"... even deficit hawks acknowledge that we should be focusing not on today's deficit, but on the long-term national debt. Spending, especially on investments in education, technology, and infrastructure, can actually lead to lower long-term deficits. Banks' short-sightedness helped create the crisis; we cannot let government short-sightedness prodded by the financial sector prolong it... Deficits to finance wars or give-aways to the financial sector (as happened on a massive scale in the US) lead to liabilities without corresponding assets, imposing a burden on future generations. But high-return public investments that more than pay for themselves can actually improve the well-being of future generations, and it would be doubly foolish to burden them with debts from unproductive spending and then cut back on productive investments."
Thus, we need to focus government stimulus spending where it's most neededin the context of global crisis convergence: the development of a zero-carbon transport, housing and energy infrastructure, generating millions of new Green jobs. On that note, theGreen New Deal Group'srecent reports provide an excellent step forward, but still highly conservative in its aspirations and out-of-touch with the imminent severity of global crisis convergence. In the UK, the Campaign against Climate Change trade union set out a more ambitious plan forone million green jobs. Similar plans have been consideredin the USwhere an investment of 100 billion over 2 years could produce 2 million jobs, but again, implementation is slow. There's a long way to go, and time in which we need to act is diminishing fast at the moment, onlyone-sixthof the British government's fiscal stimulus package has focused on green industries. On the other hand,timely global actionby governments could ride us through the storm while creating a new form of prosperity based on more harmonious and sustainable ways of living.
The simple truth is that we are now in an age ofcivilizational transition, premised on the intensifying inability of the global political economy in its current form to continue business-as-usual. This global systemic crisis has no easy answers, but unless we start thinking outside the three-party box, things will get worse, not better.
As the US Joint Forces Command report warns: "One should not forget that the Great Depression spawned a number of totalitarian regimes that sought economic prosperity for their nations by ruthless conquest." (p. 28)
If business-as-usual continues, and if the three-party consensus here and conventional policymaking reign the day, then the flawed policy measures taken by governments over the next decade may well precipitate the rise of the far-right, the permanent militarization of our societies, and the resort to violent inter-state and inter-communal conflicts to resolve disputes over diminishing resources. It doesn't have to be this way. We can avert aGlobal Weimarcollapse, but we need to do things a bit more differently than even Clegg might imagine.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
