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erronis

(14,955 posts)
25. "Why American and Britain are Self-Destructing" - great piece via Eudiamonics
Sun Dec 8, 2019, 02:48 PM
Dec 2019
How The Death Spiral of a Rich Society Begins With Austerity, and Ends With Poverty, Despair, and Collapse

https://eand.co/why-american-and-britain-are-self-destructing-a8693ebb097
There’s a simple fact that’s not noticed or remarked on nearly enough. The world’s two large English speaking societies, America and Britain, are collapsing. And they are collapsing in eerily similar ways, for eerily similar reasons, too. Yet in these societies, this basic point doesn’t seem to be understood much, if at all. And yet it’s not really a matter for debate. It’s a simple empirical fact.

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.

In fact, there are just a handful of societies with those grim statistics anywhere in the world — Venezeula, perhaps, Russia, North Korea, war torn African shells. Failed states, in other words. That is what America and Britain are becoming.

In a failed state, progress has become regress. That’s what happened to these societies. They are self-destructing. America, of course, is further down that road. But Britain is catching up fast. So how did they get here?

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.

Bancor Pachamama Dec 2019 #1
People are beginning to feel the consequences malaise Dec 2019 #2
Seriously? The people have known about this theft and have never, ever had recourse to get it back. ancianita Dec 2019 #7
Not sure we'll always be too late malaise Dec 2019 #8
One would think c-h would be supported by our military, but they don't see us as their paymasters. ancianita Dec 2019 #14
There are always counter-hegemonic challenges to existing systems malaise Dec 2019 #16
Me, too. I just think that hegemony is the overall System of systems. ancianita Dec 2019 #17
Taken literally I think you're correct malaise Dec 2019 #19
The cracks/openings are small -- ignored, denied and delayed by controllers of the hegemony. ancianita Dec 2019 #20
Commentary by George Monbiot -- wouldn't hurt to put that in the title. eppur_se_muova Dec 2019 #3
Except that the first link is about the 100th anniversary of Keynes malaise Dec 2019 #5
Oh, and about that IMF madness... ancianita Dec 2019 #15
This is a very serious post malaise Dec 2019 #22
Could you link it? Thanks.Also, shell company layers are as many as shells in the sea. Shells should ancianita Dec 2019 #23
Global web of firms for fraudsters created by British company Formations House malaise Dec 2019 #24
I wonder how they were revealed. They probably work through Brit.Virgin Islands ancianita Dec 2019 #28
Nice work malaise Dec 2019 #29
I added more stuff above about Tom Clancy that you might not have read. Bad edit, I know. ancianita Dec 2019 #30
Nice chart. So many ways to subvert information flows. Sometimes the smallest org is the most erronis Dec 2019 #27
and of course, with highly professional professionals malaise Dec 2019 #31
You mean imf.org? Its language is revealing about its Bretton Woods goals. ancianita Dec 2019 #32
Agree. Here's the link to George Monbiot's 2008 piece in The Guardian erronis Dec 2019 #11
Keynes merely pointed out a patch to capitalism Farmer-Rick Dec 2019 #4
Excellent point Farmer-Rick malaise Dec 2019 #6
It's such an easy dichotomy Roy Rolling Dec 2019 #10
It's not going to be that pleasant inside those armed gated communities. Maybe buy a decade or erronis Dec 2019 #12
Filthy rich. Yes, I remember people using that term. Nowadays, I call them billionaire PatrickforO Dec 2019 #13
They have dumbed down populations everywhere malaise Dec 2019 #18
Very interesting OP and thread. Thanks! . . . nt Bernardo de La Paz Dec 2019 #9
That was eye opening - thanks rurallib Dec 2019 #21
"Why American and Britain are Self-Destructing" - great piece via Eudiamonics erronis Dec 2019 #25
That is an excellent read malaise Dec 2019 #26
It's also about how class war insurgency, and foreign insurgency, make a country give up and give in ancianita Dec 2019 #33
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