Economy Wallowing Along – On Purpose?

[Lucy Goosey]

http://rwer.wordpress.com/2012/08/02/wallowing-along-on-purpose/

Good, if depressing, analysis

The reason that the Reagan/Clinton/Bush era has seen the steady erosion and eclipse of our middle class is simply attributable to this coincidence of political and economic enclosure. The modern enclosure movement echoes that of pre-industrial Britain. A segment of society sees benefit in the execution of new ideas and techniques and seeks to extract value from them. In order to do this they have to re-arrange society. They need to dispense with prior existing social contracts and establish new ones that give them leeway to effect the value creating change. They need to co-opt the political process in order to write the laws needed. They need to alter inhibiting social norms. They need to entrench themselves so as to extract what they can. And they need to divert the dispossessed into different and more malleable channels of subsistence.

In our case the new technology or set of ideas that undergirds the modern enclosure movement is that of economics. Particularly neoclassical economics. Whether we like it of not modern America is increasingly being re-shaped to conform with the notions of society that form the basis of that theory. Variants of it infest modern business management theory; they underpin the explosion in the share of our economy diverted into finance; they inform the media’s attitude towards policy; they form the basis of common discussion about the economy; and they provide an intellectual backdrop for the dominance of post-Reagan right wing political positions. There has been no effective reaction from the left over the past four decades because its elite too has been captured.

[Hydra]

1. Social engineering 101

The worst part is that it's working. The "Job Creators" and the "Adults" are stacking the deck impossibly in their favor, and worse, against future progress in favor of their personal gain.

There may be something fundamentally wrong with us as humans that we can do this to each other and be made to feel joy in witnessing it. Another "Success."

[Dustlawyer]

2. "There has been no effective reaction from the left...b/c it's elite too has been captured."

Corporations and the 1% have been running our country for awhile. They have the Courts and the media to go along with most major and minor politicians. One politician will get through now and then, but unless they play ball, they are gone in one term.