-Caveat Lector-
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: GLOBAL CAPITALISM: "Pathologically Amoral Economics"
Date: Fri, 1 Dec 2000 21:23:46 -0600 (CST)
From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Organization: ?
To: undisclosed-recipients:;
Essay on Economic State of the World
By Harel Barzilai
_________________________________________________________________
We take as given the desirability of redirecting resources from
armaments to human needs, and of attaining a sustainable,
environmentally healthy, and nonviolent world, and focus on the
``blueprint'' of how such a vision might be attained; namely, on the
obstacles which must be overcome.
While the growth of universal love and empathy among the world's
people would surely help attain this vision, we will not address these
themes since the focus of the topic is not religious or psychological,
but economic and political. Such an analysis entails an examination of
institutional obstacles, whose nature is revealed by surveying the
global scene.
_________________________________________________________________
*** *** ***
According to the World Health Organization [WHO], eleven million
children die every year of diseases from which they could be saved for
pennies to a few dollars per head. This ``silent genocide'' is ``a
preventable tragedy because the developed world has the resources and
technology'' to quickly put an end to these deaths (WHO's Hiroshi
Nakajima). This human disaster is merely one symptom of the amoral
structures which govern resource allocation and national policy, and
which will continue to bring about such results if left intact.
Throughout the Third World, infant formula manufacturers continue to
disregard WHO guidelines, thereby maintaining high profits -- and high
infant mortality rates. As practiced by drug-dealers, these
corporations dole out huge numbers of ``free samples'' and encourage
hospitals to bottle-feed babies. Since a new mother's lactation must
be stimulated by suckling, even brief use of the formula in the
hospital can make the mother's milk dry up, creating a dependent
``client.''
These mothers who cannot breastfeed often dilute the expensive formula
to make it last longer. In addition, the formula does not provide the
natural immunization against disease and complete nutrition found in
mother's milk. Not surprisingly, the mortality rate of bottle-fed
infants in developing countries is significantly higher than that of
breast-fed babies. UNICEF estimates that each year one and a half
million infants die unnecessarily, deaths which could be averted
through breastfeeding, a practice which suffers from one "defect": its
unprofitability.
Regarding national policy, the effects of profit-based (and hence
amoral) economics are highlighted by Oxfam's report Why Farmers Go
Hungry, whose analysis of ``food aid'' policies in the eighties notes
that 55% of U.S. grain export is fed to animals in countries where the
hungry cannot afford to buy meat. Most U.S. agricultural exports ``do
not go where they are most needed,'' but to developed countries; in
1982, the Netherlands alone received more U.S. agricultural products
than the entire continent of Africa, while World Bank figures for that
year reveal twice as much agricultural exports to Canada (with 24
million people) than to the 17 most hunger-ravished countries -- just
under a billion people -- combined.
Oxfam also states that only 3% of U.S. agricultural exports that year
were given away; most ``food aid'' is sold with low-interest financing
to Third World governments, then usually resold at prices the poorest
cannot afford. Another consequence of ``free enterprise'' is the
taxpayer subsidy of agribusiness while ``even our food `donations' do
little to alleviate hunger worldwide.''
That examining who benefits, who pays, and who continues to suffer
might shed light on the forces driving U.S. policy is a notion
thoroughly ignored in the mainstream when undesirable attention to the
influence of corporate interests may result.
Similar causes underly resource misallocation in First World domestic
policy, particularly in the U.S.
In this super-rich country, the cumulative AIDS rate per 100,000 ranks
fourth highest in the world after Malawi, Uganda, and Congo; the rate
for nonwhites tops even the worst-case African nations. Infant
mortality rates are the worst among all western industrial nations,
comparable to Cuba's rate, which is far lower than that of U.S.
Blacks. Rates of child immunizations are among the lowest in the
hemisphere.
The racial statistics do represent an independent dimension of
exploitation. The underlying issue, however, is power relations
(class), relations which are more easily established and maintained
when the victims are readily identified, e.g., by race or gender. When
elite interests are relatively minor, change comes more easily --
witness the transformation of gays and lesbians from among the most
maligned groups into beneficiaries of protection from the highest
levels of government -- than when the stakes (profits and power) are
high, where we find a $300 billion military budget alive and well long
after the Soviet threat -- and Soviet Union -- has evaporated, and the
national disgrace of the lack of an Equal Rights Amendment.
The health care crisis and concomitant debate about skyrocketing costs
and the tens of millions of uninsured Americans presents another
``paradox'' of economic mismanagement. Solutions typically offered
include ``managed competition'' and other market-based proposals
protecting health industry profits.
Almost never mentioned is that the U.S. is the only western industrial
nation without a universal-access, national health plan. The General
Accounting Office reports that if a single-payer, Canadian-style
program were implemented in the U.S., tens of billions of dollars of
savings per year would result: ``the savings in administrative costs
alone would be more than enough to finance insurance coverage'' for
all uninsured Americans; ``there would be enough left over to permit a
reduction, or possibly even the elimination'' of all co-payments and
deductibles. But that would be bad business for the multi-billion
dollar health industry, whose political influence mirrors its
financial power under our capital-based economics which put profits
before people. More accurately: which put profits first, period, and
for which human needs are entirely incidental, accounting for the
Third-World features in U.S. society following a decade of
particularly enthusiastic adherence to the logic of ``free-market''
public subsidy [for] private ``enterprise'' (profits), the polar
opposite of a democratically-run economics.
