Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Sunday, August 26, 2007

Dispatches from Libertopia: "Market Discipline" in the Upper Crust Edition

Here are a few choice excerpts, posted without comment, from an article in today's Guardian by Will Hutton:
One of the most inequitable and amoral acts in modern times is happening in front of our eyes…[: A] multi-billion dollar bail-out of global finance after one of the most reckless periods of lending and deal-making since the late 1920s….

Little people's taxes are underwriting the mistakes of big people, who in the process have made riches beyond the dreams of avarice. Globalisation, it is now clear, is run in the interests of a global financial class which has Western governments in its thrall. This class does not give a fig for the interests of savers, clients or wider workforces….

Interpol should make arrests in New York, London, Tokyo, Beijing, Frankfurt and Paris, starting with all the executives in the credit-rating agencies who blithely ranked the debt as creditworthy in exchange for fat fees and freebies from the very banks who were making the absurd loans. Governments should bring suits against the executives involved, [and seize] the repositories of vast personal wealth, to help repair the hole in private and public balance sheets.

Read the whole piece here. I love the smell of revolution in the morning, don't you?

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