The Nation Newspaper

Category: Brian Browne

  • Leaving the black race behind: No manufacturing, no prosperity

    Leaving the black race behind: No manufacturing, no prosperity

    He who doesn’t recognize he is in a race is bound to lose it.

    Last week, this column warned of impending danger to the global food supply due to the benighted tandem of perverse technology and that stubborn perennial: greed. Global financial and agricultural combines now acquire vast tracts of land around the world, including Africa, displacing traditional farmers in their wake. Global companies claim this process will increase productivity and yields. It might increase corporate profit yields; the guaranty is bogus that overall food prices will diminish. For these companies to profit, the opposition effect on prices is more likely. Much of the world needs more food. However, slanted economics will reallocate that food and other agricultural outputs to countries already in surplus and away from the places and people most in need. The world bids fretful welcome to the 21st century face of that age-old scourge: starvation.

    Ironically, haughty British PM David Cameron announced this week’s G-8 summit will devote a significant portion of its agenda to remedying world hunger. Taken in isolation, the announcement appears benign. Placed in full context, it looms as an act of aggression against weak, vulnerable people living in weak, vulnerable nations. Those of you who thought the high-brow Tory PM had located his heart might as well toss that fanciful notion into an abyss. The place where his heart should reside remains occupied by a lump of cold iron. The man is as estranged as ever from compassion.

    His call to feed the foreign poor conflicts with his policy of snatching food from the poor at home. It is illogical to support the former yet seek the latter; thus Cameron’s foreign largesse is a contrivance. For him, charity should not exist at home and thus should not begin anywhere. His concern for feeding the alien masses is a front, the legerdemain of an insensitive manipulator skilled at doing the opposite of what he states. Instead of standing as the leading statesman of one of the world’s most influential nations, he acts as the pitch man for large business interests. In the hands of this man, the once-revered office of PM has been become the hired megaphone for business interests that slink about in the dark corners so as to avoid public glare yet control the backrooms where the important decisions are made in the today’s western democracies.

    Cameron has no more interest in feeding the struggling African than he does in walking alone down the streets of Brixton. The key to Cameron’s ruse is his espousal of a “private sector” approach to the problem of hunger. What he means by private sector is not small- and medium-sized farms. A stampede of mammoth global firms is what he has in mind. At the G-8, Cameron will push for intensified foreign agro-business penetration of Africa. For him, this is a good thing. For the African, it is not good fare.

    The large companies will control expanses of African land to sate the economic demands of western nations, all to the neglect of the needs of the people from whom the lands have been purloined.

    Some African nations already cooperate in their own pillaging by implementing policies allowing the rapacious companies to seize vast portions of fertile land. Even more ominously, huge agro-businesses now do their best to nip inchoate African democracy and commercial agriculture in the bud just much the same as these large firms have atrophied democracy in western nations. They spend inordinate sums lobbying and enticing governments to enact laws inimical to the people they govern. At least one African nation, Mozambique, now considers a rather ominous twist of legislation giving preferred status to seeds produced by these large companies. This law will also prohibit the seeds most farmers traditionally have sown. If the issue were just seeds, it would be bad enough. The practical effect of the legislation far transcends the question of seeds. It mortgages the future of the small farmer.

    Seeds produced by the large companies are not of the hardy variety that needs minimal care; they are not the stock on which small-scale farmers customarily rely because such seeds lower overhead costs and guarantee minimal yields. The seeds produced by these global firms demand payment of hidden costs because they usually require the use of relatively expensive inputs such as specialized fertilizers. In other words, the legislation will force low-end farmers to increase overhead expenses to purchase the fertilizers and other items required to bring these seeds to harvest.

    This places farmers between the knife and claw, the tooth and nail. With their dilemma assured, their demise is preordained. Guided by the forlorn hope of having no other alternative, poor farmers first will borrow at exorbitant interest rates in order to pay for the seeds and related items. Descending into the swell of debt, many farmers will be forced to sell their land at distress prices to cover their financial obligations. If fortunate, they may satisfy the debt. But they will be farmers no more. They shall be landless and unemployed. Some will become indentured sharecroppers on the land they once owned. Others will wander — homeless, penniless, and unprepared — into the cities where they will merge into the rising dregs of the urban underclass. As this morbid process unfolds, farming and agriculture in Africa will be performed less by African farmers and will inure less to the benefit of the African public.

    Africa is being larruped on two fronts. While the quiet, but effective, war against African agriculture walks relentlessly toward its mean objective, Africa’s future also is being compressed because it has not joined the global pursuit of manufacturing to which economically astute nations now adhere.

    Manufacturing is to the city and the modern, dynamic economy what farming is to the countryside and traditional society. As a general rule, nations that manufacture the least are those that suffer the most. The 2008-09 global recession brought this lesson into clear focus. Sadly, Africa remains blind to the immutable fact standing before it.

    A major objective of all G-8 nations has been to revive or expand their manufacturing bases to accommodate domestic consumption and export abroad. This is how they seek to maximize growth. They have relearned what past generations understood: Creating items of economic value is the key to sustained prosperity. The nation that exports finished goods, wins. The fewer finished products a nation exports, the more that nation knows the idleness of poverty and unemployment.

    Thus, mature economies plot like mad schemers to devise ways of igniting their domestic manufacturing prowess. The austerity embarked upon by the EU and UK is not actually incorrect economic policy. It is the application of appropriate policy in pursuit of inappropriate, inhumane objectives. Conservative elites in Europe and UK have always detested the social welfare state. Now, they actively engineer its destruction. It affronts their sense of plutocratic entitlement to think that the struggling and poor should be entitled to a bit of assistance. The push to austerity also has a less visceral, yet equally misanthropic, secondary rationale. The EU was never meant to improve the lives of the bulk of the people. It was expressly fashioned to make the region a competitive trading bloc.

    The elites love austerity because it produces unemployment in addition to cutting the benefits of the unemployed. This turns many into urban serfs so desperate for work or to keep work that they will accept even the lowest wage. Lowering wages is a key objective of the moneyed elites. By suppressing wages, they hope to make the EU the competitive international trade bloc of their dreams. They have made the conscious decision to tilt their region toward this international trade objective instead of making it a region more reliant on internal growth, demand and consumption that benefits all economic classes within the EU. To make the EU more competitive with China, the EU now lowers the living standards of the common people to make their lives more like the harsh lives of Chinese workers.

    Meanwhile, China has embarked on a two-pronged policy aimed at maintaining its competitive edge. Domestically, it suppresses wages. One way it achieves this is through the westward expansion of manufacturing. Heretofore, development has been along the Pacific coast, concentrated in the massive cities in this region. Now, the government pushes economic activity inland where the bulk of the people reside. There are roughly a billion people still relatively untouched by the growth the nation has experienced the past two decades. China is now bringing the people of the hinterland into the mix. Tapping into this vast pool of rural labor, the nation will calibrate labor costs and wages in a manner allowing it to maintain its competitive trade advantage. Additionally, China will consciously keep its currency devalued, making its exports cheaper and thus more attractive to other nations.

    Also, America has embarked on a sustained program of currency devaluation, making its products cheaper and more competitive in the world markets. America’s central bank, the Federal Reserve, has engaged in a policy called quantitative easing whereby it purchases bonds and other securities, thus putting greater amounts of currency into economic play. The principle objective of this policy is to boost asset prices in the United States. However, another conscious objective is a dollar devaluation making American manufactured products more competitive in the global marketplace. Also American businesses have been manic in squeezing labor costs and milking every ounce of productivity from the American worker without a commensurate increase in wage benefits. Again, a high unemployment rate is a boon to the elite. Again, the model used is an unbalanced model whereby the gains in manufacturing go to moneyed elite and these gains are achieved by undermining the economic lot of everyone else.

    Africa stands idly watching this dynamic unfold. African nations are not making the timely adjustment to events and policies of these other nations. The EU canvasses African nations seek bilateral agreements that, in reality, will open Africa to European manufactured goods while maintaining Africa’s peonage as a source of cheap raw materials to further fuel western industry. Many nations have signed these agreements. They have consigned themselves to perpetual underdevelopment for a small stack of Euros that will rapidly disappear as the nations pay for the costly imports from Europe.

    The fate of the continent’s economies, particularly its urban denizens, tilts in great jeopardy because of the lack of verve in government policy to establish manufacturing as the fulcrum of urban growth. Already our cities teem with the poor, the unemployed and with the social afflictions these conditions wrought. To understand the bleak future that looms should this dismal course persists, all Africa need do is to look at its brethren in urban America. America is the land of plenty but the black community is in the land but not really of it.

    The black community is a place of higher want, depravation and the strife that such things bring. Fifty years ago, although poor, the black ghetto was not as unregenerate as it now is. Then, numbers of young black men gained employment in the bustling factories of their times. This introduced them into the labor force, taking them off the streets. It also introduced them to the hope of joining middle-class America. Over the intervening decades, through no fault of these people, the factories disappeared. With that, so did the economic hopes of many urban blacks. The ghettoes they inhabit have become super-ghettoes, a more virulently underdeveloped, decaying form of their prior selves. With the major chance of employment fading, cityscapes have transformed into urban tundra of joblessness, poverty and frustrated idleness that beget all forms of human mischief.

    Living in isolated wastelands amidst a sea of plenty, the people of the super-ghettoes lack the requisite political cohesion and social accord to unite to dig them from the pit. Perpetual lack renders them mutually suspicious. It has them clawing against each other for the meager crumbs that fall their way. While a new era of industry and manufacturing may come to America, it will not visit these cities to revitalize them. Unless government launches a radical program of urban economic transformation, these people will become permanently invisible. Many black people will come to live forgotten, broken lives. They will survive in the urban equivalent of the destitute rural backlands known as the Indian reservation.

    This is the plight of urban blacks in the land of plenty. Given the lowly overall state of Africa’s economic development, the fate of most African city dwellers will be even worse. It will be a turbid one of heavy penury unless we change course and do so quickly.

    We must begin to understand the importance of manufacturing. First, it provides the jobs and related business needed to employ a large percentage of the people. This is not just about the creation of jobs. We must come to understand that true wealth lies in the creative process of using human ingenuity to forge a valuable item out of various ingredients so that the end-product is a greater thing than the sum of all its parts, if considered separately. Also, manufacturing creates a positive worldview. It helps people believe the political economy can expand and overcome its limitations. As such, the political economy ceases to be a zero-sum environment where one player always views another person’s gain as his loss. This change will engender greater cooperation, growth and, hopefully, democratic good governance.

    In the end, mainstream talk of Africa experiencing an economic surge is the stuff a mountebank says when he is trying to fleece you. It is not so much that Africa is experiencing a great economic awakening but that foreign exploiters are experiencing a boom in Africa, at the expense of Africa. Agro-business now pinches the African farmer. Global finance and big business want Africa to eschew manufacturing so that it remains a supply depot of raw materials. If this is the best economic revival the world can offer the continent, then Africa should demand a refund for all the labor expended and misery endured at the wrong end of an unjust global political economy. The people deserve better.

    0806034025 (sms only)

     

  • Making the world a hungry place Making the world a hungry place

    •Hunger is the eager devourer of the poor; it is the poor man’s constant fear and closet companion

    This past week, international news networks have spent inordinate time reporting on leaks of confidential American government information concerning two massive surveillance programs operated in the alleged war against terrorism.

    First, the National Security Agency has been gathering information from one of America’s largest telephone services. The NSA basically collected information on all American calls using this service. While apparently not eavesdropping to discern the contents of the telephone calls, the program was still intrusive. It collected information concerning the identity of the parties, their locations at the time of calls, and duration of the calls. While this might seem harmless, such information can become dangerous in unscrupulous hands. It can be mined to uncover more sensitive information about people.

    The second aspect of the revelation is that the NSA gathers pervasive information from nine of America’s large internet companies, including Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Youtube. This time, the retrieved information includes the content of transmissions.

    There are two sides to this story. Both sides are ugly but in starkly different ways and measures. To the chagrin of his liberal allies, President Obama vigorously defends these programs, claiming they strike the correct balance between an individual’s right to privacy and the imperatives of national security. He claims the programs have prevented terrorist attacks. While the presidential words sound reassuring, we shall never know if they are true. Because the programs are shrouded in secrecy, we are ignorant of the scale by which their effectiveness is measured. Since there is no independent and public oversight, we know not if the programs are being abused.

    We do know the temptations of power. Whenever a large bureaucracy is given nearly unbridled power, the bureaucracy inevitably abuses its office. This has been the case since the beginning of civilization and will be an enduring feature. As long as man is mortal, some of us will be seduced by the power given to them. Where power and money are concerned, the tool often becomes the master.

    Consequently, President Obama’s assurances fall to the floor. Most likely, the program has been abused and used for things outside the already wide scope of its stated mission.

    More to the point, the intended mission of these programs troubles many Americans. The American national character values freedom and personal privacy. Americans historically have seen privacy from government interference or surveillance of their personal affairs as the main fulcrum hoisting the freedoms that constitute American constitutional democracy.

