fashion fantasy codes
fashion fantasy codes
Financial Crisis or Multi-dimensional?
By M. Nadarajah
Down
'Private equity company Blackstone Group LP (BX.N) CEO Stephen Schwarzman said on Tuesday that up to 45 percent of the world's wealth has been destroyed by the global credit crisis. "Between 40 and 45 percent the world's population wealth has been destroyed in less than a year and a half, "Schwarzman said in a hearing society in Japan." This is absolutely unprecedented in our life. " (Reuters, March 12, 2009)
Permanently in crisis
The very poor communities around the world are in "permanent crisis" of a class perspective and crisis, because that is how the mainstream of world economic structure and operation of the process. Even for many analysts and academics, there can be no situation in which we will not have the poor among us. They insist that there will always be poor among us as a fact. And that's fine even though they are, in a sense, in a perpetual crisis - no fixed home, no food security, there is no regular employment contract and no secure future. No problems with that!
Somehow, their suffering is never seen as a crisis. This is a particular part of the system, and we little shaken by it. The billions in this reality are not a focus of the media.
For the poor, the crisis is the way life is, and to be responsible of their own and their families in day to day. Every day is an uphill task and for hundreds of thousands of people (many of them children) throughout the world, this could mean going to bed hungry.
It is estimated that more than 1 billion people suffer from chronic hunger worldwide. For millions of people, there is no assurance food. Even in the supposedly rich U.S., it is estimated that about 35 million Americans do not know where their next meal would come! Not that there is enough food to supply the hungry of the world - it's just that they do not qualify for food as not part of the "demand" to consume the available "Supply" (of food)!
Perhaps from that angle, Slumdog Millionaire lot of international fame, but locally-criticized (in India) Hollywood-Bollywood film is a gentle critique of mainstream economics and the conclusion (and largely romantic) the spirit of poor people who are always in the state of "permanent crisis", but trying to creatively deal with it. Of course, it offers a solution like a dream or fantasy.
The periodic crises
For those who have been gainfully employed, middle class, entrepreneurs, financial experts and bankers, etc., the current economic crisis is a crisis of conviction. It is not the way life should be. Moreover, the media persist in presenting this crisis in all its drama. The news on this hot topic sells anyway.
The crisis is a crisis. People have a hard time. The human cost of the current crisis is really the pain and more pain for the group mentioned above. For example, suicides related to an economic crisis have increased worldwide. Japan, has the highest number of suicides in the developed world, logging more than 30,000 suicides in 2008, ie more than 25 suicides per 100,000 people. There is an increase general of suicides in Asia and the Asian crisis of 1997.
In countries like Australia and the U.S., the case was wrong. Special units and lines direct suicide are in place to deal with depression and suicidal tendencies caused by the economic slowdown. In Australia, between October and December 2008, there has been a 34 percent increase in suicide-related calls for help due to financial pressure in relation to the crisis.
Millions of people have lost their jobs worldwide. Millions more are expected to lose their livelihoods. According to an ILO report, the labor market projections for 2009 shows a definitive deterioration in the global labor market for women and men. Two scenarios are given. In the best case, 18 million jobs would be lost, equivalent a global unemployment rate of 6.1%. In the worst cases, there will be a loss of more than 50 million jobs, equivalent to a rate of 7.1%. This amount, some 21 million would be women. If the worst happens, the number of working poor can earn enough to lift themselves and their families above the poverty line (USD2 per person per day) may increase to 1.4 million. This is almost half of the world have been employed. In addition, some 200 million workers earning USD1.25 or less per day, especially in developing economies, could be pushed into extreme poverty.
Periodic crises makes it even harder for the "permanent crisis" list.
And now, to find the cause of the crisis ...
The economic crisis has given the world a new intellectual enterprise, and is gaining strength. From across the political spectrum, analysis of the causes of the current crisis financial and economic downturn are being offered and, in the same, the solutions presented. As you might expect, some of these solutions, particularly from the right, are selling. For many, the economic crisis, of course, offers business opportunities! "
The Chinese term for crisis catches within its domain which means both the notion of "danger" and "opportunity." The intellectual response to the crisis has also provided these two elements. The only difference is that the way they perceived opportunity.
Just walk into any popular book and you see the many, many books from across the political spectrum - From the "free market" theorists of "new imperialism" - available for consumption, not only to understand the crisis but also to make address both immediate and long term. Nobel prizes radicals to blow up the management gurus generously offer their ideas and solutions. A resurgence of Marxist / Socialist theories. If you've been following the intellectual production during the various crises in the distant and / or recent past, it is easy to find arguments rehash for fair and as there were some writers who have been consistent in tracking and monitoring of these crises and predict the future.
