We will need to rebuild the public sphere, reverse privatizations, relocalize large parts of economies, scale back overconsumption, bring back long-term planning, heavily regulate and tax corporations, maybe even nationalize some of them, cut military spending and recognize our debts to the global South.
"The sale could maybe drag out another two months, but to reverse the privatization process is practically impossible," Eduardo Guimaraes, the president of Banespa, said in an interview today.
In an effort to reverse the privatization of the country's energy industry that followed the breakup of the Soviet Union, Mr. Putin has pooled the wealth and power of the petroleum trade in state-owned and state-connected companies.
At the same time, he allowed runaway corruption and largely reversed the privatization of major industries.
The main left-wing opposition party, Syriza, which has vowed to reverse all privatizations if it comes to power, said Taiped was "a tool of the troika" whose goal was "the biggest sell-off of state wealth that Europe has seen since the era of East Germany".
According to the Press-Citizen, all four candidates in Tuesday's Democratic primary race had campaigned on a similar platform: increased funding for education, eliminating corporate tax cuts and reversing Medicaid privatization.
More often than not recently, such deals have led to greater consolidation of the oil sector under state control, a policy Mr. Putin favors that has partly reversed the privatizations encouraged by the West after the Soviet collapse.
In 2005 the Kremlin enacted tax reforms, proposed amnesty for repatriated funds held offshore and enacted a law restricting the reversing of privatizations.
Little known fact: one of the things that allowed this to happen is that Germans have reversed energy privatizations in hundreds of cities and towns.
The Russian metals company Norilsk Nickel, which has been fighting a prosecutor's effort to reverse its 1995 privatization, reported a higher-than-expected profit for 1999, reflecting the effects of the ruble's devaluation on export revenue.
