The press coverage of Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s arrest leaves me ambivalent. Like every other journalist who has written about the matter, I am not qualified to speculate on whether he committed the crime for which he has been charged. Rape is a very serious matter; so is the right to a fair trial.
Instead of rushing to pass judgment before the accused even set foot in court, perhaps the mainstream media should be asking why it generally ignored firm evidence that Strauss-Kahn had done wrong over the past few years. I am referring here to the decisions he took and the work he approved as head of the International Monetary Fund.
Last month, Strauss-Kahn gave a speech in Washington, in which he lamented how “in too many countries, inequality is at record highs”. Arguing that the IMF could not be “indifferent” to issues of wealth distribution, he added: “We are paying more attention to the social dimension in our programmes—protecting social safety nets for the poor and supporting an equitable sharing of the burden.”
Analysed properly, there is something obscene about that comment. The global financial crisis was caused by the feckless behaviour of financial wizards – some of whom have continued to trouser extravagant bonuses. Why should the poor have to bear any burden for a problem that the rich created?
A 2010 paper by Unicef, the United Nations children’s fund, illustrated that the “safety nets” of which Strauss-Kahn was so proud were not sufficient to prevent millions from slipping through them. It highlighted how countries such as Angola, Chad and Congo were planning to introduce cutbacks of up to 13% of gross domestic product over the following year, despite how they all had high levels of malnutrition, childhood mortality or HIV infection. Declining oil revenues were partly responsible for the economic woes of Angola and Chad but the paper suggested that IMF pressure was, too, predicting that the cuts will “likely incur potentially irreversible long-term human costs.”
Beyond some cosmetic changes to policy, Strauss-Kahn has continued to sign the same ruinous prescriptions for many economies that his predecessors have signed since the institution was hijacked by acolytes of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. A new study by the Centre for Economic and Policy Research in the US concluded that conditions imposed on Jamaica by the IMF in the past few years are almost identical to those imposed in the 1970s and 1980s, including a freeze on public sector wages. One of the most inimical effects of the measures is that Jamaica suffered one of the highest rates of decline in treatment rates for tuberculosis of any country where this disease is prevalent between 1997 and 2006. And while the enrolment rate for Jamaica’s primary schools reached 97% in 1991, it fell to 87% in 2007.
Strauss-Kahn’s professed concern about inequality and “burden sharing” belies the IMF’s stance towards Pakistan. Between 1980 and 2000, the burden of taxes paid by the poorest households in Pakistan rose by 7%. Yet the country’s richest saw their tax levels fall by 15% over the same period. Value-added tax is known to hurt the poor far more than the rich, yet the Fund has been pushing for VAT increases in Pakistan over the past year. The IMF has remained rigid on this point, despite the floods that devastated much of Pakistan in 2010.
Here in Europe, the austerity measures introduced in Latvia and Estonia at the IMF’s behest have pushed their unemployment levels to almost 20%. In Greece, a nominally socialist government has pledged to raise €15 billion from selling off state-owned resources to pay back debts to the IMF; that is twice the level of privatisation the Greeks promised last year. Portugal is about to tighten the belts worn by its citizens as part of the “fiscal consolidation” strictures of the Fund and by the EU. Ordinary Portuguese are footing the bill for a bail-out of private banks. Portugal has a gross external debt of €216 billion but just €43 billion of that sum is owed directly by the Lisbon government.
I don’t imagine that Strauss-Kahn’s prison cell has been inundated with “thank you” cards from IMF staff. But the Fund has flourished under his leadership, which – happily for him – has coincided with a global crisis. In April 2009, it was allocated a whopping $750 billion by the Group of 20 (G20) top economies. By selling gold, it has amassed a further $2.8 billion, while the interest payments on its loans are expected to bring it a cool $500 million profit this year.
Strauss-Kahn’s appointment to the IMF was orchestrated by his nemesis Nicolas Sarkozy, who was keen to send a top rival far away from Paris for a few years. No matter how much his fellow Socialists may deny this, the reality is that Strauss-Kahn has been acting as a puppet of the US Treasury and Wall Street, which ultimately control the IMF, since he moved to Washington in 2007. His successor will also be under the Treasury’s tutelage, regardless of who that person may be or what his or her nationality is.
Strauss-Kahn was able to stay at luxury $3,000-a-night hotels, while implementing ruinous policies that keep millions of poor women, men and children subjugated. It is a shame that the mainstream press was so fixated with his thirst for power that the most scandalous consequences of his work went overlooked.
