The HSBC Swiss bank is not an isolated episode. It is part of a general pattern exposing the underlying ideology which has been globally dominant over the last three decades. That ideology has been about consolidating the power and wealth of the world’s richest class, particularly in the West. It is based around the idea that the most efficient and successful way to run the world is through untrammeled markets freed to the highest possible degree of any external constraints. Continue reading
Tagged with Capitalism
Election should be about vision of new economic order – Is Labour ready?
It is ironic that the Tories, the enemies of ideology and avowed exponents of pragmatism, are starting this election with a much stronger ideological pitch than Labour, normally the proud presenter of an alternative vision. Osborne has gone on the offensive immediately by advocating the balanced budgeting and small state goals of the 1920-30s aimed at shrinking the State and consolidating the power of capital over labour, but which would cripple growth exactly as it did a century ago and restore the Downton Abbey society of that period. It is a hideous scenario and should be hammered to bits, but it does at least offer a scenario of the trajectory of Tory policy, were they to win. For Labour , against that background, the incentive to offer the vision of the new economic order should be compulsive. Continue reading
Share:
Tories: in hock to wideboys, economically dysfunctional and politically toxic
It’s tempting. You see the insurmountable difficulties besetting the Tories, and their feeble firefighting efforts, and all you want to do is point and laugh. Heaven knows how much fun I’ve had doing it these last couple of years. Unfortunately, the remorseless grind of long term economic, cultural and political change is just as surely against the Labour Party too, but more of that another time.
The crisis at the root of British Toryism is two-fold. Demographically, it’s an old white people’s party. It has little positive to say to younger cohorts of voters. The one genuinely progressive and popular policy of its time in office – equal marriage – precipitated the debarkation of thousands of blue rinsed bigots into the arms of them smelly old kippers.
Politically, its organic links to British capital have also withered. Thanks to the Tories’ opaque networks of dining clubs, front groups and the like it’s much harder to see where the money comes from. Then again, it’s not difficult to infer from the kinds of policies they push who is stumping up the cash: the socially useless rentiers of the City, the gruesome gang of hedge fund wideboys, property speculators, and (whisper it) Russian oligarchs and shady Sheikhs. JCB’s Anthony Bamford and his Midlands Industrial Council fly the flag for good old “productive” capital, but that’s it. The Tory Party is funded and owned by finance, the superficially dynamic but most short-termist section of British capital. Continue reading
Share:
Inequality and British Capitalism
As we saw the other day, inequality has become so pathological that capitalism could seize up. When lucrative markets are locked down, when governments bow and scrape to big business, when social mobility is choked off, and the unobtainable opulence of the vanishingly few is crassly paraded in front of the many, capitalism is going out of its way to court an existential crisis. Though, of course, there is no one as such to blame for this state of affairs. And that’s the most terrifying thing about the system. Capitalism is blind. Market-driven production for profit means our economics are only interested in basic human needs if there’s money to be made. It’s how hunger in the advanced nations can co-exist with Google Glass. It’s how worsening climate change runs alongside the “greenest government ever” making it even easier to allow fracking. Forget the invisible hand – we need to talk about the invisible wrecking-ball. This is why the likes of Nick Hanauer has to pen memos to his fellow plutocrats about inequality, because left to its own devices capitalism will drive itself off a cliff. Continue reading
Share:
Pitchforks and inequality
This “memo” from Nick Hanauer to his fellow billionaires is an absolute must-read. Couched in straight forward language, he’s basically saying to his class that not enough people have a stake in the system any more and this will pose them an existential threat unless inequality is sorted out. Here’s a snippet: Continue reading
