Difficult to remain completely untouched by the death of Michael Jackson.  A deeply troubled soul of course, but a great performer with a wonderful voice who also made a serious contribution to the world of contemporary dance.

Richard Williams sums it up especially well in this piece for the Guardian.

As Jonathan Freedland says in today's Guardian, in the end Gordon Brown survived the various attempts to unseat him, and the worst election result for decades because,

And this statement pretty well sums up the state of UK politics.  There is widespread dissatisfaction with the state of the country, indeed the world, and the failure of politicians to provide a lead.  None of the main parties have a credible way out of the current crisis - a crisis which is economic at it's root, but which infects all branches of society and culture - because none of the main parties understand, or are willing to admit, the underlying causes of this deepening malaise.

But then the electorate is not much better.  What do they do after the economic order imposed by politicians of the right brings the world to its knees and they get chance to vote in elections to the European Parliament?  Most stay home, and those who do bother to vote give their support overwhelmingly to parties of the right.

It's surely time for a radical new poltics of the kind espoused in the UK by the Green Party, or by Compass on the 'left' of the Labour Party.  But how we get this imperative to register with the majority of ordinary people, or with mainstream politicians, I really don't know.

We get the government we deserve?  You bet we do. 

I have a new piece on comment is free this morning which assesses the motivation behind the recent proposal by the governor of the Chinese central bank for a new global reserve currency. 

I also point readers towards Richard Douthwaite's pamphlet, The Ecology of Money, which contains a much better proposal to link such a currency to energy use.

Johann Hari has this excellent piece in today's Independent.  It's an accurate assessment of the pluses and minuses of the Boris Johnson's first year as Mayor of London.  His conclusion: not withstanding some surprising policy initiatives on the part of the mop-haired one, Johnson remains a largely unreconstructed right winger.  Hari suggests we should be very worried about the prospect of David Cameron winning the next election.

My latest piece for comment is free, which addresses the need for monetary reform in the wake of the G20 summit, and was published on Sunday while I was in Belgium, has attracted a large number of positive comments.  Very encourgaging.

I have a new piece over at Comment is free this morning in which I argue that, in the absence of any political appetite for the kind of structural reforms needed to get the economy back on track, instead of investing in an over-capacitied car industry, we shoud be investing in much needed social housing.

The truly great Billy Bragg has this piece over at Comment is Free just now in which he correctly describes the consequences of Margaret Thatcher's victory over the miners, who began their famous strike 25 years today.

Whatever you think about miners' leader Arthur Scargill, and he certainly made many mistakes and suffers deep psychological flaws, everything he claimed would come to pass were the Tory government to get its way has done so.

Hearing the obsequious Lord Tebbitt talking about the context of the strike on the Today programme this morning was really quite vomit-inducing, so it's good to see the Bard of Barking putting the record straight.

As you can probably imagine I have little time for Sir Fred Goodwin and his ilk.  People like Goodwin reconfigured the banking system for the benefit of a wealthy elite of which they were proud to be part.  Ridiculous pension arrangements were part and parcel of the system by which these people made their undeserved fortunes.

But they could not have done it without the acquiescence of government, and in Britain for the last twelve years that government has been a Labour government.

For John Prescott to absolve Gordon Brown of all responsibility, as he did on the Today programme this morning is, quite frankly, and to use language with which Prescott would himself be comfortable, taking the piss. 

Bankers and politicians thought they could get away with it.  The former because many among their number feel themselves entitled to obscene remuneration for running business which produce nothing of tangible value.  The latter because, for reasons which they really ought to explain, they refuse to challenge the wealth, power and privilege of a tiny minority. In their failure to do so they prove themselves totally lacking in democratic credentials.

If there are no legal means by which Goodwin can be forced to return his pension pot, then perhaps we taxpayers might be reimbursed through a charge on the future earnings of everyone who has served in this government over the last decade.

These concluding paragraphs from Anotole Kaletsky's column in today's Times should stir the passions of any self-respecting progressive:

So economics is on the brink of a paradigm shift. We are where astronomy was when Copernicus realised that the Earth revolves around the Sun. The academic economics of the past 20 years is comparable to pre-Copernican astronomy, with its mysterious heavenly cogs, epicycles and wheels within wheels or maybe even astrology, with its faith in star signs.

The academic Establishment will resist such a shift, as it always does. But luckily economists understand incentives. They should now be given a clear choice: embrace new ideas or return their public funding and Nobel prizes, alongside the bankers' bonuses they justified and inspired.

