Old ideology must give way to new thinking

Re. Corporate elite settles an old score

Linda McQuaig is right on in her analysis of the current fuss over industrial bailouts. When our governments give tens of billions, or in the American case a trillion, to keep investment bankers in business but demand major concessions from working people, we've moved beyond economics and are talking ideology. Specifically we are talking about the neoliberal agenda that created the current economic mess.

We saw the same thing eight decades ago. President Roosevelt's New Deal, echoed locally by McKenzie-King, is credited with saving capitalism by reigning in the unrestrained corporate power that brought about the world economic collapse called the Great Depression. The systematic undoing of these reforms has led to the string of steadily worsening crisises we've seen over the last few decades.

The continuation of these outdated policies by our leaders in dealing with this latest recession merely proves that those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it. The ideology that touts the short term interest of multinational corporations as the only consideration is behind our economic problems. The way out of this mess is to recognize that business interests are really only a small, and relatively unimportant, part of the picture.

Gary Dale