by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
For the last how many months the government of the UK, the coalition and the previous, have been telling that the country's economy was growing and the Great Recession history. Right, and pigs do fly after all.
Figures out at the end of January 2011 shows a 0.5 percent fall in gross domestic product in Britain. So, where is the growth or are we talking “negative growth” again.
So economists are starting to rumor that a double dip could be at hand, meaning that we could be headed headlong deep into the Great Recession, that never stopped, again.
Not that any of us who have their heads screwed on and unlike politicians do not live in cloud cuckoo land and in a parallel universe have ever believed that the Great Recession had passed.
Signs have been for a long time that things had but bottomed out and just gone up a very small fraction, though most of that was due to figures that were rather massaged.
With the redundancies in the public sector and other changes in that area and the knock-on effect in other industries, such as, alone, council subcontractors, this Recession is going to deepen rather than getting better. Or how, precisely, does the government think the economy can get “stimulated” when the majority have no spare cash?
Cold weather is now being blamed for this. It could not possible be anything else, could it now? The government is trying to wiggle out of taking the blame with this or that excuse and the severe winter weather seems to come in handy.
When are those politicians are going to wake up to the fact that the economy is still down in the dumps.
The other question is as to why do they all think, and with it most of us too, because of the way we are being influenced by their views, that we have to have an economy that is growing the gods only know how much on an almost monthly basis.
We seem to have this mindset that only growth, lots of growth, is good, and in order to create such growth we even have obsolescence factored into, even, expensive products, and an unrepairability (I know I have just coined a new word but I think you get my idea).
How come the world did not stop – the economic world especially – in those days of old when products were made to last, could and would be repaired and would be used for ages, often passed on to the next generation even?
Things were still being made, innovation and inventions, and the world did not stop. Today, though, everyone seems to think that unless the economy keeps and keeps going and GDP going up and up, everything will come to an end.
The ones who make such claims are the big multinationals, predominately, who are afraid that they won't have the huge profits anymore and will have to make do with less income.
It also has to be said that in those old days the great majority of the companies were family-owned, co-operatives, owned by a group of private individuals who shared the profits, and but very few were what would owned by the kind of shareholders of today.
People don't matter to them, whatever they may claim; it is only profits for them that does, and that is why they demand growth, growth and every more growth, creating and pushing the more, more, more culture.
The Great Recession still exists and may still get worse; we must prepare.
© 2011
