Occupy

The anti-capitalist movement 'occupy' is gaining momentum; throughout the world people are occupying areas of our great cities associated with finance, from Wall St to the City of London. The occupy movement has its roots in Spain, where youth unemployment is at astronomic levels. They have my full sympathy; speculative capitalism has failed. No wonder the people are angry. However, I hope it wont be like the referee in the football and rugby matches I have recently written about. In those blogs I claimed that the incident might divert attention from the true cause of defeat, missed penalty kicks or reckless tackles and so on. The banks and financial institutions are only the 'incident', part of the system if you like. During the good years we were only too glad to benefit from 'cheap money'. How many of us took out loans? How many saved? Exactly. So while the protests are well-intentioned and in the right direction, I hope they will appreciate that it is finance capitalism that needs changing. We the people must make our elected governments prevent banks from gambling with our money; and that must be only the start. Free markets certainly create wealth, but so many markets are not free. They are tilted in favour of the rich and powerful. Radicalism is in the air.