decision-making. Crises and austerity may not be intentionally sought by most state leaders and central bank governors, but they do contribute significantly towards pursuing such ends. Consequently, these politicians and leaders of the economy do not strive to put in place new structures or policies that will reduce the recurrence of crisis.

...The rising levels of inequality associated with neoliberal policies are often decried by critics as weakening social ties and generating social conflict. But this is exactly what neoliberal policies are designed to do — to break apart social organisations such as trade unions, transform worker’s into individuals at the mercy of firms’ hiring and firing strategies, and transfer resources from workers to owners and managers of capital. In this regard neoliberalism uses crisis and austerity to great effect.

There is one downside for proponents of neoliberal policies however. Because they generate socio-economic crisis they erode public confidence in politics and economic policy. It is here that progressive political organisations can highlight the class basis of neoliberalism and propose a realistic alternative that favours the majority of the world’s population, not the minority.

It's hard to imagine that today's 'permanent warfare state' could ever have arisen absent neoliberalism and the commodification of state violence into for-profit warfare.  Likewise disaster capitalism is utterly dependent on the life support of neoliberalism.  What you need to understand is that, until we throw these people out of Parliament - the lot of them - this is only going to get worse, not just for you but even more so for your children and theirs.

Forget About the 1%. It's the .1% Who Are the Emerging Problem.

They're now buying elections as efficiently as they once had to settle for buying politicians (or judges) and they're buying their way to ever dizzying heights of aberrant prosperity.

They're the top one-tenth of the top one per cent and, thanks to rampaging inequality in the United States, their wealth today is about the same as the bottom 90%.

And spare us the nonsense about a rising tide lifting all boats. 

The growing indebtedness of most Americans is the main reason behind the erosion of the wealth share of the bottom 90%, according to the report’s authors. Many middle-class families own their homes and have pensions, but too many have higher mortgage repayments, higher credit card bills, and higher student loans to service. The average wealth of bottom 90% jumped during the stock market boom of the late 1990s and the housing bubble of the early 2000s. But it then collapsed during and after the most recent financial crisis.

Since then, there has been no recovery in the wealth of the middle class and the poor, the authors say. The average wealth of the bottom 90% of families is equal to $80,000 in 2012— the same level as in 1986. In contrast, the average wealth for the top 1% more than tripled between 1980 and 2012.

Yes, America is the extreme case when it comes to inequality but it sets the course for America's key trading partners also.  Oh well someone has to bear the cost of remaining "competitive" in our globalized economy and those on the top have the means to ensure it's not going to be them. 

Neoliberalism Has Made Us What We Are Today - And That Isn't Pretty

Neoliberalism is a social, political and economic model best suited to those with psychopathic personality traits.

That, in any case, is the conclusion of Paul Verhaeghe, who dissects neoliberalism and what it has done to us in The Guardian.

"Thirty years of neoliberalism, free-market forces and privatisation have taken their toll, as relentless pressure to achieve has become normative."

"..the financial crisis illustrated at a macro-social level (for example, in the conflicts between eurozone countries) what a neoliberal meritocracy does to people. Solidarity becomes an expensive luxury and makes way for temporary alliances, the main preoccupation always being to extract more profit from the situation than your competition. Social ties with colleagues weaken, as does emotional commitment to the enterprise or organisation.

"Bullying used to be confined to schools; now it is a common feature of the workplace. This is a typical symptom of the impotent venting their frustration on the weak – in psychology it’s known as displaced aggression. There is a buried sense of fear, ranging from performance anxiety to a broader social fear of the threatening other."

The bullying reference struck me because it is precisely what I hear mid-level public servants complain has spread through their work place.  Performance anxiety, job insecurity, the sense of fellow workers being threatening.  That seems to have taken hold since the arrival of the Harper regime.

"...Our society constantly proclaims that anyone can make it if they just try hard enough, all the while reinforcing privilege and putting increasing pressure on its overstretched and exhausted citizens. An increasing number of people fail, feeling humiliated, guilty and ashamed. We are forever told that we are freer to choose the course of our lives than ever before, but the freedom to choose outside the success narrative is limited. Furthermore, those who fail are deemed to be losers or scroungers, taking advantage of our social security system."

