[Ip-health] Klein - Free Market Ideology is Far From Finished

[Riaz K Tayob]

Snip:
This spectacle necessarily raises the question: if the state can
intervene to save corporations that took reckless risks in the housing
markets, why can't it intervene to prevent millions of Americans from
imminent foreclosure? By the same token, if $85bn can be made instantly
available to buy the insurance giant AIG, why is single-payer health
care - which would protect Americans from the predatory practices of
health-care insurance companies - seemingly such an unattainable dream?
And if ever more corporations need taxpayer funds to stay afloat, why
can't taxpayers make demands in return - like caps on executive pay, and
a guarantee against more job losses?
...


Free Market Ideology is Far From Finished

But with Wall Street rescued by government intervention, there's never
been a better time to argue for collectivist solutions

By Naomi Klein The Guardian (UK) September 19, 2008

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/19/marketturmoil.usa

Whatever the events of this week mean, nobody should believe the
overblown claims that the market crisis signals the death of "free
market" ideology. Free market ideology has always been a servant to the
interests of capital, and its presence ebbs and flows depending on its
usefulness to those interests.

During boom times, it's profitable to preach laissez faire, because an
absentee government allows speculative bubbles to inflate. When those
bubbles burst, the ideology becomes a hindrance, and it goes dormant
while big government rides to the rescue. But rest assured: the ideology
will come roaring back when the bailouts are done. The massive debts the
public is accumulating to bail out the speculators will then become part
of a global budget crisis that will be the rationalisation for deep cuts
to social programmes, and for a renewed push to privatise what is left
of the public sector. We will also be told that our hopes for a green
future are, sadly, too costly.

What we don't know is how the public will respond. Consider that in
North America, everybody under the age of 40 grew up being told that the
government can't intervene to improve our lives, that government is the
problem not the solution, that laissez faire was the only option. Now,
we are suddenly seeing an extremely activist, intensely interventionist
government, seemingly willing to do whatever it takes to save investors
from themselves.

This spectacle necessarily raises the question: if the state can
intervene to save corporations that took reckless risks in the housing
markets, why can't it intervene to prevent millions of Americans from
imminent foreclosure? By the same token, if $85bn can be made instantly
available to buy the insurance giant AIG, why is single-payer health
care - which would protect Americans from the predatory practices of
health-care insurance companies - seemingly such an unattainable dream?
And if ever more corporations need taxpayer funds to stay afloat, why
can't taxpayers make demands in return - like caps on executive pay, and
a guarantee against more job losses?

Now that it's clear that governments can indeed act in times of crises,
it will become much harder for them to plead powerlessness in the
future. Another potential shift has to do with market hopes for future
privatisations. For years, the global investment banks have been
lobbying politicians for two new markets: one that would come from
privatising public pensions and the other that would come from a new
wave of privatised or partially privatised roads, bridges and water
systems. Both of these dreams have just become much harder to sell:
Americans are in no mood to trust more of their individual and
collective assets to the reckless gamblers on Wall Street, especially
because it seems more than likely that taxpayers will have to pay to buy
back their own assets when the next bubble bursts.

With the World Trade Organisation talks off the rails, this crisis could
also be a catalyst for a radically alternative approach to regulating
world markets and financial systems. Already, we are seeing a move
towards "food sovereignty" in the developing world, rather than leaving
access to food to the whims of commodity traders. The time may finally
have come for ideas like taxing trading, which would slow speculative
investment, as well as other global capital controls.

And now that nationalisation is not a dirty word, the oil and gas
companies should watch out: someone needs to pay for the shift to a
greener future, and it makes most sense for the bulk of the funds to
come from the highly profitable sector that is most responsible for our
climate crisis. It certainly makes more sense than creating another
dangerous bubble in carbon trading.

But the crisis we are seeing calls for even deeper changes than that.
The reason these junk loans were allowed to proliferate was not just
because the regulators didn't understand the risk. It is because we have
an economic system that measures our collective health based exclusively
on GDP growth. So long as the junk loans were fuelling economic growth,
our governments actively supported them. So what is really being called
into question by the crisis is the unquestioned commitment to growth at
all costs. Where this crisis should lead us is to a radically different
way for our societies to measure health and progress.

None of this, however, will happen without huge public pressure placed
on politicians in this key period. And not polite lobbying but a return
to the streets and the kind of direct action that ushered in the New
Deal in the 1930s. Without it, there will be superficial changes and a
return, as quickly as possible, to business as usual.

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