The Invisible Counterpoint

Not only is the United States slouching toward a double dip, but so is Europe. New data out Tuesday show even Europe's strongest core economies -- Germany, France, and the Netherlands -- slowing to a crawl. We're on the cusp of a global recession. Policy makers be warned: Austerity is the wrong medicine. [. . .] But chalk up a big part of Europe's slowdown to the politics and economics of austerity. Europe -- including Britain -- have turned John Maynard Keynes on his head. They've been cutting public spending just when they should be spending more to counteract slowing private spending. The United States has been moving in the same bizarre direction. Cutbacks by state and local governments have all but negated the federal government's original stimulus, and no one in Washington is talking seriously about a second. The pitiful showdown over increasing the debt limit has produced the opposite: a Rube-Goldberg-like process for capping spending rather...

Today, the answer seems both more modest and more challenging: if we want to reduce poverty, we have to stop doing the things that make people poor and keep them that way. Stop underpaying people for the jobs they do. Stop treating working people as potential criminals and let them have the right to organize for better wages and working conditions. Stop the institutional harassment of those who turn to the government for help or find themselves destitute in the streets. Maybe, as so many Americans seem to believe today, we can't afford the kinds of public programs that would genuinely alleviate poverty -- though I would argue otherwise. But at least we should decide, as a bare minimum principle, to stop kicking people when they're down. (Barbara Ehrenreich, “How America turned poverty into a crime,” Salon, 9 August 2011) The Coming Explosion... When the number and desperation of people at the bottom of the economic ladder reach critical mass, there will...

"In modern democratic nations, we usually don't actually kill our leaders; we periodically throw them out of office and replace them with revitalized substitutes. But the decline in potency of the leader, his inexorable abandonment of us as we grow still is felt today. This is because the leader is a less a figure of authority than he is a delegate, someone who tells us to do what we tell him we want done, someone who "takes the blame" for us. As poison container for our dissociated alter, the leader is expected to absorb our violent feelings without collapsing. Many societies actually designate "filth men" to help the leader with this task, relatives who exchange blood with him so they can "intercept" the poisonous feelings of the people directed at him. In modern nations, cabinet members are our "filth men," and are regularly sacrificed when the leader is under attack." (Llooyd DeMause, Psychogenic Theory of History) ...

It's too bad that growth now seems to have become a neo-con term. (One would hope progressives would see something in it they might like. Stasis -- homeo or otherwise -- just sounds so conservative.) So the story of evolutionary biology is that we start off with lots and lots of stuff, and end up with the same amount of lots and lots of stuff? We never did just have a couple fish, and end up with a bounty of them? Atwood -- being somewhat typically Canadian -- finds growth, anxious (so do I, some), and so all this activity has her thinking of resting and quiet talks. Periods of manic economic growth (what we've been living through) make most people anxious. Industrial England made the Cranford ladies extremely uncomfortable -- to the delight of Elizabeth Gaskell! The 1920s were another such period, and its termination was ultimately greeted with a sense of relief (in the Great Depression, there were FEWER suicides -- no joke!). And so ended economic growth. And so ended art...