What is killing our middle class is the replacement of a more SHARING economic system, which considers all STAKEholders in the economic system, with a free market fundamentalism, or neoliberal economic policies based on maximizing GREED for the few!
Greedy neoliberal economic policies that:
- Above all replaces rewarding the hard work of productive workers with rewarding only those at the top of the corporate pyramid
- Lets our public infrastructure and public services decay while providing excessive cuts in citizenship dues (taxes) for the extremely wealthy,
- Privatizes our public services, like public education and prisons, which transfers accountability from our elected representatives to major corporate share holders who prioritize profit above service and are only accountable to major stockholders,
- Grants human rights to non-human entities called corporations which are no longer required to support the public good,
- Provides greater freedom of speech to those with greater wealth,
- Gives huge sums of money to corporations to-big-to-fail, in the form of bailouts and corporate welfare, while forcing austerity and excessive debt on citizens,
- Replaces tariffs, that protected jobs, with free trade agreements that move jobs overseas and labor costs to the lowest common denominator in a world market,
- – Replaces professionally managed and corporate funded pension plans with personally managed and self-funded 401Ks,
- Replaces company paid benefits, like sick-leave and vacation, with fewer benefits,
- Lets corporations consolidate into larger and larger financial entities while ignoring our anti-trust laws,
- Provides greater protection to corporations while at the same time eliminating citizen’s abilities to individually, or as a group, to take legal action against corporate abuse,
- implemented the pro-corporate Powell Memo of 1971 by the world’s richest families like the Kochs,
- Believes in self-made individuals and can’t fathom the external effects of systemic causation on their success
Andy Hailey