The brutal experiment

[communicator]

Here's an article in the New York Times expressing pity for the UK as the subject of a 'brutal' experiment to prove that austerity does not work. Anyone with any claim to economic savvy who said it might ever work should hang their head in shame

Comments

[fjm]

I want to sit people down and take them through the history of the 1930s. We already *knew* that not only does it not work, it is incredibly destablising.

[communicator]

The conservatives are very good it seems at reaching down into that murky psychic basement and tweaking the knobs. What a horrible and incoherent metaphor, but you get my drift.

I was talking to someone yesterday, a man like me from a poor working class background, and he was all about getting the welfare scroungers. In the face of that I think reason gets blown away like cobwebs.

[executrix]

DAYNA: Don't you ever get tired of being right?
AVON: Only of the rest of you being wrong.

[communicator]

Avon is a big fibber: he enjoyed every minute of it.

[del_c]

I think recessions aren't accidents, they're strategies. After the manic bubble, the asset-owning minority pull as much of their wealth out of labour employment as they can, and put it somewhere else for a while. Their hope is that this will force wages down. Put that way, it's obvious the last thing they would want is for the government to spoil their private recession with public employment, so of course they want a public recession at the same time as the private one. Lucky for them, by the time the bubble bursts, they've been praised for years as being the engine of growth, and can simply tell the government what to do. Rarely does a Roosevelt come along to say "Rich people hate me; I welcome their hate

[communicator]

I totally agree with you. When I complain about people being lead astray I am talking about proles who get duped into supporting this awful process. The rich people who are doing very nicely out of this are not behaving irrationally I suppose.

Though I would say this time I think they are sailing close to the wind, and perhaps letting short term greed overwhelm them, because if the whole system goes down, they go with it.

[penguineggs]

Actually, the LibDem comment that really rankles from two years ago was "war criminal"(people who voted Labour having previously voted Labour, incidentally). But then, I didn't get on the wrong end of the "Nazi" comment. And yes; it was self-evidently a disaster coming.

[communicator]

And self-evidently a disaster for the Lib Dems as a party as well as for the country. At the time I didn't get it. They had this once in a lifetime window of opportunity, and they just chucked it away. And people saying 'Watch out what you are doing!' were treated like we were nuts. It was the most peculiar time.

[annafdd]

I defriended at least one person in real life at the time. It is starting to hurt personally now, and sneering "at least we were saved from Identity Cards!" Is no fun at all

[communicator]

Yes. It isn't as if I am an uncritical supporter of Labour, and just before the election I wrote something here saying that a Tory govt kept in check by Lib Dem partnership wouldn't be too bad. It is the reality of what happened, not a partisan 'my side at any cost' thing. In fact if the Lib Dems had been different in office they might have been 'my side'. But it just all collapsed like a tinsel facade.