Loading ...The 11 000-page Commodity Futures Modernisation Act was dumped on Congress just days before Christmas break on December 21 2000. Those who read it would have foreseen years in advance the black hole on page 262, forbidding government from regulating derivatives. That’s how things are done in the democracy that constitutes the United States. And what of global democracy?
According to the UN, just 2% of the population control 50% of the globe’s wealth, with 10% accounting for 80% of total wealth in circulation; over 80% of the world’s poor control less than 1%. [Bloody hell]
Does this democracy “of a few” and for the free depend on the exploitation of the Earth, and if so, whose democracy is it anyway?
In many ways we are faced with the paradox of a democracy imagined in a world fractured and mired in simmering wars and conflict resources; it exists because the word itself — a misnomer given current circumstances — has become apart of our language and thought-forms.
But is there truly freedom of choice when all options have been pre-determined, manufactured and propagated by a select group of people — fifteen different cereals composed of more or less the same ingredients, produced by one company, lining the shelves?
Does it matter then what you choose if choice itself is an illusion, limited to “ideas” already approved?
Does our democracy allow for us to influence economic methodologies that directly affect us, our human rights, our environment or does instead it “release” us — the politically empowered citizenry — from the right of responsibility with a simple vote?
Can democracy exist within the context of the free-market, given that the UN states “a small band of rich” — the beneficiaries of the free market — “controls global wealth?”
If this is “freedom”, what is it that represents the ideological opposite of democracy?
Perhaps in order to truly understand the phraseology of modern political traditions, a process of elimination is required. We could start with capitalism and communism — often bunched together, garnished by the either-or tribe who spoon-feed us with news the way fast-food companies feed their clients, heavy on stimulants and light on the nutrition.
Capitalism, the imperial incarnation of feudalism, developed in tandem to oceanic empires such as the United Province [Dutch], Spanish Hapsburg, Britain and others.
Whether “regulated” or “disastrous” in nature, capitalism primarily uses the same economic approach toward defining the narrative of life as broken into constituent elements; this translates to commodified labour and resources, relegating man to the status of consumer and producer, stripping him of his essential qualities.
If man is reduced to matter — to mechanics, to biology, devoid of his soul, which has since the dawn of time entreated him to act against profit, interest and self-preservation at the expense of others, in short, schooled to strip himself of his conscience — then it becomes possible to implement exploitative mechanism instituted as policy, convincing both consumer and producer that others who are suffering are nothing more than statistics.
The idea of man as the “perfect animal” has allowed for intelligence to be employed divorced from justice, lending to the policy profiteering that has raped both the Malian cotton farmer and the rural American cotton farmer. Both remain outside of the vertically integrated capital-intensive systems; these dehumanising systems are at ease with our version of democracy.
Capitalism justifies large-scale expropriation and rests on the moral imperative of a virtuous greed also packaged as rational self-interest, and this software of democratic capitalism is always structured along the “framework” of freedom — that vague misunderstood universe. What has been designated a democratic capitalism is essentially what Benito Mussolini classified as the cornerstone of fascism or corporate capitalism.
“Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.” [Mussolini].
Autocratic capitalism on the other hand, such as in the case of Red China etc, allows for the state to harness and control the economy through political narratives hinged on the commons. People are expected or physically and mentally coerced to live for the state as a power beyond the rights of man, of truth.
It is the converse of capitalism ,or so it seems, yet authoritarian capitalism is just capitalism in a different form, one that allows the corporates to sit on the board of government, formulating both business/private and social/public decisions.
There is nothing paradoxical then about China engaging in this type of system whilst still maintaining the fallacy of “common ownership or socialism”. In both cases, the commons represent not the people but a small, fixed group of interests, regularly recycling components who proclaim to uphold these very interests — and decide the interests of the public.
In fact, the core of capitalism can be defined as interest, who controls it, who doesn’t. The primary difference is that state-controlled forces do not use officially deniable arms/warrant agents such as Monsanto; the former marginalise the masses and control economic means, whilst the latter do the very same under brand names, facilitated by a revolving door.
Both negate the rights of the living using the same skeletal structure, manifest in different methods and propaganda tools.
Then there are those who state that the transnational corporation has overtaken the state as a reigning entity, additionally claiming that the corporate creature now functions as its own “state”, and that it is a synthesis of capitalism and modern technology.
The facts are correct, but the conclusion we are led to is fallacious. First World governments allow and encourage the creation, structure and intent of modern corporations; the latter can’t survive without the legal approval of the former. [Anti-Trust laws could masticate a company like De Beers, and for a long time the US threatened to do so.]
Far from independent operators, multinationals such as Halliburton and Chevron are the most fundamental components of the US as an empire, and this reality is routine in history.
‘Virtuous greed’
In the Spain of the 1600s and upwards, the practice of corporate capitalism was known as administration by asiento, or private contract, and was pivotal to the rise and development of the Spanish Empire, which required the “virtuous greed” of privateers [armed and licensed maritime mercenaries for hire] as a vehicle toward expansion and consolidation.
