Foot, Self, Shoot?

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There's a lot of cross-linking of ideas before me today: the fate of cash being discussed on Any Questions/Answers on Radio Four, my mate Jeff posting a piece from last weekend's Observer newspaper on why we should take more seriously the frankly parlous state of the UK's economy, and another article in this month's Wired magazine: 'The Defector' by Malcolm Harris. All of this stuff points toward one pretty unassailable truth: the people in whom we vest our trust to manage our world economy are, at best, incompetent, and at worst, self-interested snake-oil salesmen.

Capitalism is, and always will be, in crisis, if the economy is left in the charge of capitalists; and the stupid irony is that the capitalists themselves not only don't want to see the damage they do to the world and the rest of humanity in the service of profit, but they also completely fail to see the harm they're doing to capitalism itself: that they are effectively cooking the golden goose they rely on for their wealth. The plain truth is that greed, for want of a better word [ahem] is most definitely not good: economies, as I've said before, are transactional: you cannot have trade without participants on both sides of the selling/buying equation. The massive accrual of wealth by a tiny minority on one side and the pricing out of the system of the rest of humanity on the other, simply, will, fail. Put short, you need someone to buy the crap you're selling, to succeed.

We are now in a very precarious transitional period, where, to be blunt, we could see the UK - speaking from a totally insular point of view, but equally applying to the rest of our now, sadly, fragmenting Europe - slip into a depression the like of which hasn't been witnessed since the 1930s. Now, as then, this will be while a Tory government is on watch: the 'natural party of government' being anything but. They were, are, and will continue to be the natural party of greed, self-interest and, ultimately, of economic failure, and the figures that are readily available to anyone willing to look for themselves, prove it so to be. Have a nice evening...

Comments

  1. Anonymous20 August 2023 at 09:43

    "My object in life is to dethrone God and destroy capitalism". K.Marks (1818-1883) Don't forget that the "City" attracts the brightest talent to protect what it HAS. The very interdependancy of our world will make a REAL depression VERY unpopular with the Capitalists and we've just had Covid to show what happens . Take travel, look how DESPERATE everybody was to get back delivering CO2 directly where it does the most harm. I'll be beering (in my guise as an archaeologist studying the demise of a living culture being subsumed by a World "Order") early today if you fancy chewing the cud.
    Joe

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