Car magnate Henry Ford once said “it is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning”.

Today, as people begin to understand just how our global economy is structured and who benefits from that structure, it’s little wonder that anger is welling across the world.

In the UK, unemployment is already approaching two million, and forecasters expect this figure to rise to over three million by 2010.

Across the world figures are even more frightening – the International Labour Organisation fears 40 million less jobs by the end of the year. Falling demand and remittances from many developed countries, together with a global credit squeeze and spiralling debts, could well lead to a crisis as serious as the ‘Third World Debt Crisis’ in the 1980s and 90s, where very poor countries which were essentially bankrupt spent whatever money they had to feed the banks of the North.

None of this is accidental or surprising in a world run by finance, which has thrived on instability and has created crisis after crisis. Today more than ever the livelihoods and welfare of billions of people are dependent on the rise and fall of the market.

Financial globalisation allows massive transfers of money from developing to developed countries, with unprecedented ease. What in times past would have required guns boats and armies can now be achieved with a few clicks of a mouse.

To give a few examples, $160 billion is lost to the developing world every year through tax evasion, based on the fact that most trade takes place within global corporations and those corporations now have the ability to move that money around the world with few restrictions or questions asked. $250 billion is lost because $11.5 trillion of global assets are currently held in tax havens, like the UK.

The global money markets turn over a mind-blowing $3.2 trillion every day – much of which is speculative capital which moves very rapidly in and out of countries and currencies, causing immense damage. Another $1.6 billion a day is transferred from poor to rich countries in debt ‘repayments’, based largely on loans recklessly thrust on newly independent countries in the 1960s and 70s by financial institutions who promptly raised interest rates to extortionate levels. Needless to say these gigantic sums dwarf aid budgets.

In the West, the consumption boom, based on cheap but unsustainable credit, which has kept the boat afloat till now, would consume the resources of three to five planets if everyone in the world were to live in the same way. Now developing countries are being offered new loans so that they can deal with the consequences of an environmental catastrophe which they have not created, but from which they will suffer first.

These problems – of poverty, inequality, environmental destruction – were foreseen 30 years ago but crushed by the unstoppable advent of ‘neo-liberalism’. The result? Governments divorced from the people they supposedly represent, levels of wealth unknown in human history alongside millions who toil in conditions that would have been familiar to Frederick Engels.

But this moment is an opportunity which we haven’t seen for 30 years. Finally the king that was finance is unstable on his throne. Suddenly no one has the sort of blind faith in unregulated markets which has defined economics for a generation. World leaders who made their reputation instituting free market policies are scrambling to evade the blame for what has happened.

Gordon Brown is one of many leaders looking to show statesmanship in creating a new world order. But attempts to resuscitate a trade round at the World Trade Organisation which will further force open developing world markets, and resurrect the IMF which has led the charge of financial liberalisation, are certainly not the answer.

In reality, few people appear to have much faith that politicians can deliver the sort of change that’s needed. That’s why an unprecedented platform – spanning trade unions to development organisations, environmental networks to faith groups – have come together to mobilise ordinary people across the UK. Put People First, like Compass, is calling for ‘no turning back’. We need urgent and radical change in the way the global economy works.

Put People First’s demands include democratising the global economy – no longer can our lives be run by unaccountable institutions and an almighty and secretive financial sector. We are calling for decent and ‘green jobs’ and public services, radical action to prevent climate change and an end to an international trade and investment regime which continues to suck wealth out of the developing world for the enrichment of the few.

People from very different backgrounds, faiths and political persuasions now agree that we urgently need to make the economy serve people, rather than dominate them. But this change will only happen if ordinary people get engaged and push for the sort of world they want to see.

An essential starting point is a mass demonstration on 28 March in Central London. It will take much more than one demonstration to create the better world we want to see – but we have more chance of changing the world than at any time in a generation. Get involved.

- Nick Dearden, Director, Jubilee Debt Campaign
- First appeared on the Compass website, 16/03/09

March 16th, 2009 BOND