[Steve_American]

I just read a rather sobering opinion piece on CNN, which I will both link to, and copy and paste here. The thrust of the piece was that the political winds are blowing across the globe, and the old order is falling away, with a new, right-leaning one taking its place. This reminded me of the rise of the Fascist governments of the 1930's, led by USSR, then Japan, then Italy, then Germany, and finally Spain. We all recall how that situation was resolved. It's easy to try to draw parallels between what happened in the 1930's and what we see happening today in places like the USA, Brazil, and the EU. However, it's almost certainly too easy to make these comparisons, and there have to be a number of things that differ from these two eras.

My major disagreement with the article is that I'm an MMTer so I blame the lack of wage increases not on immigrants, but rather on the rise of Neo-liberal economics that convinced the leaders of even the Democratic Party that it should abandon the plight of American workers in favor of the 9% of the population who make less than the top 1%. With no party that holds onto the worker's vote by helping them economically, they are free to base their vote on their 2nd most important issue. The Repuds have pealed away just enough workers with a variety of 2nd most important issues to crush the Democratic Party at all levels of our Gov. (Fed., state, etc).
. . The Dems made their choice because they thought it would lead to them winning at all levels. It has clearly led to them losing at all levels. You would think, that being politicians who want to win, that they would make the necessary changes; but they still are making excuses for why they loose and are not seeing the forest for the trees (even when they stand 10 ft away and/or when they stand on a hill a mile away).
I'm curious what you think...

https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/02/opinions ... n-opinio...

This week, icy blasts of change swept two continents.

They were not heralding seasonal variations in weather but could be harbingers of what might become an enduring -- and chilling -- political climate.

As unseasonably early winter storms dumped heavy rain and snow across Europe, Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, effectively stepped down as the leader of her party and irreparably weakened her ability to keep Europe on an even keel.

That very same day, Brazil elected a far-right leader who is even Trumpier than US President Donald Trump.
Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil's President-elect, is misogynist in the extreme, reportedly telling one female lawmaker to her face she was "too ugly to rape." He believes Brazil's military regime, which ran the country in the 1970s and 1980s, didn't kill enough of its opponents and wants guns in the hands of citizens. "Weapons defend our freedoms" was a campaign cry.

His arrival and Merkel's slow shuffle to political oblivion are not happening in isolation: The world is changing, and this week ruled out a reverse. Merkel is the old right wing: a political chameleon when she needed to be yet commanding enough to make tough moral choices. Thanks to her, Germany opened its doors to more than a million refugees in 2015. They were mostly fleeing the bloodbath civil war in Syria; other European countries shunned them. But as much as she was applauded by liberals for an apparently Damascene conversion from her traditionally cautious Christian Democratic roots, she sowed the seeds of her own political demise. Ever since, she has been buffeted by the rise of far-right politics whipped up in the wake of her open-door policy. Her opponents trade on fears of terrorism, violence and a clash of cultures.

It's not just Germany where right-wing nationalism is profiting at the cost of the more traditional parties; it's all over Europe.
Brexit is as much part of its complexion as is Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban's shutdown of the EU's migrant-sharing policies.
The post-war institution is under pressure from euroskeptics of all stripes. Be it from Brexiteers, Italy's new government, Hungary's or Poland's right-wingers, change is coming. They are all trading on fears and harnessing the anger their rhetoric generates.

But that's nothing new in politics, so why is it successful now?
Logic says because there is an appetite for change. Anthony Scaramucci, former White House communications director, calls Trump an "authentic voice," not to be confused with liar. Millions in America are hungry for authenticity, according to the President's most transitory of hires. Whatever the attraction of Trump's fresh approach, it is still working for him. His base is loyal, and none of that is lost on wannabe leaders around the world.

Like Trump, Bolsonaro has a female following, despite his verbal debasement of woman. Those who like Bolsonaro do so because he addresses deeper fears: not of molestation by him but the everyday fear of rape or robbery. He says he has an answer, and they buy it. It doesn't matter that his answer is untested by them or that previous generations have found similar rhetoric empty or plain dangerous and decisive. In their world, his answers are the right ones.

In Europe, as in Trump's America, voters' fear stems from their lack of faith in the economy working for them -- fears based on migrants and their questionable cultures flooding in, stealing jobs. How that resonates when the economy -- particularly in America -- is doing so well, according to Trump, and with unemployment rates at a generational low is another question. What it indicates is that the margin between getting by and falling by the wayside is getting narrower. The American dream is perishable, no longer as plausible to the masses as it once was to their parents' generation.

