\t\t\t\tI am travelling a lot today and using my spare time to catch up on things. I have two major end-of-February deadlines impending for publishers – my book with Thomas Fazi, which will be published by Pluto Press and launched in London in late September (more details soon); and our new Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) textbook (with Randy Wray and Martin Watts) which will be published by Macmillan later in 2017. Both manuscripts have to be delivered by the end of this month. So busy busy. Today’s blog is thus a little different and considerably shorter than usual. It loses nothing in its brevity. The main text is from a friend of mine (who wishes for professional reasons to remain anonymous) but succinctly captures the anger and angst that many progressive thinkers are feeling about how things are turning out. The culmination of several decades of neo-liberalism has been an eroding of material well-being for workers, a massive financial then economic crisis, which the world is still enduring, and, then Donald Trump as President of the United States. And the progressive political voices have been largely complicit in all of this. Sure enough, they sprout about child care, gay rights, inequality, and all the rest of it, but at the core, they have embraced the neo-liberal economic lies and gone along with or even initiated and overseen fiscal austerity, privatisation, welfare cuts, deregulation – it is just, we are told, they do all that in a more moderate and fairer manner. They don’t stop for a second to think that they also have become captive to capital. Something big has to happen to stop all this. History tells us that it will. And the longer the progressive political voices remain complicit, the probability that that ‘something’ will be violent, increases.
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Privilege private education over public education.<\/p>\n
Make sure there are fewer jobs than there are job seekers – blame the job seekers for being unemployed.<\/p>\n
Saddle tertiary students with massive debts and limited employment opportunities.<\/p>\n
De-regulate banking so that the people who can least afford it have access to easy credit – they haven’t got stable employment and need to get ahead somehow.<\/p>\n
Privatise public assets like airlines, rail systems, electricity, hospitals – sell them to your political donors.<\/p>\n
Dilute the power of independent entities that monitor conduct of individuals in high office – accountability stifles creativity.<\/p>\n
Stack the public broadcaster with industry mates – go on cooking shows because you can get away with anything if voters have seen you making pasta.<\/p>\n
Destroy job security for a large proportion of the working population – convince them they can succeed if they are more entrepreneurial.<\/p>\n
Undermine working conditions and awards – direct productivity gains to capital and limit real wage growth.<\/p>\n
Make sure unskilled labour is linked to jobs that destroy the environment – keep things sweet for industry status quo and ensure there is always an army of blue collar workers ready to fight against a transition to alternative industries.<\/p>\n
Disrupt disrupt disrupt – convince a gullible public that the robots are coming and that there is very little that they or their elected representatives can do to develop alternative labour markets.<\/p>\n
Be a serious investigative journalist or an engineer or a consultant or a public sector manager or a politician – but don’t challenge neoliberal economic rhetoric.<\/p>\n
Talk about deficit reduction and ‘budget repair’ without understanding how vacuous this is.<\/p>\n
Be surprised at the outcome.<\/p>\n
Repeat.<\/p>\n
The Anonymous Blogger – February 7, 2017<\/strong><\/p>\n After that, I turned to music, which is a good way to feel things out without being too intellectual about it.<\/p>\n This is Rage Against the Machine<\/a> – letting us have it full frontal.<\/p>\n The song – Take the Power Back (American Schools are Failing) – is off the 1992 – Rage Against the Machine<\/a> – album released by Epic.<\/p>\n This is a hard buzz-sort-of-guitar album and this is what we should do. It matches the theme of today’s blog.<\/p>\nA little music to follow<\/h2>\n