Charles Ferguson

Green Army: Persons of Interest

An unregulated global financial market with the power to create money from nothing to finance high stakes financial speculation — with an expectation that government will step in with bailouts when things go bad — is an invitation to financial disaster.

— David Korten (1937), When Corporations Rule the World, 2001, p 290.

(Charles Ferguson, Inside Job, 2011)

(Collapse, While the Rest of Us Die: Secrets of America's Shadow Government, Episode 5, Season 1, Vice, 2020)

Something Worth Fighting For

Charles Ferguson (1955)

Inequality in wealth, in the United States, is now higher than in any other developed country. …

For the first time in history, average Americans have less education and are less prosperous than their parents. …

For decades, the American financial system was stable and safe.
But then something changed.
The financial industry turned it's back on society, corrupted our political system and plunged the world economy into crisis.
At enormous cost we've avoided disaster, and are recovering.

But the men and institutions that caused the crisis are still in power …
[They] tell us that we need them.
[That] what they do is too complicated for us to understand.
[That] it won't happen again.
They will spend billions fighting reform.

[That needs to change.]
It won't be easy.
But some things, are worth fighting for.

Philosophical Quibbles

Philosophy Now

Howard Darmstadter:
For the general public, [Singer] may be the most influential philosopher of the last half century. …

[Singer] is an excellent critic of prevailing moral orthodoxies. …
[When viewed] not as a philosopher dispensing theoretical arguments, but as a campaigner for the cause of animals and against suffering humanity … he can be quite convincing.
His arguments can make us see the errors in much moral posturing.
In questioning our assumptions, we may come to appreciate issues we would rather not confront.

[His] writings are full of touching examples of human and animal suffering that may move us to act, regardless of philosophical quibbles. …

We naturally feel compassion without needing a philosophical argument …

Arguments Against an Obligation to Assist

Howard Darmstadter:
Suppose you see a child drowning in a pool.
You can rescue the child at no danger to yourself, but at the cost of ruining your new suit …
Clearly, you are morally obliged to wade in, suit be damned.
But … if you are a moderately well-off citizen of a first world nation, donating 10% of your income to CARE or Oxfam will similarly relieve much suffering, with only a modest impingement on your lifestyle.
As with the drowning child [you] have to grab your chequebook and wade on in. …

Moral rules can’t generally be applied in an unlimited accumulation …
[They] can be overwhelmed by numbers and by questions about the obligations of other people. …

Would your obligation be different if

• there were hundreds of people observing the child [or]
• you encountered a hundred such children every day? …

Perhaps [you'd] think

• ‘Why does this all fall on me?’ and walk on by, pretending you don’t hear the child’s screams …
• [Why] shouldn’t it be someone
  who knows the child, or
  who can get to the child fastest, or
  who’s wearing cheaper clothing? …

Alternatively you could] just spend more time away from pools. …

Peter Singer (1946):
How we deal with complete strangers on the other side of the world has become one of the most important moral issues of our times and we don't have the right evolved responses to it. …
[The drowning child scenario demonstrates that] our evolved responses are not good enough and we have to think about the situation intellectually …
(Religion and Science)

[We] have moral instincts.
[We] often make judgments … without reflection or reason, but I don't think they're very reliable …
[When] we try and do serious moral philosophy or ethics, we should try and move beyond those judgments.
(Utilitarianism)

Big Ideas 2012

ABC Radio National: Big Ideas

William Faulkner (1897 – 1962):
The past is not dead.
It is never dead.
It's not even past. …

Alan Trounson (1946) [President, California Institute for Regenerative Medicine]:
The returns on the human genome [project —] $3.8 billion last year — is somewhere between $700 and $1,400 for every dollar invested over 23 years.
(Stem cells in medicine: Opportunities and challenges, Dean of Medicine Annual Lecture Series, University of NSW, 12 July 2012)

Paul Barklay:
… 70% of the world's poor are women.
They earn less than 10% of the world's wages [for] two thirds of the world's work.
(International Women's Day, 8 March 2012)

Rear Vision: 2011

ABC Radio National: Rear Vision

Rashid Khalidi:
[What we are seeing now in the Arab Spring is the] expression of sentiments and aspirations that seem to cut across different classes and groups and age groups within the Arab world.
[That transcend] divisions that everybody thought were hard and fast.

[Most] people in the Arab world … have a sense of what's going on the rest of the world.
They understand that other people benefit from some elements of democracy and constitutional rule and they want that for themselves. …
[People] in the Arab world actually are like everybody else.

In most other parts of the world [people] have similar aspirations towards freedom and some social justice.
[The] tides that have affected the rest of the world affect this part as well.
It is not … a place made up of crazy fundamentalists who if you allow them to have a free system, will turn towards extremism.

[What] we've seen in Tunisia so far, what we're seeing in Egypt so far, has been an expression of this exact thing kind of sentiments that we saw in Eastern Europe at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, we saw in South Korea, we saw in Brazil, we saw in other countries that have managed to overcome autocracy and move towards democracy.