Middle class fantasy

Yes yes. This is not news, but in the present environment it's particularly baffling.

Rupert Murdoch - Australia's very own salaried nonsense-tycoon, charged with peddling nonsense around the globe - has set us all straight on the future: it will be a middle-class one. Phew.

One of the most under-reported stories of our day is the rise of a huge new global middle class.

People have emerged from poverty or, I should say, have lifted themselves out of poverty, given this chance through market reforms. A world dominated by a new middle class, of course, is not what supposed radicals had in mind a century ago when they spoke of revolution.

Get your hand off it, gramps.

I submit as countervailing evidence - from a field of hundreds - the Habermas article linked just below, if only because it is close to hand:

In America and Great Britain...the political elites viewed the wild speculation as useful as long as things were going well. And Europe succumbed to the Washington Consensus. In this regard there was also a broad coalition of the willing for which Mr. Rumsfeld didn't need to advertise.

Die Zeit: The Washington Consensus was the notorious economic plan proposed the IMF and the World Bank in 1990 that was supposed to provide the template for economic reform, first in Latin America and then throughout half of the world. Its central promise was "Trickle Down": led the rich become richer and affluence will trickle down to the poor.

Empirical evidence of the falsehood of this prognosis has been accumulating for many years. The effects of the increase in affluence are so asymmetrical, at both the national and the global level, that the zones of poverty have grown before our very eyes.

Nevertheless, Murdoch gets to propagate these lies through his very own newspaper (The Australian) and through the annual Australian government-funded ABC lecture series ('The Boyer Lectures').