Noam Chomsky's Hopes and Prospects (Hamish Hamilton), reviewed by Nick Dearden
The great genius of Noam Chomsky is his way of presenting supposedly radical politics as so reasonable as to be obvious, showing with great clarity how the 'mainstream' political establishment is truly extremist.
Hopes and Prospects lacks the painstaking detail of earlier works, based as it is on a series of lectures. To readers of Red Pepper, the book's topics will also be nothing new - from Latin America to Palestine, the election of Obama to the 10th anniversary of the fall of Soviet communism.
But even if the information is not completely new, the clarity with which Chomsky exposes the hypocrisy, illogic and lack of democracy inherent in the current political and economic system makes you feel like you're hearing the arguments for the first time.
Famously, Chomsky calls the current economic system 'socialism for the rich', and in this book he elaborates how this form of 'state capitalism' has created the wealth that our development is based on. 'In the phrase "North American free trade agreement" the only accurate words are "North American",' says Chomsky, characterising the current trading system as constituting a series of top-down charters for investor rights.
In fact, US power has been constructed on heavy state intervention in, and protection of, the economy. Cotton production, a key element of the industrial revolution, more or less occupying the role of oil today, was facilitated through slavery and the elimination of native Americans - 'rather extreme forms of market interference'. Even sectors of the economy regarded as textbook examples of entrepreneurialism today, like IT and communications, developed through massive military spending and state development. Paid for by taxpayers, the rewards are handed to the richest.
Chomsky considers the crucial role of the media in 'manufacturing consent' in modern capitalism by looking at Israel and Palestine. The consistent failure of western media to report fairly on the occupation is highlighted by its emphasis on the kidnap of Corporal Shalit in justifying Israeli aggression, while totally ignoring the capture of two Gazan civilians by Israeli forces just one day before. In reporting on Iran, the media ignores repeated attempts by Arab states, Iran and most countries in the world, excepting successive US administrations, to seek a Middle East free from all weapons of mass destruction.
In fact, increasing global militarisation is consistently supported by the US, with allies like Britain, in the teeth of opposition from most countries and people. Through their military strategy, their contribution towards climate change and their support of increasingly dangerous forms of capitalism, it is indeed these western countries that threaten the extinction of civilisation.
Chomsky will disillusion anyone who places hopes in the election of Obama. Obama's first appointments included Rahm Emanuel, pro-war and pro-Wall Street; Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers, major de-regulators of the financial sector; James Jones, fierce advocate of the expansion of Nato; and Dennis Blair, formerly a strong supporter of US ties with the barbaric President Suharto of Indonesia.
Obama's view of the world is nothing new, excepting some rhetoric: the policy of arming and training Palestinian security forces on the West Bank to maintain tight control of society; the vilification of Iran; the support of friendly thugs such as Hosni Mubarak in Egypt; the use of terror centres (just not in Guantanamo); and support (albeit indirect) of the violent coup in Honduras.
This should come as no surprise, according to Chomsky, as Obama's campaign was above all a public relations triumph (and named so by that industry - he beat Apple as 'marketer of the year' in Advertising Age): 'Obama's message of "hope" and "change" offered a virtual blank slate on which supporters could write their wishes.' Chomsky contrasts Obama's election with the 2005 election in Bolivia, where the campaign 'was focused on crucial issues, very well known to voters: control of resources, cultural rights, questions of justice'.
Such a critique might be expected to depress, but the anger Chomsky's writing provokes is complemented by an incredible hope. In particular, Chomsky never blames ordinary people, highlighting opinion poll after poll pointing out the deep desire for a more peaceful, equal and generous world.
Ultimately, however, this might be Chomsky's biggest flaw. It is difficult to square the existence of an all-seeing, all-controlling, death-driven capitalist system with a real opening for the kind of radical change that is so necessary. The system makes no mistakes in Chomsky's analysis - from Vietnam to Iraq, ultimately the Empire gets what it wants.
In societies where people's emotions and drives are so expertly manipulated, it takes a real leap of faith to see these same people as agents of change - almost a belief that some innate goodness will overpower the social conditioning that keeps us passive and ineffective.
Indeed, Chomsky seems to have the same concerns, as when he invokes biologist Ernst Mayr, who speculated that higher intelligence might be an evolutionary error, incapable of survival. Perhaps ultimately he is expressing no more than the necessary optimism of the will that governs most activists' work. With these concerns in front of us, Chomsky nonetheless remains the sharpest, clearest and most inspirational thinker the movement has. Hopes and Prospects will keep you going through a good few dark hours.
This review first appeared in Red Pepper.
Thursday, 14 April 2011
Know Your Enemy: The Export Credit Guarantee Department
In December 2006, a little know Government department became part of a national scandal when Tony Blair called on the Serious Fraud Office to drop a corruption investigation into how a British arms company secured a massive Saudi Arabian arms deal during the 1980s. The controversial deal had been insured by the British government through the Export Credits Guarantee Department (ECGD).
The Al-Yamamah deal was the biggest arms deal in British history, and had been controversial even when first discussed by the Thatcher government the mid-1980s. By 2004, the Serious Fraud Office had began looking at alleged corruption in the deal – notably that the sales had been overpriced in order to pay off and entertain members of the Saudi Royal Family.
