THE RULE OF THE MARKET/MARKETPLACE FUNDAMENTALISM: Sacred belief in the market as the best provider of human needs. “Big government” and trade unions are vilified as corrupt and self-serving to justify cutting corporate regulation regardless of social damage. It’s also called “trickle-down” economics; but due to outsourcing, contingent labor, and tech-based productivity hikes, all that trickles down are greater levels of income inequality .
DEREGULATION. Reduce government regulation of everything that diminishes profits for the corporate elite including environment protection, job safety, and marketing to children. Attack unions to reduce wages by eliminating workers’ rights to organize.
PRIVATIZATION. Sell state-owned enterprises, goods and services to private investors. Privatization concentrates wealth in a few hands while making the public pay more for its needs; the shift in financial aid from grants to loans exemplifies privatization as banks profit off massive student debt. Massive bailouts for Wall Street banks while Main Street homeowners go into foreclosure.
ELIMINATING THE CONCEPT OF “THE PUBLIC GOOD” and replacing it with “individual responsibility.” Cut public expenditures for social services like public education. While safety nets for the economically-marginalized are slashed, corporations are granted subsidies and tax benefits. Those on the lower end of the economic spectrum suffer the failure of the marketplace to provide for their basic human needs: lack of health care, affordable housing, quality education, transportation. To justify this lack of societal empathy, they are branded as “lazy” and “welfare cheats,” and blamed for systemic inequities.
THE RULE OF THE MARKET/MARKETPLACE FUNDAMENTALISM: Sacred belief in the market as the best provider of human needs. “Big government” and trade unions are vilified as corrupt and self-serving to justify cutting corporate regulation regardless of social damage. It’s also called “trickle-down” economics; but due to outsourcing, contingent labor, and tech-based productivity hikes, all that trickles down are greater levels of income inequality .