The Failure of Free Markets?

Ever wonder about the deregulation decrease of our constitutional laws, and the re-rigging increase of international agencies' rules, regulations, treaties, and laws? Could this be destroying our democracy and creating a future/present corporatocracy? Here's an exellent example of how the " Washington Consensus'" international free markets truly work - The Failed Bretton Woods System?

Marshall Auerback

Latin America Loses Faith In The Free Market

Most Latin Americans live in fear of losing their jobs and believe the neo-liberal free market reforms of the past 2 decades have done little to improve their living standards, according to a region-wide survey published last week by Latinobarometro, a non-profit organisation of polling groups in 17 different Latin American countries. Only 22 per cent of respondents thought that privatisation of public services had benefited their country, compared with 28 per cent last year and 46 per cent in 1998, the tail end of the mid-1990s boom. More significantly, only 16 per cent were satisfied with the market economy as a model.

To anyone who has witnessed the havoc wreaked on Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, and Peru (to name a few prominent examples) over the past decade of ?reform? such sentiments become readily understandable. Globalisation and the measures successively introduced by the World Bank and IMF have not delivered the promised free market nirvana. In fact, there is virtually no good evidence that the creation of efficient, rent-free markets coupled with efficient, corruption-free public sectors is even close to being a necessary or sufficient condition for a dynamic capitalist economy. ...Article Continued