Food Summit Opens With Censure of Greed, Speculation
By Karl Maier and Jeffrey DonovanNov. 16 (Bloomberg) — A United Nations summit on food security opened with leaders slamming rich nations for worsening world hunger by allowing speculation in agricultural markets and using subsidies that hurt production in developing nations.
Pope Benedict XVI cited “greed which causes speculation to rear its head even in the marketing of cereals, as if food were to be treated just like any other commodity.”
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who called hunger “the most terrible weapon of mass destruction,” urged rich nations to meet their commitments to boost investment in agricultural in poor nations and to end “shameful” farming subsidies.
“They sabotage emerging agriculture in the poorer countries, wiping out their hope to create a bridge to development,” Lula said.
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buzz
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johnpi
A Pennsylvania judge has erased more than 6,000 juvenile court convictions in that state arising from a pair of corrupt judges who took kickbacks to convict more children of crimes so the private corporation jailer could increase profits by warehousing the convicted children in its jail.
The story was featured prominently in Michael Moore’s new documentary “Capitalism: A Love Story,” as a paradigm example of what happens when government functions are privatized.
Moore concluded that ‘capitalism is evil.’
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johnpi
Newsweek magazine: ‘Capitalism is the key to fighting Islamic extremism.’
While the overall picture in these countries looks grim, an economic renaissance has tentatively begun. Between 2002 and 2008, real GDP in the Middle East and North Africa grew by 3.7 percent, up from 3 percent in the previous decade.
This matters for one key reason: middle-class capitalists represent the best hope for the advancement of their societies—and the most potent weapon for combating extremism. While it’s true that the 9/11 attackers were middle class (as have been many other terrorists), what matters is whether or not the middle class as a whole supports extremism. The problem in the Muslim world until now has been that the tiny middle class has had few ties to free markets and has depended on state salaries and entitlements. The growth of local capitalism—and integration with the world economy—could help change that.
Already these forces are having an impact. The recent election controversy in Iran can be seen as a struggle by its rising middle class to protect its economic interests against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a populist who has sought to increase state domination of the economy. Turkey, meanwhile, has already arrived at the future; it is a successful Muslim democracy fully integrated into the global economy.
The same pattern will replicate itself elsewhere. One and a half billion consumers have clout, and as they move up the economic ladder, they demand a blending of traditional and moderate Islam with the opportunities and material benefits of liberal capitalism. They want distinctly Islamic goods: not just halal food and headscarves, but Islamic housing, haute couture, banking, education, entertainment, media, and consumer goods.
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johnpi
Bobby Jindal is planning to privatize Louisiana state services. When a state worker spoke out in a public forum against the plan, she was fired the next day on obviously contrived grounds having to do with her performance years before.
No word yet if Jindal has considering seeking out the hard-won wisdom of officials in Hardin, Montana, who hired the private security contractor American Police Force to run their prison and police their town.
And speaking of the privatization nightmare in Hardin, APF – now American Private Police Force – has backed out of the Hardin deal, but not before the town economic development official who signed the deal was forced to resign.
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thabet
A member of the Church of England’s ethical advisory group described protectionist attitudes towards Africa as “a fucking disgrace” at an event hosted by the Phoney Grinning Lying Warmongering Bastard Faux Faith Foundation on Wednesday night.
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thabet
Perhaps following the advice of Rowan Williams, HSBC’s chairman says banks should apologise to everyone in the world:
The entire banking industry “owes the real world an apology”, the chairman of HSBC has said.
Stephen Green told BBC World Business Report that a change in culture was needed to improve the public’s perception of bankers.
Williams is right when he was reported to have warned that the “gap between rich and poor would lead to an increasingly “dysfunctional” society”, but I think he needs to go a step beyond simply capping this or that bonus and consider the structures and relationships which generate such a gap (I am sure Williams, a highly intelligent man, if not very media aware, is smart enough to realise this).
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johnpi
Following the release of Michael Moore’s new movie “Capitalism, a Love Story,” congressional Rep. Luis Gutiérrez from Illinois has vowed to introduce legislation that would outlaw “dead peasants insurance,” where companies take out life insurance policies on their employees without their knowledge and then cash in when they die.
