As #Argentina and the #Netherlands elect leaders set on trashing the place, #Trump & his ilk plan more of the same for the US while Canada is headed towards a #PierrePoison government. In these lectures #AstraTaylor describes how #insecurity is driving us. "From rising inequality and declining mental health to climate change disasters and the threat of authoritarianism, insecurity has become a defining feature of our time"
There are those moments when I feel like my whole life is one big race against time to prove to as many people as possible that I am worthy of being loved.
This is not my only state of mind though. Most of the time I predominantly feel fulfilled and think positive about myself. #selflove#insecurity
#Capitalism#Neoliberalism#Insecurity#Precarity: "I’m always trying to expand the coalition. We are—and by this I mean the big “we”—are up against incredibly powerful entrenched forces that are causing enormous harm in this world. To have any hope of mobilizing against the institutions that are invested in profiting from the destruction of our planet, we’re going to have to build a formidable mass movement. So we need everybody. One thing I like about the concept of insecurity is that it gives us a basis for finding commonalities. Where inequality encourages us to look at extremes—to think about the billionaires versus the billions of people who have very little—insecurity encourages us to look sideways and see what we might have in common with people, even if those people have a bit more than us, or even a lot more than us. Inequality is important; it’s absolutely important to think in those terms. But when you realize, wow, even the person who has managed to get out of debt and muster up a down payment for a house, even they can’t rest, given the way that the economy is structured—that can be the basis of solidarity."
While still purporting to be ridding Ukraine of #Nazis, Putin is zeroing in on a flesh-&-blood culprit: The Russians & the Ukrainians are killing one another because of a Jewish schemer.
#Insecurity#Precarity#Capitalism#Neoliberalism#Debt: " Yeah, this is kind of a kaleidoscopic book that mixes politics and economics and history, and a bit of memoir that’s hopefully kind of humorous, to look at the way insecurity is really essential to our economy. One of your previous guests, Jayati Ghosh, she’s brilliant and did a great job of laying out the way inequality is spiraling today. And a lot of my work has focused on the problem of inequality and the obscene concentration of wealth and poverty.
But insecurity is how living in a radically unequal world is actually felt day after day. And, you know, if organizing with the Debt Collective has taught me anything, it’s that economic issues are always also emotional ones — you know, the spike of shame when the bill collector calls or our foreboding about saving for retirement, you know, and of course also our anxieties about our collapsing planet and climate change.
So, I think insecurity is pervasive. But what I’m trying to show in the book is it’s actually built into our economy. It’s not just something that we feel spontaneously. We’re all insecure by design, or something I call manufactured insecurity. We see this with advertising. You know, no advertisement will ever tell you that you’re great and the world needs changing. And we see this in official monetary policy, that tries to ramp up worker insecurity, job insecurity, so that workers will be more docile and won’t go on strike.
And I think that looking at insecurity, recognizing just how widespread it is can help us actually have empathy for each other and build powerful coalitions. I hope we can turn that insecurity into solidarity, so that we can fight for the just and sustainable and collective forms of security that we really need."
How any of Sanders’ edicts actually help her constituents is unknown. #Arkansas is the fourth #poorest state in the nation, with a mounting affordable #housingCrisis and massive #food#insecurity. A recent Scholaroo survey found the state ranks 49th in the nation for quality of life and 50th in the nation for quality of health.
Rather than fix those problems, Sanders wants to hide her movements from public view.
#Shelter's research suggests that over half of #workers in rental properties are only one payday away from falling into arrears & risking eviction....
The #insecurity of the poor is not some bug in the system, its a feature of the UK exploitative, rentier #capitalism that is structured around an insecure workforce in a weak bargaining position, so allowing the maintenance of #profits
see also: the BoE's [#interestrates policy (earlier post)]
Asshole Alan Greenspan said worker insecurity was good for the economy, today he must be ecstatic now that so many people are insecure. The more the merrier. Greenspan and Republicans have a demented fetish for insecurity of the real people as they work for the Oligarchs and Corps. How quaint.
"Because state policies and access to mental health and medical care play a major role in preventing child deaths, Woolf said, the likelihood that a child will reach adulthood varies widely depending on where they live.
Montana had the highest child death rate in 2021 at 28 per 100,000 children, followed by Mississippi, Louisiana, Wyoming, Alabama, Missouri, New Mexico, South Carolina, Oklahoma and Georgia."
Gun deaths drive historic spike in child mortality rates
"Much of the reluctance to do what #ClimateChange requires comes from the assumption that it means trading abundance for #austerity, and trading all our stuff and conveniences for less stuff, less convenience. But what if it meant giving up things we’re well rid of, from deadly #emissions to nagging feelings of doom and complicity in destruction?
What if the austerity is how we live now — and the #abundance could be what is to come?"
"The absence of fuel in South African power stations, hospitals in Gaza or for heating Canadian homes in winter also makes people in these places insecure.
It’s time to break up with fuel — and global energy supply chains more fundamentally — and aim to live more safely with renewable electricity produced closer to home."