Only at the end of 2006, amidst negotiations for a further Saudi arms deal, did Blair ask the SFO to drop the inquiry, which it did. Opposition MP Vince Cable said at the time that the decision to drop the case: “has undermined the rule of law and Britain’s reputation” and made a mockery of Gordon Brown’s fondness for lecturing the developing world on corruption.
Today that same MP, Vince Cable, is effectively in charge of the ECGD, answerable as it is to the Department for Business, Skills and Innovation. To date, little has been announced by way of reform.
What is the ECGD?
The ECGD exists to support British exports by providing them with a sort of insurance. It normally supports big companies involved in big projects in the developing world. In fact, over the last 10 years, ECGD support for fossil fuels, arms sales and aerospace (aeroplanes) has accounted for around 75% of its work. Last year one single company, Airbus, received 89% of ECGD support.
From arms sales to dictators to oil and gas pipelines through to mega-dams, ECGD has backed projects which have been implicated in corruption, environmental destruction and human rights abuses.
Even worse, when deals go wrong, it is often the developing country that ends up in debt. The ECGD pays out insurance (backed by the British taxpayer) and the amount becomes a debt of the country where the project took place.
Today, developing countries owe £2 billion of debt to the ECGD and have repaid £2.9 billion since 2005.
Arms sales and controlling energy supplies
To really get to grips with the problem with the ECGD, you only need to look at some of their past projects. Indonesia currently ‘owes’ the ECGD over £500 million, most of which was run-up selling British weapons to the brutal General Suharto in the 1980s and ‘90s.
Suharto killed between 500,000 and 1 million activists during his first year in office and conducted a 24-year occupation of East Timor. From 1994, Suharto bought half of his military equipment from the UK, supported by the ECGD. Some of these weapons, including Hawk aircraft, Scorpion tanks and water cannons, were sighted in use against civilians, including during the attack on Aceh. Yet the current Indonesian government is still paying for these tools of repression.
As fossil fuels become more difficult to access, export credits are again used to protect ‘British interests’ throughout the world. That’s why ECGD supported the Baku-Tiblisi-Ceyhan pipeline – an oil pipeline connecting up the Azeri oil field in the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean, passing through Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey. The pipeline started pumping up to a million barrels of oil a day in 2006.
The pipeline included a series of controversial agreements between oil companies and the countries involved, which gave those companies special legal status. In essence, the agreements took priority over all national laws except the constitution, and prevented any new laws, including improvements in environmental or human rights laws, from affecting the companies' profits. Amnesty International argued that these agreements “effectively create a ‘rights-free corridor’ for the pipeline”.
There’s more where they came from. Like a hydro-electric power station in Kenya which cost four times what it should have done and produced only a fraction of the power promised. The Kenyan press called the project “a stinking scandal” for which the Kenyan government are still repaying.
Then there’s a power station in Dabhol, India. In June 2001 the station was closed after the electricity board decided not to buy any more power from the plant because it cost four times more than other domestic power producers. The power plant now sits dormant and a country in which 450 million people are living in extreme poverty, faces a compensation bill for a project that has not served its needs.
Promoting a green and pleasant land?
In a recession, export credits are presented as a key way that the British government can support struggling industry and re-stimulate the British economy.
But what sort of economy is the ECGD currently promoting? Sure it could help struggling British exporters at the leading edge of useful innovation. It could help create jobs in renewable energy sectors. But there isn’t much chance of that when the ECGD does not even have a policy on climate change.
While campaigners have given ECGD a relatively easy ride in recent years, business lobbyists have been pushing back on the already poor standards that do exist. Early in 2010, the Labour Government watered ECGD standards down. One example of what this change will mean is that smaller investments will no longer be screened for any sort of social or environmental impact – even on issues as significant as child labour and forced labour.
This means supporting British interests at the expense of human rights abuses, environmental destruction and corruption in other parts of the world. If we want to avoid another generation of reckless projects and toxic debts, we need to change the ECGD now.
This article first appeared in Red Pepper.
The Al-Yamamah deal was the biggest arms deal in British history, and had been controversial even when first discussed by the Thatcher government the mid-1980s. By 2004, the Serious Fraud Office had began looking at alleged corruption in the deal – notably that the sales had been overpriced in order to pay off and entertain members of the Saudi Royal Family.
Only at the end of 2006, amidst negotiations for a further Saudi arms deal, did Blair ask the SFO to drop the inquiry, which it did. Opposition MP Vince Cable said at the time that the decision to drop the case: “has undermined the rule of law and Britain’s reputation” and made a mockery of Gordon Brown’s fondness for lecturing the developing world on corruption.
Today that same MP, Vince Cable, is effectively in charge of the ECGD, answerable as it is to the Department for Business, Skills and Innovation. To date, little has been announced by way of reform.
What is the ECGD?
The ECGD exists to support British exports by providing them with a sort of insurance. It normally supports big companies involved in big projects in the developing world. In fact, over the last 10 years, ECGD support for fossil fuels, arms sales and aerospace (aeroplanes) has accounted for around 75% of its work. Last year one single company, Airbus, received 89% of ECGD support.
