Courtesy of Pam Martens
Wall Street On Parade has repeatedly called attention to the fact that President Donald Trump, who ran on a fiercely populist platform of helping the little guy, infused his administration from the get-go with lawyers and executives connected to the fossil fuels conglomerate, Koch Industries, and/or front groups funded by its two majority owners, billionaires Charles and David Koch.
Now a step-by-step guide has been published on how to defeat the new-age robber barons, the corporate structure that made them billionaires while leaving workers with crumbs, and the enshrined political system that marches to the crack of their unaccountable whip.
Released by Cambridge University Press on August 31, the book is titled “A Manifesto for Social Progress: Ideas for a Better Society,” by Marc Fleurbaey, Professor in Economics and Humanistic Studies at Princeton University and a prolific social justice author. Reading the book feels like finding a large flashlight after endless days of stumbling around in a dark cave.
The book provides an essential historical understanding of how institutions designed to serve the public interest became co-opted by the powerful and wealthy and morphed into grotesque disfigurations of their original purpose. The steps that must be taken in order to restructure these institutions and the political process are based on the findings of over 300 social scientists who are involved in the International Panel on Social Progress (IPSP), of which Fleurbaey was one of the initiators.
The book provides concrete steps for both the individual and grassroots groups to take to make governments, institutions, and corporations responsive to the public interest. A key tenet of the vision for change is this:
“In the long run, society follows movements that are largely initiated by large groups of people with similar interests and who push for change, bit by bit, until the dam breaks or the ground slides.”
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