The recent models of capital management – the Keynesian and the neo-liberal
– reveal in their crises their maladaptation, without conjuring up the causes
of poverty, inequalities, wars, the new phenomenon of the masses of refugees
and the worsening of a classic – climate disasters and change.
What has been brought to light in the last decades is the collapse of the
autonomous power of nation-states and the driving of their political classes by
multinationals – responsible for 70% of freight transport – in partnership with
an oversized financial system, traveling in its own lane, this without
forgetting the importance of the crime’s capital that goes unpunished.
To this crisis in economic and social infrastructure is added the
discrediting of "representative democracy", which is not democratic
and represents very few, and the decrepitude of the traditional left, Leninist
rooted. This is the stage where the fascist serpent's egg is hatched, without the
standing up, on the left, of a radical, organized, and non-nationalist critique.
D – The arrival at
neoliberal suffocation
19 – The acceleration of capitalist globalization; the shortening of time
19.1 – The Portuguese transition
20 – The global character of ideological formatting
21 – 2008’s post-crisis
D - The arrival at neoliberal suffocation
18 - The shift to the neoliberal paradigm
In the first half of the cycle begun in the post 1939/45 war period, an
upward trend was observed which corresponds to high GDP per capita growth, all
the more relevant because it appeared at a time of high population growth, with
the “baby boom" that followed the war and the importation of immigrants that,
in Europe, moved from the poorest to the richest countries, as well as those
from the Maghreb, the Pakistani and the Caribbean. The second part of the cycle
portrays its downward phase, which trails beyond the subprime crisis, with the
affirmation of the neoliberal paradigm:
- With the financialization, offshores, and debt that drowns families, companies and state entities;
- With the religion of competitiveness and entrepreneurship;
- With precariousness in work and life; with the development of the internet, communications and computing in general, segmentation of production and relocation, automation, acceleration of economic integration, disintegration of borders, and the monitoring of our lives scrutinized in the so-called big data were facilitated;
- With the market logic being applied to goods and services, but also to people, and political regimes as in the management of climate drift, becoming commonplace;
- With the impunity of various traffics, such as women, children, slaves, arms, organs and drugs;
- With the constant presence of long duration wars of great destructive impact, before the indifference of those who are outside them and watch the destruction of people and goods on a screen. The "art" of the war abandoned (even more) any rules, to be carried out by cowards who destroy from a distance, without taking risks or showing their faces, ensconced thousands of miles away, and killing as in computer games.
The following table is quite illuminating on the two phases of the fourth Kondratiev
cycle until 2008; later, we shall discuss the subsequent period. If the
Keynesian paradigm took advantage of conditions conducive to GDP growth and the
relative improvement of people's living conditions, particularly in the West,
in the mid-1970s it was bogged down by the economic and political problems of
the capitalist system and opened the doors to the reactionary figures that were
grouped in the Mont Pelerin Society, among them Friederich Hayek, Milton
Friedman and Karl Popper, paladins of the economic liberalism, contrary to the State’s
strong intervention, as happened then, and of setting capitalists as creators
of humanity’s well-being. As shown in the following table, after the crisis of
the 1970s, neoliberals, taking control of the world economy, showed the
limitations of their paradigms and that the problem that remains to be solved
is called capitalism; whether under neoliberal evangelism
or with the strong commitment of the Keynesian state.
