Rosenberg, Bill wrote:
> Mind you, despite all this, Michel Chossudovsky has written some
> outstanding analyses - I can think of a couple on Africa and
> Yugoslavia. So I'm not conceding that Choss is a Lobachevsky
> by any means (unless it was the real Lobachevsky).
Hear hear. In a land of 30% (official) unemployment, like SA, Michel's
rap has gone down very well. If any of you connect into the Third World
Network publications out of Penang, you'll know that Michel is usually
right at the scene of some financial crime, doing a powerful,
well-balanced critique. We had him out to a Johannesburg seminar of the
Campaign Against Neoliberalism in SA in February and he packed the
house, telling gory structural adjustment tales of his recent travels in
Rwanda and Mozambique. The Rwanda information he acquired about the role
of the World Bank in financing the import of the tools of genocide
through quick-disbursing loans is explosive. His linkage of
socio-economic deprivation and political upheaval is usually very well
grounded. When you spend time in places like Rwanda and Mozambique where
a million people get offed, and you're practically the only one doing
analysis of financial power relations and economic contradictions, maybe
that generates an apocalyptic tendency. Maybe it should.
Just north of here, in Harare, last week saw the Zimbabwe currency drop
an astonishing 40% against the US dollar in a matter of *hours* (before
a central bank rescue). It's a violently turbulent financial world, seen
from the semi-periphery, and it particularly plays havoc with social
policy advocacy. The socio-political fallout of some yuppie NY banker's
flick of a finger on the keyboard can be terrifying. In SA, a 25%
currency crash during a six-week period in 1996 compelled the ANC
leadership to formally junk its soc-dem development programme and
replace it with a (disfunctional) homegrown SAP, purely for the benefit
of the f*ing bond traders, and the ongoing fiscal squeeze is brutal,
demonstrably killing ANC constituents.
By the way, aside from Michel, we did ask one notable leftist financial
commentator from the upper west side of NY out to Johannesburg last
year. But though the funds were in place and ticket ready, we got a
last-minute cancellation.
Which is why some of the reticence, on the part of US comrades, to
consider the limits of crisis management -- whereby your markets'
solutions to financial bubbles and overproduction effectively means
displacement of devaluation to most of the rest of us in the South -- is
a slightly irritating characteristic of otherwise crucial information
and debate on Pen-L.
Not only because it's so US-centric, which it is, but because while
everyone and everything else is thinking and acting globally, the
concession that capitalism is in ok shape is basically parochial
laziness. I'm saying this, of course, with a ;-) because it is the kind
of challenge that I posed to Doug Henwood last month at the Brecht Forum
and he did, I recall, say he'd do his best to come and check out a
different reality as soon as we can next arrange it. Same invitation
stands for the rest of you Chossudovsky-critics!
