WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — It is not (yet) a revolution, but the overreach of neoliberal ideologues in pursuing economic growth regardless of the human cost is provoking a grassroots rebellion in Europe and the U.S.

The blinkered insistence of European policy makers in Brussels and Berlin on strict economic rules they believe sustain growth has not only failed to bring about that growth but has created in some parts of Europe what Greek leaders rightfully call a “humanitarian disaster.”

In the U.S., meanwhile, grassroots activists and liberal politicians have for once succeeded in pushing back against doubletalk about the economic benefits from trade deals that lead to lost jobs, lost industries and that ultimately undermine our long-term growth prospects.

Rep. John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat who is the oldest and longest-serving member of Congress, took to the pages of The Nation last week to inveigh against the damage done to his district in Detroit by the North American Free Trade Agreement and similar deals.

“The trade deals have meant a vicious cycle of abandoned production facilities, lost population, a diminished municipal tax base, lower funding for key city services like drinking water, and, in turn, more population loss,” Conyers wrote. “No marginal increase to GDP can justify the suffering and lost opportunity.”

Conyers goes on to challenge the blind faith in “economic growth” as the sole criterion for policy decisions, as explicitly espoused by Republic presidential aspirant Jeb Bush, but implicitly by politicians of all stripes, including President Barack Obama in his push for a trade deal to burnish his personal legacy.

“There’s just one problem with this line of thinking,” Conyers says. “Economic growth — our raw output of goods and services — is a questionable measure of our success or well-being as a nation. Growth, in some cases, runs counter to priorities that matter deeply to our people.”

The 86-year-old Democrat, first elected to Congress in 1964, cites the fiery speech Bobby Kennedy gave at the University of Kansas in launching his presidential campaign in March 1968, just weeks before he was assassinated.

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Kennedy lamented the focus on accumulation of material goods, as measured by what was then referred to as the gross national product, rather than other values important to the country.

“Gross national product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage,” Kennedy told the packed basketball arena at KU. “It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities.”

It counts, as Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders updated it last month, 23 varieties of underarm spray deodorants and scores of other useless products that we consume even as children go hungry in this country.

“Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play,” Kennedy continued in his 1968 speech. “It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”

Liberal Democrats like Conyers have spearheaded the party’s opposition to the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership and have succeeded in blocking it temporarily at least. They may have the momentum to torpedo it altogether.

As the Greek crisis escalates with Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras resisting a cave-in to creditors who are doubling down on neoliberal austerity measures that have proven to be a failure, the European establishment appears willing to risk the unknowable consequences of a Greek default in order to crush this ideological rebellion.

Economist James Galbraith chastised the International Monetary Fund and other creditors for their failure to make any concessions at all, even in the face of the palpable failure of their policy prescriptions.

Calling the IMF’s forecast that a contraction in the Greek economy would be a temporary prelude to renewed growth “the IMF’s worst predictive failure ever,” Galbraith cites IMF chief economist Olivier Blanchard by name and criticizes him for urging further cuts in Greek pensions that have already been cut by 40% in some cases.

“Blanchard insists that now is the time for ‘tough choices, and tough commitments to be made on both sides,’” Galbraith wrote this week in a post for Project Syndicate. “But the Greeks have already made tough choices. Now it is the IMF’s turn, beginning with the decision to admit that the policies it has imposed for five long years created a disaster.”

Galbraith has been an advisor to the Greek government and gave Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis an academic home at the University of Texas as the crisis in Greece wore on, so he is anything but a neutral observer.

But this son of legendary economist and Kennedy advisor John Kenneth Galbraith takes the same humanistic view as Bobby Kennedy expressed when he launched his short-lived presidential campaign.

The dominant media narrative is that Greece’s naïve leftists have squandered their good will with confrontational tactics and lost potential allies like Spain and Italy, whose leaders have seen it in their own best interests to toe the establishment line.

But that is the nature of rebellion. Whatever the short-term outcome of Tsipras’s resistance to neoliberal austerity, it will in the long run oblige Europe to soften its policies and take account of the welfare all individuals in the bloc.

Ditto for the Pacific trade deal. Whether or not the White House gets its fast-track authority, the welfare of workers and domestic industries will no longer be carelessly sacrificed for an incremental growth that gives them no benefit.