Here is the real story
tibato
Oliver Twist in Hong Kong
Common Sense
John Maxwell
Sunday, December 18, 2005
On Friday morning, as I write, the Leviathan called Globalisation seems
headed for the rocks in Hong Kong. Stark failure faces the Doha round
of negotiations for a new world order in which imperialist capitalism
would adopt a new persona - a kinder, gentler face disguising the same
old rapacious exploitation of the poor of the world.
John Maxwell
Among the rocks in Globalisation's seaway are the newly awakened giants
of the Third World or so-called Developing World - India, Brazil and
others, as well as - Surprise! Surprise!! - the primary producers of
the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP), former colonies of
metropolitan Europe.
Marooned in their miserable alms houses, these minor mendicants are
saying to the rich masters "Please, Sir, we want more!"
The masters of the alms houses, the Americans, Europeans, Japanese and
other members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development (OECD) are bemused by these demands, not quite
understanding what the little beggars want when they say they are
demanding justice.
Absent from the global forum are the Haitians, the people who began the
whole process of decolonisation and freedom from plantation slavery.
And that is where the apparently intractable quarrel about economic
justice began between the rich and the poor of the world.
The Haitian revolution began a 200-year-long process of decolonisation
which is ending, as it began, with the Haitians struggling to free
themselves from slavery. They were not defeated by force of arms but by
compound interest; to escape the French and American trade embargo of
their newly independent country, the Haitians agreed to pay the French
reparations for their war of Independence.
In neighbouring Jamaica, the planters were recompensed for losing their
property when slavery was abolished. Nothing was paid to the ex-slaves,
guaranteeing, as in Haiti, the continuing supremacy of the usurers and
the shopkeepers. Haiti was the first highly indebted poor country,
having to pay the French a penalty estimated by President Aristide to
equal US$25,000,000,000 in today's money.
When the Haitians defeated two of Napoleon's armies, a British army and
the remnants of the Spanish army in San Domingue, they began a process
of exporting revolution and freedom, a process for which they have
never been forgiven. It was the Haitians who armed and dispatched Simon
Bolivar on his final and successful mission to free Latin America from
Spanish rule.
Although slavery was not abolished in Brazil and the United States for
another half century, and Cuba did not gain its full independence for
another century-and-a-half, Haiti began the process which finally
transformed piracy and the plantation economy into the system known
today as capitalism. The plantation economy is moribund - not quite
dead.
It survives in severely truncated form - as a paraplegic and
dysfunctional system in the ACP countries.
There, in Jamaica and other places, its traditions remain strong:
social dysfunctions, including seasonal unemployment, economic
emigration, social stratification and the stranglehold of elites on
primitive economies. In these economies, political parties which claim
to represent the masses enjoy the fruits of office while the elites
enjoy the much richer perquisites of economic power.
In these economies, it is the commission agents and the shopkeepers who
are in power, expressing their displeasure with mass movements by
withdrawing their confidence and their bank accounts from time to time
to enforce 'fiscal discipline' and usurious rates of unearned rent -
income from 'government paper' issued by the representatives of the
wealth creators for the greater good of the wealth consumers.
Reparative Justice?
The helplessness and intellectual bankruptcy of the plantation
economies is nowhere better expressed than in last Thursday's speech in
Hong Kong by Jamaica's minister of foreign affairs, the Hon K D Knight,
QC.
According to this newspaper on Friday, Mr Knight told the Ministerial
Meeting of the WTO that the deliberations would only be successful "to
the extent that there was a discernible movement on the development
agenda".
This, according to Mr Knight, meant:
. The promotion of the productive sectors through trade;
. The sustained development of the commodity sector;
. Building supply capacity and competitiveness and increasing market
access for developing countries in the areas of exports, including
agriculture, commodities, apparel and labour and resource intensive
manufactures and services.
Which, being interpreted, means: "Give us a 'bly' enabling us to build
more free zones, dig bigger and more destructive holes in the landscape
and have enough left over for food stamps."
The argument over Universal Human Rights and Justice which began in
Haiti 201 years ago is now subsumed into a piteous cry for bigger,
better, kindlier and gentler alms houses.
The Third World are asking, like Bustamante in 1944 in Jamaica, for a
'lickle more bread and a lickle butter'.
There are some others who are asking for an entirely different menu,
for what some describe as a 'preposterous' demand for reparations,
compensation for the injuries and injustices of the last five
centuries. Their argument is that just as the Germans had to recompense
the Jews for the injuries inflicted on them and their fellows by Adolph
Hitler and the Third Reich, so should the Americans, English, Spanish,
Dutch, Portuguese and Belgians pay for their depredations in Africa and
the New World.
These depredations continued after slavery and continue to this day, as
the Europeans, made rich by their exploitation, have maximised and
entrenched their extortion of wealth by new profit-making systems in
the form of tariffs, protectionism, quotas and, most of all, unfair
terms of trade and ruinous interest rates.
These systems in turn, finance a wealth distributive system in
subsidies and social services which keep the metropolitan working
classes out of political and trade union mischief.
What Mr Knight and his Third World backers want is that the rich
recognise that we too, have domestic constituencies to be mollified.
The unspoken rider to this argument is 'Hey! food stamps are insurance
against civil unrest and a lot cheaper than an expeditionary force'.
Meanwhile, the colonial elites, amassing new fortunes by the week,
don't put their money where their mouths are - their funds are in
Cayman, Nassau, Bermuda, Liechtenstein and Jersey.
