"Two things are unlimited: the number of generations we should feel responsible for and our inventiveness."--Jan Tinbergen, Nobel Laureate, Economics

We have been understanding as we have been writing in Ensign that the gospel of the Free Market is the wrong doctrine for our social and economic development. This Free Market has transformed itself into an Oligopoly that is a market controlled by the few and privileged transnational corporations and their representative 'appointed' governments. And the Free Market has been reinvented in the United States to become Bushim, that is an environment of secret deals, loss of freedoms, and patriotic fervor. We have been mentioning that the collapse of the Argentina's economy is a signal for an unsustainable Free Market policy and I realize now that the collapse of the Enron Corporation is a signal for an unsustainable Bushism. We must recall that the Bush family and members of president Bush's entourage have been closely associated to the extracting energies of the Enron Corporation.

Both the collapse of Argentina's economy and the collapse of the Enron Corporation have been driven respectively by the speculative money making machines of the Free Market and Bushism, that is by the neoclassical economic drive to make money with money. This economic classical tenet to make money with money cannot be sustained, and in fact the economic machinery for making money with money will eventually disassociate from the productive energies of the people and the environment and will collapse, just as we have been experiencing in the Argentina's economy and the Enron Corporation.

The lesson is obvious, we cannot sustain this Free Market and we cannot sustain its political representation of Bushism. There are natural limits to growth of anything, and this is why the Argentina's economy collapsed, and this why the Enron Corporation collapsed. And the price of these collapses is not paid by the culprits, that is the few and privileged, the price of these economic catastrophes is paid by the people at large, by the further erosion of our democracies, by the further erosion of our natural environment.

In the past, referring to the feverish trend of global mergers and acquisitions by the corporations in the name of increasing productivity and cutting costs, I stated that under this Free Market you can always rationalize further global Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A), which trigger further global Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A). And so today I discovered in the web site of the New Economics Foundation new sources of information and studies focused on the present detrimental effects of global Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A). At this web site I find that

"the majority of mergers not benefit shareholders ­ according to KPMG, 53 per cent actually destroy shareholder value and a further 30 per cent bring no measurable benefit. But they also impoverish the global commons by increasing unemployment, damaging the environment, restricting competition, monopolising intellectual property and reducing transparency." And this is what economist Jessica Bridges-Palmer says "It is time for full cost merger accounting allowing decisions to be made on the basis of the real world, rather than the power-hungry ambitions of large corporations."

There are limits to growth! And there are limits to greed!

References:
Pertinent articles published in Ensign

Beyond The Limits: Confronting Global Collapse, Envisioning a Sustainable Future, by Donella H. Meadows, Dennis Meadows, Jørgen Randers http://www.chelseagreen.com/Planet/BeyondContents.htm

Enron's Close Ties to Bush, by Josh Gerstein ABCNEWS.com December 12, 2001 http://dailynews.yahoo.com/htx/abc/20011212/pl/enron011210_1.html

'Oh, what a tangled web we weave', ("You must cut costs ruthlessly by 50 to 60%. Depopulate. Get rid of people. They gum up the works." - Jeffrey Skilling, Enron President, 1997) by Bridget Gibson, Liberal Slant, December 18, 2001 http://www.liberalslant.com/

New Economics Foundation An Introduction: The New Economics Foundation is the radical think tank. It is unique in bringing together the ideas, people, resources and influence to challenge business-as-usual. We create practical and enterprising solutions to the social, environmental and economic challenges facing the local, regional, national and global economies. We are utterly committed to fresh thinking, so please be in touch. http://www.neweconomics.org

mergerwatch; Edition three, Jessica Bridges-Palmer, Publication Date: 2001 http://www.neweconomics.org/uploadstore/pubs/mergerwatchthree.doc