The powerful exploit enormous advantages
For those in power, the money they amass is never enough; with all the notoriety and success it can buy them, it also becomes the cause of their downfall… for having become too rich. (LeonardoPadura)
1. The powerful can and do skillfully game the system quite systematically skewing the flow of resources towards those who already have much more than their fair share.* Obviously, this art of deception is not linked to a lack of trying, but to a lack of scruples. (F. Manes) In fact, every day, the macroeconomic figures deceptively made public have become the best way to hide social and human rights (HR) realities and are thus becoming less and less realistic. (RobertoSavio)Let us face it: Economic theory is, by far,not the politically most relevant branch of science …and GDP does NOT reflect inequalities in society.As deplorable is theexcessive ‘mathematization’ of economics since the 1970s. Assuming the neutrality of ‘rational’ economic mathematical models isnot only gratuitous, but a fallacy.
*: Our curse actually comes from Adam Smith who reasoned: “I am inherently self-interested –I am human”.
2. As widely and uncritically accepted, the discipline of economics is defined as the discipline that handles the allocation of scarce resources. This assumes not only equality in the access to goods, but also assumes a ‘dose of goodness’ –the latter plenty scarce in the capitalist human character.* (Frances M.Lappe)What we are left with then is that, to change course, we have to change the discourse. First, we must banish ‘scarcity’ and ‘shortage’ as descriptors of the global economic situation, never using them without the modifier ‘man-made’.
*: Think about the maxim that says that capital never is patriotic. (Alberto Bryce Echenique)
3. Furthermore, since there is no such a thing as a ‘free market’, we banish this term as well.** As we can indeed document, markets work equitably only if they are deliberately kept fair, open, and competitive by democratically arrived-at and enforced rules. What is killing such effective markets –take for instance the case of food– is the dogma: markets work on their own.This myth allows wealth-to-accrue-to-wealth, generating a veritable monopoly situation. Never forget:it is monopoly power within markets that kills openness, fairness and competition –the values for which markets have long been wrongly praised for.
**: While free market ideology is premised on limiting state interference in the
workings of an unbridled marketplace, human rights are founded upon the
notion of a capable and robust state with duties to uphold human dignity. (Olivier de Schutter)
4. Yet another confusing concept we must bar from our lips is ‘market failure’; this, because market failure is the logical consequence of a particular kind of market, one primarily driven to generate the highest returns to already existing wealth. In short, open, fair, competitive markets cannot exist outside true democracy, i.e., being answerable to citizens. Such a democracy must be freed enough from private greed influence so it can keep markets really and truly open.
5. And then there is the concept of ‘financialization’: it is rightfully used to mean profiting-without-producing. It reflects the rise of financial profit, in part extracted directly from households through financial expropriation mechanisms. Finance exploits us all.*** (C. Lapavitsas)
***: Take, for instance, ‘accumulation by dispossession’ which relates to themercantilization (grabbing) of land that removes peasants from their land andto the financialization of whole economies. It also relates to the massive private appropriation of our natural resources and to the dispossession of indigenous people. To this, we can add the ecological dimension pertaining to the myriad local environmental disasters already in a state of no return. (E. Gudynas)
6. Only by shifting the dominant discourse from the private sphere to the HR arena will a whole new world of economic, political and social innovationsopen up. Unlike what the casino economy pursues, HR are about cooperation, sharing, stewardship, equity, equality, dignity, sustainability, collectiveness, embeddedness and direct democracy from local to global. (adapted from Jose LuisVivero)
What about international trade?
Fifty years ago, international treaties mostly had mandatory clauses. Right now,they are mostly voluntary…except for trade agreements that are mandatory. (WTO)
7. The ‘global-value-chains’-trade-narrative is nothing more than a deceptive effort to sell to developing countries (and their people demanding social fairness, equality and HR), the discredited trickle-down theories that enable a US-EU transnational corporate stranglehold over markets of developing countries. (C. Raghavan)
8. Transnational corporations (TNCs) use free trade agreements to discriminatingly expand their domination and monopolistic aims, as they attempt to ride out and survive the capitalist crisis. All this, they do, not only not showing respect for nature and for human rights, but actually destroying nature and trampling HR in their quest for new lucrative markets. As a consequence, millions of people are affected and have to abandon their homesteads and end up migrating to industrially developed countries. (La Via Campesina)
9. Without going into further details here, let it be said that the way in which trade transactions are governed means that corporate entities have greater weight in terms of securing their rights, even when these spurious ‘rights’ conflict with universally accepted and ratified human rights: Think TransPacific Partnership or TPP. (J. Ghosh)
The future is already here, and it is unevenly distributed (S. Gibson)
10. In the period after World War II, capitalism was much better regulated, taxes were higher, but people did better and the economy grew faster; even though trade was more restricted, companies thrived; even though Wall Street commissions were fixed and higher than today, the financial sector accounted for a much smaller share of GDP and of profits than it does now –and all this then with unions granted a seat in the table. In short, every group was better off in the US yesterday than today, except the 1%.When capitalism was restrained by tougher rules and regulations, it did better. This not being an endorsement of it, the argument is that capitalism does better when its hands are tied, is more competitive and is less cut-throat. Highly regulated economies are healthier, grow faster and accommodate the needs of people better than more laissez-faire forms of capitalism. (D. Kotz)