    Modern technology now brings traditional notions of personal privacy into question. Advances in communication technology help us interact in ways impossible two decades ago. These advances are mainly used for decent purposes. However, a minority element employs them in mean, dangerous ways. Thus, prudent law enforcement uses elements of the same technology to checkmate the possible harm.

    These leaked programs are stinging reminders that different aspects of that same technological advance may not only be used to fight crime, they may well impair old freedoms to communicate while affording us new abilities to communicate. This is the dilemma of government and modern communications. It is a dilemma neither America nor any nation that aspires to constitutional democracy and protection of human rights has resolved.

    America would not be grappling with this dilemma in such dramatic fashion but for 9/11. That tragic event altered the America mindset. Openness has diminished and safety has become the first order. Most Americans will now tolerate a level of government intrusiveness prior generations would have rebuked. Given the terrorist threat, the President and many people believe they made a pragmatic decision to tip the scales a bit more toward safety and away from unmonitored freedom. While the changed equation seems reasonable in the abstract, human experience shouts caution. Whenever too much freedom is sacrificed for the sake of safety, eventually both are lost. At this juncture, America has not sacrificed too much freedom. However, these programs signal America may be headed toward those troubled waters.

    This brings us to the second untoward aspect of this story. Why blow the whistle during Obama’s term? Ulterior motives to paint Obama as a transplanted African dictator are part of the play. Sadly, Obama may have traipsed into his opponents’ snare by being too lenient with the national security apparatus and being a bit too pliable to the demands of this vast, faceless machine. Loathe to being seen as weak on defense and not wanting to take any heat should a terrorist attack occur, the President has given the national security network all it wants which is probably more than it needs. Politically, this has served him. When the Boston Marathon attack occurred, subterranean leaks did not emerge from the national security agencies that the president had deprived them of the means to conduct their business of protecting the American public. He could not be blamed for lack of vigilance.

    Yet, the price for his political cover is being paid in the coin of the civil liberties for all. In fairness, what confronts him is one of the toughest tests a leader must face. I fear he may have placed too much trust in the national security machinery by giving them too much latitude. He may sincerely believe these people will not abuse the expansion of their surveillance domain. History speaks against depositing such trust in those who see their mission as spying on fellow citizens. Every clandestine organization is infiltrated by a dark element that enlisted in that agency not to do heaven’s work but to do hell’s labor. They join because the clandestine nature of the agency provides them a cover of legitimacy under which they may pursue otherwise criminal inclinations. Some of the mankind’s most depraved criminals have worn police uniforms. The present situation is no different. If Obama actually believes in the fidelity of his snooping machinery, he has been had.

    In a sense, the disclosures will benefit Obama in the long-run, although causing him short-term heartburn. The leaks should make him more vigilant in constraining the domestic snooping apparatus. For a period, even this vast, anonymous bureaucracy will be more circumspect. Hopefully, public scrutiny will recalibrate the balance now struck between liberty and security so that it reflects America’s traditional presumption of freedom and no longer leans toward the intrusive national security state.

    This brings us to the second part of this story. These recent disclosures of potential government overreach seem to be an installment in a larger pattern of attacks against the Obama Administration. Just weeks ago, Congressional Republicans launched broadsides at the White House, alleging scandal in the Benghazi tragedy, the Internal Revenue Service and Justice Department. That these new revelations walk so quickly in the footsteps of the prior allegations is not coincidental. A foul air wafts through the corridors.

    While right-wing critics speak of a sinister Obama conspiracy to undermine American democracy, some of these critics are chin-deep in conspiracies of their own. They seek to depict Obama as the archetypal ruthless African dictator come to trample the roots of American freedom. It is the latest version of the tale that a black man has a tail. Obama might wear a suit and bear a Harvard education; but he is nothing but Daniel Arap Moi or Idi Amin in the making. Thus, these revelations. The disclosures are made in the name of civil liberties. To the extent this is true, the leaks are condign.

    However, an ulterior motive is in play. Conservatives want to scuttle the boat. They detest the very idea of black leadership and fear what it represents for the future. Their task is to make things messy, even ungovernable, so it looks like a black man is incapable of governing the nation. Disclosure of these surveillance programs has been a surprisingly long time coming. The programs began in the Bush years but were keep secret. However, they now explode in Obama’s face as if he prepared the admixture.

    Without proof Obama directed these extant programs into a more nefarious turn, he deserves no more flak than his predecessor. Since Bush was not scathed, neither should Obama suffer. In this regard, Obama should be judged by the standard applied to Bush, no more and no less. However, Obama suffers the special infirmity of race. When they see his black face, many critics see red. They are more foe than critics. Many serve in the Administration itself as career civil servants. That they are careerists does not divorce them from racial or political bias. Many present senior civil servants came into government during the Reagan era and adhere to the ideology of that era. They tell themselves they work for the American government but Obama can never be their boss. It is an abomination to see him as their superior. Thus, they undermine him. The constant leak of sensitive information helps accomplish this task.

    For Obama, more than any other president, the civil service upon which he should rely is not always reliable or even civil toward him. In it, exist fifth columnists working to undermine him. Some of his worst enemies man offices nominally in service to him.

    While this story is salient, a more profound story has goes unreported by corporate media. Steadily, large corporate combines and hedge funds act in concert to seize vast tracts of agricultural land and control the food supply. The net result will not be more food at lower costs. The result will be more artificially modified foods; however, the total food supply will contract and the price of it all shall increase so as to profit those who now engineer this new method of imposing hunger on much of the world’s already supine populations.

    In the northwestern United States, unapproved genetically modified wheat was discovered growing on a farm. The culprit was the international corporation, Monsanto. Yes, the same company that told the world the deadly pesticide, DDT, was safe to spray around children, pregnant women and on crops.

    Discovery of genetically modified organisms (GMO) on a farm seems minor. Not so. It should scare people. It already frightened wise governments in Japan and several EU nations to halt American wheat imports for fear of contamination of their natural food crops and supplies.

    So quick to make a profit, Monsanto and other companies have introduced GMOs into the food chain without understanding the long-term effects of this experimentation. We know not what consumption of these unnatural combinations does to the human body. We equally should be concerned what the proliferation of GMOs might do to the earth.

    Evidence suggests these crops, if not monitored, could spread like weeds or wildfire. By wind, bird, human activity or odd happenstance, seeds could spread. Once spread, they might overwhelm and choke off the more natural strains of a crop. From a few accidental seedlings, a farmer could see his fields decimated, inexorably changed from a natural harvest to this man-made complexity.

    The change entails more than a different variant of a crop. GMOs require materially different types of fertilizers and care than do natural crops. Most of these fertilizers and other materials are unaffordable to most peasant farmers. They also can only be purchased from a handful of companies. Once GMOs invade, a farmer is left helpless. He must go to Monsanto or a similar company to pay their toll or risk losing all. As such, introduction of GMO is the equivalent of turning decent farm land into a cocaine addict: Unless it gets its GMO fix, it becomes useless.

    This shall be the plight of the farmer’s worldwide should this danger be let loose.

     

  • A swamp called Syria

    A swamp called Syria

    •Civil War is as a crazed lion devouring its own flesh; only the sobriety that comes from weariness shall stop it.

    War is hell. Civil war is hell gone mad. Once fighting began, Syria became a tragedy foretold. A society and government short on tolerance but fully conversant with ruthlessness and its attendant crafts of misrule were thrust into tumult by the protests many cheered as part of the “Arab Spring.” Arab it was. Spring it wasn’t. As events unfolded, what occurred proved worse than the most biting winter.

    A harsh nation in a dark neighborhood where friends are more dangerous than enemies, Syria was not well suited for the protests. Rarely do protests against a paranoid regime yield placid results. While liberty and justice might be the aim, the result tends toward the opposite initially. Dictators do not respond to democratic protests by offering the olive branch or more democracy. They respond by offering more dictatorship. Such was the case in Syria. The morally vacant Assad regime would flash the mailed fist to deal with the protests.

    A minority government with a callous reputation, the Assad regime knew the protests could roll into something challenging the regime’s very survival. The friends Assad has in the international community could be counted on fingers of one hand yet leaving at least two of those digits unencumbered in the accounting. Lurking behind the protests was the sectarian rivalry between Assad’s Alawite minority and the nation’s Sunni majority. Unless the protesters backed down after their initial forays, conflagration was inevitable. For good measure, toss in subterranean tribal fissures in both camps and a dose of international intrigue as leaven. The contrived peace that had been imposed by force was set to expire. It would do so in puffs of smoke, fusillades of bullets and the roadside heaping of the corpses of the innocent, the guilty and the indifferent.

    This is the worst type of civil war. Pitting a minority regime against a fragmented majority opposition, the eruption forecasted stalemate. The regime enjoys the preponderance of material assets but not by such numbers as to overcome its lack of faithful followers. Most in government belong to the Sunni majority. Their membership in government was a marriage of convenience. Few things are as inconvenient as civil war. When the pinch came, their loyalty also became suspect. For Assad, this is more than a pinch. It is a vise grip closing on his throat. Thus, his government has effectively shrunk to where half of those in it are suspected opposition collaborators. Assad fights the rebels while keeping his second eye on perceived enemies within. It is hard enough to quash an uprising using all a government’s assets and energy. Using half of that inventory makes the task impossible.

    The rebels have greater people power but the power is unharnessed, wild and as often directed against internecine rivals as against the ogre government. Thusly fragmented, it cannot be viewed as a unified opposition. It too is a marriage of convenience, wedding genuine democrats, opportunists, carpetbaggers, tribalists, Sunni chauvinists, and radical jihadists. Should Assad suddenly fall, these disparate elements will lunge with equal ferocity at each other as much as they will attack the hapless remnant of Assad loyalists. Because they lack unity and also have inferior arsenals and military experience, the rebels are not strong enough by themselves to topple Assad.

    Aided by Iran, Iraq and Hezbollah, Assad has tipped the extant balance in his favor. He still remains unable to exterminate the rebels. As things stand, however, he believes he can preside over a rump Syria. Given the alternative of dangling from the wrong end of a thick rope or of being hauled before the International Criminal Court, Assad would gladly rule this abbreviated tract indefinitely.

    Meanwhile the rebels are furious at the West. In Western calls for Assad’s departure, the rebels thought they heard the unmistaken language of material support. They saw Libya being repeated in their homeland. The West wanted Assad gone but did not want to entangle themselves in protracted misadventure. Libya had proven harder than envisioned. Syria would be harder still, with the outcome less certain. Te West, including America, has given clandestine support and weapons but not at a decisive magnitude. This dollop augments the war materiel provided by conservative Sunni regimes like Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Qatar; still, the total cannot tip the scales.

    Ironically, some of these weapons will fall into the possession of Al Qaeda and other jihadist elements in the opposition. That this same situation played in Libya brings into question the primacy the West, especially America, publicly gives its anti-terrorism policies. While Syria can be considered a bad card in all categories, it is hard to believe Syria has been a more active and geographically diverse terrorist threat than Al Qaeda and its jumble of franchises and affiliated groups. Apparently, the war on terror has conditional primacy for the West. If there is chance to pick off an unfriendly Middle Eastern nation, the West will cooperate with the dreaded terrorists to achieve the task, even though who might ascend to govern the downcast nation remains uncertain. This tryst with terror groups strengthens the groups by equipping them and giving them a fighting chance at influence in or even leadership of the newborn government. Apparently, the West would rather toss the future of unfriendly nations upon the wheel of blind fortune than to focus on minimizing the impact of terrorist groups. Western nations evidently believe they can stifle large-scale attacks on their territories. Thus, they can now return to the timeworn practice of picking off recalcitrant nations.

    This policy shows neo-conservative thought retains primacy even after the Bush years. President Bush designated several nations as evil. Syria was among them. While the world has moved on and danger spots have evolved, American policy seems to have remained static at its core. This is a most curious and low-minded policy. Osama bin Laden was begotten by the blowback from the West’s cynical support for jihadists in Afghanistan during the 1980s. This time it might produce a scourge more virulent. Hopefully, it will not be born in the urban battlefields of a crumbling Syria. However, if the West persists with this tack, the blowback will occur in some desolate, broken land.

    The war has stabbed into the marrow of Syrian society. The death toll exceeds 70,000; one million people have been displaced. More are disfigured and wounded. None will forget this grisly woe. Horror is written on the face of children and lodges in the wombs of those who should be giving birth to a more optimistic generation. The mounting violence ferments sectarian tension. Senseless killing demands an answer: That answer is usually hatred. With each innocent Sunni killed, other Sunnis inch closer to blaming all Alawites for wanting to suppress them. The death of a guiltless Alawite sparks fear in that community of a bloodbath should Assad fall. Neighbor looks at long-time neighbor with new fear. In a civil war, even the initially indifferent become partisan because the ethnic or sectarian divide that shapes the battlefield comes to define the entire nation. This already harsh political system and the society underpinning are sundering, gradually but inexorably to the point that repair will be measured in decades not in years.

    Superimpose international rivalry on this picture. What emerges is the turbid portrait of a genuine catastrophe.

