Wikipedia estimates the world's stockmarket capitalisation at $51 trillion and bonds at $45 trillion. Taken together, in sterling terms, that's about £49 trillion. So in seven years' time, sovereign funds are expected to control 12% of the market. This is significant: you'll recall that and EU countries require declarations of shareholdings at various levels between 2 and 5 per cent (3% in the UK), as seen in Appendix 5 of this document, and anyone owning over 1% of a company's shares has to declare dealings if the company is the subject of a takeover bid.
My hazy understanding of democracy is that it includes two crucial elements, namely, the vote, and the right to own personal property. We're losing both. What is our freedom worth when collectively, governments not only employ large numbers of people directly, but many more of them indirectly, through ownership of the businesses for which they work?
What does the vote matter? Here in the UK, we have had a coup by a small, tightly organised (and unscrupulous, even if and when principled) group who have realised that what matters is the swing voter in the swing seat, and nothing else. "What works is what matters" - a slogan that, superficially, seems simply pragmatic, but actually slithers away from identifying the principal objective: you can only tell if it works, when you know what you want it to do. And under our first-past-the-post system, with constituencies determined (how? and who is on the committee?) by the Boundary Commission, I could vote for the incumbent or the man in the moon, but I'm going to get a Labour Party apparatchik in my ward.
And I don't think the system will be reformed if "the other lot" get in, either: "Look with thine ears: See how yond Justice rails upon yond simple thief. Hark in thine ear: Change places, and handy-dandy, which is the Justice, which is the thief?" Structural issues matter: we are cursed by the psephologists, spin doctors and databases.
And as for property, when sovereign wealth funds go from being the tail that wags the dog, to becoming the dog, multinational businesses will be less concerned to satisfy the local shareholder, who may also be an employee. Big MD (or Big CEO) will have his arm around the shoulders of Big Brother.
We worry so much about wealth, and forget what it's for: not just survival, but independence, respect, liberty. Now, the peasants are fed, housed, medically treated, given pocket money, have their disabilities catered for, their children taught, and their legal cases expensively considered. So many of them are fat, enforcedly idle, addled with drink and drugs, chronically ill and disabled, negligent of their offspring and familiar to the point of contempt with the legal system. Despite (because of) their luxuries, they suffer, like the declawed, housebound cats in some American dwellings.
What matters is what works; these outcomes don't matter, except that they work for a class - which I think is becoming hereditary - that seeks, retains and services power. I have said to friends many times that we are seeing the reconstruction of a pan-European aristocracy, disguised as a political, managerial and media nexus.
The American Revolution was about liberty, not wealth, and it is one of the few major nations where the mice did, for a long time, succeed in belling the cat; there was a period here, too, when Parliament could call the King's men to a rigorous account. Now, even in America, the abstract networks of money and power are turning the voters into vassals of the machine that sustains them. As here, the political issues there will soon be welfare, pensions, Medicare and other elements of the badly-made pottage for which we sell our birthright.
As for Bombardier Yossarian in Catch-22, the first step back to our liberty is to stop believing in the benevolence of the system.
BTW: the man who wrote "The Anarchist Cookbook" later converted to Christianity. The one thing not to do with the system is to try to smash it - you'll only get something worse.
6 comments:
"Now, the peasants are fed, housed, medically treated, given pocket money, have their disabilities catered for, their children taught....."
I'm afraid that's all the peasants ever wanted, and who's to say they are wrong. Yossarian saw reality and was a troubled man, whereas those that played the system like Cathcart and Milo did OK.
Of course, my cynical analysis will fall down if times get tough, when those at the bottom are in for a rude awakening, by which time, being fat, uneducated, and unemployable might prove to be a bit of a problem.
"The American Revolution was about liberty, not wealth". I doubt it, but I must say that it is very hard to see just what it was about because the war seems to have been so disproportionate to its purported causes. I guess the causes included a successful French foreign policy, a desire by some of the colonists to steal even more land from the Indians when the Westminster government wanted to honour its treaties with the Indians, and God knows what else. Anyway, I rather agree with your worry about the direction of change in the democracies.
DM: Yes, there were international factors, but I do think there were strongly-held principles at stake too, otherwise there wouldn't have been enough support to make the rebellion work. When time permits, I plan to read about the early American colonial period. And for us now, I do think liberty has a value quite apart from luxury.
John: welcome. I've taught the children of the underclass for some years, and worklessness and welfare is destroying their families and their self-respect and happiness in many ways. We are finding out the hard way that we cannot live by material possessions alone. Cathcart and Milo are, of course, not at the bottom of the heap, but have sold out in a way that increases the suffering of others.
'The one thing not to do with the system is to try to smash it - '
The system is what they are smashing S, they know it works, better than most of us who have relied on it but not tended to it for so long. Because it is not enshrined in anything as hard as a written constitution and a body of decided law, as is the system in America and post war Europe, it has been particularly vulnerable to overthrow.
'Smash the System' of course, was on all the banners at the beginning of the long march through the institutions at the end of the fifties (and earlier, come to think of it; post Second war might be better).
Whether we will be able to get access to the system to deal with them - and there is great determination to stop us, just look at the lack of accountability, the insertion of quasi government bodies betwee them and the legal and political systems, the absolute refusal to deliver up any of their number when publicly shown up in downright criminality, the refusal to have a general election..... - is worrying.
a certain watch needs to be kept on SWFs and where they buy in. Having watched, there's absolutely nothing to be done to stop the process.
HG: apt comment, sadly.
James: perhaps the bottom line is, flight, or at least some unconventional personal survival strategy.
Post a Comment