Colin Todhunter: GMO Agribusiness, and the Destructive

Nature of Global Colin Todhunter, with the Destructive Nature of Global Capitalism. Capitalism is based on managing its inherent crises. It is also based on the need to maximize profit, beat down competitors, cut overheads and depress wages. In the 1960's and 70s, in the face of increasing competition from abroad, the US began to outsource manufacturing production, to bring down costs, by using cheap foreign labor. Other countries followed suit. Even more jobs were lost through the impulse to automate. To provide a further edge, trade unions and welfare were attacked, in order to suppress wages at home. Problem solved. Or was it? Not really. As wages in the west stagnated or decreased, and unemployment increased, the market for goods was under threat. If people have less money to buy things, then what to do? New problem, new solution. Lend people money and create a debt ridden consumer society. Of course, it produced great opportunities for investors in finance, and all kinds of dubious financial derivatives, while products were created, sold to the public and repackaged and shifted around the banking system. That market became saturated, and the debt bubble burst. This time around, the solution is to print money, and give bailouts to the banks, to cover their gambling losses, and to get them lending once again. With a huge hole appearing in state coffers, due to the bailouts and national debt spiraling during the years of neo liberalism, the current crisis has become an opportunity for the finance sector to exert long term debt related control over sovereign states, including public asset stripping via austerity. On a global level, as local democracy is usurped by the influence of international finance, and powerful corporate interests under the guise of globalization, traditional agricultural practices and local economies have been structurally adjusted, via single crop, export oriented policies to earn foreign currency to pay off debt, dam building to cater for what became a highly water intensive chemical based industry, more loans and indebtedness, and the unnecessary shifting of food around the planet, and farmers forced from their land. The fact that such people can then at least swarm to some sprawling, overburdened city and, if lucky,, get a few dollars a day job in an outsourced sweatshop, or call center, is somehow passed off as capitalism's economic miracle!