Pushing Back Against Austerity: Hickey and Eskow on Pivot Point with Maya Rockeymoore

OurFuture.org’s Roger Hickey and Richard Eskow explain during their appearance Sunday on “Pivot Point with Maya Rockeymoore” what it will take for progressives to win the fight against conservative austerity economic policies that are holding down the economy and preventing the job growth that we need.

“The great thing is that the idea of austerity has been debunked in recent months,” Hickey points out in the interview, citing the recent disclosure that an influential paper written by Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff that encouraged U.S. and European to support austerity measures contained mathematical errors that undercut its thesis. “It’s been very, very clear now that this medicine that’s been prescribed by these witch doctors has been bleeding our economy and yet the whole thing has been on automatic pilot, so we are continuing to see sequestration sap the strength of the economy.”

But Richard Eskow warns that while the intellectual underpinnings of austerity has been “completely discredited,” he goes on to say that “I would argue that this was never primarily an intellectual movement. It was a movement of economic self-interest on the part of certain parties that needed intellectual cover, so in that sense it is very much alive and very much dangerous.”

Author:

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.