Time for a Coalition of the Rational (by: Katrina vanden Heuvel)

http://www.thenation.com/blog/168737/time-coalition-rational

Paul Krugman sounds frustrated. “You tend to think,” he told last month’s Netroots Nation conference, “that people who are demanding that we solve this [depression] quickly must be crazy idealists who are defying the wisdom of economic knowledge. But it’s actually the other way around. It’s actually the people in charge, who are refusing to end this thing quickly, who are ignoring the lessons of history and rejecting economic knowledge.”

Krugman’s consternation is easy to understand. While mainstream reporters rank gaffes and mainstream politicians demagogue the deficit, hard realities loom, against which elite discourse seems almost innocent. A rolling world economic crisis could easily lead to a Second Great Depression. The ongoing decline of middle-class wealth and income is steadily transforming the United States. The Euro project and the European social welfare state both face collapse. Disorder spreads in the Middle East. China’s high-savings economic model breeds twin political and economic crises that could shake geo-economics for decades. And the thirty-year build-up of private-public debt in the Western world will require extraordinary measures to keep it from bringing down the global economy.

But as our political system (bailouts for bankers aside) proves congenitally resistant to extraordinary measures, our elites (right-wing revolutionaries aside) shrink from even proposing them. Nowhere is elite failure clearer than in economics, a profession whose rightward drift proceeded undisturbed even after a toxic mix of neoclassical and neoliberal models crashed economies and dashed hopes for millions.