"EX-GREEDY' CAUASES PUBLIC ANGER

AS MPs Threaten the Executive Now Ghanaian know the trues colors of majority of our politicians.A bunch of corrupt greedy ,selfish and insensitive group who pretend to care about the people who put them in power. President Mills last week revised the Ex-gratia (Ex-greedy as i call it) payment that was written by the disgraced former adviser to Ex president Kuffour. This did not go down well with both the former and current Parliamentarians and government official who will benefit from it and a lot has been threaten since. Led by the chief stomach politician, Freddie Blay ,former deputy speaker and MP in the last parliament these group of beneficiaries have threaten to institute a legal action against the President for what they consider as an unjust and unconstitutional action by the president. The current parliamentarians especially those in the NPP opposition have either publicly condemned the downward revision or or quietly supported and given moral support behind the scenes. the NPP with the notable exception of P.C. Appiah Ofori are also threatening to cause problems for the the executive thorough "constitutional blackmail. (Un)Surprisingly some members of the ruling NDC are said to be angry about the action of their president are grumbling and wishing for a reversal of the decision. These insensitive politician are impervious to the angry public outcry against their excesses. The public mood is that of anger and some members of the the suffering Ghanaian populace are so disillusioned they have threatened not to vote again since all the politicians from both sides are the same.

RICH PEOPLES EXCESSES CAUSING THE POOR

In the gilded age (less than 2 years ago)the rich had it so good that their excesses became a constant feature our our times. We became so used to it in some few years it became normal.Champagne flowed, private jets flew around, huge fuel guzzling SUVs were driven around and a lot of money was earned and burned by the 2% of the world population who were part of the super rich and controlled over 90% of the worlds resources.The gap between the rich and the poor widened so much that for the first time in human history more people had more money than ever before whilst at the same time more people than ever were classified as poor. Those at the fringes of the global economy actual experienced a fall in their incomes and resources and this pushed more people into poverty. It was not only in developing countries where this happened but also in the rich economies. The US led the way with the shrinking of the middle class with a inexplicable situation where at the time the richest section of the society was burgeoning , the number of people classified as poor increased about 40%. When the "masters of the universe" were devising planning and executing their financial engineering schemes it actually affected the poorest of the poor an when the crash came the poor are the first and worst sufferers. The World Bank warned last week that up to 53 million more people around the world could fall into poverty in 2009 as a result of the global economic slump, and up to 400,000 more children could die each year as a result of rising infant mortality. The statistics highlight the worldwide character of the social catastrophe being caused by the deepening crisis. The bank's new estimates for 2009 suggest that lower economic growth rates will force 53 million more people to exist on less than $2 a day than was expected prior to the downturn. This is on top of the 130-155 million people pushed into poverty in 2008 because of soaring food and fuel prices. The bank's extremely low benchmark for poverty—$2 a day—suggests that its figures vastly underestimate the actual number of people around the world who are barely able to feed, clothe and house themselves. Preliminary estimates for 2009 to 2015 forecast that an average 200,000 to 400,000 more children a year, a total of 1.4 to 2.8 million over the six-year period, may die if the crisis persists. In addition, millions of people already living in poverty "will be pushed further below the poverty line," according to the World Bank policy note,"The Global Economic Crisis: Assessing Vulnerability with a Poverty Lens." The note states: "Almost all developed and developing countries are suffering from the global economic crisis. While developed countries are experiencing some of the sharpest contractions, households in developing countries are much more vulnerable and likely to experience acute negative consequences in the short- and long-term." Almost 40 percent of 107 developing countries are "highly exposed" to the poverty and hardship effects of the crisis and the remainder are "moderately exposed," according to the report. The bank warns that three quarters of these countries will be unable to raise funds domestically or internationally to finance job-creation, the delivery of basic infrastructure and essential services—including health, education and core public administration—and safety net programs for the vulnerable. The statistics provide only a pale outline of the impoverishment, malnutrition and misery caused by the global recession. These outcomes are an indictment of the anarchy of the private profit system. First, the speculative escalation of food and fuel prices of 2007-08 threw up to 155 million people into poverty; and now the financial crash is threatening many millions more. These forecasts make a mockery of the United Nation's Millennium Development Goals, which set targets to overcome poverty by 2015. The World Bank released its forecast to coincide with the Group of Seven (G7) summit of finance ministers and central bank governors in Rome last Friday and Saturday. Anti-poverty organisations from the UN Millennium Campaign joined the bank in lobbying for the establishment of a "Vulnerability Fund" in which each developed country would devote 0.7 percent of its stimulus package to aid impoverished "developing" countries. Even this utterly inadequate proposal received short shrift from the G7 ministers. In their final communiqué, a single one-sentence reference to poorer economies said: "The G7 also stresses the need to support emerging and developing countries' access to credit and trade financing and resume private capital flows, and is committed to explore urgently ways, including through multilateral development banks, to enhance this support." In other words, the plight of hundreds of millions of destitute people must be left in the hands of the same financial system and "private capital flows" that have broken down, producing the worst global collapse since the 1930s. The Rome summit proved incapable of offering any new measures to stem the rapidly deteriorating global situation. As the meeting gathered, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) warned that worldwide job losses from the recession that started in the United States in December 2007 could hit 50 million by the end of 2009. The ILO expressed concern that "social tensions may begin to arise." The slowdown has already claimed 3.6 million American jobs. While the number of jobs in the US has been falling since the end of 2007, the pace of layoffs in Europe, Asia and the poorest countries has now caught up, underscoring the global character of the crisis engulfing capitalism. Unemployment in Britain is expected to rise to 9.5 percent by the middle of 2010, from 6.3 percent now, according to Peter Dixon, an economist with Commerzbank in London, and Germany's jobless rate could rise to 10.5 percent from 7.8 percent. More than 20 million Chinese internal migrant workers have already been thrown out of work, and in India, another former boom economy, about 500,000 people lost jobs between October and December 2008, according to one recent analysis. "This is the worst we've had since 1929," Laurent Wauquiez, France's employment minister said in comments cited by the New York Times. "The thing that is new is that it is global, and we are always talking about that. It is in every country, and it makes the whole difference." The G7 ministers were confronted by news of a record gross domestic product (GDP) fall across the Eurozone—1.5 percent in the December quarter—and warnings by economists that Japan, the world's second largest economy, is contracting at an annualised rate of more than 10 percent. However, the summit simply reiterated calls for further stimulus and bank bailout packages of the kind that have already failed to halt the recession. Despite the global dimension of the economic and social problems, the meeting could barely paper over the mounting tensions between the major powers and the growth of protectionism. The final communiqué merely restated a perfunctory commitment toward "avoiding protectionist measures," even though a rash of such measures has occurred since the G7 ministers last met in October. On the eve of the summit, the US Congress adopted President Barack Obama's $787 billion economic stimulus package with a "buy American" clause that requires the use of American steel in infrastructure-building projects. In France last week, President Nicolas Sarkozy agreed to supply low-interest loans of 3 billion euros, or $3.86 billion, each to PSA Peugeot Citroën and Renault in exchange for an agreement not to lay off French workers, which means that Eastern European plants will bear