I was scarred by George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead as a child. I somehow was allowed to tag along with an older sister and a date to a drive-in and I cringed in the back seat as zombies tried to eat the brains of Americans.
As an adult watching this film, I was less scared by the cheesy visuals and amused that the “victims” were already mindless as they moved around a shopping mall buying stuff they didn’t need. But I still have nightmares about zombies. Now, however, those nightmares are real.
The neoliberal economic policies of our government, like Romero’s zombies, continue to eat our brains when they should have been dead long ago. And the fact that no matter how clear it is that neoliberal economic policies should have been killed because they didn’t work and they brought the U.S. and the world to financial ruin, they just keep popping up, alive, ready to eat our brains.
Today’s news makes the threat of zombie neoliberalism as scary as the first time I watched Romero’s horror classic. My heart is beating faster and I want to close my eyes and look away, but there is something about the horror of our economy that forces me to watch. It is now increasingly obvious that due to neoliberal economic ideology that believes the market will solve all our problems, we are probably entering a double dip recession. According to The New York Times,
It has been three decades since the United States suffered a recession that followed on the heels of the previous one. But it could be happening again. The unrelenting negative economic news of the past two weeks has painted a picture of a United States economy that fell further and recovered less than we had thought.
The solution to such a double dip would have been a sufficient spending from the government. Instead, we got some stimulus and lots and lots of cuts in spending on important social programs. Even the markets understand this is bad for the living and have responded by falling precipitously around the world.
But at the same time that the economy is tanking due to a Congress that would rather cut than stimulate, we continue to allow the rich to pay no taxes at all. According to recently released IRS data, over 1,400 millionaires paid zero dollars in federal taxes. This is neoliberalism at it’s worst. The zombie-like claim that businesses and the wealthy people who own them should not be taxed or even very regulated since they will create jobs and then the wealth from those jobs will “trickle down” to the rest of us should be dead. But it’s not.
The U.S. government stepped back from regulating the market and from taxing the wealthy in the late 1970s, just about the time that Dawn of the Dead was released. That’s when the deregulation of the banking industry began. A few years later, the idea that the rich should not be fettered by anything as harmful as taxation became official policy as Reaganomics ate our brains.
But it’s 2011. Surely we should be able see neoliberal economic policies that give to the rich with the claim that it will help all of us as the monsters they are? But instead we stumble toward them, begging them to eat our brains, take our money, and make sure the super rich among us don’t pay taxes so they can continue shopping.
