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On 2018/04/17 01:29 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:
... I never would have dreamed that the ANC would end up as such a
comprador bourgeoisie...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/16/world/africa/south-africa-corruption-jacob-zuma-african-national-congress.html
Here in Joburg this is an irritating read, because on the one hand it's
useful for new details about a well-known scandal; on the other, it
reproduces a pro-corporate bias that is no surprise coming from the NYT.
First, one revealing mistake in this piece: "While poverty has declined
since the end of apartheid"... Indeed the rate has gone from 46% to 65%
using the Upper Bound Poverty Line (of about $4/day), a measure the
state persistently underestimates:
https://theconversation.com/how-current-measures-underestimate-the-level-of-poverty-in-south-africa-46704
Second, here's a biased spin:
"Mandela did not understand South Africa’s political economy and agreed
to a settlement that failed to secure black South Africans’ economic
independence, said Mamphela Ramphele, an anti-apartheid activist who
became close to Mr. Mandela. She later went on to serve as a managing
director of the World Bank. “He didn’t know any better,” Ms. Ramphele said."
The plea of ignorance is not terribly unusual as an explanation, but it
undermines the agency of the elites who managed the neoliberal
transition. I worked in Mandela's Reconstruction and Development office
and was chief drafter of the government's first White Paper in mid-1994.
Here's a description of ten deals which Mandela was fully aware of and
in agreement with:
https://theconversation.com/why-south-africa-should-undo-mandelas-economic-deals-52767
But third, and most importantly, this piece repeats the bias in
mainstream commentary that the Pretoria Regime has been profoundly
corrupt. The article includes the standard details about a few firms
caught in the Gupta corruption nexus (another is Bell Pottinger, the
London PR firm that was given a corporate death sentence last September
due to its South African games).
"South African regulators have urged the police to begin a criminal
inquiry into McKinsey, the American consulting giant, over its
relationship with a Gupta-linked company in a contract involving a
state-owned utility. A South African court has frozen the $83 million
McKinsey was paid for the contract, and the firm says it will return the
fee.
"Regulators say they have also pressed the police to investigate KPMG,
the Big Four auditing firm based in the Netherlands, for its work for
the national revenue service in 2015. KPMG has acknowledged that
elements of the work “should no longer be relied upon” and offered to
pay back its consulting fees.
"SAP, the German software behemoth, is being investigated by the United
States Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission
after it disclosed payments to intermediaries on state contracts that
may have contravened the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
"International banks have been ensnared in the scandals, too. HSBC and
Standard Chartered have been accused by a British lawmaker of laundering
the Guptas’ ill-gotten gains. HSBC says it has closed a number of
accounts that belonged to front companies operated by the Gupta family."
***
The piece paints Ramaphosa as an untainted businessman trying to clean
up the corruption. More on his record:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/12/20/in-south-africa-ramaphosa-rises-as-lonmin-expires-workers-women-and-communities-prepare-to-fight-not-mourn/
Worse, the NYT writers completely neglect the existing record of white
corporate economic crime, which is persistently the world's highest.
Indeed in February the (corrupt) consulting firm PwC, which does these
measurements, again gave the SA bourgeoisie the gold medal in the world
corruption olympics:
https://www.fin24.com/Economy/sas-economic-crime-highest-in-the-world-pwc-20180227
How bad is the rate of corruption?: "eight out of ten top corporate
managers do crime": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6cD5JzFZMo
Occasionally this orientation to corruption, driven by local and global
corporations, is recognized within the ruling elite, but it's all too
rare:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/10/05/in-south-africas-fight-between-hostile-brothers-the-zuptas-and-white-monopoly-capital-a-new-consensus-appears/
Meanwhile the SA bureaucratic petit-bourgeoisie has a mediocre ranking:
the 109th most corrupt out of 180 countries in Transparency
International's state corruption index:
https://www.transparency.org/news/feature/corruption_perceptions_index_2017
It would be interesting to gauge the impact on world-elite NYT readers
of this kind of reporting, with its class and race biases.
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