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Red Alert: What went wrong in the capitalist casino
Stating the obvious, Tony Benn argues the banking disaster is the result of too much economic power being exercised by too few individuals. He prefers the socialist version of the exponential growth economy.
In his capacity as a prominnet member of the establishment [it would be too unkind and unnecessary to call him a "gatekeeper,"] he neither criticizes nor highlights root cause of the banking problems, the exponential growth economy. He never mentions the need for a ‘radical’ change to the system of political economy that is driving humanity and most other species toward oblivion.
The following excerpts are from Benn’s article Red Alert: What went wrong in the capitalist casino, which first appeared in the Tribune Magazine:
“THE great inter-war slumps were not acts of God or of blind forces. They were the sure and certain result of the concentration of too much economic power in the hands of too few men. These men had only learned how to act in the interest of their own bureaucratically-run private monopolies which may be likened to totalitarian oligarchies within our democratic state, They had and they felt no responsibility to the nation.”
These words are from the 1945 Labor manifesto Let Us Face The Future which brilliantly identified the very same crisis which is now described as a “credit crunch” as if it were a mere hiccup in an otherwise wonderful neo-liberal globalized world which could be corrected with a vast subsidy from the taxpayers to put the Wall Street casino and its partners worldwide back into profit. It reminded me of the fact that when slavery was abolished it was the slave owners, and not the slaves, who received compensation from the government of the day. Read more …
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