OMG BRILLIANT! AS USUAL — RUSHKOFF, ON FIRE!
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This YouTube video is 5 Minutes of Pure Gold.
You, me, and everyone we know have a very real understanding that we’re being played. As the late great Leonard Cohen wrote, “Everyone knows the game is rigged.” And we’re all somewhere between worn down to extremely pissed off about it but few of us are engaging in serious discussions on how to jump off this train that is heading for the proverbial cliff while we argue about whether the conductor wears red or blue.
THE PROBLEM
What if everything we’ve been doing and are doing is part of a contrived economic system designed to perpetuate the wealth and control of economic royalists, aristocrats, i.e., the billionaires, at the expense of our lives, and sustainable life on our beautiful tiny planet? And what if it’s not to lift everyone to freedom from poverty, as neoliberal capitalists and jingoistic, slick-talking politicians say it is?
Neoliberalism, (small changes that promise benefits will trickle down to the working class eventually) is putting a bandaid on a gaping mortal wound, trying to ameliorate the harm caused by extractive socio-economic policies that protect monopolies and billionaires' power while giving the appearance of caring about the masses.
One Youtube commenter:
“The fact that corporations abuse the idea of universal basic income to keep their unsustainable practices is not actually a problem of the universal basic income, rather, it is a problem of the political structure being corrupted by the money of big companies and corporations that makes it impossible to regulate them and make them internalize the externalities.” Xenibiax
Yes precisely. The problem is that corporations own the legislators, i.e. Congress, who are the ones we need to make corporations pay a fair wage.
You, me, and even Congress know this reality: they are all funded and massively influenced by “campaign donations,” which is legalized…
