LETTER: RET claims justified

Jonny Steinberg provides an interesting perspective (“Racists and nationalists dip their cups into the same punch”, January 20). However the broad claims of the “radical economic transformation” (RET) faction do in fact have some historically factual justification, even though the charged language may offend.

I recommend Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, which details how the rapid emergence of the Chicago school of neoliberal economics towards the end of the 1980s coincided with the end of apartheid and communism and informed the local negotiations between the ANC and NP at the time.

These outcomes in turn have influenced the past 28 years and the economic and political mess we find ourselves in now, and it is now clear that neoliberal capitalism has failed to deliver its promise of “trickle down” economic growth.

Conversely, it has delivered a shrinking middle class and cheap money, which are feeding a unsustainable property boom, rapidly increasing inequality and a crisis in democracy.

Much like the unfolding global climate disaster, capitalism in its current form is rapidly unfolding and the future is more uncertain than before.

Siegfried Kopp
Via BusinessLIVE

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