LAST WEEK - July 7, 2011

To misquote Lincoln Steffens from his autobiography, “I have seen the future and it stinks”. UK is so dysfunctional it almost makes Wisconsin look intelligent. The Tory government is so eager to unravel the advances made in the lives of average people in the XX Century that one fears that the human race is in the process of abandoning the advances of that century and returning to the abuses of the Golden Age, or even back to the time when the Free Market represented an advance on the pattern of old Liberal economics that were an advance 250 years ago on the Administered prices of imperial Europe. Meanwhile, all the nations of the planet are shrinking their budgets, neglecting the teachings of Keynes and their proof in the New Deal of Roosevelt. Even Pres. Obama seems to be reliving the policies of Herbert Hoover as the robust economy that USA had in the 1960s and 70s grinds to a slow crawl. UK seems like WI on sleeping pills, waiting for the super-rich to decide to invest in industry, just as they didn’t in the 1930s. And the supposed experts tell us that the route to prosperity is to deny ourselves the results of fostering the middle class through having them work, producing so many things that we all seem to want while cashing in on the good life that would follow if all of the working people had jobs, good jobs that could support the nation to the degree that we knew it in the years of the late century just past. Instead, the Tories and their owners are pulling the carpet out from under the working people and our children, creating a Lost Generation of those who are being denied access to the universities, and denying health care to those who do not have the money to buy it at its current prices, even in some cases stretching to the point of denying life-saving treatment. For most of the population the choice is to fight this reversal of prosperity or succumb to the threat of a Dark Age crawling over the horizon.