BASICS - April 9, 2009

It was amazing to hear the reports of Obama and PM Gordon Brown pronouncing on the supposed triumphs of G20, emphasizing as great gains the small adjustments in the neoclassical model that would once again enact some of the gains after the 1st Great Depression in the new hopes of avoiding another, or at least dissolving the one we are now having. Both beamed with righteous glory when they asserted that none of the tamperings with the basics would touch the rock foundation found in the Free Market and Globalization, ignorant that the manifestations of these righteous-sounding ideas were the very roots of the system that had eroded FDR’s New Deal to the point that a naïve reading would tear down the weak dike built 80 years ago against a repeat of the troubles that were bedevilling that time. By the Free Market they meant that each person must be free to pursue predaciously their greed in a manner limited only by law and that they must be free to enact and change the laws by use of whatever wealth and power they had at their disposal. By Globalization, they meant the system that had enabled them to seek out the cheapest labor to be had on the planet and to use it to impoverish the working class and the system of economics they had wrestled out of the last Great depression. And Obama and Brown spoke these principles in such warm tones that they gave every impression of delivering holy writ. So it is hard to imagine what change of heart short of a divine transformation could lead us to exceed the repairs of the 1930s, and none to reach beyond them. Everyone alive today must thus anticipate years of this collapse followed by another forgetting and another Depression 80 years from now.