Sam Girdin and Leo Panitch teach political economy at York
University. The Toronto School for Creativity and Inquiry offers
this mp3 audio in the hope that thousands of discussion groups will
arise in the world. Governments run deficits because of drying up
of the tax base. Populists brought Greenspan and Paulson before
congressional committees. Crisis is systemic to capitalism and part
of its dynamic and evolution. Capitalism has developed with
contradictions. As capitalism spread to become today's global
capitalism involving globalization of production, investment and
trade, financial capital has become important in spreading and
hedging risk. Capitalism deepens itself socially by integrating the
mass of the people in the financialization of everyday life. The
state has facilitated this process and is central to its happening.
Corporations do not sign free trade agreements.

Richard Wolff, a professor of economics at UMass Amherst, talks on
the current "financial" crisis and capitalism in general. A form of
socialism is presented as a possibility to exhausted and
anxiety-ridden workers. Maybe you can't have real democracy without
economic democracy.

The ruling bloc rediscovered the state to create a welfare state
for capital. Neoliberalism is a concrete break from Keynesianism.
In the past there was a place for workers in the structures.
Neoliberals invested in think tanks and changed how people thought
about the state.

The recent international conference on Responsible Credit in London
has made a declaration calling on governments and banks to take
action to protect vulnerable people during the economic crisis. The
Debt on our Doorstep campaign is urging all supporters to sign the
declaration.

The truth is most of the individual mistakes boil down to just one:
a belief that markets are self-adjusting and that the role of
government should be minimal. Looking back at that belief during
hearings this fall on Capitol Hill, Alan Greenspan said out loud,
"I have found a flaw." Congressman Henry Waxman pushed him,
responding, "In other words, you found that your view of the world,
your ideology, was not right; it was not working." "Absolutely,
precisely," Greenspan said. The embrace by America — and much
of the rest of the world — of this flawed economic philosophy
made it inevitable that we would eventually arrive at the place we
are today.

The foremost ethical question is, given that we owe most of our productivity to a common social inheritance, to what extent can we say that we have "earned" our personal wealth? There is a growing consensus in favor of a more robust public compact.

The famous school of economics at the University of Chicago led by
the late Milton Friedman spread its market fundamentalism
worldwide. Greed, selfishness, individualism and short-termism were
conflated with freedom and democracy and elevated to the status of
moral philosophy. The fatal flaws of this ideology fueled the
reckless risk-taking, greed and arrogance that led to Wall Street's
downfall.

The cause for the current misery is not to be sought in the huge
over-valuation of financial markets; the latter was itself not a
cause but an effect, a mechanism aimed at avoiding the real,
underlying crisis with which capitalist society has been confronted
since the 1970s.