From arms sales to dictators to oil and gas pipelines through to mega-dams, ECGD has backed projects which have been implicated in corruption, environmental destruction and human rights abuses.
Even worse, when deals go wrong, it is often the developing country that ends up in debt. The ECGD pays out insurance (backed by the British taxpayer) and the amount becomes a debt of the country where the project took place.
Today, developing countries owe £2 billion of debt to the ECGD and have repaid £2.9 billion since 2005.
Arms sales and controlling energy supplies
To really get to grips with the problem with the ECGD, you only need to look at some of their past projects. Indonesia currently ‘owes’ the ECGD over £500 million, most of which was run-up selling British weapons to the brutal General Suharto in the 1980s and ‘90s.
Suharto killed between 500,000 and 1 million activists during his first year in office and conducted a 24-year occupation of East Timor. From 1994, Suharto bought half of his military equipment from the UK, supported by the ECGD. Some of these weapons, including Hawk aircraft, Scorpion tanks and water cannons, were sighted in use against civilians, including during the attack on Aceh. Yet the current Indonesian government is still paying for these tools of repression.
As fossil fuels become more difficult to access, export credits are again used to protect ‘British interests’ throughout the world. That’s why ECGD supported the Baku-Tiblisi-Ceyhan pipeline – an oil pipeline connecting up the Azeri oil field in the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean, passing through Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey. The pipeline started pumping up to a million barrels of oil a day in 2006.
The pipeline included a series of controversial agreements between oil companies and the countries involved, which gave those companies special legal status. In essence, the agreements took priority over all national laws except the constitution, and prevented any new laws, including improvements in environmental or human rights laws, from affecting the companies' profits. Amnesty International argued that these agreements “effectively create a ‘rights-free corridor’ for the pipeline”.
There’s more where they came from. Like a hydro-electric power station in Kenya which cost four times what it should have done and produced only a fraction of the power promised. The Kenyan press called the project “a stinking scandal” for which the Kenyan government are still repaying.
Then there’s a power station in Dabhol, India. In June 2001 the station was closed after the electricity board decided not to buy any more power from the plant because it cost four times more than other domestic power producers. The power plant now sits dormant and a country in which 450 million people are living in extreme poverty, faces a compensation bill for a project that has not served its needs.
Promoting a green and pleasant land?
In a recession, export credits are presented as a key way that the British government can support struggling industry and re-stimulate the British economy.
But what sort of economy is the ECGD currently promoting? Sure it could help struggling British exporters at the leading edge of useful innovation. It could help create jobs in renewable energy sectors. But there isn’t much chance of that when the ECGD does not even have a policy on climate change.
While campaigners have given ECGD a relatively easy ride in recent years, business lobbyists have been pushing back on the already poor standards that do exist. Early in 2010, the Labour Government watered ECGD standards down. One example of what this change will mean is that smaller investments will no longer be screened for any sort of social or environmental impact – even on issues as significant as child labour and forced labour.
This means supporting British interests at the expense of human rights abuses, environmental destruction and corruption in other parts of the world. If we want to avoid another generation of reckless projects and toxic debts, we need to change the ECGD now.
This article first appeared in Red Pepper.
Egypt's debt must fall with Mubarak's regime
The debts of Egypt and Tunisia must be cancelled if the people on the streets of Cairo and Tunis are to take control of their economy and hold Western countries to account
In the best tradition of dictators, Hosni Mubarak pillaged Egypt’s economy, and leaves office with as much as $70 billion in his family’s bank account while he bequeaths $30 billion in debt to the Egyptian people. Zine el Abidine Ben Ali leaves $15 billion to the people of Tunisia, taking a more modest $3 billion for himself. As more regimes come tumbling down, so these injustices will multiply.
The true creditors of Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere are not the Western states who used loans to prop up their tough guys across the Arab world – they are the people of these countries who suffered under this rule. The West must now repay those debts by opening up their lending to public scrutiny, returning the assets of Mubarak and his cronies that have been banked in Europe and the US, and cancelling unjust debts across the Arab world. The Egyptian people must not continue to pay the bill for Western complicity through large debt repayments.
It is too easy for American and British leaders to issue warm words to the people of these police states who have endured corruption, torture and violations of human rights for decades. In fact Tony Blair has been the most honest appraiser of the situation. While most Western leaders dropped Mubarak so fast that you wonder how his desperately unpopular regime clung onto power for so long, Britain's former Prime Minister called his one time ally "immensely courageous and a force for good".
For the US and Europe, Mubarak was indeed an excellent client. Egypt repays its loans, many of which were undoubtedly run up in the interests of the regime rather than the people, at a rate of around $3 billion a year. This money has diverted what could otherwise have been used to improve the lives of ordinary Egyptians. Since 1981, Egypt has paid the equivalent of $80 billion dollars in debt and interest repayments, helping redistribute money from Egypt's poor to the global rich.