·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 22-28 May 2011
Showing posts with label neo-liberal economics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label neo-liberal economics. Show all posts
Monday, May 23, 2011
Monday, March 28, 2011
France, war and the denial of history
Recent history contains several examples of political leaders resorting to military action at times when public opinion is against them. Margaret Thatcher is widely credited with securing re-election in 1983 after going to war over those outposts of empire, the Falkland Islands, at a time of mass unemployment in Britain. Bill Clinton tried to distract attention from sexual peccadilloes that affected nobody beyond his immediate family in 1998 by bombing Afghanistan and Sudan. The resulting destruction of a Sudanese factory that was a principal supplier of medicines in a poor African country was deemed unworthy of comment by a supine US press.
Nicolas Sarkozy seems to be following the Thatcher/Clinton trend. One year before a presidential election, he has both political rivals and nominally independent editorial writers praising his hawkish stance on Libya.
France’s opening salvo of missiles against Libya has helped its president “win back his international stature”, according to Agence France-Presse. That verdict may have been slightly premature: there are rumblings of disquiet in NATO about France trying to upstage other “important” countries by making sure it was the first to attack.
The truth behind Sarkozy’s manoeuvre is doubtlessly crude. Sarkozy’s primary motivation in any major decision he takes is how it meshes with his plan to stay in office for as long as possible. So all his talk about being forced to assume a role “in the face of history” is claptrap. What he is really interested in is winning a second term.
You can be sure that Sarkozy has not been staying up at night shedding tears over how ordinary Libyans have been suffering under Muammar Gaddafi’s tyranny. Rather than protecting civilians, he is much more likely to be concerned with protecting the profits of Total, the French energy giant, which produced an average of 55,000 barrels of oil from Libyan wells per day in 2010. Let us remember that the same Sarkozy came out in favour of a ban on investment in Burma a few years back. The small print to his valiant act of support for Buddhist monks had an important caveat: Total could continue exploiting Burmese resources as before.
Nor should it be forgotten that Sarkozy had courted Gaddafi assiduously over the past few years. Business deals were central to this tawdry alliance. In 2009, the value of declared French arms sales to Libya came to €30.5 million. Ominously, these included nearly €500,000 worth of contracts belonging to a category called chemical and biological weapons and tear gas. They also included €17.5 million in sales of military planes. There is a breathtaking hypocrisy in calling for a no-fly zone against a country to which France had been supplying warplanes.
It is distressing, too, that the French Socialists have abandoned the chief responsibility of an opposition party: to oppose. Benoit Hamon, a leading member of the Socialists, has strongly backed Sarkozy on the Libya question.
Although Libya is a former Italian colony, rather than a French one, France has abetted crimes against humanity in various parts of the neighbouring region. Both Socialists and the centre-right in France are refusing to deal with imperialism’s toxic legacy. In 2005, they teamed up to introduce a provision in national law requiring that school textbooks celebrate “the positive role of the French presence in its overseas colonies, especially in North Africa.”
That amounted to a denial of historical reality. Four years earlier a book by Paul Assauresses revealed how France had supported widespread torture in Algeria, Libya’s next-door-neighbour. Assauresses admitted that as a French general he personally had committed grotesque abuses.
The US may be the world’s imperial leviathan today, yet French politicians are playing a supporting role. In his book The Breaking of Nations, Robert Cooper (now a senior official in the EU’s diplomatic service) lauds “limited form of voluntary empire” that the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund embody. The IMF is headed by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a veteran French Socialist whose name keeps popping up whenever there is speculation about who could be the next president of his country (assuming Sarkozy’s defeat).
Strauss-Kahn has embraced neo-liberal ideology as zealously as any politician from the centre-right. The IMF’s prescriptions of austerity for countries stretching from Ireland to Jamaica in recent times all bear his signature. The idea that he would represent an alternative to his old nemesis Sarkozy is laughable.
There may be a few differences between Sarko and the Socialists on dossiers like working hours. But the Socialist leadership is not seriously interested in making society more egalitarian (in the country that is credited with inventing the concept of equality). Martine Aubry, its leader, has been exposed as a hollow opportunist. Last year, she was highly critical of government moves to expel Roma gypsies. Yet it emerged that she had supported the dismantlement of a Roma camp near Lille, where she was mayor. I have visited some of the Roma camps in that part of northern France myself and was deeply shocked by the poverty in them and how they lacked basic sanitation. Roma are among the most marginalised people in French society; shame on Aubry for attacking them.
