The recent collapse or near collapse of many Banks has shown that the ideology of the capitalist free market economy has its weaknesses; Alan Greenspan, former head of the US Federal Reserve, admitted to a US congressional committee last week that he was ’shocked’ at the failure of that model.
Having crowed for years at the collapse of the Russian communist model, and always critical of the Chinese whatever social/economic model they seem to adopt, the US have now to take the bitter pill that some state interventions or part ownership of critical parts of the economy, are necessary to stabilise the model. My prediction is that globally all countries will settle to a middle of the road mix of capitalism and government ownership that best suits their local conditions; let’s hope that one day there is will be an end to this stupid “war of ideologies” which clouds peoples judgement in seeing there own weaknesses.
Apart from the media focus on the collapse of the Banking sector, and the predictable criticism of those that have made millions in bonuses, we now have the press using the term Russian oligarch seemingly as a derogatory term on a regular basis. The Wikipedia entry is typical of many articles in the English Wikipedia that are written from a US perspective (i.e. anything Russian, Chinese, Iranian etc must be evil), it runs “… Russian oligarchs are business entrepreneurs… Rare goods… were smuggled into the country and sold on the black market for a hefty profit, In the 1990s, the oligarchs emerged as well connected entrepreneurs who started from nearly nothing and got rich through participation in the market via connections to the corrupt, but democratically elected, government of Russia during the state’s transition to a market-based economy. “ Got that, this “unbiased encyclopedic” description says “democratically elected”, “corrupt”.
Now look at our Western governments, “democratically elected” i.e. we the people are given a choice of one individual from a previlidged background and another – most media in the UK seem to have forgotten we live in a parliamentary democracy and we vote for a party not a person!, and yes I think “corrupt” is fair description of a number of Members of Parliament who apart from their generous MP’s salaries collect fees for being on the Boards of Directors of companies, who solicit funding from anyone that seems to be worth a million or two, and accept ‘freebies’ from any rich businessman (or should that be oligarch?) that wants a few favours down the line. As one TV commentator remarked – If George Osborne wants to avoid criticism in future he would be wise to not take along his party fund raiser.
