by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
In November 2011 the OECD announced that Britain had entered a double-dip recession while the UK government was and is to this day trying to brainwash the people into believing that all is hunky dory. Well it isn't.
It did hardly take an economist to realize that Britain was and is in a double-dip recessing and no manipulation and massaging of figures helps there. The fact has been evident to me, a non-economist, for moths already and that we were not in the least, despite all the talk by the government, coming out of the Great Recession. Rather the opposite and it is not only the UK alone that is still in recession and is sinking further.
As Mervin King, Governor of the Bank of England, stated a while back as to the fact that our living standards will never come back to the level that they have been in the last part of the last century and the very early part of this one and which had gotten used to.
Far from it, I would say. The fact is the those very same living standards are slipping further and further downhill as with constant rising food and fuel costs.
Our Dear Leaders do, however, still try to cerate the illusion that it will come right again and that very soon and that business as before will back soon. They really live on a planet other than ours, of that I am sure. Sorry folks to have to disappoint you, and our Dear Leaders, but it is rime to wake up and smell those roses.
And the smell of those roses is not a pretty and pleasant one, I am afraid to say, all things considered. Life as we have known it – especially those with some money – is about to come to an end, if it has not, in fact, come to an end already and is lying in its death throws.
The economic system of continuous growth is not, and never was, sustainable and was only possible due to the wholesale exploitation of the Planet, its people and resources, and a system of factored in obsolescence and of continuously buying more and new. This entire system is harming the entire system and it needs to be abandoned.
The governments are on about almost continuously as to the need for growth and ever more growth but, as said, this is not good for us and especially not our fellow travellers on this Planet and the Planet itself. The present economic system, based on the ever more growth principle no longer is a sustainable way to go and, in fact, it never was.
But, I somewhat digressed...
Fact is that we are still – or again – whichever way you wish to look at it – in the Great Recession and it would appear that that is where we, that is the UK, but not only the UK, may remain or keep dropping into.
The double-dip may become a wavy line and we must find a new economic system. It is no good trying to continuously fix the broken one. It has become obsolete. It was never fir for the purpose to start with. A bit like government computer systems.
An alternative to our current system, aside from those that are seriously alternative, such as local currencies, barter, etc., has been suggested by Zac Goldsmith, MP, in his book “The Constant Economy”. And the old, and well-thumbed book “Small is Beautiful” by E. F. Schumacher, which was subtitled “Economy as if people mattered”, too will give appropriate ideas.
We need to change our economic system in order to get away from those constant and without current system unavoidable boom and bust cycles and swings.
An economy that is constant and without recessions is possible, but will the politicians buy it.
© 2012
