We Must Begin Anew

We are in a difficult predicament. For most of the people I know, life is a struggle, accompanied by gnawing, grinding stress. It's the result of an economic system that has become terribly brutal in my lifetime, and continues to get worse. The present dominant paradigm would have us believe there is something called the Free Market, through which we can obtain all our needs and wants. The new conservatives assert it's the Government that's messing things up, and needs to step aside and then all will be utopia. I've heard them and read their stuff. I'm not buying what they're selling.

We've been doing this type of economics for going on forty years. Ever since Reagan we've been deregulating and cutting taxes, with the promise being a vibrant economic activity benefiting all. It has not worked out that way no matter how many iterations we have to go through. It has not been good for hard working people. Since the election of Ronald Reagan, and the ascendance of the modern conservative movement, average working people's income has lost a couple of thousand dollars adjusted for inflation. Working people are still in the throes of the Crash of '08, the Great Recession, the ultimate consequence of conservative economic policy, with unemployment officially just shy of seven percent. You and I know it's at lest twice that. Even low-paying jobs are hard to come by, let alone anything that has a decent wage and future.

At the same time, American worker productivity has gone through the roof over the last forty years. Up until 1980, worker income rose parallel to productivity. Yet while worker productivity continued to sky rocket, they did not reap the benefits of their increased productivity. Where did these profits go? To the executives and shareholders, especially when the shareholders became capital funds, hedge funds, and investment banks. How did they get the profits? Aren't they the ones deciding how the booty gets split up? Yep.

The opposition to this rapaciousness were the unions, the only thing the working man ever had going for him to bargain with his employer, and was the only method workers ever had of getting a better shake. These were decimated in the War on Unions, which began when Reagan declared war on PATCO and fired the air traffic controllers. It is still being waged today against teachers and other government workers, not to mention Republican political interference in the UAW vote at the VW plant in Chattanooga.

This is what is happening on a national scale. The power at that level is tremendous. That's why I think the solution lies in building a new structure from the bottom up. Their are a myriad of ideas out their of people and communities attempting to take back their independence in the economic realm. It has to begin at the local level (city and county) and up from there. That's why I say, we must begin anew.