Monday 23 April 2012

Fraudulent Capitalism - From the Point of View of Posterity

In 50, 100 or more years, 2012 may not be remembered for anything in particular except that the chance of learning from the catastrophe of the turbocapitalism of previous years was sadly missed. Even the introduction, people will say, of an E.U.-wide financial transaction tax  failed due to the egotism of nations that made the excuse of the cunningness of capital to fly to wherever it can reproduce most quickly
With regret, people will look back on a time of narrow-mindedness, of greed and recklessness in the individual as well as on the national level. How long had it taken for humanity and reason to prevail and for a global government with a global ministry of finance to be created? Confronted with its regulatory authority, capital had no chance, no opportunities to fly. There were no more protected centres of finance in London or New York, no more tax-free island states, no more pirate havens for vagabonding capital.      
Madness was checked, and frenzied greed was calmed, where before it had caused whole stratums of society to impoverish while the originators of mass exploitation were free to enrich themselves without bounds. In those days, as it was dawning on the people what they had got and how they were contributing to a system that exploited them, the concept and term fraudulent capitalism came up. This resulted in social stigmatisation of all risky financial transactions that burdened society with the risk while filling the pockets of the few. So many people had become aware that they had systematically been deceived, lied to, and fleeced.             
In the end, however, the recognition that people had subjugated themselves to a system of finance that primarily harmed them had been a material encouragement for a gradual development of all the states in the world towards general regulations. Finally the USA, too, on the verge of their own economic collapse, disappeared in the USW (United States of the World).

And soon it showed how on the basis of a globally networked sense of responsibility, the system of finance could be cleansed from individual and national lust for power and increasingly contributed to the levelling of the world’s wealth.    

(Translation Michael Ehrmann)

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