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Article Excerpt
Noreena Hertz is Associate Director of the Centre for International Business at the University of Cambridge in England. In 2003, her book The Silent Takeover (ISBN: 006055973X) was published, and it has be-come hotly debated since then. In the book Ms. Hertz argues that governments have surrendered their responsibility as guardians of the public good and are now the agents of the business world.
Noreena Hertz says she is not an enemy of capitalism, nor even is she anti-business.
"Capitalism," she writes, "is clearly the best system for generating wealth, and free trade and open capital markets have brought unprecedented economic growth to most if not all of the world."
What concerns her is the way in which the political state has been taken over by the corporate state.
"Governments are now like flies caught in the intricate web of the market," she writes. "and voters see their powerlessness. They sense that politicians' hands are tied and that their promises are increasingly empty. They watch politicians dancing to corporations' tunes. They are aware that the political rhetoric they hear is not being translated into any sort of actual reality; they feel that in many cases politicians have entered into a covert pact with business. And so, increasingly, they are turning their backs on politics."
Election turnouts, she points out, are declining not only in Western countries but also in the emerging democracies of Eastern Europe. The elections for the European Parliament in 1999 saw less than 50 percent of the electorate bothering to vote, down from 57 per cent in 1994. In the United Kingdom, the turnout was only 24 percent of registered voters.
In the 1950s and '60s, voter turnouts in Canadian federal elections were between 75 percent and 80 percent....
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