American Royalty: an insight

Wealth Creates Arrogance

By Fred Mazelis

Directed by Lauren Greenfield

 

The new documentary, The Queen of Versailles, advertised at least in part as a kind of reality show based on the tale of a Florida billionaire and his wife who set out to build a 90,000-square-foot home inspired by Louis XIV’s palace in Versailles, is in fact a good deal more serious than its media coverage might suggest.

Filmmaker Lauren Greenfield, also an artist and documentary photographer, has come up with a movie that to some extent holds up a mirror to twenty-first century America. It would be difficult for any thinking viewer of the film to come away without some serious questions about the state of contemporary society.

David Siegel, 74 years old when the film was begun some four years ago, grew up in Indianapolis. His father was a businessman who apparently gambled away most of his earnings. The younger Siegel was determined to achieve wealth on a grand scale. He got his big chance in 1980, launching what was to become Westgate Resorts, a vast empire based on timeshare vacation homes.

Jackie Siegel, 30 years younger than her husband, comes from a working class background in the upstate New York town of Binghamton. When she met and married Siegel in 1995, it was her second marriage and his third.

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Once Down, Stay Down, Capitalism Rules

Upward mobility; a capitalist myth

By Micheal Lind

One of the fallacies exposed by the Great Recession was the idea of the mass upper middle class. During the bubble economy, both progressives and conservatives praised the graduation of most people from the working class to a new elite that included the majority of us.

The center-left and center-right defined this alleged new class somewhat differently.

America’s progressive elite, based it on the educational profession, civil service and nonprofit sector. America’s conservative elite based it in business and banking.

Elite progressives and elite conservatives share the assumption that the ideal society is one in which most Americans would be more like them, in owning educational credentials (progressives) or capital (conservatives).

The elderly in America can remember a long-distant era when progressive thinkers included leaders of organized labor and small-town populist politicians. But nowadays progressive politicians and strategists tend to be affluent meritocrats who got where they are by making good grades at highly selective schools.

Their narrow personal experience leads many elite progressives to equate social mobility and increases in income with obtaining academic credentials like their own.

While New Deal labor liberals and populists wanted to promote unions and a living wage, many members of the new breed of Ivy League-educated liberal technocrats prefer an alternate plan: send everybody to college.

Progressives love to claim that education is the key to upward mobility. But this is based on an obvious fallacy.

The "college premium" that results in higher incomes for college graduates is the result of the relative scarcity of college degrees.

If everyone had a B.A., then the value of a B.A. in generating high wages would drop. We know this to be the case, because access to college has expanded more rapidly in Europe, where the gap in wages between the college-educated and the rest as a result is smaller than in the U.S.

Nor is there any basis to the claim, repeated by politicians and pundits of both parties, that most of the jobs of the future require a college education.

Some have claimed that the millennium of the credentialed class has already arrived.

In a 2008 paper titled "The Decline of the White Working Class and the Rise of a Mass Upper Middle Class," the leading political analyst Ruy Teixeira and the scholar Alan Abramowitz argue that the key factor in contemporary American politics is the expansion of the highly educated, white-collar professional sector.

But they reach this conclusion only by truly heroic feats of definition. They are able to claim that 54 percent of the American people are college-educated only by combining the 29 percent who had B.A.’s in 2007 with the 25 percent who had "some college."

Taking a different approach and combining the "some college" crowd with high school graduates produces a more recognizable picture of an America with a majority of workers who have less than a four-year college degree.

The definition of "white-collar jobs" used by Teixeira and Abramowitz is even more generous, including "clerical" and "sales" along with professional. Do receptionists and shoe-store sales clerks in the mall really think of themselves as being in the same social class as doctors, lawyers and corporate executives?

Conservatives of the bubble economy era had their own mass upper-middle-class fantasy. In their version, membership in the mass upper middle class depended not upon educational credentials but upon ownership of capital invested in the stock market.

By the beginning of the 21st century, according to some calculations, a majority of Americans had private retirement accounts or employer pensions that were invested in stocks and bonds.

In the pages of the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere, conservative intellectuals declared that this made the United States a "nation of capitalists," an "investor society" based on "universal capitalism."