    Heretofore the West hoped to oust Assad by the power of positive thinking. When this failed, the spigot of clandestine aid was opened. That proved inadequate. A few months ago in an attempt to restrain Assad and pre-position the Syrian leader as being criminally responsible for potential American intervention, the American president proclaimed the use of chemical weapons would be “a game changer,” implying America would deliver militarily decisive aid to the opposition or get even more directly involved. The statement was tantamount to striding out on a narrow ledge. It would encourage renegade Syrian troops or rebels to deploy chemical weapons on a small scale to provoke a massive U.S. response. It would make little sense for Assad to order such a deployment unless he was certain the American statement was pure bluff. Assad is ruthless but not so reckless as to take the unnecessary gamble. The inhumane use of any chemical weapons was probably done by solders outside the chain-of-command or by agents provocateurs trying to elicit a muscular American response.

    When confronted by foggy evidence of deployment of the despicable weapons, President Obama wisely retreated from the precipice. Exercising prudence, he did not take the bait. His move was roundly condemned by America’s conservatives as having sacrificed the nation’s credibility. These people complain because they somehow ache for more war notwithstanding Afghanistan and Iraq. They seem to prefer America on permanent war footing. It must be good for their stock portfolios as it makes little sense from the standpoint of national interests. To his credit, Obama ignored their protestations. He realized leaping to war based on such scant evidence would not have added to America’s global credibility. It would have confirmed either American naiveté or its war lust.

    European leaders have been more hawkish than President Obama. In the face of Assad’s recently military gains, the European Union seeks to reestablish a more even balance. Consequently, it ended the arms embargo on Syria, meaning it will start openly supplying the opposition. However, given the EU’s history of half promises and given the uneven Libyan performance of key EU members, the opposition still might be disappointed by the wares it gets. The EU move will place pressure on America to openly supply the rebels. At some point, America will join the line.

    Meanwhile, Israeli takes occasional potshots at Syrian installations and Hezbollah soldiers entering Syria. Israel dislikes Assad because of his support for Hezbollah in Lebanon and because of the disputed Golan Heights. However, Israel is wary of his downfall because of the complete breakdown of order it might occasion. Israel would rather see Syria in indefinite turmoil. The uncertainty furnishes a credible reason for Israel to be skittish about peace talks with anyone, including the Palestinians. Moreover, the global attention directed at Syria deflects the overall pressure on Israel to talk peace.

    On Syria’s side stand Russia, Iran, Iraq and Hezbollah. In the shadows, hides China. Russia has too much invested in Syria, including a naval installation, to walk away from Assad. In a demonstration of support that counters the EU arms action and that will make Israel think twice about airstrikes, Russia is giving Assad new anti-air missiles. No nation makes such an expensive, obvious gift to a leader who it believes will soon be scurrying for his life. Iran has been Syria’s best friend in the region. Iran needs a friendly Syria as a conduit to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Without a cordial Syria, Hezbollah’s supply line is truncated to the extent the group will lose ground in Lebanon. Thus, Assad’s fight for survival is its own. Iraq is also a conduit of war materiel and personnel to Syria and Hezbollah. A Syria in the hands of a Sunni government with jihadist inclinations could foment Sunni resentment in Iraq, moving that already frail, febrile nation to the threshold of civil war. The Syrian crisis magnifies the Sunni/Shi’a divide throughout the region which could spark real problems in other nations.

    On balance, the western nations opposing Assad are stronger than the half-handful aligned with him. While this is serious business, it remains a bit of a lark for the West. Their existence is not threatened by the war. They have something to gain but little to lose in the contest. They will calculate how much to invest and will go no further. For them, this is a limited proxy war. For Assad’s allies, especially Iran, Iraq and Hezbollah, more is at stake. Significant interests, if not their outright existence, hold in the balance. While they have fewer assets than the West, they are willing to give more from the little they have. Much like the internal Syrian balance, the international balance of power and effort portends stalemate. However, the introduction of additional weaponry will escalate the lethality and destructiveness of the stalemate.

    In what is likely a hollow gesture at this point, the US and Russia, though on opposite sides of this matter, joined by the UN seek to sponsor peace talks. Buoyed by recent tactical military gains, Assad is eager to attend talks. With his ship currently riding high tide, any agreement achieved at the talks must memorialize his currently strong position. A few months ago, observers were talking about the regime collapsing from within and Assad escaping in the dead of night with but the shirt on his back. Today, he speaks of running for reelection next year. The opposition has no present desire for talks. Their sine qua non is Assad’s ouster; but a strong Assad will not step toward the exit let alone walk through it. Consequently, the opposition wants to continue fighting in order to change the shape of the battlefield before approaching the negotiating table.

    This problem is inherent with all wars, particularly civil wars. Rarely do both sides simultaneously see an advantage in negotiating. It may take years and concomitant war fatigue before the parties negotiate. In war, combatants rarely come to the table as a function of wisdom or reason. They usually do so because out of weariness.

    Without divine intervention or the sudden irruption of wisdom among the leaders of both sides, war shall continue for some time to come. Those who head the rival sides have little to fear personally war’s continuance. They live in padded comfort far from the daily misery and the macabre. They bear little of the physical brunt of war. They don’t experience the physical danger or the material deprivation. The anonymous, common man, woman and child whose only dream was to live a decent existence in relative peace and comfort will bear the brunt.

    Their dreams now shattered, they exist to survive. They are no longer human beings. They are objects in a dreadful game of sniper fire, indiscriminate bombing and rash executions. For them, this is not war and this war is not about them or their interests. In a situation like this, the prospective leaders who hold the interests of the people to heart are rarely those who possess enough military power to take over. Those who hold such power, on either side of the fight, are not those most interested in the people. This war is but a contest between those who want to rule but not necessarily improve the nation. For the Syrian people, this war is hell. For the rest of us, it is a hellish reminder that the best way to end a civil war is never to start one.

  • Three scandals, a bifurcated president and a vision in search of a leader

    Three scandals, a bifurcated president and a vision in search of a leader

    During last year’s American presidential campaign, President Obama’s supporters expostulated that racist conservatives would moderate their opposition to the second-term Obama since he would be ineligible for a third stint. This claim served as the preferred incantation in conventional liberal circles and within the increasingly stolid black elite. The claim was oft stated not because it was true but because its proponents wanted it to be so. While beauty may lodge in the eye of the beholder, truth does not necessarily reside in popularly-held opinion.

    Far from airtight and more akin to a bucket of many holes, this fake amulet vanished quickly after the inauguration. During the election, a few observers questioned this conventional wisdom and were berated for their heresy. Subsequent events have told their tale. Vindicated are those who questioned convention. The points are raised not to embarrass or exalt any one but so that we may better understand the politics dynamics at hand to better glean what is to happen next, be it to avail ourselves to the approach of good tidings or brace ourselves for a coming storm.

    Those who believed Republicans would sheathe their weapons underestimated conservative animus. Discord and discourse regarding race stand as the most important traits of the nation’s political history. For conservative Republicans to relent in the hunt against Obama would be to forfeit their way of life and self-definition. It would be akin to asking them to inaugurate the local chapter of the Black Panthers or the Black Muslims. This was never in the cards.

    Conservatives want the President out of the White House not because of what he has done. The man has been a loyal servitor, catering to elite interests. He has done the objective interests of the racists no harm. Not seeking meaningful change in the political economy, he has been a custodian of the unfair way things are not a visionary attempting to turn them into the equitable things they could be.

    Conservatives detest President Obama for the future their racism makes them fear he represents. The very idea of a black leader, no matter how loyal, incites racist fear of rebellion and fire on the plantation. They need to stop Obama not because of what he may do but because of what may come after him.

    Should Obama succeed, other Black commanders-in-chief will come and they might not fit the pliable mold of Barack Obama or Colin Powell. One may have the humanitarian zeal of Martin Luther King or the progressive fire of Malcolm X. If this happens, all will be lost from their standpoint. Thus, they seek to end the procession before it gains unstoppable momentum. They believing turning Obama into an abject failure will make the nation abjure the very thought of another Black president for a long time to come. This is their obsession. It would be easier to coax a mule to bray the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” than to dissuade racists from this crusade. This psychology propels the current Republican trolling to simultaneously implicate President Obama in three current scandals. They seek to batter the man like a human piñata. Instead of using a blunt bat, their preferred instrument shall be the pickaxe.

    Those who read this column know I carry no water for President Obama. He is too fixated on quarter-steps and petite, half-measures given the situation at hand. As such, he has been a mellifluous troubadour for the powerful forces threatening to lay American democracy low while promoting military imperialism abroad. Yet, he is no worse that the rest of the political lot and comparatively better than most.

    Therefore, when the racists start playing the game of lynching-the-loyal-Black servant, the rest of us must stand at alert. Blacks must do this not because Obama is a savior; he is not. He unwittingly plays the role of a doorman for progressive Blacks as much as he does so willingly for conservative Whites. Progressive Blacks and racist Whites peer at each other across a great chasm. What is condign for one is grotesque to the other. Conservatives hope to crush Obama to preclude progressive figures from rising to national prominence. Black progressives must recognize that racist success in painting Obama as an abject failure could cripple Black political aspirations for a generation or longer. Given the generally threadbare condition of Black America such a pratfall would visit a disaster as heavy as that imposed by the premature abortion of the Civil Rights Era. Black progressives may not like Obama but they cannot stand idly as racists encircle him. They must lend targeted political aid not because Obama in and of himself is worth saving. They must do so because Obama is a symbol. He must be preserved from gross failure so that we can maintain the hope of a subsequent better coming along who holds closer to heart the interests of poor and working people, both Black and White.

    The initial scandal by which the racists seek Obama’s throat is the Benghazi consulate tragedy. The second involves the Internal Revenue Service. An office within the IRS placed conservative groups to a higher level of scrutiny before approving their non-profit tax exempt status. The third involves the Justice Department seizing the communication records of journalists in order to track down leaked classified information regarding terrorism. The three matters have a few common strands. Senior level officials erred in all three. However, the mistakes occurred at the department level. No evidence implicates the president. Yet, Republicans consistently howl that each scandal is more ominous than the Watergate scandal that felled President Nixon four decades ago. Taken together, the conservatives claim, the scandals represent the specter of American democracy being manacled by the nation’s fist Black president.

    Something sinister lies at the heart of the accusations. The racists portray the three situations as either nefarious criminal cover ups masking Administration incompetence or abject signs of an Obama assault against the fundamental tenets of American governance. The claims are outlandish but dismissing them as post-election distemper underestimates Republican mastery of racial politics. The Republicans don’t need to prove anything to achieve their objective. Their goal is to stoke racist ire by constantly harping on themes such as this Black president with a Muslim name and African father allowing four White Americans to fall to the sword wielded by crazed North African Muslims. The subliminal message is that White males, who once ran the nation, become endangered once non-whites take leadership.

    Republicans portray the IRS and Justice situations as evidence of a vengeful president unable to restrain himself from using the vast instruments of government power to target opponents. This supports the myth of Blacks lacking the self restraint necessary for leadership. The message is that a Black leader will impale democracy by turning a system that took two centuries to build it into a third world dictatorship within the span of a few brief but intensely decadent years.

    Against this backdrop, President Obama made two speeches demonstrating that he remains a conflicted man lacking a unified theme. One speech revealed him still trying to negotiate with and succor intractable political enemies at the expense of a Black community that so strongly supports him. The second speech showed glimpses of a man painfully aware America has been walking the wrong path too long and wary that he risked his personal legacy should he continue blindly along the trail set before him.

    President Obama gave the commencement address at Morehouse College, the school that produced Dr. King and other Black leaders. While talking to a largely Black audience, Obama was really giving reassurance to White America. The underlying message was that he served to keep the Black community in check despite their dismal, depression-like economic predicament. For him, the speech was an opportune defensive moment countering the Republican tirade that he sought to transform America into a big Kenya. For the Black community, the speech was an offense; but given the continued euphoria over his reelection, little offense was taken by most Black people. However, a growing number of Black intellectuals are starting to condemn the obvious presidential penchant for speaking down to Black people.

    To us, he preaches a harsh, strict sermon reserved for no other group. His address gave credence to the racial stereotype of Blacks being underachieving shufflers demanding favors instead of seeking fair opportunity to prove their worth. He said what White conservatives love to hear and wished they could publicly say without being labeled racist. Obama sought their favor by taking on the curious, incorrect responsibility of expressing their racist thoughts for them.

    Given that his Administration is being hurled against the jagged shoals by opponents who seek noting but to practice their racist creed against him, the height of irony was how the president soft-shoed around the issue of extant racism during his Morehouse address. In all, the speech was a subtle exercise in self-hate, an excursion unbecoming the first or any Black president. If he seeks greatness, he must stop using his own community as a whipping post. This practice does not speak of greatness. It speaks of opportunism joined by an ample sprinkling of political cowardice.

    The second speech was more visionary and statesmanlike. In this address, he raised the need to temper the fight against terrorism lest America mortgage its democratic soul in the effort to secure itself against terror.

