Danny Schechter - ColdType

US President Barack Obama spoke of a historic consensus on
environmental policy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel
declared that “considerable progress” had been made at the
summit. In fact, most of the decisions announced over the
past three days were vague and non-committal. In general,
they marked a retreat from positions agreed (and not carried
out) at preceding G8 summits.
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Clearly, we also need a cultural shift and a deeper debate.
We need more citizen activism, if only to prod governments
to do more. We also need a discussion of values beyond the
material; something religious leaders have been calling for
over decades, if not longer.
As the G8 gathered in Italy, Pope Benedict XVI issued an
encyclical: “The Pope does not think that making Capitalism
more moral will be a simple matter of bringing a few malefactors
to account, whether this involves summoning a half dozen
bankers to hearings in Westminster or Washington, or chanting
slogans against Bernard Madoff in Manhattan streets,”
reported Christopher Caldwell in the Financial Times.
Never mind that, there are, as this book has shown, quite a
few “malefactors” behind the extraordinary crimes documented
in these pages. But what Pope Benedict did say goes beyond
that. He sees a need for a totally transformed and restructured
new financial order.
“There is urgent need [for] a true world political authority
…” that can manage the global economy, guarantee the
environment is protected, ensure world peace and bring about
food security for the poor, he wrote. “The economy needs ethics
in order to function correctly, not any ethics, but an ethics
which is people centered,” Pope Benedict wrote. “Once profit
becomes the exclusive goal, if it is produced by improper
means and without the common good as its ultimate end, it
risks destroying wealth and creating poverty.”
Amen.