In these times of exposed greed I see one very positive article in the newspaper, sticking out like a sore thumb in the abundant landscape of negative reports; all of them about the current financial crisis. The good news: small African farmers are going mobile.
I am probably very old fashioned with my leaning to a “socialist” perspective of economic order. But my observation is that it is getting into fashion again, now that one bank after the other is nationalised by its respective government.
Since my youth I have been convinced of the idea that wealth should somehow be distributed in such a way that we all have an acceptable standard of living. Later in my political career, I moved towards seriously radical thoughts, more in the line of “fuck the system, eliminate the captains of industry, incarcerate all the bankers and redistribute all the resources”. In short: Power to the People.
The idea was that a person only needs a limited amount of income to have a comfortable life, and that every step further results in overkill, decadence and complacency… and a shortage somewhere else. It went without saying: the big shots who were wielding large sums of money, were obviously stepping well over that threshold.
I was reading on the e-commerce bubble burst, and the ENRON and World.com debacle a while ago, and it became clear to me that the mistrust for the leaders of the industrial-financial complex, mistrust mainly coming from the left, was fully justified. It still is. If you read anything about that segment of our society now, one picture is very clearly pained: the bankers, company CEO’s, Hedge fund players, profit eager stakeholders; they are all a bunch of shameless robbers and money accumulators of criminal magnitude, who are indifferent to their own greed. They are only in the game for the big bucks and they seem to be untouched by any social insight.
Greed is eternal.*
One can only hope that these bastards are becoming so exposed by the current crisis, that the “normality” of this nauseating money raking will finally be put into the negative spotlight where it belongs. I am sceptical though, because when I survey the common audience, the attitude of big money-making, which caused this crisis in the first place, seems to sit in the same dark corner as those other “offences” nobody seems to really be offended by: traffic rule violations, tax evasion and the theft – via the Internet – of music, software and films.
Especially the second item, tax evasion, costs me, a modest member of the middle class, a lot of money and aggravation. The latter few mainly irritate me, because the simple civilian does not seem to understand what theft actually is when it is not his bicycle or his car that happens to get stolen.
But there is positive news. One segment of notorious criminals is slowly losing ground. They are the goods-movers, entrepreneurs who buy produce from small farmers and sell it on the world market with enormous profit margins. Usually, the farmers were dependant on the honesty and good-will of those buying their goods, and as such vulnerable to the buyers’ scheming and questionable intentions. Because information about market prices was scarce, a farmer could easily be taken out, and manipulated into selling his goods for far lower prices than the market could have offered. Eventually to the advantage of the profit margin the trafficker could make.
In Africa this is changing, now that the mobile telephone is taking firm root on the continent. This is good in general because more communication potential is desperately needed on this continent. It will make people more aware of the deplorable state their countries are in, so that they can organise themselves into interest groups that might make a difference. But more specifically, this proliferation of cellular telephoning is desirable for the African farmers, who were formerly conned out of fair prices. They can now contact any information source at will, thus putting themselves up as serious and relevant negotiators for the prices of their produce. And the mischievous businessmen, usually trying to undercut the sum that should be paid, are effectively circumvented.
What we see here is a very positive effect of the availability of small scale technology, bringing real advantage and democratic power to the small man in the field. I simply love that. The upshot will be that we will all eventually pay more for our coffee or for any other foreign cash crop that we happen to import from far away markets, but I don’t mind that at all. More important is the distribution of wealth, which seems to reshape itself into a more profitable curve for the traditionally poor. I will gladly pay the price for that.
Capitalism is showing small cracks along its edges, and maybe I will see the day that it crumbles down entirely. How is that prospect? The evening news will tell me more.
* Ferengi First Rule Of Acquisition