The cowardice of the French Socialists is replicated by their sister parties in Greece, Spain and Ireland. Those parties are all cutting back on public expenditure in a way that harms the poor most. The case for building a genuine left has never been more urgent.
·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 27 March – 2 April 2011
Nicolas Sarkozy seems to be following the Thatcher/Clinton trend. One year before a presidential election, he has both political rivals and nominally independent editorial writers praising his hawkish stance on Libya.
France’s opening salvo of missiles against Libya has helped its president “win back his international stature”, according to Agence France-Presse. That verdict may have been slightly premature: there are rumblings of disquiet in NATO about France trying to upstage other “important” countries by making sure it was the first to attack.
The truth behind Sarkozy’s manoeuvre is doubtlessly crude. Sarkozy’s primary motivation in any major decision he takes is how it meshes with his plan to stay in office for as long as possible. So all his talk about being forced to assume a role “in the face of history” is claptrap. What he is really interested in is winning a second term.
You can be sure that Sarkozy has not been staying up at night shedding tears over how ordinary Libyans have been suffering under Muammar Gaddafi’s tyranny. Rather than protecting civilians, he is much more likely to be concerned with protecting the profits of Total, the French energy giant, which produced an average of 55,000 barrels of oil from Libyan wells per day in 2010. Let us remember that the same Sarkozy came out in favour of a ban on investment in Burma a few years back. The small print to his valiant act of support for Buddhist monks had an important caveat: Total could continue exploiting Burmese resources as before.
Nor should it be forgotten that Sarkozy had courted Gaddafi assiduously over the past few years. Business deals were central to this tawdry alliance. In 2009, the value of declared French arms sales to Libya came to €30.5 million. Ominously, these included nearly €500,000 worth of contracts belonging to a category called chemical and biological weapons and tear gas. They also included €17.5 million in sales of military planes. There is a breathtaking hypocrisy in calling for a no-fly zone against a country to which France had been supplying warplanes.
It is distressing, too, that the French Socialists have abandoned the chief responsibility of an opposition party: to oppose. Benoit Hamon, a leading member of the Socialists, has strongly backed Sarkozy on the Libya question.
Although Libya is a former Italian colony, rather than a French one, France has abetted crimes against humanity in various parts of the neighbouring region. Both Socialists and the centre-right in France are refusing to deal with imperialism’s toxic legacy. In 2005, they teamed up to introduce a provision in national law requiring that school textbooks celebrate “the positive role of the French presence in its overseas colonies, especially in North Africa.”
That amounted to a denial of historical reality. Four years earlier a book by Paul Assauresses revealed how France had supported widespread torture in Algeria, Libya’s next-door-neighbour. Assauresses admitted that as a French general he personally had committed grotesque abuses.
The US may be the world’s imperial leviathan today, yet French politicians are playing a supporting role. In his book The Breaking of Nations, Robert Cooper (now a senior official in the EU’s diplomatic service) lauds “limited form of voluntary empire” that the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund embody. The IMF is headed by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a veteran French Socialist whose name keeps popping up whenever there is speculation about who could be the next president of his country (assuming Sarkozy’s defeat).
Strauss-Kahn has embraced neo-liberal ideology as zealously as any politician from the centre-right. The IMF’s prescriptions of austerity for countries stretching from Ireland to Jamaica in recent times all bear his signature. The idea that he would represent an alternative to his old nemesis Sarkozy is laughable.
There may be a few differences between Sarko and the Socialists on dossiers like working hours. But the Socialist leadership is not seriously interested in making society more egalitarian (in the country that is credited with inventing the concept of equality). Martine Aubry, its leader, has been exposed as a hollow opportunist. Last year, she was highly critical of government moves to expel Roma gypsies. Yet it emerged that she had supported the dismantlement of a Roma camp near Lille, where she was mayor. I have visited some of the Roma camps in that part of northern France myself and was deeply shocked by the poverty in them and how they lacked basic sanitation. Roma are among the most marginalised people in French society; shame on Aubry for attacking them.
The cowardice of the French Socialists is replicated by their sister parties in Greece, Spain and Ireland. Those parties are all cutting back on public expenditure in a way that harms the poor most. The case for building a genuine left has never been more urgent.