A good measure of Social Darwinism has been inculcated in us.  Even those most vulnerable to it seem to embrace it.  It's powerfully corrosive of social cohesion, an attribute that we, as a people, will need to find our way through the travails that await us this century.  "Every man for himself" becomes a mantra for social ruin.

"A neoliberal meritocracy would have us believe that success depends on individual effort and talents, meaning responsibility lies entirely with the individual and authorities should give people as much freedom as possible to achieve this goal. For those who believe in the fairytale of unrestricted choice, self-government and self-management are the pre-eminent political messages, especially if they appear to promise freedom. Along with the idea of the perfectible individual, the freedom we perceive ourselves as having in the west is the greatest untruth of this day and age.

"The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman neatly summarised the paradox of our era as: “Never have we been so free. Never have we felt so powerless.” We are indeed freer than before, in the sense that we can criticise religion, take advantage of the new laissez-faire attitude to sex and support any political movement we like. We can do all these things because they no longer have any significance – freedom of this kind is prompted by indifference. Yet, on the other hand, our daily lives have become a constant battle against a bureaucracy that would make Kafka weak at the knees. There are regulations about everything, from the salt content of bread to urban poultry-keeping."

Yes, indifference, disengagement, disaffection are the usual by-products of today's neoliberalism.  There are those, such as our prime minister, who have learned to exploit this.  The fewer citizens who turn out at the polls the better for Stephen Harper.  He needs merely appeal to the fears, resentments and bigotry of a small segment of the voting public, barely 20% of eligible voters, to achieve a majority provided enough other eligible voters can be kept away from the ballot box. 

"...There are constant laments about the so-called loss of norms and values in our culture. Yet our norms and values make up an integral and essential part of our identity. So they cannot be lost, only changed. And that is precisely what has happened: a changed economy reflects changed ethics and brings about changed identity. The current economic system is bringing out the worst in us."

This very economic system that brings out the worst in us is still accommodated by our political classes - all of them.  There's a reason there is not one federal leader today - Conservative, Liberal or New Democrat - speaking out against the scourge of neoliberalism, much less offering the public a "New Deal."  Mulcair, trying to stay ahead of the shadow of Horwath, is claiming to have turned Left but it's an unconvincing performance. 

So what are we to do?  A vote for Harper or Trudeau or Mulcair is still a vote for the continuation of neoliberalism at the expense of social democracy.  It is a vote for social and economic feudalism, the relentless advance of increasingly illiberal democracy. 

There's a study coming out of Princeton this fall that addresses the death of democracy in the United States and the ascent of plutocracy and the corporate state.  We need to pay close attention to those findings because the same process is already well underway here in Canada.  If we don't defend democracy it is at risk of remaining in name only.

Enough Talk About Inequality. It's Time Our Government Acted.

I don't expect Stephen Harper to take any effective action on inequality.   That's a problem facing the Canadian people, not the oil barons of Calgary or his chums in the Beijing politburo.  That said, I do expect our opposition leaders, Muclair and Trudeau to come up with some coherent and credible policies and well prior to the 2015 election.

Fixing this problem begins with acknowledging the problem - the full problem, inequality of wealth, inequality of income and inequality of opportunity.  Equally essential is acknowledgment of the fundamental role government plays in creating and empowering inequality.

The truth is that most inequality is legislated.  It arises out of enactments that create wealth - for a few - from grants, deferrals, tax breaks, subsidies and the transfer of rights to public property at far below fair value and sometimes free of charge.

The infamous "1%" we hear so much about?  It wouldn't be sitting anywhere near as fat and sassy if it wasn't for the political classes serving as its handmaiden.  Read Stiglitz, "The Price of Inequality", to see how Western governments have fallen into service of these elites at the direct expense of the electorates they're sworn to serve and protect.

This screed is brought to you courtesy of The Toronto Star and outgoing TD Bank chief, Ed Clark.  In his farewell speech, Clark referred to inequality in Canada as a "corrosive thing."  Clark also fingered regulators, central bankers, and politicians for helping to create the financial collapse of 2008.

