The question is, what are we going to do about it?
As an older millennial, I hate the baby boomer generation.
And with good reason too.
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.
And we listened.
And believed their lies.
And then, it all began to unravel.
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.
And so it went, until the music stopped in September 2008.
When it became apparent that liquidity had completely dried up and the entire system needed to be saved from years of unfettered neoliberalism, did we start to appreciate that we had all been labouring under a complete falsehood.
But we were failed by the governments of the day.
In the United Kingdom and in the United States of America, Brown, Cameron and Obama, chose to rescue the banks and pass on the liability to the voters.
