Book Description

"This book puts forward an innovative standpoint for politics and governance that seeks meaningful connections with organized crime, corruption and ecocide. Looking into the sources of their growth and global spread, it upholds that capitalism, the market system and economic liberalism have nourished and enabled such developments, while criminal organizations, corrupt politicians, businessmen and multinationals engaged in ecocide have been evolving and bringing havoc to countries and their populations alike. Furthermore, it intimates how organized crime, corruption and ecocide have thrived and turned out to be a conspicuous and wide-ranging player not only in governance but also in politics worldwide. When we ask ourselves why such developments took place, the answer would disclose an outrageous picture: this process simply unfolded from using the same toolkit of resources, regulations, skills, and technological innovations that capitalism and the market system had been providing to the formal habitats of legal economy and politics since the nineteenth century; needless too say, with the help of an ideology entangled in economic liberalism and its latest outgrowth, neo liberalism. We could wonder why criminal organizations and political malfeasance were both able to carry out this way so far. The answer will shock everybody: because those organizations were allowed, firstly, to set up efficacious governances to profit from crime and, secondly, politics furnished them with clout, connivance, and power to handle riches and spoils. To countervail the hideous workings of a system that faces its reckoning days and own demise, the book finally puts forward that the social democracy is the best qualified political system to build up the road towards post capitalism. Let us take a look on the roadmap for this work. In chapter 1 we will lay the grounds to a comprehensive treatment of governance and politics, which must be assessed as complementary stages in pursuit of the common good[1]. Besides, political networks and their governance will be brought to the shore since they are changing the way politics is being crafted at the end of the day. Chapter 2 will focus on the basic tenets of sound governance and politics: firstly, accountability (as the interplay of both commitments and responsibilities) and, secondly, transparency. Against the mainstream approach, it will be ascertained that both features must be regarded as social learning processes. Finally, it will highlight the governance and politics of secrecy. It is for chapter 3 to deal with political conflict systems, claiming for a clinical approach to conflicts of interest, also introducing the notion and scope of dual governance that proves essential whenever we address the subject of state-owned firms. Chapter 4 will enlarge upon dysfunctional and opaque styles of governances, moving on to the capture of the state by groups of interest and spreading corruption. Due heed will be given to regulation, gatekeepers and connivance. Chapter 5 is devoted to the governance and politics of organized crime and ecocide, what amounts to a new approach to criminal organizations that sheds light to their partnership with bad governance and worse politics. Chapter 6 points out to the comprehensive failure of both capitalism and the so-called liberal market-system. Markets in the flesh will be described further, whereas several misunderstandings involved in the predicated coalescence between capitalism and democracy will be debunked eventually. Afterwards, the hideous consequences of the business interests of the military industrial complex in the most powerful countries, as well as the shock doctrine advocated by most graduates from the so-called Chicago School economists (joining forces with followers of the Washington Consensus) will be related together so as to connect the dots that lead to the crumbling of capitalism. Finally, the last chapter gathers the threads that run through the foregoing ones, so as to shape the following two lines of argument: It seems rather implausible that within the current architecture of capitalism and economic liberalism, the above-mentioned triad could be curbed, not least uprooted. And this should not be surprising, since the triad embodies and assimilates countless black holes streamlined in the incumbent political and economic structure. In this day and age, post capitalism cannot be regarded any longer as some utopian destination, but instead as a sheer need for redressing the wrongs of rampant social inequality and widespread spate of criminal behavior. That is why this book advocates that social democracy, social markets, and the welfare state will stand for post capitalism, within healthy representative democracies. [1] The reader will find, at the beginning of each chapter, an abstract as well as an introduction to their main contents"--