Clean Slate: New Ideas for Justice & Democracy

Episode 13: Everything Sucks Because No One Knows What They Are Doing

For 50 years, governments have been doing exactly what conservatives wantThe reason the economy and the world are so incredibly messed up, and that people are so angry, and divided and desperate, and that nothing seems to change no matter who gets elected is not because governments haven’t listened to neoclassical rules, it’s because they have.The idea that the problem with the economy is the government’s fault for spending too much ignores the fact that for 50 f*****g years, politicians havebeen doing exactly what businesses, and conservative voters have been asking them to do.Governments have cut taxes.Governments have cut spending.Governments have reduced investments in infrastructure.Governments have eliminated regulations and laws.Governments have privatized and sold off government owned businesses, services.Governments have enacted austerity and laid off government workers.Economic decisions have been handed off to the private sector at the request of the private sector.Most governments did abandon Keynesian economics. Instead of having elected governments run deficits to stimulate the economy, independent central banks were supposed to manage the economy with interest rates instead.The same people who clamour for freedom of expression and decry government overreach have called for, and succeeded, in having Keynesian economics outlawed.Laws punishing politicians who don’t balance budgets have been passed. Constitutional balanced budget amendments have been proposed. In the Maastricht Treaty that created EU, Keynesian economics are outlawed. How libertarian! What freedom!The promise - the explicit promise - of economic propagandists like Milton Friedman - was that this would result in greater freedom and prosperity for all. Instead, we have the worst inequality and greatest concentration of wealth in history.There are housing and cost-of-living crises around the world. The majority people are making the same as they were years or decades ago, and people are everywhere deep, deep in debt.We are not working and investing for growth or to build savings. We are working and investing to finance the continually growing debt that underpins the entire economy.Every single one of these measures has driven greater and greater concentrations of wealth and income, mergers and acquisitions and less competition, and have fuelled an affordability crisis in real estate around the world.Because if we treat the last 50 years as a big economic and political experiment where Milton Friedman and Robert Lucas and some other Chicago Boys all convinced us to try doing it their way, that is what has been happening for the last 50 years.That is why we’re where we all are, right now.Here are some of the linksSNL: Theodoric of York, Medieval Barberhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edIi6hYpUoQ Get full access to Dougald Lamont’s Substack at dougaldlamont.substack.com/subscribe

If Modern Monetary Theory is wrong, why is it so much better at predicting the economy - and economic disaster?

Proponents of Modern Monetary Theory have predicted many of the crises that neoclassical economists completely whiffed on, because they actually measure and include data in their model that orthodox economics does not.What is even more egregious, however, are the superficial criticisms of MMT deployed to criticize it, which amount to not understanding it, because they can’t see how it fits in with their own view. That, however, is the point. It doesn’t “fit in” with their view, it replaces it with a different one.Links:Original article: https://open.substack.com/pub/dougaldlamont/p/if-mmt-is-wrong-why-is-it-so-much?r=9gk0j&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=falsehttps://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/07/28/imf-admits-disastrous-love-affair-with-euro-apologises-for-the-i/https://paulromer.net/the-trouble-with-macro/WP-Trouble.pdfhttp://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/31/business/bailout-money-goes-to-greece-only-to-flow-out-again.htmlhttps://www.3dpolicy.ca/node/459https://www.gmo.com/north-america/research-library/why-does-everyone-hate-mmt/ Get full access to Dougald Lamont’s Substack at dougaldlamont.substack.com/subscribe

Far-right extremism is rising because Canada, the U.S., UK & Europe are making the same mistakes as Social Democrats in Germany after 1929

There is plenty of hand-wringing, and not much else, about the rise of far-right extremism in “the West”. Of course, there have always been such elements, but there is genuine and bitter hatred as societies splinter into tribal factions, some of them blatantantly lawless violent criminals. Authorities like police are often unable to cope with these disturbances, because from a practical point of view, they are not equipped to. Governments and police forces in Canada are not prepared for massive surges in protestors who are also breaking the law.While the factions blame each other, or government, the real problem is that the private economy is falling apart, after a series of massive shocks over many years, where the repairs to the economy kept setting us up for bigger crises down the road.Dougald Lamont’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber today! Get full access to Dougald Lamont’s Substack at dougaldlamont.substack.com/subscribe