the brunt of planned cutbacks. Last month in Britain, unions organised strikes and protests against the employment of construction workers from Italy and Portugal, invoking Prime Minister Gordon Brown's earlier promise of "British jobs for British workers." These are not isolated developments. Most of the stimulus and financial bailout packages adopted since last October contain measures designed to rescue the national economy, banks and industrial sectors, directly or indirectly at the expense of those of other countries. Economists have noted the summit's failure to stem protectionism. "The G7 statement ticks all the right boxes, but as expected does not go beyond generic statements of principle and commitments that we have heard before," Marco Annunziata, the chief economist in London for UniCredit, Italy's largest bank, told Canada's Globe and Mail. Despite the expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars, all the national-based rescue packages have been unable to prevent the rapid growth of unemployment. None can resolve the global crisis because they are all based on protecting and upholding the interests of the financial and corporate elites in each country. While official lip service is paid to coordinated action and to avoiding protectionism, the world is once again witnessing a rise of "beggar-thy-neighbour" responses of the kind that dominated in the 1930s, culminating in the Second World War. As in Britain, France and the US, the trade unions are at the forefront of the nationalist response, which serves only to divide the international working class along national lines and divert working people from the actual source of the galloping joblessness and social misery—the private profit system itself. Rising unemployment rates, especially among young workers, have led to explosive protests in countries as varied as Latvia, Chile, Greece, Bulgaria and Iceland and contributed to widespread strikes in Italy and France. But without a clear alternative political perspective there is a danger that these upheavals will be contained and trapped within a national framework. The precipitous worsening of global poverty and unemployment and the plunge into a new period of trade wars and military conflagrations can be halted in only one way. It requires a conscious international struggle by the working class on the basis of a socialist program to overturn the capitalist order and build a new world economy based on human and social need, not corporate and private wealth accumulation.

GHANA FROM THE INSIDE

MY Perspectives from the Real Ghana as i traveled extensively in Central Region This will be the first of many blogs I will be entering while I will be on the field. Well if u are lost ; I am conducting a monitoring and evaluation as a member of a team engaged by the Ghana statistical services (GSS) together with the institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER) to conduct a baseline survey of districts that will benefit from the Millennium Challenge Account . After a difficult and mostly disorganized training program preceding a waiting period of about a month we finally set of at 1:28pm from Accra on 31 March 2008 towards Winneba in the Central Region. We arrived at Winneba around 4pm. After a meeting with the District Coordinating Director who seemed preoccupied with other things he directed us to The Army Guest House to arrange for lodging. Unfortunately for us we were told the place was fully booked for weeks. We went round a couple of hotels looking for accommodation and it became apparent that the District has a very bad record in paying its bills. For this reason no hotel was willing to give us accommodation without upfront payment. We finally got an average looking guest house where we were paired two in a room. The lady among us was given a room on her own (for obvious reasons). On the first day 2 of the team members had not fully joined us. One of them lived in the region where we were working, so he chose to commute to the survey base for the first couple of days. The other called and arranged to join us on the second day. On the second day we earnestly proceeded to start preliminary work. With the assistance of the Resident District Statistician we went ahead and identified all the Enumeration Areas (EA) that contained our respondents as well as the selected households .Winneba contained 8 being a sizeable town. This exercise proved to be quiet challenging given the nature of planning and address system in the town. During the evening the hotel manager told us that the district authorities had only arranged for only 5 days of stay we were expected to check out on the 5th day. After some long enquiries we found the identity of the various assembly members for the respective electoral areas. The assemblymen are important for 2 reasons • As part of due process and protocol they are the point of reference for all the work in the chosen community or EA. • Thety are the main respondents to the community questionnaires. On the 3rd day the two group members who had not joined us turned up; compounding our already precarious accommodation problems. Work started promptly around 7:00am. The various interviewers were sent to their respective EAs to familiarize themselves with their respondents and possibly complete the 1st cycle for the chosen 5 respondents. Meanwhile myself together with the supervisor and the driver proceeded to find accommodation. First we decided to opt for free accommodation with the assistance of the assemblymen .Being the "real men and women on the ground” we had strong conviction they will be in a better place to help. We were even pleased to hear that the assembly member for electoral area who happened to be the presiding member for the Awutu-Effutu-Senya Districts was willing to help us.The Hon Alexander Markin (who seemed ubiquitous with his highly visible billboards erected everywhere there was space in town) we were told was currently in Accra and that he will be in winneba that very evening . We were given the impression that he will assist us as soon as he gets to know about us and our mission . We acquired his contact details and promptly got in touch with him. He promised to "sort us out" as soon as he got into town.We later gathered that the presiding member was coming to oversee the conduct of a second round of elections for the confirmation of of the New Municipal Chief Executive for the newly created municipality of Winneba .(The Ewutu-Effutu -Senya district had been split into 2 and the results left Winneba as a municipality ) Apparently the man nominated by th President of the Republic had failed to get enough votes needed for him to be confirmed.The grassroots people alleged that the new MCE was arrogant even though most of them do not question his ability to perform. This necessity the re-election . We finally saw the presiding member only for a brief moment and all our hope was dashed when he shrugged us off. 15 May Following our earlierConducted protocols at Senya - Beraku and Awutu Bereku we went ahead to meet with the various community leaders including Assemblymen and Chiefs. We first stopped at Senya the hometown of the late former Vice President Kow Nkensen Arkaa. It is a mainly fishing community with an estimated population of about 18,000.The town is a semi-urban area with paved roads police station ,post office,a secondary school etc.A colonial fort and a huge mansion on the seashore are the main prominent structure in the town. We met the King of the town,a towering bulky man who has dignity written in his demeanor.He revealed that he is the Presiding Member for the newly created Awutu -Senya district .He was very welcoming and seemed eager to assist.He assured us he together with his assemblymen and unit committee members will secure accommodation for the interviewers who will stay in the community and facilitate the work. 16th May We dropped the team members off at their various stations :Alex at Aberful,Rashid at Bontrase ,Awotwe at Senya - Beraku and Josephine at Awutu Bereku. On Monday 19th May we visited a 72 year old feisty woman in the Winneba township to look for accommodation .The interesting aspect of the meeting was how from nowhere she managed to bring the Chieftancy issue that had dogged the town for years into the conversation. The level of her knowledge and passion suggested she was an interested party. 5/22/08 I have seen deprived schools in my lifetime but nothing prepared me for the absolutely shocking condition of the Awutu -Bereku AME Zion Primary and JHS.The school is housed in a flimsy wooden structure ,without a concrete floor ,window, doors or p 5/23/08 We took our GPS reading and school questionnaire from the AME Zion J.H.S. The condition of the school is simply abject. Situated in a flood- prone zone ,it sorrounded by a lagoon and stinks of rotten bog. The head gave a sorrowful rendition of the myriad problems that the school faces including the fact that classes have to be ended whenever clouds gather and rain threatens. He also complained about the working condition of teachers in general and how pupils who passed through the school go on to earn certificates as community health nurses and get paid 2 to 3 times more than himself.He remostrated on how the gap in salary of teachers and nurses which used to be at par has suddenly widened over last decade .

