After a summer of havoc on the stock markets, which wiped out hundreds of billions in the value of shares across the world, including in London, the world economy is in turmoil again.
Here, we are told by Osborne and Co., that it's all to do with Greece's threatening bankruptcy. How convenient! Especially for politicians who would like to divert attention from the bankruptcy of their own policies.
As top financial pundits admit, "the current UK depression will be the longest since at least the first world war" - and, of course, it is part of a world-wide depression. So far it has been going on for 4 years, already longer than the 1930s "Great" Depression.
For Osborne though, there is no admitting that this could be anything to do with "reliable" old British banks and financial institutions, or their guardian angels in successive governments, like himself! Does he really think everyone has forgotten who started inflating the speculation bubbles which burst so "unpredictably" in 2007? That it was the very same British and US banks, financial and real estate speculators who have since been bailed out at tax-payers' expense? Compare the £123.93bn owed in cash by the banks to the Treasury (+ £332.4bn owed in guarantees) to the £81bn in public spending cuts which the Con-Dems are imposing - claiming that there is no other way to reduce this same Treasury's deficit!
He should thank his lucky euro-stars
If British banks were exposed to the current Eurozone debt crisis, it is only because they were greedy enough to have speculated on the financial woes of poorer European countries like Greece. And now that they face the prospect of losing some of this dosh, they expect to be compensated by the European Emergency Fund.
Indeed, the big British banks, including the state-owned and supposedly state-"controlled" RBS, were up to their necks in gambling on Greek state debt and government bonds.
Now, if the Greek government is allowed to go into partial default, all it means is that the Greek government will not pay some of the interest it owes and that the Eurozone Emergency Fund will pay it instead. So the big banks who have been preying on the Greek economic crisis, will be compensated for most of their losses, by the EEF!
Osborne and his mates should in fact be saying "thanks very much" to the Eurozone, which has designed the system precisely so as to prevent banks losing out - and precisely to provide them with yet another bailout - at the expense of the countries' populations!
Replace this dodgy system
The whole system is in crisis, not because of "the euro" or "Gordon Brown" (he just did the capitalists' bidding), but because this is the way it works. Because its only aim is to produce profits for a thin layer of very rich capitalists, regardless of the cost and consequences for the rest of the economy. It can only limp from one crisis to the next, with each crisis preparing the way for another, even more devastating.
And the crisis doesn't mean that big shareholders suffer. Today they can shift enormous amounts of cash around the world for the sole purpose of boosting their enormous assets in the middle of the mess, and they do. But thereby, they make the mess even worse.
The population in Greece and in the other European countries - including here in Britain - is expected to foot the bill for this profiteering. Because the money these super-rich make, has to come from somewhere. So it comes out of our pockets - through vast numbers of job cuts, cuts in wages, cuts in pensions, cuts in services and soaring prices. Not only has average income already been cut by half in Greece, over the past 20 months, but 30,000 more civil servant jobs are to be cut, pensions will be cut by 20% and tax thresholds lowered by 47% to the equivalent of £4,400. Unemployment already stands at 25%!
This is not a "just a debt crisis" caused by the mismanagement of government budgets by politicians who overspent. It is a recession which is world-wide caused by capitalist greed - and the measures which are being taken to get out of this double-dip mean that it is the banks, not "Greece" which are being bailed out yet again - while workers and the poor across the globe, not just in Europe and the US, are meant to take a double hit.
It does not have to be like this. There is no justification for such a defective, corrupt and decrepit economic and social system to carry on surviving, at our expense. There is every justification for it to be overturned and replaced.