Here's what our friends across the pond have decided to do in the middle of the worst economic disaster since the depression. In the words of TUC general secretary, Brendan Barber:
"The chancellor has a different definition of fairness to the rest of us. His spending cuts are hitting the most vulnerable, his one big tax rise was VAT – the unfairest tax of all – and his economic policies are bearing down on the young, trapped between unemployment and an education sector with not enough places."
.......the government's planned rise in VAT to 20% on 1 January 2011...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/...
The Deficit Hawks a across the pond won. Hope their poor don't freeze to death this winter!
Will ours?
Can we stay focused on the neo-liberal economists planned death blow and blatant dismantling of our way of life for a few hours. We will lose our social safety nets while we waste time arguing about Mosques and who said what when.
THIS IS A WAKE UP CALL. So, please, wake up.
The Guardian is reporting:
George Osborne defends draconian measures to slash budget deficit
Chancellor George Osborne rejects claims that fast-track deficit reduction represents gamble with growth
You can go to the above link to watch/listen to Chancellor Osborne. Here are a few quotes:
Will tighten the public finances by 113 Billion Pounds in cuts.
11 billion in cuts to welfare reforms
61 billion from cuts to departmental expenditures
Protecting the National Health Service
Honoring to raise the international aid budget to 7% of our national income.
Provide a pupil premium for the most disadvantaged children.
What is fair about forcing the next generation to pay for debts of our generation.
We are all in this together.
The Times reports the following:
Middle-class families will bear the brunt of a £13 billion reduction in benefits that will be used to pay for radical changes to the welfare system. Child benefit, winter fuel payments and other universal allowances are likely to be scaled back, prompting claims that David Cameron is breaking key election pledges. George Osborne signalled his approval for the most dramatic shake-up of the benefit system since the Second World War despite stand-up rows with Iain Duncan Smith over the reforms. The Chancellor sought to portray reform of the “fundamentally unfair” welfare system as a progressive measure, comparing it to benefit changes introduced by Bill Clinton in the early 1990s.
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/...
I really hate to tell you "I told you so" but keep watching. The social safety nets our friends beyond the pond are being unravelled.
The neo-liberals oppose social safety nets. Their 5 main tenets are as follows. See if you recognize them playing out here in the USA, too:
There are five cardinal points of "neoliberal" economic agenda.
The supremacy of the free market.
The market was to rule supreme, unrestrained by the intervention of government, labor unions, or anything else (other than corporate monopoly power) that constrained the operation of market forces, regardless of how much social disorder, suffering or exploitation results.
Any undesirable effects are to be ascribed simply to "unidentified interventions" which, when they were identified, could be eliminated, and the problem solved thereby.
Monopolies were simply assumed, against all evidence, to be self-limiting (though no one ever managed to explain how DeBeers Consolidated Mines had managed to create and maintain a worldwide monopoly on the diamond business for more than a century).
Cutting, and eliminating when possible, expenditure for social services.
Again, in the name of reducing government interference in the market, it was not necessary for government to involve itself in social welfare programs.
To explain the obvious suffering that results, it is therefore claimed that when the poor suffer, it is due to their own laziness that they do not better themselves.
That the accumulation of money was equivalent to the accumulation of power, with its attendant distortion of the functionings of the market, was not a concern.
That this led inevitably to the disempowerment of the poor was not a concern - the poor were blamed for their condition by claiming their "inferiority" or "bad decisions." Social justice was a non-issue.
Deregulation.
If government is interfering in the market, it will only lead to a loss of profits, and therefore, government regulation had to be assumed to be bad.
Therefore, it has to be reduced or eliminated, even in monopolistic situations.
One neoliberal, Grover Norquist, an official in the George W. Bush administration commented that he wanted to reduce the size of government to the point where he "could drown it in the bathtub" - and then go on to do so.
Privatization.
Since government is assumed, as a given, to be inefficient, lazy, bloated and uneconomical in the provisioning of goods and services, it was only reasonable to presume that private enterprise could and would perform the delivery of services in a more efficient manner, and hence any activity that delivers goods or services to citizens should and must be privatized.