“In a nation where millions of full-time workers have no health insurance, maybe if we can prevent companies from betting on the death of their employees, they’ll invest in the health of their employees,” Gutierrez told Chicago Public Radio.
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johnpi
Michael Moore’s new documentary “Capitalism, a love story” comes out next week. A few things he explores on the way to making his point about the broken status quo:
The film also turns the spotlight on some underreported gems: an internal Citibank report happily declaring America a “plutonomy,” with 1 percent of the population controlling 95 percent of the wealth; an expose of “dead peasant” insurance policies that have companies cashing in on the untimely deaths of their employees; and amazing footage of FDR, found buried in a film archive and not seen in decades, calling for a Second Bill of Rights that would guarantee all Americans a useful job, a decent home, adequate health care, and a good education.
Some more reflection on the movie:
In the film, Michael describes capitalism as evil. I disagree. I don’t think capitalism is evil. I think what we have right now is not capitalism.
In capitalism as envisioned by its leading lights, including Adam Smith and Alfred Marshall, you need a moral foundation in order for free markets to work. And when a company fails, it fails. It doesn’t get bailed out using trillions of dollars of taxpayer money. What we have right now is Corporatism. It’s welfare for the rich. It’s the government picking winners and losers. It’s Wall Street having their taxpayer-funded cake and eating it too. It’s socialized losses and privatized gains.
Corporatism, not capitalism: Someone let Hizb ut-Tahrir know.
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johnpi
Here’s a reason for all you Obama voters to feel good about your vote:
During arguments in a campaign-finance case, the court’s majority conservatives seemed persuaded that corporations have broad First Amendment rights and that recent precedents upholding limits on corporate political spending should be overruled.
But [Obama Supreme Court nominee] Justice Sotomayor suggested the majority might have it all wrong — and that instead the court should reconsider the 19th century rulings that first afforded corporations the same rights flesh-and-blood people have.
Judges “created corporations as persons, gave birth to corporations as persons,” she said. “There could be an argument made that that was the court’s error to start with…[imbuing] a creature of state law with human characteristics.”
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thabet
I quite enjoyed this article on class and race:
Thus the primacy of anti-discrimination not only performs the economic function of making markets more efficient, it also performs the therapeutic function of making those of us who have benefited from those markets sleep better at night. And, perhaps more important, it has, ‘for a long time’, as Wendy Bottero says in her contribution to the recent Runnymede Trust collection Who Cares about the White Working Class?, also performed the intellectual function of focusing social analysis on what she calls ‘questions of racial or sexual identity’ and on ‘cultural differences’ instead of on ‘the way in which capitalist economies create large numbers of low-wage, low-skill jobs with poor job security’.
Race and socioeconomics intersect, and sometimes liberals don’t pay enough attention to this.
Life on the bottom of the pile is hard, no matter if you’re black, or white; Muslim or not (I mention Muslims because often reports like this on the state of Muslims unnecessarily ‘Islamise’ the problem).
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thabet
Global Islamic Capitalism conference in Dubai, the home of Islamic Capitalism.
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thabet
Who said Muslims were immune to capitalism and consumerism?
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buzz
I viewed some of the Hizb ut Tahrir America teleconference and videos yesterday. And I had a few reactions I wanted to share.
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thabet
Rod Liddle rips off Johann Hari’s article on Dubai. As ever with these articles the real fun is in reading the comments section.
I haven’t been able to take anything Liddle says seriously since he turned up on a Channel 4 series on immigration to moan about the darkies taking his seat on the buses and trains. Although the abuses he highlights are true, how seriously can anyone take Liddle’s complaint about human rights abuses given only earlier this year he was linking human rights with appeasement for terrorists?
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thabet
Using Kung Fu Panda to link Italian and Iranian politics, and discuss democracy and capitalism? That could only mean an article by Slavoj Žižek:
[...]
The wager behind Berlusconi’s vulgarities is that the people will identify with him as embodying the mythic image of the average Italian: I am one of you, a little bit corrupt, in trouble with the law, in trouble with my wife because I’m attracted to other women. Even his grandiose enactment of the role of the noble politician, il cavaliere, is more like an operatic poor man’s dream of greatness. Yet we shouldn’t be fooled: behind the clownish mask there is a state power that functions with ruthless efficiency. Perhaps by laughing at Berlusconi we are already playing his game. A technocratic economic administration combined with a clownish façade does not suffice, however: something more is needed. That something is fear, and here Berlusconi’s two-headed dragon enters: immigrants and ‘communists’ (Berlusconi’s generic name for anyone who attacks him, including the Economist).
