Suddenly it’s alright, if not de rigueur, for the political elite to talk about capitalism – so long as you end up praising the system rather than burying it.
Yesterday it was prime minister Cameron’s turn. He came out against “turbo-charged” capitalism, declared that City bonuses were “out of control” and said the Tories favoured “social responsibility”.
Naturally, the leader of Britain’s most significant ruling class party was not about to propose a radical alternative. In fact, Cameron insisted that the “real solution” to the system’s current problems was “more enterprise, competition and innovation”.
Open markets, he declared, were the “the best imaginable force” no less for “improving human wealth and happiness” and could “actually promote morality”. Believe that and you’ll believe anything.
The question is: why is Cameron so desperate to preach the alleged virtues of capitalism and markets at this particular moment? Why did Clegg call for a John Lewis co-ownership model of capitalism? What made Miliband distinguish between “predatory” and “good capitalism”?
What unites them is their role as political custodians of the capitalist system, sharing out the management of the wider state’s responsibility for its development. Just as importantly, their job is sustain the system’s legitimacy in the eyes of the majority, which it requires if the 1% is to stay in control.
And that is what is under pressure, as every survey reveals. Trust in and support for mainstream politics and politicians, as well as the operations of big business and banks, is ebbing away.
The parliamentary democratic state system is rightly viewed as partisan for siding with corporate interests in the crisis, bailing out banks while taking it out on ordinary people. In practice, it is undemocratic. A million young people are out of work; living standards have been savaged; many require two or more low-paid jobs to make ends meet while key public services are being wrecked.
Enter Cameron, Clegg and Miliband. Together they are critical of “corporate greed” and other features but carefully avoid any censure of the fundamentals of the capitalist system let alone suggest there might (or ought to) be an alternative. Even Cameron’s criticism of New Labour’s “Faustian pact” with the banks (on which he is right) is another diversionary attack.
For it is neither corporate greed (capitalists down the ages have practised this) nor the excesses of banks and bankers (also not new) that lie at the heart of the present downward spiral into global depression on a scale scarcely imaginable because it has no parallels.
The financial system provided the credit (and its twin, debt) for a globalised economy that is required to grow year on year to sustain profit levels and satisfy shareholders. Going into reverse, destroying production and sacking people, is what happens when debt overwhelms consumers.
Banks collapsed because bad debts began to mount, calling into doubt the questionable value attributed to all sorts of assets that looked good on paper so long as they earned an income. Meltdown II is now on the cards. A new credit crunch already exists and the debt crisis overwhelming the eurozone is a reflection of the recession.
Reining in City bonuses or curbing executive pay will make not a jot of difference to how this crisis unfolds. This is merely the froth of capitalism as a system of production and exchange. Creating an alternative system which does not depend on constant expansion in search of profit is the basis of a sustainable, rational alternative.
Inevitably that means taking ownership and control of capital out the hands of the reckless minority and placing it under democratic stewardship. That is what distinguishes us from Cameron, Clegg and especially Miliband.
Paul Feldman
Communications editor
For revolutionary solutions to create a sustainable, not-for-profit economy in place of global capital alongside a real democracy based on People’s Assemblies. Visit our web site at www.aworldtowin.net
Showing posts with label City bonuses. Show all posts
Showing posts with label City bonuses. Show all posts
Friday, January 20, 2012
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Draw up the charge sheet!
If you were drawing up an indictment of those responsible for the present Great Crash, it would embrace more than just a few bankers delivering a well-rehearsed “sorry” before a committee of tame MPs as they did yesterday. Those in the dock would have to include governments like New Labour, corporate executives, those who run the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB) and the so-called regulators who turned a blind eye as global capitalism gorged itself on fantasy finance.
These are the people and organisations who between them promoted the expansion of an unsustainable system that is collapsing before our eyes. Today’s figures showing unemployment close to 2 million do not tell half the story. They exclude the current avalanche of job losses and the many who do not register. Unemployment in the UK is now increasing twice as fast as the average across Europe.
Here is some evidence for the charge sheet.
Take the prime minister, Gordon Brown. In June 2007 he told bankers that he had “been able year by year to record how the City of London has risen by your efforts, ingenuity and creativity to become a new world leader”. and that the City’s “remarkable achievements” marked “an era that history will record as the beginning of a new golden age for the City of London”.
As to the New Labour government as a whole, since 1997 it has introduced the lowest corporation tax of any major economy, privatised large areas of public services and retained the most draconian anti-union laws in Europe. Anyone who served in these governments has to be indicted for their contribution to the Great Crash.
