Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/10/18/reaganomics-long-shadow.html
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Or we could eat them.
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Step one: out vote them (or if you will, vote them out)
Step two: tax them, spend on anything but more bombs, butter would be nice, bridges, bullet trains
Step three: change laws, move the Overton window back to sane thankyouverymuch, etc
very open to a steps four five and six etc
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None of Stiglitz’s suggestions is going to be put in place for all Americans, at least not without violent revolution, unless the GOP is voted out of power.* Right now through various cheats and rigging they’re continuing to push for a future where they’re effectively the only party, one that controls the judiciary.
This effort can’t wait until 2020 and can’t be limited to federal representantives.
[* before the false equivalencies start, yes, Third-Way Dems are also a problem in this regard, but not to the same degree]
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In her book A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, Barbara Tuchman writes about a peasant revolt in 1358 that began in the village of St. Leu and spread throughout the Oise Valley. At one estate, the serfs sacked the manor house, killed the knight, and roasted him on a spit in front of his wife and kids. Then, after ten or twelve peasants violated the lady, with the children still watching, they forced her to eat the roasted flesh of her dead husband and then killed her. That is class warfare. Arguing over the optimum marginal tax rate for the top 1 percent is not.
— Al Franken
I just recently started reading this book. I suggest it thoroughly to debunk Republicans claims of victimhood.
It also has a great little paragraph that reminds me why jousting was basically the “I’m into MMA” of rich, entitled, bored, white guys at the time.
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Nice, I’m going to pick this up.
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Another historian who studies Tudor england compared jousting to pro wrestling today… an apt comparison.
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Another way of saying this is that the only way to avoid violent revolution is to vote these people out now.
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Pretty much. If the GOP are allowed to continue the logical outcome is either violent revolution or some form of fascism.
Stiglitz is consistently my favourite winner of the Swedish thingy.
Some degree of violence putting the fascists in power and keeping them there. Followed by a greater degree of violence kicking that bunch out and putting a DIFFERENT bunch of assholes in charge.
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whynotboth.gif
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That’s so cute! I suppose a magic unicorn would he helpful as well! And the Dragon of Inequality can be vanquished by a brave and pure knight…
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This is the cycle of revolution that is so pointless. Our government model is flawed, but until there is a surefire way to eliminate greed and corruption in individuals, it is probably the sanest. The greedy will always be attracted to power, and wind up in any government. I’d much rather we had a culture in which individuals were punished for greed, swiftly, and without remorse, to prevent the accumulation of superfluous wealth in the first place.
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Periodic reminder that
a) Revolutions do not have to be violent:
and
b) The status quo is already massively violent:
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I just popped up to remind everyone that there is no Nobel Prize for economics.
What Stiglitz says here stands on its merits, and doesn’t need to be over-egged with dodgy appeals to authority, especially when other recipients of the Bank of Sweden Nobel-Style PrizeTM include Thatcherite pinups Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman.
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About 5-10 years ago an astrophysicist put out a paper attempting to assign a dollar value to different planets, I don’t remember why, but in any case they turned their formula back on Earth and it returned $5 quadrillion. I’ve also seen other studies attempting to put dollar values on services provided to humans by nature.
I mention these because I think it would be really, really useful if economists could do the same for laws and policies and public institutions and norms. The GDP per capita equivalent of a hunter-gatherer in the ancestral environment was a few hundred dollars per year. That’s what human labor is worth. At some level everything else everyone on Earth earns is return on capital in the form of physical technology, control over and understanding of nature, political and social technology, and probably a bunch of other things I’m forgetting. I think if everyone knew that we might end up with a deeper collective understanding of how ridiculous plutocracy is.
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