Yet Spain is portrayed as an example a “state-controlled” empire — though private banks kept the empire afloat by purchasing speculative “toxic” debt incurred through wars fought on various fronts, trade deficits and a shortage of silver as the currency.
[The decreto y medio real/bankruptcy was pushed off many times by private banks who superficially concealed insolvency, purchasing debt that contained massive potential profit.]
As with a house of cards, the people involved know not to poke.
Ports of old such as Sale, Algiers in North Africa and Trieste in Europe were “free zones” that engaged in free trade way back in 1600s.
Naomi Klein, a leading intellectual, activist and writer has classified another kind of capitalism that uses the vehicle of catastrophe to establish the no-holds-barred capitalism by force, titled “disaster” capitalism; she proposes that neoliberal conservatives manipulate crisis situations using economic shock therapy to implement free-market orientation.
Her book, the Shock Doctrine, intelligently and meticulously documents such examples using the metaphor of shock therapy. But if taken as a diet of its own — that the free market is most dangerous when occurring in an unobserved vacuum such as war, or when inserted into a crisis atmosphere, then it can also be assumed that crisis alone sets the precedent for the most lethal economic policies, whether present in the form of a war or natural disaster, and are not similarly attendant in those countries perceived as in a state of passivity but who are nonetheless experiencing similar policies — and consequences.
That crisis paves the way for the free market is a given, but could it also be said that the free market creates the fault-lines toward the same crisis, less easily identified because a big-bang doesn’t accompany it?
Certainly, the historiography of war has seen brutal control of any occupied region. But that is the nature of methodologies of hard force — none of which were specifically created by the “Chicago Boys”, nor Milton Friedman, though all were certainly guided by the already existing framework.
[At around the same time that Friedman was plaguing the world with his nasty little economic dictums, Ayn Rand was doing the same, swallowed up by disciples like Alan Greenspan and a whole host of others. Rand herself was influenced by Nietzsche, who proposed the concept of Übermensch or “super-human”, saying that “man is something which ought to be overcome …” — meaning that “weak” characteristics (and perhaps people) ought to be stamped out in favour of what is perceived as the “strong”: power and wealth, irrespective of the means.]
The concept of “privatisation, deregulation and cuts to social spending”‘ — attributed to Friedman by Klein — is pretty normal in the context of wars, empires and nations ruled by unwanted and corrupt regimes. I’ve never heard of an occupying force that did otherwise. What has been rightly been termed disaster capitalism is the timeless manna for warmongers, motivated by any region that is in a weakened state, or in other words, a state or nation that exudes colonisability.
The free market uses a combination of hard and soft force, a term phrased by intellectual Joseph Nye, the essence of which depends on a “business as usual” policy as can be seen in Botswana; it can also exist independent of hard force or tanks, never more effective than when in a state of forced peace.
At the far end of the spectrum, Botswana supplies around 23% of the global diamond market with high quality gems, yet one third of the citizens live on under $1 a day. It is one the “fastest” growing economies in the world — on paper.
If used as the sole platform, disaster capitalism may serve to diminish the potency and destructive power of “everyday” capitalism, implying that the processes of exploitation that have ensnared the majority of Africa via structural adjustment (SAP) are less dangerous.
Expropriation of resources
In 1960, Africa had around $6-billion of debt, imposed by the World Bank, accrued via loans taken out by colonial powers; by 2004, after years of SAP, African debt totalled $165-billion; 32 of the 33 “least developed countries” listed by the UN are major recipients of the World Bank. All were in Africa. It’s all done very quietly and without catastrophe. The World Bank’s 2005 Global Finance Report tells us that developing countries are now capital providers to developed countries. It’s the kind of debt that generates wealth for the jailor, taking up between 20% to 50% of annual revenue in some countries.
In short, nothing in our “free world” has changed save for the definition of “democracy”, but that doesn’t make it free or democratic, just warped.
Now that imperialism has seemingly come to an end, we assume that colonial nationalism has too.
But most Asian, African and other regimes have endorsed inherited forms of capitalist-colonialism that can be defined as male-dominated militarisation, expropriation of resources and the reduction of humans to the state of commodities.
They have done as former white colonialists: defined progress as independent of the living environment; monetised economic systems as dissociated from ecosystems and ecological life cycles, and inserted the clause of human rights as divorced from living environments.
But human rights cannot exist save within the context of ecological integrity that provides inalienable rights to the environment from which people derive their sustenance.
The president of Nigeria recently stated that annual economic losses due to environmental degradation totalled $5,1-billion. But the environment is still plundered; Nigeria has by rule of federal law allowed for ownership of land to be transferred to the government when oil is present or discovered. It is precisely the process of “discovery” used by colonialists.
Many African leaders have not only adopted the methodologies of colonialism [built on the preserve of nationalism], but have guaranteed the destruction of the natural environment — and the lives of millions who depend on it — by endorsing artificial boundaries between humans and the environment, conservation and “resources”.
Is this a democracy abated or one that never existed? Can democracy exist in a world where free trade reigns supreme?
Former boss of Archer Daniel Midland (ADM), known as the “supermarket’ to the world, said: “The competitor is our friend, the customer is our enemy. There isn’t one grain of anything in the world that is sold in a free market. Not one.”