Defining janitors with 401K’s as "capitalists" is a kind of social promotion comparable to the elevation by progressives like Teixeira and Abramowitz of shoe-store clerks who dropped out of college into the "mass upper middle class."

Genuine capitalists derive most of their income from the return on their investments or savings, not from labor. By this definition, there are hardly any capitalists in the U.S.

Most of the rich are the "working rich," who derive most of their income from wages or professional fees, not from investments. We are a nation of wage earners, some paid well and others poorly.

A majority of Americans may have some money invested in the stock market, usually through employer pension plans or 401Ks, but it is very little indeed. Forty-three percent of Americans have less than $10,000 in retirement savings and 36 percent contribute nothing to retirement savings at all.

Thanks to two stock market collapses in less than a decade, most Americans will be more dependent on Social Security in retirement than ever. So much for the "nation of capitalists" and "the investor society."

At least the credentials touted by the center-left and the stocks and bonds touted by the center-right could be described with some plausibility as income-generating assets. During the bubble years, houses also began to be seen as income-producing assets, as well as symbols of membership in the suburban upper middle class.

For a generation, most Americans have been told by left, right and center that they would be failures if they ended their educations with high school, worked hard, saved cash for emergencies and bought modest homes they could afford.

They have been told that to succeed in life they need to ape the lifestyles of the upper middle class that provides most of America’s politicians, pundits and scholars.

The result has been an experiment in social engineering that has gone horribly wrong: the creation of a faux mass upper middle class.

Millions of Americans who by objective standards belong to the working class or lower middle class have persuaded themselves that they are part of the professional-investor elite, because they have worthless degrees from diploma mills, negligible amounts invested in stocks, and suburban trophy houses they cannot afford.

For the college graduates at Starbucks working to pay off student loans for degrees that they will never use, as for the millions of Americans who are now "underwater," owing more on their mortgages than their houses are worth, the American dream has turned into a nightmare.

But many have profited from the peddling of the dream of the mass upper middle class.

The claim that everyone should go to college served the interests of the educational-industrial complex, from K-12 to the universities.

That now serves as an important constituency of the Democratic Party. (Along with Wall Street investment banks, universities provided Barack Obama with his largest campaign donations.)

And the claim that everyone needs to pour money into the stock market, to be managed by banks and brokers who fleece their clients, served the interests of the financial-industrial complex that has replaced real-economy businesses as the dominant force in the Republican Party.

Both the educators and the brokers have successfully lobbied Congress to subsidize their bloated industries, swelling them even further, by means of tax breaks for student loans and personal retirement savings.

The big losers have been the millions of working Americans whom many Democrats and Republicans alike have persuaded, against their interests, to indulge champagne tastes on beer budgets.

The alternative to the mass upper-middle-class fantasy peddled by Republicans and New Democrats is a return to the older New Deal liberal approach, based on high wages and adequate social insurance.

Working Americans should not need to go into debt to obtain college diplomas, in order to share more of the gains of national economic growth in the form of higher wages.

And there would be less pressure on working Americans to gamble with their money in the stock market, if Social Security, like public pensions in the rest of the world, replaced a higher percentage of pre-retirement income than the 30-40 percent it replaces today.

An America with a college-educated professional class majority was always a fantasy. So was an America with a majority of affluent day traders.

The America we need is one in which all Americans are paid a living wage and guaranteed a comfortable retirement -- even if they didn’t go to a university and don’t own stocks and bonds.

Detroit, City of Poverty

Wage-cutter in chief's 4 hour visit to Detroit

 Patrick Martin

Obama’s four-hour visit to Detroit on Friday brought him to the center of the economic catastrophe created by the profit system.

The “Motor City” was once a byword for decent-paying jobs in the auto industry. But Detroit is now synonymous with poverty, urban decay, mass unemployment and the virtual breakdown of a functioning society.

During his visit, Obama made no comment on the mass suffering stretching for miles in every direction. Instead, he gave a 25-minute stump speech to the 1,100 workers on the day shift at the Chrysler plant, and a briefer address to the work force at the GM plant.

He didn't mention the city’s staggering unemployment rate—estimated at 50 percent or more. Nor did he utter the words “poverty,” “homelessness,” “hunger,” “foreclosure” or “eviction.”

