May 16th was World Debt Day. Some things to think about, old and new:
DURBAN, GLOBALIZATION, AND THE WORLD AFTER 9/11: TOWARD A NEW POLITICS
This essay appears in the “After Durban” Symposium in Poverty & Race (Jan./Feb. 2002), published by the Poverty & Race Research Action Council (info@prrac.org).
Greed Kills: One message of both Durban and 9/11 is that the world’s North, for its own security, needs to terminate its ceaseless exploitation of the global South. The consumerism of “McWorld” is built on a planetary sweatshop. The global “debt trap” now engulfs not only impoverished nations, but fairly developed ones like Argentina, Mexico and South Korea. African debt/GNP ratios have reached the obscene level of 125%, and debt service in many Southern countries amounts to more than 50% of state revenue per year. Assaults on the world’s poor via the global financial system — notably the debt and its policing by the IMF through “structural adjustment policies” — result in the deaths of tens of millions every year. This can readily be understood in terms of racism and terrorism: the world’s poor are largely peasants and super exploited workers, dark-skinned sharecroppers and peons of a global corporate plantation. Transnational Simon Legrees now seek to sell their Southern darkies the water they drink, the crops they have traditionally planted and harvested, and the weapons their corrupt governments will use to kill the peons of bordering countries. Health care or AIDS medicines for these subhumans? Not unless they can pay our fees at the country club!
How To End Poverty: Making Poverty History And The History Of Poverty
The $50 billion of “aid” North to South is a tenth of $500 billion flow South to North as interest payments and other unjust mechanisms in the global economy imposed by World Bank, IMF. With privatization of essential services and an unfair globalisation imposed through W.T.O, the poor are being made poorer.
Indian peasants are loosing $26 billion annually just in falling farm prices because of dumping and trade liberalization. As a result of unfair, unjust globalisation, which is leading to corporate, take over of food and water. More than $5 trillion will be transferred from poor people to rich countries just for food and water. The poor are financing the rich. If we are serious about ending poverty, we have to be serious about ending the unjust and violent systems for wealth creation which create poverty by robbing the poor of their resources, livelihoods and incomes.
Jeffrey Sachs* deliberately ignores this “taking”, and only addresses “giving”, which is a mere 0.1% of the “taking” by the North. Ending poverty is more a matter of taking less than giving an insignificant amount more. Making poverty history needs getting the history of poverty right And Sachs has got it completely wrong.
*my link
Corporations, State Capitalism, and International Trade
Getting back to Hoy‘s* point, vulgar libertarian apologists are fond of using individuals, or small firms, as examples to illustrate the principle of faux “comparative advantage” (anything can be comparatively advantageous, if somebody else is underwriting the costs). The discussion of demand and supply curves in the standard micro-econ textbook is written as if the typical firm were still Adam Smith’s pin factory. But in fact, something like 30-40% of what’s classified as “international trade” is actually an internal transfer between subunits of a single transnational corporation, more akin to the operation of a planned economy than to any kind of real trade. The largest TNCs are approaching the size of the old Soviet economy, with the headquarters of an M-form corporation crunching as many numbers as Gosplan.
*my link
A short film by Anthony Minghella.