Voices in Sweden about the financial crisis and the state of affairs in the world…

the family Bonnier eating dinner.

[Slightly edited October 5, quite angrily written, so I wonder how my English was?]. Voices in Sweden about the financial crisis and the state of affairs in the world today: It has been about creating needs in a constantly, perpetually ascending spiral in societies all over the world. A have-mentality. But do we need to be slaves under consumption?

The bank bosses have gotten million bonuses and million parachutes.

The worst enemy to the finance and corporation world is contentedness.

Still the most important idea of business is to create needs and desires (or cravings) in a constantly ascending spiral. Nobody shall be satisfied.

Quite ironically: at the same time we are blamed for being too demanding!!! One of the contradictions and confusions again!?

It stood about the bourgeois’ scale of value and view on man. Are there people wanting to live outside their (the bourgeois’) conception of the world, in another world we think is possible a writer wonders?

Can the time come when having two cars will be seen as something embarrassing and not – as it is now – something enviable.

One writer writes that the modern “extortion”, with the help of media, advertisement, pr-consults, lifestyle-agents and trademarks, forces a lifestyle on people that has shown to be deeply destructive, but all this is (or could be, even if I think it is difficult, with all the pressure around) something one can do something about oneself, in contrast to the wage-slavery during the former turn of the century.

In the middle of this I saw that tonight (or tomorrow, I didn’t look properly) they are sending a new version of “Let’s dance”, this time the competitors are learning to dance on ice (with skates!!). Yes, this is what people are entertained with…

One can rebel against oneself and ones own have-desire, the desire you have been enticed into. You can start to grin at medias holding up the rich as models and idols (as even the newspaper ICA-kuriren here in Sweden started to a couple of years ago, and then I unsubscribed); the same medias who have been worshiping the finance-men and managers whom now have thrown the world into crisis. Haven’t they “forfeited their pound”?

No, they need to make even worse things?? But people lower on the status-scale failing aren't apologized, sometimes at all. Yes, people are treated differently, depending on their status, where on the scale they stand. What about people's equal value only seen to the fact that they are born to this world? Quite ironically. And others get ashamed for much smaller "crimes”!! That about proportions…

This obsession with the rich and successful, supplied by the media, doesn’t it all of a sudden feel incredibly out-of-date?

One person here writes about (not least) a moral fiasco for Bush, for a politics that has failed so much and in so many areas.

Does the free market actually function? Isn’t it ruled by a few actors actually?

One writer thinks it would be honorable if the ones analyzing the finance-capital as a positive, creative power in the economy some years ago (the written words are still there, and can be read even today), stating that the new global market with all its insurances and reinsurances is sound, could apologize for their analysis. Admit to what they wrote some years ago.

Or that they at least could search on the words “the economy’s ability to function” and get surprised over that they only a few years ago thought that a big welfare state and high taxes are checking for the (the economic, and overall) “growth.” Sweden and the Scandinavian countries are proofs that a big welfare state and quite high taxes aren't curbing for the economical growth? But our current government is now rapidly destroying this? (but the situation here hasn't made us lazy workers I think. We are, or have been, hard workers? And interested in other countries and phenomena in the world? Our society hasn't been a closed society, even if we have had social democratic, i.e., "left wing", government for long? But a government that has turned more and more to the right, yes!).

The most usual prevarication today is the statement that the problem is about “anonymous owners”, which means owners not steered by a steady “owner hand”, like the Wallenberg’s or Bonnier’s in Sweden.

People try to earn money on money, instead of investing them in our real lives.

The financial crisis isn’t an accident, but an element belonging to the capitalism.

It’s the taxpayers who have to pay for the speculators loans, instead of seeing their money going to school, care and nursing, or what it’s called in English. All those instances are forced aside by what the (many times well paid) speculators have done.

The ones winning on all this are the members in corporations’ managements, because the system makes so they get their bonuses and bizarre wages apart from the fact if the businesses goes well or not.

It’s a myth that the market is stable; the ones winning on these situations are those living on the differences in prizes, so what’s happening isn’t an accident.

How can one interpret our current finance minister saying that the world economy is influenced by “raw avariciousness”?

Can there be two comments to this?

1/ He is an eager supporter of market economy and this statement only reinforces the myth that this ought not to happen, that the crisis has nothing to do with the system itself.

2/ On top of it he individualizes the problem. He says that the speculators are greedy in the same manner as he says that the ones with no job are lazy!

What we see now is a saving-action for the capitalism. There is no movement which can take over. What’s so dangerous about our time is that there is no strong worker’s movement, and this increases the risk somebody else takes over, in the worst case the fascism.

See the American neurologist Jonathan Pincus on his findings, and further about perversion and perverted needs.

Texts I have used in this posting you find here.