Instead, he took the occasion of his visit to the poorest city in America to boast of the great success of his administration’s economic policies. A more cold-blooded, arrogant provocation against working people can scarcely be imagined.

Obama delivered his two speeches to audiences of auto workers who have borne the brunt of the restructuring of the industry dictated by the White House.

Some 330,000 workers have lost auto-related jobs in the past two years, while tens of thousands of retired workers have lost health benefits and seen their pensions threatened.

Obama’s “car czar” went beyond even what General Motors and Chrysler thought advisable, and demanded a 50 percent across-the-board reduction in the starting wage for newly hired workers.

The result is that side-by-side on the assembly line some workers are making $28 an hour and others $14 an hour for doing the same job. Most workers on the second shift at the Chrysler Jefferson plant make $14 an hour, but Obama’s audience consisted largely of the higher-paid first-shift workers.

Obama could say little of substance to justify the claim that his administration’s policies were producing an economic recovery, except to describe the conditions under which he took office in January 2009, and assert that things had improved since then.

The main point of Obama’s remarks at both plants was that without the intervention of the White House both GM and Chrysler would have been forced into liquidation last year, going out of business entirely instead of the structured government-supervised bankruptcy that was a condition of the auto bailout.

“Independent estimates suggest that more than 1 million jobs could have been lost if Chrysler and GM had liquidated,” he said.

“And in the middle of a deep recession, that would have been a brutal, irreversible shock not just to Detroit, not just to the Midwest, but to our entire economy.”

But the bailout was not offered without conditions, he continued, “What we said was, if you’re willing to take the tough and painful steps necessary to make yourselves more competitive; if you’re willing to pull together workers, management, suppliers, dealers, everybody to remake yourself for changing times, then we’ll stand by you and we’ll invest in your future.”

Obama made no other reference to the draconian cuts imposed on auto workers, including the 50 percent cut in starting pay. As for “pain” for the corporate bosses, GM’s profits have rebounded and GM and Chrysler executives continue to rake in seven-figure salaries.

GM Chairman Edward Whitacre, for instance, makes a $1.1 million salary, earning in one week as much as a $14-an-hour assembly-line worker makes in a year.

And that grossly understates his income, since Whitacre is paid mainly in company stock and stands to reap a fortune from the upcoming initial public offering by GM.

Obama noted that 334,000 auto jobs were eliminated between June 2008 and June 2009, and claimed that 55,000 new auto jobs have been created since then. He did not point out, however, that the bulk of these new jobs pay wages that are barely above the poverty level.

The White House intervention has had the effect of completing the transformation of auto production from a high-wage, high-benefit industry to one of brutal exploitation at sweatshop wages.

For this, Obama has earned the thanks of the auto bosses and their industrial police force—which operates under the signboard of the United Auto Workers—as well as the entire local Democratic Party establishment.

Obama was welcomed to the city with a friendly editorial in the right-wing Detroit News. Lined up behind him on the podium were the state’s two Democratic senators, the local Democratic congresswoman, Mayor Bing, also a Democrat, and Chrysler, GM and UAW officials. There was not a hint of oppositional sentiment permitted.

The address to the auto workers was imbued with economic nationalism, which Obama used to flatter both his audience and himself. He referred to his opponents in the Republican Party, who deemed the bailout terms insufficiently harsh on the auto workers and wanted even deeper cuts or outright liquidation of the company.

“You are proving the naysayers wrong,” he said. “I wish they were standing here today. I wish they could see what I’m seeing in this plant and talk to the workers who are here taking pride in building a world-class vehicle. I want all of you to know, I will bet on the American worker any day of the week!”

Obama continued, harking back to World War II: “It was workers just like you, right here in Detroit, who built an arsenal of democracy that propelled America to victory.

"It was workers like you that built this country into the greatest economic power the world has ever known; it was workers like you that manufactured a miracle that was uniquely American.”

The constant references to American greatness were somewhat strained, given that circumstances now prevailing in Detroit, and the US generally, hardly resemble a “miracle.”

The nationalist phrases were not only reactionary, but preposterous. The auto industry is entirely globalized, and giant corporations conduct their operations on a world scale, pitting workers in country after country against each other.

