Majority or minority project

 
Majority or minority project

Citizen rights
By Carlos Heller: In a country that produces food to supply nearly 400 million people, there are citizens who go hungry. Therefore, the Frente de Todos affirms in its political program that eating is a right.

Something similar happens with basic services: access to water, electricity or gas are essential rights for any person. However, a growing sector of Argentines and Argentines faces difficulties in accessing them. This happens when services cease to be a right and become a product. Because every product depends on an equation by which the generator generates the maximum gain. At a certain magnitude of this gain, the citizen loses the right to that service converted into a business because, due to its price, he can not access it. Then: the maximum profitability on a merchandise is inversely proportional to the rights of citizens.

In globalized societies, everything tends to be transformed into a product or business, oriented towards the search for profit maximization and, therefore, undermines the rights of citizens. Neoliberalism is a system that converts the rights of the majority into an increase in the profitability of minorities.
                                                                                                                                                           There is a story that led us to this situation. Forty years ago, Margaret Thatcher became prime minister of the United Kingdom and, thirty-eight years ago, Ronald Reagan became the president of the United States. The stage that we call globalization began. In it, States tended to become secondary actors because the corporations that placed themselves above them took decisive weight. Corporations do not have a Homeland: they are established where they obtain maximum profitability. Moreover, many countries governed by leaders with neoliberal ideology dispute to attract these corporations. Who manages to attract them? Those that offer lower salaries, greater deregulations, lower taxes and less protection for their citizenship. What then is a neoliberal government? An administration that generates local conditions so that the global profitability of the corporations is optimized. What these governments offer to corporations is the suppression of the rights of majorities.

How to achieve, then, that in the contradiction between business and service the latter have more weight?

We have an answer: that public services, such as gas, electricity or water, are provided by entities that do not aim to maximize profit. Is it not time to rethink public management as the best tool to fulfill those rights?

And when we talk about public management, we are talking about cooperative enterprises of municipal companies and public companies with tripartite management. In all of them the idea of ​​service is above the product idea.

The Nobel Prize for Economics, Joseph Stiglitz, in his proposal of "An alternative agenda to the neoliberal failure", in a note reproduced by the newspaper Clarín said: "The neoliberal experiment - lower taxes for the rich, deregulation of labor markets and of products, financialization and globalization- has been a spectacular failure. The growth is lower than it was in the 25 years after the Second World War, and most of it accumulated at the top of the income scale ", which is why -the Nobel holds-" neoliberalism must be decreed dead and buried. "

To reverse this situation proposes four priorities. The first affirms the need to "restore the balance between markets, the State and civil society. Governments have an obligation to limit and delineate markets through environmental, health, occupational safety and other regulations. It is also the government's job to do what the market can not do or will not do, such as actively investing in basic research, technology, education and the health of its voters. "

In this same perspective, it is worth remembering the exhibition I made at the United Nations, as representative of our continent, at the Presentation of the International Year of Cooperatives 2012.

Among other issues, we made it clear that the slogan "The cooperative enterprise as a contribution to the construction of a better world", means not to think of the cooperative as the wheel of assistance to correct the failures or errors of the capitalist system.

Read more ONE WORSE THAN THE OTHER

"We want to be part of the construction of another world, a world where the welfare, health and education of the peoples are privileged, a world in which democracy is authentic and full of popular participation," I said at that time.

 This sector is recognized as the bearer of a style of development that gives primacy to people, with the ability to generate new opportunities as well as mitigate social and economic imbalances.

The option is clear: maximization of profits with elimination of rights or extension of rights with limitation of profits. Or majorities project or minority project. There is another country not only possible but necessary. But we can only achieve it if we all commit ourselves. It is not achieved with spectators. It is achieved with collective commitment.

Carlos Heller is president of the Solidarity Party.