The WTO, IMF and WB are responsible for promoting a globalisation that has been entirely corporate-driven, based on deregulation, the enforced destruction/selling off of public services, investment in cheap labour areas and the expansion of the capitalist market economic model into every part of the globe. All those in charge of these organisations should be indicted too.
Transnational corporations (TNCs), propelled by the need to grow profits year on year, expanded production by borrowing vast sums from the banks, setting in motion the world of fantasy finance. They also ravaged the earth’s resources and are largely responsible for the acceleration of climate change. The chief executives and directors of the TNCs should also find themselves on the charge sheet.
Bankers, hedge funds, derivatives speculators et al. With an economy based on corporate and personal debt, they naturally turned this to their advantage. Debt became credit and vice versa. Untold riches were made by packaging up bundles of debt and selling them on. Money begat money in a fantasy world that seemed to defy economic laws where value is only created by the blood, sweat of tears of people actually making something useful.
The leaders of the financial sector need to be charged with bloodsucking! They could be joined by their friends in the so-called Financial Services Authority, which was warned of the present catastrophe by a whistleblower but did nothing about it.
If you think this charge sheet is drastic, remember that a senior writer in the Financial Times urged society recently to shoot the bankers without ceremony. At least my way they’ll get a trial! And when the former masters of the universe and their political cronies are sent off for a very long period of rehabilitation before their possible reintegration into society, they’ll leave room for us to establish a saner, more rational, more democratic, more sustainable society and economy based on providing for real need.
Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor
These are the people and organisations who between them promoted the expansion of an unsustainable system that is collapsing before our eyes. Today’s figures showing unemployment close to 2 million do not tell half the story. They exclude the current avalanche of job losses and the many who do not register. Unemployment in the UK is now increasing twice as fast as the average across Europe.
Here is some evidence for the charge sheet.
Take the prime minister, Gordon Brown. In June 2007 he told bankers that he had “been able year by year to record how the City of London has risen by your efforts, ingenuity and creativity to become a new world leader”. and that the City’s “remarkable achievements” marked “an era that history will record as the beginning of a new golden age for the City of London”.
As to the New Labour government as a whole, since 1997 it has introduced the lowest corporation tax of any major economy, privatised large areas of public services and retained the most draconian anti-union laws in Europe. Anyone who served in these governments has to be indicted for their contribution to the Great Crash.
The WTO, IMF and WB are responsible for promoting a globalisation that has been entirely corporate-driven, based on deregulation, the enforced destruction/selling off of public services, investment in cheap labour areas and the expansion of the capitalist market economic model into every part of the globe. All those in charge of these organisations should be indicted too.
Transnational corporations (TNCs), propelled by the need to grow profits year on year, expanded production by borrowing vast sums from the banks, setting in motion the world of fantasy finance. They also ravaged the earth’s resources and are largely responsible for the acceleration of climate change. The chief executives and directors of the TNCs should also find themselves on the charge sheet.
Bankers, hedge funds, derivatives speculators et al. With an economy based on corporate and personal debt, they naturally turned this to their advantage. Debt became credit and vice versa. Untold riches were made by packaging up bundles of debt and selling them on. Money begat money in a fantasy world that seemed to defy economic laws where value is only created by the blood, sweat of tears of people actually making something useful.
The leaders of the financial sector need to be charged with bloodsucking! They could be joined by their friends in the so-called Financial Services Authority, which was warned of the present catastrophe by a whistleblower but did nothing about it.
If you think this charge sheet is drastic, remember that a senior writer in the Financial Times urged society recently to shoot the bankers without ceremony. At least my way they’ll get a trial! And when the former masters of the universe and their political cronies are sent off for a very long period of rehabilitation before their possible reintegration into society, they’ll leave room for us to establish a saner, more rational, more democratic, more sustainable society and economy based on providing for real need.
Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Balls spills the beans
There are at least two conclusions you can draw from the admission by Ed Balls, the schools minister, that Britain is facing its most severe economic and financial crisis for more than a century: We have been systematically lied to about the severity of the rapidly developing catastrophe and the public is being softened up for dramatic political developments.
Balls, the prime minister’s closest political ally and economics adviser to Brown when he was chancellor, is, along with the rest of the government, privy to information we don’t have access to. So when Balls says that the crisis was "more extreme and more serious than that of the 1930s" and that these were "seismic events that are going to change the political landscape", he is only letting the cat out of the bag.
That’s why Downing Street was today trying to “explain” that Balls did not actually mean what he said, just as No.10 had to “explain” last week that Brown’s use of the D word in the Commons was also a “slip of the tongue”, and that the prime minister meant recession and not depression. A Freudian slip might be a more honest account.