Science, religion and society

It was refreshing to see the publication of Richard Dawkins’s book The God Delusion. It is not every day that one of the premier evolutionary biologists in the world publishes a text dedicated to the defense of atheism. Dawkins has done us a service, if only in making more acceptable the general proposition that religion and science are at odds with each other, and that it is science that should win out. The God Delusion has received an enthusiastic response from the public, including in the United States, generally considered the most religious of all industrialized countries. Dawkins book has so far spent 24 weeks in New York Times bestseller top 15 for nonfiction. During a book tour in the US last year, Dawkins drew large and sympathetic crowds, including at some states (such as Kansas), more often associated with religious fundamentalism. Some of the interest generated by Dawkins’s book is no doubt due to the author, whose books, including The Selfish Gene, have become standard texts in evolutionary biology. Whether or not one agrees with everything he says about the theory of evolution, it is certainly true that Dawkins is a gifted writer with a capacity to explain complicated issues in direct and clear language. However, there is more involved than this. There is a hunger for alternative perspectives, for views that challenge supposedly universally accepted propositions. There is a latent and widespread oppositional sentiment, and Dawkins’s book appeals to a deep hostility to the religious fundamentalism and backwardness that increasingly characterize governments in Britain, the US and internationally. Against the “appeasement” of religion There are certain severe limitations to Dawkins’s presentation of religion, which will be discussed below. However, perhaps most laudatory in the book is its willingness to challenge not only religious orthodoxy of various stripes, but also those within the scientific community who insist upon attempting to reconcile religion and science. The perspective of these thinkers (who Dawkins dubs the “Neville Chamberlain School of Evolutionists”) is that science can best be defended from fundamentalists (such as those who want to ban evolution from public school curricula) by accommodating non-fundamentalist strands of religion. This is done, according to these thinkers, by insisting that religion and science need not be in conflict, that perhaps they are complementary, or at least address different questions. The late evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould has been closely associated with this perspective, arguing that religion and science occupy what he called “non-overlapping magisteria,” using a verbose term to cloak an extremely superficial idea. “To cite old clichés,” Gould once wrote, as quoted by Dawkins, “science gets the age of rocks, and religion the rock of ages; science studies how the heavens go, and religion how to go to heaven.” Dawkins gives the adequate reply: “This sounds terrific—right up until you give it a moment’s thought.” One of Dawkins central claims is, “The presence or absence of a creative super-intelligence is unequivocally a scientific question, even if it is not in practice—or not yet—a decided one. So also is the truth or falsehood of every one of the miracle stories that religions rely upon to impress multitudes of the faithful.” In other words, if God exists and is anything more than a vacuous concept, he/she/it must have some effect on the world. This, certainly, is the belief of most religiously-minded people, who believe that God intervenes in the world, performs miracles, answers prayers, etc. Dawkins cites one experiment finding that patients who receive prayers don’t actually do better than patients who don’t receive them. This may seem a somewhat silly experiment (which was actually performed by supporters of religion) but it does illustrate the basic point—if religious phenomena exist, they can be tested scientifically. While this is an important observation, there is something missing in Dawkins’s presentation of science and religion. He treats the “God hypothesis” as basically equivalent to the claim, for example, that a teapot is in orbit around Mars (a famous proposition given by Bertrand Russell, who pointed out that though he may not technically know that such a teapot does not exist, he is not obliged to be agnostic about it). His ultimate justification for his atheism is that it is very probable that God does not exist, just as it is very probable that there is no teapot orbiting Mars. The preponderance of evidence indicates, says Dawkins, that God does not exist. This “99 percent atheism” actually leaves the door open for skepticism if seriously challenged. The God hypothesis, however, is a very different type of hypothesis from the teapot hypothesis. Indeed, it is not really a hypothesis at all, since it involves at its core the claim that the process of scientific investigation—including the testing of hypotheses— cannot arrive at truth (or at least the complete truth). The religious proposition involves the belief that there exists truth outside the possibility of scientific investigation, and therefore the statement that there can be no scientific justification for religious belief is—from the point of view of the religious individual—beside the point. One is merely question begging by asking, “But what are your scientific grounds for your non-belief in science?” The conflict between science and religion lies at a more fundamental level than Dawkins’s empiricism. The foundation for atheist belief is not really that God is an unlikely proposition (though the hypothesis, if taken as a scientific hypothesis, is the most unlikely hypothesis one can come up with), but that atheism flows from a materialist world-outlook—a philosophical position that holds that everything that exists consists of the law-governed development of matter in its various forms. Since matter is law-governed, it can be subject to scientific investigation, and at the same time science requires the presumption that the objects of its investigation follow causal relationships. This, ultimately, is the central conflict between religion and science, which is conflict between materialism and idealism, rationality and irrationality. The proof of the materialist world outlook lies in the entire historical experience of mankind in its interaction with nature, particularly in the extraordinary development of scientific knowledge over the past several hundred years. The proof of materialism is demonstrated in this historical practice, whereby mankind has not only formed hypotheses, but realized these hypotheses in the transformation of the material world. It has become a fad among those who argue that science and religion are compatible, while also arguing strongly for the teaching of evolution in schools (and perhaps most prominent among these is Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education), to make a distinction between methodological naturalism and metaphysical naturalism. Science, according to these thinkers, depends on methodological naturalism—the assumption during scientific experimentation that there exists nothing outside the material world of cause and effect. This is distinct from the claim that there is actually nothing outside of this material world of cause and effect. Such an argument, taken up by those who would defend science education, in fact undermines the foundation of science altogether, since it eliminates any solid connection between scientific investigation and reality. There may exist a God—or any other supernatural entity—but science can never discover this underlying truth (what Kant would term the noumena), since science relies on the assumption of causal relationships and natural law-governed processes, which supposedly may or may not allow humans to arrive at a complete understanding of the universe. The ability of science to predict and transform the material world demonstrates, however, that it is not only a useful method, but a means of arriving at an understanding of the real world. Through a rigorous system of observation, reason, hypotheses and experimentation, science allows humans to arrive at truths about the world as it is “in itself.” It is a systematic means of testing the truth of our conceptions through practical interaction with the world. Its rationality is what distinguishes science from religion, which