A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

then the same governments are taking measures and implementing programmes
that violate and contradict agreements that they themselves
have adopted. As Victor Baez, Secretary General of the Argentinian
Trade-Union Confederation (CSA), rightly declared: “the international
norms as a whole form part of the common goods that seek the common
good of humanity and therefore they have to be preserved and strengthened.”
The international institutions are incapable of forcing the carrying
out of resolutions that are reduced to simple ‘wishful expressions’.
Hence it follows that when more money is made from financial speculation
than in the productive activities of goods and services (that generate
wealth) sooner or later the bubble will burst. In addition, we have
“the free circulation of speculative capital at the global level, without
controls or regulation, as well as the creation of financial instruments
without real guarantees and the continuing existence of the tax havens
which accumulate capital from speculation, corruption, crime, drug traffic
and armaments, etc. All this inevitably results in a crisis of the economic
and financial system, with serious consequences on employ ment,
the environmental equilibrium, food, energy, the drying up of the water
resources so that it constitutes a veritable systemic crisis.
I am not going to go into the details of the causes of these crises.
Susan George and many others, particularly in the Madrid forum, have
made important contributions to the subject.
They have particularly stressed the idea that if the governments do not
govern, who governs is the military-industrial complex, the oil corporations,
the banking and financial system, the medical laboratories, the
huge communication and information monopolies. All these are linked
and under the control of a dominant international elite which has the
hegemonic power to govern the world.
As long as politics and governments (responsible for the common good)
do not recover power and put it at the service of society as a whole,
making the economy and finance serve human beings (men and
women), we shall not see a real solution of the crisis.
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