4
4
3
What's the response by the world's leaders? Regulatory reform of banking and finance will save us. If we only have better banking rules, they argue, we will somehow be able to generate enough dollars to keep the key enterprises going - financial and military dominance - while something may come along to help with concerns like jobs, health, and increased income.
Here's what they're really saying: it's time to fix a new set of rules that allow the game to continue in some form that will protect accumulated wealth and maintain those in power.
While the leaders and their finance ministers workout the latest scheme to produce a balance sheet that won't generate laughter and derision, they must ponder the finite limitations of their economies. Unlike the exuberance of the 1950's with the assumption of limitless energy in the form of oil, there's an awareness that the fuel underlying the entire scheme is increasingly more difficult and expensive to extract. Concerns about diminishing returns from exploration and extraction are mixed with notions that there may be an end to the affordability of oil given the voracious appetite of two of the new G-20 members, China and India.
But the leaders can sit in repose at their elegantly catered conference dinners with the comfort that although they may not be the managers of a perpetual scheme of "growth" for their incredibly wealthy patrons, they will certainly transition to the role managing the chaos caused by their efforts. Their street level operatives unveil new technologies and techniques at each G-20 conference to discourage those who seek to disagree by public assembly and free speech. When the G-20 is in town, basic political rights here and overseas are suspended. It's time for the beat down.
The heavy handed, technically brutish suppression of public protest are a form of instructive theater that engenders a feeling of helplessness for many who might otherwise be motivated to resist. This in turn perpetuates order and protection for the G-20's ongoing acts of greed and incompetence inflicted upon the vast majority of citizens in the nations they represent. If they quiet the voice of the people long enough, the leaders may even begin to think that the voices never existed in the first place. They can ignore what they've forgotten, the will of those they govern.
END
This article may be reproduced in whole or in part with attribution of authorship and a link to this article.
