'When The Lights Go On Again - All Over The World...'

The day after Gordon Brown saved the world - according to Nobel Economics Prizewinner - Paul Krugman, the first local councils have decided to save money by turning off their streetlights, and the Daily Mail is solemnly warning Gordon Brown not to turn into Josef Stalin. This is the hiss of a tory snake with its head in a forked stick.
While nobody knows what is going to happen next, it does seem that the fever has passed, and the patient is taking nourishment. The excitement of the most exciting month since 1968 is over, and now the long hard job of creating a different world begins.
Some smartalecs on the New York Times came up with a graphthis week tracking the use of key words during the Crash Crisis of 2008. 'Recession' 'depression' 'inflation' etc. The one word noticeably absent was 'co-operation', which I've been seeing a lot of lately, in one sense or another.
On the grand diplomatic scale there has been the usual predictable assurances of co-operation between banks to release credit, co-operation between nations to set the 'level playing field', and between leaders to play the game.. But it has also come nearer to real people in the debate over the crash in building society credibility, and the whole problem of 'de-mutualisation'. Various academics are now being given fresh space to put forward their angle on the simple agenda that at this stage in our history we need to co-operate more than compete. We have nothing to compete for other than an excess of luxury which we can't enjoy, knowing that any day it may be snatched away by another global crisis of capitalism. Calls for 'People's Banks' cannot be far off. And the internet does make such a thing a possibility, just as it helped secrete the virus of toxic debt into the remotest lymph nodes of global capitalism.
The Credit Unions could see a massive boost from this, as could all kinds of de-globalising projects which would return services and production to a more local, sustainable market. As all sane commentators were demanding all along.

crash08