Nothing to see here

I have received the Crikey newsletter on and off for a few years. For those unfamiliar with the on-line publication, it is an independent news service that takes a slightly tangential look at current events. Most would label the perspective expressed as veering to the left, but I'd prefer to depict it as taking umbrage with everyone and everything.

It is a good read nonetheless. The debate on climate change gets an airing like nowhere else in the media- even the denialists and conspiracy theorists get their moment in the sun.

I'm particularly taken though with the material dealing with what isn't being said about the GFC and its aftermath. I'm quite deeply suspicious of the 'nothing more to see here' approach that world governments have now adopted, and of being told that it is all over and we are now on the path to prosperity and untold riches once more.

With reference to this I found an essay in Crikey today from Richard Nasht excellent reading. Nasht is the producer of Addicted to Money, a new TV series that starts on the ABC tonight at 8-30pm, dealing with the fallout from the GFC. A couple of things that he wrote in the Crikey piece resonated with me,

"We’re kidding ourselves if we believe that somehow the scars of this collapse won’t be with us for decades. For now the panicked response has been to buy our way out of trouble, dealing with a debt crisis by piling on more debt. "

This has always been the great contradiction for me- a crisis caused by debt has been miraculously solved by going into more debt? I don't think so. He continues,

"There has been precious little done to address the systemic problems revealed by the crisis, and as Professor Elizabeth Warren, chair of the oversight committee investigating what happened to America’s bail-out money, told us, "we’re now in a permanent hostage situation". The surviving global financial institutions are in control and out of control at the same time, too big to fail and too powerful to be restrained."

Or expressed in another way, the lunatics are now running the asylum. This too makes a pertinent point,

"We’ve hit our ecological limits and the old growth-economy mantra will no longer work. Yet I think we are also missing another, even more important message from the GFC -- it reveals a shortage of ideas. Government's around the world spend a tiny proportion of their time or money planning, yet this is where the majority of us will be living most of our lives."

It sounds like a show worth watching. Addicted to Money, Thursday, 8-30pm