 justice, peace and creation news |
| Echoes is an occasional publication of the World Council of Churches' cluster on "Issues and Themes", Justice, Peace and Creation team.
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Individual national governments and societies have lost out against corporations and banking
systems, which became "footloose" actors on "spaceship earth". They created a casino
economy that has very little to do with the real economy and the exchange of goods for the
survival and life of the people. It is a gigantic machine to make a few already very rich people,
corporations and banks, even richer day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute. But still
linked to the real economy via the role of money for production and trade, any crisis in the
casino of financial speculations has immediate and disastrous consequences for the real
economy and the people.
The Asia crisis has shown the volatility of this system. Instead of landing the spaceship and
re-building a basis for a moral economy, and life in just and sustainable communities, the major
actors like the World Trade Organisation, the IMF and the World Bank further refine their
approach, expand their area of influence and increase their power.
Delegates at the WCC's 1998 Assembly called upon the WCC to intensify and deepen its
work on globalization and debt a call that came at the right time.
Making Planet Earth a safe environment for the investments of transnational corporations and
financial capital is the ultimate goal of the accelerated process of economic globalization.
Globalization transformed and changed the economic and political landscape of the old
international paradigm put into place after World War II. In retrospect, the debt issue was one
of the most important tools to gain control over national governments and their economic and
financial policies through structural adjustment and stabilization programmes (SAPs), which
were designed and imposed by the IMF according to the principles of the neo-liberal ideology.
Nature in various ways and communities of the poor and marginalized had to pay the price for
that and continue to suffer. Even entire nations were pushed into a downward spiral of
impoverishment, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Martin Robra
