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Day 19 October, 2008

Entries 2 Total

Good news: UK turns to Keynesian economics

Oct 19, ’08 9:08 PM

With New Labour’s neo-liberal agenda and long record of social­ising costs and privat­ising profits it comes as a sur­prise to me that Alistair Darling has turned to Keynes in the face of reces­sion. I had assumed until now that they’d use this reces­sion and the recent handout to bankers as an oppor­tun­ity to cut back on social spend­ing. Maybe we have the absence of Tony Blair to thank?

While I’ve increas­ingly been hear­ing news of archi­tects being laid off over the past few weeks, the firm I’m employed by works nearly exclus­ively in the social hous­ing sec­tor, so it’s cer­tainly good eco­nomic news for me:

The chan­cel­lor said hous­ing, energy and small busi­nesses would bene­fit in his new spend­ing plans.

And I couldn’t agree more with Darling on this statement:

This is a time when you have to sup­port the eco­nomy. You will see us switch­ing our spend­ing pri­or­it­ies to areas which make a difference.

It’s just a shame he includes in this the entrench­ment of the military-industrial com­plex and the myopic decision to upgrade Britain’s nuc­lear weapons.

… plans for two air­craft car­ri­ers and a new nuc­lear deterrent would go ahead.

I might add that a decision to upgrade Britain’s nuc­lear weapons is a dir­ect viol­a­tion of the Nuc­lear Non-Proliferation Treaty, some­thing the UK and U.S. gov­ern­ments have been falsely accus­ing Iran of over the past year or so.

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Is the problem really greedy bankers?

Oct 19, ’08 8:11 PM

Simon Bowers repor­ted yes­ter­day that Wall Street bankers are to take $70bn in bonuses this year, 10% of the U.S. gov­ern­ment handout. It’s a mis­take, how­ever, to blame the fin­an­cial melt­down on bankers and their greed. These people are simply fol­low­ing the rationale of the cap­it­al­ist sys­tem: take as much as you can, irre­spect­ive of the expense incurred to others.

If you think it’s scan­dal­ous to take such bonuses, espe­cially in the cur­rent cli­mate, as I do, then blame the scan­dal­ous frame­work they work within, not them for work­ing within the framework.

I got talk­ing to a home­less guy on the street the other day. He joked to me about how mean­ing­less this crisis is to him, and while the cur­rent situ­ation could make his pre­dic­a­ment far worse I took his point: for a large num­ber of people on this planet — about 80% of the pop­u­la­tion — cap­it­al­ism is per­petu­ally in crisis. Every day. What makes this a “crisis” is that a large por­tion of the other 20% are get­ting fucked too.

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