>From there, the money which could be invested in Jamaican enterprise,
becomes part of the immense fund of Foreign Direct Investment which is
channelled by the global casino bosses into China, Taiwan and other
places whose ministers are never tired of echoing the European masters'
preachments that we are poor because we are poor and/or shiftless, or
socialist, or corrupt or simply stupid.
In the 1970s, as part of the many short, sharp shocks administered by
the international financial institutions (IFI), we were told we could
not subsidise our farmers or our poor. Subsidies distorted the market.
Our subsidies, instead, were added to the subsidies paid to American
agro-industry and European farmers. It makes sound economic sense to
subsidise the millionaire Fanjuls in Florida sugar or market colossi
like Archer Daniels, Monsanto, Chiquita (ex-United Fruit), Boeing and
Microsoft.
The British are refusing to give up their £8,000,000,000 annual
subsidy from Europe and the French will fight to the death to retain
their even larger dole from the EU's Common Agricultural Policy.
The electro-convulsive therapy (ECT) of the IFIs works no better on
countries than it did on the mentally ill in 'asylums'. Nor does the
intellectual and emotional lobotomisation of whole generations of
political leaders. We now have leaders whose mental processes have been
surgically separated from their cultural roots, but out in the
grassroots, crazy people still speak of socialism and absurd concepts
such as the greatest good for the greatest number.
Paradoxically, political ECT may yet prove beneficial; if only we could
persuade the rich and powerful to behave as brutally as their perceived
self-interest tells them.
Nothing would be better for us than a Cuban-style embargo, forcing us
to think for ourselves, forcing us to look to our real resources, in
our cultures, our imaginations, our ingenuity, our people.
We prattle about agro-industry, forgetting that sugar was the original
and most deadly of all agro-industry. Mr Kinght's prescriptions lead to
an intellectual, economic and cultural dead end. If we were to wake up
and realise that if we stopped paying extortionate interest - exporting
barrels of money to Cayman, Bermuda, and similar ratholes - we would
immediately triple the amount at the disposal of the government; we
would understand that salvation is in our own hands and not in the
hands of the successors to Enron, or the psalm-singers of Microsoft or
the cooing doves of Citibank, Standard & Poors and the US State
Department.
If the people of Jamaica were to understand that the government of
Jamaica exports twice as much of their own hard-earned money to develop
foreign capitalism as it spends on developing Jamaica, things would
soon change.
And we would not have to repatriate Haitians running away from tyranny.
Democracy and Development
The US-written Master Narrative of Cuba is so pervasive that most of us
find it almost impossible to imagine what life could be like in
"Communist Cuba".
There are some fascinating snippets in the news about the fates of the
people of New Orleans which was devastated three months ago by
Hurricane Katrina.
New Orleans, a city of 600,000 people, was devastated because safety
precautions which were known to be necessary were never taken. The
levees (dikes) which should have prevented most of the storm surge
failed and thousands of people were left homeless and jobless. The
dikes should have been strengthened years ago.
Further, the emergency management systems failed, mostly because of
incompetence and malign neglect. The result is that most of the
hurricane refugees are still scattered to the four winds, some as far
away as Alaska, and the culture of the most cosmopolitan city in the US
has been scattered with them.
One harrowing story in the December 8 New York Times (NYT) tells of
Tracy Jackson and Jerel Brown and their four young children who "share
a twin bed and thin mattress on the floor [in] the 14th place they have
laid their heads since Hurricane Katrina struck just over 14 weeks
ago."
As the NYT says: "The immediate aftermath of the hurricane exposed the
deep divide between New Orleans's haves and have-nots, as middle-class
families rushed to hotels while the poorest of the poor suffered in the
squalor of the Superdome.
"The chasm remains, more than three months later. the Jackson-Browns,
who are not married and lack high school diplomas, credit cards, even
driver's licenses, are among the legions of desperately destitute still
lost and in limbo."
Three days later, the NYT said in an editorial: "We are about to lose
New Orleans. Whether it is a conscious plan to let the city rot until
no one is willing to move back or honest paralysis over difficult
questions, the moment is upon us when a major American city will die,
leaving nothing but a few shells for tourists to visit like a museum.
"We said this wouldn't happen. President Bush said it wouldn't happen.
He stood in Jackson Square and said, "There is no way to imagine
America without New Orleans". But it has been over three months since
Hurricane Katrina struck and the city is in complete shambles." (NYT
Dec 11).
If a civilisation is to be judged by the care it takes of its most
helpless, it may be instructive to compare the situation in Cuba.
Although Cuba has been visited by many more and more violent hurricanes
than the US, fewer than two dozen Cubans have been lost to hurricanes
in the last five years.
In Cuba, the entire country is organised to protect and preserve life
and community. The neighbourhood Committees for the Defence of the
Revolution (CDR) are in fact organisations for community preservation.
Every Cuban knows what to do and where to go and the CDRs make sure
that no one is left behind, neither man, woman, child, nor domestic pet
nor farm animal.
Cuba is even poorer than Jamaica in the IFIs' economic estimation. That
the Cubans can do better than the United States at protecting their
people is an amazing and perhaps incendiary fact.
As you can see, I have refrained from commenting on these facts.
Nevertheless, I am certain that merely revealing them is likely to
cause me no end of trouble.
Copyright ©2005 John Maxwell
jon...@mac.com