One of the problems in writing about this particular crisis is that it is moving so fast that before you get to the final page new events have happened which need to be taken into account. In the past few days in completing this article the government has taken a majority shareholding in the Lloyds HBOS Group and unemployment figures for the USA show that 650,000 American workers were thrown out of work in the month of February. In Britain the banking crisis is getting worse and the CBI has just announced that they expect one in tem workers in the UK to loose their jobs during 2009.
This purpose of this text, however, is not to attempt to list every event but to look a bit deeper into a number of aspects of the crisis: its general character; the governmental responses; the turn to interventionism; the role of Obama in the USA; the role of Brown in Britain; nationalisation and what it represents, and the response of the working class in Britain to the crisis. It ends with a discussion as to how the left should respond to the crisis, its attitude to government policy, and the kind of demands it should put forward.
1) The origins and severity of the crisis
The origins of the crisis are arguably the most straightforward aspect of it. Two and a half decades of casino capitalism: speculation, deregulation and privatisation, under Regan and Thatcher — backed up by Blair and Brown and the rest of them — created a speculative bubble which turned into a credit and banking crisis when the US sub-prime mortgage market, where the most reckless lending regimes were located, collapsed. This brought the global financial structure to the verge of meltdown.
There has also been an ongoing debate as to the severity of the crisis — though most, on all sides, now accept that it is the biggest crisis since the 1930s (though it is not yet on the scale of those in terms of its social effects), which is rapidly moving towards a deep global recession and probably depression. Dramatically escalating bankruptcies, redundancies, unemployment, and house re-possessions, across the globe, make the point clearly enough. We are still at the early stages of the crisis, however, and it is far from clear how far it will go. What is clear is that we stand right on the verge of a major escalation of the effects of the crisis in terms of job loss and redundancy.
The context of the crisis is the unstable economic conditions brought about by the end of the post-war boom in the mid-1970s. These conditions produced a number of severe regional crises over the last 15 years, including the Mexican crisis of 1994, the Asian crisis of 1997, the Russian crisis of 1998 and the Argentine crisis of 2002. The current crisis, however, is qualitatively different and far more globally significant than any of these. And this time it started in the capitalist heartlands of the USA and in Europe.
Although it started in the capitalist heartlands its impact on developing countries has been enormous. In China manufacturing for export has been hit hard both by the fall-off of demand from the west. In Latin America the crisis is expected to increase unemployment by 3 million during 2009. (This needs expanding)
2) The character of the crisis
It is not just one crisis, of course. The banking crisis coincides with other major global developments which increase its severity and make it far more difficult to resolve or even mitigate. These can be identified as follows:
Firstly there is the impact of emerging countries such as China and India — particularly China since the full restoration of capitalism. The explosive growth of commodity production in China, with its vast labour force under repressive conditions, has been sucking in raw materials, in recent years, from across the globe, particularly oil and steel. This has contributed to a generalised rise in commodity prices across the globe which has hit the living standards of the poor. (In fact China is a crucial player in the situation since it has funded the credit bubble in the USA for nearly two decades by purchasing huge amounts of US treasury bonds. If China sold these bonds the dollar would collapse).
Secondly, the approach of peak oil — or, to be more precise, the beginning of the end of oil reserves which are easy to extract — is another major development and alters the basic arithmetic for oil-based economies. It was the major factor behind the invasion of Iraq, of course, and is the reason US bases are likely to remain after ‘withdraw’.
Whilst the crisis has brought the price of oil and gas down the upward pressure exerted by peak oil will remain long term. The conditions of the 1990s where the price of oil fluctuated between $10 and $20 a barrel will not return. The policy of OPEC is to cut production in order to push the price back to around $70 a barrel even during the crisis. Peak oil, therefore, represents a sea change in energy costs for the future.
Thirdly, and most significant, is the ecological crisis and global warming. This is linked directly to the economic crisis of and contributes to making it a systemic crisis. This is ultimately a crisis of much greater significance than that of the economy. Global warming is expanding the deserts, melting the icecaps, drying up rivers, and destroying water reserves. It is disrupting agriculture and reducing agricultural productivity and crop yields. The impact on food prices is obvious. Bio-fuel production compounds the problem by turning food into petrol (ethanol based on sugar and diesel based on vegetable oil etc) and tying up large tracks of land in the process. All this produced food riots in 37 countries during 2008.
