Corporate-friendly international agreement like TPP and TTIP, writes Monbiot, “could scarcely be better designed to exacerbate and universalise our multiple crises – financial, social and environmental.”
What have governments learned from the financial crisis? I could write a column spelling it out. Or I could do the same job with one word: nothing.
Actually, that’s too generous. The lessons learned are counter-lessons, anti-knowledge, new policies that could scarcely be better designed to ensure the crisis recurs, this time with added momentum and fewer remedies. And the financial crisis is just one of the multiple crises – in tax collection, public spending, public health and, above all, ecology – that the same counter-lessons accelerate.