The Free Market has become a gambling casino run by the big corporations and fortunate sons. We must reflect on what has happened to our world in the last twenty years of corporate globalization. The ideology of the Free Market is a theoretical absurdity as the gap between the rich and the poor has been widening along with greater violence, wars and the erosion of our democracies.

The freeing of capital markets has turned our financial markets to a gambling casino. It was just yesterday that we commented that 95% of the six trillion dollars moving around the world every day is just an economic bubble with no supportive real wealth. Our Free Market is full of economic bubbles ready to explode as we experience the current burst of the Argentina's bubble. Our Free Market is a Big Bubble and our big corporations and fortunate sons are defending this Big Bubble with their media propaganda, their wars against terrorism along with a further erosion of our democracies.

Last week, Saskatchewan journalist Doug Cuthand wrote an article sympathetic to the plight of Palestinians and his employer Canwest Global Communications didn't publish it as our media has become an expression of corporate propaganda. We have been told that the war in Afghanistan has been won but we hear news of further American bombing in this country. We have Canadian Minister of Public Works Alfonso Gagliano ordering the hiring of his friends by governmental agencies and we hear that this behaviour is legal and that it is called lobbying. We turn our attention to the collapse of the Bush friendly Enron Corporation and we notice among the alleged many fraudulent practices that this corporation had some 874 subsidiaries located in officially designated offshore tax and bank havens while the Bush Administration is supposed to be waging the financial war against money laundering.

We are used to say not to mix apples and oranges, but we have reached such a level of erosion of our democracy that to further fragment our issues and make them specific for the interest of our conventional wisdom is not enough anymore. Let us learn how to mix apples and oranges and take back our freedoms from the Free Market, that is our big corporations and fortunate sons.

References  

The Mirage of Progress, by Mark Weisbrot, The American Prospect, Volume 13, Issue 1. January 1 - 14 2002 http://www.prospect.org/print/V13/1/weisbrot-m.html

Axing of column sparks controversy, Bill Schiller, January 12, 2002, The Torornto Star

Blind Faith: How Deregulation and Enron's Influence Over Government Looted Billions from Americans. Sen. Gramm, White House Must Be Investigated for Role in Enron's Fraud of Consumers and Shareholders, December 2001, Public Citizen http://www.citizen.org/documents/Blind_Faith.pdf

Before Debacle, Enron Insiders Cashed in $1.1 Billion in Shares, By LESLIE WAYNE, January 13, 2002, The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/13/business/13SELL.html