Surviving Capitalism (Not) : Greece is a smokescreen to hide the mother of all bank bailouts

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Thursday, February 23, 2012

Greece is a smokescreen to hide the mother of all bank bailouts

Click here to access article by Nick Dearden from Committee for the Abolition of Third World Debt.

The central lesson is of urgent importance: that the economic policies pushed on Latin America in the early 1980s were an excellent way of helping US banks out of crisis, but an appalling way of resolving Latin America’s debt crisis, instead creating two decades of more debt, poverty and inequality.

The author makes some very good points about what happened in Latin America in recent decades, but he fails to understand that this is the way capitalism functions. Capitalists cannot learn such a lesson as long as this tiny class of the (less than) One Percent continue to subscribe to that system. It is not that they are stupid, it is the logic of the system. Most of them will continue to support the logic of this system simply because they are addicted to the tremendous wealth and power that it gives to them.