For decades, the major political parties throughout the developed world have been cutting taxes, chipping away at social services and public investments, advocating privatization, deregulating finance, and generally satisfying a small number of economic ideologues and a very large number of delighted private corporations. They've allowed transnational capital to run roughshod over just about everyone and everything else cutting them every possible deal and extending them every possible advantage at the expense of ordinary taxpayers, labor unions, education, healthcare, social welfare, you name it. Transnational capital has rewarded them by moving anything that can be done more cheaply out of the developed world, and by doing contortions to avoid paying taxes back into the countries in which they hawk their goods and services.
The justification has often been that we can't afford our old ideas about society, that we all have to tighten our belts; meanwhile, trillions of dollars languish in offshore accounts. We've been told that the complete failure to regulate financial instrumentation or the housing market was somehow our fault, that government is wasteful and corrupt, that it can't do anything, that public services are always inefficient, that the welfare state is making us all poorer, that bureaucracy is always bad for business, that equitable federalism is impossible, that losses must be public, that gains must be private, that trade between nations is a zero-sum game, that only a few people can be wealthy, and only if they work hard.
Meanwhile, the bitter legacy of colonialism, coupled with a century and half of industrialization that has demanded repeated foreign misadventures and sustained environmental devastation, has turned the parts of the world that we depend on to fuel our batshit society into a cauldron of war, suffering, and extremism. Now those brown people who used to do our bidding for pennies are coming here, often because we have ruined their homeland (directly, through war; indirectly, through climate change), and they are the problem. We simply can't afford them. No, don't crunch the numbers. Don't check our figures. Don't ask about the offshore accounts. We're telling you: They are the problem. Getting rid of these dusky foreigners will bring back the industries we gutted, the services we dismantled, and the jobs we sold. Things will be just like the old days. Promise! But to do that, we have to try some more austerity, and we have to get rid of the bureaucrats. It's the only way.
