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Terror economy

Autor: Osvaldo Martinez | Fuente: CUBARTE | 28 de Mayo 2012

The term terrorism is one of those that global imperialist power has taken over and uses as stick policy to beat everywhere. Any aggression, illegality or crime can be committed under the justification of fighting terrorism.

There are, not be forgotten, the massacre of Iraq when trying to find “massive destruction weapons” that never existed, and the global war against terrorism that has been useful—among other things—to shorten the civil liberties in the United States and to unleash global terror under the name of anti terrorism. The ghost of terrorism replaced the ghost of communism.

It is about ruling through terror by actions committed by minorities, the transnational economic system of the globalized neoliberal capitalism has a massive destruction weapon not less lethal than the nuclear weapons and exercise terrorism as a permanent acting method without being accused of being terrorist.

Generally, no relation is established between terrorism and economy. In this last one, there are no attacks with bombs, assassinations or tortures. It appears as a technical, neutral ground, in which there is no sign of some people exercising terror against others.

The most destructive massive destruction weapon is the liberal financial system. The stage in which economic terrorism is displayed with special efficacy is that of the recurrent economic crisis, and its star agents are the speculators, that specimen for which financial liberalization is the ideal environment to grow and rule.

This terrorism in economy doesn´t kill with bombs or bullets but with famine, unemployment and alienation, though the victims rarely identify the victimizers, covered by the thick curtain of markets that kill with the appearance of technical rules without involvement of the guilty ones.

The massive destruction weapon per excellence is the mass of financial capitals moving in the global market and which some authors calculate to be some 600 billion dollars; against which, the World Gross Domestic Product is hardly a small fraction. That huge financial mass—real global financial power without regulation—moves by impulses of the nerve stimuli of speculation and its destructive capacity is so strong that it can overthrow the change rate of a currency as it happened in 1992 with the Pound Sterling, cause massive leaks of capital or bring governments to their knees, acting on their sovereign debt, as it happens now in Europe.

When we hear the number of more than 1,000 million of hungry people all over the world or the increase of suicides of European desperate retired or unemployed people, little connect those facts to the liberalized finances and the small compact elite of speculators and bankers, the real powers establishing the movement limits of the politic governments.

The stage of terrorism in economy are the economic crisis that accompany capitalism as its shadows. Terror of unemployment, the ruin of small enterprises, the loss of houses, the real estate collapse, are key ingredients of every crisis and they occur with implacable frequency and in the middle of one that  seems to be endless and disconcerting are today the United States, Europe and Japan.

Crisis of the foreign debt for Latin America in 1982, stock market crack  of the black Friday in the United States in 1987, real estate and financial crisis in Japan, in 1990, crisis of the debt in Mexico, in 1995, crisis of the “financial small corral” in Argentina, in 2002, crisis of the “new economy” in the United States 2001-2002, are too many crisis and they are all additional doses of the permanent economic terror.

The agents of terrorism in economy can be found in directories of the great transnational enterprises and of the great banks organically interwoven with them, and have managers of agencies qualifiers of risks, hedge funds and in general, in the so called “institutional investors” that handle important financial masses as it is the funds of pensions, the operative agents that manage the economic terror behind the shield of objectiveness, neutralism of the “invisible hand of the market”.

The immense destructive power of finances without regulation unleashed by Neoliberalism is revealed in the European crisis of sovereign debt. In Europe, as well as in the United States, the sinking of the Lehmann Brothers in 2008 caused the outburst of internal conflicts of the neoliberal globalized capitalism.

These conflicts could be summarized in an inevitable rupture of the immense financial mass because the wage and anti labor offensive promoted under the name of “labor flexibility” had a dual effect: on one hand, it held the profit rate, offsetting its decreasing tendency and on the other hand depressed the solvent demand and launched financial capital to a forward scape, thus multiplying speculation, reducing the real economy and keeping, artificially, the solvent demand through the over indebtedness of the homes trapped in the illusions of speculation with the value of housing, the mirage of the stock market and the trap of the credit cards.

Terrorism in economy is appreciated in extreme events: a wave of suicides in Europe and bankers demanding austerity plans that will cause even more suicides to the states that rescued them from ruin, for which they were responsible due to their greed.

The states saved the private finances by applying rescue packages with public money. In strict market dictum they deserved nationalization but they were saved with the money of taxpayers. Once saved, they became creditors of the states that the crisis itself and the cost of the saving had placed in deficit. Acting already as creditors of the states, they did what they know to do best: speculate and therefore squeeze the sovereign debts.

Another step has been to demand austerity in expenditure, applying adjustments that in bitter irony reproduce the ones that some of those European states applied, ruthlessly, to Latin America for more than two decades. The austerity in expenses is not the same for everyone. It has a defined addressee in the social expenditure and means shortenings in social welfare, health, education, public services, and that is economic terrorism exercised by a financial minority elite against the millions that are made believe they are the guilty ones for austerity, for having enjoyed exaggerated social expenditures.

This terror has another peculiar facet. Neoliberalism has contributed substantially to unleash the crisis and by doing it, it has shown its own and irremediable crisis that is politic and economic, and the way to establish the functioning of an economy that doesn´t lead to a dead end, but at the same time has taken important advance steps in the dismounting of the remains of the social welfare state and the submission to the public powers.

It is obvious that the indignant have reasons to be so and also that only an indignation that transcends the limits of mere indignation, elaborating a project, articulating leadership and establishing an organic link with the many victims of the capitalist crisis, will be able to leave terror economy behind.

Translation: Yusimí Rodriguez (Cubarte)