·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 27 March – 2 April 2011
Monday, September 27, 2010
Workers of the world unite: there is no alternative
Every so often the Plain English Campaign in Britain accuses the main EU institutions of butchering Her Majesty’s tongue. As an Irishman, the campaign leaves me ambivalent. I have no desire to defend the purity of a language forced on much of the world by a brutish imperialism. But I loathe how the elite in Brussels deliberately uses words that mislead.
Despite not being typical Euro-jargon, the term “social partners” is especially horrid. It gives the impression that employers and trade unions both act altruistically and that they have equal access to the corridors of power.
This week the concept behind the “partnership” – one that is explicitly referred to in the EU’s treaties – will be exposed as fraudulent. On Wednesday (29 September) trade unionists from across Europe will protest at the cutbacks in public expenditure that our political masters tell us we have to swallow to have any chance of recovery from the economic crisis. Will the bosses of this continent be displaying solidarity with their “partners” on this day of action? You must be joking.
My hope is that there will be a massive turn-out of angry workers and that this will encourage trade union leaders to be more combative towards the EU’s institutions than they have been in recent years. The protesters’ key demands can be found in a policy paper titled “Towards A New Social Deal” published last year by the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC). While its diagnosis is correct – “the dominance of the neo-liberal economic model over the past 30 years has caused the economic catastrophe that Europe and the rest of the world are now experiencing” – it fails to grapple with ETUC’s own culpability in propping up the aforementioned model.
John Monks, ETUC’s general-secretary, made a strategic blunder over the past few years by campaigning in favour of the Lisbon treaty, which legally obliges the Union to follow neo-liberal precepts. The treaty, for example, commits the Union to fight all barriers to international trade – these include social or environmental standards that irritate multinational firms.
During 2009, Monks’ contention that the treaty benefited workers was regularly quoted by dodgy politicians and other establishment figures who bludgeoned Irish voters into accepting the treaty in a referendum – having rejected the same document a year earlier. The truth was that those politicians hadn’t the slightest interest in defending workers rights and that the treaty merely threw a few crumbs to workers.
Monks now has an opportunity to atone for his poor judgement by strenuously opposing the agenda of the EU’s predominantly right-leaning governments and institutions. Far from having no other option than imposing austerity measures on their populations, these myopic ideologues relish how they can ram through decisions that would have proven unpalatable during a boom.
Mark Weisbrot from the Centre for Economic and Policy Research in Washington has demolished the myth that there is no alternative to cutting social spending and raising the retirement age. He has suggested too that Europe’s policy-makers have presented a false picture of the woes besetting euro-zone economies. Whereas conventional “wisdom” has it that the Spanish had been profligate, the reality is that the ratio between the country’s debt and its gross domestic product fell from 59% to 36% from 2000 to 2007.
“What is really going on is that powerful interests within these countries – including Spain, Greece, Ireland and Portugal – are taking advantage of the situation to make the changes that they want,” Weisbrot wrote in July. “Perhaps even more importantly, the European authorities – including the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF – who are holding the purse strings of any bail-out funds, are even more committed than the national governments to right-wing policy changes. And they are further removed from any accountability to any electorate.”
Unfortunately, we lack economic commentators of Weisbrot’s calibre in Brussels. Instead, the researchers in corporate-funded think tanks that masquerade as independent “experts” have acted as cheerleaders for cutbacks. Ann Mettler, director of the Lisbon Council – a group dedicated to making Europe “competitive” – contradicts herself in her latest “e-brief” (a term that the Plain English Campaign must decry). After arguing that Europe needs more investment in education, she then proceeds to applaud cuts that affect vital services like education. Describing the upheaval in the Greek economy as a “healthy wake-up call” she writes that “in reality, what is today called ‘austerity’ is perhaps nothing more than at last making an effort to live within our means.”
It is instructive that another new Lisbon Council pamphlet was penned by Alessandro Leipold, a former senior official with the International Monetary Fund. Leipold has recommended that joint assistance from the EU and IMF “should become the norm” for economies in difficulty.
His blueprint is frightening. Over the summer, the IMF illustrated that it remains wedded to capitalist extremism when it attempted to bulldoze Hungary into abandoning a planned tax on banks. The Hungarian government was able to resist the fund’s pressure; poorer countries outside Europe have been unable to. Under the conditions of a $1.2 billion IMF loan to Jamaica, no new schools can be built for the island’s children.
