Thursday, November 20, 2008

The Financial Crisis

More bad news for the financial markets apparently:

World stock markets tumbled Thursday, with benchmarks in Tokyo and Seoul losing almost seven per cent each, after recession fears sent Wall Street plunging and Japan suffered its biggest drop in exports in seven years.

The slide in Asian and European shares extended a global sell-off that accelerated overnight amid lowered projections for U.S. economic activity next year from the Federal Reserve and worries over the fate of America's Big Three automakers, which are pleading for emergency loans from Washington.

This seems to be the bitter fruit of decades of gouging workers and destroying democratically imposed regulations on the part of capitalism trying to rectify the crisis of profitability that's been around since the 1970s.

So far we've had trillions of dollars of citizens' money thrown at the banks and now industry. A strange state of affairs. Let's allow the banks to continue to loan money to over-extended consumers who are simultaneously losing their jobs. Now, industry can re-tool on the public dime, stop making cars that nobody wants and start making cars that people do want but can no longer afford.

We need to redirect wealth back to the masses and we need a new political-economy that is cooperative, not competitive.

4 comments:

Beijing York said...

Interesting reading by Walden Bello (president of Freedom from Debt Coalition, senior analyst at Focus on the Global South, and professor of Sociology at the University of the Philippines) at this link:

http://www.creative-i.info/?p=963

thwap said...

Bello's a cool dude. Thanks for the link.

Boris said...

We need to redirect wealth back to the masses and we need a new political-economy that is cooperative, not competitive. Ain't that the truth. But first, I think we need to reach a point where recreating that system is simply unfathomable to the people making decisions. Otherwise, they'll keep trying to recreate what is and should remain lost.

thwap said...

True,

But if we can start now, we can do the work that makes the voting public see the stupidity of the system, and vote out the brainwashed or bought perpetrators of the status-quo.