Death of a Paradigm

http://www.odemagazine.com/doc/59/death-of-a-paradigm/

Now that the cracks are so clear, now that people’s jobs are in peril, in the U.K. and U.S., unemployment is rising at meteoric rates, now that the loan pushers are calling their loans in, now that we don’t have money to shop and we witness our wealth collapsing, the public is getting angry, and not just at bankers. We’re seeing a fundamental outrage at the whole interconnected mess of a system: at energy companies that record massive profits yet allow pensioners to struggle to stay warm in winter; at CEOs who can earn up to 1,000 times the salary of their average worker; and soon, any day now, at those politicians who allowed this to happen, at all those who allowed such a fundamental disconnect between how these politicos portrayed the world and how we’re now collectively experiencing it.

The public recognizes that it has the moral right and authority to damn the ideology that resulted in this. This is a fundamental change. Smart politicians will recognize this tectonic shift, this change in the balance of power from high finance and big corporations to the people, and will seek to build political capital from it. We’re all socialists now, what with mainstream politicians from left and right criticizing bankers’ irresponsible behavior and salaries, and calling for state intervention in the financial markets.

But these calls won’t get them elected if they’re addressed only in the banking sector. For the financial crisis is a manifestation of a fundamentally flawed way of thinking about the world, a flawed way of thinking that’s going to hurt real people increasingly over the next couple of years as the world enters a recession. And it will hurt not only people in countries that preached the paradigm, but those in countries that didn’t. Job cuts, shrinking growth forecasts, tumbling stock markets are already being seen in Rio de Janeiro, Bogotá, Beijing and Moscow. The poorest countries will experience the double whammy of having had to deregulate, privatize and open up their markets to be eligible for aid and seeing those pledges go unmet.

This is the first full crisis of globalization, a recognition that in a tightly interconnected world, one country’s troubles fast become each and every country’s troubles, the first collective “lose-lose” situation.