On The Current Crisis

The article includes the following conclusion:

If we want to understand the scale of the intellectual collapse we will have to pay

a sight more attention to our recent history, and to the remnants of the critical

tradition in political economy. Dan Atkinson and Larry Elliott’s The Gods that

Failed is a good place to start, if you are interested in how the postwar system

was dismantled40. I have also learnt a good deal from Ann Pettifor’s The Coming

First World Debt Crisis, and Graham Turner’s The Credit Crunch. In general we

should pay more attention to those who were concerned about income

inequality and unsustainable lending, less to those who thought everything was

fine.

As I write Barack Obama seems intent on hiring many of the financial

masterminds who presided over the crisis. Jonathan Weil, the man who rumbled

the long con at Enron, notes that ‘almost half the people on Obama's economic

advisory board have held fiduciary positions at companies that, to one degree or

another, either fried their financial statements, helped send the world into an

economic tailspin, or both’41.

They will not jump, these people. They cannot easily accept that they are

presiding over a system that must be replaced. They will not give way willingly

to new ideas and a new reckoning with the problems facing the planet. The

world will always be run by confident and impressionable men (mostly men),

because they want power so badly. We could of old age waiting for the full

enormity of what they have done to sink in.

I am not saying that we should push those responsible out of tall buildings to

their deaths. I am not saying that. They will, if properly handled, do what is

required.

But we do have to push them.

Cultural Studies