Some of the country's debt is undoubtedly military in nature. Egypt receives more US military support than any country in the world apart from Israel – well over $1 billion a year since Mubarak came to power in 1981. The British Government has allowed UK companies to supply Egypt with as much as £23 million ($37 million) of military equipment in 2008, £16 million ($26 million) in 2009. No doubt this came in useful when Egypt became a major centre for the US’s “war on terror” programme of kidnapping, secret flights and illegal detention and torture.
Egypt currently owes nearly £100 million ($160 million) to the UK. Although the Government refuses to say what Egypt's debt is based on, we know that it relates to British exports through the controversial Export Credits Guarantee Department, largely based on sales which took place early in Mubarak's rule. This shadowy Government department insures British business working in ‘risky’ parts of the world – usually supporting arms, aerospace and fossil fuel industries.
Tunisia faces a similar situation – under Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, the country made repayments well in excess of $40 billion. Again, Ben Ali served Western interests while suppressing his people who finally rose up against his rule in January.
When people have begun to take control of their countries in the past – from apartheid South Africa to Bolivia, from Argentina to Poland – debt has been used as a key means of forcing undemocratic economic policies on those countries. These policies have caused great pain and suffering to the poorest in those societies, and put a block on democracy extending in anyway into the economic sphere. If the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt genuinely usher in a new era of independence for the people of those countries and if, as seems likely, the spark which has been lit in North Africa spreads across the Arab world, the next step will be holding to account those responsible for decades of kleptocratic and brutal rule.
As well as trying to recover money stolen by their former rulers, this means questioning the legitimacy of the debt that kept those rulers in power. It is time for the people's of North Africa to break their chains of debts which have already helped suppress freedom and development for a generation.
This article first appeared on: www.naomiklein.org/articles
In the best tradition of dictators, Hosni Mubarak pillaged Egypt’s economy, and leaves office with as much as $70 billion in his family’s bank account while he bequeaths $30 billion in debt to the Egyptian people. Zine el Abidine Ben Ali leaves $15 billion to the people of Tunisia, taking a more modest $3 billion for himself. As more regimes come tumbling down, so these injustices will multiply.
The true creditors of Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere are not the Western states who used loans to prop up their tough guys across the Arab world – they are the people of these countries who suffered under this rule. The West must now repay those debts by opening up their lending to public scrutiny, returning the assets of Mubarak and his cronies that have been banked in Europe and the US, and cancelling unjust debts across the Arab world. The Egyptian people must not continue to pay the bill for Western complicity through large debt repayments.
It is too easy for American and British leaders to issue warm words to the people of these police states who have endured corruption, torture and violations of human rights for decades. In fact Tony Blair has been the most honest appraiser of the situation. While most Western leaders dropped Mubarak so fast that you wonder how his desperately unpopular regime clung onto power for so long, Britain's former Prime Minister called his one time ally "immensely courageous and a force for good".
For the US and Europe, Mubarak was indeed an excellent client. Egypt repays its loans, many of which were undoubtedly run up in the interests of the regime rather than the people, at a rate of around $3 billion a year. This money has diverted what could otherwise have been used to improve the lives of ordinary Egyptians. Since 1981, Egypt has paid the equivalent of $80 billion dollars in debt and interest repayments, helping redistribute money from Egypt's poor to the global rich.
Some of the country's debt is undoubtedly military in nature. Egypt receives more US military support than any country in the world apart from Israel – well over $1 billion a year since Mubarak came to power in 1981. The British Government has allowed UK companies to supply Egypt with as much as £23 million ($37 million) of military equipment in 2008, £16 million ($26 million) in 2009. No doubt this came in useful when Egypt became a major centre for the US’s “war on terror” programme of kidnapping, secret flights and illegal detention and torture.
Egypt currently owes nearly £100 million ($160 million) to the UK. Although the Government refuses to say what Egypt's debt is based on, we know that it relates to British exports through the controversial Export Credits Guarantee Department, largely based on sales which took place early in Mubarak's rule. This shadowy Government department insures British business working in ‘risky’ parts of the world – usually supporting arms, aerospace and fossil fuel industries.
Tunisia faces a similar situation – under Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, the country made repayments well in excess of $40 billion. Again, Ben Ali served Western interests while suppressing his people who finally rose up against his rule in January.
When people have begun to take control of their countries in the past – from apartheid South Africa to Bolivia, from Argentina to Poland – debt has been used as a key means of forcing undemocratic economic policies on those countries. These policies have caused great pain and suffering to the poorest in those societies, and put a block on democracy extending in anyway into the economic sphere. If the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt genuinely usher in a new era of independence for the people of those countries and if, as seems likely, the spark which has been lit in North Africa spreads across the Arab world, the next step will be holding to account those responsible for decades of kleptocratic and brutal rule.
As well as trying to recover money stolen by their former rulers, this means questioning the legitimacy of the debt that kept those rulers in power. It is time for the people's of North Africa to break their chains of debts which have already helped suppress freedom and development for a generation.
This article first appeared on: www.naomiklein.org/articles
Wednesday, 5 May 2010
International Money Fiends
The International Monetary Fund devastated the developing world – and now it’s targeting eastern Europe.
