Posted on 24-7-2002

Economics Is War
By Alan Marston

The stock market has been sold to Mom and Dad as the place to put your
life-savings, as the public forum for participating in a bold new economy,
stocks and shares indexes are in every news broadcast throughout the world,
capital has won against labour, money is everything, the markets are free
and God is on Wall St not mainstreet, the only way is up.

Such is the one-way, one-colour philosophy of a mathematical world where
single-mindedness concentrates energy and produces seemingly unstoppable
inertia in one direction, where contradiction means failure, wrongness,
error, untruth. Black bad, grey bad, white good. Childish yes, but
effective, for a while. Now that the up has at last bowed to gravity and
its partner, down, there is no room for gloating, after all, the down will
be followed by an up and the whole ignorance-fueled cycle will start again,
or will it? Can the mass media use their powers to break the cycle of
childish one-sidedness? Can politicans lead us up over the trenches and
into the line of fire? Now there are the really interesting question for an
election?

I'm pessimistic. I see already the seeds of re-cycling.

First, find some people to blame, project the whole cause of events onto
them, take no personal responsibility and hey presto, business as usual.

Second, talk up the market by extolling the economy's fundamental strength,
despite the fact such an approach reeks of desperation, stocks are still
richly valued compared with earnings, and, the fundamentals aren't actually
all that great.

Third, the 20th floor attitude to corporate governance, me first and last
has now reached the street, yet those in government, being intellectual and
emotional Siamese Twins with the 20th floor, are using their influence to
deny the obvious and spin the corporate model right back up to the penthouse

Forth, state and local government's fiscal (money) problems are being
addressed by further cuts to taxes and subsidies to the corporates in order
to try and get them back in charge.

Fifth, politicians will follow the money, not enlightenment. A "jobless
recovery," in which the economy grows too slowly to make much if any dent
in the unemployment rate, is seemingly a foregone conclusion, politics as
usual.

Can the cycle be broken? Undoubtedly. How? Accept greyness, embrace
contradiction, expect a low-profile and stop giving the fingers to Nature,
bow instead. A start:

1. Bring back tariffs on goods sourced from slave-wage production and
strip-mined natural resources.

2. Setup and use a state-bank to create new money by loaning to small
businesses at low interest and re-payable loan conditions.

3. Have minimum wage and conditions laws which raise people above poverty,
decrease hours worked.

4. Re-nationlise strategic national assets such as telecommunications and
railways and bring in social goals for those and the existing state-owned
assets.

5. Stop even attempting to pay `foreign debt' to the World Bank and IMF.

6. Put caps on re-patriation of profit to foreign investors.

True, this is re-arming the state. But then, the global economy is a war
zone, one has to be realistic.