The Startling Link Between Globalisation and Bank Fraud

[Magda Hassan]

The Startling Link Between Globalisation and Bank Fraud

Submitted by smartknowledgeu on 03/10/2010 06:31 -0400

"We apologize for the inconveniences, but this is a
revolution." Subcomandate Marcos, January 1, 1994

As a history buff, I recently started to re-read a book of
essays from Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos that I read more than 8 years
ago. I was struck by the prescience of Subcomandante's essays. Even when he
seemed to offer no predictions for the future, more than a decade later, many
of his arguments, though he offered them with Mexico in mind, remain remarkably
applicable to the state of the Western financial world today. His following
essay, "The Fourth World War Has Begun" originally appeared inLe Monde
Diplomatique in September of 1997. It is a critically important essay because
12 years later, the intimate link that Marcos speaks of between globalization
and the fraud of our global banking system has now in 2010, washed upon our
shores. It is further an important essay because the citizens of many Western nations may soon be engaging in the same morality battles against the financial oligarchs that Marcos has engaged in on behalf of the citizens of his country.

When Portuguese novelist and Nobel Prize winner Jose
Saramago visited Chiapas, Mexico to meet with Subcomandante Marcos, he stated:
"The issue that is being fought out in the mountains of Chiapas extends beyond
the frontiers of Mexico. It touches the hearts of all those who have not
abandoned their simple demand for equal justice for all."

Here are excerpts from this important but forgotten essay
below.

The struggle over [new markets] is leading to a New World
War the Fourth. Like all major conflicts, this war is forcing national states
to redefine their identity. The world order seems to have reverted to the earlier
epochs of the conquests of America, Africa and Oceania a strange modernity.
The twilight years of the twentieth century bear more of a resemblance to the
previous centuries of the barbarism than to the rational futures described in
science fiction novels.


Vast territories, wealth and, above all, a huge and
available workforce lie waiting for the world's new master but, while there is
only one position as master on offer, there are many aspiring candidates. And
that explains the new war between those who see themselves as part of the
"empire of good".


Unlike the third world war, in which the conflict between
capitalism and socialism took place over a variety of terrains and with varying
degrees of intensity, the fourth world war is being conducted between major
financial centres in theatres of war that are global in scale and with a level
of intensity that is fierce and constant…


Are megalopolises replacing nations? No, or rather not
merely that. They are assigning them new functions, new limits and new
perspectives. Entire countries are becoming departments of the neoliberal
mega-enterprise. Neoliberalism thus produces, on the one hand, destruction and
depopulation, and, on the other, the reconstruction and reorganisation of
regions and nations.


Unlike nuclear bombs, which had a dissuasive, intimidating
and coercive character in the third world war, the financial hyperbombs of the
fourth world war are different in nature. They serve to attack territories
(national states) by the destruction of the material bases of their sovereignty
and by producing a qualitative depopulation of those territories. This
depopulation involves the exclusion of all persons who are of no use to the new
economy (indigenous peoples, for instance). But at the same time the financial
centres are working on a reconstruction of nation states and are reorganising
them within a new logic: the economic has the upper hand over the social…


In this new war, politics, as the organiser of the nation
state, no longer exists. Now politics serves solely in order to manage the
economy, and politicians are now merely company managers. (emphasis mine)


The world's new masters have no need to govern directly.
National governments take on the role of running things on their behalf. This
is what the new order means - unification of the world into one single market.
States are simply enterprises with managers in the guise of governments, and
the new regional alliances bear more of a resemblance to shopping malls than
political federations. The unification produced by neoliberalism is economic:
in the giant planetary hypermarket it is only commodities that circulate
freely, not people.


Injustice and inequality are the distinguishing traits of
today's world. The earth has five billion human inhabitants: of these, only 500
million live comfortably; the remaining 4.5 billion endure lives of poverty.
The rich make up for their numerical minority by their ownership of billions of
dollars. The total wealth owned by the 358 richest people in the world, the
dollar billionaires, is greater than the annual income of almost half the
world's poorest inhabitants, in other words about 2.6 billion people. (My
comment: This inequality has only become more magnified since 1997. [URL="http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=2908"]This CBPP
study[/URL] illustrates that the top 1% of all Americans captured 67% of the
increases in income in the US between 2002 and 2007 and the richest 0.1% of
American households captured 12.3% of the entire US income during this same
time period.)


