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Economy
Phew, finally recession rides to the rescue
There’s something different about this otherwise typical down side to the economic cycle. This time, it’s welcomed
By Kevin Potvin
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Now everyone’s lost their heads over the once-titanium economy. It wasn’t very long ago when every business page columnist and yammering TV-friendly investment house analyst celebrated the end of recessionary cycles and sneered at those lone few voices who expressed fear about the shaky house of cards it all turned out to be. Now, all US presidential candidates along with their play-by-play horse race callers flood every channel of US media with increasingly shrill observations and increasingly desperate emergency measures, all of which naturally spills over into our media and into our political culture. Quite suddenly, the non-debate about whether the global economy could or could not fall ever again has swung to the opposite extreme, a non-debate about how far its utter collapse will go. It’s nothing new. Economies go up and down with almost boring regularity, and whenever they’re up, everyone thinks they’ll never go down again, and whenever they’re down, everyone thinks they’ll never go up again. It’s like so many sheep bleating in surprise each morning the sun comes up, and mewing in fear each evening the sun goes down again. The interesting historical aspect about this particular down slope of the cycle is its bonded relationship to an entirely non-cyclical, and wholly new, problem. The high and rising levels of emissions of greenhouse gasses and their proven deleterious effects on the natural environment of our home planet, in particular on the heat trapped around the surface where we’re all confined to live, changes utterly the public perception of the impending economic recession. Almost all government and business responses to this new circumstance offer at best to reduce the emissions intensity per economic unit. But if the globe’s overall economy generally continues to grow at even a modest rate, virtually no achievable reductions in emissions intensity will slow the growth of emissions in absolute terms, never mind actually reducing those emissions by the large degree that scientists are insisting they must be if we expect to continue enjoying a mostly benign environment. The only way to lower global levels of emissions of greenhouse gasses is through a sustained reduction in nearly all economic activities. The human community as a whole needs to consume less, to eat less, to drive less, to fly less, to buy less, and simply to do less. In economic terms, what is required is a long-term, managed global economic recession—that is, a coordinated global depression, and a pretty serious one to boot. Until now, the words “recession” and “depression” have been nearly universally regarded as bad things that need to be immediately remedied. Probably for the first time in history, economists and government and business leaders are confronted by confusing counter-intuitive popular and scientifically sound pressures to achieve the exact opposite of everything they’ve been raised and trained to produce. For the first time in the eternal cycle of economic growth and economic recession, growth is rejected and recession is welcomed. The people intuitively know there’s a new reality taking hold. News of global economic recession hasn’t been met this time with the usual widespread popular discontent, despite the best attempts of the corporate media to whip up that usual discontent. There is, in the murmur of the streets, an audible and entirely new note, if only in the background for now, of relief. Those who listen for it and pick up on that new note and concoct methods of managed economic shrinkage will be the leaders of tomorrow. The first brave pioneers will be those who stand up and pronounce that the recession, even the depression, in this current cycle, is a good thing that should not be remedied, but rather nurtured. They’ll be ridiculed and dismissed, but they’ll be right, and they will gather the forces of popular opinion behind them, perhaps slowly, if we are to go through a process of reform, or suddenly, if we are to go through a process of revolution. Or they might not, but failing profound reform or revolution, we will experience every prediction of environmental disaster and catastrophe being described by scientists, and probably more than can be imagined, beginning probably within the lifetime of the average person alive today.
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The Republic of East Vancouver masthead
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