Planning ahead is a measure of class. The rich can plan for future generations, but the poor can plan ahead only a few weeks.
~~Gloria Steinem
An earlier diary by Empty Vessel elicited the comment from hestal
But at the same time I feel a little strange. I feel that I am aware of events before the events occur.
I've been getting those same spidey senses a lot, lately. A great juggernaut of Catastrophe approaches, and will overtake us all, and there won't be anything but diluted legislation in its path, and that legislation, along with the people it halfheartedly protects, will be treated like a leafblower treats leaves.
We know what to do to prevent, or at least ameliorate these things, but I frankly don't think they'll get done. And I'm starting to suspect why.
Paul Krugman bemoans a lot these days that the economic policies of the planet are being directed 180 degrees out of where they should be. When the risk-averse rich are unwilling to invest, economies falter. Governments should then be stepping in and creating enough of an economic bandwagon that the rich will lose their reticience and jump on for the ride. The rich get richer, and the rest of us can collect paychecks for another decade or so. To date, that ain't happening. Much of the CW around these parts is that the ack-basswardness of current policy is driven by political considerations.
What if it's not?
[tinfoil hat]
Keynesian economics, to my mind, assumes that there in fact exists an economy to jump-start, that there will always be enough demand and resources on the other side of a downturn to compensate for large stimulus efforts. But what if there isn't? If someone is whispering into the ears of the rich: "global warming, monetary collapse, energy crises, and there's nothing you can do about it, because there is no other side," what would their responses look like?
Right. Austerity measures. Buy all the plywood you can, nail it across the windows, and sit tight. Maybe you'll have enough left over after the storm to have an ongoing concern. If you can't save the people, save your own 'family'. Build an economic bomb shelter. Juggle some accounts, inflate some short-term temporary economic bubbles that just pop faster and faster, and get what you can, because if the future holds an unavoidable neo-feudal society, you might as well be on the fief side than the serf side.
When the rich see doom, economies falter. But when governments see doom, economies collapse. If someone is likewise whispering into the ears of the governments: "global warming, monetary collapse, energy crises, and there's nothing you can do about it," and those whispers are believed, bad things happen: for what's the point in stimulus if we're already on the leading edge of an environmental catastrophe, with its corresponding wars, famines, pestilence, crop failures and mass human migrations just wiping it away? What's the point in stimulus when peak oil hammers society back down? What's the point in stimulus if the monetary system itself may have run out of steam?
One Pissed Off Liberal wrote a recent diary on the liklihood of the extinction of the human race. I am slightly more optimistic. I only see dystopia.
It's easy to see the future as a funk, when there are so few alternatives on the horizon, 'stimulussed' or not. And the chances of getting anything passed to address the tiniest fraction of the requirements necessary to get things back into shape are also tiny. My suspicion is that many of those in power may see themselves as powerless to avert the greater calamity, but they might avoid a lesser, personal calamity by using the ringing proclamations of deficit reduction, austerity, and gridlock as cover while their own economic bomb shelters are being built, for themselves and their friends.
I'm not savvy enough about economics or the motivations of the rich or the government to assert that the forgoing is the case; only that it would explain a great many things. I for one would follow Krugman's advice and stimulate the hell out of the economy anyway, even if such actions might fail, only because the alternative guarantees failure.
But Obama is not Krugman, and even if he were, there are still enough institutional roadblocks to make a stimulus impossible. Barring Obama asserting an executive authority for unilateral action to a degree that would make Dubya look like a cautious Dem (even if it were for the right reasons), I just don't see it happening.
I think we're headed for a major restructuring of society, with the vast majority of us laboring as a permanent underclass. In spite of our continued efforts (and we will continue them), the chances of us averting catastrophe becomes increasingly remote, and it wouldn't be such a bad idea if some of our thoughts turned to the what-will-we-do-then scenarios, as post-apocalyptic progressives.
[/tinfoil]