Our Generation Is The Most Fucked In History
Baby boomers — the generation which was born in the immediate aftermath of the second world war, are without question, the most fortunate in the history of mankind.
They were the recipients of free healthcare, low university tuition, excellent living standards and every other important metric of life.
But the interesting paradox of the boomers is that they have stripped every right from the working class in order to enrich the 1 percent.
Neoliberalism, which was about the privatization of government resources, deregulation of the financial markets, easy access to cheap labour and raw materials, found great expression among the likes of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, who created companies, which took the fullest advantage.
For my generation, we were told that we could become the next Gates and Jobs, if we left everything to the power of the markets.
First was the Russian default and the subsequent destruction of Long Term Capital Management, which was exposed to Russia’s bad debt.
And not too long afterwards, there was the Asian tiger economic collapse, when Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam, went bust, nailing their colours to the mast of neoliberalism.
Back then, Greenspan convinced us that what was needed was more deregulation, not less.
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