Obama spoke at one factory run by Chrysler—now owned by Fiat, with the Italian CEO at his side—and at another operated by GM, which has sold more cars this year in China than in the United States. GM has 32,000 workers in China, while its US hourly employment has fallen from 468,000 in 1979 to only 52,000 today.

These figures suggest the reality facing auto workers and the working class as a whole: the only way forward in the struggle against corporate downsizing, wage-cutting and the destruction of all rights on the shop floor is to unite the working class.

This is a political fight against the Obama Regime, the Democratic Party, the two-party system and the capitalist ruling class whose interests they serve.

Unequal Distribution of Wealth

Captialist Nature

By David Barber

David Barber is an assistant professor of American history at the University of Tennessee at Martin. He is the author of A Hard Rain Fell: SDS and Why it Failed (University Press of Mississippi, 2008).

American society’s fantastically skewed distribution of wealth stands as one of the main structural fault lines underpinning the Crash of 2008.

America’s richest one percent of the population own over forty percent of America’s wealth – exclusive of home ownership – in this, the most opulent society history has ever known. On the other hand, the bottom sixty percent of Americans own approximately one percent of all of America’s wealth.

If we picture an auditorium with one hundred people and one hundred seats, the single richest person would be able to spread out smartly over nearly forty-three seats. The poorest sixty people in the auditorium would have to make due squeezing into a single seat.

This mal-distribution of wealth does not bode well for a society based on the buying and selling of goods. Our super-rich plutocrats, after all, do not need more than five or ten automobiles or five or ten homes each.

This top one percent – 3 million people – certainly cannot purchase all the goods that the poorest 180 million Americans would be capable of purchasing had our society a more equal distribution of wealth.

And so debt has had to sustain our market economy: the more skewed the distribution of wealth has grown over time, the more frantically has the economy been forced to create a growing array of consumer debt mechanisms – subprime mortgages, payday loans, more and more intricately structured credit card debt – in order simply to maintain its functioning.

When a critical mass of poor and working-class Americans could no longer pay their fabulously expensive subprime mortgages and usurious credit card bills, this house of cards collapsed.

A number of the financial institutions built on this consumer debt foundered and the remainder required unprecedented injections of federal funds to remain afloat.

The housing market and new residential construction, the market for consumer goods – automobiles, appliances, electronics – all crumbled, taking down with them the jobs and retirement savings of millions of Americans.

The Crash, in short, was not an episode of mass hysteria or panic; it represented a structural crisis in part rooted in the grossly unequal distribution of wealth in this society. When millions of Americans could no longer buy goods, industry had to stomp on the brakes.

And what is true in the United States of the unequal distribution of wealth, and of the consequences of that unequal distribution, is true again on a world scale. Nearly half the world’s population lives on $2 per day or less.

This super-poor mass of humanity, from whose soil is ripped vast amounts of mineral and agricultural wealth, and out of whose labor the world’s manufactured goods increasingly come, are almost wholly excluded from participating in the world’s market economy.

These people, too, must depend upon debt, public debt in this case. More importantly, the survival of our world’s economic system, as it is currently configured, depends upon these people being both poor and indebted. But it is both the poverty and the debt which lead inexorably to the Crash.

They Believe in Greed

Disparity of class

  By Chris Floyd

This is the system, the creed, the extremist faith that "serious" players in all the "major" power factions on both sides of the Atlantic adhere to.

Their ideology is capitalism. Their god is greed. Both demand human sacrifices. So the poor must go to the wall. And to keep the system going, more and more people must be made poor.

First those in the "outer darkness" of faraway lands, then finally those in the sacred "Homelands" themselves. We have been watching the latter process play out slowly in the past few decades -- but it is accelerating now at dizzying speed.

News from the UK the disparity in death rates between the well-off and the poor in the UK is now greater than at any time since 1921.

The London Review of Books points to a new study by the British Medical Journal that shows that by 2997, "for every 100 people under the age of 65 dying in the best-off areas, 199 were dying in the poorest tenth of areas."

The Journal study said that the data suggest "it was only prolonged and enthusiastic state intervention" that kept the disparity from being greater.

On the other hand, the elite-coddling market jihadism of the Clintonian-Obamaish "New Labour" government helped stretch the yawning gap even further.