    The speech had its blemishes. His defense of the drone bombing and targeted assassinations of key terrorist figures rang hollow. He can boast of killing bin Laden but to boast that the world is safer because of it is a questionable claim better left unspoken. The network bin Laden spawned has gained strategic foothold in more nations now (add Libya and Syria to the list) than when the man was alive. Moreover, the guidelines the President outlined for restricting civilian deaths from drones will likely prove ineffective because of the inhumane way the Administration determines who is a terrorist. (By their definition anyone within close proximity of a notorious figure is also presumed to be a terrorist. This included unarmed women and children.) Also, allowing the CIA to retain some of its drone program is a dangerous loophole. Overtime, the CIA can ramp its program without public scrutiny or knowledge of the escalation.

    Yet, the speech was a solid attempt to steer America from the overly militaristic approach it has adopted toward political terrorism. This implicitly acknowledging the threat cannot be answered by force alone. Statesmanship and wiser policy toward both friend and foe in troubled regions are necessary. This may prove to be the most important foreign policy speech the President will give.

    His harshest critics have already harpooned the speech as a slick attempt to divert attention from the triplet scandals. On this matter, President Obama deserves the benefit of the doubt. This policy shift was occasioned by something more than a wily effort to avert public attention from the scandals three.

    Perhaps President Obama had a foretaste of history and was startled by its bitter sting. He looked in the future and saw the future glaring back, asking why a Black man and a lawyer fully aware of the nation’s checkered history concerning injustice to non-whites would brand his name to a shadowy policy condoning the extrajudicial killing of American citizens without judicial review of the action. Such a policy is unprecedented and shall stain the legacy of any leader who vigorously pursues it.

    Even more profoundly, President Obama probably fears America is losing its moral balance by engaging in this amorphous, indefinite war against terror. A nation constantly at war with others becomes a nation not at peace with itself. Democracy becomes choked when placed in such hostile soil.

    America may be more secure now than prior to 9/11 but it is also more afraid. The spirit of the nation has shrunk. A nation that once prided its open national character has become petulant and suspicious. In the quest to cocoon itself from harm, it risks distancing itself from the virtues of liberty as well as from the practical and concrete achievements these virtues have helped wrought over the years.

    In the end, the usually detached Obama may have sensed this transformation of the American psyche and decided he did not want his name on it. Yet, this partially visionary stance on one issue, albeit encouraging, does not a good legacy make. He needs to invoke the same perspective to materially alter his domestic policies for it will be on domestic policies that his name will either be etched in stone or dragged through the mud.

    This past week a deadly tornado ripped through the state of Oklahoma. The sad event was a metaphor for the destruction of middle-class America. Conservatives and liberals harangue in bitter debate over gay rights, gun control and other emotive social issues. In so doing, they engage in major wars on minor battlefields. These social issues will never determine the fate of America. Nor will the war on terror. No modern nation or ancient empire has ever been brought low by gays undermining society or by fringe groups plotting sporadic violence against it. However numerous empires have been brought to destruction by the naked avarice of their elites.

    Overconcentration of money and power in the hands of an increasingly smaller elite has doomed republics and kingdoms alike. When the rich and powerful are allowed to become too much themselves, they seize control of nearly all instruments of government then impose laws that allow them to profiteer without risk at the expense of the many who are left without hope. Eventually, the people become thralls to debt. No matter how subtly camouflaged, debt is a sure footpath to a servitude incompatible with democracy. So it was in ancient Greece and so it is with modern America. In a certain sense, the quality of American democracy has more to fear from decisions taken in the boardrooms of its largest financial firms than from gay marriage on the domestic front or from violent jihadists abroad.

    The national security speech offers the slight hope that events may push President Obama toward greater recognition of the role he should play in both international and domestic affairs. He has taken a first step in the foreign policy arena. He must now shed timidity in the domestic arena and approach the transformation of the American political economy in bold strokes. Only then will he become the agent of change his campaign trumpeted. Until then, he remains correctly accused by progressives of false advertisement and falsely accused by racists for being a progressive.

     

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  • Looking for security in an insecure world

    Looking for security in an insecure world

    •In the long run, security is not attained by force of arms but by the calmative influence of justice and prosperity.

     

    In America, the Boston Marathon bombing fades from memory. Benghazi is now the roiling tale. Congressional inquiries have been constituted. The media is awash with Republican charges that the Obama Administration has concealed its negligent handling of the consulate attack in Benghazi that left the American Ambassador and three other officials dead. Congressional Republicans huff that the Obama cohort is guilty of such transgressions that make the Watergate cover-up appear to be the epitome of benign transparency and fidelity in governance. These fire-eating conservatives hope this episode will not only serve as Obama’s Watergate but also double as the Waterloo for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential aspirations.

    Checkmated at the ballot box by an American electorate demographically too black and brown (Latino) to for their liking, the Republicans seek to gain through the trapdoor what they could not win through the front. They dream of toppling Obama while amputating the legs of a Clinton candidature years before that horse is brought to the starting gate. What the Republicans now do is tawdry and ethically bankrupt. What they practice is not in the spirit or practical ways of a mature democratic republic. They delude themselves into believing they represent the final line of defense laboring to save America from the great unwashed horde of the dark-skinned people who call themselves Americans but who shall forever be alien and foreign in the hearts of the white conservatism.

    Yet what their abuse of public office for political gains does is to turn American governance into the stuff of which fledgling banana republics are made. So blinded by hatred, they undo that which they purport to save and invite the very calamity against which they purport to fight. Not since the Civil War has a major political party been so spellbound by and attached to an obvious wrong. These racists meanly depict Obama as a monkey in a suit. But, they are the ones who behave as baboons.

    They attack Obama as if he is a bacillus; save for the hue of his skin, he is their own. I care not for his milquetoast policies and his ersatz populist rhetoric rings hollow in my ears; but I defend his right to be as narrow and purblind as they are. The simple but harsh truth about Benghazi is the fate of the vanquished quartet was sealed when the decision was made to overnight in the rough city. In a lawless place, danger assumes governance of the evening. Remaining in Benghazi after the sun had left the city placed these men on a limb. Those who attacked them realized their scant predicament and were all too ready to cut them down.

    By the time the attack commenced, no rescue operation could be had. The victims’ sole means of escape at that point laid in the miraculous. Neither President Obama nor then Secretary Clinton would have been personally involved at this level of operational detail. Neither can be blamed for what happened lest one asserts the proximate cause of the deaths was America’s involvement in the war itself. If that is the charge, then Republicans are likewise guilty because they pursued the war with even greater bloodlust than the Democrats. It is a sad commentary on American political leaders that they will spend more time on Benghazi than examining wrong-footed decision to war against Iraq based on false accusations. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis perished as did thousands of Americans. The war was a lie but their deaths were all too true. To send this vast number to premature graves is the ugliest act thus far committed this century. For humanity’s sake, let’s hope it maintains this evil distinction and that no subsequent event surpasses its malevolence. Sadly, no one will ever be made to answer for this massive wrong. Yet, Republicans are hell bent to see a few Democratic careers interred by Benghazi, which ultimately will be gauged as a salient tragedy but one of insignificant strategic import in the great tide of events. The loss of the four men was tragic. Measures must be taken to avoid the facile repetition of such an easily-perpetuated tragedy. On another level, America must realize this represents the inevitable human costs to be paid for the muscular empire America seems intent on building.

    On the domestic scene, the Boston bombing is also a price America bears for the global situation it helped author. Whether the bombers were formally linked to any known incendiary group is, in some ways, immaterial. The bombers share the worldview of these notorious organizations. They see the world as unjust and believe America is the primary author of that injustice. In a world of over 6 billion people, there will be hundreds of thousands willing to kill because of that belief. Some of these people are Americans or live in America. Again, such is the price of hegemonic empire.

    Responding to the marathon bombings, America will augment budgets for the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security. Already America has spent more on Homeland Security than it did prosecuting World War II. At least, the World War finally ended. The fight Defense and Homeland Security fight has no end. It does not even have a military solution yet Defense and Homeland Security seek to win through force of superior weaponry and gadgets. Once again, technology has been perverted by the vain and arrogant to accomplish a feat for which it is terribly suited.

    The true battlefield of this contest is shaped by politics, economics and governance and not by military hardware. However, those in control never want to hear such things because they ultimately define and measure things in terms of power and might. Thus, they attack problems instead of seeking to first answer them. They clench their fists then fire a bomb. Yet, they act indignantly when some desperate soul detonates a home-made bomb on a crowded street in one of their hallowed cities. What the bomber did was inhumane and the imperialists find solace in calling the bomber a deranged extremist. This description may be apt. Nonetheless, that the bomber is an extremist does not necessarily mean the government he opposes is not extreme in its application of violence in foreign nations.

    The Boston bombings were cruel homicides but, in the minds of their perpetrators and of many people around the world, they were no more misguided and cruel than the drone strikes America visits upon innocent people around the world. As such, the Boston bombings are an outcrop, the blowback, of a global political economy America has done more than any other nation to create. No global system can be perfect because we are fallible in the conception and implementation of all we attempt. There shall always be disagreements and confrontation. Justice is in shorter supply than the situations its application might resolve. As long as there is man, there shall be war and woe. To expect American power to usher in perfect peace asks too much. Moreover, had Germany won World War II or the Soviet Union won the Cold War, the world would be worse than it is. That said, the world is bad enough. Whatever benevolence existed in the initial stages of post-WWII Pax Americana has waned, being steadily replaced by a steely arrogance that knows few answers yet brooks little opposition. Killing bin Laden matters little; the turn of events will produce another.

    I have no want to debate the causes of the violent extremism in much of the world. One point is unassailable. Societies achieving long-term justice and prosperity are more peaceful and their people are less vulnerable to extremist views and to the formation of violent organizations. Among the lessons to be learned from the Boston bombings, this is the most important.

    There is another lesson from Boston germane to our local circumstance. Faced with many security challenges, Nigeria currently debates changes to its internal security/law enforcement architecture. This debate mostly is couched in terms of whether to revive the local police. How the American internal security/law enforcement structure tackled the Boston bombings offers guidance that can benefit Nigeria. In Nigeria, the ongoing debate draws a stark dichotomy between the current federal police and advocates of state police. It is as if Nigeria must select one or the other. Much of the debate is more influenced by a proponent’s political stance on federalism than on what is the most pragmatic solution to our security threats. Those who believe the central government has too much power espouse state police almost to the exclusion of retaining a national law enforcement presence. Those supporting the current federal distribution of power oppose the state police. Most people reach their conclusions not based on what is best for the internal security but upon which tack supports their overall theory of federalism.

    Because protection of life and limb is such an existential purpose of government, we must reverse our thought processes on this vital issue. Development of the nation’s security architecture should not become hostage to political debate. Instead of shaping the security architecture to accord with a prior political notion of federalism, we should first discern the most pragmatic, effective security apparatus. Then, we adjust the federal structure accordingly so as to enable this more efficacious system. This process accords with the viewpoint that government is not an abstraction nor is it the playground of competing factions among the elite. Instead, government is intended to advance the real and tangible interests of the people.

    Viewed against this backdrop, shaping the debate as a choice between state and federal police is a false ultimatum. First, we need not select one over the other. There is ample reason and evidence pointing to the need for both. Second, we should expand the conceptual scope of discourse from “policing” to “law enforcement.” In the aftermath of the Boston event, the American law enforcement machinery ramped into gear. However, this effort did not become the sole property of a federal agency or the state police. Instead, law enforcement at three levels – local, state and federal – joined hands to investigate the crime and apprehend the culprits. Each level of law enforcement has its different skills, expertise and talents. Over the long-run, America has found this division of labor to be most effective.

    Local and state law enforcement bodies are essential because most everyday, mundane crimes are of local impact. Locally-based law enforcement has greater knowledge of the community. This means the law-abiding citizens will have greater confidence and familiarity with local agencies. It also means the agencies will have better knowledge of the criminals and their activities because the local agencies will have greater knowledge of local culture, society and the political economy. Meanwhile, law enforcement at the federal level focuses on those complex crimes that do not respect local boundaries and that might involve vast criminal syndicates spanning several state or even international borders. Thus, while the U.S. does not have a national police force, it has several specialized agencies that tackle specific crimes. For example, DEA battles illicit narcotics. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) deals with cases that have been expressly by statute deemed federal crimes.

    Even with this rough division of labor, there is significant overlap between local and federal officials. When this happens, as in Boston, ad-hoc task forces are formed. Depending on the nature of the criminal problem, such multi-jurisdictional task forces can have indefinite life spans.

    There is no functional reason prohibiting Nigeria from establishing a similar division of labor. It can establish state police to address the vast majority of common crimes. Simultaneously, it can remodel the federal law enforcement structure to create or strengthen existing agencies to address those momentous issues, including but not limited to organized crime, narcotics, terrorism, and human trafficking that are too big and complex for state police to handle.

