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Turn Away From Neoliberalism Or Lose Government Legitimacy
Neoliberal deregulation, captive oversight, too low interest rates and outright criminality within the banks led the "western" world into a financial crisis. A very wrong step was taken when governments stepped in to rescue failed banks and to guarantee their bad debt. Central banks again showered the shattered financial markets with even more liquidity increasing speculation. (This, through oil and food price increases, led to the Arab spring revolutions.) While some stimulus programs where launched these were too small to restart the economic growth process while the serious underlying problems stayed unsolved.
Private bad debt was turned into government bad debt. The financial crisis of the banks was thus turned into a financial crisis of governments.
Still the wrong steps get taken. Attempts to save Greece and other European countries will be fruitless. They will default and leave the Euro zone as they can not economically survive within a strong currency.
The "western" world will now fall back into recession while an insetting austerity ideology will prevent more Keynesian programs. Unchallenged this will lead into the second world depression.
To change the direction a change of mind and ideology must take place. There are signs that this is starting though it might well turn out to be a rather slow process, too late, or even fail.
Charles Moore, a conservative commentator of the Telegraph and official Thatcher biographer, recently wrote: I'm starting to think that the Left might actually be right (recommended). In Germany Frank Schirrmacher, publisher of the German "paper of record", the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine, joined in (in German). (In France „Indignez vous!“, a bestselling political essay written by the 93-year-old former resistance hero Stéphane Hessel, earlier went into a comparable direction.)
These people now see and state that traditional conservatism has been taken over by neoliberal ruthlessness. This is a betrayal of the values and morals true conservatives (die Bürgerlichen) once held high. The same can be said for major former social-democratic parties, New Labour in Britain, the Democrats in the U.S. and in Germany the SPD, all of whom have slaughtered worker rights they once fought for on the altars of the neoliberal free-trade religion.
Should the change of mind within the ruling elite away from neoliberalism back to the original post world war II values not happen, the question of government solvency will soon turn into one of government legitimacy. The riots in the UK were one of the first signs for this to happen. But the loss of legitimacy will not only be in the eyes of the street rabble. It will also be in the eyes of conservative intellectuals like Moore and Schirrmacher and the likes of Hessel. That might be the real threat to the ruling cast.
Reprinted from a comment from Democratic Underground, but it mirrors my feelings exactly:
All of the people who say, “if you don’t vote, then you’ll be the reason that (fill in the blank with any evil republican name) became president.
I believe that the people, most of whom call themselves good progressives, have it ass-backwards.
In my case, and I will only speak for myself, there isn’t one asshole in Washington, save for Emanual Cleaver, who has earned my vote, who reflects the human core values of the old Democratic party. This includes Obama and Biden. More than three years ago I saw our current president for what he has turned out to be; a toady for the corporate elite. Instead of getting caught up in all of the “hopey, changey” bullshit, I looked at his record as an Illinois state Senator. I looked at the deal he had cut with the Excelon corp., and how he had sold the residents of Illinois down the river. And as he became the candidate, I saw the obscene amounts of money he was getting through corporate bundling. You just don’t get that much from corporations, without a big payback. I knew that, once he became president he was not about to spit in Wall Street’s collective face. Call me a cynic, but I never had much hope when he was inaugurated, and I knew there would be no change for the better. And now the tsunami of good will that the president surfed into office on is gone, and most of us are trying to survive the riptides left in its wake. You may be wondering what I did. I did the only thing my conscience would allow; I wrote Al Gore’s name on my ballot, because I believed he was the only grown up who could direct this country where it needed to go in one of the most critical times of our country’s history. I knew it was a throw away vote, but I was goddamned if I was going to vote for another ham sandwich, just to keep another “candidate X” from getting into office.
This country, and most of you here voted for Obama with their eyes wide shut. And now I’m hearing and reading about a hell of a lot of buyer’s remorse. And, true to form, I’m reading a lot of posts that are telling me that if I don’t back Obama, then it’s my fault that a heathen republican, cloaked in Jesus’ bloody garments will become the next president. How about chewing on this: Obama doesn’t get my backing because he hasn’t done anything to fucking deserve it. Call him a Blue Dog, A new Way, Third Way or whatever kind of name you want, but in my opinion, he is not a democrat, has no business leading the democratic party, and is really the poster boy for what I say is the “Corporate Party,” which most of us ain’t members of.
For myself, I see both parties as the same. They both serve only those that can keep them in power, and that’s the corporate world. I never in my lifetime dreamed that we would now be discussing cuts in Social programs, the social programs that the Democratic party started to give those less fortunate Americans a real safety net. Yet, here we are, and it will only get worse. As I see it, both parties are nothing more than the same side of the coin. One party plays good cop, the other party…bad cop, but to keep up appearances for their constituents, the rhetoric changes. And if you want proof, you need look no further than who Obama appointed to cabinet posts, who was selected to key committees, and just exactly what got done legislatively when our party controlled all three houses of the government.
Lastly, I’ll throw the ball right back at you. It can be argued, (and I believe this to be true) that those who keep propping up this joke of a political system ARE THE ENABLERS who legitimize the corrupt way business is done in Washington, and you should be ashamed of yourselves for supporting asswipes whose political practices are diametrically opposed to your beliefs, just because they have a D right next to their name. Nothing will ever change for the better, until all of us hold these clowns accountable and quit donating our money and our time trying to keep DINOS in office. These criminals posing as politicians just might get the message when their campaign contributions and their vast pools of volunteers dry up. I don’t give a fuck if it’s the only game in town. It’s a rigged game, most all of you know it, and so I must ask why you want to sit in and play, if you know going in that you’ll get fleeced?
And yes, maybe a jerk like Rick Perry will become president because of people like me, but I’ll tell you right now, we are headed in that direction sooner or later on this crash course, and I would rather have it be sooner, so that we can hit bottom quickly and rise back up. So, to be blunt, right now I don’t give a fuck about party politics. I want the whole goddamned system changed. To paraphrase Peter Finch in the movie “Network,” I’m mad as fucking hell, and I’m not about to play this fucking game anymore.”
Posted by: ben | Aug 21 2011 13:32 utc | 15
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