The inequality problem is only going to deepen if the next prime minister plays it safe and seeks political cover in the status quo.  We need a leader who will change Canada's course economically, environmentally and socially.  That sort of change might have the appearance of being revolutionary but that has nothing to do with the imperative merit of change and everything to do with how far Canada has listed to the right.  We're heeled over so far now that the gunwales are kissing the water.

So, let's hear it Tom, let's hear it Justin.  Are you going to be Bay Street bumboys or are you actually going to lead this country to an even keel?

When Overshoot Meets Inequality

Tuesday marked Earth Overshoot Day, 2014.  August 19th was the day by which humankind had consumed an entire year's production of renewable resources. Overall that means we're using resources more than 1.5 times the rate at which the Earth can replace them.  EOD is a moving target that, unfortunately, keeps moving in the wrong direction.

Overshoot Day got me thinking of a study that came out in March that found abrupt societal collapse was and will be triggered by two factors - overconsumption and inequality.  The researchers concluded that today's global civilization is in the throes of these very forces.

Among the findings, an egalitarian society that limits consumption to less than the natural carrying capacity of its environment can achieve an equilibrium.  Failure to live within our environment's limitations (see Overshoot above) inevitably leads to collapse.  Likewise, inequality, if not held in check, grows exponentially, also leading to collapse.  The rapid rise in inequality over the past three decades suggests we're also in the end-game phase envisioned in this research.

And so the question is, now that we've got the data and this research, what are we going to do about it?  Steady State or Full Earth economics specifically addresses what we need to restore our society to a state of equilibrium but we're saddled with a political class (in Canada, all three major parties) that are absolutely obsessed with perpetual, exponential growth.  There are two locomotives racing toward each other headlong on the same track.  One is being driven by our political class. The other is being driven by reality.  How do you think this ends?  Abruptly?


     
     
Source:LiveScience
 

It's Not That We Disagree, It's That I Despise Your Ideas

When ever I read another article and view another series of photographs of the carnage Israel has inflicted on the civilian population of Gaza and then think of the Netanyahu apologists, Trudeau and Mulcair, I despise them and any party that would tolerate much less follow their views.  That these two greasy opportunists haven't been tossed to the street for their blatant pandering tells me all I need to know about the Liberal Party and the New Democrats. 

Our general election is less than a year away, possibly much sooner if Harper sees a window of opportunity in which to catch the opposition off balance.  Trudeau is said to be the odds-on favourite and the ranks of non-Conservatives fairly swoon at the idea of someone "less worse" to replace Harper in ruining Canada.

We have, for years, been ruled by a despotic, manipulative, chronically secretive and dishonest, bully boy. Stephen Harper set out to dislocate Canada's political centre far and permanently to the right.  Fulsomely aided and abetted by the parliamentary lap dogs we still call Liberals and New Democrats, Stephen Harper has succeeded.  With the shameless collaboration of the so-called "opposition" parties, Canada is now firmly in the grasp of neoliberalism.  It's all free market capitalism from here on in and democracy and social justice be buggered. 

It is the fundamental duty of the Liberal and New Democrat leaders to campaign to restore Canada's political centre to its natural place.  Polls and studies show that, despite occasional claims to the contrary, the public remains slightly centre-left.  The Canadian people have been abandoned not just by the Conservatives but also the Liberals and New Dems.

"Less worse" is not an acceptable standard on which to support anyone and certainly not for the sake of replacing Harper with a Harper-lite.  That's merely substituting a coward for a fiend.  At the end of the day it may be a difference devoid of much distinction.

I understand all the arguments about how it is unwise for opposition parties to unveil policy in advance of an election campaign.  What puts the lie to that is the Green Party whose clear and sensible platform is available for all to see on its web site.  That platform sets a useful standard by which to measure both Liberals and New Democrats in the election that draws ever closer.  Prepare to be abjectly disappointed.

The 2015 election is not one that I look forward to if only because I expect disappointment on a grand scale from Harper's rivals. 

They'll make vague promises about electoral reform and call for more studies and position papers but the reform they can and should make if we're foolish enough to hand them the keys is voting reform in the Commons.  Anything that's not a confidence vote should be a free vote.  Whipped votes should be a last resort.

