Derek Wall, via his blog.
Lets talk about economics. Bill Clinton said, "Its the economy stupid," but I prefer to quote a more radical voice
"A society in which consumption has to be artificially stimulated in order to keep production going is a society founded on trash and waste, and such a society is a house built upon sand".
That's from Dorothy Sayers, the detective novelist who wrote the Lord Peter Wimsey books in the 1940s.
It doesn't take a Clinton to clean up after a Bush, it takes a Sayers to put us on the road to an equitable economic system!
:)
We have to win the economic arguments and put forward alternatives that work.
On the environment we know that business as usual is suicide. From incinerators -- I fought the monster in Slough, that spews deadly mb-10 particles -- to the car culture: we have to change.
Nonetheless the first concern for most voters is the economy.
Capitalism, as it is practised today, doesn't work too well. OK...it sucks. There. It doesn't mean that a capitalism which is built on the equitable spread of wealth between workers and owners, with an eye toward the environment, won't work. It's just not what we have today.
Here's some fun stuff:
I will try and cut through misleading appearances and get to the essence of the matter.
1% of American families were involved in some stage of home repossession in 2007. That's 2,203,295 individual cases.
9.5 million Britons currently have debt problems.
As we know, a French trader lost $3.6 bn a couple of weeks ago, enough to have paid off the credit card bills over here.
Northern Rock collapsed, in the first run on a bank in decades.
The British government has spent £40bn bailing out Northern Rock and has acquired liabilities of £100bn. This has pushed government debt beyond his golden rule sum of 40% of GDP limit set by Gordon Brown.
It started with the sub prime market, and free market globalisation is pushing it in our direction. Sub prime is jargon, and economics is all about jargon which hides simple truths.
It's not just in the US, but in much of the West. Of course, it's the Dollar which is worth $0.6809 to the Euro which puts the US in a weaker position.
To keep the increasingly risky and unreal economy afloat we have to keep on consuming. If we spend less then unemployment rises, homeowners who lose their jobs can no longer keep up with mortgage payments, houses are repossed, credit card debt cannot be paid, and the vicious spiral of negative economic growth leads to poverty and mass unemployment. The system eventually rebounds but with a huge cost in insecurity and human misery.
How Brave New World of us! :(
There's much more, and it's quite interesting.
Also from Derek's blog header:
Derek Wall is the Principal Male Speaker of the Green Party of England and Wales. "How to be green? Many people have asked us this important question. It's really very simple and requires no expert knowledge or complex skills. Here's the answer. Consume less. Share more. Enjoy life." Penny Kemp and Derek Wall This blog promotes anti-capitalism, green politics, direct action, practical lifestyle change, Venezuela/Cuba and a touch of Zen. Ecosocialism or muerte!
Note: For those of you who might feel like complaining that it's a green politician, vitrually none of us can vote for the Green Party of England and Wales, so it doesn't affect votes for Dems here in the US. Derek puts out a good argument for the rationale of a green economy, which many of us here support, and is no further left in the US than Dennis Kucinich.