|
Evolution of GDP per capita ($ 1990)
|
|||||
|
|
1948
|
1973
|
2008
|
1973 /
1946
|
2008/
1973
|
|
France
|
4.393
|
12,824
|
22,057
|
2.92
|
1.72
|
|
Germany
|
2.834
|
11,966
|
20.801
|
4.22
|
1.74
|
|
Netherlands
|
5.490
|
13,081
|
25,112
|
2.38
|
1.92
|
|
Switzerland
|
9.116
|
18.204
|
25,293
|
2.00
|
1.39
|
|
Great Britain
|
6.746
|
12,025
|
24.602
|
1.78
|
2.05
|
|
12 countries in Europe *
|
4.944
|
12,070
|
22,350
|
2.44
|
1.85
|
|
Portugal
|
2.046
|
7.063
|
14,583
|
3.45
|
2.06
|
|
Spain
|
2.186
|
7.661
|
17,734
|
3.51
|
2.31
|
|
USA
|
9,065
|
16,689
|
31,251
|
1.84
|
1.87
|
|
Japan
|
1.725
|
11,434
|
22,175
|
6.63
|
1.94
|
|
* West and North
|
http://www.ggdc.net/maddison/maddison-project/home.htm
|
||||
The upward phase that began the fourth Kondratiev wave suffered a first
shake when Britain devalued the pound in 1967 and then the US (1971) suspended
the possibility of converting its currency into gold... which, in fact would be
impossible to meet because the available metal no longer had any correspondence
with the circulating currency. The Bretton Woods architecture suffered, thus, a
rude blow, and the monetary instability returned.
The closure of the Suez Canal in 1967 (only reopened in 1975) caused major
changes in the transportation of goods between Europe and Asia, as well as
Europe's supply of oil from the Middle East. Then come the shock of the
quadrupling of the oil price in 1973, following the concerted attitude of the
Arab states after the war against Israel; which also served to increase the
value of the energy component of the global product, by the OPEC countries, to
the detriment of the industrialized countries; and also for the nationalization
of the oil producing facilities in the possession of the latter which would, in
the twenty-first century, regain possession of those energy resources in Iraq
and Libya following the (or the cause?) of the Western invasions. In 1979 a new
hike happened, due to the disturbances resulting from the American commissioning
on Iraq to attack Iran; which originated a bloody war that dragged on for ten
years.
These changes in oil prices and logistics have created difficulties in key
industries such as the steel industry, shipbuilding, heavy chemicals and the
automobile industry, with consequences for unemployment levels which were
residual up to those changes – and especially for less skilled workers, women,
and immigrants. On the other hand, the dominant Keynesian logic will promote a
strong intervention of the national State and the support of the unemployed,
whose numbers grow again; and also the exploitation of the virtues of public
investment and the public deficit, with the growth of indebtedness and the issuing
of currency. To the increases in prices resulting from higher energy prices,
the inflationary effects of public spending are added, in a context of continuous
productivity stagnation.
As inflation coexisted with a recession, it called into question the
Keynesian logic for which inflation could only arise in situations of proximity
to the full use of resources but not in recession and unemployment phases when
there are "available production factors". This phenomenon, that came
to be called stagflation, has encouraged the reawakening of neoliberal theses
in experimentation in Chile since 1973, and where all the freedoms for the
accumulation of capital, for the massive entry of foreign capital, for the
reduction of the public spending, especially that with social content, with
privatizations and brutal repression of workers' incomes and rights, took hold under
the political cover of a fascist military regime.
Chile, until then one of the Latin America countries with a stabilized
market democracy, moves to the situation of neoliberal laboratory. The social
expenditure borne by the State does not in any way resemble the "European
social model"; while in the latter the state managed generous social
security, advanced rights in the context of employment stability, the right to
strike, safety in sickness and unemployment, the Chicago Boys, in their Chilean
essay, reduced social burdens to indigence situations, subordinated labour
rights to the aims of corporate profitability, rendered employment precarious through
greater power of the capitalists, making any labour challenge highly penalized
and repressed. The Chilean example has been replicated in Argentina, Uruguay,
Bolivia, Paraguay, Ecuador, among others, although not all dictatorships have
had the same neoliberal character but rather the oligarchic domination of
traditional wealthy classes, in connection with fascist military.
19 - The acceleration of capitalist globalization
The Keynesian model demanded high and incessant GDP growth that became
difficult to achieve in a context of stagflation; keeping the GDP fetish as a
goal, the neoliberal paradigm, to achieve growth, would come to use instruments
such as deregulation, privatization, state support to creation of competitiveness,
free market to the detriment of labour, wage and social constraints, and
borders open to the movement of goods, capital and (not always) people. From
the point of view of the multitude of workers and dispossessed, Keynesian
management, as the neoliberal, are only two
genres of capitalist management; capitalism is
always a system dependent upon capital accumulation.
