June 12th - It's getting pretty exciting now!

 Although I feel I have a long way to go before I quite understand just what has gone wrong in our world and how we can change direction, I'm beginning to feel that I'm moving in the right direction.  Last night, in bed, I was reading Deborah Orr's article in last Saturday's Guardian (sad really aint it!?). It takes me all week to wade through Saturday's paper. The article was entitled 'Neoliberalism has spawned a financial elite who hold governments to ransom' and, although it didn't exactly identify a way forward out of the mess, it gave a pretty good explanation of where we are at.
Her basic point was that in order for markets to work they need consumers who need to be educated, housed and earning money so that they can go out and buy.  A hundred years ago Henry Ford recognised the need for his workers to earn enough to buy cars when he is quoted as saying, when it was suggested that robots could work in his factories: 'But robots don't buy cars.'  
So, in recent years, as undeveloped countries started on the road to development, they, working for lower wages than we in the West, made goods which were exported to us. They were not able to afford to buy what they produced themselves.  As manufacturing slipped away overseas two things happened - immigrants, seeing the 'good life' enjoyed by people in the West,  came to this country to provide a low-paid labour force to support our remaining manufacturing/service and agricultural sectors and people in this country, especially as unemployment began to rise,  began to borrow money so that they could continue buying. And government borrowing shot up to support the benefits system and the infrastructure.
As Deborah Orr points out a big problem now is that globalised companies take the profits but do little or nothing to support the customer base on whom they depend.  They either set up shop overseas so they do not pay corporation tax or they find a myriad of ways to avoid paying the very taxes which are used by government to provide the infrastructure for their customer base to flourish and carry on buying.
Whew!!!  Must stop for breath there.