Looking more nearby, a group just wants to look at the sub-prime mortgage crisis in the U.S., and to address the current crisis from that starting point, and who armed the whole problem for the U.S., European and global economy. They want to re-examine national and global financial regulation, pull it, do more tinkering to the system Current and move on. As usual, with, of course, some adjustments here and there. In fact, a crisis is seen as a gateway to more economic opportunities.
The other group, looking at the crisis historically, to go beyond the crisis. They look at high-risk mortgages as only one of many answers to problems inherent structural global economy based on the trend line profit of only the bottom (and the ownership of the value produced by a group another group). For many in this group, the current problem has its roots in the period following the end of the Second World War and subsequent reconstruction begins the economic war Japan and Germany Europe /. They want us to reexamine and fundamentally change the way we organize our economy and our management society.
Perhaps an analysis revealing is the fact that from the period after the Second War II onwards, there has been a progressive degeneration of the "economy real "and the progressive growth of the financing of the economy." Real wages, productivity and demand have dropped or reduced. With many new locations increased production and capacity, we are now faced with the problem of overproduction.
Over the years, political leaders, industrialists and financial statements have tried many ways to address these long-term structural economic problems. Even when facing a set of needs, the dotcom bubble, war against global communism and terrorism then, now, Afghanistan and Iraqi wars and reconstruction efforts, and huge sub-prime mortgages in the U.S. were, in general, all attempts to tackle the problems of national and global economies. Political and economic leaders were looking for ways to shore economic activity ... anyway. Whereas all the above efforts, the U.S. acted as a leader, a transnational group of entrepreneurs around the world benefited.
It is instructive to know that war used to benefit national and global economies is undoubtedly incorporated into the economic system dominant. It is central to the financing and maintenance of the "American dream" has exploded outside the borders of the political entity is U.S. and become powerful globally available and appropriated the cultural idea.
Still, all these really could not stop the arrival of the crisis Current. The crisis in sub-prime mortgages in the U.S. has taken the world into a disaster that is waking up.
Real production companies provide goods and services that do something better than what existed before: the creation of jobs and increase productivity and overall efficiency. Economic growth and progress in real world world take place due to "product entrepreneurs and community workers who do earn profits or wages, invest these profits in the creation of new products or businesses, or consumption of the product of the real economy. According to a UN report from 1980, "decline or stagnation has affected 100 countries, reduction in revenue of 1.6 million people. For 70 of these countries, average incomes are lower in mid-1990 than in 1980 and 43 fewer than in 1970 .
For now, the real economy, which supports real people, their wages, the production of real goods and value creation is disrepair. The stagnation in the real economy has led investors to promote the "financialization of the economy," a strategy to money "out of nothing" ... a kind of economic voodoo!
Financial institutions are creating the benefits of nowhere. Billions of dollars have been created out of nothing and there is a big world out there that operates exclusively financial in it. It's just an empty world that only plays on the rise and fall of trends in money market paper. If that amount was actually available and distributed fairly in the real economy, there would be no poor people go to bed hungry.
financial entrepreneurship has become more dominant in the national and global economies. Like many creative minds are absorbed by the war economy to support wars, corporate creative minds are being exploited by financial institutions to create different derivative financial instruments increasingly luxury obligations secured loans, mortgage-backed securities and bonds. These are strategies to create value, but not only benefit.
The competition in the economy financial is often a zero-sum competition. For every investor or speculator who wins, another loses. We build a "fantasy world". But competition in the economy generates real creativity, better products and consumers. It builds the real world, which is very poorly organized. .
We have all consciously or unconsciously participated in creating the fictional world. Today, the fiction is breaking and comes to bite us ... with a vengeance. The real economy will ensure that this is a sting a very hard for us all to remember!
Do not we have a deep cultural crisis?
The Current economic philosophy is preparing the world to its slow destruction. The central tendency that moves us is the benefit and is closely associated with it, greed. Making profit is still a value. This has become the basis of social life and influences all aspects of our daily life expression. Our notion of progress, performance, success and achievement is also influenced by it.
