Myths of the Global Market

[Jcrowley]

Economic Goods, or Bads?

Such an economic calculus is fatal in the long term, but not questioned. That is why no principle of business or economics has been developed to distinguish commodities that cause disease from goods that enable people’s lives. With 25 years of market de-regulation, disease epidemics like cancer that are traceable to commercial carcinogens grow. But these too are ignored by government food-and-drug oveseers, cancer institutes and economists, as Samuel Epstein has argued since 1981. With the recently emerging obesity epidemic, an initiative by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization to inform consumers about healthy versus unhealthy foods was mounted in 2002, but was repressed. A 2004 warning by the U.S. Surgeon-General that “the obesity epidemic is a bigger world problem than terrorism” was also ignored. In Britain in 2007, public policy for color-coded warnings on cereals laden with sugar, salt and fat is now campaigned against by the war-chests of corporate food.

A tragic macro-spiral unfolds. The more the global market system produces and consumes, the more it cumulatively despoils and destroys human and ecological life systems. But preventative laws are repudiated as “too costly” or “interference in the free market”.

Even the eminent U.N. Scientific Panel on Climate Change does not connect climate stabilization to the causal mechanism producing the industrial gases behind it. So new markets in “carbon trading”are prescribed, and the life-blind market mechanism causing the problem is extended further. The global spiral downwards continues as long as the public accepts it.

Global Market Growth = Life-System Collapse

Turning market money-stocks into ever more of them does not work unless regulated by life-standards. But de-regulation of the market has been an economic panacea since the Thatcher-Reagan era. A pattern of world-wide collapse of life-capital bases is thus increasingly structured into the globalizing system. From pseudo foods and consumables that cause most cancers, heart failures, and organic disorders to commercial pollutants and resource wastes that cause climate destabilization to species extinction spasms, exhaustions of fishstocks and arable soil, the same for-profit drivers are at work, but assumed as having “no alternative”. Since corporations are bound by law to maximize profits for stockholders, they maximize all “externalities” they can onto others as “necessary to compete”. With governments declining into “the best democracies that money can buy”, there is no public authority left to protect the common life interest. Instead, party leaders call for more market growth, and thus more life-system depredation. The causal link is taboo to mention.

http://www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=12223§ionID=10