[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are you care about HR. This Reader is about how greed and corruption, rife in the current system, leave no room for human rights. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text].
-Hegel would say that the consumer society will lead to the consumption of society.
-The true alternative of the consumer society: Omega or Longines? (graffiti)
Getting away with profit as greed
1. As it is shaped, the capitalist system does not offer the conditions to make structural changes, that is, to develop another more ethical production (sub-) paradigm that is friendlier with nature and able to overcome social inequalities and human rights (HR) violations. Its internal logic is always, first, to secure profit, not caring to sacrifice nature and human lives. From this system, we can expect nothing. (Leonardo Boff)
2. We actually all have been made to live by the profit motive. In other times, one lived to serve God. Today, profit is somehow posed as divinity and the motive is not being hidden anymore. (Daniel Pizarro)
3. In short, the core issue of neoliberalism is that society has lost its moral compass, with the culture of greed paramount in the capitalist West. We live in a ‘greed is good’ culture.* (Roberto Savio)
*: Take, for example, how the poor countries are being ‘squeeze’ by rich ones through Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) clauses inserted in free trade agreements. Through these clauses, investors can sue countries for ‘discriminatory practices’ concerning their foreign direct investments when they feel their profits are being curtailed. The clever idea is that, because of ISDS, these countries ‘benefit’ since foreign investors are motivated to invest under the protection that ISDS affords. The suing though is done in international arbitral tribunals governed by different rules than national courts —most often the International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes …of the World Bank! ISDS clauses are set so that they cannot be reformed/amended; so, ISDS must be abolished. Period. (Alfred de Zayas)
Getting away with corruption
-Politics without ideas stimulate corruption. (Primera Piedra)
4. The war against corruption is organized to be selective giving people, for instance, the idea that US corporations are the least corrupt in the world when, in reality, many corrupt corporate behaviors are legal in the US (e.g., lobbying Congress). In such a system, our political enemies are all political-leaders-that-defend-the-interests-of-corporations above the public good –especially when it is about HR and, among other, about the predatory access to natural resources.** (Boaventura de Sousa Santos)
**: People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion but, when they meet, the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. (Adam Smith in his The Wealth of Nations)
5. Yes, governments may be slow, cumbersome and sometimes corrupt, but private corporations are fast, agile …and so often corrupt.*** (Fred Spielberg)
***: Take, for example, pyramid schemes; they are not a corruption of Capitalism, they are a microcosm of how the class system arbitrarily creates winners and losers while falsely promising opportunity for all. (Luke Savage)
Corporations may employ humans, but the corporation itself is not human –nor does it have room for human rights (IBFAN)
6. The constant revolutionizing of production, the uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions (including HR violations) and the everlasting uncertainty and agitation being fostered upon us all distinguish the current capitalist bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.
7. According to Thomas Piketty, in many parts of the world, we have similar situations today than that that existed before the French Revolution when unexpected protest movements sprung up when faced with the excessive power of nobility. Today, the nobility are the TNCs in the energy and other (food, pharmaceutical, agricultural, financial) sectors that speculate, monopolize and contaminate. (Vicente Navarro)
8. In this select ‘nobility’group, calling all kind of social actors in the above sectors ‘partners’ contributes to blurring the fundamental differences between actors in terms of power, interests, and legitimate societal roles and has favored the rise of public-private hybrids (including PPPs and multistakeholder platforms) that have acted as Trojan horses for business interests within the public sector. (Judith Richter)
9. And let us not forget revolving doors: “I do not think businessmen can be good managers of the state, not because they are necessarily malicious, but because they naturally tend to believe that the country is a corporation –which it is not”. (José ‘Pepe’ Mujica)
Bottom line
10. The basic question (at the base of re-moralizing the economy) that does not get asked enough is: What (and who) is the economy for? Well, we can draw on HR to answer this question. (CESR)
11. To re-moralize the economy, one just needs to go back to the political economy, i.e., the one that clearly prescribes that it is the citizens with established claims to HR that have to be at the center of decision-making in financial systems, instead of the so many purportedly rational(?) neoliberal economists that are taking such decisions. (Louis Casado)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
Postscript/Marginalia
–The cynic Greek philosopher Diogenes used to walk the streets of Athens in plain daylight carrying a lit oil lamp. When passers-by asked him what the hell he was doing, he laughingly responded: “I am looking for an Honest Man”. For him, whoever yearned for material goods, forgetting their human condition, were nothing but beasts.