They'll probably support the already unviable bitumen mining industry with energy policies that are inconsistent, contradictory and unrealistic.  Mulcair says "no tankers" but I don't believe him for a minute.  If Canada is to make a meaningful effort to mitigate the impacts of climate change we will have to make hard decisions about the very future of Athabasca. 

They will ignore that other grave threat to Canada's democratic freedom - our corporate media cartel.  Only the Greens are honest enough to recognize this threat and call for a break up of the cartel through divestiture, the only effective way to undo toxic concentration of ownership and monopolistic cross-ownership of media outlets.  The Canadian people need the greatest diversity of voices expressing opinions of the widest range across the entire political spectrum.  That's how ideas and information are conveyed to nurture a genuinely informed public capable of exercising their political franchise. 

Inequality, that wrecking-ball of the middle class that corrodes social cohesion leaving the many vulnerable to the few, is getting scant attention from Trudeau or Mulcair.  I've not heard either of them acknowledge that most inequality has very little to do with merit or market-forces but is a largely legislated outcome arising from tax policy, subsidies and deferrals of all sorts, and the surrender of natural resources, the property of all Canadians, either free or at far-below market value.

I have yet to hear Mulcair or Trudeau acknowledge that fighting the scourge of inequality entails more than narrowing gaps in wealth and income but, even more, depends on bolstering equality of opportunity that requires rehabilitating our public education and healthcare systems.  If we want productive young people, we must ensure that they are able to access advanced education that is affordable.  We have to see funding health care and education not as a cost but as an investment.

They will avoid mentioning the urgent need to restore the balance between labour and capital so fundamental to the maintenance of social cohesion and prosperity.  Labour didn't abandon Andrea Horwath because it preferred Wynne's table manners.

They will not commit to the sort of national works programme Canada so badly needs to construct essential infrastructure capable of withstanding climate change impacts throughout this century.  We are struggling with infrastructure designed and built to cope with the climate we enjoyed in the 19th and 20th centuries.  The Halocene is over.  The Anthropocene is here to stay.  Even 'early onset' climate change is already visiting us with severe storm events of increasing frequency, intensity and duration.  We have to invest an enormous sum of money into this because, if we don't, the costs and losses will be even greater.

We need a foreign policy more akin to what we had in the post-WWII decades, not the 'muscular' foreign policy so admired by Ignatieff and Harper.  The world is awash in guns and soldiers to wield them. It doesn't need Canada's paltry warfighting ability.  We can do far more good furnishing what has become so scarce today - superlative peacekeeping forces and global, "honest-broker" mediation.  We've gone the "All the King's horses and all the King's men" route.  We did it in Libya and Afghanistan.  Just marvel in awe at our grand successes.

These are all matters that speak to the future of Canada and the wellbeing of our people, both today and for generations to come.  These are matters beyond the myopia of neoliberalism.  We have lost invaluable time during Harper's machinations.  We don't have the luxury of squandering even more time on those who are in line to succeed him.

The IMF Wades In on Inequality

The hard Right have transitioned seamlessly from the fight to thwart action on climate change to their even more desperate rear guard effort to defend inequality from nasty, money-grubbing reformers.

Well, Movement Conservatives, have just lost a potential ally, the International Monetary Fund.  The IMF has just released a report that undermines every Rightwing Shibboleth on the perils of reversing inequality.

 ...in what is likely to be viewed as its most controversial conclusion, the IMF said analysis of various efforts to redistribute incomes showed they had a neutral effect on GDP growth. This last point is expected to dismay rightwing politicians who argue that overcoming inequality robs the rich of incentives to invest and the poor of incentives to work and is counter-productive.

The paper, written by Jonathan Ostry, the deputy head of the IMF's research department, and the economists Andrew Berg and Charalambos Tsangarides, comes after several years of heated debate over the path that developed and developing countries' economies have taken since the financial crash and whether their recoveries are sustainable.

Anti-poverty charity Oxfam welcomed the report, saying it shows "extreme inequality is damaging not only because it is morally unacceptable, but it's bad economics".

It added: "The IMF has debunked the old myth that redistribution is bad for growth and demolished the case for austerity. That redistribution efforts -essential to fight inequality- are good for growth is a welcome finding. Low tax and low public spending are clearly not the route to prosperity."