Alas, as you might expect from the always stimulating, but rarely anything but conventional Kaletsky, the rest of his piece says little about the nature of this paradigm shift.

The problem is that in order to be a successful academic economists, you have to toe the establishment, neo-classical, line.  This narrow form of economics, which forms the basis of all economics text-books and teaching makes a set of assumptions about the foundations of the economy, and proceeds then to examine how this particular kind of economy works.

Any economists that values their career will not question these assumptions for fear of rocking the boat.  As Keynes said  'In the City, it's better to be conventionally wrong than unconventionally right."  The same applies to academic economics.  And it largely explains why we're in the mess we're currently in.

What is needed is a rejuvenation of the discipline of political economy, of the kind practiced by Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, Henry George, Joseph Schumpeter. J.K. Galbraith and E.F Scumacher among others.  Political economists need to wrest back the discipline from the econometricists that have come to dominate the profession.  Their assumptions must be assessed against ethical criteria.  We need to ask the question, 'what kind of economy and society do we want?' and then set about devising economic structures and institutions fit for the purpose of delivering that moral vision.

Brian Hodgkinson's book, A New Model of the Economy, is a good place to start for any economists that want to be in at the start of the paradigm shift.

Jonathan Freedland has an excellent piece in today's Guardian about the double standards of those on the liberal/left in respect of the tendency of some to associate all Muslims with acts of terror, and all Jews with Israeli government policy in Gaza. 

Nobody should be subject to abuse, assault or attacks on their property because they share religious beliefs with others who commit atrocities. 

In Britain, there remains a nasty, simmering anti-semitism that seems to surface at regular intervals. It is a prejudice which appears to go beyond the fear/dislike of 'other' cultures that seems to underpin many people's attitudes to members of the Muslim community. 

Anti-semitism must not be tolerated.  But the absolute rejection of anti-semitism is perfectly compatible with condemning Israeli government policy in Gaza, which I do unreservedly.  I also condemn Hamas for firing rockets at civilian populations, although I do think the plight of the Palestinian people is as close as any population could get to having just cause for resort to military action against an oppressor.

I've always been a huge fan of Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell, both for his If series, and his topical cartoons which appear on the comment pages.  But today the great man excels himself, as you can see here.

A final post on the Baby P affair.  This excellent article by Anne Karpf should be required reading for everyone who thinks more could be done to prevent child abuse and filicide.

Depite all the talk of a new Bretton Woods, there is remarkably little reporting of the outcome of  this weekend's Washington summit in this morning’s press.  But then it was never likely that the Washington summit would make real progress towards addressing the underlying causes of the economic crisis.  There is little in the final communique to suggest that any real lessons have been learned.  Nobody is questioning the fundamental nature of the global economic arrangements that have brought us to this point, nor is anyone prepared to admit that the system of global finance, which is supposed to support the real economy, has morphed into monster that routinely undermines it.

There is a simple reason for this depressing lack of action:  Despite a string of bank failures, mounting unemployment, and general acceptance that the forthcoming recession will be long and deep, too few people in the countries that matter have yet to feel sufficient pain to force politicians into the kind of common-interest negotiating position that inspired the post-war economic consensus.

In 1944, the world was desperate for a new beginning after almost three decades of continuous turmoil.  Europe had barely begun to recover from the Great War when the Wall Street crash heralded a depression which saw unemployment reach 25 per cent in the United States - four times current levels - with Britain not far behind.   The outcome of World War II was still in the balance as representatives of the allied powers gathered at Bretton Woods.

The extent of the misery in the decades preceding that meeting bears no comparison to the situation today.  Despite the gravity of the current crisis, there is no palpable sense of fear for the future among ordinary people.  Indeed, compared with the reaction to the 9/11 attacks, there seems to be a remarkable degree of equanimity.

The agreement at Bretton Woods was motivated by a collective desire to avoid a repeat of the conditions that led to economic meltdown in the 1930s.  Although the Americans dictated terms to such an extent that US policy would ultimately bring about its collapse in 1971, it survived nearly three decades because, having been through so much, people were determined that their children should inherit a world free of war and poverty.  And because politicians had the vision and confidence to deliver economic and political conditions in which such a world could be created.

No such vision or determination exists today.  Most of the measures currently on the table are aimed at returning the economy to the supposedly rude health of the last decade.  Politicians are unable to accept that the current crisis is the direct and inevitable result of the way they chose the run the economy.  Until very recently, their hands-off approach was regarded as unprecedentedly successful.  They can only possibly perceive the current crisis to be a little local difficulty; to do otherwise would call into question the very assumptions and beliefs upon which they have built their careers.