The progress of the major transnational companies does not
necessarily involve the advance of the countries of the developed world. On the
contrary, the richer these giant companies become, the more poverty there is in
the so-called "wealthy" countries. The gap between rich and poor is
enormous: far from decreasing, social inequalities are growing…


One of the lies of neoliberalism is that the economic growth
of companies produces employment and a better distribution of wealth. This is
untrue. In the same way that the increasing power of a king does not lead to an
increase in the power of his subjects (far from it), the absolutism of finance
capital does not improve the distribution of wealth, and does not create jobs.
In fact its structural consequences are poverty, unemployment and
precariousness.


In the 1960s and 1970s, the number of poor people in the
world (defined by the World Bank as having an income of less than one dollar
per day) rose to some 200 million. By the start of the 1990s, their numbers
stood at two billion…


The unemployment and precarious labour of millions of
workers throughout the world is a reality which does not look set to disappear.
In the countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development
(OECD), unemployment went from 3.8 % in 1966 to 6.3 % in 1990; in Europe it went
from 2.2 % to 6.4 %. The globalised market is destroying small and medium-
sized companies. With the disappearance of local and regional markets, small
and medium producers have no protection and are unable to compete with the
giant transnationals. Millions of workers thus find themselves unemployed. One
of the absurdities of neoliberalism is that far from creating jobs, the growth
of production actually destroys them. The UN speaks of "growth without
jobs". (My comment: in 1997, Marcos foresaw how "the absolutism of finance
capital" would create the very "jobless recoveries" that politicians incessantly speak
of today.)


But the nightmare does not end there. Workers are also being
forced to accept precarious conditions. Less job security, longer working hours
and lower wages: these are the consequences of globalisation in general and the
explosion in the service sector in particular.


All this combines to create a specific surplus: an excess of
human beings who are useless in terms of the new world order because they do
not produce, do not consume, and do not borrow from banks. In short, human
beings who are disposable. Each day the big finance centres impose their laws
on countries and groups of countries all around the world. They re-arrange and
re-order the inhabitants of those countries. And at the end of the operation
they find there is still an "excess" of people.


The nightmare of emigration, whatever its cause, continues
to grow. The number of those coming within the ambit of the United Nations High
Commission for Refugees has grown disproportionately from 2 million in 1975 to
more than 27 million in 1995.


The objective of neoliberalism's migration policy is more to
destabilise the world labour market than to put a brake on immigration. The
fourth world war - with its mechanisms of destruction/depopulation and
reconstruction/reorganisation - involves the displacement of millions of people
(My comment: This essay should be a must read for UNHCR goodwill ambassador
Angelina Jolie.) Their destiny is
to wander the world, carrying the burden of their nightmare with them, so as to
constitute a threat to workers who have a job, a scapegoat designed to make
people forget their bosses, and to provide a basis for the racism that
neoliberalism provokes…


If you think that the world of crime has to be shady and
underhand, you are wrong. In the period of the so-called cold war, organised
crime acquired a more respectable image. Not only did it begin to function in
the same way as any other modern enterprise, but it also penetrated deeply into
the political and economic systems of nation states.


With the beginning of the fourth world war, organised crime
has globalised its activities. The criminal organisations of five continents
have taken on board the "spirit of world cooperation" and have joined
together in order to participate in the conquest of new markets. They are
investing in legal businesses, not only in order to launder dirty money, but in
order to acquire capital for illegal operations. Their preferred activities are
luxury property investment, the leisure industry, the media - and banking. (My
comment: Read this article for a view into the enormity of[URL="http://dunwalke.com/3_RJR_Nabisco.htm"]money laundering
activities by banks[/URL].)


Ali Baba and the Forty Bankers? Worse than that. Commercial
banks are using the dirty money of organised crime for their legal activities.
According to a UN report, the involvement of crime syndicates has been
facilitated by the programmes of structural adjustment which debtor countries
have been forced to accept in order to gain access to International Monetary
Fund loans.


Organised crime also relies on the existence of tax havens:
there are some 55 of these. One of them, the Cayman Islands, ranks fifth in the
world as a banking centre, and has more banks and registered companies than inhabitants.
As well as laundering money, these tax paradises make it possible to escape
taxation. They are places for contact between governments, businessmen and
Mafia bosses…


The world-wide power of the financial markets is such that
they are not concerned about the political complexion of the leaders of
individual countries: what counts in their eyes is a country's respect for the
economic programme. Financial disciplines are imposed on all alike. These
masters of the world can even tolerate the existence of left-wing governments,
on condition that they adopt no measure likely to harm the interests of the
market. However, they will never accept policies that tend to break with the
dominant model. (My comment: This is precisely the reason why fiscal policy under
Bush Sr., Clinton, Bush Jr. and Obama never changes and remains remarkably
consistent despite the enormous professed differences among these Presidents.)


