THE MOST RECENT POLITICAL, ECONOMIC CHANGES

FROM Z NET - PAUL STREET

When asked what the most radical changes have happened recent times Street said:

• The Soviet bloc vaporized and with it any credible state-specific military counter to American militarism as Russia morphed from Stalinism to neoliberal gangsterism.
• U.S. manufacturing base has all but disappeared and finance capital has seized power, dismantling and de-developing much of the nation.
• Neoliberal ideology (which says that social solidarity, the common good, and human empathy are defunct and dysfunctional) knocked off the lingering social Keynesian liberalism of the long New Deal era.
• The percentage of U.S. workers enrolled in unions fell from 27 to 11 percent – to a pre-Great Depression level.
• The loathsome rat and arch reactionary Ronald Reagan was elected to the U.S. presidency. He served two terms, doing enormous damage at home and abroad.
• Japan was overtaken by the U.S. as the industrialized nation with the longest working hours
• Wages and benefits have stagnated or fallen for most while wealth and income has skyrocketed for the top tenth, especially for the richest within the top 1 percent.
• U.S. inequality has reached “Second Gilded Age” levels, on par with the 1920s.
• “Marxist-Lenninist” China has emerged as the great new center of manufacturing and global capitalist accumulation.
• The U.S. prison population (now over 2 million) has increased more than 6 times over and 1 in 3 black adult males are now saddled with the crippling lifelong mark of a felony record, aptly termed “the New Jim Crow” by law professor Michelle Alexander.
• Poor kids’ former entitlement to public family cash assistance was liquidated
• The low-wage anti-union import platform Wal-Mart replaced high-wage unionized General Motors as the nation’s leading corporation (and leading “template” for labor-management relations).
• The universities returned to their normal historical pattern of abject servility to the corporate and imperial establishment.
• Corporate media ownership has shrunk yet further to what is it now…8, 7, 6, 5…corporations owning more than half of all media print and electronic? (I lose track).
• The Internet emerged for better and/or worse and countless millions Americans are regularly zoned-out in front of atomized glowing computer screens on private e-mail chats, Facebook “walls” (Ray Bradbury must have appreciated that term), Twitter, and iPhones.
• There has emerged a related mass prescription epidemic of psychosomatic drugs (Aldous Huxley would appreciate that).
• The Supreme Court installed a proto-fascistic messianic militarist in the White House on openly absurd grounds (Bush v. Gore, 2000). He served two terms and did enormous damage at home and abroad.
• The Supreme Court has permitted (on openly absurd grounds – Citizens United, 2010) the nation’s sociopathic corporations to invest unlimited sums from their business treasuries in the deepening their already extreme plutocratic control of U.S. politics – this in the name of free speech.
• Both of the official political organizations (which barely resemble parties anymore) have moved well to the right of the citizenry qua electorate in abject service to “the unelected dictatorship of money” (Edward Herman and David Peterson’s excellent phrase).
• Urban and national policing have become highly militarized and ever more technologically sophisticated as the war on “homeland” (a lovely and revealing phrase) dissent has been buttressed by a significant and chilling expansion of police state powers (e.g. indefinite detention and rendition) in the wake of 9/11.
• Runaway carbon emissions generated by the growth addicted profits system are now pushing the climate quickly towards an irreversible “tipping point” that has some earth and life scientists talking in serious terms about the not-so distant threat of human extinction.