What Nouriel Roubini says

Atrios saved himself a lot of neural wear and tear for a while by putting up What Digby Sez posts. I'm going to be a little more effortful here, but Roubini lays out the cold truth very clearly. Since we've been talking about Karl Marx lately, this is particularly apropos because he thinks about the applicability of Marx's critique of capitalism to the present situation. (And no, he isn't any kind of an "ist." Neither am I. I read people who provide good information or have interesting thoughts about it, and I make up my own mind.)

Here's how he starts:

The mass protests following the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer are about systemic racism and police brutality in the United States, but also so much more. Those who have taken to the streets in more than 100 American cities are channeling a broader critique of President Donald Trump and what he represents. A vast underclass of increasingly indebted, socially immobile Americans – African-Americans, Latinos, and, increasingly, whites – is revolting against a system that has failed it.

 Yes indeed. I asked "why now" with regard to this uprising and I think Rubini has the answer. Even as the plutocracy has gotten ever more obscenely wealthy and powerful, people have found their own lives stagnating and even deteriorating. More and more don't even have secure jobs with basic benefits. They are contingent workers -- the "precariat" -- which Roubini slots into Marx's proletariat. After World War II, powerful labor unions, the GI bill, the New Deal programs and the destruction of great fortunes in the war meant that working class people had increasingly secure lives, saw their children doing better than they did, and looked forward to an acceptably comfortable retirement. That started to change in the 1960s and it's just been getting worse.

The 2016 election represented a successful ploy by the plutocracy to divide the working class along racial and ethnic lines, scapegoating immigrants and people of disadvantaged ethnic castes for the troubles of struggling white workers. Do read the whole thing, but I'll leave you with his conclusion.

To be sure, the American Dream was always more aspiration than reality. Economic, social, and intergenerational mobility have always fallen short of what the myth of the self-made man or woman would lead one to expect. But with social mobility now declining as inequality rises, today’s young people are right to be angry.The new proletariat – the precariat – is now revolting. To paraphrase Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto: “Let the Plutocrat classes tremble at a Precariat revolution. The Precarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Precarious workers of all countries, unite!”

And in case you still don't get it, President Trump kicked off Sunday morning by going on a Twitter spree that included retweeting a video of a supporter in Florida agreeing that he’s a racist and chanting “white power.”