Public frustration with the system - US

Now that Abbott has revealed himself to all to be the capitalist pariah he is, trying at every turn to change Australia into his Nirvanic capitalist dream of a world without fairness and only the strong survive, it was with much interest reading this one paragraph at the head of a long report on the US Chamber of Commerce (that capitalist shining god itself). It's all starting to sound very familiar.

It's now clear this is the sort of bullshit that Abbott wants for Australia. Entrenched inequality, the creation of poverty in the face of extreme wealth, and a political system that doesn't respond.

Not for us Tone.

Any glance at the inert state of political progress in our market-addled age has to leave even the most dogged investigator a bit bewildered. We live, after all, in an era of economic and ideological drift—of street occupations and ballot-box insurgencies. Yet our institutions of national government remain in shameful fealty to a laissez-faire fantasy. With metronomic predictability, the wise men of Washington preach austerity amid a raging jobs recession and wish away the bulwarks of economic security that make life in these United States (barely) tolerable for fixed-income retirees and poor people who have had the unpardonable bad taste to fall ill. As major manufacturing metropolises go bankrupt, as wages continue to go south while productivity climbs, as mortgages and pension plans are pillaged by the bailed-out banking class, we are trapped in a political consensus that urges government continually to shrink and depicts tax increases on the rich as an unholy abomination against the market’s righteous will. Why, for God’s sake? more