In relation to this dependence, it should be emphasized here that the
incontinent drive for capital accumulation makes capitalism expansive, in terms
of geography, society, and time, the latter being the object of a constant
struggle for its reduction; a neurotic drive. Producing more per unit of time
or the same in less time corresponds to an increase in productivity that tends
to raise profit margins; getting the worker to produce more per unit of time is
a way of reducing the cost of labour; and if the consumer is motivated to binge
on more food, more services, and more debt for every day of his/her life, that
is to insert him/her into the struggle of capital against time in the web
assembled by capital to dominate it. The capitalist logic for the incessant
growth of GDP is part of this avidity of anticipation of the passage of time;
and which is clearly applied in the functioning of so-called financial markets.
And none of this disturbs the incorporators of neoliberal or Keynesian logic,
even those who call themselves "left."
The drive of capitalism for the shortening of time entails the development
of technology, beginning with nautical, when it became necessary to make the
long voyages from Europe to the East or to America, which globalized the planet
and allowed the latter to come to be ridden by capitalism, especially since the
seventeenth century onwards, with extensive colonization and slavery. As we
have already mentioned, the problem is not
globalization, with the exchange of goods, cultures and affections among
humans; the problem is the capitalism that dehumanizes and bastardizes these
exchanges destroying, among other collateral damages, the environment, which
private appropriation is impossible.
Continuing the approach about paradigm transition in capitalism, the crisis
of the 1970s shows the interdependence between Western countries, especially in
Western Europe, with little differentiation and, on the other hand, their
collective integration with oil-producing countries within an increasingly
globalized logic that did not facilitate specific solutions within the scope of
nation-states. And this interdependence will require articulation in a
competitive context and great inequalities, with the use of war applied, then,
only to colonial and neo-colonial spaces.
While in the USA the contestation of the Vietnam War was increasing – as
the defeat approached – and the Watergate case wrought political havoc, the
USSR, taking advantage of the American paralysis, secured a strong influence in
Angola and Ethiopia. The Iranian revolution and the disastrous US military
intervention in Iran was another element that favoured a qualitative change,
with Reagan in 1981, towards the unrestrained and brutal application of the
neoliberal paradigm which, with enormous determination, had already been
applied by Margaret Thatcher in Britain since 1979. The way the fights of British
miners and US air traffic controllers were crushed, in both cases, is striking;
without any reaction to the gravity of the moment from the unionized,
domesticated and bureaucratized structures.
19.1 – The Portuguese transition
In Europe, fascism was swept in Portugal and Greece while Franco's death carpeted
a soft transition in Spain that recycled the fascist oligarchy into a future
rotational system with the PSOE; and the then EEC, which had already integrated
Britain, Ireland and Denmark, would prepare itself to extend the area of
economic integration – a single market – to the south, to the countries that
had left fascism. The EEC was then essentially a free trade area with a vague
underlying political project.
In Portugal, at the time, this situation of structural, economic, social
and political crisis was very clear, requiring a transition or even a change.
The oil crisis ruined the global integration strategy set up in the last days of
fascism and based on heavy chemistry and metallurgy, both affected by the
reopening of the Suez Canal. It was followed by the fall of fascism and the
absorption of hundreds of thousands of people from the colonies, the cessation
of the migratory movement to Europe, given the global crisis, and then there was
a huge investment in the under-capitalized companies – hence their nationalization – transportation, heavy
industry, banking and insurance, in particular – to the development, in parallel, of a very encompassing
state apparatus faced with new or more intensive functions in the areas of
education, health, economic coordination, social facilities... The State thus
assumed the typical functions of safeguarding the interests of capital, in
parallel with a great strengthening of its social responsibilities, which would
become unbearable in the short term, even if, in a first phase, it had the
support of the entire Portuguese political classes, from the right or
"left" wings.