With unmitigated hubris, most leaders still believe they can fix a machine they themselves broke in the first place with more of the same.  If they can just get people spending again, if the banks can be persuaded to start lending to each other, and to consumers, things will return to normal.  And as long as the pain of recession does not engulf entire populations like it did in the 1930s, they will probably pull it off, until next time.

As Clive Crook writes in this morning's FT, "Expectations will have a second chance to get out of hand in April. Another meeting has been called for then."  Things will have to get a great deal worse if politicians are to be persuaded to use that opportunity seriously to revisit the economic drawing board.  They have proved this weekend that they are certainly not yet ready to lay the foundations for the kind of brave new world that emerged from Bretton Woods in the summer of 1944.

Further to yesterday's post about the tragic death of Baby P, Simon Jenkins has a very good summary of the case in today's Guardian.  As he says:

There is much one could say about the horrific neglect and murder of Baby P in Haringey, North London last year; a case that has only now come under the media spotlight because of the legal requirement to await the outcome of the trial for murder of the child's mother and two other men.

What irritates me most, however, is the way politicians and pundits alike talk about how shocking it all is.   When I hear those words I know immediately that nothing will be done to address the underlying causes of the happily very rare instances of extreme child neglect and abuse.

Then there's the blame game.  Someone must always be responsible and held to account.  For David Cameron, it is the government.  For the lamentable Jeremy Paxman (whom Minister for Children, Beverley Hughes, dealt with admirably on Newsnight, I thought) it is politicians in general.  No one, of course, lays any part of the blame at the state of a society in which people like the parents who murdered this child can aspire to parenthood without having first learned the fundamentals of humanity.

The reason, I suspect, that people are so shocked by these dreadful events, is that they have a the false impression that the world is, bye and large, a good, safe, warm and  comfortable place.  For the majority of citizens globally, and for sizeable minorities even in the rich countries, this is palpably not the case.  If 30,000 children under five die each day from preventable causes, then we've got some considerable way to go before we can be proud of the world we have created.

It is probably impossible, ever, under any conditions, to keep all infants safe from the actions of psychopathic parents.   It is however possible to create social and economic conditions in which more young people grow into adults and undertake parenthood with the a level of emotional and psychological maturity that would minimise the possibility of abuse or neglect.

It would also be possible, if we chose not to fix society, to properly fund, invest in and motivate social services departments and people who work in them, to sort out the mess that inevitable follows without on occasion, failing to act in time.

If we really want to protect every single child from parental abuse we have either to change society beyond all recognition, or massively increase social services funding.

We could settle, on the other hand, for being thankful that such events are so rare, and remind ourselves, as Professor Colin Pritchard noted yesterday,

But please, let's be a bit more grown up about the warts-and-all reality of human existence.  Dreadful thinks happen, thankfully not that often; and unless we are really prepared to address the underlying causes, at huge cost, we really should stop pretending to be shocked.

With UK unemployment nudging 2 million once again (and that's the official count - if we apply the measurement criteria used back in the 1970s, it's now well over three million) it's time to ask again a simple question: just what, and more to the point, who, is the economy for, and what ends it is supposed to serve?

It's not - or should not be - rocket science:  the economy consists of those mechanisms and institutions in society through which its members secure for themselves the means to survival and satisfaction in life in exchange for their labour.

For the last thirty years, however, the objective of full employment has fallen off the radar of economic policy because the neo-classical school of economics that has come to dominate the political and academic establishments has persuade people in large numbers that economic policies focussing on continuous growth and low inflation offer the best hope for economic advance. 

This argument is now revealed as a gigantic con-trick, pulled off by economists and politicians, ably aided by much of the mainstream media, in the service of the interests of elite wealth and privilege.  Democracy, meanwhile, appears quite unable to defend majority interests.

I'm not arguing that the state should take responsibility for directly creating jobs for those whom the market doesn't provide.  But there needs to be a moral basis for economic policy, and key among the values referenced should be a commitment to an economy in which everyone has access to the resources and opportunities necessary to make a reasonable living for themselves. 

By starting from that belief, and ensuring it remains the over-riding goal in policy formulation, it should be possible to restructure the economy along more just and inclusive lines.  Presently however, there seems little chance of such progress.

Whatever one may think of Peter Mandelson, he still show signs of being a top-rate political operator.  He has today called on the Prime Minister to save the threatened UK post office network arguing that in the current financial crisis, the Post Office's trusted brand could become the focal point for renewed confidence among savers and borrowers.

