The Shadow Commission

The Europe we don’t want Human Dignity dies when a person’s each and every action has to be efficient, economically justifiable and sustainable. Where only profit maximisation rules, there is no room for Democracy. The ‘survival-of-the-fittest - credo’ is the opposite of Freedom and Equality. A different World is not possible, a different Society based on a New Economic System is. The citizens of Europe do not want to live in a Society in which the upper class bathes in Champagne while more and more children have to grow up in a devastating poverty Europe hasn’t witnessed for the past 100 years. The citizens of Europe do not want to live in an economy in which dividends and shareholder values explode while more and more people can not make a living in dignity from their hands work. And, the citizens of Europe overwhelmingly reject a regime in which a few multinational corporations decide over the life-perspectives of billions of people while brutal exploitation and wars over resources go hand in hand with a renewed Imperialism depriving many countries of any hope and by this of any future. Champagne parties for the rich, soup corners for more and more poor and a declining standard of living for the vast majority aren’t the givens of Globalisation but of global Capitalism. Drastic consequences of unregulated Capitalism are to be endured by 497 million Europeans of which 75 million live below the poverty line while hundreds of millions work for minimum wages that buy them nothing and let them merely survive, not live. Jobs are axed by major corporations despite high profitability only because of some shareholder’s hunger for one-time effects, national governments go through the social net with a chainsaw in their hands, although an ever higher productivity amid stagnating social expenditure and tumbling birth rates would allow for an increased social security, equal and non-discriminatory access to education and health care. Neo-liberal Jedi Riders have managed to let the interest of CEOs and owners become political guidelines of the European Union. This agenda is a slap into the face of the majority of Europeans and especially of those who had lived under dictatorial Stalinist regimes and saw the Berlin Wall that separated my Fatherland by an barbaric border finally collapse under the weight of the desires for Human Rights, Freedom and Democracy we all had dreamed of in 1989. Since it started to exist, Capitalism had ignited productivity, inventions and innovation wherever profit could be made. It has created enormous wealth while it makes sure that billions of human beings are excluded from participating in such. Capitalism has created the technological predicaments in order to overcome poverty while it cements a world order in which every ten seconds a child dies of hunger and more than a billion human beings be denied access to clean and consumable water. With all possible brutality destroys Capitalism production and wealth, exercises profligacy causing climatic calamity and wanton destruction of natural habitats as long as this maximises profit. During the transition period from the 19th to the 20th century for the first time market dominating major corporations combining the capital-typical profligacy with the power to define the investment priorities of entire industries and by this subordinate state politics to their interests emerged. These conglomerates profited from the exploitation of colonies while they manifested inequality as well as a rigid distribution of wealth giving the rich by taking from the poor in industrialised countries. The latter resulted in declining sales of consumption products and led to more and more capital being pumped into financial - as well as stock markets. Market value of American stocks multiplied between 1924 and 1929 whereas the stock of assets grew only rather modestly on a worldwide basis. An increase of profits which because of real-economic givens of decreasing growth rates and shrinking demand has become an impossibility that had been simulated instead by speculative gains until the massive financial blasé burst in October 1929 resulting in the until today most terrible economic crisis of Capitalism’s history. The consequences have been massive destruction of productive industrial capacity, return of hunger and extreme poverty in industrialised nations, fascist dictatorships as well as a deadly World War, costing millions over million’s lives. The western European post war model can be seen as an answer to the barbaric experiences of an unregulated Capitalism. In France, Austria, Italy and Great-Britain strategically important economic sectors were nationalised in West-Germany those conglomerates at least were unbundled. Strong unions, and immediately after 1945 also broad anti-capitalistic movements and the establishing of an alternative economic and social model in Eastern Europe led to a generous social system also in the West as well as wages keeping pace with productivity. Governments regulated many areas of the economy and by this limited excesses of profit maximisation. This model worked quite well as long as rapid growth rates and a steady increase of productivity guaranteed the profit margins of major corporations. The economic crisis of the 1970ies marked the end of this dynamism. Growing unemployment rates, the disappearance of anti-capitalistic movements in line with a waning attractiveness of the Eastern European Socialism let the demands of capital owners celebrate a revival. The aggressive approach of shareholders got founded by the potential of major corporations which hade been grown into an international dimension to be able to blackmail elected governments and parliaments to subordinate their economic policy to the only goal of increasing returns of investment. Useful in this strategy have been weakening unions, the cut of social benefits as well as a deregulation and privatisation wave making any facet of public subsistence and life subject to financial feasibility along with wide ranging deregulations of international financial markets. A renewed worldwide polarisation of income created a gigantic speculation-boom on financial markets while the growth rates of the real economy stagnated or grew at best modestly. Private wealth exploded pretty much at same pace rate than public and later also private indebtedness increased. Unimaginable amounts of money, a multiple of the world’s social product, are vagabonding day by day on the global financial markets. These funds are moved by banks, financial investors as well as ultra rich privateers whose wealth - multiplication are usually managed by high yield investment funds which determine by their strategies the value of stocks and shares, bonds and currency exchange rates and by this investments, trade and last but not least the financial abilities of public households, governments and the European Union as a whole. The ‘deadly foam’ created by those funds is responsible for instability and an ever new crisis which can ruin entire economies. This situation has been created politically. It is always put down to a so called “Globalisation” but in reality it has been political decisions that paved the way for an ever more ruthless profit maximisation and concentration that leads to destruction and de-industrialisation. Like it has been a unilateral decision of our leaders to roll out the red carpet for financial conglomerates that too often behave like parasites one could also unilaterally roll back. It doesn’t matter whether there are still some global players standing on the red carpet while it is rolled-in again as those who come to late always get punished by life’s reality. This is how hedge-funds, private-equity firms, bubble-creators and snow ball - financiers treat the general public anyway.