Source – wagingnonviolence.org
– McKinsey, one of the world’s preeminent business consultants, released a sobering new report this week detailing that, worldwide, total debt has risen by 40.1 percent — or $57 billion — since the financial crisis of 2008. “Debt,” here, can mean many things: debt to other countries and international institutions, as in Greece and Italy, which were bailed out by the troika; it also means debt to financial institutions, or household and personal debt of the kind those of us paying off mortgages, medical debt or student loans here in the states know all too well. It all means bad news for the economy.
While the economic challenge posed by capitalism’s own zombie apocalypse is obvious, it’s also, maybe even primarily, a political challenge. In the absence of significant popular pressure, global elites (politicians, bankers, etc.) are likely to respond to the coming financial crisis like they did the last one: the wrong way. Rather than putting money into the “real economy,” where we live, spend, love and work, politicians in 2008 chose to prop up the bankers and speculators who got us into the mess in the first place. Consequently, the only industry that’s grown significantly since 2008 is the financial sector. In other words, they bailed out the wrong people and are likely to do so again and again. Given our current political landscape, they’re also more likely to ground us further into a vicious cycle of austerity and “backdoor privatization,” as Ashcroft calls it. That is, cutting spending and public services to save money, starving out vital public services and paving the way for private industry to buy up our now husk-like social safety net, post offices, public transit systems, schools, etc. As the private market drives down wages and busts unions, people’s ability to buy the houses, cars and expensive educations they’re being marketed decreases, leading those same people to take on even more personal debt and landing us all back at square one: more debt, more crisis.
While some economists might have you believe that their choices are based on cold hard calculations, the choices of where to allocate money — especially in the wake of a financial crisis — are ideological. It’s not an ideology of evil bloodsuckers, but of a heartfelt, pragmatic belief that more resources should be controlled by fewer people. Similarly, zombies are driven by their physical need for brains. Are zombies evil? Certainly not, but their primary interest in the acquisition of brains is directly opposed to our own as people with brains.
RIELPOLITIK 