It’s stripped millions of people of their livelihoods, but the global economic crisis has brought one institution back from the dead: the International Monetary Fund.
Two years ago, the IMF looked to be on its last legs. It had got to a stage where no-one wanted to borrow the Fund’s money anywhere. Many developing countries started accumulating reserves to avoid ever having to go to the IMF loan shark. Developed countries in trouble would go just about anywhere –
Then came the meltdown. Despite the fact that the IMF failed to see it coming – pretty damning for a body supposed to oversee global financial stability – bankrupt countries suddenly had no choice but to come begging.
In April last year, the G20 pumped the organisation with £330 billion worth of new funds. The radical Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano called the decision “black humour”, saying it would “rub salt in the wound" of countries hit by a crisis they did not create.
The IMF claims to have been reborn. It says it has mended its ways (without apologising for them) and will do things differently this time around.
Certainly there are discussions about changing its voting system, which currently assigns
But in depression-hit eastern Europe the IMF is rapidly becoming as hated as it once was in
In the 1980s at the height of the Third World Debt crisis, the IMF lent huge amounts of money to developing countries, allowing them to pay off their loans to banks who had recklessly lent in the 1970s. The banks got bailed out, while the poor paid the price. Exactly the same thing is now happening in
The fund has led a rescue package of 7.5 billion euros (£6.7 billion) – but the price is eye-watering austerity measures. Schools and hospitals are expected to close and the government has pledged to reduce maternity benefits and raise taxes. Wages have been slashed by up to 40 per cent.
In
In
Late last year,
Clearly the IMF is as much about power as economics. This is nowhere seen more clearly than in
The IMF is repeating history. But so too are the people, with street protests in Riga, the Latvian capital, becoming increasingly militant and a small-scale renewal of anti-IMF activism in the west. It looks like the seeds of the next wave of resistance are already in place.
This article first appeared in Red Pepper.
Thanks to the Bretton Woods Project for some of the information it contains.
Wednesday, 16 December 2009
Copenhagen: the sound of silence
By Nick Dearden and Tim Jones
The problem the Danish government faces gets bigger by the hour. Clearly the government is desperate for the UN climate summit in Copenhagen to be seen as a success, regardless of whether the deal done is capable of slowing down climate change in a just way. But it is faced with an ever-swelling army of critics who believe this issue is too important for a stitched-up compromise, negotiated late at night between corporate lobbyists and rich-country governments in conference hotel rooms.
Faced with seemingly irreconcilable positions – between developed countries who won't change their economic model and poor countries who realise that accepting the crumbs from the table is little use when faced with environmental devastation – any facade of consensus has broken down. Looking increasingly desperate, the authorities are trying to clamp down on all criticism in the hope that that will make it go away. In fact it is making it even more vocal.
For months the Danish government has been preparing to silence the critics – even approving new police powers to clamp down on protest. Last month we wrote to express our concern that these powers could easily be used to prevent those without a voice at the summit expressing themselves. The Danish government responded that "the new [police powers] will in no way affect peaceful demonstrators".
The sight of 1,000 activists being held in freezing temperatures without basic rights for many hours clearly exposes the Danish authorities' argument. So do reports of pepper spray being used on protesters held in cages, the constant raids on meetings and sleeping quarters, the arrest of a civil society spokesperson on the eve of yesterday's demonstration and the many more stories of serious infringements of civil liberties.
Time and again, we have seen that those incarcerated in unacceptable conditions were actually peaceful protesters – or even bystanders, in some cases. A member of our own staff taking pictures of a demonstration inquired what law he was being challenged under and was told: "It doesn't matter, you have no rights, you must do what I say or you will be arrested." The purpose, it seems is not directed at the threat of vandalism or violence but at protest per se.
This reflects exactly what is happening inside the conference centre, where criticism or alternative voices have been ignored and are now being silenced. Developing countries have felt so marginalised by a process clearly under the control of rich countries that they staged a walk-out on Tuesday. The same day the Danish prime minister Rasmussen sought to impose an agreement from above, killing off the legitimate negotiations and the binding Kyoto agreements. Rich countries have been trying to wriggle out of their emission reduction commitments throughout Copenhagen, and developing countries are right to resist.
Today, many developing countries are leaving the centre again to join protesters outside. Also today, civil society organisations including Friends of the Earth, Avaaz and Tck Tck Tck have been thrown out of the conference. Incredibly, delegates and media have been told they will lose their accreditation if they talk to these banned NGOs. No credible justification has been given for this behaviour.
But the real reason is simple – civil society groups ensure that the interests of ordinary people and the planet are not trampled on; at least not in silence. They have few resources to offer in comparison with the power of the corporate lobbyists inside the summit, many of whom will make a fortune if the free market "solutions" to climate change that they are advocating are to go ahead. Together with developing governments and protesters on the streets, civil society organisations are standing up against such deals, and making clear that only a radical, just solution will get us out of this mess.
Attempts to stop the voices of the protesters do not only ride roughshod over Denmark's reputation for upholding civil liberties, they also threaten to foist an unjust and ineffective climate deal on the world. The lives and livelihoods of millions of people across the world are at stake. They have a right to be heard. Silencing them is a crime of unimaginable proportions.
