Our Society And What the COVID Pandemic Lays Bare For All To See

We have all see the fissures the pandemic has exposed...let's venture in and examine how they got there in the first place.  In Nicholas Shaxon's book The Finance Curse - How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer explains it well.  And don't be put off by the title - very readable, at times actually a page turner.

Building on the accepted and familiar concept of free market capitalism and healthy competition we have moved (or should I say finessed) to finance capitalism and monopolies.  I'm old enough to remember when monopoly was a dirty word.  Not so now.  The courts have replaced concern for concentrated control of a market to a focus on keeping consumer prices down - a huge shift.  We have heard the mantra that we need to get lean and mean to compete in the global economy, but there is no "we."  In fact, in finance capitalism there is not society, so no wonder our infrastructure is crumbling - our schools, town, and states scrambling for funds.  The pandemic is only amplifying this.

Financial derivatives, financial sector, commodity swaps, futures contracts, limited liability, stock buybacks, tax havens... the vocabulary swirls around us in the news, but do we understand what these words actually mean and how these financial tools are used?  I sure didn't except in the most vague sense, and the effect deliberately obscures what is going on.  Shaxson writes that "The finance curse constitutes one of the most significant, troubling, and complex national security threats the Western world has ever faced."  And many of us don't really see it!

It reaches us in various forms, but you will recognize them; hospital closings, large corporations bully communities into accepting compromised PCB (or other toxin) cleanups, public school special needs programs get slashed, teacher layoffs, water giants get rights to regional aquifers, family farms destroyed, meat packed with antibiotics and hormones, and politicians that aren't acting on our behalf, etc...

Saxson's book takes the world of finance that is dominating our nation, and much of world, and pulls it out into the sunlight, demystifying its parts and how they are used to drive the economic inequality divide even wider at breathtaking speed.  This is an important book.

(If you are going to purchase it, try to avoid Amazon. )
The photo is by my son, Sean McCabe.