BRING BACK CLAUSE 4 ! KILL THE SQUID !

With the beginnings of serious social unrest in Greece despite the EC and IMF loans under a nominally Socialist government I think we may be starting to see clearly the emergence of the need to review thoroughly all the accepted economic mantras.
Who are these rating agencies that wield such power ? They are private companies based in America. They are closely connected to the investment banks such as Goldman Sachs who profit from their pronouncements. Who are these ' investors buying debt ' that are so important in this perverse scheme of things ? Why are governments in thrall to these people who make money from manipulating markets ?
Is it not time to fundamentally challenge this form of market making which is about as divorced from reality as it can be. Is the stability of Europe to be threatened by continuing to slavishly follow a model of aggressive Capitalism in which barely regulated privately owned banks who dream up these complex financial instruments hoover up money while the problems this causes are to be tackled by imposing austerity measures upon people that still simply work for a living ?
Even the in house commentators such as Mr. Wolf in the Financial Times are now saying that there has to be radical reform, only now note, when the greed and total lack of control led these very 'institutions' (which is giving them too much kudos), to bring the whole system to the brink of meltdown due their own hubris.
I had cause to refresh my memory as to what Clause 4 of the Labour Party manifesto was the other day, it was the one that was excised by Tony Blair in his drive to 'modernise' the party. It was actually a foundation stone of Socialist principle and concerns the objective of bringing all the major elements of the operation of a developed society into public ownership and thus outside of the machinations and mystification of the world of private capital.
A salient example, was the re-nationalisation of Railtrack yet again only after their hand being forced by the appalling sequence of preventable deaths following the privatised Railtrack's cutting back on maintenance : read austerity measures. The Government took back control of the infrastructure of the railways so that it was not subject to the vagaries and whims of a profit driven private company that had been handed a monopoly on a public service on a plate.
The pitiful record of this Labour government did not go any further and the remaining franchises for train operation are a patchwork of competing private companies, with the notable exception of Deuche Bahn the German State Railway which has two. This means these two, Chiltern and London Overground are the only ones that are outside the private sector and guess what, they are two of the very best train operators in the country. The rolling stock is still largely owned by banks, an ultimate absurdity given that you cannot run a railway without trains and yet these are currently in the hands of banks who lease them out or sell them when necessary to make their profits which then sit in their coffers doing nothing useful.
Someone with some balls should try and get this crucial idea back on the agenda although I hear only deafening silence from all the major British parties as they all live in fear of being branded as Nationalisers. What is wrong with putting the interests of the country as a whole before that of the precious 'market' ? For how much longer are senior politicians going to accept the greater wisdom, read:self interested greed and the smoke and mirrors of their complex financial instruments, from the unelected, discredited self-selecting elite of the City and the precious, vastly over important, overpaid, under regulated, venal and arrogant commercial banking, insurance and credit rating cabals ?
It is simply not enough to have a few show trials and for fines and settlements to be made : government has the power to legislate these bloodsuckers out of existence, (calling Goldman Sachs a vampire squid is an insult to vampire squid), or at least clip their wings so short that they can no longer fly in permanent First Class while everyone else has to crawl along the pavement looking for the pennies they have dropped.
As I write this Golman Sachs have already settled by making a payment over one accusation but admitted no wrong doing whatsoever.
I strongly suggest that something very close to Clause 4 is used as the basis of future government legislation by whatever party or coalition take over, otherwise it may be forced to do it by the increasingly untenable effects of allowing policy to be made in response to the pronouncements and the machinations of those in control of capital whose only raison d'etre is to keep it and accumulate more.
Why was the BBC interviewing at length a very rich American investor, one Jim Rogers, about what to should be the governments of Europe response to the Greek situation ? Why on earth should his view, which was that Greece should go bankrupt, as if it was a private individual, and sod the consequences, given such credence ? These moral and intellectual pygmies cannot be allowed to attempt to dictate the policies of our elected Governments simply because they have mistakenly been given increasingly free reign to accrue vast quantities of wealth over the preceding 50 years.