The few spare pence that the war criminals of the Labour government threw at the poor kept them from dying quite as fast as they would have done otherwise under the system of voracious corporate rapine that Labour entrenched and expanded after inheriting it from the Thatcherite Tories in 1997.

Now, even those few pence are being stripped away -- gleefully -- by what many say is the most extremist government Britain has ever seen, outstripping even Margaret Thatcher in the scope of its draconian cuts and the fervor of its market fundamentalism.

The savage cutbacks and vast, churning upheavals being pushed through, at breakneck speed, by the new Conservative government (and its truly pathetic coalition "partner," the lapdog Liberal Democrats) will send millions of people tumbling down into a permanent underclass.

Finally, after 60 years of trying, the Lib-Cons will gut the national health service with a stealth "Americanization" that will turn the operation of local doctors' offices over to private firms (many of them from the US) and privatize public hospitals.

They will be allowed them to "fail" if they don't produce enough cash for their elite shareholders.

Meanwhile, the schools are now in the hands of the arch-neocon Michael Gove. He's plotting with revisionist historian Niall Ferguson to impose a pro-Empire, pro-elite "national greatness" ideology on the young.

Gove is also using "emergency" legislative procedures to strip public schools away from the oversight of democratically elected local government and put them into the hands of unaccountable corporations, religious groups and wealthy elites.

This Revolution of the Rich is being justified by a carefully crafted, constantly stoked panic about budget deficits, pointing to the example of the perpetually weak government and economy of Greece as a horror story to be avoided at all costs.

Yet even if the Greek situation was as dire as the fear-mongers make out, the fact remains that the cuts which the Tory-LapDog coalition is making in the much stronger, much more stable UK are actually far in excess than those being imposed upon Greece.

As with the fear-mongering about "Iraqi WMDs," the "dangers of the deficit" are being exaggerated -- and manufactured -- in order to put into place a pre-existing (and transatlantic) ideological agenda: a neo-feudal oligarchy.

But in almost all of these measures, the Tory-LapDog government is only entrenching and expanding the "market-led reforms" imposed by New Labour. And "New Labour" was of course a close copy of the "New Democrats" of Bill Clinton and his clique of "triangulating" bagmen for Big Money.

Clinton, in turn, wasscarcely distinguishable from the Reagan-Bush faction that preceded them, and then succeeded them in the Bush dynasty's second turn in the White House.

And we all know that "continuity" is the byword of the Obama administration, which is chock-a-block with holdovers not only from strangulating triangulators of the Clinton era but also the imperial militarists from the two Bush reigns.

Thus for more than 30 years, the world-dominating Anglo-American alliance has been under the sway of factions which, for all their internal squabbling and hair-splitting, are strongly united in their steadfast, unshakable adherence to the perpetuation -- and expansion -- of elite power and privilege.

They have shown themselves willing and eager to degrade their own societies (and destroy many others) in the service of this brutal, barbaric, inhuman faith.

The poor have no place in this system, which is a retrograde, hi-tech, rhetorically sugarcoated revival of the laissez-faire fantasies of the past, as Jeremy Seabrook notes:

'Pauperism' long ago took on the colour of culpability. The distinction between the idle and improvident poor and the "deserving" goes back at least to the Elizabethan poor law. It took on a new force in the early industrial era, which saw an unprecedented growth in pauperism. The enthusiasts of laissez-faire capitalism concluded that the evil was compounded by efforts to relieve it, and helping the poor only increased their number.
Everything indicated that 'natural' processes should be allowed to take their course. In this version of the world, the market mechanism is as flawless a creation as the earth. It should remain untouched by the hand of meddlers, whose only effect is to upset its power to enrich us all.
It is remarkable that the establishment of laissez-faire itself in the early 19th century required an enormous amount of government intervention and regulation."

And so it is today. The "regulation" of the health care industry introduced by the Obama Administration is actually a gargantuan transfer of wealth, by force, from working people and the poor to a few huge corporations.

The financial "regulation" signed into law is yet another sham that will leave the rapacious fools and fraudsters who brought down the global economy -- and triggered the convenient "deficit crisis" by demanding massive bailouts of public money for their private businesses -- at large and in charge of the world's finances.

Meanwhile, more and more government regulations restrict the right of ordinary citizens to challenge the rich and powerful in court, or to register a public protest (herding them instead into the truly hideous "free speech zones").

