ZNet Commentary / Sean Healy - Saul LAndau / Globalization - Bay orPigs

apologies, the main text of my previous msg forward  got lost in
cyberspace. here it is - i hope
agf



    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

                 ANDRE  GUNDER  FRANK

        1601 SW  83rd Avenue, Miami, FL. 33155-1133 USA
        Tel: 1-305-266  0311      Fax:  1-305  267 9606
  E-Mail: franka@fiu.edu   Web Page: csf.colorado.edu/agfrank/
    



---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2001 08:51:29 -0400
From: Michael Albert <sysop@zmag.org>
To: znetcommentary@tao.ca
Subject: ZNet Commentary / Sean Healy - Saul LAndau / Globalization - Bay
    or Pigs / April 15

Two commentaries today -- one from our new Aussie
commentator Sean Healy on Globalization, the other
from Saul Landau on Bay of Pigs Lessons.

And, as always...

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====



Is globalisation inevitable?
By Sean Healy

"The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was
convincing the world he didn't exist."
- Roger "Verbal" Kint (Kevin Spacey), The Usual
Suspects, 1995.

"M1 can be as big as it likes", someone recently
said to me, "but isn't opposing globalisation a
bit like opposing the telephone?" Not quite.

Rulers always justify their actions with high
words and lofty claims. They seek to conquer the
high moral ground and, with it, the mantle of
"inevitability".

Roman emperors termed the enslavement of Europe
and the Middle East "civilisation"; the owners of
the dark, satanic mills of the Industrial
Revolution dubbed their work "progress"; and the
investment bankers, stockmarket gamblers and
multi-millionaire business executives of today's
corporate capitalism call their subjugation of the
world "globalisation".

With such words, rebelling slaves, striking
factory workers, anti-corporate protesters cease
to be partisans fighting oppression and become
ignorant throw-backs who oppose "civilisation",
"progress", "globalisation", the very forward
march of history itself.

Globalisation, at its most basic, means simply the
long-term, secular trend towards ever-greater
interpenetration and interdependence of the
world's economies. And this is indeed inevitable.
Over the centuries, as production processes have
developed and grown more sophisticated, their
linkages have increased.

By this definition, however, globalisation is not
something specific to now: it has been with us
since the beginnings of mechanised industry. Marco
Polo and Christopher Columbus were just as much
"globalisers" as Bill Gates and George Soros are,
if not more so.

But this is not what the world's rulers mean when
they speak of "globalisation" and remind us of its
"inevitability" - any more than Augustus Caesar
and Caligula meant the spread of literacy, roads
and sanitation when they spoke of the
"inevitability" of Roman "civilisation".

What they mean by these words is the caprices and
cruelties of their rule, and whichever form of it,
whether subtle or flagrant, presently meets their
fancy.

And neither the forms of it, nor the rule itself,
are in any way inevitable - which is why they
spend so much time and make so much noise seeking
to convince us that it is.

"Globalisation" is but their word, their
high-sounding euphemism, for "global capitalism"
and the forms it has taken over the last two
decades.


What's been globalised?

Only very specific things have been "globalised"
during the 1980s and 1990s; in many other things,
there has been not a "growing together" but rather
a pulling apart. Wealth, for instance, has not
been globalised; it's been further concentrated,
both within and between countries.

During the 1990s, the gap between the richest
fifth and poorest fifth of humanity grew from 60:1
to 74:1. Three men - Bill Gates, his fellow
Microsoft founder Paul Allen and rentier
extraordinaire Warren Buffet - now own assets
equivalent to those owned by the 600 million
people in the world's 48 least developed
countries, while the number of people living under
US $1 a day is expected to increase from 1.2
billion today to 1.9 billion people in 2015.

Technology hasn't been globalised, either; its
concentration in the hands of the high and mighty
is greater than it has ever been before. Ninety
percent of the world's patents on technology are
now held in the richest countries, heavily
protected by World Trade Organisation agreements,
amongst other things. According to a February
study by the International Labour Organisation,
only 5% of the world's population has ever used
the internet - and 88% of them live in the
developed capitalist countries.

Not even economic growth, the supposed root of
capitalism's historic superiority, has been
globalised. The United States may have boomed in
the 1980s and 1990s, but according to a study of
countries' growth patterns by the US-based Center
for Economic and Policy Research, the growth rates
in 77% of countries were significantly lower in
1980-2000, the decades of "globalisation", than
they were in 1960-1980.

And the flow of people certainly hasn't been
globalised, either - the fortress walls of all the
rich countries are growing higher, to keep out the
huddled masses.

The things which have been "globalised" are far
more specific and far more pernicious.

Money capital has been "globalised": it can now
flow as it likes into (and out of) pretty much
every country in the world, as profit rates rise
and fall and as its owners see fit.

