The Only Way Out Of The Financial Crisis!
Economist Paul Krugman smells smoke, so he’s yelling “Fire!”! In an op-ed piece in the New York Times, he sees a new and prolonged depression setting in.
Meanwhile, Simon Jenkins at the London Guardian has a solution that could and should take fire all around the globe, Cut Defense Spending, All of It!
Why The Alarm?
Krugman says we are sliding into a Long Depression of the type that struck in 1873, rather than Great Depression which struck in 1929.
“This third Depression will be primarily a failure of policy. Around the world most recently at last weekend’s G-20 meeting governments are obsessing about inflation when the real threat is deflation, preaching the need for belt-tightening when the real problem is inadequate spending.”
The tragedy here is that we have so many areas of society that have been allowed to decay and would be so easy to rebuild; public transportation (needed now more than ever) infra structure (been crumbling since the Reagan Admin), new energy industries (oil and gas are still powerful enough to block these), and my plan for Obama to plant 20 billion trees to save the earth!
Another tragedy in all this is that we’ve been having the same freakin’ argument with right-winger cheap skates from one generation to the next. And you know what? The conservatives always lose the argument! But not until they’ve taken their ball, gone home, and left the rest of us to suffer from their steal from the poor and give to the rich agenda. Theirs is a feudal warlord mentality which says good people are and deserve to be rich, bad people are and deserve to be, poor. What’s mine is mine, blah, blah, blah. So here we go again, arguing with assholes.
The formula to escape financial meltdown is tried and true: spend your way out of recession/depression, pay it back with taxes and equity restoration as jobs and wealth return. In the meantime, however, while the oligarchs wring their hands and throw mud in the wheels, society tumbles and nearly is destroyed. Then, every new generation of conservatives take their entrenched wealth and start tossing around the same old red herring; the Free Market can handle any problems in the economy through its natural Darwinian processes, all bullshit of course because there’s nothing natural about it. There can never be a free market because the system is too easily rigged not to police itself. Why? Simple, people who do not care about what happens to the world after they die, are dangerous to the rest of us.
More from Krugman, “…slashing spending in the midst of a depression, which deepens that depression and paves the way for deflation, is actually self-defeating it is, instead, the victory of an orthodoxy that has little to do with rational analysis, whose main tenet is that imposing suffering on other people is how you show leadership in tough times…”
Conservatism is simply greed masking as dogma, slight of hand posing as a paternal hand. It is rapaciousness posing as blind necessity. It is the philosophy of “Fuck you!” all dressed up for intellectuals (whom conservatives despise) to chew on while the Republican/Tory wolves are raiding the larder. And trust me, they don’t believe their own bullshit any more than I do. It works, but only long enough for them to get over on the public and get on down the road with our money, and that’s all they care about.
Now we are having to make the argument for regulation as if it has never been made before as if all those wars and recessions and depressions and revolutions never occurred. Wool is being sewn to put over our eyes even as the Gulf of Mexico becomes a cesspool for the next 1000 years, even as world oxygen is falling because of deforestation, even as world wide banking is failing, because of malfeasance and sheer thievery, even as the oceans which, a mere 60 years ago were clean enough for future planners to think that enough food could be harvested there to handle the population explosion plus more. Now, worldwide fishery is down 90%. Mercury poisoning in the oceans is worldwide. Tuna will soon be endangered and inedible. What a bunch of assholes! I can’t believe Republican/Tory/Conservatives have the gall to step outside in broad daylight.
Cut Defense Spending Big Time!
Meanwhile, The London Guardian reporter Simon Jenkins has the world financial problem solved with one neat stroke. Cut defense spending. All of it.
In the UK that means £45 billion pounds a year, a pittance compared to the $1 trillion spent per year in the USA. Think about it. America just spent a gut-wrenching year arguing over a trillion dollars for health care over a ten-year period that, experts say, would pay for itself. But a trillion a year for the military? Roughly $700b for the military and another $300b for the 22 Intelligence agencies, which, is an Orwellian absurdity historians will be forced to conclude was, from its inception in 1948, out of control. Chilling is the only word to describe it. Now, pile on the extra costs of the “wars” we are fighting and bam, there goes your financial system, your culture, your transportation, health, education, everything. Speaking of tragedies, every dollar spent (wasted) on defense would generate ten dollars if spent in the private sector. Until someone has the balls to tell Lockheed and Grumman to start making useful things people actually need, we’re all doomed.
Meanwhile, let’s bring our soldiers home and let them spend the rest of their tours helping clean up the Gulf and rebuild New Orleans. That might also be a healthy project for the one million people sitting in US prisons serving terms for victimless crimes.
Write someone a letter today, but sign it someone else, and don’t tell’m where you read this!
-JJP