Employmentweb_low

epilogue: the econoMic crisis
groups have imposed self-regulation on the sector (corporate social
responsibility) or the privatisation of certain public information and
supervisory functions through the use of auditors and rating
companies, thus avoiding democratic meddling in their economic
authoritarianism. hence, given that the crisis will eventually end, an
important premise would be to ascertain the criteria with which
economic activities will be regulated, what goals will be pursued,
what the (more or less democratic) institutional framework under
which such things will be decided will look like and, particularly,
whose interests will be furthered by the outcome of this intervention
(see case study 100).
Case study 100. The crisis as an opportunity to change the economic model. - Óscar carpintero
Reorganisation of property ownership and the financial system in an “economy of acquisition”
one of the balsams used to placate criticism of the neo-liberal rules of the game has been to claim that their
application promoted economic growth. however, going beyond the serious shortcomings of the gDp as an indicator of
population well-being, growth in the production of goods and services hides a vast, planet-wide process of wealth and
corporate asset acquisition. large-scale extraction of riches in the form of energy and non-renewable raw materials has
meant that rich countries have ceased to be “production” economies and have instead become economies of “acquisition”.
to do so, they have used two powerful instruments: international trade and the financial system. the former allows over
2,000 million tons of energy and raw materials annually, a quantity which increases yearly, to flow away from the rest of the
world and into rich countries. the latter reinforces the acquisitive nature of “developed” economies (naredo & valero, 1999;
carpintero, 2005), since the financial world also has an impact on economic assessment, thus redistributing both the
financing and purchasing power of economic agents with regard to not only goods but also companies and territories. thus,
along with the cheap importation of energy and raw materials, over the last two decades there has been an increase in
acquisitions of companies that extract and export energy and raw materials destined for rich countries. these countries’
transnational companies, thanks to the liberalisation of international financial markets, have taken advantage of successive
waves of transnational mergers and acquisitions in order to gain control of a large part of the world’s corporate assets,
leading to a vertiginous and unprecedented planet-wide reorganisation of property ownership.
a global analysis of foreign direct investment (FDi) shows that such investment is mostly a matter of the acquisition or
simple purchase of existing companies (either between rich countries, or between companies from rich and poor countries)
and not of investment in installations or economic activities that create employment and increase production and income in
the host country. the last decade has seen a growth of investment in extractive industries in poor countries, where levels of
FDi stocks are consequently very high. some examples include nigeria (74% in extraction mining), botswana (68%), bolivia
(70%), venezuela (almost 40%), chile and argentina (each around 30%) (united nations conference on trade and
Development, 2007). Moreover, trans-national companies control mining extraction and commercialisation completely in
countries such as Mali, tanzania, guinea, botswana, gabon, namibia, Zambia and argentina, and have very high levels of
control in colombia, peru and chile. in fact, the expansion of the so-called “new economy” has largely been possible due to
the acquisition of company assets in sectors closely related to the utilisation and commercialisation of natural resources
(examples include electricity, gas and water production and distribution or oil extraction and refining industries), as well as
the fact that africa and latin america have supplied strategically important minerals needed by the new information and
communications technologies (carpintero, 2004). For instance, the large-scale manufacture and consumption of computer
monitors, hard discs, cellular telephones, electronic components, integrated circuit boards, condensers and so on would
not have been possible without the gold, platinum, palladium, rhodium, ruthenium, iridium, tantalum, columbium, and
magnesium mined in africa (between 65% and 75% of imports of these substances going to oecD countries). it should also
be pointed out that the rich countries themselves, in order to control poor countries’ natural resources, provoke or prolong
wars and conflicts (for example, oil drives conflicts in nigeria, coltan in the Democratic republic of congo; Klare, 2003).
Many times, a large part of this process has been financed thanks to so-called “finance money” (naredo, 2000), thus giving
companies enormous power and control in establishing the rules of the game, which tend to increase social inequalities.
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