In the eyes of mega-politics, national politics are
conducted by dwarfs who are expected to comply with the dictates of the
financial giant. And this is the way it will always be - until the dwarfs
revolt…The third world war showed the benefits of "total war" for its
victor, which was capitalism. In the post-cold war period we see the emergence
of a new planetary scenario in which the principal conflictual elements are the
growing importance of no-man's-lands (arising out of the collapse of the
Eastern bloc countries), the expansion of a number of major powers (the United
States, the European Union and Japan), a world economic crisis and a new
technical revolution based on information technology.


Thanks to computers and the technological revolution, the
financial markets, operating from their offices and answerable to nobody but
themselves, have been imposing their laws and world-view on the planet as a
whole. (My comment: Consider how western stock markets have been repeatedly
gamed for the past year by the computerized high frequency trading programs of
Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, et al.) Globalisation
is merely the totalitarian extension of the logic of the finance markets to all
aspects of life. Where they were once in command of their economies, the nation
states (and their governments) are commanded - or rather telecommanded - by the
same basic logic of financial power, commercial free trade. And in addition,
this logic has profited from a new permeability created by the development of
telecommunications to appropriate all aspects of social activity. At last, a
world war which is totally total!


One of its first victims has been the national market.
Rather like a bullet fired inside a concrete room, the war unleashed by
neoliberalism ricochets and ends by wounding the person who fired it. One of
the fundamental bases of the power of the modern capitalist state, the national
market, is wiped out by the heavy artillery of the global finance economy. The
new international capitalism renders national capitalism obsolete and
effectively starves their public powers into extinction. The blow has been so
brutal that sovereign states have lost the strength to defend their citizens'
interests.


The fine showcase inherited from the ending of the cold war
- the new world order - has shattered into fragments as a result of the
neoliberal explosion. It takes no more than a few minutes for companies and
states to be sunk - but they are sunk not by winds of proletarian revolution,
but by the violence of the hurricanes of world finance. (My comment: Iceland
and now perhaps, Greece, are fine examples of this. On the horizon, Ireland,
Japan, Italy, etc.?)


The son (neoliberalism) is devouring the father (national
capital) and, in the process, is destroying the lies of capitalist ideology: in
the new world order there is neither democracy nor freedom, neither equality
nor fraternity. The planetary stage is transformed into a new battlefield, in
which chaos reigns.


Towards the end of the cold war, capitalism created a new
military horror: the neutron bomb, a weapon which destroys life while sparing
buildings. But a new wonder has been discovered as the fourth world war
unfolds: the finance bomb. Unlike the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this new
bomb does not simply destroy the polis (in this case, the nation) and bring
death, terror and misery to those who live there; it also transforms its target
into a piece in the jigsaw puzzle of the process of economic globalisation. The result of the
explosion is not a pile of smoking ruins, or thousands of dead bodies, but a
neighbourhood added to one of the commercial megalopolis of the new planetary
hypermarket, and a labour force which is reshaped to fit in with the new
planetary job market.


The European Union is a result of this fourth world war. In
Europe globalisation has succeeded in eliminating the frontiers between rival
states that had been enemies for centuries, and has forced them to converge
towards political union. On the way from the nation state to the European
Federation the road will be paved with destruction and ruin, and one of these
ruins will be that of European civilisation.

Given the similar nature of Marcos's numerous essays prior
to the one he wrote above, it is no wonder that a Chase Manhattan (now part of JP Morgan Chase) analyst
publicly called for the "elimination" of Subcomandante Marcos in a January 1995
memo. When the Chase memo was leaked to the public, many argued, including
present day US Representative Marcy Kaptur, that the Chase Manhattan memo was a
thinly veiled call for the murder of innocent people: "Suggesting the killing
of innocent people, throwing electionsnone of this seems to bother Chase...
anyone who honestly believed that Wall Street's hands weren't all over ...
[U.S. policy towards Mexico] should take a good hard look at this memo." You
can access the referenced Chase Manhattan memo here.

Marcos's deep understanding of the complexity of
globalization issues and its intimate ties to the global banking syndicate (the
BIS, the IMF, the World Bank, Central Banks and CHIPs) is well formulated in
his above essay and proves him to be a peer of men like Gerald Celente and
Nassim Nicholas Taleb. In fact, within the bigger and more layered context of
globalization, Marcos has few peers in explaining the links of globalization
and financial fraud.


About the author: JS Kim is the Managing Director ofSmartKnowledgeU, a niche wealth
consultancy firm that tirelessly analyzes the institutionalized fraud of our
financial system to consistently identify assets that have the best long-term
lowest-risk, highest-reward potential.
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/startli...bank-fraud