Who is to blame for the chaotic state of western society and the World financial melt down?
The question has 2 parts. First of all who is responsible for the present chaotic state of the financial world and more importantly who and what led to this situation.
The sub-prime mortgage fiasco was the trigger and this situation was engineered by former U.S. Presidents Carter and Clinton in their efforts to give housing to their supporters who lived in poverty stricken areas of America. Wall Street played it’s part by inventing new ways to gamble in finance because the migration of industry from the developed world left little scope for investment in worth while projects in the post industrial West.
British Business Secretary,Peter Mandelson,warned that in future Britain must end its’reliance on the City and it is time to widen the economic scope to other industrial sectors. Obviously not manufacturing but perhaps Polly Toynbee “we need a soft landing”,(The Guardian Weekly,24.10.08) has a clue. She suggests that green jobs can be created in renewable energy and in a universal home insulation programme. A serious social housing programme could employ hundreds of thousands and staff are needed in child care centres,schools,hospitals and care homes. That tells you all you need to know about the economic credentials of the British Labour Government.
Janet Albrechtsen in her article “Don’t overlood the greed of Main St.”(The Australian,24.9.08. p.14) lists many of the methods used by the financial sector to distribute cheap money and lending has become a boom industry.
Anyone who had an imput to these loans took their cut and in the case of bank loans “the banks sold them off in bundles through a process called securitisation”to stupid investors down the line.
The alternative view is put by Madeleine Bunting “The poor will pay the highest price again”,(The Guardian Weekly,24.10.08,p.18.).
Bunting uses the Booker prize winning book “White Tiger by Aravind Adiga”to “nail the myth of a benign US economic hegemony that has lifted millions out of poverty across Asia”! She quotes the book which says on the one hand you have abject poverty entrenched across swaths of rural and slum city India. Meanwhile on the other hand an elite surfing on a tide of consumerism and cheap credit has been entirely dislocated from the majority of the country.
What does this cursed woman want from us? We have given the Third World our technology for free,the Lima Agreement,most of our manufacturing base and we have financed their industrial expansion. Is that not enough? does she want our skins to make their sandals.
The above is the answer to the second question. After World War Two altruistic idiots who took over our western nations;were convinced by Academic and the Inner City Elite that the Third World should not only be the supplier of raw materials to factories in the West but manufacture as well.
In a stroke of the pen Europe and America gave away the birthright of a thousand years of industry. Having given away our technical edge we could not compete against their wage rates and our manufacturers and investors were only too pleased to move their firms to areas of greater profit.
Englands clever arts graduates called the move the “Post Industrial Revolution”and there were drinks all round with the Greens.
Having been given our industry for free the Asians are not about to let us live off them and our clever ‘inner city elite’had to find other ways to make a living.
Bunting quotes Ha-Joon Chang,Cambridge economist,who said,“The West coundn’t compete in manufacturing,so it turned to financial markets and used the cheapest way to make money,it offered loans,not for productive investment,but to consumers,using their homes as collateral. Credit cards and small loans are particularly lucrative”.
So the West leaned heavily on countries through the World Trade Organisation and the I.M.F. to open their financial sectors.
What Bunting does not say is what India got in return.
As for Adiga’s book,it is of little value. India has always been a hell hole of famine and poverty,we did not impose it on them. England got out of India after W.W.2. and England is no longer responsible for India’s poor or how loans are spent.
The best thing that Bunting and Adiga can do is to go to India and convince the men to use contraceptives,an exploding population is their problem.
As for Britain’s ‘inner city elite’,they have committed the ultimate crime,the destruction of their society.
I would not expect any less of the cream of Britain’s private schools.
Do not expect the G20 meeting to come up with any answers,those greedy baby boomers will not take too kindly to their depredations into the financial system being curtailed.
The future looks bleak for the planet even the so called old democracies are becoming more and more authoritarian and less and less productive. Many commentators chastise the West for it’s leaders huberis in trying to rule the world through their financial institurions. Money is only paper and we can hardly preach morality when our populations act in their private lives like alley cats.
For the 10th year in succession the auditors of the E.U. books have refused to sign their audit. More and more of the world’s wealth is going to oil rich,mineral rich and the new manufacturing nations. The old developed nations have nothing to sell the Third World who only want to be given what remains of our wealth.
The West refused to face the fact that the planet is already over populated and by 2050 another 3.5 billion extra people will inhabit the Third World.
That false prophet John Vidal “West rescues banks but fails the World’s hungry”..(The Guardian Weekly,24.10.08,P.1.) blames the ‘rich’countries for looking after their own interests and points out that the number of malnourished people in the world went up by 44 million in 2008.
People like Vidal and Barbara Stocking,Director of Oxfam,G.B.,seem to think that the West should be responsible for nearly one billion people going hungry. Get real John and Barbara.
The West no longer generates real wealth,go cap in hand to China,India and the Middle East. That is where the wealth is now.
Don’t talk about global warming,address over population and stop all migration.
If as Peter Mandelson,Business Secretary,suggests,Britain curtails the activities of the financial sector,then Britain will rank as a third rate power. Post industrial societies are of little value in a materialistic world and education merely an ornament without value.
Globalisation has destroyed the West and even the class that created it. Nationalism is still our only hope…….
