Thom Hartmann - Forty-two years ago, Ronald Reagan launched America into a great social, economic, and political experiment. It was based on the 1940s utopian thinking of a handful of conservative economists and promised to bring peace and prosperity to the entire world through a magical thing they dubbed the “free market.” Reagan and his Vice President GHW Bush, who initially called it “Voodoo Economics,” became true believers, as did Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. And, it turns out, it was based on a lie and has produced an utter disaster for America.
This experiment — called neoliberalism, but more commonly referred to as Reaganomics — has transferred $51 trillion from the pockets of America’s working class directly into the money bins of the morbidly rich, taking America’s middle class from almost two-thirds of us to fewer than half of us. It has made a handful of billionaires richer than any humans in history, richer than the pharaohs, richer than the mythical Midas, richer than the historic kings of Europe.
By exploding inequality and crushing the ability of a single worker to raise a family, it has fueled an economic bitterness and fatalism we see in every poll today about people’s satisfaction with their ability to keep their heads above water and prosper. As I document in my book The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America, it moved over 50,000 factories out of America and destroyed an estimated 40 million good-paying manufacturing and support jobs.
1 comment:
Yup. The robbery of the millennium shows how far we are gone and the victims have Stockholm syndrome
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