Blimp deflator: Letting out the gas

A problem for the writer of letters to the editor is that a reply to a columnist must be made in 200 to 250 words, compared with the 1000 to 1500 words allotted to the columnist for the exposition of his or her case. If I had had more space, I might have pointed out that when the sweeping policies of deregulation/privatization were introduced, from the 1980s onward, they explicitly excluded any “moral” dimension. “Greed is good,” we were solemnly informed. When people were allowed to devote themselves entirely to the pursuit of their own interests, all sectors of society would eventually benefit. Even those at the bottom of the heap would see their standard of living rise, thanks to the “trickle-down effect” of the accumulation of wealth at the top.

As The Economist noted in 2002: “The case for greed was perhaps best made over 200 years ago by Adam Smith, who argued that the invisible hand of market forces would ensure that the efforts of individuals acting in pursuit of their own self-interest made society as a whole better off. In other words, judge capitalism not by the motives of the capitalists but by its fruit.”

Earlier, in 1987, the fictional character Gordon Gekko summed up the thinking of the era when he said in the film Wall Street: “I am not a destroyer of companies. I am a liberator of them! The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, for knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.”

Clearly, there is no “moral compass” here, now waiting to be “rediscovered”. There are no “moral moorings”, which the deregulated and privatized system has unaccountably “slipped”.

Any “moral” action was left entirely to the discretion of the individual. A rich businessman could, if he wished, toss a coin to the beggar at his gate — in much the same way as an 11th-century robber baron distributed largesse. He could also use his wealth to create new industries and employment opportunities, and thereby give substance to the “trickle-down” theory.

In practice, he generally did neither. Instead, he chose to maximize his profits by closing his industries in the West and exporting their workers’ jobs to Third-World countries, where the elimination of local industries, mainly through the undercutting of local prices by imports of cheap food from the United States, had sent millions of potential slave laborers flooding into the cities. At the same time, he tended to blame the poor for their plight, by suggesting they lacked initiative and the necessary get-up-and-go attitude. (Note the tone of almost all the mainstream media comments on the various Occupy movements, and the emphasis placed on the protesters having beards, being “hygienically challenged”, and — horror of horrors! — handing out free condoms.)

This means that, today, many consumer products are made in Third World sweatshops, and are bought by Westerners who, if they want to maintain their “affluent” lifestyle, must increasingly do so by borrowing — and entering inter-generational debt servitude. The whole system is a racket that ultimately benefits no one except the super-rich, who must now resort to draconian security/surveillance measures, including the so-called War on Terror, to ensure a lid is kept firmly clamped on unrest. But as Michael Parenti points out in The Face of Imperialism (see earlier post), this “Third Worldization” of all countries is actually the objective of our present capitalist system — to which, the pundits stress ad nauseam, there is no alternative.

In short, what we are witnessing is tantamount to a revival of feudalism, cleverly obscured by the banners of “freedom” and “democracy” that it is promoted under, by an elite class that knows the world’s resources are either running out or being seriously degraded and that it must act decisively now to cement its position of privilege. When British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan said in 1959 that “most of our people have never had it so good,” — usually paraphrased as “You’ve never had it so good” — he thought he was speaking only about the past. But we now know that his words are equally appropriate when put into the future tense. The “good times” of the late 1950s to late 1960s will never come again.