Meanwhile, the state grants corporations extraordinary privileges to interfere with the political process with their vast resources and protects their leaders from personal accountability for the ravages they commit.

The government "intervention and regulation" on behalf of the industries and elites who service the endlessly expanding symbiosis of corporate, military and 'security' power -- stretching even to the countenancing and cover-up of torture and murder -- is one of the defining elements of our age.

As Glenn Ford writes,Obama is preparing to "regulate" the last tattered fragments of the social welfare system -- already decimated by the progressive's favorite good old boy, Bill Clinton -- right out of existence:

In April of this year, Obama once again reminded everyone that everything is and has always been 'on the table', as far as he's concerned, including Social Security. His so-called 'deficit commission' is stacked with rich sociopaths sharpening their knives to carve up, sell off or otherwise doom Social Security. It is a battle that safety net defenders thought they had won against George Bush.
Obama has picked up Bush's marbles and put them back into play. He is the right wing's most potent weapon, the one before which liberal Democrats throw up their hands in surrender without the dignity of a fight.
Obama, working in plain sight over the past 18 months, has constructed and rigged a deficit commission to render a kind of death sentence to the foundational program of Roosevelt's New Deal.

This is the system -- the creed, the extremist faith -- that all "serious" players in all the "major" power factions on both sides of the Atlantic adhere to.

Their god of greed demands human sacrifices: and so the poor must die. And to keep the system going, more and more people must be made poor.

First those in the "outer darkness" of faraway lands, then finally those in the sacred "Homelands" themselves. We have been watching the latter process play out slowly in the past few decades -- but it is accelerating now at dizzying speed.

Soft Left Sides With Wallstreet Rich

During a recession, soft left sides with big money

By blackandred

Liberals support fiscal austerity during the recession because they no longer care about economic performance, much less the interests of workers and the poor, but instead identify their interests with those of Wall Street and the upper middle class.

At the recently concluded G-20 meetings in Toronto, Canada the leaders of the major economies issued a communiqué pledging to cut their budget deficits in half over the next three years.

Instead of draconian fiscal austerity, what is needed is a massive, globally coordinated, fiscal stimulus to pull the economy out of the worst global recession in over eighty years.

In Greece, when PASOK was in opposition it called for pro-growth policies favoring middle income sectors. Now, as Prime Minister, Papandreou is presiding over policies even more draconian than those of the previous right wing government he and PASOK criticized. How does one explain this madness?

One possibility is that many in the economics profession have contracted amnesia and forgotten the most important economics lesson learned during the twentieth century.

Governments must spend more when the economy is depressed and save only after the economy has recovered -- and that center left, along with right wing politicians, have now made the mistake of embracing the advice from misguided establishment economists to do just the opposite.

Two Nobel Prize winning economists, Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, who have not forgotten Keynes’ lesson believe this is exactly what has happened, and there is evidence to support their hypothesis.

Keynes was only able to successfully challenge the wisdom of traditional, balanced budget orthodoxy which requires governments to cut spending when recessions reduce their tax revenues with a powerful assist from practical experience during the Great Depression.

Even when conservative economists like Milton Friedman and right wing politicians like Richard Nixon were quoted saying “We are all Keynesians now” during the late 1960s and early 1970s, many economists and politicians remained uncomfortable with Keynesianism and were already hard at work organizing an economics counter revolution.

Over the ensuing decades establishment economists labored mightily to write Keynes out of their macroeconomic theories, models, and text books, and conservative politicians happily reverted to their pre-Keynesian, balanced budget orthodoxy.

These conservative politicians and their advisers focused on balanced-budgets and zero inflation in order to accomplish their real agenda -- decreasing the bargaining power of working people.

There was never any great mystery about why right wing political parties pushed an agenda designed to increase unemployment rates, weaken unions, and raise the cost to workers of being unemployed by cutting the social wage.

But now center left political parties are embracing the same economic policies and consorting with anti-Keynesian macro-economists, leaving the likes of Krugman and Stiglitz to wring their hands on the sidelines.

Is this simply an intellectual mistake on their part? What if we drop the assumption that the purpose of today’s economic policies is to rescue us from the Great Recession

We should put in its place the hypothesis that center left political parties are now aimed at benefiting higher income groups rather than promoting the interests of their former political constituencies.