Another effect global warming has on the economic crisis is through the impact of extreme weather events on the insurance industry and through it into the banking crisis. Katrina is a prime example. It is not difficult to see what the effects of a Katrina type event would have if it happened now with the banking system in a state of collapse. Big resources are also increasingly required in order to adapt to climate change — even with the most optimistic emission reductions.
The fourth factor is the unprecedented level of globalisation of the world economy. It is not just that the world economy is more integrated than ever before but with the collapse of the Stalinist regimes of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s and the full integration of China into the world economy since then capitalism now covers the whole globe. Cuba is politically significant but economically irrelevant to the global economy. This makes it a very different crisis to that of the 1930s, which was at a more primitive stage of globalisation and which had the Soviet Union outside of the system.
For all these reasons this is not a ‘normal’ cyclical crisis, of the capitalist system — although all the contradictions of the system, traditionally identified by Marxists, which drive such crises, exist with full force within it. This is clear in that none of the post-war economic models — Keynesianism, monetarism, or its later neoliberal form, were able to avoid periodic crisis of ‘over-production’.
The duel character of the crisis also has implications for the long-term solution we propose as socialists; in other words an ecosocialist solution. We have to argue that capitalism in crisis points towards the need for an alternative society, built by and in the interests of the working class, which is at the same time ecologically sustainable.
3) Governmental responses
Governments around the world floundered when confronted with the scale of the crisis. None of them had remotely predicted it. Nor did the bankers or the speculators — the so-called masters of the universe. In fact many governments — with Gordon Brown to the fore —had actively promoted the myth that they had now achieved much greater control over capitalism and its contradictions, particularly since the turn of the 21st century. It was the end of boom and bust, as Gordon Brown repeatedly insisted.
The crisis began in the summer of 2007 when the US investment bank Bear Stearns revealed huge losses on the US sub-prime mortgage market — which was the weakest spot in the global bubble, the so-called toxic loans. Soon afterwards Britain experienced its first run on a bank since the 19th century with the mortgage lender Northern Rock. At first Brown tried to hold his long established New Labour neo-liberal line together and avoid intervention. But in February 2008, after weeks of agonising, he grasped the very painful nettle — and nationalised it. It was the first nationalisation in Britain for 30 years and in financial terms one of the biggest ever.
In the summer of 2008 two major US, government backed, mortgage lenders, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, collapsed. They were gigantic operations involved in the US mortgage market to the tune of $5.5 trillion. They were simply too big to be allowed to fail and were nationalised by US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson along the lines of Northern Rock.
The Republican right was horrified. And a number of other major US financial institutions were already in trouble. These included Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers. Under pressure from the right Paulson resolved that interventionism had gone far enough and that when the next financial institution failed market forces should be allowed to take their course. It was a seminal decision for the Bush administration.
The next to fail, in mid-September, was Lehman Brothers. It was the fourth largest US investment bank and the one most exposed to sub-prime mortgage losses. (Merrill Lynch collapsed at the same time and was bought up by the Bank of America.) Paulson proceeded to announce that Lehman would not be saved and it promptly folded — with the famous (or infamous) pictures of the staff carrying their boxes to their cars. It was the biggest banking failure in US history at that point and it would have massive consequences. Lehman had assets of $650 billion and was at the centre of as multi-trillion derivatives system.
The shockwaves from Lehman’s collapse triggered the biggest worldwide fall on the stock markets since the 1930s, and the pack of cards began to fall. If Lehman’s could go to the wall anyone could go to the wall. Its other effect was to paralyse the banking system, with banks refusing to lend to other banks and credit drying up. The US mortgage industry had by now lost a staggering $2.8 trillion in sub-prime write-offs and was in a state of collapse.
Lehman triggered the collapse of AIG — the world’s biggest insurance company. It insured the banks against sub-prime losses and was massively exposed. Paulson’s initial reaction was to let market forces take it to the wall, but asked JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs to prepare a report on the likely effects of this on the rest of the sector. Their report, delivered almost immediately, was to the effect that the result would be global Armageddon — or in bankers’ parlance a “systemic failure” of the global banking system. The scale and consequences of such an event were hard to comprehend. Paulsen didn’t hesitate, however. AIG was promptly nationalised with the injection of a total of $150 billion.