Kung Fu Panda, the 2008 cartoon hit, provides the basic co-ordinates for understanding the ideological situation I have been describing.
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thabet
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johnpi
Author Naomi Klein calls for boycott of Israel.
“Boycott is a tactic … we’re trying to create a dynamic which was the dynamic that ultimately ended apartheid in South Africa,” said Klein, the author of “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.”
“It’s an extraordinarily important part of Israel’s identity to be able to have the illusion of Western normalcy,” the Canadian writer and activist said.
“When that is threatened, when the rock concerts don’t come, when the symphonies don’t come, when a film you really want to see doesn’t play at the Jerusalem film festival… then it starts to threaten the very idea of what the Israeli state is.”
Klein is in the Middle East promoting her book “The Shock Doctrine,” which has recently been translated into Hebrew and Arabic. “Klein said she would get no royalties from sales of the Hebrew version and that the proceeds would go instead to an activist group.” Wow.
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plimfix
During my teacher training, the local community of the 98% Muslim school where I was first placed was still buzzing with the story of a tomato that contained a message from Allah, discovered in nearby Bradford. The pious hospitality offered by the family who discovered this tomato message to the thousands of visitors who came to their home contrasts with the response of Paul Grayhek of Idaho, who on discovering the basalt wall in his backyard resembled God’s hand, decided to flog it on eBay for $16,866+. I wonder if there were any Wahhabis among the bidders…
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johnpi
The joys of no-safety-net capitalism: Some Wall Street and financial industry types just love the opportunities that are afforded to them by the recession/depression. The Cunning Realist has a round-up of Manhattan Craigs List ads from men seeking to be “sugar daddys” to women in desperate financial straits. Caucasian and Asian girls are a hot item…CR titled the post “Trickle Down Economics” which I’m sure isn’t a double-entendre…
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Lawrence of Arabia
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thabet
I thought this was a very interesting opinion on the differences between American and British politics:
[W]e Americans do not have an intuitive class consciousness of what capitalism does to community, and so have yet to produce a political figure who is able to talk about creation–or, if you prefer, the “conservation”–of a national community, an instantiation of social solidarity, that doesn’t become bogged down in arguments over the First Amendment. That’s not to say that “culture war” arguments are absent in Great Britain; that’s hardly the case. But still, when Americans (liberals and conservatives alike) try to talk about the “common good,” we end up arguing over religion and lifestyle and choice, rather than capital and labor and equality and distribution. And as important as the former are, the almost complete absence of the latter amongst conservative arguments is a shame, and something that it would be good to be able to change.
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Lawrence of Arabia
My own read on some of the data on religious identity that Razib linked to last wk, is that liberal culture erodes Christian identity (I suspect it erodes everyone’s identity, but…). Thus you see the growth in those who identify themselves as “no religion”. Insofar as certain Christian groups were growing, it was limited to those groups that have no historical memory, lack a strong confessional identity and emphasize the immediate psychological experience of the believer as the basis of their Christian commitment (Evangelicals, Pentecostals, non-denominational, etc., etc.). This immediacy, the loss of any sense of belonging to a historically dynamic community, the denigration of rationality, all yield Christians who in fact lack an identity. Identity relies on memory; the absence of it means a Christianity that is simply caught in a perpetual present.
In the face of this erosion, communities with a rich historical tradition find themselves resorting to authority to protect themselves from this religious-stream-of-consciousness. Authoritarianism is though just the other side to the coin of identity-loss. It reflects the fact that the persons no longer have a sense of why they believe the things they do and so the traditional practices are maintained, not by an ephemeral feeling, but by fiat. It stands in reaction to social forces that are chaotic, unmasterable by the individual, and therefore frightening. Authority may produce a kind of stability but it is no better at creating identity. Unable to experience the present moment as part of History, we, instead, believe because God/the Pope/the Church/random-book says that is what we must believe in order to get the reward of avoiding relativism and getting our ticket punched to heaven.