in one way or another relies on the irrational, on superstition, on “faith.” Religious belief and social history Dawkins does not deal seriously with any of these philosophical issues, and his defense of atheism, while important, is ultimately unconvincing and superficial. He devotes a considerable amount of space in his book to discussing the various “proofs” for the existence of God (the cosmological argument, the argument from design, etc.), all of which have been refuted a hundred times already, and to which Dawkins adds nothing new. Most of these proofs (such as the assertion that every effect must have a cause, a recession that must lead ultimately to an uncaused cause, which is God) are not remotely convincing to anyone who does not already believe in God, and their refutation will not in general be convincing to anyone who does. On the more frequently invoked “argument from design,” Dawkins points out that Darwin put an end to this proof in his theory of evolution, which explained how complex, apparently intelligently-designed organisms, are the product of a long process of natural selection. In discussing the origins and perpetuation of religious beliefs, much more is required than a review of the various proofs for God’s existence. A scientist must also examine why these beliefs arose and why they are perpetuated. Here Dawkins enters what is for him somewhat foreign territory, and he frequently stumbles, due in large part to his failure to take seriously the role of social relations in shaping and perpetuating religious belief. To adopt a materialist, scientific, approach to religion is first of all to recognize that religion is fundamentally a product of society. Culture is a social, not an individual, phenomenon, and in the process of his development the individual adopts in one form or another ideas present in the broader social milieu. A materialist explanation of religious belief must therefore be rooted in a materialist approach to society. As with many natural scientists, however, Dawkins does not carry through his materialism to social and cultural history. He ends up resorting to various idealistic explanations for religious belief. Historical materialism—that is, Marxism—sees ideology, including religion, as rooted in the process of production and the social relations humans enter into in order to produce. As Marx wrote in his famous preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, “The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.” On the one hand, religion is perpetuated by the ruling elite during different stages of historical development as a means of justifying particular social arrangements. In the Middle Ages, for example, the Catholic Church in Europe was one of the principal institutional and ideological props of feudalism, not to mention one of the largest landowners. With control over the productive forces, the ruling elite, in alliance with the church, could perpetuate religious belief through myriad means. In addition to justifying various hierarchies, religion has been used to tell the poor and exploited that salvation lies in the next world, rather than this one. On the other hand, religion frequently plays the role of “opiate,” i.e., it provides comfort for the poor and exploited, a hope for salvation and a better life in another world. For this reason, religious ideology can have a receptive response among broader sections of the population. Religion, Marx wrote in his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, is the “sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions.” Of course, the history of religion, like that of any ideological phenomenon, is complex. Religious ideology takes on a semi-independent existence, with its own internal logic. There is also a trend in religious evolution. As humans come to understand the natural world through the process of scientific explanation, the concept of God has tended to become more abstract, more removed from day-to-day events. Religion tends to occupy the realms of human experience that scientific knowledge has yet to penetrate, though this is not an entirely linear trajectory. In general, however, social progress has been associated with the advance of science and the retreat of religion. The point is that this explanation of religion imbues any discussion of religion with the social content necessary for its comprehension. Dawkins completely dismisses this perspective. “Nor are Darwinians satisfied by political explanations, such as ‘religion is a tool used by the ruling class to subjugate the underclass’,” he writes. “It is surely true that black slaves in America were consoled by promises of another life, which blunted their dissatisfaction with this one and thereby benefited their owners. The question of whether religions are deliberately designed by cynical priests or rulers is an interesting one, to which historians should attend. But it is not, in itself, a Darwinian question. The Darwinians still want to know why people are vulnerable to the charms of religion and therefore open to exploitation by priests, politicians and kings.” This is a fair enough point when discussing the historical origins of religious belief in the evolution of man (though the talk of “cynical priests and rulers” is a mechanical and one-sided presentation of the Marxist theory of religion, which Dawkins here alludes to without naming). Given the way in which religious beliefs of some sort or another have emerged on numerous occasions in almost every society, it is certainly legitimate to ask if there is something in our biological makeup that predisposes human society to adopt religious conceptions, even if one insists that the social dimension takes precedence in man’s later development. There might be other ideologies that could serve the same social function as religion does, so one is led to ask why religion predominates. Dawkins would like to discuss what it is in our evolutionary heritage that makes religious explanations particularly attractive, that makes religious ideology particularly universal. We will return to the limitations of this approach below, after first going into some detail about Dawkins’s views on the question that he would like to focus on. In giving his own answer, Dawkins notes that an evolutionary explanation of religious belief need not postulate an evolutionary benefit for religion itself. “I am one of an increasing number of biologists who see religion as a by-product of something else,” he writes. “More generally, I believe that we who speculate about Darwinian survival value need to ‘think by-product.’ When we ask about the survival value of anything, we may be asking the wrong question.” Dawkins proposal for an evolutionary foundation of religious belief is not particularly profound: We have evolved to believe what we are told by our elders. This is beneficial, Dawkins says, because generally our elders are right, and those who believed what they were told benefited from the accumulated experience of their elders. This may be true, but it leaves open the question as to why it was religion that has been passed on from elders to children, rather than something else. The fact that Dawkins does not consider this obvious objection to his theory is an indication that he has not really thought through this question very seriously. More promising is the theory presented by Daniel Dennett that religion is fundamentally misplaced intentionality. Humans evolved to interpret certain actions, particularly actions that they did not understand, to be the product of intentional agents. This was useful when dealing with actual intentional agents, because it allowed early humans to better predict the behavior of animals or fellow humans (a particularly useful quality as social relations developed). Religion is the imputation of intentionality on the natural world: It is a god that causes the rain to fall and the rivers to flood; it is a god that is the cause of life and death, etc. While these various proposals are interesting, they are not particularly useful unless they are rooted in an investigation of the scientific evidence, including archaeology. As of yet, both Dennett and Dawkins have been engaging largely in armchair evolutionary biology in discussing this question. More fundamentally, theories such as those proposed by Dawkins and Dennett do not further our understanding of the history of religion, which is really the most important question