Friends, while the capitalist world is heavily involved in giving trillions of dollars of taxpayer money to bailout private blood-sucking banks, corporations, car companies, finance companies, mortgage lenders, etc, our friend Hugo in Venezuela has just purchased a major bank in his country and intends to use the bank to give low interest loans to the little people! Amazing, eh?

This news (see Al Jazeera for full details) fortuitously comes hot on the heels of my last post where I questioned why the world was trying so hard to resurrect the stinking, sinking hulk of capitalism. Perhaps Hugo read my post and decided to buck the trend and try to help those who live on less than $2 a day! I can but dream!

According to Al Jazeera, The Associated Press news agency quoted Chavez as saying that banks needed to intervene in the financial system and provide low interest credit to people buying houses or producing food, rather than generate massive earnings for their owners. Can you believe what you’re reading?

This follows on from a time, in January 2008, when he threatened to “seize” private banks that neglected laws he’d put in place requiring them to set aside nearly a third of all loans for agriculture, mortgages and small businesses at favourable rates. As usual, our Hugo leads from the front and does not make promises likely.

Friends, do you realize the importance of what Chavez is saying?

He is questioning the very philosophy of capitalism which works on the basis that private enterprises are there to generate massive earnings for their owners who may be multi-millionaires, billionaires and/or rich shareholders. He is saying that the needs of a country and its citizens should come first, not the insatiable greed of the wealthy. Shock! Horror!

This is revolutionary! This is heresy in some quarters! This shakes the very pillars of our capitalist world and must put fear into the black hearts of those who happily exploit others so they can have it all. It must give heart to those whom capitalism has left behind (which must be between 80% and 99% of the world’s people).

It’s time that we in the Western World rejected the huge con that capitalism is, a con that rivals even the religious one. It’s time we broke the stranglehold that capitalism has on our lives, broke free from its spiritually cancerous, dehumanizing, avaricious clutches and set up a world that exists for the benefit of all its people rather than an elitist handful of the infinitely greedy!

It’s time to stand up and help to change our world into something decent, something compassionate, something noble, a place of  real equality and justice.

Let’s get started! Let’s bury capitalism.