"Orthodoxy dies hard." "Rejecting austerity is only a first step."
This is a very persuasive piece on dispelling the cheerleaders for privitization.
"It was a tempting conclusion. Putting Wall Street and financial speculators at the center of the universe had generated an economic supernova, and everyone seemed to get the message. Everyone except Big Money, which never received the obituary notice. After some minor tweaking of Wall Street practices, some bailouts of enterprises deemed too big to fail, and the injection of some stimulus spending to arrest the free fall, Washington continued with business as usual. The Obama administration, like the Clinton administration before it, discovered the immense power of the bond market. The IMF and the World Bank, meanwhile, didn’t fundamentally change their policies. And the European Union, led by tight-fisted Germany, continued to back austerity. All the major economic actors held to the old orthodoxy even though it flew in the face of common sense and common decency (though not in the face of the bottom line).
Wall Street’s continued irrational exuberance, its lavishing of bonuses on its elite, and its pushback against even the most modest of regulations all suggest that the old Ptolemaic system – with Wall Street and the Washington Consensus still at the center of the universe – had not yet given way to a Copernican revolution that displaces these powerful institutions from their privileged position. Such revolutions, of course, are not made in a day. Remember: Ptolemy’s system, with the earth at the center of all things, reigned for 1,300 years even as it grew inordinately complex to explain new astronomical observations. A century after the publication of the great Pole’s theory of heliocentrism, Galileo still ran afoul of church authorities for his Copernican leanings. Orthodoxy dies hard.
As a first sally against the prevailing orthodoxy of neo-liberalism, today’s economic Copernicans have taken aim at austerity. It’s a fat target: belt-tightening, after all, is not only unpopular but unsound. Paul Krugman marshals the economic evidence in the latest New York Review of Books, concluding that the “chances of a real turn in policy, away from the austerity mania of the last few years and toward a renewed focus on job creation, are much better than conventional wisdom would have you believe.”
Nowhere is that clearer than in Europe. There, the case for austerity, explains Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson, “was that once governments began slashing their spending and deficits, markets would reward them by investing in their presumably more productive economies. But the reverse has happened. As Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain have cut their budgets, investors have grown less willing to buy their bonds. By plunging themselves deeper into recession, these nations have convinced investors not that they’re fiscally virtuous but that they won’t become economically viable for many more years.”http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/9091-waiting-for-copernicus-moving-beyond-wall-street-centric-economics
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