This unanimity was quickly broken, giving way to the slow passage from the
Keynesian model well expressed in the program of the first PS government to the
reigning neoliberalism.
a)
In a first phase and after a short period (1974/75) of
workers’ generalized struggle for better wages, the distribution of income was
changed in its disfavour from 1976 onwards, with the establishment of the
oligarchic power that still exists today, already without the military, but
with a new generation of people, without democratic quality or personal
suitability. In 1977 and 1983/85, the two "regenerative"
interventions by the IMF occurred, with very visible effects (Chart 1).
Still on the graph, it can be seen that the arrival of Community funds and European integration, coupled with low labour conflicts, only lead to improvements in the weight of labour income between 1990/93, followed by a regressive period[1] and the stabilization of the weight of labour income in GDP by 2005 – with no visible impact from the euro introduction – and, in 2015, the second lowest position of a 56-year period, after the troika intervention.
Chart 1 - workers
wages/GDP (%)
Source: Pordata
b) The second phase would emerge in the mid-90s, with the agreement on
privatizations between Prime Minister Cavaco (PSD) and Constâncio (PS, untill
2018, he was vice-president of ECB) under which the State "group" was
alienating the companies that had been nationalized and recapitalised; all in
the name of reducing the public deficit that had survived all the privatization
stages that will have reached their (provisional) end after those ordered by
the troika. However, in order to favour private capital, rents were
created under public-private partnerships (the first, for the concession of the
Vasco da Gama Bridge, was in 1994) and the losses with the sinking of the
autochthonous financial sector were to be assumed by the State.
20 - The global character of ideological formatting
As we can see, institutions of a multi-national nature aim at economic
objectives, the facilitation of the business of multinationals and the
accumulation of capital; or themes which are vehicles for the achievement of
the stated objectives. Multinationals or the entities of the diffuse and
volatile financial system know how to train the political classes for their
service; and they know that it is easier to act from institutions that
aggregate several nation-states than to undertake lobbying actions, going from
country to country, with their respective political classes. Multinationals and
the financial system have since long been acting on a global basis and, in too
many situations, consider that nation-states only hinder the accumulation of
capital[2] with their domestic laws, parliaments
and bureaucracies. They show some more respect to a few countries only, among
those holding some weight in terms of global companies, having a reasonable
market size (population x purchasing power) and a relatively stable political
framework; as are the cases of the largest EU countries, the United States,
South Korea, Japan (even though they are militarily protected by the US),
China, Russia, India, Iran, Canada and a few others. The very way in which
within the EU, Greece, Ireland, and Portugal were intervened, with the
monitoring of the troika, was different from the attitude towards Spain,
where the troika was not introduced.
In the area of materials production, the establishment of globalized,
unrelated to any nation, capital, is the product of the segmentation of this
production, with the development of logistics chains that include multimodal
systems of transportation and cargo accommodation, as well as massification of
information, distribution and sales; which allows their management in an
integrated framework. Although with different material infrastructures,
services and the financial system are also established in a global form. Left
out of this logic are millions of small, medium-sized enterprises at the
national, regional or local level, without large financial means, many of them
indebted, with low profit rates and tending to dream of a marvellous return to
the past, to the national guarded frontiers, own currency, courted by
xenophobic and fascist rights as well as by the trotsky-stalinist
"lefts". A return to the past.
From this need for global management and subordination of nation-states and
their political classes results the emerging of a denationalized, mercenary
elite, producer of a unique thinking that
is a central and present element in all societies. This elite manifests itself
in an institutional, formal, form – IMF, WTO, EU ...; at other times, at formal
– but not institutionalized – conclaves with the presence of representatives of
the main nation-states, be them the G20, G7, G8, G10 ...; and also at the discrete
Bilderberg, Davos and Trilateral meetings of the political elites with the top
executives of the banks, the multinationals and the media, where
elements of small and medium-sized countries appear annually for evaluation (some
Portuguese are regularly summoned to the Bilderberg
meetings). And it would be unfair to forget what we call the Hillbilly Bilderberg, a meeting of the richest members of the Portuguese entrepreneur club and local
parish’s think tanks, in the already distant year of 2009.
