The Economic Doom Watch

Sometime in the near future, when I have a little more time, I’m going to put together a comprehensive list of articles about the present or impending decline in our economy.  For quite a while now, it seems that many people have been waiting for the big crash to come.  It’s no longer a matter of Marxists waiting for the inevitable collapse of capitalism due to its internal contradictions in spite of outward appearances of a good economy; now, almost any halfway honest person who knows anything about the economy is going to admit that it’s being kept afloat (barely) through increasingly false and precarious means, a deck of cards waiting to collapse, a castle made of sand about to be hit by a tsunami. 

And the indicators all say it’s already starting to fall down.  We’ve got the ever-deflating housing bubble and the credit crunch (problems that get a mention even by Osama Bin Laden from deep within his cave in northern Pakistan), and quite a few people who still have money trying to do everything they can to take the cash and run before the inevitable high tides arrive.  We’ve also got lots of working people, and out of work people, who never benefited from the supposed expansion to begin with, who already had their housing crises and credit crunches a while back - and you can count me among them.  To many of us, the economy never recovered during the whole lengthy and essentially jobless (definitely raiseless) “recovery.”  On top of it all, we’ve got a dollar that keeps plunging and a “Fed” that keeps lowering interest rates to comfort all the shortsighted investors on Wall Steet in spite of the fact that it’s going to send the dollar down even more (and no doubt make a lot of things more expensive and unaffordable for many of us).  And we live in a country whose basic economic survival has been insured mainly by the fact that it owns the world currency - a situation that increasingly looks as though it will not last forever.

No other country would have survived the way this one has with this kind of national debt, with this kind of personal debt within the population, this exodus of jobs overseas and this trade deficit, but the U.S. has maintained an illusion of relative economic health because it owns the world currency.  And other nations remain willing to the support the U.S. economically only because the fate of the U.S. economy is too directly tied in with the fate of the world’s - including each of said countries’.  However, all it takes is the building of confidence or motivation on the part of some big country with over a billion people (and maybe a fake “communist” government that’s more capitalist these days than anyone’s), and we might see a major withdrawal of some very essential support.

This might all be basic news to some, and I’m sure there’s a lot of simplification in what I’m saying.  I find it hard to keep track of the details because I am no economist; in fact, I can’t even fill out my own tax returns or keep track of any checks that I write.  But if anybody is concerned about the fate of the world and the political trends controlling it, they should be aware of the changes in the economy.  I believe that is the most essential thing right now, more than ever.  In that sense, I guess I am a pretty big Marxist.  Unfortunately, a lot of people on the left, especially the radical left, including so many of these anarchists, pay the least attention to this stuff.  There’s endless attention being paid to the evils of the police and the atrocities in Iraq, but relatively little being said about economic forces, and so much deliberate economic manipulation, steering our society toward conditions more conducive to tyranny and brutality.

Yet, if we are, as I mentioned before, on the bring of the point where the whole thing is going to cave in anyway, then it will become all too obvious that we do not live within a healthy or “good” economy. 

It’s difficult, in a way, not to hope for the crash to come.  This would seem like a rather cruel, misanthropic, and self-destructive attitude were it not for the fact that the decline is happening anway, only the downward momentum has not been great enough to pierce through the thick layers of wool pulled over so many people’s eyes.  People are putting up with greater losses in their own standard of living (measured in any sense), but they can always maintain false hopes as long as they see the decline as something temporary, a product of a “cycle” or maybe their own personal shortcomings, and not part of something far bigger and more fatal. 

Someone at Infoshop - I believe it was ChuckO himself - made the excellent comparison to a live frog in boiling water.  Apparently, a frog will let itself be boiled alive if the heat is turned up slowly.  But turn it up suddenly, and the frog will make every effort to jump out of the pot and save itself.

Combine all of the above with anxiety due to the fact that all the usual indicators point to a major economic shock just a little down the road, and it’s easy to understand why some of us are almost eager for it to happen already.

Meanwhile, I’ve taken to watching the words of some of the best writers on the subject.  In that near future time, when I have more time, I am going to list a few of them.  Right now (as I’ve done before), I’ll just mention one of my favorites, Paul Craig Roberts, over at Counterpunch.  This former Assistant Treasurer in the Reagan administration(!) has turned out to be one of the best radical-left critics of the present administration and the present system.  He’ll probably deny that he is either radical or left, but he is a writer, in my opinion, who’s doing better at making valid criticisms from the left than most people who make a big noise about how leftist, progressive or anarchist they are.  Roberts could even serve as the best basic introduction to the current - and growing - Economic Doom Watch.

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P.S.  I should add, though, that even if I think a more obvious crash might or will make more people aware, I do not subscribe to the idea that revolutionary or radical change is the direct result of immiseration.  Quite the contrary, it takes some kind of hope, among many other social factors, to influence such change.  (And, in fact, there have been many times when radical change took place while economic conditions were in some way improving.)  An increase in immiseration by itself, without any other factors, might only lead to more misery.