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	Why The Super-Rich Need Governments by Dani Rodrik, Slavoj Zizek Project Syndicate, agencies   The very rich, F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote, “are different from you and me.” Their wealth makes them “cynical where we are trustful,” and makes them think “they are better than we are.” If these words ring true today, perhaps it is because when they were written, in 1926, inequality in the United States had reached heights comparable to today.   During much of the intervening period, between the end of World War II and the 1980s, inequality in the advanced countries was moderate. The gap between the super-rich and the rest of society seemed less colossal – not just in terms of income and wealth, but also in terms of attachments and social purpose. The rich had more money, of course, but they somehow still seemed part of the same society as the poor, recognizing that geography and citizenship made them share a common fate.   As the University of Michigan’s Mark Mizruchi points out in a recent book, the American corporate elite in the postwar era had “an ethic of civic responsibility and enlightened self-interest.” They cooperated with trade unions and favored a strong government role in regulating and stabilizing markets. They understood the need for taxes to pay for important public goods such as the interstate highway and safety nets for the poor and elderly.   Business elites were not any less politically powerful back then. But they used their influence to advance an agenda that was broadly in the national interest.   By contrast, today’s super-rich are “moaning moguls,” to use James Surowiecki’s evocative term. Exhibit A for Surowiecki is Stephen Schwarzman, the chairman and CEO of the private equity firm the Blackstone Group, whose wealth now exceeds $10 billion.   Schwarzman acts as if “he’s beset by a meddlesome, tax-happy government and a whiny, envious populace.” He has suggested that “it might be good to raise income taxes on the poor so they had ‘skin in the game,’ and that proposals to repeal the carried-interest tax loophole – from which he personally benefits – were akin to the German invasion of Poland.” Other examples from Surowiecki: “the venture capitalist Tom Perkins and Kenneth Langone, the co-founder of Home Depot, both compared populist attacks on the wealthy to the Nazis’ attacks on the Jews.”   Surowiecki thinks that the change in attitudes has much to do with globalization. Large American corporations and banks now roam the globe freely, and are no longer so dependent on the US consumer. The health of the American middle class is of little interest to them these days. Moreover, Surowiecki argues, socialism has gone by the wayside, and there is no need to coopt the working class anymore.   Yet if corporate moguls think that they no longer need to rely on their national governments, they are making a huge mistake. The reality is that the stability and openness of the markets that produce their wealth have never depended more on government action.   In periods of relative calm, governments’ role in writing and upholding the rules by which markets function can become obscured. It may seem as if markets are on autopilot, with governments an inconvenience that is best avoided.   But when economic storm clouds gather on the horizon, everyone seeks shelter under their home government’s cover. It is then that the ties that bind large corporations to their native soil are fully revealed. As former Bank of England Governor Mervyn King aptly put it in the context of finance, “global banks are global in life, but national in death.”   Consider how the US government stepped in to ensure financial and economic stability during the global financial crisis of 2008-2009. If the government had not bailed out large banks, the insurance giant AIG, and the auto industry, and if the Federal Reserve had not flooded the economy with liquidity, the wealth of the super-rich would have taken a severe blow. Many argued that the government should have focused on rescuing homeowners; instead, the government chose to support the banks – a policy from which the financial elite benefited the most.   Even in normal times, the super-rich depend on government support and action. It is largely the government that has financed the fundamental research that produced the information-technology revolution and the firms (such as Apple and Microsoft) that it has spawned.   It is the government that enacts and enforces the copyright, patent, and trademark laws that protect intellectual property rights, guaranteeing successful innovators a steady stream of monopoly profits. It is the government that subsidizes the higher-education institutions that train the skilled work force. It is the government that negotiates trade agreements with other countries to ensure that domestic firms gain access to foreign markets.   If the super-rich believe that they are no longer part of society and have little need of government, it is not because this belief corresponds to objective reality. It is because the prevailing story line of our time portrays markets as self-standing entities that run on their own fuel. This is a narrative that afflicts all segments of society, the middle class no less than the rich.   There is no reason to expect that the super-rich will act less selfishly than any other group. But it is not so much their self-interest that stands in the way of greater equality and social inclusion. The more significant roadblock is the missing recognition that markets cannot produce prosperity for long – for anyone – unless they are backed by healthy societies and good governance.   Leaving Democracy to the Experts - Secret trade negotiations quietly restructure our global economy, by Slavoj Žižek.   The key decisions concerning our economy are negotiated in secrecy, out of our sight, with no public debate. And such decisions set the coordinates for the unencumbered rule of capital.   On June 19, the second anniversary of Julian Assange’s confinement to the Ecuadorian embassy in London, WikiLeaks rendered public the secret draft text for the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) Financial Services Annex. The document was classified not only during TISA negotiations, but for five years after it enters into force.   While the TISA negotiations have not been censored outright, they have been barely mentioned in the media— a marginalization and secrecy that are in stark contrast with the world-historical importance of the TISA agreement. TISA would effectively serve as a kind of legal backbone for the restructuring of the world market, binding future governments regardless of who wins elections and what the courts say. It would impose a restrictive framework on public services, making it more difficult both to develop new ones and protect existing ones.   