The ‘secret Capitalist cabal’ behind austerity

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http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/12/31/the-secret-capitalist-cabal-behind-austerity/


The ‘How to Win the Class War’ satirist tells Claire Provost about the ‘shadowy plot’ to claw back working-class gains

In a discreet villa in Switzerland, carefully chosen experts have been assembled by a shadowy group of wealthy and powerful commissioners and tasked with answering a single big question: how, amid the global financial crisis, can a renaissance of western capitalism be best ensured?

This is the Machiavellian scene that opens the latest book from Susan George, the prolific Franco-American political scientist and global justice activist. While perhaps best known for her work on world hunger, poverty and debt, George has turned to Europe and the US in How to Win the Class War, a satire of the 1%, or the “Davos class”, as she puts it, in reference to the elite annual gatherings of the World Economic Forum.

Tongue-in-cheek and at times bizarre, the book is likely to strike a chord with those involved in movements such as Occupy and others increasingly suspicious of political parties and elite institutions. “I don’t think preachy books work,” says George, who was in London this month. “I think sometimes people are more moved by [satire] and black humour … God knows there’s plenty to satirise out there.”

George, 79, has spent decades studying and critiquing mainstream economic policy and is a key figure in alter-globalisation circles. Born in Ohio during the Great Depression, she moved to France in the 1950s and never left, joining activist movements against France’s colonial war in Algeria and America’s war in Vietnam. Today, she is honorary president of Attac-France, a group founded to push for taxes on foreign exchange transactions but which now works on a range of issues, and heads the board of the Transnational Institute network of “scholar-activists”.

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