Corporate scams give a sense of deja vu

h hue and cry over the Satyam fiasco? It has only exemplified the expostulations of Balzac and Proudhon that that crime is the bulwark of every capitalistic empire and also that lure of lucre is the nemesis and originates in filch. Parasitic capitalism thrives on scams, scandals, corruption et al and the 7000 crore plus Satyam scam is a case in the point. This is being projected as one-off case but it seems just the tip of the iceberg. Rest can follow suit. The legendary Gordon Gekko in the movie Wall Street in the late eighties proclaimed that ‘Greed is God’. Circa 2010, he will have to rephrase it, ‘Greed is God but only for me’. Such is the state of capitalism. Or is it the real face of capitalism whose underbelly is now fully exposed to all and sundry? Is the moribund capitalism now hell-bent on striptease to mitigate what seems to be an irreparable damage?
Satyam is only one among the other IT bellwethers that render services or rather end-to-end solutions to a vast capitalistic market of lesser productive activities vis-à-vis real production ventures. They do not effectively contribute to the actual world resources. What Raju did should not have come as a bolt from the blue. Or else, who could have given the rationale of unprecedented profit booking within a year without cooking up the books? A year back, the media heaped encomiums on ‘India Shining’ and took recourse to iconization of corporate crooks when they should have actually gone beyond the hype and hoopla to realize the situation at a ground zero level. Now they and the government are probing a daunting task of uncovering the parasitic character of capitalism, which actually operates on a feedback mechanism to camouflage its true colours. Capitalism is surviving not because it is innately utopian but because we lack a ‘third alternative’ as of now with pseudo-socialists failing to deliver the true ideologies of Socialism. Russia and China had actually started behaving as capitalist nations even before they got capitalistic recognitions and accolades, the veracity of which is already irking the skeptics and justifiably so.
The middle class is raising hue and cry over corporate fiascos but they are the ones who want to earn quick bucks borne out of excessive greed and badmouth the system when investments go sour. They want to walk away with the profit but refuse to wash the dirty linens in public. They eulogize the bulls and decry the bears. Why can’t we take cognizance of the fact that giants and dwarfs have to co-exist? In a mad rush to earn quick bucks with least effort, we have hit the cul-de-sac.
The Satyam scam exposes the class-struggles even more as the state tries to ensure least possible retribution to Raju and his league of a few good men. On the other hand, stringent norms are enforced if a poor child gets caught stealing 10 rupees for the sake of belly. Either he gets severely beaten by a furious crowd or is incarcerated for this minor offense. Even a layperson has realized a tad lately that a scam of such magnitude is not the handiwork of few but is a systemic complicity driven by capitalism. Inflating accounts, cooking up of real and fictitious funds, nepotism and red-tapism that involve bureaucratic complicity, nexus and attempts to liaise by dint of bribery and taking full advantage of lax regulatory mechanisms have badly shaken the common man’s confidence in the capitalistic order as of now. Raju is a scamster as he got caught but many others are still evading the law. We do not know by what means and in what amount taxpayers’ money is siphoned out by these white-collared thieves. Still, the matter is being projected as a spoilt-brat’s prank and as a one-off case. Who knows Subhiksha might follow suit or any other nationally or internationally? The moot point is that it is high time we realized that heroic surges to spiraling profit building within a short span of time is mostly short-lived and is never sustainable. Let us not vindicate any such hero nay villain who takes undue advantages of capitalistic loopholes. Paradoxically, the legalese ensures protection of such tainted corporate crooks so that they walk away with mild punishment and manage to retain their assets in the long run.
We could have at least ensured one square meals for every citizen before focusing on an illusory resurgent economy campaign. Food crisis will worsen in the years to come and will lead to civil unrest thereby jeopardizing the already overburdened and moribund economy. The fears of worsening global recession, giant banks filing bankruptcy, plummeting stocks, unimpressive bailout packages and other issues are undermining the efforts to prevent the ‘silent tsunami’ of worsening food crisis and will only push crores of poor to the brink of slow death. It is a clear case of imbalance of demand and supply primarily fuelled by capitalistic behemoths who in turn pass the bucks by blaming all on increased middle-class consumption in emerging economies like India and China. The latter take perverse delight in the quixotic woes of the developed nation because of their growing clout forgetting that in the end it is they who will suffer the most and for little fault of theirs. Over 80 crore plus Indians spend less than 20 rupees a day and barely manage to live from hand to mouth. Little do they know that the trigger lies in the hands of Wall Street speculators who can risk any number of lives for their greed. When the latter bear the brunt, the entire issue snowballs and nonsensical talks of Asian decoupling theories gain prominence when it is crystal-clear that if New York catches cold the entire world sneezes. We catch the infection of our masters who play sport with us as per their whims, fancies and unnecessary needs. The foray of domestic billionaires in the agriculture sector threatens to take away the sustenance of a large farming populace. This also negatively impacts the food production. Globally too agriculture is now the oligopoly of selected few colossal corporate entities who misuse fertilizers-seeds-pesticides for their perverse experimentations on the pretext of bio-diesel production. They also get the leverage of manipulating state subsidy in ethanol production, which should have been utilized to eradicate poverty, illiteracy and to improve the general standard of living. Crying hoarse over recession, billions of dollars are being doled out as stimulus packages worldwide at taxpayers’ expense. Overspending will never stop but the poor man’s thali will have lesser chapattis. Not to say that pulses and vegetables have almost vanished in thin air. If ‘thali’ becomes ‘khali’ we can overturn the state if need be arises. Yes, we will.