Last week US Treasury Secretary Henry
Paulson unveiled a dramatic plan to arrest the present financial crisis and
prevent future economic catastrophe. It is to cost $700bn.

It sounds like a breathtaking break from
neo-liberal philosophy. It’s not really. Neo-liberalism was always a giant lie.
Homeless people don’t matter. People in danger of losing their jobs in a
recession don’t matter. But, when it comes to banks and billionaires,
self-reliance is for the birds. These people are hapless bums.

“I like
thieves. Some of my best friends are thieves. Why, just last week we had the
president of the bank over for dinner.”  W.C. Fields.

The
capitalist system is in the throes of the worse financial crisis since the
Great Depression. This is the view not only of the billionaire George Soros,
but also of the International Monetary Fund, the custodian of the capitalist
system, and all the serious capitalist commentators. 

For ten years Gordon Brown has been mouthing the
phrase “no return to boom and bust”. Now we see it is meaningless. Darling in
his Mansion House speech in June also brushed off the threat of recession,
asserting that “our
economy will continue to grow.” But there has been a boom and it has
turned to bust. Brown and Darling are denying what is going on in the real
world before their eyes. They can’t do anything about the recession since they
are not prepared to act against the source of the problem, the capitalist system.
More and more people will begin to see that if the only way we can control the
economic system and make it work in our interests is if we own it.