Whether you are Bolsonaro convincing the middle class you need protecting form the poor, or Trump and Orban, convincing voters they need protecting from migrants, the message is much easier to sell if the cost of making the wrong choice at the polling booth could cost your life or your livelihood.

We are watching the world order being ripped up over fears of a return to a world order that our current post-war world order was designed to forestall. It sounds complicated, but it is not.

There is not enough of everything to go around. There are not enough people making decent livings in a global economy. So, we are reverting to protectionist nationalism to insulate ourselves from the deficit.
We are running from the problem, not solving it. But it's what we have always done when fear takes hold.

The world order we are seeing now is one fixing for a fight. We are not quite sure what that fight will be, or where it will begin, but we are shaping the arguments for it and preparing our defenses.
As with many arguments, it has a momentum of its own. We are watching, aware of what's happening, but without seeing a way to hold it back.
That's what makes Merkel's slow political demise all the more troubling. In a turbulent Europe, she provided a bulwark of no-nonsense common sense, a steadying logic in an increasingly illogical situation.

The season of her political generation is waning, and there is a chill in the air.

[pugsville]

The Great Depression was fairly massive event and there was much less of a safety net though now. The Current economic situation is much different, there is a disenchantment with economic system but it's more about long term slides than brutal short term dump.

[Ter]

As with many arguments, it has a momentum of its own. We are watching, aware of what's happening, but without seeing a way to hold it back.
That's what makes Merkel's slow political demise all the more troubling. In a turbulent Europe, she provided a bulwark of no-nonsense common sense, a steadying logic in an increasingly illogical situation.

Merkel has single-handedly destroyed the European Union and caused the electoral success of the extreme right by letting millions of Muslim migrants in. She caused her own downfall.

[One Degree]

The reality today is the western military alliance can not be confronted. The only way to defeat it is infiltration. Why is it we are seeing identical migration scenarios in Europe and the US with different people? This is a deliberate overthrow by demographic change. The only weapon left against the West and it is being deliberately used. These are not coincidence.

[Steve_American]

I think that it is not unlikely that Neo-liberal economics has been adopted is as a result of a conspiracy by the elites/rich to get the world's economy back onto a pseudo-gold standard.
1] All fiat currencies allow the Gov. that issues it to create money and spend it into existence to help the poor and working class.
2] Neo-liberaal economics denies this with the fear of hyperinflation.
3] The EU was created with Neo-liberal economics baked into its founding documents. The member states can't create money, they are like a state in the US. The ECB is supposed to fight inflation and not care about unemployment, according to the founding docs.
4] The Repubs in America want to pass a Balanced Budget Amendment. This would strangle the American people because the trade deficit sucks dollars out of America and only deficit spending can replace them. Without a deficit every year there would be less dollars in the US than the year before [as long as the trace deficit continues]. These dollars are not going to come out of the pockets of the rich. No, they are going to come out of the pockets of the workers and poor. You can be sure of that.
5] The gold standard or a pseudo-gold standard works well for the rich and poorly for the workers. If the Gov. can help the workers only with dollars that it taxes away from them then it can't really help them. The Gov. would need to take dollars away from the rich to help the workers and the rich know how to keep the Gov. from doing that. Therefore, the workers don't get the help they need.
6] The rich want there to be a fixed amount of money [dollars or euros] because they already have a lot so the workers must get extra money form them. If the workers can get additional money directly from the Gov. this gives the rich a lot less power. So, they need to return the world to a pseudo-gold standard.
7] I have seen reports over the years of instances where the rich acted to for example create an economics dept. in a university with the stipulation that it teach Austrian economics. I have seen reports of economists who strayed were punished (harshly) for not keeping to the Party Line. Etc. This is (at least) evidence of a conspiracy.

Today Neo-liberal economics is baked into the EU/euro and is believed by both the Repuds and the Dems. It is taught at over 95% of the world's university economics depts. Most of the readers here believe it. Never mind that MMT describes how the economy works many times better. Never mind that zero mainstream economists saw the GFC/2008 coming and right up until the crash were saying how perfectly well the economy was going, but that several MMTers did publish that a crash was coming. [Yes, the mainstream did predict a problem with inflation someday, but the GFC/2008 had nothing what-so-ever to do with inflation.]

I think it will take you [the people of America, Europe and the rest of the West] to learn about MMT, see its truth, and vote to see it adopted by your Governments. In Europe this will be more difficult, so you may have to wait until you leave the EU or until most other nations have tried it and proven that it works far better. The UK is out of the EU so it can adopt MMT all on its own.

It is up to you, the people, to save yourselves.
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