Capitalism a catastrophe, but still ‘best’ system
A problem for the writer of letters to the editor is that a reply to a columnist must be made in 200 to 250 words, compared with the 1000 to 1500 words allotted to the columnist for the exposition of his or her case. If I had had more space, I might have pointed out that when the sweeping policies of deregulation/privatization were introduced, from the 1980s onward, they explicitly excluded any “moral” dimension. “Greed is good,” we were solemnly informed. When people were allowed to devote themselves entirely to the pursuit of their own interests, all sectors of society would eventually benefit. Even those at the bottom of the heap would see their standard of living rise, thanks to the “trickle-down effect” of the accumulation of wealth at the top.
As The Economist noted in 2002: “The case for greed was perhaps best made over 200 years ago by Adam Smith, who argued that the invisible hand of market forces would ensure that the efforts of individuals acting in pursuit of their own self-interest made society as a whole better off. In other words, judge capitalism not by the motives of the capitalists but by its fruit.”
Earlier, in 1987, the fictional character Gordon Gekko summed up the thinking of the era when he said in the film Wall Street: “I am not a destroyer of companies. I am a liberator of them! The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, for knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.”
Clearly, there is no “moral compass” here, now waiting to be “rediscovered”. There are no “moral moorings”, which the deregulated and privatized system has unaccountably “slipped”.
Any “moral” action was left entirely to the discretion of the individual. A rich businessman could, if he wished, toss a coin to the beggar at his gate — in much the same way as an 11th-century robber baron distributed largesse. He could also use his wealth to create new industries and employment opportunities, and thereby give substance to the “trickle-down” theory.
In practice, he generally did neither. Instead, he chose to maximize his profits by closing his industries in the West and exporting their workers’ jobs to Third-World countries, where the elimination of local industries, mainly through the undercutting of local prices by imports of cheap food from the United States, had sent millions of potential slave laborers flooding into the cities. At the same time, he tended to blame the poor for their plight, by suggesting they lacked initiative and the necessary get-up-and-go attitude. (Note the tone of almost all the mainstream media comments on the various Occupy movements, and the emphasis placed on the protesters having beards, being “hygienically challenged”, and — horror of horrors! — handing out free condoms.)
This means that, today, many consumer products are made in Third World sweatshops, and are bought by Westerners who, if they want to maintain their “affluent” lifestyle, must increasingly do so by borrowing — and entering inter-generational debt servitude. The whole system is a racket that ultimately benefits no one except the super-rich, who must now resort to draconian security/surveillance measures, including the so-called War on Terror, to ensure a lid is kept firmly clamped on unrest. But as Michael Parenti points out in The Face of Imperialism (see earlier post), this “Third Worldization” of all countries is actually the objective of our present capitalist system — to which, the pundits stress ad nauseam, there is no alternative.
In short, what we are witnessing is tantamount to a revival of feudalism, cleverly obscured by the banners of “freedom” and “democracy” that it is promoted under, by an elite class that knows the world’s resources are either running out or being seriously degraded and that it must act decisively now to cement its position of privilege. When British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan said in 1959 that “most of our people have never had it so good,” — usually paraphrased as “You’ve never had it so good” — he thought he was speaking only about the past. But we now know that his words are equally appropriate when put into the future tense. The “good times” of the late 1950s to late 1960s will never come again.
The deposed elite snips Arab Spring
Cartoon from the Manawatu Standard of November 26, 2011.
The Wandering Who?
The Wandering Who? by Gilad Atzmon
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Essential reading for anyone interested in the issues of Zionism, Judaism, Jewish-ness, anti-Semitism, and history in general. (Atzmon maintains that Zionism “developed as a reaction to the emancipation of European Jewry”, when it was realized that this “might lead to the disappearance of the Jewish identity”. He further maintains that Zionism drew strength from a “created image of emerging anti-Semitism” . . . “a myth of persistent persecution”. Hence Herzl’s displeasure when French Jews, in the wake of the Dreyfus affair, showed signs of feeling “truly emancipated”.)
Elsewhere, Atzmon shows how a tribal cult like Zionism, which by its nature is exceptionalist, is incompatible with a universalist ethic, and suggests that nothing truly progressive can be expected from a state, such as Israel, that clings relentlessly to “a phantasmic, invented yesterday”. Appositely, he notes that Britain and America have also abandoned a “true historical discourse” in favor of a “banal and simplistic historic tale to do with WWII, Cold War, Islam, 911, etc”.