This article first appeared on the Guardian website.
The problem the Danish government faces gets bigger by the hour. Clearly the government is desperate for the UN climate summit in Copenhagen to be seen as a success, regardless of whether the deal done is capable of slowing down climate change in a just way. But it is faced with an ever-swelling army of critics who believe this issue is too important for a stitched-up compromise, negotiated late at night between corporate lobbyists and rich-country governments in conference hotel rooms.
Faced with seemingly irreconcilable positions – between developed countries who won't change their economic model and poor countries who realise that accepting the crumbs from the table is little use when faced with environmental devastation – any facade of consensus has broken down. Looking increasingly desperate, the authorities are trying to clamp down on all criticism in the hope that that will make it go away. In fact it is making it even more vocal.
For months the Danish government has been preparing to silence the critics – even approving new police powers to clamp down on protest. Last month we wrote to express our concern that these powers could easily be used to prevent those without a voice at the summit expressing themselves. The Danish government responded that "the new [police powers] will in no way affect peaceful demonstrators".
The sight of 1,000 activists being held in freezing temperatures without basic rights for many hours clearly exposes the Danish authorities' argument. So do reports of pepper spray being used on protesters held in cages, the constant raids on meetings and sleeping quarters, the arrest of a civil society spokesperson on the eve of yesterday's demonstration and the many more stories of serious infringements of civil liberties.
Time and again, we have seen that those incarcerated in unacceptable conditions were actually peaceful protesters – or even bystanders, in some cases. A member of our own staff taking pictures of a demonstration inquired what law he was being challenged under and was told: "It doesn't matter, you have no rights, you must do what I say or you will be arrested." The purpose, it seems is not directed at the threat of vandalism or violence but at protest per se.
This reflects exactly what is happening inside the conference centre, where criticism or alternative voices have been ignored and are now being silenced. Developing countries have felt so marginalised by a process clearly under the control of rich countries that they staged a walk-out on Tuesday. The same day the Danish prime minister Rasmussen sought to impose an agreement from above, killing off the legitimate negotiations and the binding Kyoto agreements. Rich countries have been trying to wriggle out of their emission reduction commitments throughout Copenhagen, and developing countries are right to resist.
Today, many developing countries are leaving the centre again to join protesters outside. Also today, civil society organisations including Friends of the Earth, Avaaz and Tck Tck Tck have been thrown out of the conference. Incredibly, delegates and media have been told they will lose their accreditation if they talk to these banned NGOs. No credible justification has been given for this behaviour.
But the real reason is simple – civil society groups ensure that the interests of ordinary people and the planet are not trampled on; at least not in silence. They have few resources to offer in comparison with the power of the corporate lobbyists inside the summit, many of whom will make a fortune if the free market "solutions" to climate change that they are advocating are to go ahead. Together with developing governments and protesters on the streets, civil society organisations are standing up against such deals, and making clear that only a radical, just solution will get us out of this mess.
Attempts to stop the voices of the protesters do not only ride roughshod over Denmark's reputation for upholding civil liberties, they also threaten to foist an unjust and ineffective climate deal on the world. The lives and livelihoods of millions of people across the world are at stake. They have a right to be heard. Silencing them is a crime of unimaginable proportions.
This article first appeared on the Guardian website.
Sunday, 15 November 2009
Developing Nations Unite Around Justice in Barcelona talks
by Nick Dearden and Tim Jones
The decision of African nations to walk-out of the Barcelona climate talks this week, and the support they received from other developing countries, proves that climate change is transforming global politics. The poorest countries in the world are refusing to sit by while their future right to development is negotiated away by vested interests in rich countries.
Developing countries have rediscovered a unity in recent months which is capable of shaking western complacency in a more fundamental way even than the collapse of WTO talks in Seattle 10 years ago. And their argument has an authority which will draw support from citizens right around the world – because at its core is a call for justice, summed up by the concept of ‘climate debt’.
It isn’t simply a matter of asking the rich world to pay for the devastation climate change is causing in the developing world. As a report recently launched by World Development Movement and Jubilee Debt Campaign points out, ‘climate debt’ questions a global free market system which has pushed many developing countries into high carbon pathways that they now need to find a way out of.
Through enormous debt burdens, through aid and lending and through trade rules, rich countries and their spokesmen in the IMF and World Bank have forced policies on developing countries which have created carbon addiction. These policies have led to more oil and coal being dug up, more trees being chopped down, more food being grown on massive farms to export to the West, more dependency on fossil fuels for electricity needs.
Indonesia is home to the world’s third largest area of tropical forest and faces a huge problem of deforestation – it accounts for 70% of the country’s carbon emissions. Indonesia’s timber trade boomed under the corrupt President Suharto, as he looked for ways of repaying the enormous loans flowing into the country from his western backers. Suharto liberalised investment regulations, allowing foreign companies to become key players in the destruction of forests and export of timber.
When the IMF waded into Indonesia’s financial crash in 1997, it infamously told the government to cut government spending (the very opposite of how our own governments have dealt with the financial crisis), forcing cuts in environmental protection which left forest resources vulnerable to private operators. It also told the government to remove restrictions on foreign investment in palm oil plantations, causing rampant deforestation and destruction of peat land.