This management and political elite makes the 1% (referred to in the
popular movements of 2011/13) that constitutes the great obstacle to the 99%,
and that holds enormous power, even in a context of internal divergences,
because it defends competing institutions, often with conflicting interests. It
is as a product of its action and the management of conflicts within it, on a
global scale, that the Empire as defined by Hardt and Negri is instituted; an
empire that removes from the decision-making the other 99% of humanity – including
those still voting in their respective political classes – where all the candidates
to the genocide to be perpetrated for a "profitable" resizing of
humanity are gathered.
It has long been discovered that the brute force of the State – military
and police – must neither, nor has it the ability to, be in the forefront of
domination; they are reserves for repressive action in a situation of constant alertness,
attentive to the voice of the government command, when the crowd awakens from
its lethargy and rebels, sending that unique
thinking down the gutter.
One of the areas where this unique
thinking is generated and propagated lies in the business schools,
specialized in "business sciences", which have removed from teaching
economics, sociology, history as disciplines for understanding the integration
of the social and the political, focusing in ideological panaceas such as
entrepreneurship or competitiveness; or in techniques such as accounting and
taxation, integrated into standardized computer packages.
Translation “University develops
all abilities, including stupidity”
Dominant in most countries or in the configuration of economic and
political relations of the last decades, neoliberal catechism is incorporated
into the novices of the new religion of value creation (for shareholders, it is
understood), even if it is so in the most foolish way such as asset
registration (the IFRS 9 normative, we suppose) by market values, which makes
the balance sheets very volatile, sensitive to the moods of financial speculation,
and that can at any time contribute to triggering the next global financial
crisis.
Top rated or media catechists divide their activities into various segments
of this diffuse thing called the market. They stand out in the business
activities as top managers or consultants[3]; as
heralds in the parties market; in the well-paid media market, as opinion
makers, contributing with a mixture of banalities and falsehoods to shape
the thinking of the plebs, with oracles on the enigmatic and capricious designs
of the economy, which contrast with the very real domestic economy, which is
limited to balancing the salary with the payment of the essential expenses or
the instalments of debts, the creation of which banks so much enjoy.
Within this unique neoliberal thinking, there is a set of norms that the
great economic powers on the planet – multinationals and the financial system –
have defined as for widespread application by the various strains of political,
national and multi-national classes:
- One is the privatization of everything publicly
owned, formally or informally, provided it can be a source of private
profit, possibly with inflated prices for this purpose, such as
public-private partnerships or the so-called outsourcing of functions;
this is the hiring of companies to perform specific functions within
public bodies – computer services, security, cleaning, meals ... or this
miserable function of temporary work in which 21st century slave traders
shine under the modern name of businessmen. The troika's privatization
program was very clear on this point, as in the 1990s it had been under
the Cavaco-Constâncio agreement, as bosses of the PSD and PS gangs.
- Linked to the privatizing euphoria and in contradiction with outsourcing, there is a bet on the reduction of the public expenses, in cutting off the "fats" as it is usually called, and that unvaryingly means freezing wages, reducing the number of workers in public functions, and cuts in social areas; but... never in the defence and security areas, in the name of the fight against terrorism. In the fiscal policy, there is always a concern to support companies with tax cuts, while they simultaneously cry out for exemptions, subsidies and government investments in order to reduce "context costs" and create support for greater competitiveness; other times, hypocritically, to counteract the desertification of the most depressed regions. As the evildoer Portas used to say, "We have to support companies because they’re the ones creating jobs"; in this logic, Portas would rewrite the Genesis by having God to first create the entrepreneur and then gift him with servants. Public debt is precisely the result of the use of the political class for the execution of these neoliberal norms, including the assumption of losses and the harmful effects of bank and bankers’ fraud.