in understanding its persistence and nature today. Supposing that religion had an initial impulse in misplaced intentionality or in the tendency of children to believe what they are told, this does not explain why it should continue even when science has led us to the conclusion that this intentionality is in fact misplaced, and does not explain why children continue to be indoctrinated in the existence of fictional beings. It also does not explain why religion has evolved as it has over the years. To deal with this question, Dawkins (and Dennett) resort to the theory of the “meme,” a supposed cultural equivalent of the gene. A meme is a purported “unit of cultural inheritance,” and certain memes have a greater tendency to reproduce themselves, etc. A more detailed critique can be found in James Brookfield’s review of Dennett’s book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a natural phenomena. Here it is sufficient to note that by locating the basis for the spread of an ideology in the idea itself (rather than the society in which the idea emerges and spreads), the proponents of meme theory generally fall into an idealist interpretation of history, one that has great difficulty in explaining what accounts for ideological development. Dawkins confesses the difficulty he has in explaining cultural evolution when he writes about the “moral zeitgeist,” which he says is “a mysterious consensus, which changes over the decades” and accounts for changes in moral or religious conceptions. He has no real explanation for the changes in this “moral zeitgeist,” but, Dawkins writes, “The onus is not on me to answer.” If all Dawkins aimed to do was provide a logical proof for the non-existence of God, or propose theories for why religion may have emerged in the development of early human society, we might accept this statement. But in fact Dawkins aims to do much more. He wants to tackle contemporary social and political issues, and without any serious basis for explaining why religions persist he is left floundering, often finding his way into quite reactionary positions. Religion and politics The problem Dawkins and others confront in explaining religious and ideological change lies ultimately in their refusal to take up Marxist theory. Dawkins refers to Marx only once in passing, and deals with class theory only in the paragraph quoted above. For Dawkins, religion has no social or political significance. He treats it merely as an idea without any real connections to the more material conditions of life. He writes, to cite one example, “The Afghan Taliban and the American Taliban [Christian fundamentalism in the United States] are good examples of what happens when people take their scriptures literally and seriously.” Certainly scripture plays a role, but both the Afghan Taliban and the “American Taliban” are products of deeper social relations in their respective societies, and in fact the differences between these societies impart different characters to the respective ideologies. This approach to religion has definite political consequences. Early on in the book, Dawkins discusses the case of the anti-Islamic cartoons published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, which produced sharp protests in February 2006. Press and governments around the world denounced the protests as attacks on free speech, and defended those who decided to publish the bigoted cartoons as proponents of free speech. Dawkins accepts this interpretation entirely. One need not be a supporter of the ideology of Islamic fundamentalism to recognize that what was really involved was not a defense of free speech by a Danish newspaper, but a deliberate provocation designed to whip up anti-Islamic sentiment in Europe and elsewhere. The protests, on the other hand, reflected anger that was more than merely religious in character. There is seething resentment against the United States and European governments to their policies in countries composed largely of Muslims. The fact that discontent in many regions of the Middle East and other areas often takes a religious character is also a product of historical and political factors. The perspective of secular bourgeois nationalist movements has failed utterly, secular socialist and internationalist movements have been systematically betrayed by Stalinism, and the United States and other powers have worked for a long time to undermine secular movements of all stripes because they have viewed these movements as more of a threat to their interests than religions movements. Both Osama bin Laden and the Taliban are in part products of the American intervention in Afghanistan in the 1980s, when the US waged a proxy war against the Soviet Union by generously funding the most extreme Islamic fundamentalists. On the other hand, a movement such as Hamas in the Palestinian territories—which is very different phenomenon from Al Qaeda—has gained traction in part because it provides critical social resources and services not provided through any other channels, particularly as the Palestinian Liberation Organization has moved increasingly to the right, accommodating itself to American imperialism. Dawkins’s blindness to the social and political roots of religious ideology leads him toward quite reactionary positions. He goes so far as to quote approvingly the words of Patrick Sookhdeo, director of the Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity, who has written: “Could it be that the young men who committed suicide were neither on the fringes of Muslim society in Britain, nor following an eccentric and extremist interpretation of their faith, but rather that they came from the very core of the Muslim community and were motivated by a mainstream interpretation of Islam?” One rubs ones eyes in disbelief when one reads the uncritical representation of these words by Dawkins. The Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity is an evangelical outfit whose main aim is to promote anti-Islamic chauvinism, which is precisely the aim of Sookhdeo’s sentence quoted above. One might give Dawkins the benefit of the doubt in assuming that he quotes without real knowledge of who he is quoting, but regardless it is certainly a misfortune that Dawkins, an outspoken opponent of the war in Iraq and an opponent of Christian ideology as much as Islamic, should lend his authority to such a vile perspective. But such is the consequence of remaining blind to the social and political issues that lie behind most religious questions. Approaching such matters from an idealist perspective, Dawkins is easily led to the conclusion that Islamic fundamentalists must simply be a product of Islam as a religion, and this leads him into the same bed with such utter reactionaries as Sookhdeo. There is a tendency among the advocates of atheism—and this is perhaps most clear in the works of Sam Harris, who Dawkins also quotes approvingly on several occasions—to adopt a contemptuous attitude toward the religiously-minded population, which is still a majority of the working class around the world. Since religion is conceived of only as an ideological phenomenon, it is ultimately the population itself that is to blame for belief in religion and whatever policies are justified in the name of religion. Not only does this often lead to right-wing political positions, it also fails utterly in offering a suggestion for how the influence of religion can be diminished. Marxists too want to undermine the influence of religious movements, in the Middle East, in the United States, and around the world. Religion is inherently anti-scientific. It cloaks the real nature of society and repression, and it often serves as an ideological buttress for social reaction and militarism. However, to realize this aim requires that one first of all comprehend the actual social and political basis of religious belief. As Marx wrote in the same work quoted above, “The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their conditions is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions...Thus, the criticism of Heaven turns into the criticism of Earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.” In other words, the fight for scientific consciousness among masses of people, and with this a materialist world outlook, must be bound up with the attempt to explain to people the real nature of society and oppression. It must be bound up with a political struggle and a socialist movement.

