Postmodern Financial Reality

The world financial system is in chaos as governments seek to control the damage. There are as many economic projections as there are economists and many honest economist admit they had no idea that this crisis was coming and no idea what will happen in the future.

Economics grew out of the Enlightenment period when it was believed (and indeed is still proposed by many) that every thing can be understood if we analyse it enough! There is a belief that universal explanations can be found for all scientific and human phenomena through disciplined research.

The problem with this idea is that world conspires against such theories by becoming more and more complex, fragmented and unpredictable.

It is clear that the unregulated financial markets have become more and more complex and uncontrollable and are really underwritten by human emotion not some rational system as claimed.

It is the complexity of technologies offering instantaneous and simultaneous transactions from as many points on the globe as there are stars in the sky combined with the real human emotion of fear that makes the global financial market so hard to understand and to control.

Rationalities founded in the optimism of the Enlightenment that look to universal explanations will be inadequate in identifying these crises and their cause.

In the end we have to live in an exciting world of unpredictability, complexity and fragmentation and manage risk as best we can without the comfort of the Enlightenment promise of understanding, managing and exploiting everything.

For a proposal for a new Economy read David Korten article "Beyond the Bailout:Agenda for a New Economy" http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?id=3050




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Symbolic Injustice

So Lex Wotton escapes with a six year sentence with parole as early as 2010 for his part in the riots that besieged Palm Island in the wake of Mulrunji Doomadgee's death while in police custody!!!

The police officer, who at the time of Mulrunji's death, had a duty of care towards his prisioner and whose actions were hidden from view, escapes any condemnation either of the law or of his professional body.

There is an interesting parallel here that should not escape us.

While Wotton's anger at what he perceived as another injustice in the long and painful history of this island was exposed on the media's cameras no such privileged was in the offing for Mulrunji who died behind the thick walls of the police institutional mechanisms.

Some actions, it seems, are protected by institutional processes and go unseen and unpunished, while other spontaneous and less calculated actions are exposed for all to see and become yet another manifestation of neglect and political disregard for one group of Australians over many years.

All actors here, both Indigenous and Police are victims of an unfortunate history both on this island and in Australia as a whole, however there is a clear difference of power between these actors - a power that often results in the death of the less powerful while in the control of the "authorities".

While policing institutions appear to be free from recrimination and while those that are supposed to serve the community act in such ways against the most marginalized, these undercurrents of injustice will not abate.

Palm Island is a microcosm of the relationships that often exists between the marginalized and the policing authorities and the imbalances of power produced by our social processes.

(Of interest http://sydney.indymedia.org.au/story/drop-charges-against-lex-wotton-melbourne-speakout )and http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2007/s1965120.htm