Plutocrats
Posted: Wed Oct 17, 2012 8:09 am
http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript ... =162799512" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
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There is a chance that the Plutocrat Romney could win. He is a man without a moral center.Ben wrote:Thanks Tilt.
That article looks interesting.
Actually, I was just listening to someone on the radio giving an analysis of the second Obama v Romney debate.
Thanks, Tilt. I don't think I need to read the book because it's theme is one we have noticed (to put it mildly) in Australia in the last few years: the rich are getting *much* richer and are losing any sense of connection or community with the 99%. The most outrageous recent example is one Gina Rinehart - see http://www.smh.com.au/business/worlds-m ... 25fpq.html - but there are several others in (especially) mining and the media.tiltbillings wrote:http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript ... =162799512
Review wrote: The Selfish Capitalist: origins of Affluenza
Oliver James
Vermilion, 2008
In this sequel to his Affluenza (2007), Oliver James argues that capitalism as practised recently in the richer English-speaking countries – that’s us – is making us miserable. ‘Affluenza’, a term coined in the late 1970s, is the pattern of chronic over-work, debt, anxiety and waste generated by our obsession with goods and income, and James traces its cause to economic policies.
He defines Selfish Capitalism as the neo-liberal Thatcherism adopted in the 1990s and finds that, depite the ‘trickle-down’ rhetoric, those policies made the rich very much richer while leaving the rest of us no better off financially and significantly worse off in other ways. Labour market deregulation undermined job security and held down real wages, the media joined business in successfully promoting perceptions of relative poverty even as real levels of consumption reached new highs, and debt increased enormously (in Australia, mortgages rose from 2.8 to 4.2 times average annual income between 1994 and 2004 while other personal debt tripled).
James is a clinical psychologist and he focuses on levels of ‘distress’ - basically unhappiness and mental illness. Others have presented similar arguments blaming unrestrained capitalism for social inequality, family breakdown, declining moral standards, teenage crime and many related problems. They may all be right. Convincingly untangling the causes and effects might be impossible – there are just too many factors to consider – but Oliver James does a good job, supporting clear arguments with good evidence.