The rising tide of economic nationalism

As the global economic crisis continues to deepen, the unmistakable stench of economic nationalism is on the rise around the world. Confronted with collapsing industries and growing anger over job losses, governments are reaching for protectionist measures despite the disastrous consequences of such beggar-thy-neighbour policies in the 1930s. At the G-20 summit in mid-November, the leaders of the world’s largest economies pledged not to raise barriers to trade and investment—even those allowed under World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules—for a year. The joint communiqué also promised to restart the failed Doha round of trade talks as a means of boosting world trade. However, as the Financial Times noted this week: “The solemn pledge intended to bind its signatories for a year lasted less than 36 hours before Russia said it would go ahead with planned increases in car tariffs. Moscow’s violation of the pledge was followed by several other G-20 countries—India, Brazil, Indonesia and Argentina—all pushing for increased protection.” Since then protectionist measures under various guises have been enacted in country after country, including the US and the European Union. As for the Doha round, WTO director general Pascal Lamy last month called off a planned ministerial meeting aimed at kick-starting negotiations, declaring that there was “an unacceptably high risk of failure which could damage not only the round but also the WTO system”. This week, Lamy tried to sound a more optimistic note. In an interview on British television, he described the completion of the round as “low-hanging fruit” and emphasised that 80 percent of the package had been finished. But there is no sign of any end to the bitter wrangling over the “remaining 20 percent” that led to the collapse of talks last year. The new Obama administration spurred on the rising tide of protectionism with the comments last week of Treasury Secretary nominee Tim Geithner accusing China of manipulating its currency to boost exports. Designating Beijing as a “currency manipulator” would allow the White House to invoke a broad range of punitive tariffs and other economic penalties against China under US trade legislation. The Democrats in the House of Representatives went one step further by including a “Buy American” provision in Obama’s $825 billion stimulus package approved on Wednesday. The clause, which requires infrastructure projects funded by the package to use only US-made iron and steel, has provoked protests from European steelmakers. Democrat senator Byron Dorgan is proposing a broader measure to exclude most foreign-made manufactured goods when the package reaches the Senate. Such measures threaten to provoke escalating retaliation and a full-blown trade war. A comment in the US journal Foreign Policy warned that the “explicitly protectionist language” contained in the package would “certainly be taken as a bad sign by the rest of the world. The world can deal with a protectionist India or Indonesia. The trading system will have much more trouble if the United States starts to renege on its traditional leadership role.” Cautions about growing protectionism have been sounded already at this week’s Davos Economic Summit, including by the Chinese and Russian premiers. Igor Yurgens, a senior adviser to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, gave vent to some of the bitterness in Moscow and other capitals over the impact of the various US rescue packages. “Of course, [Mr Obama] expects the Chinese or Russians to buy US Treasury bills [to fund the massive US deficit]. That is pretty selfish and philosophically it is protectionism,” he declared. Tit-for-tat trade measures and legal challenges are on the increase. In only its second case before the WTO, China pressed ahead this week with a complaint against US measures restricting the import of steel pipes, tyres and woven sacks. After Beijing initiated the dispute last September, Washington began legal action against subsidised Chinese branded goods. China, which is the world’s second largest exporter after Germany, has been the target of seven WTO disputes, all of which involve the US. There is no shortage of economic commentators issuing dire warnings about the potential for protectionism to catapult the world economy into a depression akin to the 1930s. International trade is slowing dramatically, with the IMF forecasting this week that world trade volumes would contract 2.8 percent in 2009 after rising 4.1 percent last year. Nevertheless, as the global economy shrinks, the capitalist class in every country is driven to foist the crisis onto its international rivals as well as the working class. In 1930, many foresaw the disastrous consequences of the Smoot-Hawley tariff act, which increased nearly 900 American import duties. Some 1,028 US economists signed a petition pleading with US President Herbert Hoover not to sign the bill into law. The Economist magazine recently cited the comments of Thomas Lamont, a partner of J.P. Morgan, who recalled: “I almost went down on my knees to beg Herbert Hoover to veto the asinine Hawley Smoot Tariff. That act intensified nationalism all over the world.” Nevertheless, Hoover signed the law, provoking an avalanche of retaliation, the collapse of world trade and the formation of antagonistic currency blocs that set the course for the Second World War. While those promoting “free trade” speak for the bankers, financiers and more globally competitive sections of capital, there is a definite constituency for protectionism among less competitive industries. The whipping up of economic nationalism also serves a vital ideological function in diverting the anger of working people over job losses and the precipitous decline in living standards outwards rather than at the real source of the crisis—the profit system itself. Those who push this reactionary poison in the working class are the trade unions and their various middle class radical allies. Far from defending jobs and conditions, economic nationalism goes hand-in-hand with the continuing impoverishment of working people. Whether in the US, Europe or any other country, the same union bureaucrats who have presided over the decimation of manufacturing industry over the past three decades now insist on the further sacrifice of wages and conditions as part of the protectionist packages to defend American or European companies. The bailout plan for the US auto industry backed by the United Auto Workers is conditional on a savage restructuring of the industry that will result in plant closures, layoffs and the systematic lowering of wages. In France, Germany and other European countries, the unions are collaborating with governments and corporations in plans to defend “their” auto industries, using the threat of job losses to enlist the support of workers. The logic of economic nationalism is class collaboration in a dog-eat-dog competition that pits workers in one country against their class brothers and sisters around the world. The end result is trade war and military conflict. The working class cannot defend its interests under the banner of either protectionism or “free trade”. The precondition for any genuine struggle to defend jobs and living standards is the political independence of workers from all wings of the capitalist class. The natural allies of workers in advanced economies such as US and Europe are workers in cheap labour platforms like China and India who are often exploited by the same global corporations and share a common class interest in abolishing the anarchic profit system and replacing it with a world-planned socialist economy. That is the perspective advanced by the World Socialist Web Site and the International Committee of the Fourth International.