Meanwhile, Nicaragua faced demands to privatise its electricity sector as a condition of receiving debt relief from the IMF and World Bank. Short-term this actually reduced Nicaragua’s carbon emissions – in the most regressive way possible – by increasing the average electricity bill by 100-400% and pricing the poor out of the market. But long-term it has increased the country’s fossil fuel addiction, because private companies are far less likely to put in the investment needed to create a renewable energy base.
Since the mid-1990s, the proportion of Nicaragua’s electricity coming from oil has increased from 55% to over 70%, while electricity from renewables has fallen. In contrast, Nicaragua’s neighbour Costa Rica has maintained a public, not-for-profit electricity system and the country gets 94% of its electricity from renewable sources.
Likewise, Ecuador has massively extended its oil production over the last 20 years, with the IMF seeing oil as a key way of Ecuador repaying its mountain of debt, itself based on loans irresponsibly lent to its military junta in the 1970s. This oil has done little for Ecuador – the IMF demanded 70% of oil revenues be earmarked for debt servicing, and no more than 10% for social spending. When current President Correa increased the proportion flowing into the social sector IMF loans were cancelled.
The examples go on, adding to the rich world’s ‘climate debt’, which we need to pay to enable developing countries to rid themselves of poverty, but in a less carbon-intensive way then we did. Our new report estimates that the UK – accountable for 6% of historical emissions – needs to make massive cuts in emissions. By rights, it is we who have used up our allowance – we are already carbon bankrupt. To make up for this fact we believe that the UK owes £660billion – which could be repaid as just under £17billion a year through to 2050. A huge amount – but on the other hand it is only 1% of our national income, which has been built up by carbon intensive industry, and less than the Lloyds group was given in its bail-out package. A small price to pay for a habitable planet.
But the rich world fails to understand that climate change will not be solved by throwing a few loans the way of the starving and destitute. Indeed their solution is an avalanche of new loans to developing countries who are already repaying debts at a rate of 5 times what they receive in aid every year. And to oversee these loans will stand the World Bank – an institution at the very heart of carbon-fuelled growth and Third World debt. As Central American activist Ricardo Navarro commented recently “I would rather that the UK government bought flowers for every household in the UK than spend this money on a World Bank coal fund."
Of course the concept of climate debt scares many – the same vested interests referred to earlier. Arch-climate-change-denier and former Thatcher government advisor Lord Muncton even described it as a blueprint for “world communist government”. Doubtless many saw Roosevelt’s New Deal or the creation of the welfare state in the same way. Certainly it implies fundamental changes in the global economy, radical redistribution of the world’s resources.
But the alternative is not ‘merely’ the continuation of gross inequality and shameful levels of poverty in a world rich in resources. It is the ability of all of us to inhabit our planet.
This article first appeared on UN-NGLS.
Thursday, 15 October 2009
Radicals return to the UN
After 30 years of marginalisation, commentators from across the world are hailing the United Nations conference on the economic crisis as a new opportunity for progressive change. While the June summit’s outcomes were not as radical as many would have liked, the battles that took place between rich and poor countries hold out some hope for the enfranchisement of the majority world – the global South.
Southern governments demanded the conference as the economic crisis started to grip the world last November. Despite repeated offers by UN secretary general Ban Ki-Moon to host talks on the crisis, rich countries have preferred their own company. They have, however, used the relatively unheard of G20, rather than the G8, to add a sprinkling of legitimacy to decisions – and, more importantly, because the financial reserves of countries such as China and Saudi Arabia are essential to stimulating the global economy.
The fightback on behalf of the UN was led by Latin American countries. After months of attempts by rich countries to downplay and delegitimise the summit, it finally happened on 26 June.
Central to the process was the president of the UN general assembly, Reverend Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann. D’Escoto, a leftist priest from Nicaragua, enraged rich countries by offering a radical paper for nations to debate that declared ‘globalisation without effective global or regional institutions is leading the world into chaos’.
That this former Sandinista foreign minister should encourage 192 countries to air their views on matters of global importance caused the British – and other western delegations – a touch of indigestion. A suitable programme to discredit d’Escoto was launched. Rich country diplomats told Reuters that the UN summit was a ‘joke’, a ‘tragedy’ and a ‘waste of time,’ accusing d’Escoto of hijacking the conference in order to put capitalism on trial and threatening to boycott it.
D’Escoto replied that rich countries could not control the conference and that ‘it must speak to the hundreds of millions across the globe who have no other forum in which they can express their unique and often divergent perspectives.’ He warned countries not to turn the UN summit into an ‘international charade’, adding, ‘I earnestly believe that this is an opportunity the world cannot afford not to take advantage of.’
The UN versus the G8
Western hostility could be clearly seen in the level of representation they sent. Gordon Brown, Barack Obama and other western leaders shunned the summit, but found the time to turn up to the annual photoshoot known as the G8, which met only two weeks later in L’Aquila, Italy.
