Weekend Economists Ring in the Old, Wring Out the New: Dec. 30, 2011 to Jan. 2, 2012

[bread_and_roses]

132. "We’ve got to change it all, and we’ve got to do it before the ice caps melt"

"Occupy Wall Street is by and large in phase one. Fair enough; it’s been only two months. Building a movement took the Populists ten or twenty years, so we could easily rest easily. But for most people I know, there is a deep, darkening sense that we do not have that kind of time. We’ve got to change it all, and we’ve got to do it before the ice caps melt, before that python, global finance, dies and squeezes its victims one last and lethal time. We are on the edge of history. We are urgency embodied."

This is the bottom line. Yet even those economists "on our side" are still, for the most part, parroting the "growth" mantra. This is where my imagination, my "hope" fails me - I think we've left it too long, that we can't do it in time. I wish I thought otherwise.

I have no hope. I see no future.