- Freedom of movement of capital includes the
placing abroad of domestic companies’ headquarters, to relieve the tax
burden or the purchase and sale of businesses, infrastructure, and services
by so-called foreign capital, although this designation is losing meaning
given the globalized nature of companies, especially when they are located
in offshore registers. This includes the profitable action of the
vulture funds that buy companies in difficulty, reshape them, restructure
them, do large scale layoffs and then sell the spoils, in a purely
financial logic, without any connection to the inherent character of
wealth creation one would think to be inherent to capitalism, in its
earliest times, as is written in the manuals.
- The liberalization of transactions and the functioning of the market requires the dismantling of the rules which gave some security to the workers – within the national contexts – inherited from the dwindling or extinct "European social model"; the capitalists intend to and manipulate the political classes towards making each salaried worker become an obedient, hard-working, without rights and, if possible, paid by public money precarious worker. Another aspect of this liberalization is the contempt for the extensive incorporation of elements harmful to human health in food or, by the careless production and dissemination of garbage and pollutants that permeate air and soils, contaminate the water and enter into the food chain of people and animals. The important thing is the "creation of value", the reproduction of capital, and the distribution of profits to shareholders even in the most nonsensical way, in management terms[4]. On the other hand, the disdain for regulating environmental quality and not contributing to the containment of climate change also happens, so that it does not affect the profitability and competitiveness of companies; even if it is necessary to reduce Humanity to some 600 million people, as was already floated around in the Bilderberg conclaves.
- Financial drift is the most dynamic element of capitalism. Capital, in this context, is composed of securities in companies (stocks), bonds, public or private debt securities, CDs and other derivatives that, of course, give rise to profits and interest. Left behind are the times of the creation of financial capital, in the Hilferding’s pioneering sense, as the result of the integration between industrial enterprises and banks, with both types of institutions anchored in the same nation-state; these conglomerates seeking to maximize profits through the companies they came from, taking advantage of existing synergies and state support.
Today, more valuable than
these synergies is, on the one hand, to buy and sell these bonds very frequently
– as if they are burning – even if the gains in these operations are small per
unit; but as they are traded frequently and in enormous volumes, this results
in, after some time, these small gains materializing in large increases in the
initial value held by the speculator. The instantaneous nature of information
circuits worldwide and the use of powerful computers for the analysis of
quotations and transactions also make extremely fast the options for the
purchase of some securities and the sale of others or even for their momentary
parking in a bank account, waiting for an advantageous application opportunity.
Although economic journalists call the protagonists of this frenetic activity
"investors", investment is what matters least to them, focusing on
the gains of speculation, obtaining profits without investment, without
producing any goods or services; a pure parasitism from a social point of view.
Another aspect in which the domain of the financial system is observed is the
debt, of families and companies, to which the public debt must be added. The
latter, mutualised for payment by the multitude, is a means of creating,
through the State, income favouring the financial
capital in general. Debt is a way of
ensuring application to speculative capital, of fuelling the bubble; one of the
roles of the political classes as agents of financial capital is to convince
the plebeians of their duty to honour
its (impossible) payment.
21 - 2008’s post-crisis
Just as Keynesianism stumbled into the crisis of the 1970s and gave rise to
the neoliberal wave, the latter found in the aftermath of the subprime
crisis its systemic crisis that is far from being overcome, but is damped and
hostage, in particular, to China’s economic dynamics. And a paradigm that
minimally satisfies the great majority of Humanity remains to be built, so
neoliberalism drags itself along politically through alliances with fascist
groups, without the assertive rise of a credible alternative for change, able to
enthuse the many millions of victims of the neoliberal drift, being seen; even if
we are before glaring scenarios of climate catastrophe or deliberate genocide
policies.
The connection between capitalism and the state, even though being
permanent, went through several phases:
- Emerging capitalism anchored itself to a strong state intervention, in the seventeenth century, gradually created its national empires and from this partnership the nation-state was born, very useful to protect the business of its rich natives, enticing the plebs through patriotism and wage war on competition.
- In the nineteenth century and for a few decades, until the First World War, liberals who understood the global system in the private enterprise’s image, thought to remove the state from their path, with liberalization of labour, repression of workers and free enterprise; but not doing without the affirmation of the nation-state in the fierce defence of frontiers, war and colonial expansion.
