In today’s Fast Facts about the march of inequality making its way throughout the world, Errol Black and Jim Silver use a term I like very much: the INEQUALITY AGENDA. This agenda – to ensure that wealth continues streaming up to an increasingly bloated privileged class – is being pushed by the Harper government and like-minded administrations around the world.

I’m glad that progressives are using hard-hitting, pithy terms like this. These two simple words capture the spirit (agenda) and devastating consequence (inequality) of free-market fundamentalism .

We see the results of income inequality in Canada, with the well-documented growing gap and attendant increases in societal problems. We see the deviousness of the agenda’s design in the “solution” to the US debt-ceiling problem (their solution will exacerbate the problems faced by every-day people). Indeed the very fact that the world’s economic problems are blamed on too much debt is in itself testimony to the ability of the inequality agenda to appropriate a situation, revise it to suit its purposes and then convince a “largely complacent majority” of the public to believe  utter nonsense.

The extreme Right has been very effective at this sort of revisionist economics and part of the reason is because they’ve captured terms like “tax burden” and “entitlements” that resonant with the public. We need to use terms like the “inequality agenda” until they become as much of the public discourse as “tax burden”.  I recommend that you take a moment to read about the inequality agenda as presented by Black and Silver. And spread the words: Inequality Agenda.

Lynne Fernandez