The Zimbabwefication of the British economy

Today brings news of some frightfully desperate attempts to keep the British economy from completely foundering in the stormy economic global waters. However as they are being promoted by the very government and politicians that caused all the problems in the first place, their track record isn’t that good. We’ve heard no mea culpas either.

It was Einstein that said “We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them” Good advise from a very intelligent man, but obviously lost on the UK government, and pretty well nearly every other politician and economic guru in the world. I have previously explained that the cause of this economic crisis is fundamentally, an environmental one. In which case not recognising this fact dooms every measure to stimulate our moribund economy to futility

So the UK is going to print £75 billion dollars, and make up to £150 billion available to the economy by buying up government gilts, and at the same it has reduced interest rates to 0.5%., the lowest ever in the Bank of England’s entire history. News also that house prices have fallen by more in the UK than in any other country, Latvia excepted, even Iceland has done marginally better. You can read about his for instance in the Independent.

It would appear that the UK’s PM, Gordon Brown, has been taking lessons in economic management from Robert Mugabwe, now, there’s a man who really knows how to run a country. And Gordon would have known, even while he was speaking to and lecturing the US Senate on how to save the world economy, what plans he had for financing the UK by printing money that the UK doesn’t possess. And, according to the Independent, you don’t even have to print the money nowadays, you do it all electronically. Makes life and lies so much easier.

I have, as readers to this blog will know, written quite a lot of e-mails to our media, requesting them to stop interviewing the same incompetent economic commentators about this crisis, and suggesting instead getting an environmental economist, or preferably an ecological economist to comment on what is happening in the world presently. Their listeners desperately need another point of view. I don’t get any acknowledgement, and neither does the content of their programmes change.

The New Zealand Greens are having a policy conference next weekend, and I have learnt this evening that they have invited Dr. Robert Constanza to talk here in Wellington next week. He is a well know ecological economist, and is professor at Vermont University. He co-founded the International Society of Ecological Economists. It doesn’t say in Wiki, but I wonder if that was with Herman Daly, whom I mention in an earlier blog.

I was delighted to hear this, I hope that Dr Constanza can be interviewed on radio and TV while he is here, though I suspect he won’t because his message is most unlikely to fit in with the media’s unstated agendas. It would be good if he could meet John Kay, our PM, but that is even more unlikely, and in any case, John Kay is so saturated with moneterist economic dogma, probably he wouldn’t be capable of understanding what Dr. Constanza is likely to tell him. Ditto Gordon Brown. Obama, I don’t know. We are hearing from the new US leadership a great deal more about a new, green economy, but they are still pumping tens of billions into a dead and corrupt US car industry, and even more rescuing rotten banks- this money will disappear for ever. What I’d really like to hear from Obama is the admission that the old economy is dead, long live the new one. A US$500 billion investment in solar power in the SW states would also be a sign of the needed sea change.

I and my wife will be going to hear Robert Constanza speak, I am really looking forward to hearing someone expert who can give a much needed perspective on what is happening in the world, and some direction, and hope, for the future.

And that’s because Gordon Brown’s nostrums give me no hope at all. It probably hasn’t escaped the reader’s attention that the photo of the Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe could be a picturesque and grand metaphor for the world’s economy.

End