Tag Archive for economic decline

The Government is Not a Business

June 27, 2011 Economics, Media, Politics, Republicans, Values, Wealth No comments

Have we forgotten whose policies caused the plunge?

In the graphic above, lifted from ABC’s “This Week” with Christiane Amanpour, the yellow line shows how much deeper the current recession is than all previous recessions, at least since 1980. So because the economy is not healing fast enough, we should turn its management back to the people whose policies caused the crash in the first place? Look doctor, my loved one isn’t getting better as fast as I would like. So I think I’m going to go back to the doctor who administered the poison. You know, because whatever you’re trying to do isn’t working. Maybe that other doctor will be good this time.

This reasoning seems to be treated as perfectly logical in the lame stream media. That’s right, I’m using Sarah Palin’s phrase, but for the complete opposite reason. The lame stream media seems to accept the Republican spin that reducing the deficit is the most important step we can take to create jobs. Why? It’s clearly bullshit. Yes we need to cut the deficit, but to even pretend that this will somehow revive the economy is ludicrous. Cutting is cutting. You can’t cut programs without cutting jobs.

What does a CEO do when he needs to get the company back on solid footing? He cuts jobs. He lays people off. He reduces spending to improve the bottom line and get profits back up. Fine. This restoration of the company’s fiscal health doesn’t create jobs, it costs jobs.

The policies the Republicans are trying to put through are not about jobs. They are about deficit reduction, which is essentially restoring the country to a fiscal balance. They seem to view government as a big corporation that is not in good fiscal health and themselves as CEOs who will cut spending and restore the company to the black. They clearly care more about fiscal responsibility, i.e. profits, than they do about the well-being people. This is about the ideology, or rather mythology, of personal freedom. When people are free from government regulations and programs that take money from the worthy workers and wealthy job-creators and give it to the undeserving lazy poor then everything will be in balance and a growing economy will be magically restored.

Not only is this ideology totally wrong, with no possible way of creating growth, it will exacerbate the destabilizing disparity of more money going to fewer and fewer super rich overlords. This is fascism and it’s where Republican policies have been and will continue taking us.

At this moment in time, as the Republicans petulantly refuse to consider any discussion of closing loopholes on their large corporate puppet masters, it seems as if many of these zealots truly believe in the righteousness of their cause and are willing to crash the global economy in the name of fiscal balance. This is shear madness. And yet the “free press” pretends that it’s a legitimate approach. How can one not be pessimistic when clear stupidity passes for a valid economic option and when people are so deluded and mislead that they will seriously consider returning the patient to the care of the poisoner?

The End Is Near

July 2, 2010 Economics, Energy, Evolution, Politics, Values No comments

If you’re awake and paying attention you may have noticed that things aren’t going so well right now. The oil spill in the gulf is a harbinger of more difficult challenges ahead as we have to go to greater depths, literally and figuratively, to find the oil that powers our world. That’s because the end of easy cheap oil is here. That’s bad news for the economic reality of the life we’ve become accustomed to. Because to work properly, the dynamics of our current economy depend on constant growth fueled by cheap oil. So the end of life as we know it is near. And the change that is bearing down on us is not pretty.

Of course it’s not like the economic system we have has been working all that well anyway. The middle class is going backward and the millennials are really going backward in terms of prosperity. The world economy had to stop growing sometime. Constant growth—in the stock market, in home prices, in ever more affordable energy—has never been possible. But it’s only now, when it’s ending that we realize we shouldn’t have expected an ever-rising arrow of economic well-being.

The idea that most of our kids will have a better life than we did has already ended. With cheap energy ending, global warming coming and a world economic system increasingly unable to sustain itself at the current level, life as we’ve come to know it is definitely ending.

The question is how bad will it be when it ends? You see, many great civilizations, such as Rome and the Egyptians, collapsed not because of conquerors, but primarily because they grew too large for the energy resources available. Their agricultural land went fallow and in the case of Rome at least, the dark ages ensued. (This is laid out in the great 2009 book The Empathetic Civilization by Jeremy Rifkin.) Right before the industrial revolution Europe was entering an energy crisis because the wood they used for virtually all housing and energy was almost gone. Fortunately rail and mining technology arrived just in time for a transition to coal without a real nasty economic collapse.

Will we be so fortunate? Or will we only transition to new forms of cleaner, sustainable energy after life as we know it ends? Right now the power lies in the hands of those who control the oil and the industries that rely on it. Unless we all rise up and recognize it’s already ending and work together to make a transition many of the humans on this planet are definitely going feel extreme stress. I don’t want civilization as I’ve known it to end. But unless we radically change course, the end truly is near. It’s too bad that many in power have let self-interest be a blanket they pull up over their heads to keep from having to acknowledge how near the end is.