Skip to main content

Home/ ThesisPolitics/ Group items tagged austerity

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Shantastic Marie

Occupy Wall Street rediscovers the radical imagination | David Graeber | Comment is fre... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...occupy-wall-street-protest

OccupyMovement Import

shared by Shantastic Marie on 21 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • beginnings of the defiant self-assertion of a new generation of Americans, a generation who are looking forward to finishing their education with no jobs, no future, but still saddled with enormous and unforgivable debt
  • working-class
  • college
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • humiliated – faced with a life of being treated as deadbeats, moral reprobates
  • colossal social failure
  • demand to finally have a conversation we were all supposed to have back in 2008
  • There was a moment, after the near-collapse of the world's financial architecture, when anything seemed possible.
  • Everything we'd been told for the last decade turned out to be a lie. Markets did not run themselves; creators of financial instruments were not infallible geniuses; and debts did not really need to be repaid – in fact, money itself was revealed to be a political instrument
  • t seemed the time had come to rethink everything: the very nature of markets, money, debt; to ask what an "economy" is actually for
  • Then, in one of the most colossal failures of nerve in history, we all collectively clapped our hands over our ears and tried to put things back as close as possible to the way they'd been before.
  • real priority of those running the world for the last few decades has not been creating a viable form of capitalism
  • flaws are irrelevant
  • economic crisis of the 1970s never really went away
  • exact same approach: declare a financial crisis, appoint supposedly neutral technocrats to manage it, and then engage in an orgy of plunder in the name of "austerity"
  • rejection of old-fashioned party politics, the same embrace of radical diversity, the same emphasis on inventing new forms of democracy from below
  • entire political classes
  • target
  • This is why protesters are often hesitant even to issue formal demands, since that might imply recognising the legitimacy of the politicians against whom they are ranged
  • beginning with the Arab Spring
  • opening salvo in a wave of negotiations over the dissolution of the American Empire
  • consider the collapse of the European colonial empires
  • creation of the modern welfare state
  • But if the occupiers finally manage to break the 30-year stranglehold that has been placed on the human imagination, as in those first weeks after September 2008, everything will once again be on the table – and the occupiers of Wall Street and other cities around the US will have done us the greatest favour anyone possibly can.
Shantastic Marie

FAST FACTS: Connecting the Dots | Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives - 0 views

www.policyalternatives.ca/...fast-facts-connecting-dots

Occupy Politics Thesis CCPA inequality

shared by Shantastic Marie on 23 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • rise in attention being paid to the growing poverty and inequality in Canada
  • The Occupy movement can be credited for much of the recent attention but it is the data being released by mainstream institutions and ‘think tanks’ that have made it politically acceptable to challenge the dismal reality. Most recent is the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) report Divided We Stand: Why Inequality Keeps Rising (Dec. 2011). It shines a spotlight on the growing inequality in OECD countries, including Canada, which is shown to have income inequality above the OECD average
  • significant coming from the OECD
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • recognition that significant change is in order
  • economic policies are at the root of the problem. The report acknowledges that the policies that have given us an increasingly low-wage economy, inequitable tax policies and a shrinking social safety net are not serving us well
  • OECD appears to be realizing
  • For the OECD, this is a major shift in thinking
  • Neoliberalism was supposed to make the world a better place for us all.
  • The OECD Jobs study had a significant influence on policy reforms in Canada through the 1990s, many of which were first outlined in the Liberal government’s 1994 policy paper Agenda, Jobs and Growth. This document provided the template for a restructuring of social policy in Canada throughout the 1990s – a template that continues to guide policy today.
  • “Canada spends less on cash benefits such as unemployment benefits and family benefits than most OECD countries. Partly as a result, taxes and transfers do not reduce inequality by as much as in many other countries. Furthermore, their effect on inequality has been declining over time.”
  • “publicly provided services fulfill an important direct redistributive role” and that the scaling back of employment protection, something that the Jobs Study advocated for “ had an overall disequalizing effect.” The OECD report leaves us with hope because it demonstrates that we need to rethink neoliberal economic theory.
  • begin a process of reversing the damage done
  • As recommended by the OECD, this will require that we return to a more equitable taxation and redistribution model, and invest in education and social programs
  • latest mantra—austerity
1 - 3 of 3
Showing 20▼ items per page