Rudd calls for action to save capitalism

[ev]

Rudd calls for action to save capitalism






Prime Minister Kevin Rudd says a new era of government intervention and financial regulation is the way the forward for capitalism, condemning the greed of free-market fundamentalism.
In an essay to be published in the Monthly magazine next week, Mr Rudd argues that the neo-liberals who have refashioned global markets since the 1970s, are ultimately responsible for dragging the world into the current financial crisis, according to media reports.
"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.
"Neo-liberalism and 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."
But Mr Rudd says that pressure should be resisted to rebuild an "all-providing state".
"The intellectual challenge for social democrats is not just to repudiate the neo-liberal extremism that has landed us in this mess, but to advance the case that the social-democratic state offers the best guarantee of preserving the productive capacity to properly regulated competitive markets, while ensuring government is the regulator, that government is the funder or provider of public goods and that government offsets the inevitable inequalities of the market with a commitment to fairness for all."
Mr Rudd writes that "minor tweakings of long-established orthodoxies will not do".
"For social democrats, it is critical that we get it right - not just to save the system of open markets from self-destruction, but also to rebuild confidence in properly regulated markets, so as to prevent extreme reactions from the far left or right taking hold."
"Government is not the intrinsic evil that the neo-liberals have argued it is. Government, properly constituted and properly directed, is for the common good, embracing both individual freedom and fairness, a project designed for the many, not just the few."


Thoughts?

[Bilan]

No surprises.

[Lynx]

Reform is a start...

[SocialRealist]

We will watch as the fire starts under their feet. They will attempt to wash the fire away with water, then they will begin to notice the fire is to strong to wash out.

[Lynx]

They will start to dance... hoping their fancy footwork (changing politics) will save them.

[Davie zepeda]

Capitalist will blame ever one but them selves for the failure of there system. The crisis was created by capitalism. The Ussr was ignorant to the fact there system was never meant to have a huge army there downfall as well. Liberal's conservatives are the same to me they hold the working class down.

[ev]

It's Rudd v Turnbull on capitalism


Article from: AAP


By Cathy Alexander and Andrew Drummond
January 31, 2009 07:00pm



WATCH out – the Cold War's back.
The Labor and Liberal parties are at loggerheads about whether capitalism is to blame for the financial crisis, and if a little more socialism is the solution.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd started the ideological battle when he railed against greed and declared governments should intervene more in the market, for the good of the people.
“Free market fundamentalism, underpinning greed, caused the global financial crisis which has now caused a global economic recession affecting every country in the world,” Mr Rudd said today.
He referred to the “absolute economic carnage” caused by the crisis.
In an article to be published this week, he calls for activist governments to regulate financial markets and reduce inequalities due to unfettered capitalism.
But he stopped short of calling for a return to trade protectionism and tariffs.
The Labor and Liberal parties' ideologies had appeared to be converging in recent years, with both pushing for free markets, deregulation and a social safety net.
But apparently the Cold War-era philosophical rift of right versus left remains.
Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull blanched at Labor's new socialist tinge.
“It is amazing that at this point Mr Rudd is seeking to go back to the failed days of big government, Gough Whitlam,” Mr Turnbull said.
“Older Australians like myself will shudder at the thought that today Kevin Rudd is channelling the Whitlam era in his treatise.”
Mr Rudd's new mission appeared to be one of high taxes, big government, and socialism, Mr Turnbull said.
He said it was appropriate to improve the regulation of markets, but Australia's market was already well-run, as evidenced by the lack of a sub-prime housing crisis here.
Mr Rudd hit back.
“Mr Turnbull argues that the free market should sort all these problems out, well that failed spectacularly with the global financial crisis,” Mr Rudd said.
He said free market fundamentalists were now turning to governments to rescue them from the crisis of their own making.


http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,24990091-5005961,00.html

Personally, I think this reform is a positive start.

[Lynx]

Mr Rudd's new mission appeared to be one of high taxes, big government, and socialism, Mr Turnbull said.
[...]
Mr Rudd hit back.
“Mr Turnbull argues that the free market should sort all these problems out, well that failed spectacularly with the global financial crisis,” Mr Rudd said.
Welcome to RevLeft, Mr Rudd. Please be sure to visit the sticky threads in Learning.

[ZeroNowhere]

Oh, please. 'A little more socialism'? :rolleyes:
"Reform if you would preserve."

