Two recent articles in popular news magazines caught my eye this weekend.
The Economist ran a story on climate change dealing with new evidence on global warming. Hopefully this should put to rest the furious debates triggered by the "climategate" scandal couple of years ago. In hindsight, that scandal was probably a good thing, inasmuch as it cleaned up the scientific research on the subject and served to keep climate change researchers honest. Scientists are, after all, human beings, and like all other specimens of our species, equally fallible and equally prone to fudging data to prove their hypotheses. They may not be as dishonest as an aspiring entrepreneur approaching a Venture Capitalist with a sexed-up business plan, but surely, they're prone to a little bit of disingenuousness here and there. But here's the fresh evidence now, from a squeaky clean team, led by a mild skeptic. Clearly, the "heat is on", to quote The Economist (and the first line from an old song).
The more interesting story was the one in the New Scientist a few days ago. It was about how a group of researchers had analyzed the complex network of relationships between over 43,000 transnational corporations (TNCs) and found that a relatively small number of them (mostly banks) wielded disproportionate power over the global economy. Here's an excerpt:
The work ... revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships. Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What's more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world's large blue chip and manufacturing firms - the "real" economy - representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.
Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protesters would probably say "not surprising, we've known this all along", but now there's some hard evidence. While economists have already noted the increasingly widening gap in the distribution of income in America, and observers have already commented that "much of what investment bankers do is socially worthless", this is the first study that establishes the nexus of global dominance by TNCs including some big Wall Street players.
Hopefully this should help establish a clearer perspective on the OWS protests, which have been criticized and supported for all the wrong reasons. And that clarity should help us look past the hype and hysteria, to recognize three simple truths at the heart of the pan-American Occupy protests: (a) It's all about fairness, and not really about equality (b) It's all about redefining capitalism, not about rejecting capitalism (and bringing in communism) (c) It's a "primal scream" of anguished masses, that doesn't require a structured manifesto to be morally valid. Dismissing the Occupy protests as a confused incoherent anti-establishment rant by a loose, louche lot of lazy leftist losers who blame the rich for their misery and who have no concrete solutions to offer, while convenient, would be a big mistake - one that may lead to worse consequences.
To any rational person with an open mind, the common thread that resonates in these two stories is the revelation that we are now at an important cusp of history - a point in time when we seriously need to rework our socioeconomic models to foster a kind of prosperity that will enable future generations to flourish. A global prosperity that will enhance rather than erode social and political harmony around the world, and that will maintain rather than destroy the planet's delicate ecological balance.
These are strong calls for change, backed by hard facts. We've been missing these calls in the past, under some pretext or other. But now it's high time the denial and the deception and the dithering stopped. Let's not keep missing these calls till it is too late to give our children a better future.