    Nigeria faces myriad security challenges. These challenges are not the fault of any one person, group or section of the nation. The geneses of these problems reach far back into the past but threaten to stretch far into the future if left unattended. We needn’t point fingers at each other. Better that we spend time pointing out possible solutions. Now is not the moment for stilted debate about the merits of more or less federalism and power distribution between the federal government and the states. While this political debates drags on, our security problems become more acute and biting. This column has been a constant, regular critic of American governance. However, it is wrongheaded not to acknowledge an important instance where America’s methodology may help Nigeria’s future. The division of labor between state and federal law enforcement bodies is one such instance. Here, Nigeria has some important lessons to learn from America. What have you got to lose but your insecurity?

     

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  • Love and leadership

    Love and leadership

    •A wise leader is ointment unto a wound but the uncaring ruler is like sharpened glass in the eye.

    Love and leadership. Rarely do these words appear in tandem. Conventional scholarship treats them as if one is fatally allergic to the other. This error visits at our peril.

    A quick survey of the world reveals a smoldering planet. Boiling hatred and cold indifference strut triumphantly. War, strife, economic crises, food shortage, resource battles reveal that life will be less inviting for most people ten years hence than it now is. Old antagonisms remain while new ones become quickly invested with a disturbing permanence.

    Leaders may opt to use the unprecedented reach of the state to change their nations for the better or to impose themselves upon populations in ways dictators of the past would die for and did die for. Unfortunately, most modern leaders have not used the vast instrumentality called government to accomplish much that is great. Generally, they have scarred their people or turned their backs against them.

    Progress in science, technology and economic knowledge has been perverted to segregate global and national societies into extremes of wealth and poverty. The complex apparatus of governance empowers and alienates at the same time. As a leader, a person occupies a world immensely different than the world he is tasked to lead. Unless possessed of keen perception and focus, he becomes trapped in his small but powerful orbit while being alienated from the larger one he must govern. Most leaders are both prisoner in and warden of their unique ambit. They act upon but are not participants in that prosaic world occupied by common man.

    As such, they no longer lead. Leading requires an organic connection with the led. This connection is lacking. They make policies and order things but do not lead people. They are like angry, amoral scientists conducting experiments. The more elaborate and frequent the experimentation, the less empathy they have for the subjects of their tests. Should the subjects deign to wince or moan, the angrier and more amoral the experimenters become. Sadly, these subjects are the decent people you see at work, on the bus, in the store, and in the mirror.

    Leadership has become barren because it has lost humanitarian drive. Few modern leaders talk with passion. Fewer act with it. Yet great passion is needed to overcome the inert, vapid meanness of modern bureaucracy. To counterbalance the dull vastness and expanse of government, leadership must be inspired and be capable of inspiring both the unwieldy government apparatus and a numbed public. Unfortunately, today’s leaders are more driven by political calculation than by conviction or compassion for the people. Lacking the spirit to attempt the noble, they bask in what is base. They do what is palatable for those who inhabit their elite realm yet little ponder how their decisions affect the vast numbers who live in the larger, less stately world. Elitism has become so strong and shameless that it can now be spoken of as bordering on something evil.

    Adversity is said to reveal the character of a person. This is partially true. Adversity may unveil the strength of a person’s character. If you really want to know a person, don’t pound him with adversity. Laurel him with success. Nothing reveals the soul of a man more than acquisition of money or power. The poor and weak must behave meekly lest they be crushed for contending with the stronger. The weak must appeal to morality and justice for they lack other weapons with which to fight. Turn an average man into a powerful one; he often severs his pursuit of justice and the sense of proportion that comes with it. He joins the behavior he once criticized. In reality, he never believed in justice and morality. They were survival tools employed to help move him toward his immoral objective.

    In short, the poor and weak do as they must. The rich and powerful do as they wish. With money and power at easy disposal, a man reveals his true self; the unbecoming revelation of his vice is no longer a liability because no one dare challenge him. Thus, most politicians cannot remain true to their public word because they prefer to keep fidelity with their selfish designs.

    Most leaders in the western world and in their former colonial playgrounds are more ambitious than compassionate. Nowhere is this imbalance magnified than in economic policy. Few leaders primarily consider the plight of the working class and the poor although the majority of the people. Instead of thinking how they may accommodate the interests of the elite and rentiers of the world within the context of advancing the interests of the common and lowly, they first cater to those who already consider themselves the masters of all. If the concerns of the hoi polloi can be squeezed into a small corner of that large box, they will do the squeeze, lauding it as a populist achievement knowing full well the great herd of people has been dreadfully shortchanged. If they cannot fit in the people’s interests, so be it as well.

    All you have to do is tell the poor they must suffer because government gave them too much in the past. The price for the past generosity has matured and must be paid. Conditioned to suffering and inching by, the people accept this mean, superfluous austerity as the natural order of things. With a nearly religious conviction born of ignorance, they believe they must suffer because this evil japery is what is preached by those in high positions. But many in high positions are possessed of the lowest social morals. Yet this tale has been told so long and convincingly both the liar and victim are deceived by it.

    The poor thus willingly exchange the unfair smallness of their lives for something even less. If you press them, they cannot even remember what precious thing government gave them that they must now recompense at such a cost. They cannot say because there is nothing requiring the steep toll. They have been duped by the misplaced application of the morality of individual frugality to national governance. Yes, individuals cannot long spend more than they earn without falling into bankrupting disaster. However, national governments don’t suffer the same restrictions as individuals since national governments have the unique ability to issue currency. A currency issuer can “earn” as much money as they like. However, the elite have succeeded in imposing a Spartan penalty on those already suffering a Spartan life. Meanwhile the elite gain a libertine’s reward for their already libertine ways. In effect, the elite tell the masses they are politically and morally liable to pay for the excesses of the elite. The common and poor accept the unjust surcharge.

    Nowhere is this imbalance more on display than in the United Kingdom. In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the Cameron government embarked on a severe austerity program. They treated the nation and its population as villains in a crude morality play wherein the profligate must pay for their errant ways by donning a coarse hair shirt after having endured prolonged and severe economic flagellation. Thus, Cameron and his smug Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, forced austerity upon a weakened economy.

    They slashed the government’s budget claiming growth would ensue. What they wrought is recession upon recession. Millions of lives have been impaired. Even the global champion of financialism, the conservative IMF, warned the bumbling Brits that they have gone too far off the ledge. The heartless IMF was forced to complain that Cameron’s knife wielding had become so draconian that it imperiled other nations as well the UK. Yet, Cameron and his sidekick stubbornly continued their painful imposition. All evidence substantiates the folly of their actions. In that fine Tory tradition, the two insisted they were right and that objective fact was never a good measure of economic policy.

    The fallacy of this brand of economics has long ago been exposed. The intellectual justification for clinging to this old rag has vanished. Yet, Cameron and his ilk across the world cling nonetheless. Their adherence is not based on rationality. It is based more in the strength of their bile and not on the content of their brains. They did not come to elitist economics as the logical conclusion of an intellectual journey. They embraced ugly economics because it fit their inhumanity, the low opinion they hold of their fellow man. Conservative economics mirages itself as an objective school of thought. It is an intellectual mask used to conceal mean, misanthropic sentiment. Most of those who adhere to classical economics care little about the general public.

    The world remains locked in a contest of good versus evil. Enslavement fights enlightenment. Poverty contests prosperity. Indifference opposes compassion. Odium battles love. Evil’s most effective weapon is subterfuge. It seeks to make you believe it is good and that good is evil. Thus, purveyors of this mean economics tells you what they do is morally sound and the only practical alternative. They lie a great lie. Their entire edifice of intellectual thought is founded on an ancient hatred. They believe the poor and humble are inherently inferior. Thus, anything done to better their lot is quixotic and wastrel. The poor are as they are because that is who they are.

    This brings us to a most basic point. Those who embrace this conservative philosophy can never mold or reshape modern society for the better. Their brand of conservatism may have served some utility two centuries ago. Now it manacles human progress. Although we live in an era of born-again conservatism, the challenges we face — those of poverty and inequality — call for enlightened and compassionate leadership. We need visionary leadership. To be a visionary leader, one must love the people such that he considers their plight night and day. Upon awaking, the first thought is of them. Retiring at night, the last thought is what to do on their behalf the next morning.

    A leader must love something greater than himself be it a nation, a company, a church or his family. The love of that thing must also be greater and more intense than the leader’s love of self.

    Those who think more about themselves than about other things and people should forget the quest to lead. One’s thoughts reflect the abundance of one’s heart. A person who thinks more about his narrow interest is not a fit leader. That person will devote the people and institution he leads toward his ambitions instead of devoting himself to the collective good.

    Conversely, love of others begets problem solving because love compels a leader to improve the lot of those for whom he deeply cares. Without love, the poor are perceived as inherently wretched, grubby and ignorant. With love, the wheelbarrow boy becomes a potential CEO. One can see a groundbreaking inventor in the young man constructing toys from discarded wood for his younger siblings. The girl walking along the side of the road in tattered school clothes becomes a future president.

    Leaders must never be satisfied with seeing the people as they are. A leader must believe in them more than they do themselves. If a leader is satisfied with people as they are, that leader will never do enough to exhort them toward what they can become. Nations enter their golden era when they convince even the people of the most humble social station to strive toward their better selves and to pursue their better dreams.

    The blossoming of a nation requires faith. A leader must believe in and act in reliance upon the inherent goodness of the people. He must believe they can improve. Given the chance to work at decent jobs with decent wages, the unemployed will apply themselves with verve and dedication. Given the chance, the homeless would live in a home and the ignorant would love to learn. Given the chance, the poor would seek to prosper and the hopeless would find in their heart a way to rekindle hope.

    In the end, the sun shines on the good and evil, the just and unjust. However, because God is kind to all does not mean we should treat all brands of leadership as equal. The conservative, classical brand seeks to define your place and then confine you to it. Enlightened leadership seeks to identify your better destiny, and then encourage you toward it. I see no close contest between the two.

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  • Intellectual fraud is stealing your economic future

    Intellectual fraud is stealing your economic future

    •  The rich purchase the truth; the mighty take it; the poor must suffer it.

    War and ideas are the primary factors determining the cast and color of human history. A bad idea is often more dangerous than an army. A terrible idea, widely accepted, can inflict damage no weapon can achieve. To achieve military victory, an army must assert itself to subdue the foe. One who plants a wrong idea in the head of an adversary need not spend a drop of sweat. He can enjoy the luxury of watching his victim self-destruct.

    Because of the minatory quality of erroneous economic concepts, this column often focuses on this theme to warn against the indoctrination the world attempts against you. Money Power, the global elite, claims it wants you to prosper. They lie. Your prosperity would require they forget their economic mastery of you. Forfeiting their mastery means to forfeiting their profits and exalted station. Why would people whose economic creed is the utility of greed suddenly turn selfless to benefit weak and imperfect strangers? They preach you may reach prosperity only if you do as they say. They hire smart people to write books and craft elaborate theories to convince you about the veracity of their assertions. What they neglect to tell you is that the advice they provide you was not the advice they followed. The books and theorems they recommend you digest are such that you eating this select diet will nourish them more than it does you.

    In 2009, Ivy League economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff authored a book This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly. They also wrote a paper Growth in a Time of Debt. Both works contend slow economic growth always plagues nations with debt-to-GDP ratios exceeding 90 percent. Put another way, economic growth depends on national governments running no or low deficits. Their work becoming an intellectual chevron for the conservative elite worldwide, the two authors were instant darlings of the corporate media, the establishment intelligentsia, and international financial institutions.

    The authors proudly hawked their wares on CNN and other stations. The book received the 2011 Gold Medal Award from the Council of Foreign Relations, America’s most prestigious foreign affairs organization that heavily influences government policy. The book garnered accolades from USA Today as “One of the Best Books to Make Sense of the Financial Crisis.” Moreover, their paper has become one of the most cited economic short pieces of the past quarter century.

    The fanfare would not have been so disastrous had it been limited to this intellectual exhibitionism. Purporting to expose and explain financial folly, their works would be used to justify financial policy folly worse than any since the 1930s Great Depression. The IMF and EU would seize upon their work to cram fiscal austerity down the throats of the member states along the northern tier of the Mediterranean. England would voluntarily minister the loopy tonic to itself courtesy of a Tory government with the flinty predilection for believing anything that imposes hardship on the poor must be good. Governments around the world slashed budgets, believing this exercise in “fiscal consolidation” would miraculously unleash growth. They were correct.

    Several economic indicators did grow. The length of unemployment lines grew. The number of people living in poverty’s harsh domain grew. Business failures grew. The number of people who went without food, school and medical care grew. The number of people made homeless grew. The number of people who tossed themselves from windows or put guns to their head from sheer financial hopelessness grew. The living conditions of most residents in the austerity nations grew worse. These were the growth aspects of the Reinhart-Rogoff principle. In other words, the fiscal austerity their conclusion supported also caused the list of nations suffering economic recession or depression to grow.

    While the two authors raked in handsome payoffs for their work, people suffered and died because of their twisted contribution to economic alchemy. In an earlier column, I offered a brief critique of this and related economic works that seem to celebrate the prospect of cutting off money to the poor.