- Things did not go well to the liberals, and the state was once again called to a central role in economic activity, with the New Deal, fascism and state capitalism, in a context of isolationist, self-centred nation state, which did not prevent the most destructive and deadly war ever (1939/45).
- This was followed by post-war II, with the emergence of multi-national consultative bodies among nation-states, followed by integration cases in Western and Eastern Europe; and with the continuation of strong state intervention in the areas of investment, regulation and domestication of labour – this is the period of Keynesian rule in economic policy.
- The opening of frontiers to trade and capital transactions, coupled with substantial technological development, has increased the size and power of multinationals; those, while continuing to not do without States’ support, went on to control them, addition to their accumulation logic the political classes, as mediators of their interests among the peoples, still kept on the illusion of the power of the nation-states, in the great majority of the latter. More than ever can it be said that capital has no country, only interests; but it certainly likes to see people disunited, infected by the patriotic fetish.
- Technological evolution in the field of communications and computing, coupled with capital’s freedom of movement, its ability to exempt itself from tax regulations and impositions, allowed the creation of a powerful financial system, largely disconnected from the economy of goods and services (the so-called real economy), as well as from the social world and labour, but whose dysfunctions are decisive for the disastrous state of the world. We reproduce, incidentally, a sentence by Mikhail Gorbatchov[5]: "... financial structures, which are not controlled by anyone, quickly adapted to globalization and took advantage of it, creating "soap bubbles" one after the other and making billions literally from the air. These billions are available to an ever smaller group of people who evade paying taxes". And recently, these "soap bubbles" like bitcoin and its copies are appearing all over the place.
- Finally, the relevance of the financial system and the production of multinationals, segmented and spread a little everywhere, have accelerated globalization, have been controlling it. The end of the USSR that, at the outset, seemed to be the victory of neoliberalism over state capitalism – the End of History, by Fukuyama, already object of self-criticism – destroyed that political and economic model but did not transform both Russia and China into simple corridors for the multinationals’ flows, States anchored in state-parties being maintained there, determinant and intervening in the management of the respective nation-states.
This and other texts at:
[1] We can’t resist
telling two anecdotal episodes from the domestic economics. At the beginning of
the 1990s, Abel Mateus, who in the meantime circulated through the BoP and the
Competition Authority, built a fabled macroeconomic model that announced a GDP
growth of... 10%. And at the same time, Minister [of Finances] Braga de Macedo,
commenting on the recessive crisis in Europe, referred to Portugal as an oasis
(!)... which the chart shows to be a dry one, after all, unable to produce any
dates, although having camels parked there .
[2] In his
boorishness and arrogance Trump makes this very clear by recently referring to
"shit countries” .
[3] The top
consultants are few and are characterized by "pack-saddling the donkey to the owner's
satisfaction" (loose translation, meaning their
opinions/conclusions are issued according to the wishes of those who commissioned
them). The Price Waterhouse-Coopers
(PwC) was recently banned from India; and, in Portugal, in the cases of BPN or BES, the
auditors also "failed to detect" the slip of the accounts (as, by the
way, did the Bank of Portugal which also uses the precious audit firms), even
if they were royally paid.
[4] A Portuguese
public company, the CTT (postal services), when privatized by the Passos
government, was presented with an authorization to practice the banking
activity, which was transferred for free by the CGD public bank. This was a
clearly understood negotiation; the shareholders – including the great Goldman
Sachs – were receiving hundreds of branches across the country where postal
services operate and that would see banking services coupled. The CEO in charge
of this postal/banking services merger was a certain Francisco Lacerda, with an
annual salary of one million euros, certainly many times higher than the
average CTT workers’. Recently, the company presented high losses and the same
Lacerda advocated 800 layoffs while distributing fat dividends by shareholders;
in an act of moving solidarity, Lacerda would have lowered his salary to a paltry
€ 750,000, an act of self-flagellation
that sits well on a former Catholic University student. On the subject we
highlight here the commentary of the journalist Nicolau Santos.
[5] Rossiskaia Gazeta, 4/20/2016
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