By Henry McRandall
WRISEUP.COM
The G8 and G20 confabs in Seoul, South Korea, in the coming days are doomed to failure before they even begin, because they simply don’t have the proper items on the agenda.
It is feared the G20 meeting will get bogged down in a concerted effort to avoid a global currency war which appears to be the most imaginative plan the world’s leaders have to address the current economic crisis.
But just as a currency war will not solve the global crisis, neither will avoiding such a war solve the crisis.
The problem is much deeper.
The problem, in a nutshell, is that the masses – the poor, the working class and the middle class – have been economically marginalized in most advanced western industrial nations in order to further enrich the already inordinately rich.
The problem is a crisis of corporate capitalism, perhaps the ultimate crisis that will eventually prove to be its undoing.
The extreme concentration of wealth, income and power in the hands of a very tiny socioeconomic elite has resulted in a virtual bankrupting of the spending power of the masses.
If the masses can’t afford to maintain their established consumption rates then companies will not produce goods and services for a market that does not exist.
If companies reduce their production of goods and services, unemployment and underemployment will persist and even worsen.
What should be on the agendas of the G8 and the G20?
Something much more radical. So radical that only it could breathe new life into the rotting cadaver of corporate capitalism: an cross-the-board (global), massive increase in taxes on corporations and the wealthy; a massive downward redistribution of wealth from the socioeconomic elite to the masses and the abolition of so-called “‘free trade’ on corporate capitalist terms.”
Why aren’t they discussing such ideas?
Because the G8 and the G20 are controlled by the U.S. and its wealthy allies – primarily through such international agencies as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO); and the agenda they continue to pursue is the slavish NeoConservative/NeoLiberal devotion to the corporate capitalist agenda and the vested interests of the econocorporate elite.
And in their short-sighted devotion to the next quarter’s financial results, they will not allow themselves to even ponder a solution so radical, so anti-capitalist that it might indeed prove to be corporate capitalism’s final salvation.
Of coure, the implementation of such a global prescription would not necessarily result in the rescuing of corporate capitalism.
If the bankers and the captains of industry remain steadfast in their obstinate opposition to socioeconomic sanity, then the masses might someday soon have rise up and force the elite and their political servants to act in the best interests of the poor, the working class and the middle class.
And if push comes to shove on these vital matters, the masses might no longer be so willing to continue suffering under the corporate capitalist yoke.