    First, the authors likely inverted the causal relationship between growth and debt. High debt ratios are not the likely causes of low growth. Low growth causes high debt more so than the obverse. If the authors had embraced the more accurate cause and effect relationship they would have arrived at policy recommendations materially different from the austerity they came to espouse. A more accurate view of causality would have led to the conclusion that high growth is the predicate to debt reduction. Sustained growth becomes unattainable when government spending is slashed at a time when the private sector remains too frail and fragile to expand by its own accord.

    Second, their research was dubious because they failed to differentiate between eras when nations were constrained by the gold standard and the modern era based on national currencies with flexible exchange rates. Today, most sovereign money is fiat currency. This currency is not pegged to gold. Nations have an unlimited ability to issue currency. Insolvency and default are not their problems. Such nations can always pay provided their bills are denominated in local money. Sovereign debt ratios may have been important in earlier times but are less important today. Thus, the USA Today award crediting the duo with explaining the recent financial crisis is a demonstration of well-heeled ignorance. If this duo adequately explained any financial crisis, it was not the one of a few years ago. It was one of a few centuries ago. Their book has little relevance to modern economics. At best, it is a work of economic history. As you read further, you might conclude it belongs to that arcane, little known literary genre, economic fiction. As a manual for modern economics it constitutes the abysmal triumph of prejudice and bias over truth and objectivity. Its solutions are akin to caring for a hemophiliac by bleeding him with leeches.

    Third, designating a 90 percent debt ratio as the breaking point smacked of intellectual caprice. No empirical evidence warrants this designation. This designation was not an objective finding intended to illuminate how things work. It was an arbitrary decision meant to advance a subjective purpose.

    These flaws render their influential work suspect. However, a more detailed analysis of their mathematics expose the work as an emblem of gross incompetence or outright fraud. After writing their book, Reinhart and Rogoff were highly reluctant to release their data. Today, the two probably wish they had behaved more like seasoned confidence artists who always destroy the incriminating paper trail. Had they not begrudgingly released their data, they might have gotten away with their delinquency.

    A few weeks ago, the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) of the University of Massachusetts published a document titled Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff. After a thorough scrubbing of the data, PERI concluded the duo’s thesis contradicts the information used to support it. In their work, the tandem asserted nations with debt ratios exceeding the 90 percent threshold suffered -0.1 percent negative GDP growth. In recalculating the data, PERI found Reinhart/Rogoff were wrong to the point of indecency.

    Reinhart/Rogoff’s research stumbled upon data showing high growth but highly indebted nations. The authors merely ignored these nations and tossed aside the associated data. This allowed the writers to continue on their merry way to the conclusion they preordained. Include these inconvenient nations in the analytic mix as PERI did, the tale is a different one. Nations exceeding a 90 percent ratio attained 2.2 percent growth rates. This pace approximated the rate for nations below the contrived threshold. In short, the threshold is a meaningless contrivance. The Reinhart/Rogoff thesis is good for nothing except to fill a waste receptacle.

    Truth has been revealed but will quickly be ignored because those who control the truth don’t want you to learn of it. Reinhart/Rogoff’s work will still be widely cited by the establishment and its agents. They want you to accept an untruth as truth. They want you to live by it although there is no real life to it or in it. Their work is a dead letter masquerading as a parade. Conversely, the astute PERI refutation will not make the front page. Its authors will not be guests on internationally televised talk shows. At most, their findings will be a short-run ticker at the bottom of the television screen. In the main, it will never be considered by policy makers who remain committed to Reinhart/Rogoff notwithstanding that the duo represents financial scholarship’s equivalent of Typhoid Mary and Blackbeard.

    For the damage done, the couple should be run out of town. Had they been physicians, they would be in court on charges of negligence. Instead, they still participate in the elite cocktail circuit as respected academicians.

    Their misconduct is not a fluke. It is part of a systematic distortion of the truth in the service of a financialist elite and ideology that abetted the destitution of billions of human beings in order to elevate the profits of a few hundred thousand people. In its paper Growth Forecast Errors and Fiscal Multipliers, even the IMF finally admitted austerity was a draconian cloud with a jaundiced lining.

    Following the Reinhart/Rogoff postulate, the IMF forced nations into austerity, claiming reduced governmental expenditures would stimulate growth. Reality has forced the IMF into a semi-public mea culpa. In this recent paper, the Fund acknowledged its woeful underestimation of government expenditures multiplier effect on economic growth. Due to its ideological bias, the IMF arbitrarily assumed a dollar of government spending would contribute less than a dollar to economic growth. This fiction enabled the IMF to press governments to cut their budgets. Under this scenario, budget reductions would not impair economic growth. Sadly, this scenario existed only in the IMF’s mind. It had no place in reality. The multiplier effect of government spending was of a magnitude significantly higher than the IMF’s assumption. Now, the IMF admits to a government spending multiplier of 1.5, meaning every dollar of government spending produces $1.50 dollars in growth. By any standard, this reveals government spending as an effective catalyst for economic growth. It also means reduced government spending would cause overall GDP to drop more precipitously than the cut in government expenditure. Thus, when the IMF muscled nations to reduce government spending, GDP growth would not occur. The tactic would precipitate a downward spiral, immersing whole nations in recession or worse.

    The EU apparently did not want to be outdone by the IMF and the Reinhart/Rogoff tag team. When shoving the misnamed “bailout” down the Cypriot throat, the EU claimed the impact would be negative growth of -4.9 percent over two years for the island nation. With the bitter pill now swallowed, the EU readjusted it forecast. The new two- year projection is negative growth of -12.6 percent. The difference is jarring. The first is staunch hardship. The second is sheer doom. To call this a rescue package is to invest in the humor of the gallows. The Cypriot economy will be compressed like an overripe pea smashed by a falling anvil.

    Objectively, the victims of this grand theft should be in hot revolt. Instead, they accept it as fate inescapable. They believe what they have been taught without realizing what they have learned enchains their minds with the densest of fetters.

    Despite the ample economic wreckage visible all around, most people embrace the elite fiction. Africa’s leaders are most taken by the formulas and theories of this mean elite. Too many of our people want to be accepted into the international club. They will sell both soul and nation for a rear seat at the festivities. They want to appear to understand the events vaticinated by the financial world’s high priests and their missionaries stationed in our nations. The extent to which we believe the disciples of austerity is the extent to which we have been led to lead ourselves to the slaughterhouse. To do what we are told is to seal our fate to its worst version.

    A fundamental economic truth is that nations with weak, collapsing private sectors must resort to government deficit spending to pull them from deflation’s gravitational pull. Innovative, targeted government deficit spending is the best and almost only resort for nations where the bulk of the population suffers chronic recession and high employment. It is an inanity to believe less money and reduced aggregate demand will blossom into greater economic growth. This only happens in books written by the like of Reinhart/ Rogoff. However, we don’t live in books. We exist in the real world. Until we learn this key lesson, real world prosperity will evade us just as much as the truth evades Reinhart/Rogoff, the IMF and EU.

     

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  • Will nations align anew?

    Will nations align anew?

    •History tends to vindicate those who keep their eyes on it

    For all the righteous melodies coming out of Western capitals exalting the rule of law, openness and democracy, when their money is jeopardized, these governments reach for a different fiddle to play a discordant, crasser tune. The rule of law retreats in the face of the imperatives of power. These nations berate African states for inconstancy in economic and financial policy and practice. When it comes to the crunch, we now know these countries commit similar misconduct. In fact, they may have authored it.

    Decades ago, a courageous intellectual, Walter Rodney, wrote the seminal work How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Sadly, Rodney left us prematurely without finishing the contributions he could have rendered to mankind. If alive today, the West Indian would likely feel a sense of vindication, even schadenfreude, at the economic woes Europe currently experiences. The book he would write today would bear a startling title: How Europe Underdeveloped Itself.

    A few weeks ago, a courageous Cypriot government tried to buck the heavy financial pressure levied against by a venal trinity: the German government, the EU and the IMF. The rebellion offered by the tiny island was as futile as it was brave. Given the size of the island’s economy compared to three behemoths against it, the Cypriots’ stood not a chance. We predicted they would be forced to do what they loathed. The choice before the beleaguered people was one no sovereign nation or innocent person should face. By sticking to principle, they would face sudden and certain financial death. Through surrender to greater power, they would consign themselves to protracted economic recession tantamount to death through slow but gradually compounding torture. Since the latter delayed the execution, thus providing a sliver of a chance for reprieve, the proud Cypriots bowed their heads, tendering to Berlin and its cohorts their dignity in exchange for the less dramatic but equally moribund fate. With heads lowered, they were forced to drink of a bitter cup, the taste of which shall sting well into the next decade.

    The price they paid was a steep one. The Cypriots relinquished to the Venal Triumvirate the scant chards of economic sovereignty the island still possessed. The harsh trio showed little mercy in putting the island to the lash. With the strength of an absolute monarch’s medieval edict, the Venal Trio turned the rule of law into the rule of might with one tragic blow. Heretofore, bank deposits were sacrosanct, insured so savers felt secure in parking their earnings in banks. This no longer applies to Cyprus. The largest depositors lost most of their funds through no fault of their own save bringing their money to Cyprus in the first instance. This effectively destroys the nation’s commercial banking sector. Now only the maddest of mad man would lodge his money in Cyprus. The only men known to be that insane are the North Korean and Syrian leaders both of whom are currently too preoccupied with other matters to bestow such largesse at the moment. For a nation where banking stands as one of two major industries, this is not a mere knell. It is the presence of Death itself.

    Moving from the terrible to the sublimely catastrophic, the Trio of Doom imposed currency controls on Cyprus. Basically, any euro already there must remain on the island. Any that enters must stay save a minimal amount per individual exiting the isle. Also, most business transactions on the island have been reduced to cash. However, there is daily maximum limit on bank cash withdrawals. With these restrictions, the only tourists with the desire to visit Cyprus will be ascetics who neither like money nor enjoy the normal comforts upon which money is spent or those who have so little money that the restrictions are inapplicable and who most likely cannot afford to come to the island in any event. Upon neither class of people can tourism be revived. For a nation with tourism as its other large industry, this is akin to deboning a turkey while the fowl is yet alive.

    Add to these debilitating measures, the biting fiscal austerity placed on government expenditures, Cyprus has descended into the deepest gaol of depression. The island state shall not see the light of prosperity until after it has forgotten such a light exists.

    These controls blatantly contravene the EU treaty’s (Articles 26 and 63) provisions guaranteeing the free movement of money, people and goods. When it comes to extracting demands from weaker nations, the Unholy Three have the same lack of qualms as a hardened racketeer. They gutted core EU principles in order to extract a pound of Cypriot flesh. For them, the rule of law comes distant second to the rule of money. To legitimize their mischief, they passed measures and regulations giving the appearance of propriety. No matter the ribbons and bows place on it, what they did remains a strong-arm confiscation as if done at gunpoint. Pasting butterfly wings on an elephant doesn’t convert it to a jumbo jet. Drafting these onerous measures on EU parchment neither eases the misery caused thereby nor makes the overbearing intimidation any more ethical. There lies a broken body in the street, the casualty of a financial mugging of the worst order.

    In superficially attempting to save the Euro, this martinet plan makes the first structural crack in the euro zone’s architecture. The essential principle of a monetary union is that of a uniform currency. This is no longer the case. The dire restrictions placed on money in Cyprus means the “Cyprus euro” is less useable, thus valuable, than the regular euro. Two currencies effectively are in use. Cyprus now exists in a netherworld. It is of the euro zone but not completely in it. Only the future can tell if it returns to full membership or goes in the opposite direction. Exiting the zone’s strictures would better serve the nation’s interests but it would take politicians of the rarest courage to hew that path. Thus, the nation’s future is to be written by the pen of sorrow. Meanwhile, predator nations will swoop on the supine island and purchase its ample gas reserves on the cheap. Have you ever seen an island sink? It is a rare thing but you shall witness it if you keep your eye trained on Cyprus.

    Since Cyprus is such a small economy, all this might seem like a tempest in a teapot. More accurately, it is a teapot tossed in a tempest. A majority of banks in the EU are illiquid; many of these are insolvent. This means the EU financial crisis is buried but not dead. Like most living things, it detests life underground. It wants to surface. More banks will crash. EU officials now contemplate applying the Cyprus medicine to banks in other nations. Even the American Federal Reserve is considering measures that will lessen the government’s heretofore ironclad guarantee of bank deposits.

    Before our very eyes, a financialism counterrevolution is underway even before the progressive revolt was had. If this method of writing off bank losses becomes practice, depositing savings in a bank will soon assume the same risk as investing in the stock market. The very nature of savings and commercial banking will alter. People will feel compelled to ply their savings into more speculative forms of investments. Non-bank investment houses, known as the shadow banking sector, will enjoy a field day.

    If this becomes fashion in the developed economies, it may quickly infect African economies given our penchant for mimicking what comes out of the West without fully understanding the consequences.

    However, what recently took place in South Africa offers a thin hope that the days of mimicry may be ending. On March 26-27, BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) held a summit in Durban whereby they attempted to turn their grouping into something more material than just a notion. They tried to bring some organizational structure and purpose to the unit. They succeeded in part and failed in part.