The G8 discussed aid, climate change and energy security, keeping announcements firmly within the western comfort zone, trying to pre-empt a UN agreement on climate change in December and refusing to subject itself to criticism from upstart countries.
But then this is exactly the point of the G8 and always has been. The G6, forerunner to the G8, first met in Rambouillet in 1975, amid another economic crisis and with the aim of excluding the majority of the world from decision-making. In 1974 the troublesome UN general assembly had passed a far-reaching proposal for economic reform, the ‘new international economic order’, that outraged the west.
Had the world listened to the calls for change in the 1970s – for corporate regulation, fair prices for raw materials and equitable trade rules – we would not have embarked upon the three decades of free market fundamentalism that have brought the economy and environment to breaking point.
Structural reforms
The UN was a thorn in the side of western leaders for decades from the 1950s, hence their strong desire not to go back to those days. Perhaps it was no surprise, then, that proposals to the UN conference on the economic crisis looked so different to the business-as-usual agenda set out by the G8 in Italy, and indeed the G20 at the London summit in April.
Central to that G20 agreement was the resuscitation of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The institution has been promised £450 billion (though much of this is still to be seen), very little of which is for the poorest countries.
In addition, of course, the IMF is a deeply flawed institution, which seems to have learned little in the 10 years since its policy impositions turned a disaster into a crisis in south-east Asia. A recent report by the European Network on Debt and Development (Eurodad), ‘Bail-out or blow-out?’, shows that, of 10 recent IMF loans to low-income countries, all required spending cuts, five mandated wage bill freezes or cuts, five forced governments to pass on food or fuel price rises to citizens and all include some sort of structural reforms such as privatisation, increases in indirect taxation or trade liberalisation.
The rest of the money promised by the G20 is for ‘export finance’ – helping companies to invest overseas. In the UK this means the infamous export credit guarantee department, which has used taxpayers’ money to hold up the British arms industry for decades.
At the UN, meanwhile, former World Bank chief economist turned globalisation critic Joseph Stiglitz put forward a range of structural reforms on behalf of President d’Escoto. He was clear that ‘the international trade and financial system needs to be profoundly reformed.’ The Stiglitz commission recommended a powerful global economic co-ordination council at the UN to bring the World Bank and IMF to heel, an end to the practice of forcing economic policies on developing countries, an international debt work-out process that would allow for far greater and fairer debt cancellation and a new reserve currency to replace the dollar.
Agreeing with many developing countries, Stiglitz was said that ‘without a truly inclusive response, recognising the importance of all countries in the reform process, global economic stability cannot be restored.’
Moving away from the self-selected club
The final result was – predictably, given the intransigence of rich countries – less radical. The conference agreed few concrete measures, short of setting up a working group to examine many of the issues raised – though this itself is an important step forward. The conference also laid the blame for the economic crisis firmly at the feet of the developed world, conceded rights to developing countries in terms of economic sovereignty and acknowledged that many countries were unhappy with the dollar as global reserve currency.
Sadly this was too much for the US, which promptly started distancing itself from a document it had just agreed to.
The real significance comes not in the formal agreement, however, but in the fact that the conference took place in the teeth of such strong opposition. As Stiglitz said: ‘The UN showed that decision-making needn’t be restricted to a self-selected club, lacking political legitimacy, and largely dominated by those who had considerable responsibility for the crisis in the first place.’
Unlike the G20 or G8, negotiations at the UN were transparent and open to civil society groups across the world. Moreover, developing countries have shown themselves able, for the first time in many years, to express a common vision of a more equitable world. The G77 plus China group (actually a group of 130 developing countries) has shown a remarkable level of unity over the economic crisis and climate change.
Forum for alternatives
The weakness of the UN has led some social movements to sharply criticise its usefulness in bringing about radical change. It is no wonder some regard the UN as a tool for imperialism given its recent history and championing of initiatives such as the Global Compact – a weak and unenforceable code on companies that turns the likes of Coca-Cola, Nestlé and BP into ‘good corporate citizens’. But the crisis summit shows, at least, that the UN can be a forum for an alternative economic and political agenda.
The UN is something that can and should be fought over – not simply conceded by ordinary people and developing world states to the powerful. There are still UN institutions that consistently produce radical analyses of the world economy. If developing countries can find the unity to fight for it, real change is achievable. For example, China’s criticism of dollar hegemony makes massive changes in the global financial system possible, ending the insane system whereby China and other developing counties continue to fuel US over-consumption by effectively lending it trillions of dollars at low rates of interest.
While western leaders may scoff at D’Escoto’s words, they can surely provide a rallying cry for hundreds of millions of people across the world: ‘The anti-values of greed, individualism and exclusion should be replaced by solidarity, common good and inclusion. The objective of our economic and social activity should not be the limitless, endless, mindless accumulation of wealth in a profit-centred economy but rather a people-centred economy that guarantees human needs, human rights, and human security, as well as conserves life on earth. These should be universal values that underpin our ethical and moral responsibility.’
As we head towards the Copenhagen climate summit, as the economic crisis further devastates Southern economies, the UN might again become a battleground on which we can win important victories.
This article first appeared in Red Pepper.
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