Economist James Galbraith was on The Intercept's “Deconstructed” podcast, Sept. 17, and effectively schooled the Democrats in some physical economics. Without mentioning the word “green” for an entire 30 minutes, Galbraith strongly emphasized the need for a return to the Franklin D. Roosevelt New Deal. Short of Lyndon LaRouche, Galbraith’s words — which President Donald Trump would also do well to heed — are the clearest insight into the depth of the crisis we are facing.
Introduced by co-host Ryan Grim as the man who warned Democrats that their 2009 “stimulus” program was too weak to be effective, Galbraith was also described as “really clear-eyed but also not horribly politically biased.” Notably, economist’s first insights were to describe the “psychological impact” of the pandemic-induced collapse, or in Roosevelt’s words, “fear.” “People are uncertain of their future, their own jobs — they’ve either ended or they might end pretty soon. They’re facing cutbacks, even if they’re in relatively stable sectors like state and local government,” he said Add the threat of impending evictions and bankruptcies, and it all amounts to “an enormous retrenchment,” he said, only partly due to the health situation, but also because “people are uncertain of their economic futures — and rightly so.”
Galbraith said there would definitely be no “return to normal.” After first posing the uselessness of the service economy, where, “your job depends on my having an income and therefore me having a job,” he counterposed the example of the aircraft manufacturing sector, “which has been completely idled” — “whole sector needs to be reorganized and mobilized to do things that we actually need doing.” In sector after sector, this thinking applies, and although it only makes the job bigger and more significant, “There’s always work to do,” as he optimistically put it.
