George Galloway September 2011
It is three years since the masters of the universe at Lehman Brothers went supernova.
The financial crisis unleashed then has morphed around the world and shows no sign of abating.
Indeed the normally news-light summer months brought a slew of shocking surveys revealing falling business confidence, plummeting employment and economic activity from the US, through to Europe to Japan.
Of the big zones of the world economy, only China showed a pulse.
Now we stand on the brink of further round of chaos and collapse.
Talk of a double-dip or W-shaped recession is misplaced. We have had no recovery to speak of and instead have been locked into an L-shaped limbo for many months, shuffling towards another precipice.
The full scale of what lies in store is only beginning to register in the public consciousness. The riots last month were a foretaste of the social consequences of the slash-and-burn policies which Cameron, Osborne and Clegg are pursuing.
Look to Latin America, Africa and Asia at so many points over the last 30 years and you see the effects of structural adjustment programmes designed to hammer public spending and squeeze the public as a whole in order to meet the insatiable appetite of private bankers.
Put simply, people die - and more of them and younger.
And make no mistake - what is being imposed on Britain, Europe and elsewhere is a structural adjustment programme of that kind, not merely some unwelcome cuts that will be reversed after a few years of growth, for growth is the last thing that the austerity-mongers are talking about.
To see where all this is leading, look at Greece. In the business section of the news broadcasts the economic data flashes across the screen and talking heads refer to "bond yields," "haircuts," "rescheduling" and an alphabet soup of international agencies and the latest European financial initiatives.
Grey is the dismal science of economics. Blood red is the reality behind this blizzard of buzzwords.
Children returned to school in Greece last week. They are without textbooks - the education ministry does not have the money to print them - and soon many may be without teachers.
The troika of the IMF, European Union and European Central Bank which is enforcing the savagery flounced out of Athens a few weeks ago saying that Greece had not slashed enough.
The government swiftly announced the immediate sacking of 10,000 public-sector employees, with another 10,000 after, on top of the mass redundancies already underway.
Pay for many households - not the shipping magnates and business elite, of course - has fallen 20 per cent.
Now, in another panic move to secure October's tranche of loans to stave off bankruptcy, the Greek government is imposing a €2 billion tax on housing. It is simply going to add the charge to household electricity bills. Greece has a state-owned electricity company that will cut off anyone who doesn't pay the tithe. It is of course a supreme irony lost on the free marketeers that they are demanding that that enterprise is privatised and broken-up, which had it already happened would now deprive the government of income and revenue-raising power.
Such ironies are built in to this Greek tragedy because the entire play is in the theatre of the absurd.
The European elites seem surprised that by forcing Greece - and before it Ireland - to destroy large chunks of the economy, that the result has been a greater gap between government revenue and the amount it must spend, increasingly to the banks.
But you don't have to be an economics Nobel laureate to know that if the economy shrinks, then the amount paid in tax goes down while the amount paid in welfare - minimal in Greece - and in debt repayments - huge - tends to go up.
Yet this kind of austerity dogma, which tipped the world into the Great Depression of the 1930s, is now being inflicted on Greece and here too.
So obviously destructive are the results that doubts are expressed even among the partisans of capitalist globalisation.
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