The global stock of financial assets has grown
sixfold, from US $12 trillion to US $80 trillion
between 1980 and 2000; cross-border flows of bonds
and equities into the largest economies have
increased by 55-60 times since 1970; and the
amount traded on international foreign exchange
markets daily has exploded from US $18.3 billion
in 1977 to US $1.5 trillion in 2000.

The power, the grasp and the freedom of manoeuvre
of the transnational corporation has also been
"globalised". While the volume of international
trade trebled between 1982 and 1999, the sales of
TNCs' foreign affiliates increased sixfold.
Forty-nine of the 100 wealthiest and most powerful
institutions are now corporations rather than
governments and they control 70% of the world's
trade and 80% of the world's foreign investment.


By design

All this, the "globalisation" of some things and
not of others, is no accident, nor the workings of
some historical inevitability. It is by design, it
is the result of the deliberate and calculated
plans of men (and a few women) who meet in
corporate board rooms and government cabinet
rooms, at diplomatic summits and international
conferences, and at exclusive social clubs.

For the number one thing that has been
 "globalised" in the past two decades is a very
specific set of economic and social policies, the
formulae of economic liberalism (in Australia,
because these policies were initiated by a Labor,
and not a Liberal, government, they are dubbed
"economic rationalism").

These policies are everywhere the same, they come
from the exact same recipe book: hand over state
assets to corporations, turn a blind eye to the
operations of financial institutions, prorogue
controls on capital flows across borders, allow
currencies' exchange rates to be determined by
speculators, weaken laws which specify labour
rights or environmental standards, cut government
spending on social programs, cut taxes on
corporations and the super-wealthy, force workers
to pay for their own retirement and education and
health care, rob from the poor, give to the rich.

Between 1991 and 1999, there were 1035 changes
worldwide in laws on foreign investment - 94% of
them increased the freedom of foreign investors
and reduced government regulation.

By 1998, 145 of the International Monetary Fund's
182 member-nations had acceded to the IMF's
Article VIII, which specifies the free flow of
capital across borders - 70 had acceded in the
previous five years.

By March 1, 1999, the starting date for the WTO's
new Financial Services Agreement, which
drastically reduces restrictions on cross-border
finance flows, 102 member-nations (out of 140) had
signed onto it. The FSA gives the WTO jurisdiction
over 95% of the world trade in banking, insurance,
securities and financial information.

Those governments which haven't read willingly
from the recipe book have had it forced on them.
Since the 1980s, there have been 90 Third World
countries forced to sign "structural adjustment
programs" with the IMF, as a condition for
refinancing their massive debt burdens. These
programs are a long list of pro-business,
pro-Western measures: the IMF's grotesquely named
"Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper" for Tanzania,
signed in April 2000, for example, included 157
specific changes to the country's laws and
regulations.


Can it be reversed?

If "globalisation" - or rather the globalisation
of financial flows, of corporate power and of
economic liberalism - is the result of the
deliberate and calculated plans of people, then
they can be reversed by the deliberate and
calculated plans of (other) people.

Privatised assets can be re-statised, freedoms can
be taken away from corporations and given back to
communities, tax burdens can be shifted from poor
to rich, the rentiers can be euthanised and the
expropriators expropriated.

There's one further proof that "globalisation"
isn't inevitable: its architects don't think it
is.

If it is inevitable, why are World Trade
Organisation director-general Mike Moore and the
trade representatives of the United States and
Europe desperately criss-crossing the world
twisting the arms of governments to make sure that
the coming WTO conference in Qatar doesn't end up
the debacle that the last one in Seattle in
November 1999 was?

If it is inevitable, why have the drafters of the
Multilateral Agreement on Investment, the
"corporations' bill of rights", buried their
document since massive public outcry erupted when
it was leaked in 1998? And why are they now forced
to plot its reintroduction, through as yet
little-noticed clauses of proposed WTO agreements,
by stealth and not in the open?

If it is inevitable, why are the meetings of the
corporate globalisers taking place behind high
barbed-wire fences and lines of riot police? And
why are the numbers, and the confidence, of
protesters around the world increasing?

Three days before thousands from across Europe
gathered in the Czech capital, Prague, to
demonstrate at the annual meetings of the World
Bank and the IMF, the British Economist magazine,
which boasts that it is the standard-bearer of
economic liberalism, editorialised on September
23: "The protesters are right that the most
pressing moral, political and economic issue of
our time is third-world poverty. And they are
right that the tide of `globalization', powerful
as the engines driving it may be, can be turned
back. The fact that both these things are true is
what makes the protesters - and, crucially, the
strand of popular opinion that sympathizes with
them - so terribly dangerous."

And into the breeze goes claims of "inevitability"
.