    At its most ambitious stance, BRICS represents the non-Western world’s latest attempt to restructure the global economic order. BRICS nations are not paradise and their leaders are not always sufficiently versed or statesmen enough to overcome the peculiar national tasks they each face. Thus, creating a supra-national entity transcending geographical bounds and somehow harmonizing these disparate economies is a herculean endeavor. But, some of these leaders tend to run when it comes to most forms of heavy lifting.

    Heretofore, the unity of BRICS has been a negative one. BRICS joined hands not because of what they were; they did so because of what they were not: they were not the West. However, this anti-identity does not do much except if all that is wanted is a new global platform to publicize Western failings. Those failings are so self-evident that limiting BRICS to such a role would quickly render the grouping an intricate but wet fuse.

    BRICS needs to be something more than a club of large economies not situated in the North Atlantic. In Durban, the process of lending the group a positive identity took a few steps. The most noteworthy is the agreement in principle to establish a development bank. Funded in the amount of 100 billion dollars, the bank is envisioned as an alternative to the rabidly financialist IMF and, to a lesser extent, the World Bank. Such a bank will be condign but all will be opposed by established powers. They will see it as directly threatening their ability to impose conservative economic strictures on struggling, beggar nations that now must visit the IMF because there is no other place to go. But IMF remedies are like those of the mad physician who relieves a patient’s pain in the neck by poking a sharp dagger in his back.

    Unfortunately, the agreement regarding the bank was only in principle. The summit could move no further on this issue because BRICS members disagreed over structural and operational details for the bank. Also, it is one thing to stand before the klieg lights and pledge 100 billion dollars before a supportive audience. It is quite another thing to return home to write the checks. Allocating funds to the bank entails cutting funding for extant priorities. Influential elements in each government will be unhappy, seeing the bank as a foreign policy romp prematurely, thus quixotically, made. BRICS also stepped toward strengthening their Business Council. Also, China promised African nations 20 billion dollars in concessionary loans.

    In all of these, China is the biggest winner. Under cover of BRICS, China will pursue its agenda to influence numerous African nations, thus securing supplies of raw materials. However, instead of chasing the hare as a unilateral action, China will do more of this as a member of the BRICS collective. This may help Beijing blunt criticism that it pursues an agenda as equally hegemonic as those of developed nations. However, such criticism is proper and justified given Chinese recent antecedents in Africa. Its policies have revealed a China disinterested in Africa’s independent development. China’s driving mission is to position itself to control African raw materials and strategic industries at their source. The neo-imperialism of the West focuses on gobbling African raw materials then exporting finished manufactured goods and specialized business services to Africa.

    Departing from this model, China reverts to old fashion colonialism. They want to snatch raw materials but are all too willing to export millions of Chinese citizens to run factories and open businesses in Africa. The face of 21st century resident colonialism in Africa is not the face of the Occident. It is the face of China. The “chinafication” of African economies is noticeable in several countries. It may initially bolster local production and GDP. The uptick comes at the longer-term price of mortgaging the nation’s economic sovereignty. As Cyprus and the other nations of the southern tier of the euro zone have shown, sacrificing long-term independence for short-term profit is a wretched bargain.

    Consequently, Africa should applaud the ongoing institutionalization of BRICS. At this point, a group offering a perspective of the world economy different than Western financialism is a positive counterpoise. Western financialism is a corrosive way to model any economy. It is especially disastrous for Africa. We need something else. BRICS may not be the final remedy but perhaps it may be a transition providing some breathing room. For BRICS to be more than a stopgap, it must expand its membership and advocate a more reformist agenda than the one now implied. In some ways, BRICS nations don’t want to amend the current system. They just want to negotiate more room for themselves at the top of the appalling heap.

    With this in mind, Africa must keep an eye on the West and one on China. Both want to keep Africa in subordinate so as to exploit her resources. Africa must be wise by leverage each against the other. If not, this century will not be the advent of Africa’s climb out of poverty. It will be the century of Africa’s compound abuse because this time it will not be just the West larruping us the East too will pounce and extract its portion.

    In the end, talk about economics as an exact science and about the objective rules of finance is the stuff of fables. This is an elaborate nursery tale told to those who the architects of the current global economy would rather have believe in make believe. Too many of Africa’s people are too poor to afford the luxury of believing in things that do not exist and in ideas that do not work except against those who obey them. Africa needs to come to the place where it understands the rules of the current game offer it no respite. The economic and financial regimes set by organs such as the IMF and World Trade Organization are so stacked against the evolution of African economies that should one of them a grow into a developed economy, it will be by accident. Africa needs to confront these regimes to which it has sheepishly agreed. The continent needs to formulate ideas, ways and means that promote its own interests. Then it must use these things to build its own positive economic life and structure, brick by painstaking brick.

     

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  • The continuing onslaught: The rich ambush the poor

    The continuing onslaught: The rich ambush the poor

    •The rich so cherish the poor: they do everything to keep them in that condition

     

    During mass last week, the Pope Francis appealed for protection of the weak and poor. The new pontiff seems a humble person committed to humanity. Hopefully, he will sweep the stale air and crooked ways from the Vatican so the Catholic Church can be a church again. Not only Catholics but the world can stand to have a pontiff who wears common, plain robes but speaks in words touched by the spirit of divinity. For too long, we suffered religious leaders who wore divine robes only to speak in the spirit of what is common and worldly. May Francis be more than fine ritual and liturgy. May he be real and compassionate. Even at that, he will face hard opposition and sour disappointment. His counsel to protect the weak and poor was condign but it was only hortatory. Save for public attention, a pope commands little these days. Those in positions of power and wealth to make good his counsel paid him as little heed as they do the poor and weak of whom the new pontiff so touchingly spoke. In many ways, it is not an outmoded perspective to think of the world as a perpetual battle of good versus its opposite.

    A subtle global struggle is underway. The outcome will determine the course of nations and the welfare of billions of people. Hundreds of millions of lives will be made long or cut short depending on how the conflict unfolds. As long as man has existed, the rich and power have taken more from the weak and poor than they have given the humble masses. In prior ages, this dynamic assumed several names that highlight the foul play of which man is capable in pursuit of high affluence and great power. Slavery, serfdom, and indentured servitude are but the poor man’s basement view of the grand historic procession of the divine right of kings, noble aristocracy, manifest destiny, and the white man’s burden.

    Today’s struggle is the latest manifestation of elite man’s penchant for polishing his boot against the neck of the lowly. This time is has little to do with birthright or pedigree. It has taken centuries but science has largely shorn us of the myths of innate superiority of any race, people or class. This time the struggle is distilled to the most durable and persistence of social myths: the supreme worth of money. This myth has been sustained by that ever present thing called human greed. It has been legitimized by the advent of perverse social science known as classical economics. It has been made catholic by the advance of technologies permitting the transmission of information or money in the form of electronic pulses moving at the speed of light. Economic life has been globalized. With globalization comes uniformity. What might have been the way of a few nations and their allies has become the way of the world.

    On a universal scale, Money Power and its enabling philosophy, financialism, seek to place the rest of us under the lash. Thus far, they are winning because people were so deceived they believed no option existed but to accept their fate. Things are now changing. People are beginning to understand that few economic policies are objectively inevitable. Policies result from subjective preferences. To accept the policies espoused by the rich and powerful is to relegate most people debt peonage and reduce poor nations to colonial outposts of international finance in the same manner much of Asia and Africa were subjected to ownership by royal corporations in days of yore when imperial aspirations and discrimination against purportedly lesser civilizations were considered virtues to be nurtured and extolled.

    During the last one hundred years, global wars have been military in nature, i.e., the two world wars and the resultant Cold War. In the 21st century, the first war of global dimension is the purported fight against terror. Terrorism is a serious matter. Nigeria well knows the harsh costs incurred when terrorism takes residence. However, the alleged global nature of the war on terrorism is more in hyperbole than fact. Most people and areas are unaffected. In truth, the first global war of the 21st century is financial in nature. It is a battle where rich and powerful nations, instigated by their largest financial houses, seek to control the destiny of other nations by whittling their economic sovereignty so that the lesser nations become vulnerable to further machinations by the more powerful economies. It is this war, not the one against terrorism, that affects all of us. This war’s outcome will determine whether modern technology joins with humane social knowledge and understanding to forge a better world where poverty is less jarring and wealth more equitably shared. Or will technology be perverted by twisted ambition to bring hardship that is severe and disconnected from the world’s actual productive capacity? If the latter, then we have entered a period as doleful as the entrance into the Dark Ages. A thick, heavy cloud would have descended over the vast swath of mankind for no reason other than to sate the greed of a powerful few.

    As irony would have it, the epicenter of this fight is Europe much the same as Europe was the center of last century’s world wars. What Hitler could not accomplish through racial hatred and by strong bayonet, modern Germany now attempts to do through the manipulation of government and bank balance sheets. Germany seeks nothing less than to bring the rest of Europe to heel economically. Instead of the military blitzkrieg, Germany seeks to dominate Europe by brusque financial intimidation. It seems national tendencies don’t easily fade. When it comes to attempting to dominate others, the Germans dispense with subtlety. Bullying becomes the order of the day. Over the past two years, the euro zone has been a battlefield of rich versus struggling European nations. On one hand, Germany, using the European Central Bank (ECB) as proxy, has battled the southern tier of Europe. One by one, it has subdued these nations like a conquering invader. Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy have fallen down the maw of austerity. Toss in Ireland for a measure of geographic diversity. One by one, these nations plummeted into recession.

    Now, enter the most unlikely hero at the most unlikely moment. If this chapter in history has a benign conclusion, the small island nation of Cyprus may well be the proximate cause.

    Buffeted by the Greek meltdown, the Cypriot banking system is in crisis. The island’s second largest bank is overexposed to potential Greek default. If that bank goes down, the other Cypriot banks go with it. Thus, Cyprus needs a bank bailout of 16 billion euros in short order. It turned to the European bank for help. In effect, this was tantamount to requesting the financially martinet Germans for assistance. Viewing the Cypriots as profligate wastrels living beyond their means, the Germans conditioned help on the Cypriots donning a skin-piercing hair shirt. The Germans demanded Cyprus pay for the bailout, in part, by imposing a ten percent tax on bank deposits. This was a brusque and unusually draconian move.

    Germany and the ECB had strong-armed and intimidated relatively large nations such as Italy, Spain and Greece, to the extent of causing the Greek government to fold during the height of that crisis. German officials and European bureaucrats blithely thought they could steamroll tiny Cyprus which represented a fraction of one percent of the euro zone GDP. In their arrogance, they miscalculated.

    The move sent shocks through the world banking system. The highbrows in Berlin and Frankfurt (the latter being the home of the ECB) had stepped too far to grab too much. In order to stop bank runs, governments have insured private bank deposits since the Great Depression. This has been a totem of modern banking. The innovation strengthened depositor confidence and encouraged savings. In one swoop, the equation changed in Cyprus. The Euro giants were demanding the Cypriot government to shift from guaranteeing deposits to confiscating them for no compelling reason. Worse, roughly one-third of bank deposits were expatriate, mostly Russian. Thus, the euro giants were poking a finger in the Russian eye by essentially demanding that Russians involuntarily fund the Cypriot bailout. Clearly, European officials knew of this Russian presence in the banking system. Penalizing Russia also gave motive to this harsh tactic.

    News of the proposal predictably ignited a bank run which was only stopped when banks used various tricks and methods to dishonor depositor withdrawal requests. Those who thought the euro zone had exited crisis better thing again. If people in other troubled nations believe the medicine foisted on Cyprus may soon come their way, we will witness depositor withdrawals and bank runs in these nations the likes of which the world has not seen since the scythe of economic depression mowed down the European banking system seventy years ago.

    Yet, something peculiar happened in the Cypriot capital, Nicosia. Parliament balked at passing the confiscatory deposit law. With this, they rejected the German-originated bailout plan. Germany thought they had Cyprus trapped. Without the bailout, a major bank collapses and a national banking crisis becomes imminent. With the bailout’s confiscatory tithe on bank deposits and its fiscal austerity measures, the economy will lose its place as a preferred international banking center and will deflate due to lessened government expenditure. Similar to Greece, the bailout may avert rapid financial calamity by replacing it with a slower yet inexorable long-term diminution approaching acute recession or depression.

    Cyprus was being asked to select the means of its execution, either by gunshot or slow but sure poison. Banking on the risk-adverse nature common to most politicians, the euro bullies figured Cypriot parliamentarians would pass the legislation, thus avoiding an immediate financial showdown in favor of creeping disaster. The proud Cypriot lawmakers did what their colleagues in larger Spain, Italy and Greece lacked the spine to do. If they were to sink, they shall do so on their own terms, not according to commands from Berlin or Frankfurt. Finally, the euro giants had encountered resistance through this act of desperate courage. Given the smallness of the Cypriot economy, this was the wrong nation to take the stand but at least a stand was finally taken. Now electorates in Spain, Italy and Greece are irate that their lawmakers were not possessed of such nationalist courage when their moment to stand or fold came. As the winter becomes spring and weather moderates, expect street protests and political realignment in these nations as the people bristle under the harsh weight of unnecessary austerity.

