Update 21 publishes the press release of the International Committee for the Ethics of Biomedicine (CIEB).
Opinion (No. 26): on the erosion of fundamental human rights caused by the spread of ultra-financial and digital capitalism and artificial intelligence
There is no doubt that the main characteristic of contemporary capitalism is its dependence on the creation of growing volumes of liquidity aimed at supporting the financial markets, in the face of the systematic demolition of the real economy based on the production of goods and services intended for mass consumption.
This process began in the Seventies, with the large-scale introduction of automation in production processes: since then, capital has no longer been able, or wanted, to reabsorb the mass of wage labor that was progressively becoming unemployed and has preferred to find refuge in the financial markets, where money makes money work, and not people.
The fictitious character of the post-industrial economy was further accentuated with the neoliberal revolution of the 1980s, when the speculative frenzy – especially on bonds, corporate and sovereign debt securities – began to take on a life of its own, extending over time to the point of overwhelming any possible correspondence between the securities traded and their real value.
Today, we seem to have reached a point of no return: if, for any reason, the appetite for bonds fades, the law of self-expansion of capital causes central banks to step in to print cash and thus allow the purchase of unsold bonds.
The centralized management of this debt bubble, where “growth” is literally simulated thanks to massive credit injections by the Central Banks, constitutes the last bastion in defense of the financial markets and, ultimately, of the entire contemporary economic system .
It is no coincidence that this rescue operation has now become permanent, taking into account the fact that the alternative to an inflationary policy would only consist in a sustained increase in interest rates, which in turn would cause the collapse of the markets, the atomization of capital all levels and, in cascade, business failures, mass layoffs and consequent waves of social chaos.
In other words, if the choice is between sinking the currency to save the system or sinking the system to save the currency, it is not surprising that the option followed by central banks – and supported by elites – and that of protecting the system, i.e. the markets, at all costs, even at the cost of lowering interest rates, i.e. the cost of money, to create further inflationary liquidity: and therefore sinking the currency to generate more debt.
One piece of data may be useful: between the last half of 2019 and the first half of 2020, just as the world was starting to be distracted by the COVID emergency, the central bank of the United States of America gave short-term investment banks of liquidity the astronomical and staggering figure of 48 trillion dollars, more than double the US GDP at the time. (1)
This data allows us to understand at the same time why monetary expansions and financial distortions have become endemic and necessary to the system and why the survival of ultra-financial capitalism depends on its ability to keep increasingly unproductive, impoverished and superfluous populations under control, managing a decline social situation which sees the middle classes becoming proletarianized in the face of the fragmentation of the old industrial proletariat into a multitude of unemployed, underemployed, precarious workers and those who give up everything short to look for work.
Obviously, the risky combination between impoverishment and population reaction must be controlled in some way: and if wars, epidemics and euthanasia tendencies were not enough to eliminate the “four billion useless eaters” complained by exponents of elites financial, this is effectively ensured by the totalitarian management of society, which aims at the subjugation of the masses through the propaganda of terror based on the manipulation of scientific data, be they of a health, climate, environmental, energy, geo-political or strategic nature.
Permanent emergencyism is ideologically integral to the totalitarian perspective: the health crisis caused by COVID has made it possible to introduce a control tool – the Green Pass inspired by the social credit system and the principles of behavioral economics – whose ratio was taken up and expanded as part of the digitalisation process of financial flows and currencies, which is leading to the adoption of Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) (2); the sole threat of one escalation of armed conflicts – from Ukraine to Palestine – once again causes enormous quantities of money to flow back into bond markets deemed safe; the unstoppable spread of Artificial Intelligence (AI) undoubtedly constitutes the definitive step towards a post-human dimension destined to eliminate fundamental human rights and cancel the primacy of the human being over the interests of science and society, sanctioned by art. 2 of the Oviedo Convention on biomedicine of 1997, but curiously continues to be celebrated by institutions and political decision-makers as the supreme test to overcome retro anthropological and cultural taboos, as a true initiatory path to gnosis, to be undertaken by all costs: which also explains the need, felt at various levels, to conceal the consequent risks, either by presenting them as obscurantist legacies, or by promoting the adoption of tools which, fact, lead to results opposite to those declared.
Emblematic, in this sense, is the regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council n. 2024/1689, of 13 June 2024 (3), which, on the one hand, emphasizes the need to safeguard “fundamental rights” (an expression that occurs 97 times in the regulatory text), but which, on the other, clearly reveals the desire of the European legislator to remove the concrete enforceability of the rights in question from the initiative of individuals – who are also their owners – and leave it to the decisions of agencies, committees and institutes in various controlled ways of the European Commission: a body which, as is known, is not elected and, in fact, answers only to itself.
In a world that appears increasingly suspended between economic collapse and totalitarian solutions, the CIEB continues to urge citizens to develop the critical awareness necessary to doubt the goodness and effectiveness of emergency solutions proposed by government apparatuses that are increasingly insensitive to fundamental rights of man, because they are organic to elites financial institutions that have made those emergencies a reason for existing, and to pave the way for real systemic alternatives.
CIEB
October 31, 2024
The original text of the Opinion is published in: www.ecsel.org/cieb
NOTE
1) Cfr. www.newyorkfed.org/markets/OMO_transaction_data.html#rrp. The figure reflects the overall amount of Repo contracts (Repurchase Agreement) – corresponding to the «repurchase agreements» – provided by the Federal Reserve to the global systemically important banks (Globally Systemic Important Banks or G-SIBs). These are, essentially, short-term loans in which the debtor receives liquidity in exchange for a security as collateral (generally, government bonds) which he undertakes to repurchase at a higher price at the pre-established maturity, a maturity which, however, it is generally extended.
2) According to the principles of behavioral economics, in conditions of uncertainty human judgment tends not to align with the solutions indicated by economic theory and, for this reason, must be guided, «whatever it takes», towards the options indicated by political decision makers: obedient individuals will then be rewarded with objects, even virtual ones (such as i token), or with the possibility of accessing certain services or benefits (according to the Green Pass experience).
3) In the Official Journal L series of 12 July 2024.
