Britain's Robber-barons steal £50 billion Public Funds!

The £50 billion bank bailout that the UK PM, Gordon Brown, has announced is being described as a part nationalization. It is nothing of the sort.

It isn't even a loan. Brown's £50 billion bailout is a straight subsidy being given the banks in the hope of getting them to function again. Once they are alive and kicking again the subsidy is supposed to be withdrawn and the loaned money paid back to the Treasury. If, on the other hand, they didn't revive the public taxpayer will have thrown away £50 billion on a bad investment.

Even part nationalization would require the state to play some sort of regulatory role in the future running of these banks. That won't happen and though finance minister, Alistair Darling, made it quite clear in a press conference this afternoon that the bailout did not amount to part nationalization the point is being missed by the BBC.

As left-wing Labour MP, John McDonnell, has said this option that Brown and Darling have taken is the riskiest one of all and will cost the British taxpayer dear: finding the £50 billion will inevitably lead to higher taxation and more cuts in public expenditure leading to a further deterioration of an already-ailing national health system.

And even were the bailout to revive the banks, then what? Where are the guarantees that they would not simply return to the speculative, Ponzi-schemes which triggered off this present crisis? In sum, Brown's bailout is really no different to the much larger $700 billion pay-off that the Bush gangsters just extorted from the taxpayer in favour of the US fatcats.

And how is it that while in the US such a scam was required to be pushed through Congress --however cynically-- that its British equivalent is simply announced as a diktat by Brown and Darling? Is any further evidence required to show the rest of the world how British parliamentary 'democracy' has been usurped by a dictatorship of the privileged elite?

Unlike in the US I am not seeing any spontaneous demonstrations yet of public anger, they must surely follow. Meantime Brown and his cohorts must again be exposed for the robber barons they really are.