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"THE CAPITALISM HAS TO SURVIVE"

While stock markets are crashing and the world is facing a crisis, CNN Int'l is still talking about the Global Economic Crisis/GEC (and - what a surprise!! - there's no end in sight..) Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus, much celebrated in the international "left-alternative" movement demanded (in an interview with the German bourgeois Spiegel magazine, 10.10): "Capitalism, with all its market mechanisms, has to survive!"

Noam Chomsky - the "guru" of the "radical left", "anti-capitalist", anti-globalization movement - said about the "current crisis of capitalism" (in the USA) following in an interview with Spiegel Online (10.10):

SPIEGEL: Professor Chomsky, cathedrals of capitalism have collapsed, the conservative government is spending its final weeks in office with nationalization plans. How does that make you feel?

Chomsky: The times are too difficult and the crisis too severe to indulge in schadenfreude. Looking at it in perspective, the fact that there would be a financial crisis was perfectly predictable, its general nature, if not its magnitude. Markets are always inefficient.

SPIEGEL: What exactly did you anticipate?

Chomsky: In the financial industry, as in other industries, there are risks that are left out of the calculation. If you sell me a car, we have perhaps made a good bargain for ourselves. But there are effects of this transaction on others, which we do not take into account. There is more pollution, the price of gas goes up, there is more congestion. Those are the external costs of our transaction. In the case of financial institutions, they are huge.

SPIEGEL: But isn't it the task of a bank to take risks?

Chomsky: Yes, but if it is well managed, like Goldman Sachs, it will cover its own risks and absorb its own losses. But no financial institution can manage systemic risks. Risk is therefore underpriced, and there will be more risk taken than would be prudent for the economy. With government deregulation and the triumph of financial liberalization, the dangers of systemic risks, the possibility of a financial tsunami, sharply increased.

SPIEGEL: But is it correct to only put the blame on Wall Street? Doesn't Main Street, the American middle class, also live on borrowed money which may or may not be paid back?

Chomsky: The debt burden of private households is enormous. But I would not hold the individual responsible. This consumerism is based on the fact that we are a society dominated by business interests. There is massive propaganda for everyone to consume. Consumption is good for profits and consumption is good for the political establishment.

SPIEGEL: How does it benefit politicians when the populace drives a lot, eats a lot and goes shopping a lot?

Chomsky: Consumption distracts people. You cannot control your own population by force, but it can be distracted by consumption. The business press has been quite explicit about this goal...

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,583454,00.html

And while the Washington Post (10.10), has been asking if this will be "The End Of American Capitalism?"...

..the Palestinian "people's restistance" (according to SWP/UK, SAV/Marx21/D, All Together/ROK..etc...) organisation Hamas, one of the main subjects of solidarity for the int'l "anti-imperialist" movement, tells us the "truth" who's really behind the GEC and/or at least the financial crisis in the USA in following "analysis" (Caution! That's - really, believe me! - not an article from the 1929/30 edition of Der Stuermer!):

☞ When Will America wake up from her slumber? (PIC, 10.4)