Saturday 21 February 2009
by: André Pratte, La Presse
André Pratte for La Presse and Christine von Garnier in Le Temps argue that capitalism has to be reinvented and controlled. (Image: www.hermes-press.com/collapse.htm)
The capitalists were bad winners. They pushed their system to the extreme, that is to say, to excess. Outrageous risks, gargantuan appetites, crass incompetence and arrogance, brazen frauds have marked the last decade - until the temple's columns collapsed.
Also see below:
Christine von Garnier | The Amoral Moment •
Today, the very same actors who preached lean government are begging governments to come to their rescue. The automobile industry alone says it needs a lifesaver of $40 billion. And as staunch a free market apostle as former Federal Reserve president Alan Greenspan wants the temporary nationalization of certain banks.
The stock markets' reactions to the gigantic recovery plans governments have implemented suggest that investors want still more. That is, that they want recovery to come from the government and for the latter to assume all the risks. What sissy capitalists we have there!
When French President Nicolas Sarkozy started to talk about the necessity of "restructuring capitalism" in September, many people smirked at the outsized ambition he expressed in that formulation. Yet that's precisely what will be necessary.
In spite of its weaknesses and its pernicious effects, capitalism has proved itself. To paraphrase Churchill on democracy, it's the worst economic system there is, with the exception of all the others humanity has tried. That's why those who believe in free market economic liberalism - beginning with our political leaders and company heads - must knuckle down to the necessary reform.
Nothing is more troubling in the present rout than the multiplication of abuses at very high levels. The Stanford affair followed the Madoff affair. The leaders of a company as respected as Research in Motion (manufacturer of BlackBerry) have just paid the American Securities and Exchange Commission fines totaling $1.4 million in an options backdating case. For its part, the great Swiss bank UBS has acknowledged responsibility for "irregular activities" that arose in transactions with American depositors. According to Washington, UBS lured its clients by asserting that they could escape the IRS.
It's the state that has revealed these abuses, the state that will allow economies to recover, the state that will absorb the shock its citizens have undergone - financial losses, unemployment. As quid pro quo, governments will want to strengthen their controls over the economic system. In the medium term, that will damage the economy's efficiency.
As totally contrite and docile as they may be today, the capitalists will soon come to complain about the weight of the laws, the regulations, the bureaucracy. Nevertheless, their credibility will be nil. And they will have only themselves to blame.
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Translation: Truthout French language editor Leslie Thatcher.
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The Amoral Moment
Thursday 26 February 2009
by: Christine von Garnier, Le Temps
Christine von Garnier of the Africa-Europe Faith and Justice Network deems that human beings must take a new look at themselves if they are to pass a less ravaged Earth on to their grandchildren.Situations of chaotic change favor a rise of dangerous ideologies. Confronted with neoliberal capitalism's failure to assure a suitable life for the majority of the world's citizens, some, especially in Germany, are rereading Karl Marx's "Kapital." Marxism is a product of 19th century capitalism. Marx ably demonstrated the appropriation of the means of production by a single "social class" - a term not much used today - and the sufferings of the "working class." Zola and Dickens magisterially described that for us in their novels. One may write the same thing about the slums in the South [today]. In the free market neoliberal capitalism practiced at the moment and which spiraled out of control following the fall of the Berlin Wall, a few powerful states, a few banks and other multinationals planned world commerce and finance to suit themselves. They also appropriated the means of production and the wealth of the earth as though it belonged to them by divine right. They transformed everything to their own advantage because there were no controls. Tough luck for the billion starving people and the desperate signals the earth, the air and the seas are launching. That societies tend to structure themselves unequally is a truism that proves itself in every generation and every country. But what responses are to be given to this massive looting?
For the "magical" outset of the third millennium, all of the United Nations's member states, aware of the enormous challenges to address, agreed to the Millennium Development Goals (MDG), intended to correct these deadly aberrations. But who's really applying them? According to a senior WTO official, that institution does not have the financial resources to effect any real control of their application within the trade agreements decided within its confines! At Seco [Secrétariat d'Etat à l'économie - the Swiss national economy secretariat] also, they don't overburden themselves; business is business; they just make a reference on paper to the Human Rights Declaration, since the MDG "is the UN's business," they tell us.
But there are other responses. Protestantism, which is one of the main vectors of capitalism, encourages the individual to be responsible and free; Calvin played a major role. But that analysis no longer holds true in those countries of other cultures where capitalism has also imposed itself. The notion of responsibility doesn't go further than that to the family, clan or tribe. Let's look at the Neapolitan, Russian or Rumanian mafia and some heads of state in African and elsewhere along with their surrounding ministers, who help themselves to their countries' wealth as though they were in a free supermarket. Calvinist austerity doesn't seem to have inspired certain American and Swiss bankers very much either. As the humanist and materialist philosopher of the Left, Count Sponville, said, "they acted out of greed and passion ... the lure of money readies these individuals for any insanity." According to him, capitalism is neither moral nor immoral, but amoral. It's up to the individual to moralize it through the law - and consequently, by way of a democratic process. But what good is the law, if it's neither applied, nor supervised at the international level? So, we need supranational institutions to effect this slow work of constructing a global democracy in which the most powerful no longer make their own law of the jungle. However, the Bush government always opposed the slightest loss of power. And now other powers are lining up.
But it's also the individual who must thoroughly reappraise himself as well as the meaning of his life and the organization of society if he wishes to pass a less ravaged earth on to his grandchildren - whose right to a worthwhile life is inalienable. Calvin was right to insist on individual responsibility and Marx to show the perversions of the newborn capitalism. Today, he is echoed by another Marx, that is Mgr Reinhard Marx, archbishop of Munich, former professor of the Church's social doctrine at Padderborn and unbridled defender of social justice. He just wrote his own "Kapital." He speaks to all those who think they can become wealthy without working, simply through speculation. "Capitalism without an ethical and legal framework is inhuman! The capitalist system which maintains return on capital as its only goal is a bogus stimulant." Today, there are certain clear limits to illegitimate enrichment, to the maximum return on pension funds and to science's insane robotizing of human beings to extend the life of individuals. All of that shortens the life of the world's generations to come.
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Translation: Truthout French language editor Leslie Thatcher.
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