Let's get over our silly fears of public ownership. Will Hutton in Guardian Comment.

[Joe Chi Minh]

Here is a link to an interesting article by Will Hutton on the post WWII nationalisation of the national infrasructure in the UK, both overt and less overt, and the likelihood of the merits of the former becoming increasingly recognised and implemented in the future.

Will Hutton's article, Nationalise It, will be broadcast on Radio 4 on Monday 7 April at 8pm.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/apr/06/transport.transport

[patrice]

1. Done!

Enthusiastically! done.

Next?

[Joe Chi Minh]

4. "Next?" I'll keep my eyes peeled. If you're not already familiar with it,

read The State We're In by Will Hutton. Most enlightening.

[Joe Chi Minh]

8. I was greatly taken with the other article, too.

[Greeby]

2. But it's wasn't public ownership, it was state ownership

If we own it, then how come we don't get to make any decisions about it? For instance, if the public had any say in the matter, do you think we would have had a Beeching report? I think not

[Joe Chi Minh]

3. It's an imperfect world. Are you grizzling! Do you think national infrastructures should remain

in private hands, and only temporarily nationalised, when they've been financially filleted by their owners? So that the whole process can be repeated by the latters' progeny in some future decade?

[DBoon]

5. time to leave behind the religion of privatization

The LSE's Professor David Stevenson told me that close examination of the data shows that throughout the Fifties and Sixties the performance of the nationalised industries in terms of productivity and growth matched or exceeded their private-sector counterparts.

Interesting, when you actually apply scientific technique and measure productivity and growth, you find the religious myths of the right wing have no substance

[sharesunited]

6. Government-owned businesses = tax revenue at a rate of 100%

Not bad. As long as they're profitable.

Otherwise they're a potential albatross around the neck of the commonweal.

Solution? Privatize only proves to be unprofitable!

[Joe Chi Minh]

7. Nope. There are all sorts of national non-monetary synergies created by the

mere fact of an industry being in public ownership.

What good does the added expense of directors and shareholders' profits contribute to the common weal? We have seen all too clearly that, in that order, they are the enemies of the common weal, since they are never content with large profits, but argue that they must make more in order to stay competitive, or even avoid being taken over (not that that need necessarily cost them, personally); and worse, they never tire of doing so, no matter how much they lower the incomes of their empoyees. That is the really catastrophic effect of their fathomless acquisitivenes. It would matter not a jot how much they profited personally, if it were not at the expense of their employees and the country at large, as indeed it always is.

This, however, from Time For Change's blog, has of course, been the trigger of the depression we are now just beginning to suffer:

"Or, to summarize it in my unsophisticated economic language, producers produce goods and services and the financial elite, through a variety of complex financial mechanisms, find a way to… uh …. have the money transferred to themselves.

But how are they able to do this? Petras explains:

"Two interrelated processes led to the growth and dominance of finance capital: the transfer of capital and profits from the ‘productive’ to the financial and speculative sector and the transfer of finance capital overseas, in the form of takeovers of foreign assets… The roots of finance capital are embedded in three types of intensified exploitation: 1) labor (via extended hours, transfer of pension and health costs from capital to labor, frozen minimum wages, stagnant and declining real wages and salaries, and frozen minimum wages; 2) manufacturing profits (through… transfers to financial instruments, interest payments and fees and commissions for mergers and acquisitions); and 3) state fiscal policies…."

See the whole brilliant post of Time for Change, here:

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Time%20for%20change/280

And this, after manufacturing industry has been scandalously downsized, ultimately, in order to maximise the profits of the invisible-earnings scam artists we know as the financial sector. Heavy industry always produced too many employees who wanted a decent wage and strong enough unions to fight for them. "Get rid of them! Why not employ people in the third world for what remains of our respective manufacturing industries in the US and UK?" is the way they think. Psychopaths without the least vestige of conscience, still less, sense of honour and healthy patriotism. The worst enemy of our countries have been our own respective finance sectors run wild, and their far-right political and media enablers. It was their unfinished business, neither Roosevelt nor General Smedley Butler, alas, were able to restrain for ever.

The fact is that the unworldiness of most people, which made them prey to the cunning of the far-right after the left brought them the good times, was matched in a certain way by the good guys at the highest levels, who thought it un-Christian not to give the benefit of the doubt to their "white-collar psychopath" colleagues, unable to believe that they could really be without the least vestige of conscience. And once the apparatus, lauded to the heavens by the MSM, is in place, you need the Beasts' stamp on your head to find your niche-level of employment. It would have been impossible for them to fight against the system, until this economic catastrophe finally uncovered the system for the psychopaths' snake-oil it always was.

I'm not aying we shouldn't have a private sector; but it needs to be closely regulated, and the myth of the necessity for open-ended greed utterly repudiated.

[Joe Chi Minh]

9. I should have added to the last sentence, that you could constitute an economic bloc in

your own right. And with South America and Canada being allowed to prosper unhindered (though currently hindered by different means), an enormous economic bloc). Lucky you! Potentially.