EDITORIAL - EA number 16

MONEYLENDERS IN CRISIS
Oswald Mosley said it years ago - the way out of crisis was to create an economic area large enough to be self-sufficient thereby insulating ourselves from international competition and the international banking system. Today, that policy is needed more than ever.
The global banking system has recently thrown governments into disarray simply because they do not understand anything beyond their free market fundamentalist ideology ... the misbegotten idea that markets will find their own bottom on their own. In this case, the housing markets in both the United States and Britain are further from a bottoming out than any of them think. The ‘credit crunch’ brought about by the 2007 subprime mortgage financial crisis in the United States is ongoing with the larger banks and financial institutions around the world reportedly losing US$240 billion as of April this year. That is, even with the dispersion of bad credit to third party investors.
The United States, along with Britain and other countries, face slipping into a recession which, according to Professor Nouriel Roubini of New York University, “... will have a systematic banking crisis like we have not had since the 1930s”.
The Wall Street Journal in September 2007 quoted Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, as saying the current turmoil in financial markets “is identical to the problems of 1987 and 1998”.
Citigroup economists recently stated that “the self-feeding downturn now in place shows signs of becoming deeply entrenched” - indicating the very certainty of massive long-term recession around the world.
An obsession with massive consumer spending is a fundamental cause of the crisis as the freely available loans from lending institutions extended to many who could not or would not repay them. The massive losses to these institutions prevented many from further lending. The result is a downward spiral and hyperinflation.
The world housing bubble could be seen by anyone with long term vision to be heading for disaster. The obsession with home-ownership became endemic globally. This fuelled house price increases along with massive consumer spending. The idea was to spend ourselves out of recession, hence the massive imports of cheap Chinese goods, but it was on such high risk credit that eventually it all became unsustainable.
The answer is the one Mosley gave all those years ago. Free yourselves from the international banking system by building Europe a Nation, a fortress Europe that can supply everything the Europeans need with a European banking system that serves the European people alone. Then, what goes on in America would have no effect upon us whatsoever.
In his page on the BNP’s website, John Bean had this to say on ‘The Global Slump the BNP Predicted’ of February 16, “Although we can not isolate ourselves completely from the erratic behaviour of the world’s money markets, the way of modifying its effects that we gave then has not changed”. In the same article he openly adopts Conservative Party economic policy, an obvious indication that the BNP does not have one of its own, apart from a rigid autarky for these isles.
Mr Bean seems to have learned nothing from his short stay in Mosley’s Union Movement. Substitute the word isolate for insulate and it is no longer a matter of ’can not’ but one of necessity. Modifications to a system that is out-dated and out of control will never work and Little Englander economics always meant being thrown to the wolves of high finance.
Housing in Britain needs to be geared towards more rented social housing in order to house the homeless and those on lower incomes. Instead, Gordon Brown robs the poor in order to give money to his banking chums. This from the party of Keir Hardie that once claimed to be for the workers. What a disgrace.
Mosley was always for the working man ever since his days in the Labour Party when he offered constructive proposals for curing mass unemployment. Ramsay MacDonald’s government rejected them for being ‘too socialistic’ while the old Labour relics stuck to their blind faith in free market capitalism.
Nothing has changed and nothing will change while you have this acceptance of a global dimension to economics and the way we all trade with each other.
We say no to a global economy because it makes a mockery of sovereignty and the people’s will. We want our own economy within Europe, of Europe and for the Europeans. That is our revolutionary purpose. RHE