VIDEO: The Truth of Residential Schools is Still Being Denied

I’ve done a video about Residential Schools and Residential School denialism, because it's becoming a bigger issue.Angus Reid, who's a pollster, ended up leaving Twitter, talking about churches being burned and about claims around Residential schools.And it's really important because the sad - the really tragic part about this is that we're not actually fighting about history. The history is actually not in question.In, 1907 Dr. Peter Bryce, Canada’s First Chief Medical Officer issued a report detailed the fact that First Nations students at Residential schools were dying in appalling numbers of Tuberculosis, when the deaths could be prevented. He wrote:“I believe the conditions are being deliberately created in our residential schools to spread infectious diseases […] The mortality rate in the schools often exceeds fifty percent. This is a national crime.”There's still more to be discovered, but when you actually look at the records, at people's letters, the stuff that was compiled in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, there's no question, that Residential schools were not well-intended, that they were horribly run, that thousands of children died. And it was because of neglect.Uou have people who you might call the usual suspects on the right have been playing down and minimizing the harms of Residential schools.And these articles are being pushed out by Right-wing think-tanks.The Fraser Institute has published them, media outlets like True North.And they're not backed up by facts.It's really, really distressing because the reality is we are nowhere close to accepting the history of how First Nations and Indigenouspeople were treated in the past, or how they continue to be treated right now in Canada.Indigenous children being taken by child and family services in Canada is every bit the catastrophe that Residential schools were.It's being completely ignored, as if it never happened.And as if it is not happening when thousands and thousands of First Nations and Indigenous children have been seized over decades, taken from their families, and it's still happening now.And it is almost impossible to express the damage that's happened. Just this year, there was a family and children in CFS who died, who were murdered.There have been hundreds of deaths in the last 20 years in Manitoba.Missing and murdered women and girls and two-spirit are overwhelmingly people who were in CFS systems.Manitoba has twice the national incarceration rate, and many of them were in CFS. The vast majority of our prison population in Manitoba is Indigenous.And there is a basically a pipeline CFS to prison because of the way the entire system has been structured and never properly reformed since the 1950s.The Manitoba government doubled the number of children they were taking from First Nations families, from 5500, in about 2005 to 11,000 just a few years later.And then they also took the federal funding that was intended for those children.The apology for that just happened this week.And no one, no person has ever been named as being responsible for any of it, for any of it.And this is ongoing.So part of the problem with Residential school denialism is that people are denying what really happened in the past and fighting over that, while also completely ignoring everything that's happening right now.Images: Thompson Ferrier* 30Thanks for reading Dougald Lamont’s Substack! This post is public so feel free to share it.Dougald Lamont’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Dougald Lamont’s Substack at dougaldlamont.substack.com/subscribe

It’s the Private Economy that’s Broken, not the Federal Government

Read the original post here: https://dougaldlamont.substack.com/publish/post/143346997 Canada has a housing crisis - a private market crises. Builders, lenders, investors. We have a debt crisis attached to the housing crisis. But it’s all private sector. So why is the Federal Government being asked to intervene? Because the private market is broken. Canada also has a productivity problem - a private sector problem, often solved by investing in new capital machinery that makes employees more productive, with higher wages and greater output. That hasn’t happened, because private banks loaned trillions for real estate instead. Canada is not the communist or socialist place people claim and believe it to be. It is profoundly economically conservative. Quite frankly, you must be on the extreme right-wing to think that Canada is that far left when it comes to economic beliefs. Most governments in Canada right now have much lower taxes than in the 1950s under Progressive Conservative Prime Minister John Diefenbaker. And there are plenty of extreme-right libertarians in Canada, and there are prominent think tanks that try to normalize their radical views, which are, quite frankly, a combination of dystopian power fantasy and long confidence scheme, and increasingly delusional theories that are divorced from reality.     Get full access to Dougald Lamont’s Substack at dougaldlamont.substack.com/subscribe