by
Harry Shutt
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In fact almost their only concerted actions over the years have been precisely those designed to dismantle the few instruments of control previously available to them (such as those over cross-border capital movements). On the occasions when they are moved to express concern about the damaging consequences of the growth in money laundering, corruption and organised crime, nobody ever points out that the G7 have the collective power to close down the offshore finance centres which play such a large part in facilitating these activities. Instead their meetings have been reduced to nothing but exercises in platitudinous exhortation based on spurious economics – such as urging the need to hold down wages, reduce public spending and thereby curb inflation as the essential prerequisites to reviving economic growth.
Given the manifest futility of these conclaves, it is perhaps surprising that they have not been abandoned as damaging demonstrations of the incapacity of governments, both collectively and severally, to take effective remedial action against chronic economic failure. However, the fact that this has not happened may reflect a view that actually to terminate the ritual would be an even bigger public-relations disaster, signifying in most people’s eyes not only a confession of helplessness but an abdication of responsibility.
It is precisely the need to challenge the notion of an unconditional right of property and to insist on the public accountability of its owners – taking account of the immense power of corporations to influence the welfare of society – which now demands to be grasped. The justification for doing so is surely all the more compelling in view of the huge privileges and protection now provided to the private corporate sector by the state. These supports – beginning with the right to limited liability conceded in the mid-nineteenth century and culminating in the state’s assumption of the role of lender of last resort in the Keynesian era – have become indispensable to the present-day corporate sector. Yet the implied contract linked to these favours clearly must be that the corporate sector will in turn provide the economic well-being which the community requires.13 Hence it seems inconceivable that in a modern economy the presumption that private companies (whether truly answerable to their shareholders or not) can be the ultimate arbiters of our common economic destiny will be found tolerable indefinitely. Indeed future generations may well marvel that they were allowed so much latitude for so long.