Francis wades into the heart of modern-day capitalism

In 2008, at the height of the economic crisis in the US, I mentioned in this column about an email I had received from a Buddhist friend of mine.

Sep 17, 2015

Anil Netto

By Anil Netto
In 2008, at the height of the economic crisis in the US, I mentioned in this column about an email I had received from a Buddhist friend of mine.

He had conjured up the following scenario after I had told him about Jesus’ entry on a humble donkey into Jerusalem and his cleansing of the temple:

“Wouldn’t it be great if they made a film about Jesus’ view of the financial markets today? There could be a ‘donkey entry’ into Wall Street or the City of London, casting aside the greedy speculators and profiteers, a ‘miracle at the IMF’ with its Damascene renunciation of neo-liberalism, and a sermon on ‘Mount Davos’ (the global summit of economic movers and shakers) where our man could prevail upon the high priests of capitalism to discard the false commandments of (economic) growth that are causing environmental destruction?”

Well, it may not be Jesus riding on a donkey into the heart of Wall Street this time. But Francis, the Bishop of Rome, is wading into the heart of modern day capitalism in Washington and New York, where he will deliver an address to the UN general assembly on Sept 25, just a stone’s throw from Wall Street.

And what will ‘our man’ Francis say during his Sept 22-27 trip? That we have to discard the notion that a system based on maximising profits will somehow serve the common good in the long run.

As he has noted in the past, “Finance overwhelms the real economy. The lessons of the global financial crisis have not been assimilated.”

In the end, “whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenceless before the interests of the deified market, which become the only rule.”

Francis has decried the obsession with maximizing profits in the global economy and urged those responsible to stop and “reflect on the environmental damage which they will leave behind for future generations”.

Climate change is already making its presence felt and future generations will not thank us for not doing more to curb the real culprits. Francis has also condemned the priority given to “speculation and the pursuit of financial gain, which fail to take the context into account, let alone the effects on human dignity and the natural environment”.

Now Francis may not be a learned economist but from his walkabouts in the slums in his native Argentina, he has seen first-hand the damage inflicted by free-market policies, neoliberalism and intervention by global financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund.

Only last week, I met a researcher from Argentina, Francis’ native land, who described to me how IMF policies and neo-liberalism have given rise to wide income inequality in that country.

Neoliberal policies, including the inclination to privatise everything under the sun, have spread across the world. Transnational corporations have also grown enormously powerful and can almost dictate the agenda of so-called “free trade” agreements.

Coupled with speculation in the financial and property sectors, these policies have inflicted enormous suffering on exploited workers around the world and devastation of the natural environment. As Francis puts it, they have contributed to “the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor”.

Certainly, capitalism and a corporate-led globalisation may have contributed to rising economic growth and per capita GDP. But the flip-side is that it has placed enormous amounts of wealth in the hands of small groups of powerful elites and their corporations and widened income inequality.

Now, this is where things should get interesting during Francis’ visit to the United States. Here is a country where in recent decades, the church has placed priority — Francis says perhaps too much priority — on hot button issues such as abortion and same-sex marriages.

Unfortunately, the concern for the sanctity of life and human dignity did not seem to extend to the deaths inflicted in the US military adventures abroad, notably Iraq, which led to the loss of hundreds of thousands of innocent lives. Don’t forget this was also the nation that in the 1970s and 80s supported murderous regimes in places like El Salvador, where the outspoken Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated while saying Mass.

Neither did that concern for the dignity of human life translate to concern about the withering effects of cutbacks on social spending that has pressured much of the middle-class in America. And all the time, military spending has escalated.

Yet, this is a country that, in an earlier age, had a rich tradition of Catholic support for labour unions and the rights of workers. After all, the United States also produced Catholic heroes such as Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, the radical founders of the Catholic Workers movement in the United States. They championed the rights of workers and unions, worked to feed and house the poor, promoted the idea of distributism and were resolute in their opposition to war.

Francis will seek to nudge the US Church — and Americans in general — to embrace a wider sense of solidarity to combat “the globalisation of indifference” that plagues our world today. So all in, Francis’ trip to the United States promises to be fascinating and worth watching.

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