If the post office were to be decimated, as has been the likely upshot of current government policy, it would represent a hammer blow for hundreds of rural communities.  In suggesting, not only that they should be saved, but by coming up with a commercial rationale for saving them, Lord Mandelson might be doing both the government and the country a massive favour.

I have a new piece over at Comment is Free this evening urging caution in the wake of Barack Obama's victory.  I certainly believe his success makes the world a better place, but the kind of progress which would make a real difference to the lives of millions of excluded and disposessed people worldwide, will take more than the election of one man, however remarkable.

Alongside the obvious pleasure at Barack Obama's victory in this week's presidential election, there was much to smile at in the election coverage.  The sight of Jeremy Vine on the BBC struggling to get his touch screen controlled map of the United States to work properly will have brought pleasure to many people who, like me, spend hours cursing such devices for their inability to deliver a simple train ticket.

But the highlight of the last week has to be Simon Schama's pre-election rebuttal of a rather unpleasant American gentleman on Question Time from New York.  Against my better judgement I really rather like Schama, although as you can see from the clip, without his own production team to restrain his bizzare limb, and indeed whole body, movements, he is rapidly turning himself into a new Magnus Pike for the noughties.

The chances of creating a more just, inclusive, sustainable and human world are a little better after the victory of Barack Obama.  America is a country full of contradictions, but as Mike Tomasky - who now deserves a vacation as much as the cadidate himself - observes here, it could not have happened anywhere else.

When America has a good day, the rest of us can afford to celebrate the fact that the United States remains the world's only superpower.  I have my doubts about Obama: anyone who achieves his stunning level of success must necessarily have kept very quiet about any plans to change the world. But, for those of us who know how urgent the need for substantial, structural change is, an Obama White House provides a much better context in which to make our case.  As Tomasky concludes, it's been a good night.

If, as now seems very likely, Barack Obama is elected to the Presidency today, it will be an historic moment.  But what it will mean for United States policy - both domestic and foreign - remains unclear.  The world moves very slowly, especially in respect of building a more inclusive and sustainable global society.

There's been little in his rhetoric to suggest Obama is a radical, and in any case, as veteran US commentator James Ridgeway points out, the realities of congressional inertia and the country's continuing dependence on foreign oil suggest that while the place might look very different to outsiders, it will take some considerable time before any real progressive gains are made.

I have a new piece over at Comment is Free this afternoon looking at the social and economic impacts of the contrasting histories of the UK and Italy.

I have another piece at Comment is Free this morning.  This one looks at the financial crisis in terms of the huge discrepancy between consumption and production that has become the norm over the last decade of so.

Although Sir Simon Jenkins can be bloody irritating at times, he can claim to one of the few polymaths of our time; remarkable given that his principal trade as been that of a newspaperman.

Despite our having obvious and deep political differences, I am happy to admit that he is probably the finest columnist at work in the English language today, and I offer this sublime piece of writing from today's Guardian as evidence.

Playwright David Edgar has an excellent piece in today's Guardian in which he reminds us it is the Tory policies of the 1980s that are responsible for the current crisis and for many of today's social problems.  He argues that Cameron's new Tories should not be allowed to escape responsibility, even if new Labour could have done much more to repair the damage.

This piece by the always excellent Chris McGreal in today's Guardian explains why the resignation of Thabo Mbeki is long overdue.  Like many though, I fear it will take more than a change of leader for South Africa to escape its current predicament.  The country is a perfect example of how economic growth can do absolutely nothing for society, if its fruits are not widely distributed.

As someone who has been predicting the economic and financial chaos that we are now witnessing for a number of years, it's rather difficult to know what to say now it's finally upon us.

To be honest, I didn't think it would quite as catastrophic as it has turned out, although my gut feeling was always that as the financial markets became ever more complex and globally interdependent, then the inevitable crash could only get bigger.

It's fascinating to read a million and one commentators give their opinion.  Suddenly we are all experts on short-selling.  But all this attention to the detail and intricacies of the markets and the various instruments that have been devised solely to allow traders and fund managers to make more money for themselves and their wealthy clients should not distract us from the real problem: that a financial system that makes its central focus the generation of unearned wealth from speculative trading of shares and securities that has nothing to do with the real economy needs replacing with a system which supports the economy in a way that promotes the interests of all citizens and of wider society. 

Reform is not enough; we need to replace the system with one that works, and to do that we need a thorough reassessment of the underlying economic theory on which the whole fragile edifice is built.