We didn't start the fire - 1

We didn’t start the file

It was always burning

Since the world’s been turning

We didn’t start the file

No we didn’t light it

But we tried to fight it

 - Billy Joel

Wealth

They say it is the one-percenters, who hoard more than 70% of global wealth while the other 99% scrap for the rest. There were global movements - the Occupy showdowns, the constant fixtures of friction at WTO and Davos summits etc - in the recent times decrying this unfair imbalance in the society handing undue advantage to the rich helping them pull more and more away from the baseline. While there is certainly no argument that rich are indeed getting richer (when was it not?), never before in history has there been a greater democratization in the process of getting rich, where anyone worth an idea and a will to see the idea to fruition is rolled a red carpet into the balcony section of the society. What was once natural resources - air, water, land, oil, mining, gold - that minted millionaires, technology has now levelled the playing field and turned pimpled and gangly teenagers into instant billionaires all the by the virtue (and the marketability) of their ideas. The innovation revolution that started chugging since the late 80s, gathering up the steam in the 90s and roared to its full speed in the 00s, proved to be the greatest advertisement for the capitalistic ideology, aided amply by the fall of the communist empire over most of Eastern Europe and Russia, decimating the concept of pure socialism once and for all. Times were good, stock markets glossed over the systemic issues in the society, the main of which was the growing class divide, money was thrown indiscriminately around at practically every problem that plagued the world. And then the bottom fell.

Dot-com crash, 9/11 and housing market collapse, the three epochal events that razed down all that had been built over close to couple of decades, brought prosperity to its knees and made the world realize the illusion and fallacy of its wealth based economies. Before the turn of the decade in the new century, some companies were wiped off the face of relevancy, some countries were left gasping for a helping hand and society, in general, was cauterized against dreaming big (and foolish). In one of his rip roaring routines, 'You are all diseased', George Carlin, the clairvoyant comedian, cautioned against this current situation, that all the safety and comfort that materialism offered were merely a fog that would just melt away at the first sign of trouble, specifically mentioning the issue of latent terrorism to be the first domino that would set the ball rolling....and all this prophecy in 1996, when everything was just going swimmingly well. Well, it doesn't really take a seer or a soothsayer/doomsayer to look at the fault lines and the instability of the system and then glance at the glossy towers being built upon with a gusto, and predict that it would all come crashing down soon enough. After each of the three major crises above, when the society settled down to pick up the pieces, out came these naysayers out of the woodwork waving their theories and models that they claim they had been warning the society with but to no avail. While it would seem painfully obvious, 'What goes up must come down' which is just another way of saying that perpetual growth is a fallacy, something that prognosticators at stock markets loathe to agree, it is the fallout of the painful falls that is anything but. A Dotcom crash might have had the think-tanks think twice about making blind investments in invisible products, but that's the extent of it. But the fallout of 9/11, the body count is still rising 17 years after those embers have died down. Closing on those heels, the global economic shutdown following the housing market collapse saw a fallout of a completely different kind where security concerns of the society went head on with the economic anxieties giving rise to xenophobia, protectionism, nationalism and other forms of ideologies that called for societies to close down to anything new or foreign and retreat to safe compounds of the tried and tested.

It had been all done before empires rising and falling, civilizations cresting and crashing, societies tumbling and turning, so much so that every subsequent evolutionary cycle appears to have incorporated the lessons from the previous iterations and was better for it. This is where Twain's quote about history not repeating but rhyming comes into play. Where once was anarchy bringing about downfall of societies, monarchies took to power next, held the society by some rule of law, which over a period of time created its own imbalances and inequities, due to the concentration of power in a single seat and with it the inexorable tying of the fate of the collective to the whims and fancies of a single individual, fomenting resentments and fostering revolutions. Monarchies fell and then it was the turn of the autocracies, plutocracies, and dictatorships, each with its own share of blame games in power distribution. Like Churchill who said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others, there was no choice for modern society but to embrace this rule of the ruled. It looked natural and logical, there was no permanent ruling class, the subjects have a say in deciding whom to hand over the reins to and when aggrieved, they have a non-violent release mechanism in elections. What could go wrong now? While it may seem the reasons and causes for why societies fall and rise (since the period of enlightenment) center around power struggles, it is in fact the uneven distribution of wealth and the ungainly measures taken for the protection of that wealth which is in fact the true motive for social upheavals and uprisings.

After the breakup of Soviet Russia into independent states, the monied class, whose vested interests spread across every wealth generating avenue of the modern society - banks, oil, steel, mining - took indirect control of the government, an oligarchy, with the sole intention of protecting their business interests regardless of whoever is the high seat of power. An interesting phenomenon in Indian politics too in the past decade or so, where businessmen, who earlier propped figure heads to be their mouthpieces in the administration bankrolling their costly campaigns, started to take control of their destinies and speak for themselves by entering the election fray directly, making the Indian democracy a refined version of oligarchy. Be it in more advanced societies, like Western Europe and US, or authoritarian regimes, like China, or a mix of the two, like India, it is strictly money that is calling the shots giving rise to a class schism, this time around, quite ironically, by capitalism and democracy. While the present day turmoil in Western democracies appear to be stemming from their immigration policies and migration crises, where people from impoverished and war ravaged nations and fleeing from and flocking for more stable pastures of the West, the seeds of the suspicion were sown much earlier in another concept that capitalism itself peddled and exported to the world, globalization.

It would appear a double standard of sorts, going by the plain definition of globalization, which calls for a near borderless world where goods have to freedom to move about freely with no obstacles put in the way between the producing and the consuming ends, while the true effects of it calls for erecting walls and imposing sanctions once the osmosis truly happened. In the days of General Agreement on Trades & Tariffs (GATT), bilateral relations were in vogue with countries handing out the prized Most Favored Nation status to whomever it wished to go to the ball and dance with, and in case of any violations of the terms agreed upon, an arbiter was called in to resolve the crisis. But contentment was never Capitalism’s strongest suite. Why settle for one country when the entire world can be brought under one ambit and dictated terms to, prying open tough and stubborn markets with a carrot and stick approach (buy little of theirs to selling a lot of ours) and create even more avenues to its products. Industries and sectors which were once setup in safe and stable societies soon moved away to place where they both could be compromised at the altar of profit. Consider what just happened here. The communities from where these industries were uprooted crumbled, while the countries where these have been moved to often condoned sub par working conditions, building up anger and resentments on both sides of the globalization equation. While the corporations certainly stood to benefit with this new mantra of capitalism, better margins with lower costs, a far cry from its founding principle of better profit through continuous innovation, this move certainly uncoupled the traditional symbiotic relationship between an organization and the ecosystem it was housed, benefiting only a tiny slice of decision makers and stakeholders, leaving the rest disillusioned, disenchanted, disenfranchised and ultimately divested of the glowing notion of capitalism.

The firms that have moved away have naturally seen a surge in their profitability quotients and consequently an uptick in their market value, all contributing to a surge in global stock indices. Stock market, once a bellwether for the health of an economy, now turned into a cruel sport brandishing the spoils of the privileged. And what does that disconnect between the apparent and the reality manifest as?

Cont'd in next part - Migration