4) Turn to interventionism
The nationalisation of AIG was a turning point in economic policy and it could hardly have been more dramatic. The hard-line monetarist, neoliberal, economic model of Milton Friedman, Ronald Regan and Margaret Thatcher, which has dominated economic policy for the last 30 years had been stopped in its tracks. And this by the actions of a right-wing Republican administration which had held market forces and market deregulation at the level of a religion. Regan’s mantra had been that the state was the problem and deregulation the answer. Thatcher had held the same view. Now in place of this was a series of panic measures, designed to avoid the collapse of the banking system, which were more akin to the long discarded reformist economist John Maynard Keynes.
The move was hugely controversial. But the market forces, option — which had been the approach of the US and British governments the first years of the slump of the 1930s, in the period before the second New Deal, was seen as too dangerous to contemplate. It had resulted, at that time, in a wave of protectionism and mass unemployment (10m in the USA) which was only overcome by the Second World War and the reconstruction afterwards.
This dramatic policy change in the USA triggered a series of interventionist moves by governments around the world as they realised the depth of the crisis. This involved stuffing extremely large sums of money down the throats of the bankers in the name of “recapitalisation”. In the US Paulson decided to “pump” $200bn into the credit market and the Federal Reserve announced that it would buy up to $600bn of toxic loans. In early October the US Congress debated a proposal from Paulson to make $800 billion available to prop the mortgage system up. This was the equivalent of the total world defence spending for a year. The Republican right opposed it but it eventually went through despite them. In Britain the Bradford and Bingley was nationalised at the end of October followed by HBOS.
And along side state intervention into the banking system went Keynesian type intervention into the economies in the form of interest rate cuts, tax cuts, government spending programmes, and other fiscal stimuli, aimed at boosting the economy by spending money.
In October the head of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, spelled out the imperative behind this. He urged governments to launch spending packages to jump-start economies in order, as he put it, try to avoid a prolonged slump and widespread social unrest. If we are not able to do this, he argued, then violent protest could break out in many countries”.
All this reflects a remarkable ability, on the part of the bourgeoisie internationally, whatever the particular colour of the government, to act to defend their system of society at the expense of the working class using the best option they could see. They leave the leadership of the workers’ movement a long way behind as far as defending their own class is concerned.
The G20 met in Washington in mid-December on the initiative of Brown and Sarkozy to take it a stage further. They proposed what was dubbed Bretton Woods 2. (The original Bretton Woods established the IMF and the World Bank and ended the gold standard.) They presented it as their ‘master plan’ to stabilise the world economy by a return to higher levels of regulation of financial services.
The main opposition to interventionism in Europe, at that stage, was German Finance Minister Peter Steinbrueck. He accused Brown of going all the way from free-market economics to “crass Keynesianism”. The British Tories also nailed their colours to the market forces mast, and still do, opening up the first real policy division between them and new Labour for many years.
By the end of last year what started as a banking crisis began to hit manufacturing and retail in a big way. The giant US carmakers Chrysler and General Motors appealed to Congress for a massive bailout along the lines of those afforded to the banks. Again the Bush administration agonised and then conceded. When the Republicans blocked his aid package Bush bypassed them and authorised $24 billion to keep the two car firms going until March.
Similar interventionist moves were made across Europe most notably in cars and steel. France provided carmakers with £2.5 billion in aid. The German government began subsidising the purchase of new cars by paying for old ones to be scrapped. In Britain Peter Mandelson announced a totally inadequate £2.3 billion package of EU grants and loans for the car and steel industries. In the US GM was bankrupt again by February and was back for another $20 billion and Obama was forced to respond.
Some of these packages of aid have conflicted with EU rules, which impose a strict limitation on state-aid for industry. This is part of a much wider problem created by the crisis, however, as member states revert to their national interests and the survival of their ‘own’ industries rather than relating to the requirements of European integration. At the same time some of the new accession states of Eastern Europe are being hit so hard by the crisis that they could become failed states and be forced out of the euro zone, creating a major political crisis for the EU. The European banking system is in any case in a state of collapse.
