Says Paul Krugman, as all our seventies doom science fiction dreams and fears seem to come alive in the New Great Depression:
The lights are going out all over America — literally. Colorado Springs has made headlines with its desperate attempt to save money by turning off a third of its streetlights, but similar things are either happening or being contemplated across the nation, from Philadelphia to Fresno.
Meanwhile, a country that once amazed the world with its visionary investments in transportation, from the Erie Canal to the Interstate Highway System, is now in the process of unpaving itself: in a number of states, local governments are breaking up roads they can no longer afford to maintain, and returning them to gravel.
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But Washington is providing only a trickle of help, and even that grudgingly. We must place priority on reducing the deficit, say Republicans and “centrist†Democrats. And then, virtually in the next breath, they declare that we must preserve tax cuts for the very affluent, at a budget cost of $700 billion over the next decade.
In effect, a large part of our political class is showing its priorities: given the choice between asking the richest 2 percent or so of Americans to go back to paying the tax rates they paid during the Clinton-era boom, or allowing the nation’s foundations to crumble — literally in the case of roads, figuratively in the case of education — they’re choosing the latter.
Bad enough, but much worse is the fact that almost every European government seems bound to walk the same road. We’ve got Greece that on the one hand can’t be bothered to collect the taxes of the people who own all those nice villas just outside Athens, can pay off the banks to not collapse, but now has to pay for it by squeezing ordinary workers hard. Germany meanwhile is putting its nose in the air at Greece’s profligacy but is still planning to put the screws on its workers too. We all know already what the ConDem(med) coalition wants to do to the UK even if Cameron is still vain enough not to want to be milk snatcher 2.0, while the most likely coalition in the Netherlands is not so much divided on whether or not eighteen billion euros in spending cuts are needed now, but on where to cut…
A spirit is haunting Europe and it’s the spirit of undead neoliberalism, the last gasp of the freemarket fuckers, using this crisis to once again help themselves and their banker friends to our money.