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Austerity Poverty

Many of us often come face to face with poverty. Often only of a kind known as monetarypoverty. Someone by the name ofKumarendra Mallickrecently wrote on Face book:

Daridra Narayan,

the poor is the lord

has been an age-old slogan,

though a hollow one-

a convenient escape route

to flee from responsibility

by glorifying abject poverty

The rich have their ways

to mock at and cheat the poor

in some pretext or other

sometimes offering pest-eaten rice

and wheat at reduced rates

and at times waiving off bank loans

only to ensure their win in the election

Political parties in power often try to tackle it, but not really, because they themselves suffer fromanother kind, the mental poverty. They very often engage in extravagant expenditure till they facean economic crisis; and then they talk about austerity!! As someone else posted on Internet:

Everywhere, austerity is the demand of the day. To be sure, there are seeming exceptions for the momentin a few countries - China, Brazil, the Gulf states, and possibly a few others. But these are exceptions to a

demand that pervades the world-system today. In part, this demand is absolutely phony. In part, it reflects

a real economic problem. What are the issues?

On the one hand, the incredible wastefulness of a capitalist system has indeed led to a situation in whichthe world-system is threatened by its real inability to continue to consume globally at the level at which

the world has been doing it, especially since the absolute level of consumption is constantly increasing.

We are indeed exhausting basic elements for human survival, given the consumerism that has been the

http://www.facebook.com/kumarendramallickhttp://www.facebook.com/kumarendramallickhttp://www.resilience.org/stories/2012-12-15/austerity-at-whose-costhttp://www.resilience.org/stories/2012-12-15/austerity-at-whose-costhttp://www.facebook.com/kumarendramallick

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basis of our productive and speculative activities.

On the other hand, we know that global consumption has been highly unequal, both among countries andwithin countries. Furthermore, the gap between the current beneficiaries and the current losers has been

persistently growing. These divergences constitute the fundamental polarization of our world-system, notonly economically, but politically and culturally.

This is no longer much of a secret to the world's populations. Climate change and its consequences, food

and water shortages and their consequences are visible to more and more people, many of whom arebeginning to call for a shift in civilizational values - away from consumerism.

The austerity that is being practiced is an austerity imposed on the economically weaker parts of theworld populations. Governments are seeking to save themselves from the prospect of bankruptcies and to

shield mega-corporations (especially but not only mega-banks) from paying the price (lost revenue) of

their egregious follies and self-inflicted wounds. The way they are trying to do this is essentially bycutting back (if not eliminating altogether) the safety nets that were historically erected to save

individuals from the consequences of unemployment, serious illness, housing foreclosures, and all theother concrete problems that people and their families regularly face........

Immanuel Wallerstein

Both have a point indeed!! But miss the larger picture perhaps!! What about mental poverty that afflicts amajor fraction of any society; is there any need foe austerity in this sphere?

Rakesh Mohan Hallen