By Peter Boyle
“Why didn't I think of that first”, muttered Miranda Devine when she read fellow right-wing columnist Gerard Henderson explain that the global financial crisis was the fault of Obama-loving “do-gooders” who pushed for housing for the poor. Devine is usually the first to turn a
ridiculous right-wing rant into a newspaper column but the Sydney Institute's Henderson beat her to the silliest punch in his October 7 column in the Sydney Morning Herald and several other newspapers in Australia.
See here
Henderson was incensed that PM Kevin Rudd had blamed “extreme capitalism” for the global financial mess. "Today we are still cleaning up the mess of the 21st-century children of Gordon Gecko," Rudd had said in an October 3 speech before a business forum.
Rudd was right about the mess and he's right about corporate greed. How else would you describe the fact that the average cash remuneration (ie. excluding share options and other benefits) of the chief executives of the biggest 51 companies in the Business Council of Australia is 63 times the average earning of a full-time worker?
How is it possible to deny extreme greed when the richest 1% in the world own 40% of global wealth while the poorer half of the world shares 1% of global wealth?
Has this gross inequality this messed up the world? Damn right it has. And the global financial meltdown ain't half of the global mess. Every day the world races faster into climate change catastrophe because systematic capitalist greed demands its short-term profits be put ahead of averting this catastrophe.
It really is no point Rudd lecturing the corporate rich to be a little less greedy, and wishing capitalism to be a little less extreme. At Green Left Weekly, we think it is far too late for that.
Instead of the world's governments wasting trillions of dollars in public funds bailing out banks and financial institutions, these bodies ought to be nationalised and run for the public good by popularly elected boards of management. The public's savings should be used to
address the urgent challenges of climate change and social justice. Let's invest trillions of dollars on renewable energy, housing the homeless and feeding the starving instead of bailing out the Gordon Geckos of the world.
It's high time for some “extreme” do-goodism and some “extreme” long-termism. Indeed our future depends on it.