Even within this benefit, the baseline economic framework, instead of paying attention to the real economy, we have allowed financial entrepreneurs to lead. This has not only affected the real economy entrepreneurs who have been disciplined and held prisoners in results for the quarter, "but also highlighted the drive to achieve the benefit of the" nothing. "Now, we are all floating on the fictitious capital and construction fantasy worlds based on a 'nothing' generated by empty values of future speculation.
All this has lasted for years was deeply affecting on Earth and all life. Without serious attention to the "deep sustainability" in an integral sense (not only in an ecological sense, but in terms of the socio-cultural, political, economy and technology), who have approached "multidimensional crisis. The little real attention to the sustainability of the activity general economic and contemporary entrepreneurship have caused damage to land and large human societies and is greatly diminished.
indiscriminate consumption, no sense of restraint that has pushed us into an ecological crisis. In addition, the thrust of the darker side of American dream, which is based on consumption and more consumption, land resource needs about 6 more to match American levels of consumption for the whole world. We are already living on the resources of future generations!
The current unsustainable global economic activity is also based on the benefits of a "permanent war economy" wars are invented, which depend directly on labor and creativity to the production of weapons and firm strategies to kill human life. This also implies environmental damage in these episodes of violence. U.S. war against terrorism could cost about $ 2.4 billion by 2017 and many business owners see it as a investment in U.S. security. This could mean more gradually than was once seen as' war of independence "within nations or regions that are re-appointed by the media and foreign policy as "war on terrorism" so that we can invest in them.
Moreover, current economic structure of society contributes to the inequality of the haves and have-nots, which expose large segments of the human population, including children, a "permanent crisis." And, many more of the regular cycle of economic and financial crisis. According to a 1999 report by the United Nations "The income gap between the fifth of the worlds population living in the richest countries and the fifth in the poorest doubled from 1960 to 1990 from 30 I to 60 to 1. By 1998 it had jumped again, with the widening gap to an incredible 78 to 1.
In a deeper sense, and as a critical growing movement of indigenous peoples in the dominant economic development paradigm, we have lost contact with more holistic cosmology this "capital focused on 'one. While the former created a culture and mentality of close relationship between nature and society, the later separated the detriment of both. While it creates a deeper meaning in "other things" be "aware characterized by the interconnection of all creations, so fashionable in recent we as a species on islands and dominating all living and non living nature and plays God. In this context it is interesting to note that there is a growing topic of popular culture to some extent generated by Hollywood films depicting the human species as a parasite or virus that has to be controlled or exterminated by the planet to survive!
The domain and the arrogance of the capital-centric culture and mentality are undoubtedly the basis of any economic or financial crisis. But today this crisis must be seen with all other crises that have brought about ourselves: the ecological crisis, a crisis of legitimacy and democracy and socio-cultural crisis. This is a period in which we must reach an agreement with 'multi-dimensional crisis. "
If you make a cursory examination of the line religious / spiritual interventions to address the current crisis, attention focuses on the critique of values that encourage us and the race of those values and the need to reassess our values orientation. However, the mainstream of today's institutional efforts are directed only to the quest to treat the symptoms of a deep socio-cultural crisis.
By design or default, a large majority of us have chosen to ignore a deeper solution to the system of multiple economic crisis are prone to a more deep in. would result in the dismantling of the base of economic and political power, reorganizing production, property and distribution of wealth, and re-structuring of the legitimacy and leadership in a global society based on the principles of true justice, equality and freedom. Not much to lose and too many institutional changes to some very powerful people, companies and institutions.
We, as governments, simply unwilling to do so. Even with the growth of all forms of philanthropy, including corporate philanthropy, the global initiative of several lines and background social codes of conduct, in the grip hand, grabs and takes only refuses to become a hand that nourishes, protects and gives. That requires a massive cultural shift.
'Going and Down "part of the script of a global human drama
So, meanwhile, as the history of economic cycles of financial crisis will, in the end will come back to where we are today, perhaps in another 10 to 15 years. The crisis then may not be as severe as today. It will be a episode with its own specificities in a global human drama series that seems to continually deny a season together, again with a different breed of producers, writers, cast and crew. It's like watching some Hollywood or Bollywood movie: do we really know what will happen, but we still see, right?
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(Originally published in online journal of Malaysia, Malaysiakini.Com, April 2009. Minimally reviewed here.)
About the Author
Dr. M. Nadarajah is a sociologist by training. He belongs to the Asian Public Intellectuals (API) Community, a community of filmmakers, theatre people, songwriters, poets, activists and academics working in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines and Japan for a sustainable Asia. His work focuses on cultural and sustainability issues. He lives and works from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
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