Politics Has Lost Control of “Rogue Economics”
Loretta Napoleoni, Italian economist and Fulbright Scholar, has a new book that’s piqued my interest. Her appearance on Democracy Now this week finished with me very interested in her book. [Full Transcript] Napoleoni defined rogue economics at the start of her interview with Amy Goodman:
Rogue economics is a sort of umbrella under which we find the criminal economy, the illegal economy, but also those gray areas, gray areas where there is not a proper regulation, where there is not legislation for the economy. Now, these gray areas in this particular crisis are being created by globalization. Now, this happens generally when there are great transformations. We have seen it during the Industrial Revolution, but we also have seen it during the crisis in 1929. The economy suddenly starts moving faster than politics, and politics can’t manage to keep pace with it, so it can’t manage to regulate the economy. So, the current crisis is the product of the 1990s, of the easy money, cheap credit of the 1990s.
The discussion turns to Napoleoni’s “provocative” argument that democracy and slavery coincide in history and the contemporary world. She cites sexual slavery in Eastern Europe since the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the well-documented enslavement of children in West Africa’s cocoa production, led by Western multi-nationals, and, most startlingly, the economic and social conditions contemporary United States in the interview.
Well, I think that what we are facing today is something very, very similar to what’s happened in this country several centuries ago, because when I talk about slavery, I do not talk about the new form of slavery. I talk about people who are deprived of their freedom, who are forced to work for, you know, the slave traders, who are given only the sustenance to survive and nothing else. It is true slavery.
She is critical of the internet, as well, for being among the best examples of an unregulated environment that allows criminality and exploitation. Nonetheless, she still wisely markets her book with a rather slick YouTube video:
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