I had some gratuitous? advice for the Ruddster...
"The Prime Minister needs to review the errors of Scullen, ditch the tawdry advice of those who "didn't see it coming" and get ready to bite the bullet and abandon, repudiate and punish those responsible for this long terrible sleepwalk into disaster: the property and real estate carny barkers, the directors of public companies unresponsive to the will of shareholders, the housing developers against local democracy, the auditors and accountants who certified an oligopoly of greed and tax fraud prudent in return for a place on the gravy train. And generally, the whole media, business and professional elite that apropriated twenty years of productivity growth on the promise of prosperity for all and delivered instead declining real incomes, insecurity of tenure and equal opportunity disaster."
open letter to PM
Well, I only caught the zeitgeist, I guess because Rudd's letter of thanks didn't arive.
But the news of his 180 degree turn is everywhere..
"In an essay to be published next week, the Prime Minister is scathing of the neo-liberals who began refashioning the market system in the 1970s, and ultimately brought about the global financial crisis.
"The time has come, off the back of the current crisis, to proclaim that the great neo-liberal experiment of the past 30 years has failed, that the emperor has no clothes," he writes of those who placed their faith in the corrective powers of the market.
"Neo-liberalism and the free-market fundamentalism it has produced has been revealed as little more than personal greed dressed up as an economic philosophy. And, ironically, it now falls to social democracy to prevent liberal capitalism from cannibalising itself."
Mr Rudd writes in The Monthly that just as Franklin Roosevelt rebuilt US capitalism after the Great Depression, modern-day "social democrats" such as himself and the US President, Barack Obama, must do the same again. But he argues that "minor tweakings of long-established orthodoxies will not do" and advocates a new system that reaches beyond the 70-year-old interventionist principles of John Maynard Keynes.
"A system of open markets, unambiguously regulated by an activist state, and one in which the state intervenes to reduce the greater inequalities that competitive markets will inevitably generate," he writes.
He urges "a new contract for the future that eschews the extremism of both the left and right".
He mocks neo-liberals "who now find themselves tied in ideological knots in being forced to rely on the state they fundamentally despise to save financial markets from collapse"."
rudd breaks off the dance
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