People are now dying as the deficit terrorists ramp up their attacks

[girl gone mad]

People are now dying as the deficit terrorists ramp up their attacks
by Bill Mitchell
http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=9544">economicoutlook.net

Three people are dead in Athens as the people turn ugly against an even uglier ideological push against their welfare. The EMU is now facing an untenable future. Senior policy makers within the EU are now lecturing the UK about the need for harsh fiscal measures following the election. And the UK goes to the polls today and the polls are suggesting “sweeping gains” for the conservatives who are unfit to govern and will drive their economy even further backwards if elected. All of this is unnecessary. All of it a reflection of a failed ideology trying to re-assert itself. The upshot will be that the Eurozone will wallow in crisis for years to come and the rest of us are taking policy positions that will lead to the next crisis – if not a double-dip recession later this year.

Note: the UK Labour Party are also not fit to govern – which just demonstrates how damaging the neo-liberal onslaught on our polity has been over the last few decades. All political parties have started to attract conservatives who just “badge up” with Labour/Liberal/Tory/Democrat/Republican – as career moves and learn to mindlessly recite the mainstream macroeconomics dogma about deficits, public debt, and the rest of it.

As this process of selection has developed, our political parties look more and more alike and the voters have very little real difference. The contest becomes one of selecting which party is proposing the biggest budget surplus in the shortest period of time.

And the slime that makes up my profession – particularly the academic economists and those working in the international organisations like the IMF, the OECD etc – mostly provide support to this vacuous debate with their meaningless “research” papers. Maybe I should have been a geologist or something.

At least the economists were quiet for a while as the global crisis accelerated – given that their models were all shown to be wrong and of no application to anything we might call the real world. But progressively, they have been crawling out of the slime again and seeking to strut the centre stage.

http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=9544">more...