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The Forum > Article Comments > Democracy failure > Comments

Democracy failure : Comments

By John Keane, published 20/4/2009

The quest to extract folly from capital markets - to rein in the ruinous power of foolishly inflated expectations - may never fully succeed.

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First principle of markets: Failures must be allowed to fail. The only organisation that should be "too big to fail" is the government.
Second major oversight: Accounting has failed. There is no transparency or accountability in the financial systems. We *still* don't know where the end of the current financial crisis is because the unAccountants have been allowed to hide the truth.
The fact that billionaires are bailed out while the poor continue to get nothing from the "booming" economy is not just evil, it is very, very stupid.
The rich are only allowed to be rich because the poor play by the rules. Social revolutions are *very* unpleasant for the well off, and are inevitable unless the wealthy start being merely greedy again.
Posted by Ozandy, Monday, 20 April 2009 10:18:55 AM
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Time for a bit of Democratic Communism :D
Posted by hadz, Monday, 20 April 2009 10:56:04 AM
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The rich saw the rise in "monitory organisations" and so bought up the media, advertising and education systems and have used them to brainwash the population to think like the wealthy elites even though they are dirt poor. That is if they even think at all. Witness todays craving for wealth and celebrity and the humiliations people will subject themselves to on the off chance of "making it big".

People somehow, for some reason see the rich as untouchable and that it would somehow be morally wrong to take from them. How did it work in the old days? Im sure Rockefeller and his ilk werent happy to have their giant monopolies broken up and Im sure it made them less wealthy than they had been. So why cant we do the same today? Break up the big multinationals. Return them to local control. Make them small enough that they can fail and not pull the rest of us down with them. If a business cant keep up or isnt providing a service people want or is corruptly run then it deserves to fail and to prop it up would seem to me to be madness.

The democracy of the market is the democracy of the dollar. The more dollars you have the more votes you get. There is no democracy in business. All firms are run as absolute totalitarian dictatorships. The owner/s and their proxys are absolute lords and masters of their property including, for eight hours a day, the bodies and souls of their employees. The sham that is voting once every 3 or 4 years is a pale imitation of what inclusive and participatory democracy really is.
Posted by mikk, Monday, 20 April 2009 11:06:21 AM
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Amazing. Almost 3,000 words on the Mega Crash without even a single, passing mention of its long-term and systemic cause i.e., the derivatives trade. Keane alludes vaguely to a "bursting credit bubble", repeatedly, but he may as well refer to the dynamics of boiling mud in Rotorua, or distract us with some natural-disaster metaphor like an earthquake, tsunami, volcano, etc.

Of course, this is no "natural" disaster at all. The monetarists' calamity fits perfectly the original definition of "tragedy" i.e., a disaster caused by the stupidity and arrogance of people who should have known better, or at least listened to those who did - instead of ignoring them for decades, and even blacklisting, censoring, and fitting them up on trumped-up charges.

And this gem: "the scale and depth of the bursting bubble are simply unknown". That coming from a professor too! The comment is exactly the type of rubbish that should make Keane feel ashamed to the point of resignation from his job. For "scale and depth" of the imperialists' globalization bubble, try around USD 1.5 QUADRILLION in derivatives debt. For Australia alone it's around USD 15 Trillion...

Another word noticeably missing in Keane's piece: "BANKRUPTCY". Not once, not even a whisper. Yet the entire financial sector is bankrupt, and the only way to salvage "democracy" (or any other functioning, non-regressive political system) is to effect bankruptcy reorganization NOW!

Lastly, Keane should lose the "nutty/lefty professor" cliche-image, and get a haircut and put a tie on instead. After all, misleading spin like his does such sterling "Royal Society" service for the establishment's hedge and equity fund industries. Is that where he's heading? A chancellorship at the University of the Cayman Islands perhaps?
Posted by mil-observer, Monday, 20 April 2009 4:33:54 PM
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Talk about shutting the Barn door after the horse has bolted !

Why didn't you publish your book before the whole thing went pfhut .

What a Wally , how do you think everybody will pay for your book !
Posted by ShazBaz001, Monday, 20 April 2009 4:52:08 PM
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Thanks to those many readers who made independent contact and offered such intelligent advice and serious comments on my piece on democracy failure and the great global recession. I see that ON LINE opinion attracts the Awkward Blog Squad: those who are lightning-quick to react, never read what's been written, get things wrong and (of course) are nevertheless cock sure that they know everything about the topic. OOp definitely deserves much better readers. For mil-observer there's some bad news: the 'nutty/lefty' professor hasn't accepted a chancellorship in the Cayman Islands but has instead decided, from July of next year, to come home to Sydney University, where I'll be glad to meet and debate with you, sporting a tie and wearing shorter hair, of course...
Posted by johnkeane, Tuesday, 21 April 2009 12:26:39 AM
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