As with U.S. ``food aid'', capitalist economies' socialization of
costs -- not profits -- were highlighted by Dr. Fazlur Rahman in the
New York Times business pages: ``Basic biomedical research has long
been heavily subsidized by United States taxpayers'' to the tune of
billions of dollars; ``high-tech pharmaceuticals owe their origin
largely to these investments'' but are often ``out of reach of our
patients'' as corporations rake in private profits.
In this crucial respect, capitalism scarcely differs from communism: a
tiny elite controls the key economic levers -- not the people. That
the people can and should is as ``Utopic'' as were the elimination of
slavery and child labor, or attaining suffrage for women. The common
features of communism and capitalism were suggested by candidate
Harkin in comparing communism with the virulent form of the later,
``trickle-down economics.'' Both had the ``same outcome'': they were
``supposed to help everyone'' but benefited a ``privileged few at the
top'' -- just as in the ``regular'' capitalist examples reviewed.
Another example is the U.S. military budget, some $300 billion per
year including Energy Department, NASA, and other hidden spending --
excluding interest on the deficit.
``We spent $150 billion during the height of the Cold War, back in
1980,'' observes Rep. Maurice Hinchey. ``Obviously we can spend
substantially less on the military than we were spending [then] -- not
having to double it as we have.''
In fact, even the 1980 Cold War budget was excessive, with Soviet
might consistently exaggerated, and the defensive uselessness of being
able to destroy the USSR so many times over. For the purposes of
violent intervention abroad, however, and as a corporate welfare
program, the ``defense'' budgets functioned well. As for ``economic
stimulation'' from the technology of homicide (or tax-breaks for the
rich), the same defects as plague breastfeeding explain lack of
interest in productive stimulation [of the economy] via purchases of
homes for the homeless, food, clothes, etc.
The breadth of mainstream political discourse on this issue is
reflected in Clinton's interview with Defense Electronics (10/92).
Clinton contrasts his proposed military budgets with those of his
conservative Republican opponent: over the period 1993-1997, he would
spend a whopping 5% less. For the same institutional reasons, in
discussions of the deficit, one may mention tax increases and spending
cuts, but not the vastly bloated military budget, nor basic economics
of resource allocation -- i.e., productive endeavors versus building
military waste-products unnecessary for defense -- and their public
(versus private) consequences.
1991 was good business for military contractors, with $41 billion in
U.S. arms sales. These striking deviations of national policy from
economic prudence (and moral sanity), and an analysis of the
beneficiaries of these policies, reveal a great deal about effective
power distribution [in the U.S.] which cannot be legislated away but
is rooted in the economic systems and in the institutional relations
between the business and governmental sectors in a capitalist order.
Disarmament cannot be addressed separately without an examination of
the same economic forces which allow millions of children to starve.
Both paradoxes of misallocation resolve by observing that costs and
benefits for the nation as a whole differ from those of the elites who
control the national economy and national policy. In addition to these
institutional dimensions, there are interrelated personal ones; the
deterioration of public schools and hospitals do not affect George
Bush's family.
``Throwing the bums out'' will not change the systemic roots which
consistently bring about amoral economic allocation, infanticide, etc.
One cannot judge capitalism -- or any economic system -- by how it
would function with ``decent, honest people'' in high office and
corporate suites; Soviet communism would pass such a test, suggesting
the system be maintained while we strive to make CP officers more
``decent,'' with ``integrity,'' so they don't abuse their power.
That East Bloc elites referred to these states as ``socialist'' is as
significant [i.e., as irrelevant] as the label ``democratic'' which
they also adopted. We are not told that democracy has been
``discredited'' following the fall of the ``German Democratic
Republic.'' [the former East Germany]
Beginnings of democratic socialist alternatives have consistently been
crushed by both Powers: Prague (1968) and Guatemala (1954) for
example; ``but, while the Moscow-imposed government in Prague would
degrade and humiliate reformers, the Washington-made government in
Guatemala would kill them'' writes Guatemalan journalist Julio Godoy,
adding, ``it still does, in a virtual genocide that has taken more
than 150,000 victims,'' (citing Amnesty International's reports on the
``government program of political murder.'')
These essential features are obscured in our capitalist Free Press --
the large corporations in the business of selling mass-audiences to
client advertiser companies -- which is controlled by the same
interests behind the national and global disasters reviewed. Also
obscured are the striking parallels between capitalistic and East
Bloc-style media: both are run and controlled by a tiny, elite class
-- not the public.
The proclamations of the ``Triumph of Capitalism'' in the Cold War are
part of the PR campaign, and worth examining. To assess them we
naturally compare public welfare in the former East Bloc with Latin
America, where the Monroe Doctrine, free-market capitalism, and
U.S./IMF control have reigned.
