Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed. -- Mahatma Gandhi
The Current Financial Crisis: Dishonesty fuelled by Greed
"Over the weekend, John McCain's top adviser announced their plan to stop engaging in a debate over the economy and "turn the page" to more direct, personal attacks on Barack Obama. In the middle of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, they want to change the subject from the central question of this election. Perhaps because the policies McCain supported these past eight years and wants to continue are pretty hard to defend. But it's not just McCain's role in the current crisis that they're avoiding. The backward economic philosophy and culture of corruption that helped create the current crisis are looking more and more like the other major financial crisis of our time." www.barackobama.com
Dr. Kamran Mofid, Economist.
On 10/6/08 Dr. Mofid, an internationally renowned economist, and founder of the Globalisation for the Common Good Initiative, in a letter to his subscribers, wrote the following on the current economic crisis:
In the last couple of weeks, 100s of billions of Dollars, Pounds and Euros of tax payers money have been poured down the drain to bail out a non-functioning, unregulated, unaccountable financial system. The money that we were told was not there to pay for improvements in health, education, housing, transportation, pension, child care,..to name but a few. Moreover, no body has been charged yet: one law for them and another one for the tax payers! The profits were privatised when the going was good and the costs have been socialised, now that the going got tough, heaven on earth for them and hell for the tax payers!
Where are the market forces now, you might ask? Where are all those neo-liberal economists now, singing the praises of the market, deregulation, liberalisation, privatisation, free tade, share/property-owning democracy,..? Where are they now, telling us how to maximise our profits and income, how to minimise our costs and how to exploit the natural resources, all for the sake of maximum economic growth, and then tell us how to externalise the costs and consequences to the tax payer or to the people of Bangladesh for example, when they get flooded.
Where have they gone now? Why are they so quiet now, not sharing their wisdom on the wonders of the market and competition and scarcity with us all! I wonder if all these billions that tax-payers have given will work in rescuing the economy where mammon has taken over? My answer is: it will not, as long as the so-called experts/economists do not admit that without humanity, ethics and justice, economics and business are house of cards built on shifting sands.
Many millions of words have been written on this meltdown, on what went wrong, but not much on why it went wrong. The overwhelming majority agree on the role of one vital element: dishonesty fuelled by greed. We forget at our own peril that honesty and greed are essentially spiritual and moral issues.In the last few weeks the greed of Wall Street and the City (London financial district) has been under the spotlight. The Archbishop of York recently- and in my view correctly- called some of the traders bank robbers. "We find ourselves in a market system which seems to have taken its rules of trade from Alice in Wonderland", the Archbishop remarked. The Archbishop of Canterbury has also criticized "trading of the debts of others without accountability" and compared unfettered belief in the market with fundamentalism. This last word "fundamentalism" used by the Archbishop means a lot to me. It is the fundamentalism of economics, its teaching and MBA programmes that is, in my view, the shifting sand upon which we have built this house of cards, called economic globalisation, which has now come home to roost.
The Chicago Boys school of economic thought has proven to be an Emporer with no clothes! As long as this curse persists, there will be no possibility of reaching the Promised Land: where we can have justice, peace, happiness and contentment.
