Hoewel de neoliberale dogma's een fiasco zijn gebleken voor onze reële economie worden ze nog steeds te vuur en te zwaard toegepast en doorgedrukt. Van redelijkheid of gezond verstand is geen sprake meer. Het gaat om de pure uitoefening van macht en het overdragen van alle bezittingen aan de kleine groep welgestelden. De staat wordt afgebroken waardoor de vrije jongens vrij spel hebben. Ook de natuur wordt steeds verder gecommercialiseerd en geprivatiseerd.
Onderstaand artikel heeft het over de nexus, de verbinding tussen natuur en de 'financialisering' van onze maatschappij. Met financialisering wordt bedoeld een economisch systeem waarin het winstprincipe voorop staat en waarin de financiële markten voorrang hebben op de reële economie. In dit systeem wordt alles gereduceerd tot iets dat verhandeld, gekocht en verkocht kan worden. Het is een cynisch en totalitair systeem dat geen oog heeft voor menselijke normen en waarden.
(Oscar Wilde)
FoodAndWaterWatch: "In a Green Economy world, the financialization of nature will take place through new technologies, focusing on innovations funded by public money to profit private companies in the name of resource efficiency. Among the nexus solutions are the promotion of desalination based on renewable energy, genetic engineering/breeding for food security and large dams.
The financialization of nature will also take place through financial mechanisms, such as the creation of a virtual market to manage the allocation of our commons. Water markets and trade-able rights, payments for ecosystem services, the economic value of “natural infrastructure” are all instruments that are part of the nexus solutions as well as the Green Economy. Policies to allow these financial mechanisms to take place have also been envisioned, demonstrated by numerous calls for governments to integrate these instruments into their negotiations.
Experience has shown that market schemes like REDD have not helped in climate change mitigation and have had negative impacts on local communities. Why push ahead with such market mechanisms when the past few years have only shown how miserably these have failed? At a conference in the European Parliament before Bonn, a speaker from the UNEP International Resources Panel insisted it should be Finance ministers dealing with the environmental crisis and not Environment ministers, because they are (allegedly) the ones who know how to evaluate environmental systems properly. Their aim is to transfer the entire logic of nature functions into financial market functions. It is hard to see how this point of view could lead to technological advances and investment mechanisms that promote social and environmental justice.
The Bonn conference completely ignored the European financial crisis. Focus was placed solely on private finance and how to create incentives for private investment, with no space whatsoever left for finding solutions for public financing. Instead, we should be looking at innovative global taxation methods and at appropriate national tax frameworks. The Financial Transaction Tax (FTT) was never mentioned, though seems to have made it into the “points to be considered” of the final policy recommendations thanks to input from civil society after the conference. Another point civil society managed to add for consideration was the restriction of investor speculation on commodities during times of shortage.
The nexus may sound like a new idea but it does not distinguish itself from the corporate trends of best practice and voluntary guidelines, clearly preferring that route to regulation and enforcement. While they made everyone stand up and clap at the new “nexus” solutions, to the extent of inventing a special “nexus clap”, the question still remained: how exactly is the nexus in the framework of a Green Economy going to contribute to a fairer and more sustainable world? How is it going to help fulfill our right to water, food and energy? We have a fairly good idea about who will benefit from it and the likely candidates will definitely not be the environment or the “bottom billion”."
Omdat onze wereld geglobaliseerd is zullen negatieve effecten van de heersende financiële en economische politiek op natuur en klimaat desastreus zijn. Het neoliberalisme is een totalitair systeem dat armoede in stand houdt en erger nog veroorzaakt en zorgt voor totale uitbuiting van mens en natuur. Het wordt hoog tijd dat we ons dat realiseren.