In a terrific column, Aditya Chakrabortty looks at how Britain has come to have an economy that benefits the few to the detriment of the many.

Unthinking, unquestioning, neither alive nor dead, the zombie is horrific. It is also us.

Britain in 2018 is stalked by zombie ideas, zombie politicians, zombie institutions – stripped of credibility and authority, yet somehow still presiding over our lives. Nowhere is this more true than in the way we run our economy.

This September marks the 10th anniversary of the death of Lehman Brothers. In autumn 2008, the banks broke, the governments stepped in – and the cast-iron premises that underpin our economic system were exposed as fiction for all to see on the Ten O’Clock News. Yet a decade later, those dead ideas still walk among us.

They form what John Quiggin at the University of Queensland terms zombie economics – dogmas now cracked beyond repair, but which continue to shape British society.

Austerity – the policy that more than any other will define this decade – … and how 21st-century sovereign countries could be run just like household budgets. Tax cuts for “wealth creators” and privatisations of the few remaining national assets: all utter zombie-ism.

And this was no one-party game….

In this way, a broken economy has been force-fed more of the same ideas that helped to break it. The outcome has been almost predictably dire….

One lesson of the 1930s and the 1970s is that when capitalism fails this badly, it jeopardises the very functioning of democracy. So it is starting to prove today….

And so British politics has reached the deepest state of zombie-ism: a zombie minority government, implementing zombie economics, underpinned by zombie ideas.  [emphasis added]

This assessment applies equally well to the US.

Having described the current state of affairs, Mr. Chakrabortty then looks for where change will come from.  He finds hope in the ideas of

real people, working within real constraints, who often struggle with a dysfunctional banking system or unhelpful national policies.

This pretty much sums up the Transparency Label Initiative.  Since Wall Street captured the process by which disclosure requirements are set, there has been the need for investors to assert their right to know what they are thinking of buying or own.  The Initiative is asserting this right despite resistance from the Opacity Protection Team and unhelpful national policies.