The peripatetic Mr. Blair missed Ms. Tett’s essay on a speech by economist Benjamin Friedman:
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/927efd1e-9c32-11e4-b9f8-00144feabdc0.html?siteedition=intl
Mr. Benjamin Friedman’s full address here:
Mr. Friedman, in his address, speaks forthrightly about a pattern of debt forgiveness that was granted to Germany in 1924, 1929, 1932 and 1953. Mr. Blair scolding admonishment to the debtors, the Greeks and their soon to be successors, is patently obvious, but unsurprisingly history tells a different story!
Mr. Blair offers the usual Neo-Liberal apologetics: the Free Market upon it’s ignominious failure is replaced by the mirage of Austerity, and then Structural Reform combined with economic growth etc., etc. with asides about the danger of ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ extremists. Mark well the Greeks as the harbingers of the complete failure of the myth of Market Discipline. The problem with Neo-Liberalism is that with each dismal failure the prescription of it’s apologists/rationalizers is more Neo-Liberalism. See Philip Murowski’s Never Let a Serious Crisis Go To Waste:
Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste
Mr. Blair engages in fear mongering about political extremism, tangentially mentions Putin as The New Stalin, and then offers himself and his fellow Neo-Liberals as the ‘centrists’ capable of producing the answer to the Crisis. Yet both New Labor and The New Democrats were the central civic/political actors whose Financial Reform led directly to the 2008 financial collapse. Mr. Blair’s essay is a riff on his usual speech, that he charges handsomely for, full of foreboding about encroaching ‘extremism’ and self-congratulation about the ‘moderation’ that he and his fellow travelers offer as an alternative.
Almost Marx
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