• The ills of financial dominance
    http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/doreen-massey/ills-of-financial-dominance

    Less routinely recognised is how ‘finance thinking’ has become hegemonic ideologically. Finance may be a global industry but part of its power lies in the fact that it is intimate too – it gets inside our heads. People from finance are interviewed as ‘experts’ in the media, as though they had no interests at stake. Economics is thus removed from political contestation. Competitive individualism is taken for granted. Distinctions are forgotten (erased) between earned and unearned, between value creation and value extraction (convenient, since finance’s growth has depended so much on the latter – hence the burgeoning inequality from which we began this thumb-nail sketch of the state of the nation). In this society that celebrates choice we are told there is no alternative. This truly is hegemonic common sense, and it is at this level that social settlements are consolidated. It is at this level, therefore, that a challenge must be launched. This means not just contesting individual policies and issues (though that must be done) but even more importantly challenging the whole framework, the very language, that has become our society’s common sense, and that both obscures the injustice that is being done and lulls us into acceptance that it is all inevitable.