On the Current World Crisis (II)
Written by Alfonso Elizondo
The serious political crisis afflicting Western capitalism today was not created by Putin but by US bankers who, by taking advantage of deregulation and financial interconnectedness, dragged the world economy into the 2008 debacle. After that crisis, the top US politicians refused to introduce adequate banking regulations and did not punish those who caused the crisis while they got rich. Meanwhile, in Europe the ethical and political failures of democracy spread to support the populists on the left and on the right.
Italy’s populist parties obtained almost 50% of the total votes in the most recent national elections and that was not due to the disinformation campaigns of the Russians – as said by the US – but because of the growing discomfort with a political establishment that did not know how to or could not solve the big economic problems Italy was experiencing at that time. So the last elections were a clear demonstration of the inequalities in the different regions in Italy. While the North favored the xenophobes, in the South the populist Five-Star Movement won most of the votes of the poor. However, the slogan of the Italian League campaign that says “Italians first’ is not inspired by Italy, but rather that nationalism comes from US president, Donald Trump.
The mass media publications with ‘fake news’ spread by Russia on social networks have had some influence on the European crisis, but in the UK the newspapers of Murdock and Harmsworth have had a major disruptive impact on the so-called democracies of Eastern Europe through their religious and autocratic myths that have obstructed the progress of that European region towards postmodern culture, secular tolerance and the high values of the European Union.
For several decades the West has been experiencing great social inequalities because it did not know how to act in the face of globalization at the same time that its governments gradually isolated themselves from public opinion. So many bureaucracies in those countries are currently not accountable and are very far from being legitimate.
For its part, Russia faces enormous internal problems, not only in its economy, but in its association with the domestic mafias that it has been dealing with since the fall of the USSR, in addition to its great demographic collapse. But the reality is that Russia does not represent a big problem for the West, as is the case of the current US president, Donald Trump, and to a lesser degree some of the richest countries in the world today such as Japan, Germany, New Guinea and Australia.
Nevertheless, looking at current democracy from a statistical perspective, the surveys by Pew Research, – the largest and most recognized polling company in the world – one finds that in the vast majority of countries globally ordinary citizens do not believe in their national governments and even less in those who govern because in most cases gaining power and wealth are still the main paradigms, while only a few countries such as China, Asian and Middle Eastern countries are on the rise. These countries are located on the new trade routes that China has financed from Beijing to Berlin, Paris or Madrid, a situation that is barely more than two decades old.
Addendum: In such a situation it could be concluded that in spite of everything, the world at the moment and world of the near future are much better than the world of the last 40 years, when the US gained complete control of the world order based on its military capacity, the enormous ambition of its billionaires and their financial tricks; this in spite of the fact that it has been very costly for the middle and lower classes, in a situation where an oligarchy controlled by the plutocracy took global control of the economy, its finances and its monetary system to benefit only a small sector of human society and a few poor people who have only slightly increased their personal incomes.