http://www.thecanary.co/2016/06/24/brexit-usher-third-world-britain/
EXCERPT:
Aim your disillusionment at the cause, not the symptom
This model is accelerating global and national inequalities. For the last 8 years, the model has failed dismally to restore global growth, which is plateauing.
The model, which for a while marginally ‘lifted all boats’, stopped doing so in the very golden age of globalisation (1980s onwards), and has increasingly led to the regression of social progress on key indicators: not just in the poorer, less developed countries, but across richer, developed nations, too.
Sleight-of-hand data calculations have allowed policymakers to pretend that the model has halved global poverty since the 1990s. But this is a lie based on measuring poverty at a mere $1.25 a day. When measured more accurately, at between $5 and $10 a day, the last few decades of wonderful global economic progress have seen the number of poor people increase dramatically. Since 1990, the number of people living under $10 a day has increased by a quarter. Today, 4.3 billion people – nearly two-thirds of the global population – live on less than $5 a day.
While this model is horrific for the global working class, it works for the one percenters. That’s because the rules of the global economic system are structured to facilitate the interests that dominate it, transnational banks and corporations, which in turn hold excessive lobbying power over both the EU and national governments.
And those rules function to extract wealth and resources from the planet, from people, from workers, and hoard them in an ever decreasing circle of elite power.
And as corporate-backed governments have resorted to bailing out their friends, the public purse has suffered on the back of gruelling austerity. That’s why the NHS, schools, and other critical public services are haemorrhaging. And that’s why the ‘haemorrhage effect’ is not unique to Britain: the crisis is not British – it’s global.
The same global system is rapidly eroding its own environmental resource base, over-exploiting energy and raw materials leading to rising costs and diminishing returns fuelling climate change to the danger point of no-return, and using excessive debt-money to keep itself chugging along while turning more and more citizens into debt-slaves.
Feeling powerless?
You’re missing the mark if you want to pinpoint all the blame on any one political party, on one government, on one institution, or on just the EU. It’s all of them, together, collectively, systemically: it’s a system that is crumbling under the weight of its own chronic unsustainability.
Simply remaining in the EU without an agenda for radical systemic transformation would never have addressed this. Equally, simply leaving the EU without grasping that lacking radical systemic transformation, this will create space for more deregulated financial forces in the City to play havoc, does not address this.
You’ll notice that none of this ever really made it into the Brexit debate. That’s the level of ostrich-like insanity we’re inhabiting as we frantically rearrange the deck-chairs on the Titanic, while pointing fingers at everything other than ourselves and the hole in the boat.
The next recession was coming with or without Brexit. Brexit just brought it on faster – it also brought on the short-termist knee-jerk ‘solutions’ faster.
Neither side of this political charade is going to address the real issues, the real causes, the fundamental need for radical systemic transformation to get out of the mess we’re in.
That’s why now is the time for a renewed form of solidarity between citizens, wherever we stand within the defunct Leave/Remain paradigm, to begin exploring grassroots action to re-build our communities from the ground-up.
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