Consumption Crisis

Remember after 9/11 G W Bush told America that the best thing to do was to go shopping? America listened and now faces the consequences of this disasterous neo-con advice.

Shop for victory. Buy for Bush and Blair. What to get? Big, expensive stuff, clearly, now that Vigilance rather than Prudence stalks the Treasury, and the £2.2 billion contingency reserve has largely gone on fighting foot and mouth and other pre-Taliban adversaries. But conspicuous spending seems obscene when the first flurries of war begin and when Afghan refugees eat grass or weeds.

Through out the eighties and ninties as the neo-con agenda took over governments around the world those proclaiming the new rights agenda continually promoted globalization reminding us that the advanced industrialized capitalist countries were now transfroming from fordist manufacturing economies to service industries. No longer were we to be workers, we were consumers. Others would work for us. With the great crash of 2008 the chickens have come home to roost for that bankrupt ideology.

Furthermore the ideology of the neo-cons was that we should no longer be renters but owners. Thatcher began the transformation in England, with the selling off of row housing to those who rented.

In America the ideology of home ownership began with Clinton and continued under Bush. Congress pushed the idea of homeownership as self reliance and responsibility. It conincided with both Thatchers push and Clintons push to adopt the neo-con agenda of work for welfare. They go hand in hand.

Of course during this past presidential election republicans and right wing commentators focused on this push for homeownership and lowering the mortgage credit limits as being for African Americans. Forgetting that most working poor could not afford thier own homes without a more liberal mortgange scheme.

However all this is moot. The reason for America's economic collapse is twenty years of promoting credit based consumption. Unemployment and corporate restructuring has been continous since the eighties. Offshoring and contracting out, privatization of public services, all the practices of the neo-con agenda have resulted in a growth in credit and consumption and a decline in manufacturing production.

The result was the ultimate in credit crunch economics; the war in Iraq.