August 2007 Edition
Riaz Quadir in Versailles
IF a fictional story began like this: once upon a time an American President appointed a British Prime Minister, who had helped him start the Iraq War against the Baathist regime to help adjust the unjust tyranny of the Sunni minority against the Shia majority, as the Envoy Special of the Great Western Powers to resolve the long standing issues between the Muslims and the Jews, the Arabs and the Israelis, tearing up the Middle East… the story would sound as bizarre as this Proustian sentence, but in reality it sounds perfectly normal – even predictable – given the nature of the realpolitik that rules the world. As the cliché goes, truth is indeed stranger than any serving of the imagination. As though to put all of this cluttered incongruity into perspective I was led to a just-released book of an ex-US government employee and whistle-blower, John Perkins, in the McHill University Bookstore, while on a personal visit to Montreal.
The book is called, The secret history of the
American Empire. Nothing in
the book is new, or as the
author himself says, everything
in it has been previously ‘documented’. What makes the
book remarkable is the logical
thread that not only holds it
together but actually provides
the rationale for why things are
the way they are. More importantly,
the author himself
either participated or was a
direct witness to some of the
most abominable acts of international
skullduggery imaginable.
It is a direct indictment
against every instrument and
every institution of corporate
globalisation.
What do western governments
have to do with the
highly predatory nature of
global corporations?
Everything! In fact it is only
with the government’s active
help and support that corporations
ransack the world.
Perkins speaks mainly of the
American government and
those of its client states, but
other western governments are
equally involved. A cursory
peek at the British government’s role in the BAE scandal
or the French government’s
role in Total’s African affairs,
tells us of the complicity
between big business and politics.
With an ironic twist, democracy
connects elections with
campaigning and campaign money with business. Since most of this is conducted
in a non-transparent way (with exceptions of occasional glitches. See current
Tory headache over the discovery of a 4800 pound cheque from a fast track
Indian businessman, Tony Lit, to the Tory coffers just before being put up for
Ealing Southall by-elections as a Tory candidate), the constituents have little
insight into the workings of the body politic, specially when media is an elemental
part of ‘big business’.
Nobody laughed when Conrad Black openly snuck his way into the House of Lords. Only when he stole money from the shareholders equity was he hauled up. Democracy? Huh! The very institutions which were ‘designed’ to promote global economy had a hidden agenda, as in the case of the World Bank, the IMF and of course, the World Trade Organisation (WTO). What Perkins conclusively proves in his book is that it is not the beautifully crafted ‘mission statements’ and other symbols of good intentions that we should look at for the raison d’etre of these institutions but their actual workings and the long-term effects and results of their work. These institutions must be looked upon as political organisations (albeit global) whose workings are determined by the power structure of its membership. While projecting themselves as the tools of democracy they are in fact the most autocratic of bodies, their leadership directly appointed by the American and European governments. Even where a semblance of democracy is followed, as in the UN, votes of the ‘minions’ are negotiated, bartered or directly coerced. Another very important area that Perkins puts focus on is development aid. (I still haven’t got over the use of the word ‘aid’. If ever there was a misnomer this is it).
Apart from a very valid anthropological objection to international development aid in the main, the murky financial shenanigans long practised in this field have raised few eyebrows in the past. While doing my MBA in 1980 I had accidentally discovered how the lending institutions reap back hundreds of per cents of the original principal by almost constant devaluation of the developing countries’ currencies. And that is merely one of the ploys. Ironically, the World Bank’s 2005 Report showed how 40 per cent of the total of $50 billion dollars ‘aid’ received by Africa was recycled back to the ‘donor’ nations just through ‘consultants’. The rest was recycled back through the businesses supplying the goods and services targeted by the loans – over-invoiced many times their real prices. Imagine you went to your local bank for a car loan and were told that you would be charged 40 per cent of the loan amount for a bank consultant to tell you what car you can buy and limiting the purchase to their own financed manufacturer. Not to forget that your money would be constantly diminishing in value by a largish percentage while the loan amount would remain unchanged. Should you default you would be forced to let your children starve while repaying your bank (the equivalent of the IMF’s rescue plan called Structural Adjustment Package (SAP), where the defaulting nation is given more of the same loan to enable it to repay the original loan amount, the terms becoming ever more stringent).
Like Joseph Stiglitz (another whistle blower and a Noble Prize winner, ex-World Bank official) Perkins shows that systematically, the countries that followed the World Bank, IMF programmes ended in failure while those (like India) who challenged them ended up successful. He adds that these institutions don’t even blink while ‘manufacturing’ data and statistics. He did it himself for them countless number of times over decades. When will the world wake up? The danger is that as we move to a consumer driven culture our sense of ethics is continually compromised and we are willing to look the other way while these very businesses that are ransacking the globe, provide us with our daily jobs, enabling us to put food on the table and pay our mortgages… What we do not see, I should say, foresee, is that it’s a numbers game and very soon it will be our turn,no matter where we live. (Countless examples of layoffs and devastation in the developed world, as manufacturing, and recently the service industries, move to greener pastures in countries with cheaper labour). Corporatocracy, as Perkins calls it, does not discriminate on the basis of age, gender, race or even nationality. Its criteria is solely money and power. It can be challenged only on a moral basis.
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