Het Neoliberale Geloof 396

'The Fall of the Towers of Wall Street
Capitalism From the Standpoint of Its Victims
By M. SHAHID ALAM

It has never been easy offering a critique of capitalism or markets to my
undergraduate students. Most have never heard an unkind word about these
bedrock institutions, which they know to be the foundations of American
power and prosperity.

These are hallowed institutions. The power of private capital to produce
jobs, wealth and freedom is one of the central dogmas that many Americans
absorb with their mother’s milk. To hear this dogma challenged – in any
context – is unsettling. I sometimes suspect that this bitter pill is
harder to swallow because it emanates from someone who, so transparently,
is not a native-born American.

As the weeks pass, however, my students appear to settle down. In the past,
they have been reassured to learn that markets have done a good job at
delivering prosperity to a few centers of global capitalism. They do work
for us, even if they have not worked for most Asians, Africans and Latin
Americans.

Nevertheless, the thesis that ‘free’ markets have rarely worked for
economies lagging far behind the economic leaders, does not quite take
root. The fault could not lie with markets. For too long, the West has
believed that Asians, Africans and Latin Americans failed because they were
lazy, spendthrift, venal and unimaginative.

My students – like most Americans – have been conditioned to look at
capitalism from the standpoint of the winners in global capitalism. Because
of the accident of birth, they have been the beneficiaries of the wealth
and power that global capitalism concentrates at the nodes of the system.
They cannot conceive how a system that has worked so well for them could
produce misery for others in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

I have been away from my teaching duties as the United States has led the
world into a deepening recession. Within a few months, the titans of Wall
Street have been laid low, rescued from extinction by tax-financed
bailouts. Teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, the auto giants have been
placed on life-support also by taxpayers, their future still uncertain. In
this maelstrom, there steps forward Bernard L. Madoff, the Einstein of
Ponzi schemes, who operated his colossal con for twenty years without
notice from regulators.

Millions of Americans have lost their jobs; millions are threatened with
loss of their homes; millions have seen their retirement funds melt before
their eyes; millions are threatened with loss of health care. As Americans
on Main Street were being devastated, executives of bailed out banks
continued to receive millions in bonuses. That straw now threatens to break
the back of the fabled American tolerance for the foibles of the capitalist
system.

Ordinarily, American democracy directs its venom against writers and
activists on the left, foolish enough to want to defend the
underprivileged. For a change, Americans are threatening captains of
finance, venerable bankers, with dire consequences – even death threats.'
Lees verder: http://www.counterpunch.org/shahid03232009.html