As the global economic crisis continues to deepen, the unmistakable stench of economic nationalism is on the rise around the world. Confronted with collapsing industries and growing anger over job losses, governments are reaching for protectionist measures despite the disastrous consequences of such beggar-thy-neighbour policies in the 1930s. At the G-20 summit in mid-November, the leaders of the world’s largest economies pledged not to raise barriers to trade and investment—even those allowed under World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules—for a year. The joint communiqué also promised to restart the failed Doha round of trade talks as a means of boosting world trade. However, as the Financial Times noted this week: “The solemn pledge intended to bind its signatories for a year lasted less than 36 hours before Russia said it would go ahead with planned increases in car tariffs. Moscow’s violation of the pledge was followed by several other G-20 countries—India, Brazil, Indonesia and Argentina—all pushing for increased protection.” Since then protectionist measures under various guises have been enacted in country after country, including the US and the European Union. As for the Doha round, WTO director general Pascal Lamy last month called off a planned ministerial meeting aimed at kick-starting negotiations, declaring that there was “an unacceptably high risk of failure which could damage not only the round but also the WTO system”. This week, Lamy tried to sound a more optimistic note. In an interview on British television, he described the completion of the round as “low-hanging fruit” and emphasised that 80 percent of the package had been finished. But there is no sign of any end to the bitter wrangling over the “remaining 20 percent” that led to the collapse of talks last year. The new Obama administration spurred on the rising tide of protectionism with the comments last week of Treasury Secretary nominee Tim Geithner accusing China of manipulating its currency to boost exports. Designating Beijing as a “currency manipulator” would allow the White House to invoke a broad range of punitive tariffs and other economic penalties against China under US trade legislation. The Democrats in the House of Representatives went one step further by including a “Buy American” provision in Obama’s $825 billion stimulus package approved on Wednesday. The clause, which requires infrastructure projects funded by the package to use only US-made iron and steel, has provoked protests from European steelmakers. Democrat senator Byron Dorgan is proposing a broader measure to exclude most foreign-made manufactured goods when the package reaches the Senate. Such measures threaten to provoke escalating retaliation and a full-blown trade war. A comment in the US journal Foreign Policy warned that the “explicitly protectionist language” contained in the package would “certainly be taken as a bad sign by the rest of the world. The world can deal with a protectionist India or Indonesia. The trading system will have much more trouble if the United States starts to renege on its traditional leadership role.” Cautions about growing protectionism have been sounded already at this week’s Davos Economic Summit, including by the Chinese and Russian premiers. Igor Yurgens, a senior adviser to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, gave vent to some of the bitterness in Moscow and other capitals over the impact of the various US rescue packages. “Of course, [Mr Obama] expects the Chinese or Russians to buy US Treasury bills [to fund the massive US deficit]. That is pretty selfish and philosophically it is protectionism,” he declared. Tit-for-tat trade measures and legal challenges are on the increase. In only its second case before the WTO, China pressed ahead this week with a complaint against US measures restricting the import of steel pipes, tyres and woven sacks. After Beijing initiated the dispute last September, Washington began legal action against subsidised Chinese branded goods. China, which is the world’s second largest exporter after Germany, has been the target of seven WTO disputes, all of which involve the US. There is no shortage of economic commentators issuing dire warnings about the potential for protectionism to catapult the world economy into a depression akin to the 1930s. International trade is slowing dramatically, with the IMF forecasting this week that world trade volumes would contract 2.8 percent in 2009 after rising 4.1 percent last year. Nevertheless, as the global economy shrinks, the capitalist class in every country is driven to foist the crisis onto its international rivals as well as the working class. In 1930, many foresaw the disastrous consequences of the Smoot-Hawley tariff act, which increased nearly 900 American import duties. Some 1,028 US economists signed a petition pleading with US President Herbert Hoover not to sign the bill into law. The Economist magazine recently cited the comments of Thomas Lamont, a partner of J.P. Morgan, who recalled: “I almost went down on my knees to beg Herbert Hoover to veto the asinine Hawley Smoot Tariff. That act intensified nationalism all over the world.” Nevertheless, Hoover signed the law, provoking an avalanche of retaliation, the collapse of world trade and the formation of antagonistic currency blocs that set the course for the Second World War. While those promoting “free trade” speak for the bankers, financiers and more globally competitive sections of capital, there is a definite constituency for protectionism among less competitive industries. The whipping up of economic nationalism also serves a vital ideological function in diverting the anger of working people over job losses and the precipitous decline in living standards outwards rather than at the real source of the crisis—the profit system itself. Those who push this reactionary poison in the working class are the trade unions and their various middle class radical allies. Far from defending jobs and conditions, economic nationalism goes hand-in-hand with the continuing impoverishment of working people. Whether in the US, Europe or any other country, the same union bureaucrats who have presided over the decimation of manufacturing industry over the past three decades now insist on the further sacrifice of wages and conditions as part of the protectionist packages to defend American or European companies. The bailout plan for the US auto industry backed by the United Auto Workers is conditional on a savage restructuring of the industry that will result in plant closures, layoffs and the systematic lowering of wages. In France, Germany and other European countries, the unions are collaborating with governments and corporations in plans to defend “their” auto industries, using the threat of job losses to enlist the support of workers. The logic of economic nationalism is class collaboration in a dog-eat-dog competition that pits workers in one country against their class brothers and sisters around the world. The end result is trade war and military conflict. The working class cannot defend its interests under the banner of either protectionism or “free trade”. The precondition for any genuine struggle to defend jobs and living standards is the political independence of workers from all wings of the capitalist class. The natural allies of workers in advanced economies such as US and Europe are workers in cheap labour platforms like China and India who are often exploited by the same global corporations and share a common class interest in abolishing the anarchic profit system and replacing it with a world-planned socialist economy. That is the perspective advanced by the World Socialist Web Site and the International Committee of the Fourth International.