For the New Labour government actually knows that the banking system is shattered and beyond repair, that jobs are vanishing at an unprecedented rate, that demand for everything except food has collapsed, that the pound is on its knees on foreign exchange markets and that Britain is the most vulnerable of all the advanced economies because of its reliance on a now broken financial sector.
And yet the government staggers from pillar to post, with a bail-out here and a bail-out there and a pathetic inquiry about City bonuses headed by Sir David Walker, who enjoyed and sanctioned bonuses when chairman of investment bank Morgan Stanley International. Walker earned the nickname Mr Whitewash after being closely involved in two previous inquiries – into the transparency of the private equity industry and ethical standards at BAe Systems – that led to little change.
Back to Balls, who told New Labour members in Yorkshire: "We now are seeing the realities of globalisation, though at a speed, pace and ferocity which none of us have seen before. The reality is that this is becoming the most serious global recession for, I'm sure, over 100 years as it will turn out." More to the point, Balls also them that they should remember how the politics of the 1930s “were shaped by the economy".
We are left to draw our own conclusions about what he implying. The politics of that period included fascism in Germany and Spain, military dictatorship in Japan and, of course, national, coalition rule in Britain following the collapse of Ramsay MacDonald’s minority Labour government in 1931. So which of these are we are being softened up for by Balls’ reference to “seismic events” that will change the “political landscape”?
None of these “choices” are acceptable yet the fact is that we now have a profound political crisis alongside the global economic and financial crisis. This is making itself felt in every country, including America where president Obama is already in some difficulties, in Spain, where the government is being overwhelmed by the growth of unemployment and in France, where Sarkozy is under enormous popular pressure.
At times like these, there is an all too apparent danger that the façade of the parliamentary democratic state will be torn aside in favour of some sort of emergency, authoritarian rule. Such a move will expose the capitalist state for what it is – an instrument for preserving the rule of the corporations and banks at any cost. Balls has spilled the beans and we should take note.
Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor
Balls, the prime minister’s closest political ally and economics adviser to Brown when he was chancellor, is, along with the rest of the government, privy to information we don’t have access to. So when Balls says that the crisis was "more extreme and more serious than that of the 1930s" and that these were "seismic events that are going to change the political landscape", he is only letting the cat out of the bag.
That’s why Downing Street was today trying to “explain” that Balls did not actually mean what he said, just as No.10 had to “explain” last week that Brown’s use of the D word in the Commons was also a “slip of the tongue”, and that the prime minister meant recession and not depression. A Freudian slip might be a more honest account.
For the New Labour government actually knows that the banking system is shattered and beyond repair, that jobs are vanishing at an unprecedented rate, that demand for everything except food has collapsed, that the pound is on its knees on foreign exchange markets and that Britain is the most vulnerable of all the advanced economies because of its reliance on a now broken financial sector.
And yet the government staggers from pillar to post, with a bail-out here and a bail-out there and a pathetic inquiry about City bonuses headed by Sir David Walker, who enjoyed and sanctioned bonuses when chairman of investment bank Morgan Stanley International. Walker earned the nickname Mr Whitewash after being closely involved in two previous inquiries – into the transparency of the private equity industry and ethical standards at BAe Systems – that led to little change.
Back to Balls, who told New Labour members in Yorkshire: "We now are seeing the realities of globalisation, though at a speed, pace and ferocity which none of us have seen before. The reality is that this is becoming the most serious global recession for, I'm sure, over 100 years as it will turn out." More to the point, Balls also them that they should remember how the politics of the 1930s “were shaped by the economy".
We are left to draw our own conclusions about what he implying. The politics of that period included fascism in Germany and Spain, military dictatorship in Japan and, of course, national, coalition rule in Britain following the collapse of Ramsay MacDonald’s minority Labour government in 1931. So which of these are we are being softened up for by Balls’ reference to “seismic events” that will change the “political landscape”?
None of these “choices” are acceptable yet the fact is that we now have a profound political crisis alongside the global economic and financial crisis. This is making itself felt in every country, including America where president Obama is already in some difficulties, in Spain, where the government is being overwhelmed by the growth of unemployment and in France, where Sarkozy is under enormous popular pressure.
At times like these, there is an all too apparent danger that the façade of the parliamentary democratic state will be torn aside in favour of some sort of emergency, authoritarian rule. Such a move will expose the capitalist state for what it is – an instrument for preserving the rule of the corporations and banks at any cost. Balls has spilled the beans and we should take note.
Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)