Here's an article by Naomi Klein Espresso released this week ...
cardinal sin
They give up for dead. But it is a trick. The market will rise again stronger than before. And everyone will pay for his sins. Unless it puts pressure on policy. Back in the streets. Whatever means are the events in recent weeks, no one should believe the exaggerated claims which see the market crisis, the death of the ideology of free markets. The free market ideology has always served the interests of capital and Her presence alternate motion according to its usefulness to those interests.
During periods of economic boom is useful to preach laissez faire, because an absent government give the speculative bubbles to inflate, pushing up prices. When those bubbles burst, the ideology becomes a hindrance, or even an impediment, and is set aside while big government running for cover. The rest is assured: the ideology will come back stronger than ever to roar once the financial rescue.
The massive debts the public is accumulating to save financial speculators then become part of a global budget crisis that will lead to streamlining and cutting social programs, in short, a renewed push to privatize what is left of the public sector. There will also be told that our hopes for a green future are, sadly, too costly.
What we do not know is how the public will respond. Consider that in North America all those who have less than 40 years have grown with the knowledge that the government can not intervene in their lives, that government is the problem not the solution, that laissez faire is the one and only option.
Now suddenly we are faced with an extremely active and highly interventionist government, seemingly willing to do whatever what is needed to save investors from themselves.
Faced with this scenario, a question arises:
if the state can intervene to save corporations that run reckless risks in the housing markets, why can not intervene to prevent millions of Americans be taken from the right to cancel a 'mortgage?
Similarly, if 85 billion dollars can be made available immediately to buy the insurance giant AIG, because the health care system for all would protect Americans from the predatory practices of health insurance companies, is made to look like a dream unattainable? And if other companies
capital need taxpayer funds to stay afloat, why can not taxpayers make demands in return, such as roofs salaries of managers and a guarantee against the loss of jobs? Now it is clear that the government can act in times of crisis, will be very difficult in the future to support the government's own impotence.
Another potential shift has to do with market expectations of future privatization. For years, banks that deal with investments globally have been lobbying politicians for two new markets: one that would result from the privatization of public pensions and the other that would result from a new wave of privatization of the systems water and roads. Both of these dreams have become quite difficult to sell: Americans are not in the mood to entrust their assets, individual and collective, to the reckless gamblers on Wall Street, especially because it is quite likely that taxpayers will have to buy back their property when they explode next financial bubble.
With the failure of the negotiations of the WTO (World Trade Organization), this crisis could also serve as a catalyst for a radically alternative approach to regulating world markets and financial systems.
Already we are seeing a movement towards 'food sovereignty' in developing countries, rather than leaving access to food to the whims of wholesalers. Perhaps the time is ripe for such ideas as the Taxinge trading, which would slow speculative investment and other global capital controls.
And now that nationalization is not a dirty word, the oil companies should pay attention: someone must pay for the change towards a more sustainable future and has even more meaning for the volume of funds from a sector that is highly profitable most responsible for our environmental crisis and climate. It certainly makes more sense than creating another dangerous financial bubble in carbon trading.
However, the crisis we are seeing needs to be changed even deeper. These junk mortgages were allowed to proliferate not just because the moderators-correction do not understand the risks, but also because we have an economic system that measures our collective health based exclusively on GDP growth.
So long as the junk mortgages subsidize the economic growth, our governments actively supported them. So what really is called into question by the crisis is the unquestioned commitment to growth at all costs. Where this crisis should lead us is to a radically different way for our society to measure the welfare and progress.
None of this, however, will happen without an enormous Public pressure on politicians in this key period. And not a little political pressure, but a return to the streets and direct action that ushered in the thirties, the New Deal. Without this pressure, there will be only superficial changes and a return as soon as possible to the business of all time.
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