Carrol Cox
> ``I don't see where the fraud is. If you mean regular capitalist
> operations, it is a defense of capitalism to call them fraud. It lets
> capitalist relations off the hook and pretends that all would be well
> in the best of all possible worlds if only we could get rid of those
> scoundrels who are committing fraud. That is silly...''
>
> ---------------
>
> The fraud mentioned was the ideological propaganda that wealth and
> prosperity were available to all, provided financial capital was
> allowed to play previously forbidden games.
>
> The current crisis does not let captial relations off the hook. On the
> contrary, the crisis has exposed the whole complex artiface to public
> scrutiny. Sure market types celebrate the crude ponzi scheme frauds
> like Madeoff, but I am pretty certain the corporate elites and their
> center-left Democrat enablers are deeply worried that the entire
> armature of neoliberal capitalism will become exposed to the same harsh
> appraisals. Maybe not by the US public, but perhaps in Europe, Latin
> America and perhaps Asia.
> CG
=================
I read CG's original post and went fishing through the pen-l archives for the following quote. When Carrol responded I thought oh no here we go again...Why is it no problem to use "systemic fragility", "systemic growth" "systemic crisis"in every day pol-econ chatter yet fraud is thought through in terms of methodological indvidualism or at most at the level of the theory of the firm. You know, the rotten apples/rotten barrel boundary. Oh, and Michael Perelman, the pen-l search engine still sucks!!!
Anyway, it tweaked my memory because the quote is great and only needs a tweak or two re current events; it's also why the neo-Gramscians should have more market share.....
A text written in 2003:
From A Claire Cutler's "Private Power and Global Authority: Transnational Merchant Law in the Global Political Economy"
"A knowledge structure that privileges expert knowledge through the juridification, pluralization, and privatization of international commercial relations and the operation of liberal-inspired commercial laws that reify the autonomous 'legal subject' provide the ideological foundation for assumptions concerning the inherent superiority of private legal ordering in the regulation of international commerce. A mercatocracy of lawyers, merchants, corporations, and governments maintains this thought structure by limiting entry to lawyers trained to believe in the superiority of private law. It works through both consensual and coercive methods to silence voices of dissent. Corporate global hegemony operates ideologically by removing private international law from critical scrutiny and review, producing apparently consensual private arrangements. However, these arrangements, in fact, operate coercively in that they reinscribe asymmetrical power relations between buyers and sellers, employers and workers, insurers and insured, lenders and borrowers, shipowners and cargo in their contractual arrangements and the very fabric of the law. The apparent consensual nature of these 'private' relationships contributes to their characterization as neutral and apolitical, inhibiting the development of a critical understanding of private international law...Global authority is increasingly resting upon fragile foundations as competing social forces contest their peripheralization and marginalization in the global political economy. The inability of the mercatocracy to bind these segments by delivering on the rhetoric of globalization and promises of efficiencies, economic development, and justice suggests the emergence of an historic bloc based on fraud. To Gramsci, supremacy based on fraud signals a 'crisis of authority' and is bound eventually to fail." [p.243]
Ian