Never was an explanation offered for the contrary incentive of capitalism - that the capitalist's basic profit-driven incentive is to charge as much money as possible for providing as few goods and services as possible.
Elimination of the concept of "Community" or the "Common Good."
Since this is antithetical to the notion of privatization and "rugged individualism," the concept of the commons (the air we must all breathe, the water we must all drink, etc.) to them, reeks faintly of Communism, it is assumed to be bad, wrong, and hence is oppositional to the "neoliberal" agenda.
Such notions as public health, public education, etc., are to be replaced by private initiative, as anything else is simply considered to be a manifestation of lassitude, indolence and governmental dependence.
I believe the policies that eviscerated the quality of life for the Chilean workers are being applied in America today. You can read the Chilean story here, if you are so inclined to read history:
http://www.bidstrup.com/...
And now there is a great deal of noise to privatize Social Security, we just privatized health care, and the push to vilify public educators in order to privatize K-12 education is loud.
It helps to learn where the Talking Points originated: Milt Friedman.
Legislating on behalf of, deregulating, and refusing to curtail corporations full freedom to police themselves is a nice way to describe what others have described as fascism:
"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power."
The merger takes place when the state is a complicit partner with the corporations by refusing to regulate them and protect the general welfare of the state's citizens from the powers of the corporations they refuse to curtail. Predatory lending is a good example.
You would have to be completely living in a dark cave to avoid hearing the economic pain, suffering, environmental damage, and even the deaths of thousands who died without health care, who died doing their jobs, and/or who simply took their own lives.
Neo-liberal economics does not work. The proof is found throughout the world. The proof is found in America today.
Corporations don't police themselves in any other manner than to maximize profits. It's what they do. It's why laws were written (and since overturned) to help level the playing field.
Even Greenspan, in his loquacious, beat around the bush manner, admitted that there are serious flaws.
In 17 seconds, Alan Greenspan exposes neo-liberal economic policies as the total failure they are.
If I may be glib here: Pssst, Alan, once the shareholders money is IN the pockets of the institutions, the big money earners running those institutions could care less about the shareholders. With huge salaries and bonuses socked away into Swiss bank accounts, and the financial futures of generations of their progeny secured, the big money earners have done their jobs: enrich themselves and their families. Why wouldn't they?
Personally, I will never be convinced we didn't end up in our new insecure world by any kind of accident in judgment.
I am convinced we are part of a long-term plan that will not end well for the majority of the workers of this world, unless we push back now.
The last thirty years have been, in fact, a full charge application of Friedman's neo-liberal ideology and it failed the workers here just as miserably as it failed the workers in Chile. Except, we have yet to hit the rock bottom neo-liberalism is capable of taking us to. Imagine your daughter not being able to afford the fees to send your grandchildren to first grade? Fees paid directly to public schools are already being levied, btw.
The neo-liberal long-term plan required prolonged wars, an ethereal enemy, and enough fear to lull us into losing many of our constitutionally protected rights.
Job well done! (and I am not promoting ct theories at all.
Neo-liberals never let a crisis go by without applying some economic shocks as in Klein's The Shock Doctrine, a must read as well as The Rise of the Fourth Reich by Jim Marrs. Poorly named sadly. It would be better titled The Rise of the Neo-Liberal World Economy.
We need the workers of this country to unite in spite of the fact that our ability to unite has been undermined greatly by neo-liberal propaganda.
And if we are not going to unite and push back now, then we are wasting our time here trying to enlighten each other and, hopefully, others.
We can spend more of what remaining time we have with our families.
How did we get here? It's really quite simple to understand if you know the truth.
Actually, knowing the truth can help us know whether or not the economic policies being touted will actually improve our state of security or cement us in a new world economic philosophy that intimates that:
Do you really want our children and grandchildren to live in this world, the world as it used to be?
There's no need for rules. It's dog eat dog, because the end justifies the means and, if you fail to be rich, it's because you are lazy and/or stupid.