Posted on 4-3-2002

Left Right - Or Wrong About Global Economy?
by Alan Marston

Ann Pettifor, former coordinator of the international debt cancellation
campaign Jubilee 2000 thinks “... the anti-corporate left sometimes gets it
wrong. They focus on what they can see and touch, which is trade. And
because the international financial regime isn’t visible, it isn’t
attacked. But in reality, it has a much greater power of determination than
trade.” She notes in the latest issue of Resurgence magazine "In 1970 90%
of all international transactions were trade transactions, and only 10%
were financial. By the the end of the year 2000, despite a massive increase
in trade, the situation had been completely reversed, 90% of all
international transactions are financial, and only 10% are trading
transactions."

Whose preying?

Last year, via an interview with Keith Rankin, PTV came to a similar
conclusion as Pettifor has, the `usual suspects' for pro-people protestors
are petty crims, the Nike's, the McDonald's and Monsanto get their orders
from the pope's of another order, the all conquering religious
fundamentalism of finance capital. These capos are full-time in the service
of the the one, the capo de capos, the only, the mighty and the great - the
$US. It is to the maintenance of the value of that holy of holys that the
finance institutions impose the deflationary credo upon its servants,
governments, people and the rest of the natural world.

People in general, poor people in particular are invisible to the eye of
finance. So is the climate, the seas, the lands, the earth's crust, the
waterways and all living things therein. What counts is the value of the
$US on international finance markets and let no blasphemous regulation from
any source propose otherwise on pain of compulsory payment of `credits' and
obligatory linking of local currency to the $US and increased interest
rates and mass sacking of state workers and increased prices of essentials.
The new order is imposed by the insiders of the finance world using a
seemingly invincible weapon which they monopolise to great effect, the dark
force of debt.

The facts are that debt is a convention, wholy man-made not holy spirit.
Debt has, is and always will be a trick, a slight of hand which rests on
the attitude taken to money. If money is seen in the religious context as
beyond the mere powers of humans to make and unmake then debt assumes
biblical powers, the snake in the garden with all the ideas. If on the
other hand money is seen through, a mere tool to be used in the interests
of humanity and the rest of nature, then king dollar has no clothes, no
heart, no liver, ...the king is a myth, a metaphor.

As soon as the snake-in-the-grass of left ideological demonisation, the
capitalist, is killed (methaphorically of course) at that moment anger and
hate is dissipated by a great revelation, the truth, monetary mirages lack
matter and energy. TOnly then will come to pass a 21st Century incarnation
of the reformation, with people united and coherent enough to sweep away
the church of the holy dollar.

Let us pray.