#resistneoliberalism

[resistneoliberalism]

NEOLIBERAL LIE # 24

They say that public health care would be too expensive, too inefficient, too burdensome on our national budget. Apart from the fact that they’re assholes, they’re wrong.

Total health care expenditure per capita, public and private, 2010 (or nearest year)

[resistneoliberalism]

NEOLIBERAL LIE #7: Private Contractors Are Cheaper. (Percentage U.S. Government Overpays When Using Private Contractors Instead of Federal Employees)

[resistneoliberalism]

Shouting into the Abyss in the Second Gilded Age

Banks plead guilty. U.S. government fines banks $2.5 billion. Banks borrow money from the U.S. government (Federal Reserve) at 0.75% to pay fines.

U.S. government allows banks to continue to operate as is.

Banks continue to borrow money from the U.S. government (Federal Reserve) at 0.75%. Banks lend money to consumers at much higher rates, from 3.5% (mortgages) to 25% (credit cards).

Freedom and Justice for all!*

*No, not really for all, but for the select few who have been able to rig the system in their favor. We may want to stop worrying so much about Republicans and Democrats, about guns and marriage equality, about Christians and Muslims, because, as you may have noticed, it doesn't really matter what we think about these issues; we have no control; we have no voice. Really, when you look at it like this, we're only one people, one downtrodden, disenfranchised, politically oppressed people.

But that's not the problem: it's that we don't seem to know that we're voiceless, and, in many cases, we don't seem to care. Some of us have made a bargain with the powerful: "Give me access to credit so I can buy an iPhone, a TV, a car, clothes, tickets to Jamaica, and in return I'll give you political apathy, free reign to create a system that benefits you 354 times more than it does me [CEO to worker pay ratio], a system that steals from me and gives to you."

As for the rest of us- we just shout into an abyss, our messages lost in translation as the media, the mouthpiece for powerful, convert our human cries for help into partisan platitudes for propaganda: divide and conquer; distract and erode.

So, what can we do about it? First of all, reject the bargain. Form no more lines at the Apple Store for iPhone releases, at Best Buy for Black Friday. Demand that more productivity equal more pay; that more work equal overtime pay; that if corporations are people with rights, then unions are, too. The only way we escaped the First Gilded Age alive was through protests, strikes, massive riots; and if they don’t hear us shouting now, then in this Second Gilded Age, let unrest speak for us once again.

http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/five-major-banks-agree-parent-level-guilty-pleas

[resistneoliberalism]

GDP Per Capita Growth Rate and the Top Marginal Tax Rates, 1945-2010