One of the key complaints that one hears in many advanced countries is that the basic prerequisites of a middle-class life are no longer attainable. Very large fractions of the population feel more insecure. If you draw a chart of what’s happened to the average income of the bottom 90 per cent, it’s hardly budged. With a microscope you can see a little bit of an increase. But if you look at the average income of the top 1 per cent, it has soared exponentially.

But all this requires systems of truth-telling, of ascertaining, discovering what the truth is, verifying the truth. But, the demagogues, like Orban in Hungary, Trump in the United States and the LNP in Australia, are systematically trying to destroy all of our truth-telling institutions. Like media censorship and undermining the ABC, a judiciary to protect those with the most money, cutting funding to corporate regulators, opposing a federal corruption watchdog, ignoring human rights protection, environmental abuse and weighted education in law and economics to name a few.

The upshot of this is that our economic and social prosperity has been put into jeopardy. We need to be vigilant and we need to battle these demagogues and these right-wing conservative governments to restore some version of sustainable shared prosperity.

via Progressive reform in a populist era – » The Australian Independent Media Network