Investor Rights Agreements are not trade agreements and governments that don’t allow agreements to be read by officials or the public should be shamed into economic democracy. Transparency should not be made a nonsense word. If it is made a nonsense word, public spirit vanishes along with trust between the generations. Suspicion takes the place of trust. The one who can complete a sentence becomes president!
Ulrich Thielemann, a Swiss-German critical economist, emphasizes profit making is different from profit maximizing which is even self-destructive and perverse. Life is full of paradox and scandal since it is ambivalent and dialectical. What is rational from a micro-economic perspective (e.g. competition) can be disastrous from a macro-economic perspective (e.g. countries upended by mass unemployment). Thielemann wrote the article “Studying Economics Today is Like Brainwashing” and pleads for pluralist economics and economic ethics. An Austrian Economist Nicholas Krowall insists that profits explode while investments stagnate in late stage capitalism.
The state has a public nature though private interests often seem in the driver’s seat with privatization, deregulation, liberalized markets, tax havens and tax evasion. Bill Moyers grieves that the state has become an “errand boy” for the banks. Wall Street banks have three times as many lobbyists as there are political representatives and spent billions in the last decade to prevail in Congress. The corporate share in federal revenue has fallen from 40% in the 1960s to 8% or 9% today according to www.foreffectivegov.org.
The 159-page eBook anthology “Alternative Economics: Reversing Stagnation” is available from Smashwords.com. There is even a 50% discount for July! The appendix “Myths of the Economy” explains 29 state myths, labor myths, business myths and social myths. Enjoy the feast! 725 free movies are ours on www.openculture.com. 800 of my translations await you at www.freembtranslations.net. Don’t become listless or oblivious as neoliberal economic darkness becomes bipartisan!
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/627516
