“The Monetary God has taken ownership of the world’s heart and there is the first terrorism, Pope Francis said. If we had to paraphrase Moses to define the rules of the Washington Consensus that is at the basis of the neoliberal order, the Ten Commandments of God to Moses in Sinai would constitute an impressive decalogue of neoliberal fundamentalism: all privatization and economic liberalization, the central banks forgetting inflation and dreaming of nothing other than price stability, justice, precipitation.

Ammar Belhimer (1950) is how he speaks in the book The Ten New Commandments of Wall Street. As he has published in Algiers, far from the pulpits of New York, London, Brussels or Shanghai, he hasn’t had much resonance with us. On the other hand, there are those who think that Belhimer has dared to break the limits of Thomas Piketty's famous X-ray when analyzing 21st century capitalism. Richard Labévière, who has just published among other books Terrorisme, face caché de la mondialisation, has been in charge of giving him a voice in Europe.

Belhimer is a law doctor, university professor and journalist. It has participated in the creation of various media, it has also suffered the censorship of the authorities. In a 1998 book he looked at Algeria's foreign debt and the 2016 Spring he looked at the famous springtime that has shaken the Muslim world from Tunisia to Syria in the deserts.

From Algeria, Belhimer sees that financial capitalism has led to the ultimate deregulation of the economy, to end up being the absolute owner of the world. In 1996 in Davos, within the World Economic Forum, as announced by German Central Bank President Hans Tietmeier: "The financial markets are going to make me more and more gendarmerie. Politicians must understand that from now on they are under the control of the financial markets and not just of the debates in their country.”

Seven years earlier, the Washington Consensus was first mentioned in 1989, which, after the collapse of the Soviet Union bloc, became a means of implementation for the whole world. Since then, international financial institutions and alliances have applied the same formula to any country in an emergency situation: dismantling the public sector, privatizing public services, preventing subsidies, implementing flexibility and precariousness in employment, including in basic needs (water, education, health...) prevailing the law of performance.

The workers of the northern wealth have suffered the relocation of many of our jobs with the formula. However, looking south, Belhimer warns us that they have not enriched relocations either. Companies have moved to the South, but the value generated by them, the wealth, has been re-exported to the North through different instruments: foreign investment tax relief, public debt recovery...

As in Iceland, say “No” to the authorities

To highlight how far the impunity of the world’s richest elite reaches, Belhimer mentions what Lloyd Blankfein, president of Goldman Sachs, told a journalist: “I am no more than a banker, forced to do the work of God.” Arrogance in the hot crucible of 2008.

Neoliberalism has had among its main political consequences the notoriety of the oligarchy that has conquered all power, “a permanent incest between the business world and politics”. It's not worth starting a list of the last 30 years, from Bush father and son to Donald Trump, to Silvio Berlusconi. If we look in Russia and elsewhere, we cannot deny that the model has prevailed throughout the world.

The point is that the logic of neoliberalism has entered into armies completely. The agency conducting US military research, DARPA, uses forecasting tools for oil market speculation on stock exchanges to set out its strategies. Thus, the “viability and stability of globalization” has been placed at the level of national interests, either alive or moral, of the United States.

Even after the new wars in the Middle East, Belhimer said in Algerian magazine Reporters, there is a global alliance made up of oil companies and arms sellers, who are the ones who command Western governments and oil producers what to do. “Those wars raise the price of oil, such as the margin of business and the profit of companies. The United States has launched wars not to have a cheap price, but to keep oil expensive.”

With these wars starting but not ending, globalisation, says Belhimer, destroys national states to replace them with global governance organised by markets: “The new subjects who have assumed the role of states, sovereign financial companies, shape a generalized mafia model, characterized by the militarization of economic thinking in the metropolis and the forced transformation of the economy abroad.”

What do we have today? The new democratic system is a totalitarian democracy. A dollar = One vote is the rule, making terror inevitable, reinforcing the far-right, losing the left, middle classes down, slave syndrome everywhere...

The main risks of the future? Virtual companies and the financial system are increasingly focused on speculation through funds managed by the Internet from tax havens. It is estimated that the American empire will end in 2035, the world will be polycentric. The market around 2050 will not saturate with the remote control and will enhance self-control among the population through the objects created by the industry for this purpose. Belhimer predicts that the world will move from having commercial democracies to becoming a market without democracy: “The planetary market is going to violate the laws of democracy, because democracy is indeed local.”

Hopes? He always talks about Iceland. Amid the external debt crisis, in 2010 Icelandic citizens responded with a big “No” to politicians who wanted to pay illegal debts. “The first intelligent reaction to the crisis came to us by the ice,” he says from the edge of the desert.