06-13-2008, 09:36 AM
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Viva Fidel
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Join Date: Dec 2007
Userid: 107 Location: Imperialist Britain
Age: 23
Posts: 4,604
Rep Power: 5
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A 30's Style Depression May be Looming
It's a frightening picture that is painted here, although i like the sounds of the solution, get back to making things of use and scrap economies based on chance and debt.
Quote:
VINCE CABLE, the best Liberal leader we never had, was on my radio show the other night confirming that he really is a lad o' pairts.
An expert on bees, he declared a "bee-mergency" in the Sunday papers. A humorist, he first articulated the rapid transformation of the Prime Minister's reputation from "Stalin to Mr Bean".
An economics guru, he was the first topline politician to see the credit crunch coming, and in vain pressed for the public ownership of Northern Rock while Darling dithered only to be forced to do so later.
In the course of a great interview with me (available in my radio archives at georgegalloway.com), Dr Cable discussed the possibility of a coming economic period which could be like the "inter-war years".
He hoped it wouldn't get that bad, but told us the head of the US Federal Reserve had openly worried that it would be so.
So let me run that past you more slowly.
The most powerful banker in the world is worried that we are heading into the kind of Great Depression we suffered in the Thirties, where mass unemployment and widespread immiseration stalked the land.
Hunger marches, homelessness, hatred and ultimately the rise of fascism and the cataclysm of the Second World War in which 100 million people died. Phew. No wonder Cable hopes it won't come to that.
Certainly Britain is uniquely vulnerable to the tidal wave which will cross the Atlantic if the US economy goes from slump to crash.
Our economy, deliberately de-industrialised by the last Thatcherite government, is now hopelessly dependent on the casino economics of financial services - pushing numbers around on computer screens, betting on futures, speculating against each other and making off this year with £13billion in bonus payments alone.
Our house prices are too high, our stock market ditto and our level of personal indebtedness astronomic.
Food prices up six per cent in five months, fuel prices rocketing, one trillion pounds in non-mortgage debt, one third of all the credit-card debt in Europe, with credit drying up and house prices falling below inflation wage increases. It all points one way. Down into "stagflation", the apparently impossible paradox of economic stagnation and rising prices............
If there is an emergency, let's have a real emergency response. Let's return to the Thirties all right - with a full-scale New Deal.
Scrapping unnecessary war and military expenditure to pay for a massive programme of public works - flood defences, new energy developments such as wind, wave and solar power farms, low-cost social housing building, infrastructure improvements and the mobilisation of people and assets in the national service.......
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Brown should play the New Deal card - The Daily Record
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Viva Fidel
If there ever was in the history of humanity an enemy who was truly universal, an enemy whose acts and moves trouble the entire world, threaten the entire world, attack the entire world in any way or another, that real and really universal enemy is precisely Yankee imperialism
They talk about the failure of socialism but where is the success of capitalism in Africa, Asia and Latin America?
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