--------


Bay of Pigs Lessons

By Saul Landau

What have we learned from what historian Arthur
Schlesinger Jr dubbed "the perfect failure?"
Schlesinger, who served as a high level adviser to
president John F. Kennedy, opposed the CIA backed
invasion of Cuba's Bay of Pigs by a brigade of
anti Castro Cuban exiles. But at last week's Bay
of Pigs conference in Havana, Schlesinger said he
had no apologies for his having written an
official and obfuscating White Paper to justify an
invasion of Cuba. It was too interesting to turn
down an opportunity to see how history was made
from the inside.

In 1961, Schlesinger, who had achieved
well-deserved praise for his scholarship on Andrew
Jackson and Franklin Roosevelt  -- and later for
his opus on John F. Kennedy -- had accepted the
task of speaking for the provisional government of
Cuba, which the CIA had brought to a small hut in
the Everglades to ship to Cuba after the invading
brigade established its beachhead.

As Schlesinger and his White House partner in this
undertaking, Adolph Berle, Chairman of the Board
of the American Sugar Company that Castro had
recently expropriated, told the media what
policies and values the new US-backed government
would uphold, TV listeners could hear cries in
Spanish from the members of that government inside
the hut: "Let us out. Let us out." Schlesinger and
Berle, embarrassed, nevertheless continued to
speak for the members of the supposedly legitimate
government formed by the CIA, who were locked
inside the hut because the Agency feared what they
might say about Kennedy "betraying the invasion."

C. Wright Mills, the great sociologist, watched
the scene on TV, pointed to Berle and Schlesinger
and commented: "They are examples of moral
schlemiels."

Unfortunately, Schlesinger didn't reflect on his
experiences after forty years. What did it mean
for example, that US officials conspired to
overthrow another government in violation of US
laws and treaties, albeit under the sacred aegis
of anti-communism?

Some of the Cuban actors at the Bay of Pigs
present inquired: "suppose the Bay of Pigs
invasion had succeeded: would that not have led to
an even greater US disaster?" Had President
Kennedy called in US air power and then,
presumably, Marines to support the CIA's Cubans,
we might well have witnessed a Vietnam-style war
90 miles form US shores.

President Kennedy accepted the blame, publicly.
"Victory has a thousand fathers," he said "and
defeat is an orphan." But in private, instead of
attempting to reach a modus vivendi with the Cuban
revolution, Kennedy appointed his brother,
Attorney General Robert Kennedy, to avenge the
"fiasco" by directing the CIA to launch a campaign
of state terrorism.

Operation Mongoose was born, a plan to assassinate
Castro and other Cuban leaders and to sabotage the
Cuban economy. Sam Halpern and Robert Reynolds,
CIA officials who helped direct these operations
attended the Bay of Pigs meeting. They described
these operations as "stupid" and "ineffective,"
but the Cuban government found them devastatingly
punishing. So, in August 1961, Castro sent his
most trusted "diplomat" to talk to the Kennedy
team.

Richard Goodwin, a top White House adviser, met
Guevara in Montevideo, Uruguay. Goodwin said that
he listened attentively as Che offered
concessions: to pull back from the Soviet Union
and especially from its military reach; to repay
expropriated US companies for the property the
Cuban government had confiscated; and, finally, to
discontinue Cuba's hyperactive support for
revolution in Latin America.

In return, Che asked that the Kennedys cease and
desist from their assassination and terror
campaign against Cuban officials and property.

The Kennedys rejected the détente offering and
instead "turned up the heat." As we now know, the
White House's terrorist campaign against Cuba
through 1961 and into 1962 became an important
factor in Castro's decision to accept Soviet
ballistic missiles - which led to the terrifying
Missile Crisis of October 1962. So, the Bay of
Pigs and its aftermath, the Missile Crisis, in
which the entire world fearfully awaited the
outcome, derived from a simple and historic
premise of the US government: to break our own
laws and elementary morality so as to punish
disobedient regimes in "our sphere."

What has Washington learned since then? Just as
the Kennedy brothers didn't consider a "worst-case
scenario," so does the current Bush team eschew
logical policy thinking. They do not consider,
apparently, how difficult it will become to reach
an understanding in a post Castro Cuba when Fidel
will not be around to command consensus. Indeed,
the Bush administration threatens the proverbial
harder line - but without having clear hard-line
policies.

Does Secretary of State Colin Powell have the
mental cojones to act before Fidel reaches his
75th birthday (this August) and push to drop the
embargo and travel ban? At the Havana meeting,
five former members of the invading Cuban exile
brigade extended their hands to their former
mortal enemies. It only took a few seconds, but it
held profound meaning.

Why am I not holding my breath for the Bush gang
to take a similarly sensible step toward the Cuban
government?