Re: A controlled economy is a financier's best friend.
They set up a false dichotomy by always contrasting the two. Either way, they win. A true free market would be too chaotic for financiers to stomach, I'm afraid. I find it interesting that "free trade" treaties tend to be 10 pound documents.
I agree 100 % !! This is what my article below is all about (in French):
ornitho.org
Today's blatant irony is to witness Communism's victory over free-market capitalism WORLDWIDE.... Of course, such a subversive interpretation of the current M&A craze is not the official, politically correct version concocted by the establishment.
But let's face it: at the current rate, in less than 10 years from now, we'll end up --and by 'we' I mean the 'global village'-- with TWO aircraft manufacturers (Boeing and Airbus), with FIVE car manufacturers (DaimlerChrysler, Ford/Volvo/Mazda, VW/Rolls-Royce/Rover/BMW, GM, and Toyota), with a couple of financial behemoths (CitiGroup, Deutsche Bank, AXA-BNP-Paribas, Banco Santander,...), a few foodstuff conglomerates (Philip Morris/Kraft, Nestle, Unilever,...), a handful of pharmaceuticals (Novartis, Eli Lily,...), a couple of worldwide utilities (Suez-Lyonnaise, Vivendi,...). Not to speak of the media environment where the Disneys, the TimeWarnerCNNs, the Bertelsmanns, and Mr. Rupert Murdoch are sharing out the multimedia cake....
Does such an oligopolistic picture not remind you of Karl Marx's wildest dream?? When a handful of global corporations --whose annual turnovers far outweigh most of OECD countries' GDPs-- can we still depict their economic environment as a competition-driven free market? Nope! The CEOs and CIOs and COOs, along with their corporate boards are actually planning the world economy, much as Soviet bureaucrats were doing in the Brejnev era!
Coca-Cola, Boeing, Nike, Disney, and the rest are shaping a capitalist controlled economy --worldwide. The difference with the brutal Bolshevik system is that a capitalist controlled economy doesn't rely on ruthless coercion and propaganda to sweat people into behaving properly: the media conditioning --through Hollywood, the advertising industry, and logocratic gurus-- purport that our happiness lies in the business-sponsored consumerism.... Of course, not everyone's invited to the Capitalist Party --working poors and 'displaced, redundant nerds' are repelled at the gate. But who cares? Since Fukuyama tells us that there is no escape route toward some allegedly superior political fabric! Hopefully, the Vatican and its army of clerics, along with all the other persuasions's mouthpieces claim that, postmortem, we'll all magic up in a f a n t a s t i c, everlasting Disneyland --trust you God! |