Is this discrepancy between politico-economic importance and secrecy really surprising? Is it not rather a sad but precise indication of where we in Western liberal-democratic countries stand with regard to democracy? A century and half ago, in Das Kapital, Karl Marx characterized the market exchange between worker and capitalist as “a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham.” For Marx, the ironic addition of Jeremy Bentham, the philosopher of egotist utilitarianism, provides the key to what freedom and equality effectively mean in capitalist society. To quote The Communist Manifesto: “By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying.” And by equality is meant the legal formal equality of buyer and seller, even if one of them is forced to sell his labor under any conditions, like today’s precarious workers. Today, freedom means the free flow of capital, as well as of the financial and personal data (both flows guaranteed by TISA). But what about democracy?   The main culprits of the 2008 financial meltdown now impose themselves as experts who can lead us on the painful path of financial recovery, and whose advice should therefore overcome parliamentary politics. Or, as former Italian prime minister and EU technocrat Mario Monti put it: “If governments let themselves be fully bound by the decisions of their parliaments without protecting their own freedom to act, a breakup of Europe would be a more probable outcome than deeper integration.”   Which, then, is the higher force whose authority can suspend the decisions of the democratically elected representatives of the people? As early as 1998, the answer was provided by Hans Tietmeyer, then the governor of the Deutsches Bundesbank, who held up “the permanent plebiscite of global markets” as superior to the “plebiscite of the ballot box.” Note the democratic rhetoric of this obscene statement: Global markets are more democratic than parliamentary elections, since the process of voting goes on in them permanently, rather than every four years, and globally, rather than within the limits of a nation-state. The underlying idea: When separated from this higher control of markets (and experts), parliamentary-democratic decisions are “irresponsible.”   This, then, is where we stand with regard to democracy. The TISA agreements are a perfect example. The key decisions concerning our economy are negotiated in secrecy, out of our sight, with no public debate. And such decisions set the coordinates for the unencumbered rule of capital. This severely limits the space for the decisions of democratically elected political representatives, leaving the political process to deal predominantly with issues toward which capital is indifferent, like the outcome of cultural wars.   Consequently, the release of the TISA draft marks a new stage in the WikiLeaks strategy. Until now, its activity has focused on making public how our lives are monitored and regulated by intelligence agencies of the state—the standard liberal concern of individuals threatened by oppressive state apparatuses. Now, another controlling force appears—capital—that threatens our freedom in a much more twisted way, perverting our very sense of freedom.   Since our society elevates free choice into a supreme value, social control and domination can no longer appear to be infringing on subject’s freedom. Un-freedom, then, is cloaked in the guise of its opposite: When we are deprived of universal healthcare, we are told that we are given a new freedom to choose our healthcare provider; when we no longer can rely on longterm employment and are compelled to search for a new precarious work every couple of years, we are told that we are given the opportunity to reinvent ourselves and discover new unexpected creative potentials that lurked in our personality; when we have to pay for the education of our children, we are told that we become “entrepreneurs of the self,” free to invest in our own—and our children’s—personal growth and fulfillment.   Constantly bombarded by these imposed “free choices,” forced to make decisions for which we are mostly not even properly qualified or informed, our “freedom of choice” increasingly becomes a burden that deprives us of true freedom of choice—the choice (or rather, decision) to move beyond market-freedom into the freedom of collectively organizing and regulating the process of production and exchange. It is more and more becoming clear that only in this way will humanity be able to cope with antagonisms that threaten its very survival (ecology, biogenetics, “intellectual property,” the rise of the new class of those excluded from public life).   Perhaps this paradox throws a new light on our obsession with the ongoing events in Ukraine—events extensively covered by the media, in clear contrast to the predominant silence on TISA. What fascinates us in the West is not the fact that people in Kiev stood up for the mirage of the European way of life, but that they—seemingly, at least—simply stood up and tried to take their fate into their own hands. They acted as a political agent enforcing a radical change—something that, as the TISA negotiations demonstrate, we in the West no longer have the choice to do.   * Slavoj Zizek, a Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst, is a senior researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, in Essen, Germany. He has also been a visiting professor at more than 10 universities around the world. Visit the related web page
	Making All Voices Count by Hivos, Ushahidi, Institute of Development Studies   Making All Voices Count is a global initiative that supports innovation, scaling, and research to deepen existing innovations and help harness new technologies to enable citizen engagement and government responsiveness.   This Grand Challenge focuses global attention on creative and cutting-edge solutions, including those that use mobile and web technology, to ensure the voices of all citizens are heard and that governments have the capacity, as well as the incentive, to listen and respond. The aim of Making All Voices Count is a substantial push towards effective democratic governance and accountability.   Making All Voices Count aims to create: tools to enable citizens to give feedback on government performance; stronger incentives for, and greater capacity within, governments to respond to citizens’ feedback; incentives and the capacity for citizens to engage with government to improve their policies and services.   The field of technology for Open Government is relatively young and the consortium partners, Hivos, Institute of Development Studies (IDS) and Ushahidi, are a part of this rapidly developing domain. These institutions have experience in the field of citizen engagement, government accountability, technical innovation and research.   http://www.makingallvoicescount.org/news/ http://www.makingallvoicescount.org/news/28-cutting-edge-projects-to-boost-government-accountability-citizen-engagement/ Visit the related web page
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