[ev]

NEW UPDATE:


Ethos vaulted the Berlin Wall


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By Piers Akerman
February 01, 2009 12:00am

CANDIDATE Kevin Rudd, the bloke from Queensland who believed in conservative capitalism and signed on for 98 per cent of the Coalition government's policies while campaigning against it, has now emerged as the new anti-capitalist Godzilla.
Once again, the sincere pledges he made to keep the good ship Australia sailing on a true and prosperous course have been shown to be no more than hot air and hogwash.
Ignoring the reality that the great economic and moral leadership of such global figures as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher paved the way for a wave of prosperity that raised the living standards for billions, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has now declared the capitalist experiment to have been a catastrophe.
Backing Big Government, he now says only the state can save capitalism from itself.
Utter ideological garbage of which Candidate Rudd might have been ashamed, had he not already mortgaged his soul to the spinmeisters from the NSW ALP who were ultimately to deliver him the prize of government.
Having the wealthiest Prime Minister ever to grace Kirribilli House, and of course, The Lodge, lecture Australians, let alone a global audience, about the frailties of the capitalist system and the reforms which delivered his wife's companies their massive profits is sheer hypocrisy.

But Rudd has always been a man of many coats, and not only does his wardrobe contain a coat for every occasion, he is more than happy to change his garb to suit his audience.


As the candidate of last resort, he was the ideal person for the NSW Labor machine to back when it decided that former Opposition leader Kim Beazley was terminally unelectable.
Rudd would be whatever the spin-doctors wanted him to be, and the investment the NSW Labor Party made in time and contributions has paid off.
It needed a shallow, malleable figure and it got one. Rudd wanted the highest office and he got it.
But, as the elevation of former trade union boss John Robertson to the NSW Cabinet last week demonstrated, the NSW ALP is a grotesque parody of a democratic party and, now, Rudd is bringing the same distortions to the federal sphere.
The Rees government in NSW is the first to be installed in the State by so-called Labor Party members who were determined to destroy the fabric of a State Labor Party to achieve their ends.
Robertson, the man most responsible for undermining the premiership of Morris Iemma, has been rewarded for his Machiavellian feat of disloyalty.
His promotion is yet another symptom of the transparent dysfunctionality of what is loosely described as government in NSW.
The litany of failures that daily marks the suffering of the people as they await the expiration of the current four-year fixed term is a constant reminder that this Labor experiment failed and should be brought to an end as speedily as possible.
The Rudd government is nothing more than the natural descendant of the nauseating NSW State. Rudd's campaign was orchestrated by the NSW machine and, so successful was it, that on ousting the universally acclaimed Howard-Costello team, the NSW manipulators moved into the highest levels of the Rudd apparatus, advising, putting forward policy, kicking heads.
They didn't need the overt trappings of Yarralumla and The Lodge; all they needed were the computers and the power to begin the task of remodelling the levers of influence which act upon the Australian federal government along the lines of the model they used to such success in NSW.
It's no secret the former head of the disastrous NSW health system and the department of NSW premier and cabinet, Robin Kruk, is now in Canberra, along with the former NSW treasury secretary John Pearce, who stood nodding beside successive Labor State treasurers as they published dodgy state Budgets.
Nor should it be overlooked that the former secretary of the NSW ALP, Senator Mark Arbib, is one of the most influential thinkers in the Rudd inner circle.
But are there any figures with illustrious records of career achievements? No.
Rudd's whole agenda for the nation is based not on empirical data, on fact-based reality, it is based on ideological theories that should have been euthanased with the fall of the Berlin Wall.
That they are still in existence is a testament to the power of the relics of Marxism who still control the ethos in the nation's major universities.
Rudd is setting out his new-found theory in a left-wing Melbourne magazine known for its turgid columns.
But no matter how he frames his argument, Big Government is not, and will never be, the answer. Big Governments have always failed.
The Great Depression was not brought to an end by Big Government - it was brought to an end by small business.
It is an anathema to Labor, but small businesses are the powerhouses that supply the jobs that helped make Australia prosperous during the Howard-Costello years.
Those small businesses are suffering now and will suffer more when Labor's new industrial relations and emissions trading policies choke them to death.
Even former NSW treasurer Michael Costa - who now looks like a reforming giant compared with Kevin Rudd and the current hopeless NSW government - last week branded Rudd an economic incompetent.
Unfortunately for the nation, spin alone will not resuscitate the ailing economy.



Now the media is turning on Rudd because he is saying that government intervention is necessary for capitalism to survive..