I have determined that I must stick to my promise to share the views of a knowledgeable analyst regarding how the rich world and its specially-created institutions perpetuate poverty around the always “developing” and “under-developed” world.
But I know that this first effort in my sixteenth year with the Stabroek cannot ignore the savagery which resulted in the Lusignan Massacre last week-end. After all I do have a most active social conscience. And I am as outraged as any other civil, decent person now mourning for the land I am to live in for the rest of my life.
**********
Unacceptable solutions
Yes, just a few comments on the atrocity – with emphasis on my suggestions for members of the forces who are non-collaborators.
I feel that citizens/residents of villages suspected to be affording hospitality and “security” to bandits should be invited to official security points to be interrogated and counselled. The hiding-places of the bandits’ weapons should be found. Obviously. Now where do they keep and hide their weapons of destruction? Besides the usual places suspected, certain homes, churches, schools, cemeteries, farms, discos, police stations and senior citizens’ homes should be routinely searched in the tradition of surprise road blocks. The relatives of both known and suspected bandits’ ought to be kept under surveillance constantly. Many of the bandits don’t live in the village’s backlands. They rob, maim and kill then merely melt into the community of willing, wicked, evil relatives, friend and accomplices.
New legislation to pre-empt human rights activists’ objections should be enacted. Some harsh laws are needed for these harsh, brutal times. Indeed, some new, bandit-specific SWAT-like squad – with some neutral foreigners included – should be established urgently. If we can’t access two or three police helicopters immediately, surely the Americans can avail their satellite imaging to us. And do you really mean to tell me that the shady backland “farms” can’t be demolished?
Further I say not. My Birthday President has not stood tall amidst this tragedy. His hands are either stayed – or tied. I suspect the pool of really top military minds at his trusted disposal is small. The loyalty of the ranks is being severely tested. Within their respective forces and by the relatives they have in the villages. They must know if they are going to honour the oaths they took after getting the jobs in the police and military. I thank them for their efforts and risks. But I favour some foreign interventions – for both intelligence-gathering and pre-emptive field strikes. Too extreme?
***********
Donors’ wealth, creating poverty
Unashamedly, I share with you Michael Parenti’s analysis (www.michaelparenti.org) of how donor nations’ wealth creates poverty in the numerous “under-developed” or “developing” countries that aid or assistance is supposed to eradicate.
It’s one of the best, simple-to-understand pieces on the issue, amongst the many I’ve read or studied so far. Just a few paragraphs, however.
“There is a `mystery’ we must explain. How is it that as corporate investments and foreign aid and international loans to poor countries have increased dramatically throughout the world over the last half century, so has poverty? The number of people living in poverty is growing at a faster rate than the world’s population. What do we make of this?
Over the last half century, U.S. industries and banks (and other western corporations) have invested heavily in those poorer regions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America known as the “Third World.” The transnationals are attracted by the rich natural resources, the high return that comes from low-paid labor, and the nearly complete absence of taxes, environmental regulations, worker benefits, and occupational safety cost.
The U.S. government has subsidized this flight of capital by granting corporations tax concessions on their overseas investments, and even paying some of their relocation expenses – much to the outrage of labor unions here in the USA who see their jobs evaporating.
The transnationals push out local businesses in the Third World and preempt their markets. American agribusiness cartels, heavily subsidized by U.S. taxpayers, dump surplus products in other countries at below cost and undersell local farmers. As Christopher Cook describes it in his Diet for a Dead Planet, they expropriate the best land in these countries for cash-crop exports, usually monoculture crops requiring large amounts of pesticides, leaving less and less acreage for the hundreds of varieties of organically grown foods that feed the local populations.
By displacing local populations from their lands and robbing them of their self-sufficiency, corporations create overcrowded labor markets of desperate people who are forced into shanty towns to toil for poverty wages (when they can get work), often in violation of the countries’ own minimum wage laws.”
Parenti then goes on to illustrate the fact that not even American consumers benefit from the exploitation of the poor by American Corporations, for example.
“The savings that big business reaps from cheap labour abroad are not even passed on in lower prices to their customers elsewhere. Corporations do not outsource to far-offs regions so that U.S. consumers can save money. They outsource in order to increase their margin of profit. In 1990, shoes made by Indonesian children working twelve-hour days for 13 cents an hour, cost only $2.60 but still sold for $100 or more in the United States.
U.S. foreign aid usually works hand in hand with transnational investment. It subsidizes construction of the infrastructure needed by corporations in the Third World: ports, highways, and refineries.
The aid given to Third World governments comes with strings attached. It often must be spent on U.S. products, and the recipient nation is required to give investment preferences to U.S. companies, shifting consumption away from home produced commodities and foods in favor of imported ones, creating more dependency, hunger, and debt.
A good chunk of the aid money never sees the light of day, going directly into the personal coffers of sticky-fingered officials in the recipient countries.
Aid (of a sort) also comes from other sources. In 1944, the United Nations created the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Voting power in both organizations is determined by a country’s financial contribution. As the largest “donor,” the United States has a dominant voice, followed by Germany, Japan, France, and Great Britain. The IMF operates in secrecy with a select group of bankers and finance ministry staffs drawn mostly from the rich nations.
The World Bank and IMF are supposed to assist nations in their development. What actually happens is another story. A poor country borrows from the World Bank to build up some aspect of its economy. Should it be unable to pay back the heavy interest because of declining export sales or some other reason, it must borrow again, this time from the IMF.
But the IMF imposes a “structural adjustment program” (SAP), requiring debtor countries to grant tax breaks to the transnational corporations, reduce wages, and make no attempt to protect local enterprises from foreign imports and foreign takeovers. The debtor nations are pressured to privatize their economies, selling at scandalously low prices their state-owned mines, railroads, and utilities to private corporations.
They are forced to open their forests to clear-cutting and their lands to strip mining, without regard to the ecological damage done. The debtor nations also must cut back on subsidies for health, education, transportation and food, spending less on their people in order to have more money to meet debt payments. Required to grow cash crops for export earnings, they become even less able to feed their own populations.
So it is that throughout the Thi
rd World, real wages have declined, and national debts have soared to the point where debt payments absorb almost all of the poorer countries’ export earnings – which creates further impoverishment as it leaves the debtor country even less able to provide the things its population needs.”
I’ll return to Mr Parenti’s excellent but simple analysis next Friday. But are you not impressed and informed now? Can you counter his arguments? On behalf of the rich?
*****
Until
