Submitted by Pachamama
Owen Seymour Arthur’s predescent cries for the resignations of the Minister of Finance, the Governor of the Central Bank and his repeated attempts to regain government by default, as if to reinforce his perceptions of his own hagiography, deliberately ignore the pending collapse or radical restructuring of all the post Britton Woods Keynesian global management systems. These calls come at a time when there is a near absence of a public discourse in the corporate media about national security strategic responses, having several scenarios, by either political tribe; an inability to think outside the box or beyond the margins of the imposed neo-liberalism; the official fiction that we need for continuing and annual GDP growth; the unquestioning acceptance of a fiat money system and the intermediaries who make interest from the printing of paper currencies or its electronic representation and the underlying fractional reserve system; a generalized failure of economics as a
‘science’.
Arthur’s self-imposition of the ‘majesty’ of the economist as having special powers to make gold out of tin ignores, that as a profession, it is criminally predicated on notions of the inexhaustibility of needs; has produced gross distortions in ownership patterns everywhere; it refuses to accept that natural resources are finite; it does not account for the environmental cost to all life forms; it threatens our survival as a specie; is eviscerating the so-called middle classes everywhere; has left most of the world’s population without a distribution of the essentials for life. Only a few years ago the leading lights of his ‘magical’ profession argued steadfastly that they knew how to manage an economy in a way to avoid the worst excesses, a position still accepted by Owen Arthur today, but instead of even and continuing growth Arthur and his cohorts have produced the worst recession known to mankind. And despite the hopes of officialdom it is getting worse by the day.
During 2010 Barbados suffered two significant blows. First we had the untimely demised of David Thompson. Second, we had soft coup against Mia Mottley. At a time when the country needed two of the people who were least inclined to be labeled with the dirty title of “economist’ they were both removed. There is little evidence that either Mr. Thompson or Ms. Mottley had any real vision for a future where the country does not blindly following the dictates of the American Empire, the Washington Consensus, the IMF, The World Bank, the OECD or the International Bank of Settlements but at least they were never braggarts about being ‘economist’. In these times that maybe a good starting point despite the platitudes about Barbados as small open economy, survival is never guaranteed to any people.
Does Owen Arthur take any personal responsibility for this state of affairs? Instead as a repeat offender he now seeks to trick us again, with that smart man’s devilish smile on his face; he wants us to believe that he has some exclusive economic formula, on the one hand, and on the other to create circumstances that would again breach the cyclical nature of the political duopoly. Therefore the country may want to consider whether the activities of Arthur may not amount to a deliberate attempt to impoverish Barbadians even when the world knows that all of Arthur’s old fashion thinking must be abandoned. The game is up. A general economic collapse could be the final stage for a profession that has led us all into a cul-de-sac.
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