The measures being taken in the name of economic recovery in Europe and around the world are manifestly unjust. Calling for workers of the world to unite against them might sound old-fashioned but in this respect at least, there is no alternative.
•First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 26 September – 2 October, 2010
Despite not being typical Euro-jargon, the term “social partners” is especially horrid. It gives the impression that employers and trade unions both act altruistically and that they have equal access to the corridors of power.
This week the concept behind the “partnership” – one that is explicitly referred to in the EU’s treaties – will be exposed as fraudulent. On Wednesday (29 September) trade unionists from across Europe will protest at the cutbacks in public expenditure that our political masters tell us we have to swallow to have any chance of recovery from the economic crisis. Will the bosses of this continent be displaying solidarity with their “partners” on this day of action? You must be joking.
My hope is that there will be a massive turn-out of angry workers and that this will encourage trade union leaders to be more combative towards the EU’s institutions than they have been in recent years. The protesters’ key demands can be found in a policy paper titled “Towards A New Social Deal” published last year by the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC). While its diagnosis is correct – “the dominance of the neo-liberal economic model over the past 30 years has caused the economic catastrophe that Europe and the rest of the world are now experiencing” – it fails to grapple with ETUC’s own culpability in propping up the aforementioned model.
John Monks, ETUC’s general-secretary, made a strategic blunder over the past few years by campaigning in favour of the Lisbon treaty, which legally obliges the Union to follow neo-liberal precepts. The treaty, for example, commits the Union to fight all barriers to international trade – these include social or environmental standards that irritate multinational firms.
During 2009, Monks’ contention that the treaty benefited workers was regularly quoted by dodgy politicians and other establishment figures who bludgeoned Irish voters into accepting the treaty in a referendum – having rejected the same document a year earlier. The truth was that those politicians hadn’t the slightest interest in defending workers rights and that the treaty merely threw a few crumbs to workers.
Monks now has an opportunity to atone for his poor judgement by strenuously opposing the agenda of the EU’s predominantly right-leaning governments and institutions. Far from having no other option than imposing austerity measures on their populations, these myopic ideologues relish how they can ram through decisions that would have proven unpalatable during a boom.
Mark Weisbrot from the Centre for Economic and Policy Research in Washington has demolished the myth that there is no alternative to cutting social spending and raising the retirement age. He has suggested too that Europe’s policy-makers have presented a false picture of the woes besetting euro-zone economies. Whereas conventional “wisdom” has it that the Spanish had been profligate, the reality is that the ratio between the country’s debt and its gross domestic product fell from 59% to 36% from 2000 to 2007.
“What is really going on is that powerful interests within these countries – including Spain, Greece, Ireland and Portugal – are taking advantage of the situation to make the changes that they want,” Weisbrot wrote in July. “Perhaps even more importantly, the European authorities – including the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF – who are holding the purse strings of any bail-out funds, are even more committed than the national governments to right-wing policy changes. And they are further removed from any accountability to any electorate.”
Unfortunately, we lack economic commentators of Weisbrot’s calibre in Brussels. Instead, the researchers in corporate-funded think tanks that masquerade as independent “experts” have acted as cheerleaders for cutbacks. Ann Mettler, director of the Lisbon Council – a group dedicated to making Europe “competitive” – contradicts herself in her latest “e-brief” (a term that the Plain English Campaign must decry). After arguing that Europe needs more investment in education, she then proceeds to applaud cuts that affect vital services like education. Describing the upheaval in the Greek economy as a “healthy wake-up call” she writes that “in reality, what is today called ‘austerity’ is perhaps nothing more than at last making an effort to live within our means.”
It is instructive that another new Lisbon Council pamphlet was penned by Alessandro Leipold, a former senior official with the International Monetary Fund. Leipold has recommended that joint assistance from the EU and IMF “should become the norm” for economies in difficulty.
His blueprint is frightening. Over the summer, the IMF illustrated that it remains wedded to capitalist extremism when it attempted to bulldoze Hungary into abandoning a planned tax on banks. The Hungarian government was able to resist the fund’s pressure; poorer countries outside Europe have been unable to. Under the conditions of a $1.2 billion IMF loan to Jamaica, no new schools can be built for the island’s children.
The measures being taken in the name of economic recovery in Europe and around the world are manifestly unjust. Calling for workers of the world to unite against them might sound old-fashioned but in this respect at least, there is no alternative.
•First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 26 September – 2 October, 2010
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