THE SHAPE OF US POPULISM, Part 1
A rich free-market legacy - for some
By Henry C K Liu
*****************************EXCERPT***************************
The financial crisis that broke out in August 2007 has stirred a revival of the latent populism that had been effectively suppressed by blanket anti-left hysteria during the Cold War. Despite residual psycho-political phobia, such indigenous populism has been simmering upward from deep-freeze depths after two decades of debt-driven financial and trade globalization in the post-Cold War era. Globalization of deregulated trade and finance has produced spectacular wealth for an elite minority at the expense of the wage-earning majority even in boom time all over the world.
Income and wealth disparities have been the legacy of free market capitalism, dictated by the call of neo-liberal supply-side economic theory for concentration of wealth to achieve indispensable capital formation. While internationally, the United
States has been the clear beneficiary of "free trade" which dilutes the authority of national sovereignty to institute defensive protectionism, stagnant wages in the face of high corporate profits from outsourcing jobs overseas have left US workers in manufacturing worse off than their parents.
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