| The Killing Fields |
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| Written by Administrator |
| Sunday, 31 July 2011 08:58 |
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They may be the lowest form of human life, but when it comes to defending their wealth the Financial class are not stupid. They know they need to make us, not them, pay for those debts whatever it costs. That’s why, to quote one leading market analyst, ‘there are still doubts on whether the peripheral countries can deliver on austerity.’ That's their worry now. That is what the financial class sees as the proper and apparently only role of government. DELIVER ON AUSTERITY. That is what your government is for. Welcome to your future. There is now no easy way out of the killing field we have been led into. And it must be coming clear to people that a killing field is a good description of the place they are taking us. Men in fine suits, with fine degrees, who live golden lives have led us and our children to a desperate place. Our political leaders have helped them take us there. They chose not to spend our future taxes on education, on health, on investment in a better future, but instead they sacrificed it all to save the banks. That sacrifice will involve tearing from us every thread in the fabric of our national life that is not tied down and defended tooth and nail. It is the ultimate failure of imagination and courage by a generation of political leaders. The pain they have stored up for us will not go away. This means, in my opinion there are only two futures remaining. One in which the pain comes quickly but where we do everything to make sure it is the financial class, and not us, who suffer the most. But there is another future, the one they have planned for us, where it happens slowly, the pain getting greater and greater with time, but where it is made to fall on us rather than the immensely rich people and institutions that caused the crisis. It is the future where everything we have sacrificed and struggled to build to make this country a better place - our universities, our schools, our pensions, our health service - is hacked down and the little left is subjected to the laws and logic of the market where nothing is valued but profit. That is the future they want; it is the future we must resist. With that future in mind our political leaders know everything now is about enforcement - about enforcing this future upon us. In simple terms it means what we are seeing in Greece and what we saw in Iceland. It means police versus people. It is where Democracy and Finance run into each other like bulls in a field. It will come here too. If you believe, like me, that the only long-term and sustainable path out of the killing fields we have been led to is for the ordinary people of all countries to force the bad debts to be taken by those who made them and put an end to public money being misused to bail out the wealthy then we must act now. The longer we delay, the longer we put off the inevitable, the greater the pain for all of us. In my opinion democracy - when you have it already - is about peaceful voting. When you don’t have it, or you are in danger of having it hollowed out and what is left serves only the rich and the powerful then it is time for standing up and confronting those who would deny you. That time is now. Our political leaders, if we let them, will deliver us to the killing fields. A different leadership will have to come from the bottom, from you and me, to stop them. We have to confront this disaster together or each of us will be pulverized by it on our own. I wrote those words on 10th May 2010. They are the final words of The Debt Generation,
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