We find that Cuba and East Europe are human rights paradises compared
to the U.S-backed ``fledgling democracies'' employing a governmental
```Death Squad' strategy'' (Amnesty ), murdering hundreds of thousands
of their citizens (El Salvador, Guatemala); or compared to the murder
of a child per day by Brazilian death squads in league with security
forces, among other victims of U.S.-backed terror necessary for
maintaining oppressive capitalist orders; victims whose ``lives and
deaths have not touched the conscience'' of those shedding tears over
Soviet atrocities, writes correspondent Martha Gellhon; ``I can
testify that it was far better and safer to be a peasant in communist
Poland than it is to be a peasant in capitalist El Salvador.''
We correctly ascribe East Bloc atrocities to the system which produces
them, not ``those bad people over there.'' The same logic applies to
capitalism in Latin America (and elsewhere); the higher levels of
violence it requires do not make totalitarian ``socialism'' benign,
but should dispel similar illusions about capitalism.
Capitalism's environmental and development catastrophes can barely be
sampled within these confines. The nightmarish results of the
maquiladoras highlight the former; meanwhile, Chilean poverty has
risen five-fold, from 1 million under Allende to 5 million today in
that ``economic miracle'' following two decades of ``free-market''
medicine, and two-thirds of Brazil's people do not get enough to eat,
for whom East European life would be a feast.
Remarks Economist Jose Camargo, ``Saying that Latin America needs
`free market reforms' is a little bit crazy, because we've basically
had market economies from the times our countries were founded;'' the
catastrophes reviewed reflect ``a failure of the market and not of
socialist economics.''
Millions of children do not starve and die of diseases each year
because the world's people are heartless, but because of a system of
elite-controlled, profit-based allocation of resources to which
starving children, environmental destruction, etc, are externalities,
and because in a profit-run, market economic order those who put
babies' lives above profits will be replaced by more amoral actors who
win out in this system [i.e., "nice guys finish last"], which requires
overhaul, not ``modification'' at the margin with new carrots and
sticks to perhaps correct some of its more vicious manifestations.
A private, profit-based ``competitive'' economy drives players to
externalize costs, punishing those who consider human and
environmental consequences and are thus overtaken by those who more
singlemindedly pursue profits.
Governmental regulation does not address and cannot eliminate these
incentives. At best, some protections may be afforded; however, the
profit-based market economy will encourage elites to try to get around
such restrictions and transfer costs to the weak. This they are likely
to succeed in doing given their inherent influence and power, under
this system, over the political institutions in charge of legislating
and enforcing such laws, as well other key institutions like the mass
media with its vast influence over public opinion and perceptions.
The notion that the consequences -- let alone global or long-term
consequences -- of the pursuit of private interest in a profit-run
system can deliver prosperity in any more than an incidental fashion,
let alone that such a system is ``the best'' or ``only'' economic
order humanity can hope for, is so self-evidently absurd as to require
no comment, but extreme marginalization in the Free Press and the
political culture generally awaits those who would deviate from the
capitalist Party Line; including any progressive economists, with
tragic consequences.
If ``socialism'' means a party-run economic order administered under a
totalitarian regime, then ``socialism'' has indeed died. Amen. But any
reasonable definition of ``socialism'' must (minimally) encompass a
social order in which the economy and principal institutions are run
and democratically controlled by (all) the people -- not by elites, be
they Corporate- or Vanguard Party-based . This socialism did not die;
it has yet to be born.
In the long run, economic democracy mandates that capitalism, like
feudalism and communism before it, must be overcome, in favor of a
popularly controlled economy, a Participatory Economics like that
described by Albert and Hahnel.
Until that time, and in that direction, economic empowerment and
enhanced democracy may be advanced by various means. A genuine labor
movement, Party, and press, could counterbalance the ``War on Labor
and the Left'' described by Patricia Sexton. Public Access media and
citizen control of the airwaves generally, and minimally a financially
corporate-independent PBS would promote a truly free press.
``Freedom'' without resource equality is Animal Farm Freedom, in which
some players are ``more free than others'' -- free to control,
manipulate, and exploit.
Democratically controlled, credit-union based rather than profit-based
financial institutions; Ralph Nader's concept of Citizen Utility
Boards and similar organizations; and Worker's Councils and
Worker-ownership would be additional steps towards establishing a
truly democratic, socialist order, as would generally reversing the
assaults of the capitalist/Corporate class and their counterparts,
Lenin and Trotsky, who abolished factory councils, Soviets, and other
institutions of popular control soon after the revolution, thus
preventing socialism from taking root.
Since then and to this day, the human struggle towards economic
democracy and liberation from all forms of elite-controlled economics
and oppression has continued, offering the hope of a just, peaceful
future for humankind, and a future for the Earth.
Harel Barzilai
(From a February 27, 1993 file)
--
RECLAIM THE MEDIA: http://EconomicDemocracy.org/reclaim.html
<A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A>
DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic
screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! These are
sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, mis-
directions and outright frauds�is used politically by different groups with
major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought.
That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and
always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no
credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
Archives Available at:
http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html
<A HREF="http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html">Archives of
[EMAIL PROTECTED]</A>
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
<A HREF="http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/">ctrl</A>
========================================================================
To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Om