After all, for decades prior to the financial crisis of 2008 and the onset of the Great Recession neo-liberal economic policies were championed by center left as well as right wing governments.

Not only Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, but Tony Blair and Bill Clinton also claimed that neo-liberal policies would improve economic performance by removing unnecessary and counterproductive shackles on corporate creativity.

Privatization, deregulation, tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, capital liberalization, and trade liberalization did not increase global growth rates or reduce poverty as advertised.

But these policies did greatly enhance corporate power, disempower workers, consumers, and citizens, and produce the greatest redistribution of income and wealth from poor to rich the world has ever seen.

It is now apparent that these neo-liberal policies which laid the groundwork for the present crisis were never about improving economic performance, but merely about redistributing power, income, and wealth.

So why should we now believe that the same center left political parties, following the advice of the same economic advisors, actually believe, or care if lavishing generous bailouts on banks without conditions while imposing fiscal austerity on workers and ordinary citizens will pull the global economy out of recession?

There is a more simple explanation for the behavior of today’s center left politicians, which is becoming more credible by the day.

Fiscal austerity and stalling financial reform in response to the worst financial crisis and deepest recession in eighty years is not about improving economic performance as its proponents claim.

These policies are simply about continuing to shift income and wealth from the poor to the rich, and from the manufacturing sector to finance, insurance, and real estate (known as FIRE) which have become increasingly ascendant in the US and Europe -- despite the fact that these policies will worsen the economic slump and make another financial crisis likely.

The claim that fiscal austerity during recession is “good economics” when it is actually “bad economics” is merely a “cover story” for public consumption.

As for why center left political parties and politicians now support this disastrous policy, the simple answer is these parties no longer care about economic performance.

They care much less about the interests of workers and the poor, but instead identify their interests with those of Wall Street and the upper middle class who appear to be the focus group for the Obama Administration and Nancy Pelosi.

Democratic Party politicians used to promise to press for policies to help workers, minorities, and the poor. They usually failed to do so, but that was their campaign rhetoric nonetheless.

But for many election cycles in the United States Democratic Party candidates have been promising instead to champion the interests of what they call middle-class Americans.

If center left politicians no longer make a secret of pretending they are concerned about unemployed workers and the poor, why should we be surprised when they adopt policies detrimental to their interests?

Voters in the UK already sent Gordon Brown and the Labor Party packing. Will other center left politicians and their parties -- Zapatero and the Socialist Party in Spain, Papandreou and PASOK in Greece, and Obama and the Democrats in the US -- who agree to impose fiscal austerity also be punished at the polls by voters who know we did not create the crisis and are furious at governments who subject us to counterproductive austerity?

When center left politicians echo false hopes that the economy is recovering promoted by right wing think tanks and the corporate owned media who shout “green shoots” whenever the prices of bank stocks or an index of consumer confidence stabilize momentarily.

They do this while unemployment and home foreclosure rates hold steady or worsen. One can only hope they badly miscalculate their own political self-interest.

But it is apparent that more and more center left politicians are quite willing to gamble that they can bamboozle a guileless public into thinking that fiscal austerity is necessary and wise and avoid voters’ wrath.

It is also increasingly apparent that center left political parties are more afraid of angering Wall Street and upper middle class funders by opposing policies that continue to redistribute income and wealth their way than they are of angering ordinary people who have traditionally voted center left because the right wing alternative is even worse.

However, people know when either they or some relative or friend has lost their job or home. And they will eventually turn on those who persist in telling them that the economy is recovering when they know it is not.

The question is where voters will turn when they abandon traditional center left parties who have abandoned them.

What is needed are social movements and new political parties who answer to and are led by those whose interests are being trampled on, who fight for policies which actually do generate high employment and greater economic equality, and who say no to counterproductive fiscal austerity, trickle down economic nonsense, and corporate sponsored globalization.

We need to build movements and parties which will take power back from multinational corporations and Wall Street, and launch the kind of Green New Deal needed to address the economic and ecological crises which otherwise will continue to worsen by the day.

6 Million Americans Are on Food Stamps

Mass poverty is growing

A sobering read.