----- Forwarded by Jean-Francois Darcq/SUD/MENA/UNICEF on 10/08/2008 06:01
PM -----
"John Ashworth"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]
ail.com>
Sent by:
sudan-john-ashwor
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
om
10/08/2008 04:37
PM
Please respond to
sudan-john-ashwor
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
om
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: 2008/10/8
Subject: TAJUDEEN's POSTCARD: Where are the free market ideologues Now?
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
If you and I owe money to a bank or any lending agencies, any supplier
of goods and services, credit company or outstanding mortgage and we
default in our payments we know what to expect: threatening letters,
last warnings, advisory notes that are really last chance orders
before the bailiffs, lawyers and auctioneers descend on us.
It may be unfair but somehow we have been brainwashed by the
capitalist ideology that there is no other alternative than to keep up
with our payments unfailingly! The market, we are deceived into
believing is no respecter of anybody and its immutable logic will fix
things. In the past three decades nations, social groups and
communities have been destroyed, reduced to penury by Structural
Adjustment policies across Africa, Asia and Latin America through
supposedly market –led policies imposed by the IMF/world Bank backed
by the west led by the USA. SAPs gave way to Globalisation which is
treated as a moving train in which the only option is to jump in, no
opt out option. Imperialism was dressed up as new technology and 'the
market' became the acceptable vocabulary for exploitation and greed.
This god of the market is supposed to fix all things regardless of the
fact that the market has never been a fair place. We do not enter it
on equal terms while the hands of many are tied to their backs inside
it. Triumphalist neo-liberalism forced everyone behind its hegemony
and loss of faith in religion and anti capitalist ideologies was
replaced by a new utopia: the market. Anyone who espoused a different
world that stresses people above profit was seen as a 'conservative,
'old style state socialist' 'illiberal' and a relic of past
ideological battles. Fukuyama even declared an end to history with the
West (meaning the US and the American way) as the victors. It seemed
that our destiny is to be Americanised!
All these untruths became received wisdom until recently. What was
thought to be a temporary wobble in the greedy halls of the Wall
Street, London City and other financial casinos across the world
have become a real crisis whose magnitude is yet to fully unfold. The
market could not fix itself as it was supposed to do for all things.
Bankers, financial corporations, Mortgage Lenders saw billions wiped
off their paper trillions in a few weeks with stocks in free fall, as
they face the market forces of their own greed. Yet instead of letting
the market to sort itself out, the greedy plutocrats whose excesses
led to the financial collapse turn to their friends in the white house
for a bail out. Why can they not be allowed to chew the grass after
swallowing the cattle? So it is alright for the state to bail out the
rich but unacceptable for the state to protect the poor, the sich, the
marginalized and those pauperized by the greedy capitalists. They are
opposed to socialism after all , they just want it for the rich!
For decades we are told that the state is 'useless', 'inefficient',
'parasitic' 'anti enterprise' yet when the wheelers and dealers are in
trouble they fall back on the same state to bail them out with
freebies! The right always talk about personal and individual
responsibility yet they are not asking the greedy bankers to takle
responsibility for their actions instead of taxing everyone else?
It is instructive that the $700 billions bail out plan of Wall Street
by the Bush administration was being hammered out at the same time
global leaders were assembling across the river at the UN General
Assembly where two related High Level meetings were taking place. One
was on Africa's DEVELOPMENT NEEDS and the other was a renewed Call to
Action on the MDGs. Both identified funding gaps between promises and
pledges by African and Global leaders on the one hand and delivery to
the poor on the ground. $72billions annually for the next 7 years will
help all the poor countries to deliver on the MDGs yet this could not
be found almost 8 years since the promises were made to achieve the
MDGs by 2015! What is required between now and 2015 is far less than
what Bush alone is prepared to throw at Wall Street immediately not to
talk of more billions to come and what other richer countries in the
EU and Japan are already throwing at their own greedy bankers.
There are a number of lessons for Africa in all this. One, we should
not expect others to be our messiahs; we should be our own liberators.
We cannot be continuously ridiculing ourselves by accepting every
invitation to come and talk about our problems. We should say No to
future invitations and stay at home and actively engage in development
action instead of talking about it. Two, for many years our leaders
have been behaving like zombies parroting neoliberal nonsense that
'There is No Alternative' to the liberalization and pauperization of
our peoples. Now their patron Saints in America have shown that the
state has to intervene when the market is failing. They have always
used state power to protect their market that's what slavery,
colonialism ,neocolonialism and their recolonisation of other peoples
through Globalisation is all about. Three, Fukuyama is right but not
in the sense in which he meant his end of history postulation. It is
indeed the end of the history of the Market as god and hopefully the
beginning of a more realistic development dialogue that should give
political, policy and intellectual spaces for people desiring a
different world and making it possible, beyond the market.
"Forward ever , backward never".....Kwame Nkrumah (1909 - 1972)
..................DON'T AGONISE!
ORGANISE!!....................................
END
--
John Ashworth
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
+27 82 853 3556 (cellphone - international roaming)
PO Box 60413, Karenpark 0118, South Africa
086 616 3523 (fax - domestic South Africa only)
+254 725 926 297 (when I'm in Kenya/Uganda only)
+88 216 4333 3401 (satphone - when I'm in the more remote parts of Sudan)
Denis Hurley Peace Institute
PO Box 4000, Pretoria 0001, South Africa
+27 12 321 2600 (office phone - but I'm rarely there!)
+27 12 326 6218 (fax - international)
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "JFD
info" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected]
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/jfdinfo?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