11. Sixty years later, under full-blown neoliberalism, political institutions have lost their gloss. No political party has any longer a youth movement. They are perceived more and more as self-referent, considering citizens just as an electorate; they are seen as more part of the system in power than spokesmen of their citizens.Electorates are voting on the basis of political nostalgia and lack of security. Facing an uncertain future, the dream to go back to a better past is strong. In the last decade, the cost of electoral campaigns in Europe has increased by 47%. In other words, more and more of us consider that we live now in a democracy that is turning (or has turned) into a plutocracy. The regional organizations, like the African Union, ASEAN or the Organization of American States, are notoriously toothless. (RobertoSavio)
One of the most worrisome aspects of neoliberalism fostering privatization in a hurry is the dominance of capital (profits) over labor (wages)
The neoliberal economy considers precarious jobs as natural, social inequality as a legitimate reality, the market as the sole basis for societal development, and the state as inefficient and a brake to the private sector. (RobertoSavio)
12. Scorecards need to be kept on how fast different countries are privatizing. Privatization is really easy –all one has to do is give away the assets to one’s friends, expecting a kickback in return. But all too often no scorecard is kept on the number of people who are/were pushed into poverty, or the number of jobs destroyed versus those created, or on the increase in the sense of insecurity or the feeling of powerlessness of many. The disjunction between the HR values of society and the ideology of the self-regulated market is clear today. Last but not least, the freedom to move capital in and out of a country at will is a freedom that some exercise, at enormous cost to others. (JosephStiglitz)
Corporate capture represents a veritable ‘life grab’ (Flavio Valente)
Power is something that some people grab and then too often maintain by the way of force (think about many a long lasting head of state that has done whatever he wanted and who took power through a coup or a putsch). (Alfredo Bryce Echenique)
13. The power and the impunity of TNCs through their use of a ‘democracy of bribery’ continuously represses the voices of the people in all kinds of policies and legislative processes at multiple levels. Democracy shrinks while the governing classes together with TNCs seek further private profits. (La Via Campesina)
14. And then there is corporate social responsibility: CSR is not something benign that helps companies end harmful practices. Corporate Social responsibility is a carefully developed strategy that deliberately diverts public attention from the need to regulate corporations effectively and ensure accountability for HR abuses. (NathalieBeghin) We have to deconstruct and counter corporate social responsibility arguments especially when they claim corporations are backers of HR.
15. For many people, it is easier, safer and more comfortable to live in a world of delusion, particularly when this delusion requires no effort to seek out and understand truths about corporate behavior that may prove unpalatable. The delusion is reinforced:there is a persistent beaming of elite/corporate propaganda. Questioning the delusion is the challenge. The rhetoric of the modern empire describes the global system as ‘consisting of liberal-democratic nation-states, connected by more or less free markets and ruled by international law’. This, of course, masks the reality that the United States imperial elite considers itself the vanguard of the global order with the right to violate state sovereignty and to control markets (including via corporate-written ‘free trade’ agreements), as well as to be above international law. In short, territorial control is less important than the control of markets, capital, labor, and resources. It thus seems logical to critique and resist the US imperial world order and this cannot happen if we listen to those cowardly and servile individuals who work in the corporate media on behalf of the empire. Caveat: Choosing where you get your news from is important. (R. Burrowes)
16. Bottom line here, so-called sovereign consumers do not exist. We are all easily manipulated by, among other, the Big Agri-Food Industry and all sorts of public relations specialists. (Jose LuisVivero)
One more time
More than two millennia ago, in The Art of War, Sun Tzu wrote that most battles are won or lost by the choice of battlefield, long before they are fought.
17. How can a collection of separate local efforts build anything close to the kind of large-scale, international change required to confront the many global crises the world is facing? The answer is that, in isolation, they cannot. Our challenge continues to be to build a global movement of connected local movements, so that their impact becomes vastly more than the sum of their separate parts. Regional and local governments across the world are already building those collaborations and linkages, through a set of formal agreements. The pace is just too slow.
18. Activist and empowered communities must also find similar ways to join forces. Working together means many things. It means sharing strategies and learning from one another about what it takes to win public support and succeed in political action. It means joining together to take-on common strategic adversaries, including corporations: they do their damage not just in one community or one country, but in many at the same time. It also means taking inspiration from one another. HR activism is hard, and in the face of a deepening crisis it would be easy for an entire movement to collapse under the weight of pessimism. Our passions, victories, and commitment must be shared in new and powerful ways to keep the movement’s hope solid and alive.
19. And a departing word: Global summits (think SDGs), so far removed from regular citizens, are never going to be the place for us to win solid HR action, so we should not be surprised by the inadequacies coming out of them. Our powers lie elsewhere,especially in grassroots communities with their not-yet-claiming claim holders; so this is where we must take the struggle. Our future will rely not on a single global accord, but on a wide constellation of diverse and creative advances across the world, that we win together, arm in arm, and community by community. (J. Shultz)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
schuftan@gmail.com