But then so do all the other corporate media lapdogs of the rich--the New York Slimes, the Wall Urinal, Slime magazine, the Associated Pukes, Rotters, the lot of them. None of them has a clue what really makes an economy successful, and they are doubly clueless about Latin America. This is WHY I call them by demeaning names--their dis-reporting on Latin America--that's how they earned those names (that and the Iraq War).
I shouldn't say clueless. They are not really clueless. They know exactly what they're doing--LYING! Because they can't tolerate fairness, equity, distributed wealth, good wages and benefits, humane programs of health care, progressive educational programs, inclusiveness, attention to "the commons" and real democracy, and the success that such policies always create for everyone, for the whole society.
They can't stand it. They lie about it.
I'm afraid that the northern countries are in the end-stage of predatory capitalism--the Great Looting. Socialist policies (as per the above) create wealth and opportunity--such as the "New Deal" created here and in post-war Europe--and then the Looters gather like sharks for a feeding frenzy and gobble up all the wealth that the poor and the middle class have created, including even the public programs and infrastructure upon which wealth-creation depends.
The Economyst and all the others are simply shoveling the propaganda crapola of the Looting Class.
One hopeful thought: The thing about "Big Lies" is that they die their own horrible deaths. People get sick of them, and no matter how often, how loudly or how brutally they are hammered into peoples' heads, the human brain is essentially free and ultimately repels "Big Lies," sometimes cataclysmically (not always) but inevitably. People hate lies, and the bigger the lies, the harder do the liars fall. Our Corporate Rulers never learned the lesson of Stalinism or the lesson of the Medieval Church. Instead they are repeating those methods of control and they WILL fail--because you can't really control the human mind. You can subdue it for a time, even for a long time, with relentless brainwashing; you can make it fearful and self-censoring--but you cannot conquer the natural curiosity and experimentation of the human brain or of aggregate human brains in a society.
"Riches for the rich and austerity for the poor" WILL fail. It is completely unviable. It is being "sold" as the necessity for a successful economy and it is a complete lie. The reverse is true. Successful economies only occur when the wealth at the top is curtailed and the wealth at the bottom is improved. When you have the rich stuffing their pockets, you have increasing poverty to the point of social and economic collapse. And we have worse yet--we have devious, highly organized transglobal corporations holding all the wealth and wielding all the power as virtual 'countries' unto themselves, with national governments shunted aside, as mere errand-boys for transglobal interests. This is a VERY difficult problem for democracy to solve.
And I think this is one of the marvels of the leftist democracy movement in Latin America--they ARE solving it. I won't go into how they are doing so--it is a complex story--but I will say that their success at doing so is WHY The Economyst and its brethren are such LIARS about Latin America. They don't want us to know that there are solutions to this problem!
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