5) New Labour in Britain
The banking crisis broke out again in full force in Britain in mid-January forcing Brown into a new round of bailouts in the financial sector. By February 2009 a trillion dollars have been handed over to the bankers worldwide and $1.5 trillion had been injected in fiscal stimuli. By the end of February RBS had turned in the biggest loss in corporate history and Lloyds was £10bn in the red thanks to toxic loans it inherited from HBOS. Citigroup, the world’s biggest banking group was collapsing and the situation getting worse by the day.
New Labour is a part of the international interventionist consensus; of course (Brown would claim a leading part). They are therefore seeking to hold the banking system together whilst spending their way out of the crisis by building up debt and printing money. They have nationalised various banks with massive cash injections, they have cut interest rates to the record low 0.5%, they have cut VAT to 15%, and now they have turned to quantitative easing to the tune of a huge £75 billion over the next three months in an attempt to boost consumer spending and get the banks to lend money. This is a figure approaching the annual budget of the NHS and is clearly a last-gasp measure to prevent a slump. It is also a shot in the dark in what is completely new economic territory. And they are clocking up more debt under conditions where Britain already owes a record £2 trillion. This severely limits their scope for fiscal stimuli and makes the problem of eventual repayment more awesome.
And they are doing all this, of course, as part of their anti-working class new labour project. It is some kind of marriage between Keynesian economics and right wing politics, and it creates huge contradictions. Whilst they are nationalising banks they are at the same time part-privatising Royal Mail. Local authorities, Labour as well as Tory, are privatising everything that is left that they can get their hands on under the impact of the crisis. Their overarching approach to the crisis, however, is interventionist
Under these conditions the overall character of the Brown Government remains the same: new Labour. Brown, whilst intervening into the economy continues to support the war drive and attack public services, welfare rights, civil liberties, wages, pensions and working conditions just as he did before. Sarkozy and Merkel do the same.
6) The role of Obama
Far more important than what Brown does, though, from a global point of view, is the role of Obama in the USA. His election represents an important shift US politics and would have done so even without the economic crisis — assuming he could have won the election without the crisis. He will act consistently on behalf of US imperialist policy; of course, there is no doubt about that. This is already clear both from the scandalous way he allowed the blitz of Gaza to continue without comment in the run up to his inauguration and his policy of boosting the war brutal in Afghanistan.
On social policy, however, he represents a break with the bush era. And the significance of this has increased sharply with the escalation of the economic crisis. The $787 billion economic stimulus package he has launched — which was opposed almost unanimously by the Republicans — is the biggest in the world other than China and is already an international benchmark for interventionism. It is likely to become even more so as the crisis deepens.
True some of his campaign proposals for renewable energy have been watered down. And it is clearly already inadequate to the scale of the problem. But overall it is a big turn round from anything the Bush administration could have produced. And his package is linked to his $2.5 trillion budget, which reverses some of the policies of the Bush era and makes major proposals such as the reform of health care. Whether such proposals ever come to fruition is another matter of course, but we should not underestimate what Obama represents.
Brown sees his best chance at the present time in climbing aboard Obama’s bandwagon. No doubt he will seek a joint proposal on tackling the crisis with Obama at the G20 meeting in London in April.
7) The politics of the fight back
The central political issue thrown up by the crisis is who will be made to pay for it, capital or labour. In this regard the two options that capitalist governments have been debating — market forces or interventionism — are no different. They are both designed to make the working class pay and give capitalism a new lease of life.
This does not mean, however, that the immediate impact of the two options on the working class are the same or that the opportunities that each presents for building a fight back are the same.
From this point of view socialists should welcome the ‘New deal’ interventionist approach in as far as it saves some industries, saves some jobs, and gives some relief to the working class in the depth of a crisis of the system. It does of course raise as many questions as it answers. We have to demand that it goes much further than Obama or Brown, or any of the others, is prepared to go. We have to demand programmes of public works which can employ and reemploy millions of workers. It can be done. If trillions of pounds can be given to the banks the same can be done for programmes of pubic works. Why not? And we have to demand that such public works are directed towards establishing a more sustainable society for the future, in order that the ecological crisis is tackled at the same time.
We should welcome this approach, as opposed to that of market forces which would send the weakest to the wall and many more millions on the dole, not only because it creates the best immediate conditions for the working class but because it creates the space in which to build a fight back. The more workers are thrown into unemployment and atomised as individuals the more difficult it will be to begin to organise. On the other hand if workers remain employed or are taken on for public infrastructure work they are in a far stronger position.
