I am a fairly optimistic person by nature, but if you had told me earlier this year when I co-founded the Campaign For Public Ownership, that just a few months later, George Bush's neo-conservative administration in the U.S. would be following the CPO's pro-nationalisation agenda, I really wouldn't have believed it. As Simon English, writing in The Evening Standard puts it, "Large chunks of Wall Street, supposedly the home of capitalism, are now under government control". We've had Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and now AIG, passing into state ownership. The 'free-market', anti-public ownership fanatics, normally so loud on the blogosphere, have gone strangely quiet. Little wonder.
We are now back in 1989- but the system that is collapsing before our very eyes is not Soviet communism, but Anglo-Saxon turbo-capitalism. In the end, this most rapacious of economic models was destroyed by its own greed. It's time for everyone who believes that people should always come before profit- and that a mixed economy is far preferable to a turbo-capitalist 'free market' one, to pop the champagne corks.
We are now back in 1989- but the system that is collapsing before our very eyes is not Soviet communism, but Anglo-Saxon turbo-capitalism. In the end, this most rapacious of economic models was destroyed by its own greed. It's time for everyone who believes that people should always come before profit- and that a mixed economy is far preferable to a turbo-capitalist 'free market' one, to pop the champagne corks.
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