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Now that capitalism is over, what’s next?

It has been said many times during recent days that the current global financial crisis has been caused by the greed of those who, making millions of dollars, were never satisfied with those millions and wanted millions more.

In ancient times people were warned about the effects of greed, even telling them not to covet the house, the wife, and not even the donkey or the slave or a neighbor. Those who don’t pay attention to traditional wisdom will probably not respect others either and, hiding behind the shield of an outrageous capitalism, they vacuum life, wealth, and hope of those around them.

Now that the biggest ever capitalism experiment in the history of the world is over (as it is clearly shown by the fact the U.S. government is buying banks and companies), what’s next?

Now that globalization is forcing the development of a new social consciousness and the implementation of sustainable projects, what’s next? What’s the antidote against greed and dehumanizing capitalism?

It should be clear we are not oppose to any person having the freedom of creating his or her own livelihood by means of any licit entrepreneurial activity, regardless of the size of the company. Having said that, we do oppose the materialism and the individualism generated by an extreme capitalism (and it doesn’t take that much to reach that extreme).

What’s the solution and who has to implement it? The answer is this: we are the solution and we should begin its implementation right now. These are the reasons why.

I recently attended a meeting of American business owners, most of them multimillionaires, but all of them, because of their faith, humble and accessible.

One after the other these successful men and women told that, among the many lessons they wanted to learn but they never did the main lesson was how to be part of a community and to stop living as an isolated individual always competing against others.

I told them two things. First, an extreme “communitarian” approach is as pathological as the isolationist individualism they want to escape, so both extremes should be rejected. Second, if there is something we Latinos know very well is how to be part of a community.

I left the meeting with the distinct feeling that, because of the crisis, those business person and their families are ready to learn from us how to be part of a community, if we begin to teach them (and if we know how to do it.)

There is yet another reason why we Hispanics are the answer to the current crisis: our children. According to some projections, almost 70 percent of children under 10 in this country are Latinos.

When in just a few decades those children are in charge of the companies of this country, what kind of values are they going to follow, the destructive individualism they see all around them or the traditional values they learned at home with their families?

This important decision is all ours.

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