[tjelen]

On the other hand, I remember that there were lot of Czech companies that were privatized into Czech hands and most of them do not exist anymore, because they went bankrupt a long time ago.

At the time (during the 90s), most of those companies that had foreign investors/management grew and survived and those that didn't were often tunneled-out by a corrupt management and were closed down. There were definitely some pretty big cases in 90s. Also there was a big public discussion about this at the time, and many politicians were against the foreign investments in general.

So I simply don't think that it's so clear-cut issue and that it's not like most of Czech people are completely unaware of the problem.

[timthelion]

You are, of course right, that the privatization process wouldn't have ended up being magically perfect if foreign investment would have been banned. There is so much awfulness that happened around the privitization process... And I wonder, if škoda hadn't been bought, would it have simply gone bankrupt after having been tunneled.

But if škoda had gone bankrupt, then that wouldn't have been an end to the Kolín, Mladé Boleslav, Leipzig industrial triangle. Cars would still be made here, given the huge amount of equipment and expertise in the area. But with škoda owned by VW, it cements a market dominance which is hard to shake. In a way, capital ownership is perminant.

A worse case is that of the swiss owned coal mines in the north. We behave as though those are still state owned mines. We kick people out of their houses with the power of the law. But the profits flow across the border to the west. Personally, I think that the government should pass a law that would re-nationalize the mines, without paying anything for them. The Chinese would certainly re-nationalize their mines if they were in the same situation. Right now, we behave as if capitalism is absolute, and democracy is relative to capitalism. The people cannot vote to confiscate the mines, but the companies can certainly bribe elected officials into privatizing them. So privatization is a one way process which puts more power into the hands of capitalists and takes power from the voters.

And now the Chinese are buying assets in democratic countries, and we are sitting here with our hands folded, saying "well, capitalism must come first. Democracy must never be allowed to interfere with the needs of capitalism." Which will be the death of democracy, unless we learn to dissobey capitalism and vote for things that break the rules of absolute and perminant ownership.