8) Nationalisation
The key to developing a socialist approach to this crisis is nationalisation — which takes the issue to the political level. And there is a big opportunity in this regard. The perception of nationalisation, which was discredited by Labour in the 1970s and 1980s and demonised by the Tories in the same period, has been transformed in the course of this crisis out of all recognition. It has gone from an issue discussed in socialist circles to a part of the mainstream debate on the response to the crisis. When leading members of the US government (first the Bush regime and now Obama) discuss how much of banking and even of industry to nationalise its clear that something has changed.
This opens up a space for the left which to which it has a responsibility to respond. It gives the opportunity not only to demand that governments intervene into the crisis but that the framework for their intervention should be nationalisation. Nationalisation does not equal socialism, of course, but it does open a space in which socialist ideas and a wider socialist programme can be developed.
There are many things wrong with recent nationalisations of course. They are the nationalisation of bankrupt companies, carried out in order to socialise risk and bail out debt, and with the intention of handing them back at a later date. Many of them are not nationalisations in the formal sense but simply government majority shareholdings, which can be sold off at any time. And not only is there very little control exercised over these institutions but Brown is making it clear that he does not want to exercise control if he can possibly avoid it.
It would be a big mistake, however, in the current circumstances, for socialists to say either that such nationalisations are irrelevant or that they are unsupportable. Rather socialists should welcome the nationalisation of financial and other institutions as far as they go, whatever form they take, as better than the alternative — which is to leave it to market forces. At the same time socialists should strongly oppose any adverse conditions imposed on the workforce in the course of the takeover and vigorously demand that the initial takeover is replaced by full nationalisation under democratic control.
And the arguments for full nationalisation under democratic control are overwhelming and extremely popular. There has been a wide-ranging debate in the mainstream media about it. It has been a popular reaction. If huge sums of money are being injected into bankrupted companies it makes no sense at all to do it without full democratic control of the process and of the future development of those industries. Socialists need to put themselves at the centre of this debate. A year ago it didn’t exist.
At the same time the preference given to the banks when it comes to state aid should also come to an end. Other industries have an equal need and this must be met. In many cases nationalisation is the only framework in which a solution can be found. It is the only framework which can provide any kind of answer to an industry like car manufacture which is faced with a very bleak future in its present form and which needs a serious programme to change it over to socially and environmentally useful production.
All this implies a big campaign by the labour movement and the trade unions around both the demand for nationalisation and the form it should take, which is not happening at the present time. The Peoples Charter, which is launched this week, would be a good starting point for such a campaign.
9) The response of the working class to the crisis
Given the scale of the crisis almost anything is possible in response. So many people are getting hurt that we are in uncharted territory. To repeat a point from above, we are still at the beginning of the crisis and are about to see a dramatic increase in unemployment worldwide as the events of the past three months come to fruition. Upheavals seem inevitable. The problem is what form will they take and will they defend the interests of the working class.
Already there has been a backlash against the effects of the crisis across Europe and beyond. France and Greece have been in the forefront but there has also been protects and action from Spain and Italy to Ireland where over a hundred thousand responded to a trade union call to demonstrate and where 300 workers are in occupation at Waterford Chrystal. There have been general strikes in Martinique and Guadeloupe and strikes and protests in Russia and Eastern Europe.
How this will play out in Britain, however it is harder to say. Some of the tabloids are predicting riots on the streets in the summer. It is one possible development. It is certainly a provocative situation. Those getting most money from the government, i.e. the bankers, are the very people most responsible for the crisis.
The situation with the unions, however, is verging on disastrous. The leaders of the major unions have nothing to say about the crisis. Nor has the TUC. They have reverted to defending their own patch — if they do anything at all. Mostly they do nothing at all — or worse, they negotiate away hard won wages and conditions in give-back deals to ‘save jobs’. Every day the media carries new announcements of closures and job losses, often by the tens of thousands, and the unions are nowhere to be seen.
That trade unionists are looking for an alternative to this kind of disastrous leadership is demonstrated by the remarkable vote for Jerry Hicks in the election for General Secretary of Amicus. He came second with 39,000 votes on the basis of a radical platform which spelled out a strong and detailed response to the crisis.