Gloom, perplexity, divisions dominate World Economic Forum in Davos

The World Economic Forum was first launched by its founder and still-president, the Swiss economist and businessman, Klaus Schwab, in 1971 in the midst of a mounting financial crisis that led in August of that year to the collapse of the Bretton Woods System, the international monetary framework, based on US dollar-gold convertibility, that had undergirded the post-war economic expansion. In the ensuing years, the forum developed into a semi-official gathering of business chiefs and government officials that discussed and debated both international economic and political issues. In the more recent period, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, it has become a venue to affirm the supposed triumph of the "free enterprise system," with American investment bankers holding court, surrounded by a small army of economists and media, complemented by film stars and other celebrities. One year ago, after the initial collapse of the US housing market and eruption of the credit crisis, concern at the forum over these worrisome developments, which had been almost universally unanticipated, was tempered by assurances from American bankers and politicians that the disorder would be quickly resolved and that, in the worst case scenario, a US recession would be mild and brief. Most of the discussion centered on the widely held notion that the problems in US financial markets would not spread to Europe or Asia, due to the phenomenon of "decoupling." Robert Greenhill, the forum's chief business officer, set the tone for this year's forum by declaring, "The meeting was founded at a time of division and uncertainty in the 1970s and this year is a return to its roots. People are coming to compare notes on what they need to do to emerge from a serious crisis." Just how serious and universal a crisis was underscored on the opening day of the forum by the International Monetary Fund's downwardly revised estimate of world economic growth for 2009 of a mere 0.5 percent, including major contractions in the US, Britain, France, Germany and Japan. That followed the previous week's IMF forecast that world trade volumes would shrink 2.8 percent in 2009. Also on Wednesday, the International Labour Organization warned that some 51 million jobs could be lost worldwide this year. The two dominant and interrelated features of this year's forum are a general sense of shock and near-panic over the inexorable and rapid manner in which the crisis has overtaken the efforts of central banks and governments to shore up the banks and revive economic activity—amounting to trillions of dollars in loans, guarantees and cash infusions—and the devastating loss of American prestige and credibility. The Financial Times on Wednesday wrote: "Most notably, faith that a mix of globalization, financial innovation and free-market competition would build a better financial system has withered away, as bank losses have piled up. Thus the critical question that now hangs over this year's meeting at Davos is: ‘What, if anything, can replace this creed?' " Along similar lines, the New York Times on Friday quoted James Rosenfeld, a co-founder or Cambridge Energy Research Associates, as saying, "We've all been building this big, integrated financial system. We didn't consider what would happen when it disintegrated." As for the position of the United States, the opening day of the forum was given over to Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, both of whom lambasted the US, without directly naming the target of their attacks, for precipitating the world crisis, and called for measures to lessen US dominance on world financial markets. Wen urged an expansion of regulatory "coverage of the international financial system, with particular emphasis on strengthening the supervision on major reserve currencies." He said the financial crisis was "attributable to inappropriate macroeconomic policies of some economies and their unsustainable model of development characterized by prolonged low savings and high consumption, excessive expansion of financial institutions in blind pursuit of profit." He also denounced "the failure of financial supervision." Putin was, if anything, more blunt. He attacked the concept of a "unipolar world," called for an end to the privileged position of the US dollar as the world's major reserve currency, and noted that "just a year ago, American delegates speaking from this rostrum emphasized the US economy's fundamental stability and its cloudless prospects." He continued, "Today, investment banks, the pride of Wall Street, have virtually ceased to exist. In just 12 months, they have posted losses exceeding the profits they made in the last 25 years." Alan Blinder, the Princeton economist and former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, responded, "The sad thing is that we might have scoffed at this a while ago. But we really dragged the world down." The Obama administration, for its part, signaled its disinterest in any serious international coordination or financial regulation by failing to send a single high-ranking official to the forum. While an array of government leaders from around the world were in attendance, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso, none of the top US delegates who had been advertised—chief economic adviser Lawrence Summers, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, National Security Adviser General James Jones and chief of the US Central Command General David Petraeus—showed up. The virtual official boycott by the United States underscores the bitter tensions and divisions simmering beneath the diplomatic decorum of the forum. While general statements are being issued at Davos abjuring protectionism, and warnings are being made about the disastrous implications for the world economy of such policies, the reality is a growth of economic nationalism. Less than a week before the opening of the forum, US Treasury Secretary Geithner issued a provocative threat of possible trade sanctions against China, accusing the Chinese of "manipulating" their currency to obtain a trade advantage over the US. Steven Roach of Morgan Stanley Asia spoke at Davos of a "rising tide of economic nationalism." And delegates from so-called developing countries complained that the massive US deficits resulting from Obama's stimulus program and bank bailouts would suck up the bulk of available private credit on world markets. "Large economies are accessing international capital markets for themselves," said Trevor Manuel, the finance minister of South Africa. Ernesto Zedillo, the former Mexican president who was in power during that country's financial meltdown in 1994, said, "The US needs to show some proof they have a plan to get out of the fiscal problem. We, as developing countries, need to know we won't be crowded out of the capital markets, which is already happening." The New York Times cited Lord Adair Turner, the chairman of Britain's Financial Services Authority, as voicing similar concerns, speaking of "the risk of a new mercantilism" centered on credit availability rather than trade. These tensions erupted into the open on Thursday, when Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan stormed off the stage after an angry exchange with the Israeli president, Shimon Peres, during a panel discussion on the Gaza crisis. Erdogan, whose government maintains close political and military ties with Israel, told Peres, "When it comes to killing, you know well how to kill." The Davos forum underscores the impossibility of developing a rational and coordinated international policy to resolve the economic crisis within the capitalist framework of private ownership of the means of production and finance and the division of the world between rival nation states. Putin, speaking as a defender of capitalism, referred to the financial parasitism that fueled the massive fortunes of the financial aristocracy over the past three decades as a "pyramid of expectations [that] would have collapsed sooner or later," and indicated who is to pay the price for its collapse: "This amounted to unearned wealth, a loan that will have to be repaid by future generations." Within the existing economic and political system, the only future is one of increasing poverty and repression and the growth of national antagonisms leading inevitably, as in the last great depression, to the horrors of global war. The specter haunting Davos is the emergence of an independent movement of the working class fighting to put an end to capitalism and build a socialist society based on the satisfaction of human needs, not private profit. The disintegration of the world economy poses with the greatest urgency the development of a unified struggle by the working class on the basis of an international socialist program.