EXTRACT: The Holocaust religion [as first postulated by Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz] is the conclusive and final stage in the Jewish dialectic: it is the end of Jewish history, for it is the deepest and most sincere form of ‘self-love’. Rather than requiring an abstract God to designate the Jews as the Chosen People, in the Holocaust religion the Jews cut out this divine middleman and simply choose themselves. Jewish identity politics transcends the notion of history — God is the master of ceremonies. The new Jewish God, i.e. ‘the Jew’, cannot be subject to any human contingent occurrence. Thus the Holocaust religion is protected by laws, while every other historical narrative is debated openly by historians, intellectuals and ordinary people. The Holocaust sets itself as an eternal truth that transcends critical discourse.
The Face of Imperialism
The Face of Imperialism by Michael Parenti
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
“Excellent summary (in only 134 pages) of the monstrous crimes committed by the US empire as it attempts to control the world.”
EXTRACT: The goal of US reactionary rulers is the Third Worldization of the entire world including Europe and North America, a New World Order in which capital rules supreme with no public sector services or labor unions to speak of; no prosperous, literate, effectively organized working class or highly educated middle class with rising expectations and a strong sense of entitlement; no public medical care, pension funds, occupational safety, or environmental and consumer protections, or any of the other insufferable things that might cut into profits and lead to a more egalitarian distribution of life chances.
Libya: Another nation goes down to imperialism
Cartoon from the Manawatu Standard of October 22, 2011.
Gaddafi’s murder only ‘disturbing’ and ‘distasteful’
If you’re searching for a suitable adjective, Mr Rasmussen, how about “illegal”? Thanks to the Israelis and the Americans, we are now so inured to murder and assassination that the issue of the legality of summarily executing someone hardly arises. It’s as though an extra-judicial killing is now to be judged on a scale of unpleasantness, and described, euphemistically, as a “death” — like a death in a traffic accident, which simply occurs. Presumably, if Gaddafi had been cleanly dispatched, without all that blood (and without a knife up his rear end), his killing would have been more acceptable.
I’m full of steam, says Obama
Or is that hot air? Cartoon from the Manawatu Standard of October 19, 2011.
Insulting response to demands for change
Cartoon from the Manawatu Standard of October 17, 2011. Are those “missiles” stones or crumbs?
Assassination contracts: Let us quote, says Obama
Cartoon from the Manawatu Standard of October 15, 2001.
Cognitive dissonance: How we’re better off, despite the pain
The legacy of Reaganism — predatory lending and financial fraud — have taken the world to the brink of the abyss, yet somehow we are all better off — with the possible exception of the “squeezed” middle class, the writer below argues. She hails the “unprecedented global economic boom” that resulted from Reagan’s policies of tax cuts (largely for the rich), financial deregulation and privatization of state assets, and says that this has been most beneficial to “some of the world’s poorest people”. In my comment to the editor of the Manawatu Standard, where the article appeared on October 15, I point out that the World Bank statistics, on which this assertion is based, are highly suspect. (See letter to the editor below.) And incidentally, shouldn’t the word “boom” be replaced by “bubble”?
Letter to the editor:
I write in response to the article headlined “Left struggles for sound bite for US’s angst” (Manawatu Standard, October 15).
The World Bank’s statistics, which show that “between 1981 and 2005 the number of people living in poverty in the developing world fell by 500 million”, have been challenged by several academics.
In How Not to Count the Poor, Sanjay G Reddy and Thomas W Pogge, of Columbia University, say “the bank uses an arbitrary international poverty line that is not adequately anchored in any specification of the real requirements of human beings”, and that its approach is therefore “neither meaningful nor reliable”.
The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs says global poverty levels “have changed very little over the past two decades” and that “the situation today may be even more deplorable than a money income poverty line would suggest”.
As Adam W Parsons notes in his article “World Bank Poverty Figures: What Do They Mean?”: The World Bank uses statistics “to support its policies of deregulation, privatisation [and] market liberalisation…” In other words, the bank is a biased researcher whose “findings” are to be regarded with scepticism.
To read the above article, click on it.
REFERENCES:
http://www.columbia.edu/~sr793/count.pdf
http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/rwss/docs/2010/fullreport.pdf
http://www.stwr.org/globalization/world-bank-poverty-figures-what-do-they-mean.html
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