There have also been some welcome protests around the privatisation of Royal Mail and the strikes by construction workers at oil refineries and power stations. The construction strikes were, in my view, confused and even problematic. But they were at least a reaction to the growing threat to jobs as the strikers perceived it. Elsewhere there is very little happening. Even in other parts of the construction and building industry the situation is absolutely dire. Swinging wage cuts are being routinely imposed, at will, on bricklayers, steel erectors carpenters and other trades right across the industry.
It is similar across a range of industries from manufacturing to retail to service industries and financial services. Previous recessions have hit the blue-collar sectors the hardest with white-collar jobs generally a safer prospect. Not so this time. Everyone is being hit from bank workers to steel workers.
There has been the scandal of the sacking of agency workers in Cowley at an hours notice with no redundancy pay. Not only did the unions refuse to defend them but it was the unions who told them that there was nothing which could be done because it was beyond everyone’s control — including the management’s control. Yet the unions in Cowley were built in the 1950s and 1960s out of very militant strikes against pre-emptive redundancies. After that car employers had to pay heavily to get redundancies through. Now the wheel has turned the full circle and instant dismissal is back.
Not only are people being thrown onto the dole but widespread givebacks taking place. Many unions are accepting wage cuts, longer hours, higher work rates and unpaid overtime as an attempt to save the firm.
In Birmingham workers at LDV Vans have voted to accept a 10% wage cut, a three day week and the cancellation of their bonus in a deal to ‘save jobs’. At Land Rover/Jaguar workers voted to accept a package of cuts, recommended by the unions, which involved a four-day double day shift with no shift premium, a cut of one hours pay, no pay increase in 2009, and an increase in pension contributions. Staff employees are required to work three hours extra per week for no extra pay, accept full flexible working across all sites in the West Midlands, along with cuts in sick pay, holiday pay, and maternity entitlement.
What is taking place in Britain at the present time is probably the biggest attack on wages jobs and working conditions since Thatcher started it in the 1980s. If the unions fail to organise against it we could see a response which bypasses the unions, at least in its initial stages — and possibly amongst young people. Job prospects for young people are plummeting and in the summer the highest number of graduates ever will leave university without the prospect of the job. If this takes place the task will be to bring the unions on board and widen and develop the fight back.
But any fight back will also need a political expression, which makes the building of a broad political alternative to new Labour, which can articulate a response to the crisis, even more urgent. In Britain Respect is clearly the starting point for such a development along with broad initiatives such as the Peoples Charter.
At the end of the day if the working class does not defend its interests — through the unions or otherwise — capitalism will go ahead with its own solutions at the expense of working people. There is never a crisis that capitalism is incapable of resolving providing it is at liberty to impose the conditions on the working class necessary for its solution.
10) Bailout the people not the bankers
We say:
– Halt all further privatisations by either government or local authorities.
– Halt the attack on wages, working conditions and pension rights.
– Halt all giveback negotiations. Uphold and defend trade union agreements.
– No social dumping.
– Halt all house re-possessions for mortgage arrears. Transfer houses to local authority stock and rent them back at affordable rents.
– No attacks on public services. Defend them by taxing the rich.
– For a massive, trade union backed, campaign for public ownership including:
a) The nationalisation of all banks and financial institutions under democratic control.
b) The nationalisation of bankrupt industries under democratic control to preserve jobs.
– For a green new deal in the shape of a crash programme of public works to combat the recession, create new green collar jobs, and to build a new sustainable energy infrastructure. This to include:
a) A crash programme to construct a sustainable, publically owned, energy infrastructure based on wind, wave, and solar power which could create a million new jobs in manufacture, construction and engineering.
b) A crash programme to build new sustainable publically owned transport systems which could create hundreds of thousands of new jobs.
c) The renovation and insulation of housing to conserve energy — which could also create hundreds of thousands of new jobs.
d) A major programme of job conversion to socially useful production for industries such as car manufacture.
– An extensive programme of publicly owned and financed house building to avoid another housing bubble.
– Open the books of both the financial and industrial companies to public scrutiny in order to prevent the use of the crisis to force through cost-cutting and redundancies.
– A full government guarantee for pension rights. Future pensions to be paid for by taxing the rich and not to be reliant on returns from shares and bonds.
– Current pensioners to be compensated for loss of income resulting from interest rate reductions.
– Control over international financial speculation both through controls on capital movements and through taxation.