Government spending targets another housing boom

GuidesWeek for week ending December 27th, 2008

My mother bought herself a DVD player for Christmas. She had discovered that the epic 1967 BBC serialisation of The Forsyte Saga was available on DVD and, by this inverted route, took her plunge into the digital world.

I declined the offer of marathon viewing sessions over the holiday but a glance at the box gave me pause for thought. The echo of John Galsworthy’s salutary tale of late Victorian middle class obsession with property has exploded in our faces in 2008. It is our continuing addiction, abetted by the parasitical financial industry, that lies at the heart of the 2008 economic meltdown.

Far from taking this opportunity to ask searching questions about the prevailing economic model, our leaders appear bent on restoring the values of the Forsytes, wanting nothing more than to see house prices return to their dizzy ways. In rescuing banks and conjuring up immense spending plans, governments are tugging the levers of geriatric economic machinery constructed over 60 years ago.

Many of us will see this strategy as a recipe for more global inequality and environmental dysfunction. It also exposes how the option of fighting economic malaise with public spending is exclusive to the richer countries which possess the tax collection capacity to underwrite their debt.

This is a worrying replication of the interdependence of climate change

Developing countries are poorly equipped to combat the consequences of a crisis which has been caused by economic mismanagement elsewhere. This is a worrying replication of the interdependence of climate change. No wonder the development agencies are putting out a red alert for world poverty in 2009.

Galsworthy would surely have seized on the choice of words in naming the US government’s $700 billion flagship rescue plan as the “Troubled Asset Relief Program”. To associate worthless paper assets with the language of humanitarian aid is an act of imagination quite beyond anything in the program itself.

As we lurch into a new year, our task in fighting global injustice is to compel governments to define the goals of the global financial system for which our futures have been mortgaged. And next time a multi-billion dollar spending spree is envisaged, first in the queue should be the “Troubled People’s Relief Program”.

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The BBC 1967 production of The Forsyte Saga on DVD
From our US Amazon Store
From our UK Amazon Store

OneWorld Guides for reference:
Hunger: Countries at Risk

OneWorld Guides updated this week:
Serbia

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