Robert Reich: How Austerity Is Ushering in a Global Recession

[highplainsdem]

http://robertreich.org/post/9014405465

-snip-

Europe depends on exports – especially to Asia, India, Latin America, and the United States. But exports to China and other emerging markets have been dropping. China, worried about inflation, has pulled in the reins on its sizzling economy. Brazil has been pulling back as well.

And as the United States economy sputters, exports to America have been slowing.

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 than increasing it, and a public that’s being sold the Republican lie that less government spending means more jobs.

-snip-

[Newest Reality]

1. Welcome to the

Serf Machine!

This is the way to takeover the World without wasting valuable, (and exorbitantly expensive) weapons of any kind.

There are the Lords, ascending to their thrones of total control, and there are the rest of us. However, most of us watch corporatist propaganda via most of what's on cable/satellite. Most of us depend on the corporate veil that the few hide behind for almost all that is essential to us, right now.

How do you fight or struggle against the company store? They own almost everything supplied and could easily cut-off supplies in a reverse boycott, if we revolt. To break away requires many groups of people with vision who voluntarily simplify their lives and attempt to re-localize. While there are many attempts at this, it is a struggle and any success is a threat to the machine. Since it is hard to reach the mainstream, a lot of headway needs to be made before breaking away from corporatist control will become more obvious and easier to emulate.

[GeorgeGist]

2. It's GREED ...

not austerity.

[BadgerKid]

3. Bubbles, money on the sidelines, global recession....

the world is being prepared to be bought up.

[WingDinger]

4. You got that right. Normal depression cycle, writ large.

The rich buy up the assets of the less than rich. Periodically. On schedule. Only with globalisation, we have buying nations into servitude. They are buying tracs of Africa for food production, when the modified weather patterns emerge.

[ixion]

5. It's only 'bizarre' if you refuse to acknowledge what is really going on

There is a concerted, organized, orchestrated effort to concentrate the vast majority of the wealth in the hands of a small group of people. They were subtle, initially, but now they're not even bothering to mask the movement, which means it's entered a new phase. It has escalated, not abated.

Doesn't it strike anyone as odd that that Wall St. and the Government seem to be heading in a bizarre direction that, while they're both happy with it, looks (and smells) like crap to the Rest of Us?

Doesn't it strike anyone as odd that the government doesn't seem to give a rat's ass whether or not jobs are created?

Doesn't it strike anyone as odd that a nationwide effort to destroy the public school system and unions is going on and no one seems to care?

Doesn't it strike anyone as odd that the stock market is above 10K in the midst of one of the worst economic corrections in the last century?

I could go on. The point is that when something appears to be 'bizarre', you can bet there is a reason behind the appearance.

This isn't haphazard, it's by design.

[dgibby]

6. +a gazillion!

You should make this an op. I've been saying it's a planned op, but you've said it so much better. Thanks.