Why American and Britain are Self-Destructing
<snip>
There are only two societies in the rich world where life is getting shorter, poorer, meaner, and more hopeless — fast. Where life expectancies, incomes, and savings are all falling. America and Britain. Where middle classes have imploded, people live hand to mouth, and upward mobility has all but vanished. Where the idea of living a better life is somewhere between a joke and a distant memory. Where entire generations of young people — at last count, three, Gen X, Millennials, and Get Z — live worse lives than their parents and grandparents. Just two such societies where trust, happiness, and purpose have all imploded catastrophically — while depression, rage, anxiety, and suicide are all surging.
America and Britain have entered a vicious cycle, a death spiral. It’s a novel and bizarre phenomenon for a modern, rich society, unseen since Weimar Germany. It goes like this. In the 1980s, America began decades of underinvestment in public goods and social systems. It privatized whatever there was to privatize. The idea was that whatever it was — healthcare, education, finance — the private sector could do it better. The Reagan Revolution was in full effect — as a backlash to the advances civil rights made in the 1960s and 1970s, the good white American using “choice” as a shield to protect themselves from ever having to invest in or mingle with those dirty, filthy subhumans. All that was called “neoliberalism.” Let markets sort it all out! Translation: let the strong survive, and the weak perish.
<snip>
At the same time, the “private sector” which was supposed to provide good healthcare, education, retirement, finance, and so on, began to charge the average American more and more for these things, while lowering their quality. After all, corporations are profit-seeking entities: their motivation is money. And so over time, the average American began to pay prices for things that astonished the rest of the world: $50K for childbirth, $200K for an education, and so on. How could they afford the basics of life at ever increasing prices — when their incomes had begun to stagnate? They couldn’t — so they began to go into massive debt (and today, the average American dies in debt.)
<snip>
We are seeing a weird and gruesome new thing in the modern world. Rich countries which become failed states. In a precise and hard sense: they enter death spirals of austerity-poverty which cause a chain reaction self-destruction. That is the story of America and Britain’s twin collapses. Having let their investment rates fall too low, kicking off a vicious spiral of austerity and poverty leading to more austerity and poverty…which left the average person too poor to invest in anyone else, let alone him or herself…now no recovery towards a path of progress may be possible. Their future is just more of this, more regress, only harder and faster. Their destiny now well may be written in stone. They are joining nations like Russia and Venezuela in decline and collapse.
<snip>
More: https://eand.co/why-american-and-britain-are-self-destructing-a8693ebb097
= new reply since forum marked as read
Australia -- Murdock's original home -- will have even shorter life expectancies after everyone dies of complications of smoke inhalation from those oh-so-climate-hoaxy fires.
Thanks, Hedda ! I'm off to read the whole article.
I've always loved your screen name 
but hadn't noticed you for awhile.
It's all a very serious state of affairs. 
*FYI Folks, another important post worth checking out today, in Gen. Disc.:
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100212758844
Accepting responsibility for our own roles in allowing it to happen is the first step towards fixing it.
Or we can tsk tsk and hope it goes away. And with that I'm going away, from this thread. Good night.
they are a few, yes. But they're more than a few.
And findable. There's just no jurisdictional enforcement -- whether it's the UN's military force, Interpol, ICC, US military, or even the FBI -- to bring them to the tax table to have that sitdown and give them the ultimatum.
There are 2,604 billionaires in the world, 607 of them in the U.S., and 40% of those in New York and California. We've got 420 more than the next closest country, China. Worldwide they're worth over US$9.1 trillion, up from US$7.67 trillion in 2017. The top eight worldwide own as much combined wealth as half the human race.
https://wealthygorilla.com/top-20-richest-people-world/
Looks like the world's 46.8 MILLION MILLIONAIRES collectively own more $ than the other half of humans, owning approximately $158.3 trillion.
Global wealth grew in 2019 to $360 trillion, according to the Global Wealth Report published Monday from the Credit Suisse Research Institute.
It's not a few. It's a big club, and we ain't in it. But we know their names.
I'm glad I've put in my order to The Universe that this isn't the planet in which I want to reincarnate...
A good article from the UK in April that summarizes much of how we got to this point:
Neoliberalism promised freedom – instead it delivers stifling control
Creeping privatisation is rolling back the state to create a new, absolutist bureaucracy that destroys efficiency
George Monbiot @GeorgeMonbiot
Wed 10 Apr 2019
Link: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/10/neoliberalism-freedom-control-privatisation-state
(snip)
Workers find themselves enmeshed in a Kafkaesque bureaucracy, centrally controlled and micromanaged. Organisations that depend on a cooperative ethic – such as schools and hospitals – are stripped down, hectored and forced to conform to suffocating diktats. The introduction of private capital into public services – that would herald a glorious new age of choice and openness – is brutally enforced. The doctrine promises diversity and freedom but demands conformity and silence.
Much of the theory behind these transformations arises from the work of Ludwig von Mises. In his book Bureaucracy, published in 1944, he argued that there could be no accommodation between capitalism and socialism. The creation of the National Health Service in the UK, the New Deal in the US and other experiments in social democracy would lead inexorably to the bureaucratic totalitarianism of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.
He recognised that some state bureaucracy was inevitable; there were certain functions that could not be discharged without it. But unless the role of the state is minimised – confined to defence, security, taxation, customs and not much else – workers would be reduced to cogs “in a vast bureaucratic machine”, deprived of initiative and free will. By contrast, those who labour within an “unhampered capitalist system” are “free men”, whose liberty is guaranteed by “an economic democracy in which every penny gives a right to vote”. He forgot to add that some people, in his capitalist utopia, have more votes than others. And those votes become a source of power.
The situation we're in also explains why unemployment is so low for both nations. Stagnated wages, savings lost to the big recession, inflation and massive personal debt leaves many no choice but to work more hours, more than one job and put to work those who normally would not. New jobs mostly are bottom-dollar pay.
Purging us of the right-wing world-wide is the only cure but the public has zero will to do so......
is not sustainable in the long run? 
I remember when capitalists hated the old Soviet 5-year plans. China still has them. Maybe Western capitalists should have done something similar to encourage some occasional long-term thinking in the interest of sustainability?
gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme...
Response to hedda_foil (Original post)