He should know — over 40% of ADM goods are subsidised by an unknowing American public; subsidisation is used to deliberately distort and by implication control markets by artificially lowering prices for Northern farmers, competing on the “free market” with farmers from impoverished countries, laden with debt.
Northern farmers are subsidised to the tune of $1-billion a day — farmers in the South get zilch. Their own government won’t protect them because structural adjustment prescriptions compounded by loans, interest and fungible aid have ensured that the means to keeping the country afloat is earned primarily by interchanging cash crops for hard currency, in order to pay off the debt.
Fungible aid allows for these governments to purchase arms by stealth trade; those regimes most favoured by corporate capital globalisers such as the World Bank are those who buy into the policy of virtuous greed or self-interest. In short, people like Mugabe have become the same thing that they proclaim to oppose.
The Grimmet Report states that 73% of arms manufactured by the G8 were delivered to developing countries in 2007, so it appears that many regimes in Africa, Asia and South America are being very virtuous indeed.
The intention of the free market is to pit one poor country against the other. To control or destabilise the price of a commodity, various mechanisms of applied power are used: the World Bank will use “soft power” to persuade Vietnam to grow coffee. The Vietnamese government will pitch in to curry favour. Soon, cheap coffee beans flood the market, crashing the commodity and those nations that depend overwhelmingly on coffee for revenue such as Ethiopia.
The story is true: Vietnam, producer of low grade coffee, is now one of the top three coffee producers in the world per tonnage, second to Brazil. Coffee is always one of the top five traded commodities in the world. Along the way, Vietnam’s forests have died. No big deal.
For cash croppers such as India, the highest suicide rate is that of the farmer; very often they kill themselves with the same pesticides actively promoted as “salvation”. “One-crop economies” fall the hardest and are most vulnerable to market fluctuations i.e. speculators who gamble on commodity and currency futures, delinking real value from commodities whilst enabling New York or London to artificially determine the price of stock.
In 2008, ADM recorded revenues of $69,8-billion; contrast this with the economy of South Africa — in 2007, our GDP was $467-billion. It is probable that ADM makes up the rule by sponsoring their politicians, but this reality is made possible by legislation that creates the “enabling” vacuum required by corporates. This reality is one, singular. The government does not oppose corporates — not in the empires of old, nor today.
The revolving door between governments and corporations has been widely and thoroughly analysed, whether the industry in question is agriculture such as that of Monsanto and the FDA, or “private soldiers” like Aegis, the private security company present in Iraq, categorised by the Guardian as the “second largest army”.
Alan Greenspan recently negated the concept of virtuous greed by stating that it was a “flaw” within the free-market narrative, that it left him in a state of “shocked disbelief”.
Greenspan, a Randian at heart though not always in policy, has managed to keep the US afloat by engaging in laws that are directly converse to the free market, as has the US in general.
Subsidies for e.g. have no place in the free market and constitute protectionism; the concept of “reciprocal trade” made mandatory by the WTO is another law that constitutes protectionism for wealthy countries and not free trade. If the latter is a form of economic colonialism — as it appears to be — can democracy exist in a free market?
Woodrow Wilson stated: “Is there any man, is there any woman, let me say any child here that does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry?”
By redefining the concept of war using contextual intelligence, the canvas of the modern world has clearly shown us that there is no such thing as democracy in the free market, no such thing as a monetised economy that does not lead to crisis, no such thing as freedom as long as the inalienable rights of the environment do not exist, and do not constitute the basis of human rights.
At the end of the day, those who catch the bus, change diapers, worry about rent always get hit the hardest, yet they are also the very people who will never get a chance to influence the decision-making processes.
Democracy or forced peace?
This is brilliant, carefully constructed and poignant.
However I choose to point out that Liberalism is opposed to Cartels, Monopolies, Oligopolies and all other manipulations of markets through fictitious crises.
Indeed the very complaints you have raised are the reasons that Liberalism does not endorse laissez faire capitalism (or the unbridled greed of material accumulation) but rather chooses to define economic liberty as being best realised through a system of free enterprise within the context of an Open, Competitive, Market Economy - which is predicated on a Liberal Democracy and Equal Opportunity for Every Individual and governed by universal human rights for each and every person and the rule of law; which itself must be defined by Open Democratic Civic Participation and Universal Franchise.
In fact none of the extortion committed by global capitalism is in any way commiserate with the Liberal belief in the protection of the rights of all - especially those who are “weak” - and as such Liberalism does not endorse such activities
Equal Opportunity for all is the premise of Liberalism… not the might of right and the power of the privileged… for that is (as you rightly state) the progeny of feudalism and conservative exploitation.
I agree that a few have exploited the many - for thousands of years; but i fear that we disagree on how to resolve this matter - consumer choice, within the policy framework of open competition and zero barriers to market entry would have prevented the emergence of megalithic monopolistic MNC’s in the first place - and even now it is not too late - to ensure that through the delivery of equal opportunities to every single individual and the protection of the rights of every single individual, we will be able to enable every persont to grow and develop to their full potential.
Once again, I thank you for writing what is the most informative and entertaining article I have read in a very long time.
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