good old days are here again

And you knew who you were then
Girls were girls and men were men
Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again...

--"Those Were the Days"
Theme song of TV sitcom "All in the Family," sung by Archie and Edith Bunker

We're hearing ominous rumblings from the plutocrats who rule us as they congregate for their annual huddle at the G-20 meeting, this time in South Korea. The world's highest-placed movers and shakers have decided that worldwide government debt is the villain in the current economic malaise, and that reducing it is the cure from our troubles.

"The deficit hawks have taken over the G20" groans Paul Krugman, who writes on his blog today (via Atrios):

(D)on’t we need to worry about government debt? Yes — but slashing spending while the economy is still deeply depressed is both an extremely costly and quite ineffective way to reduce future debt. Costly, because it depresses the economy further; ineffective, because by depressing the economy, fiscal contraction now reduces tax receipts.

Argh, don't the Lords of the Universe putting their heads together in Busan know this? Haven't they studied the history of the First Great Depression of 1929-1940? Don't they know how disastrous Hoover's budget-balancing policies were? Of course they do.

So when Atrios says the reason this is happening, at a time of crisis-level unemployment in the States and rising unemployment in Europe, is because "The planet is ruled by idiots," I disagree. I believe it's the fruit of a deliberate ruling-class strategy to further impoverish and disenfranchise working-class people everywhere. They know that a population composed of desperate péones, preoccupied with satisfying the bare requirements of a hand-to-mouth existence, has little time and less inclination to mount a serious threat against the status quo.

They aren't at all worried about the chances of any serious revolutionary agitation breaking out anywhere at the moment, and are taking whatever steps are required to make it even less likely.