PUTNEY DEBATER
A personal blog
Starting ‘Money Puzzles’
The thought can hardly be original, but visiting the Acropolis during a recent trip to Athens, I couldn’t help but see it as a symbol of the condition of Greece: under renovation, but work currently suspended. At the end of April, the liquidity crisis forced the government to stop payment on public works because the European funding they relied on has dried up. Greece is being punished by the obstinate, pig-headed, anti-democratic plutocracy of the EU and the IMF for the crime of electing the wrong government, a government that opposes austerity as an unworkable policy that creates unpayable debts and has indefensible consequences for the mass of the people. Read more
Election aftermath
Reports that Labour has lost its ‘soul’ may not be exaggerated. Whoever they pick as their new leader is probably beside the point, because judging from the opening salvos, they just don’t get it. In fact they never did. Five years ago, Labour took so long to replace Gordon Brown that the Tory/neoliberal media apparatus was easily able to induce a series of instant false memories that utterly distorted the truth about the 2008 crash. Pinning the blame on Labour’s economic mismanagement, they told lies about the deficit that disguised the real cause-and-effect of the financial bubble that burst when Lehman Brothers went bust (and Brown ‘saved the world‘ by bailing out the banks). Then, as if wishing to confirm Naomi Klein’s thesis of the Shock Doctrine, they imposed austerity. Which patently doesn’t work. Read more