    Despite the courage shown, Cyprus is still in dire trouble. It must devise a rescue package by Monday or the ECB pulls the plug on the vulnerable bank. Then collapse would no longer be imminent. It would have begun. The last time someone in this part of the Mediterranean survived such a predicament was when Odysseus navigated past the monster Scylla and Charybdis, the whirlpool. Yet, this offers the Cypriots no consolation. This feat took place several millennia ago and is the stuff of myth. The Cypriots must face the pressure of modern financialism which places little premium on national heroism.

    In the end, Cyprus will likely bend. It is too small and the pressure too great upon it. Being in the euro zone, the gallant island does not print its own currency. If it had a sovereign currency, the nation would have more policy space in which to maneuver. To a degree, it could inflate its way out of immediate crisis. This has problems but not as severe as those now faced. Cyprus has run to Moscow in search of kinder bailout assistance. The Russians will not do enough. Moscow will use Cyprus as a pawn in the grand game of geopolitics it plays against the European Union and NATO. Simply put, the island was ripe for the plucking. Exposure to Greece made frail the banking system. That it has untapped gas reserves makes the island a more attractive prey. “Cripple the economy, then take assets and resources on the cheap.” This is the new leitmotif of economic cooperation among nations bound as allies in an economic treaty and monetary union.

    The crisis should sound a caution to African nations. By all means safeguard your currency sovereignty. Any nation that uses the currency of another or pegs its currency to the value of another, has shifted too much of its financial decision-making to another nation. That other nation will exploit the unintended gift; it will not act with altruism. Consequently, Nigeria must discourage the growing practice of conducting domestic transactions in dollars. While this might benefit individuals, it saps the overall economy.

    West Africa must closely reexamine its pursuit of a monetary union that is partially based on the flawed European model. If the flaws are not resolved in this architecture, the union not only might cause imbalances between its members, it could make their economies more vulnerable to manipulation by foreign powers. Last, Nigeria and Ghana especially must be wary of the renewed flow of speculative hot money. Since the 2008 meltdown, western financial houses have largely been made whole by massive doses of government subvention. They are flush with cash. Due to the structural uncertainty of the euro zone and the low rates of return throughout the developed world, they do not have many places at home to park this money to earn handsome returns. Their eyes bulge as they look at the high interest rates in West Africa. They rush to temporarily park money here to profit from the high rates. We should be concerned. Lest we forget, a similar inflow helped foster the Nigerian banking bubble years ago. A subsequent outflow of the same money precipitated the banking collapse of 2008-9. This sudden and steep crash checkmated the banking system, almost crumpled the entire economy and obliterated the savings of hordes of forlorn investors. We must not allow a repeat so soon thereafter. We would be wise to impose capital and currency controls to prevent a repeat of this speculative roller coaster ride and its concomitant crash into the hard wall of financial reality.

    To safeguard African economies from the fate of Cyprus, we must unlearn the mainstream economics we have been taught. Mainstream economics preaches that sovereignty matters little. It says go for the most lucrative deal. The lesson of the euro zone is that the most lucrative deal today might not be the best deal for posterity. Joining the euro zone was clearly against the national interests of Greece, Spain and Cyprus. Perhaps Cyprus might escape but with difficulty. The best way to escape such a trap is never to enter it. No nation with a large population base has ever reached durable, broad-based prosperity without maintaining its currency sovereignty. To relinquish sovereignty is to relinquish your right to grow as you deem fit. In such a mean, ungracious era of human history, no wise nation will place its fate in the hands of a competitor. Enough said!

     

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  • Financial speculation feeding food and job crises

    Financial speculation feeding food and job crises

    This past week, finance ministers and central bankers of the G20 nations met. Joining them were the Managing Director of the IMF and her World Bank counterpart. Lurking ever in the interstices were the emissaries of the global financial houses. These private concerns influence governments to the extent that no policy is made without their input. No policy is implemented which they genuinely oppose. Even more than before the 2008 Great Recession, these private forces retain the impregnable status of a government outside and beyond government. This impregnability harvests a sense of arrogant entitlement leading the financial houses to think everything must be done so that their profits always maximize or not be done at all. This might not be the best nature of things but it is the present order of them. The finance ministers gathered not to correct the global economy; they gathered to pet the interests of Money Power.

    The final communiqué was as shallow and meretricious as a prostitute’s embrace. The group proclaimed member nations must eschew competitive devaluation of their currencies. Devaluating one’s currency, through either enhanced deficit spending, loose monetary policy or both, stimulates an economy’s export sectors. However, when many nations devalue at once, a currency war looms as each nation later attempts to outdo the others by enacting even steeper devaluations to gain the export advantage. This is a cynical way to promote jobs and exports by literally pilfering them from those nations whose currencies remain static.

    Marginal tinkering with a currency’s value is tolerable to the financial class. Because they have inside information or some inkling of movement, the financial houses make windfalls from transferring liquid assets from one currency into another. However, too much downward movement in the value of too many currencies makes hash of this managed game, causing both financial uncertainty and significant economic dislocation in the process. In truth, prolonged currency warfare is a race to nowhere. Thus, on a superficial level, the statement against currency wars was condign. Sadly, the other actions and inactions of the ministers reveal that their cardinal purpose was not strengthening the real economy where the majority of people live. Their great obsession was to assuage the clannish financial markets. Whatever solace given the rest of the economy was collateral and incidentally done.

    Concerning the flaccidity of their overall economies, the ministers acted with the disorientated perspective of penguins confined to a dark, narrow closet, all making unintelligent noises while ceaselessly bumping into each other. If justice prevailed in this world, these ministers would be sued for malpractice; successful defenses would not avail them. Brandishing the crooked wand of austerity, they have transmogrified sickly economies into shrinking ones.

    In the final quarter of last year, the entire Eurozone contracted by 0.6 percent, a fall much steeper than mainstream economists predicted for some had predicted growth. Orthodox minds thought Germany, the continent’s largest economy, inoculated from the infirmity afflicting the Mediterranean nations. Yet, the Teutonic dynamo was felled by a bout of economic measles. Germany’s export-driven economy contracted like an overstretched rubber band because its southern neighbors have become too ravaged to buy German goods in quantities that would sustain German production levels. Confronted by the dire and obvious logic of this economic contagion, the Germans still appear incapable of grasping the deeper lesson of this morality play. The rich man who impoverishes those upon whom his commerce and wealth are based depletes his wealth to the degree his avarice undermines the welfare of others.

    Going around the globe, America contracted during the same period. Japan contacted so severely that its government quickly embarked on a loose money policy and a concomitant spending spree in financial markets in the vain hope of escaping its third recession in less than ten years. Britain’s bullheaded insistence on austerity produced a second recession in three years. Meanwhile, Greece has descended so headlong down the gutter that it is a nation on perpetual strike and nearing riotous strife. Millions would migrate but the sapping economic conditions deprive them of the funds to do so. In Spain, when two youths meet, they are sure at least one is unemployed. Italy is so much wracked that serially discredited Silvio Berlusconi might once more elected Prime Minister.

    Despite their withering economies, the finance ministers were unable to come to grips with the malevolent evidence of results of their beloved austerity. During the Great Recession, they touted austerity would spur private sector growth. What austerity has done is abet the financial sector’s dominance of the overall economy by further weakening the productive sector, making the latter vulnerable for the speculative plucking. After years of intense such plucking, the bird has no more feathers. The experiment has gone terrible awry. Austerity has produced the “Son of the Great Recession.” So steeped in foul craft of orthodox economics, the finance ministers could not bring themselves to understand the economic carnage that lay all about was not an inevitable thing; it was a matter of their own doing. Their economics, their beloved pseudo-science, has proven to be nothing more than a graven idol that blasphemes reality rather than explains it. These arrogant men in their arrogant fashion believed they could tell reality how to behave. Upon the shining altar of their false deity, tens of millions have suffered; too many lives have been lost in futile sacrifice to their dumb, uncaring god.

    Instead of admitting the failure of austerity, these ministers proclaimed austerity has served its purpose because growth waits on the horizon. Yet, isn’t this what they said last year and the year before it? Misery has appeared in legion manifestations but economic growth remains a rather bashful thing adverse to human companionship. There is a rather peculiar attribute about horizons. The closer you move toward them, the more they seem to move away. The horizon never gets closer; it is too well mannered to become intimate and thus keeps ample distance. Thus, people do want economic growth to be on the horizon. They want it in their hands.

    The ministerial participants maundered that austerity should be attenuated for the time being. This was like a team of assassins appearing at their victim’s burial and the lead killer surmising that they should lessen their attacks on the decedent given that he is six feet underground. However, the ministers simply could not break completely break from this belief to which they are so emotionally attached despite its obvious inhumanity. While talking down austerity, they parroted terms like “fiscal discipline” which is austerity with a less odious moniker. It is a sign of our desolate times that the IMF Managing Director was the meeting’s leading proponent for employment creation and economic growth via fiscal stimuli. However, few ministers listened seriously to her. The leadership of these nations has so imbibed hyper-capitalist doctrines, i.e. financialism, that each government has become a draconian IMF unto itself and its people. Never in the history of mankind have the world’s most affluent nations heaved so much unnecessary pain on their people in peacetime for the most unwarranted reason: the stubborn adherence to mean policies ruinous of the many, profitable to only the chosen few.

    Consequently, the ministers did not adopt fiscal stimuli as the path for their nations to emerge from the obvious downturn. Empirically, fiscal stimulus or deficit spending is the most effective measure in the current environment. This assumes helping the working and middle classes is the objective. If the aim is to secure the financial elite, then fiscal activism is not the preferred cup into which your tea is poured. Instead, you would do as the financial ministers and central bankers have done. They have engaged in lax monetary policy by embarking on large scale purchases of financial assets. In exchange for these assets, the central banks place new money in the hands of the former asset holders. Theoretically, they will use the money to buy things or invest in additional financial assets, thus increasing asset prices and spurring economic growth. While the public may be duly hoodwinked, those in the know also know this mechanism works differently than advertised.

    Speculators hold many of the assets purchased by the central authorities. Giving additional money to speculators is like handing cocaine to an addict. He will not invest for the wise or the long-term. He will search for the next speculative high. Money will not trickle into the real economy. It will circulate in the financial sector. Like a rapid dog, it will bound from one end to another, chasing the highest return possible. As a result, the balance of funds in the financial sector as compared to the productive sector will worsen. The financial sector will be flush with money, the real sector starved of it. The planners will increase asset prices; the victory will prove hollow, if not pyrrhic, because it is based on an inversion of cause and effect. Economic growth inevitably produces price inflation. However, the engineers of lax monetary policies assume the reverse is equally true: that price inflation produces economic growth. It is not. As an orange tree grows its branches come to bear fruit. This is a farmer’s dream. However, it is the height of folly for a man to walk into the grove to hold up an orange at branch height, expecting a tree to miraculously grow, attaching itself to the object in outstretched hand. He will soon tire from the exertion or caring relatives will escort the man to the nearest institution that cares for people with his type of affliction.

    So is it with policy that targets asset prices. Because the money does little but chase its own scent within the confines of the financial sector, financial asset prices indeed rise. Yet, economic fundamentals remain mired, heavily burdened. Financial speculators gain windfalls. However, employment and wages stagnate. Consequently, we see soaring stock markets in many nations while their overall economies wade the brackish water.

    The stock and financial markets have delinked from the overall economy. Stock and financial markets are no longer the bellwethers for the rest of the economy. These markets are no more reliable indicators of the health of an economy than is the casting of lots. Financial assets and stock prices climb when investors instigate firms to cut costs by reducing their work forces. This provides transient benefit to speculators but penalizes the real economy and the labor force which depends on it. Lax monetary policies rewards the financial class and its allies while slowly amercing the great wash of people in these nations.

    In the end, the policy mixture employed by the developed nations ensures bloated hyperactive financial sectors on the verge of producing new speculative bubbles and weak productive sectors on the verge of constriction and collapse.

    Worst, these errant policies hurt the developing world. As previously stated, financial speculators obsess for the next high. Prior to the 2008 recession, they believed real estate was the guaranteed high. They plowed funds into real estate only to see that market and their nominal worth sink into the quicksand. Since then, they have searched from hill to valley for the next “sure” bet. Many believe they have found it: food. Real estate was viewed as certain because people need a physical location to live and work. Demand exists as long as people exist. With food, the demand is more compelling. Everyone might not own land but all must eat. Fed easy money through the lax monetary policies of the developed nations, speculators are becoming increasingly active speculating in agricultural commodities. The presence of these financial middleman increases the price of food. For them to retrieve the profits they seek, while farmers and others in the chain of production retain their profit levels, necessarily means prices must increase.

    For poor and struggling Africans, this is the kiss of hunger blown from afar by esoteric financial dynamics about which they know little and understand less. What they will come to know is the difficulty of contending with rising food prices that eat at their static incomes. The people will pinch here and scrape there. Meager meals will become smaller. Plates and bowls will appear bigger to children because there will be less food on them. Hunger will bite its stinging bite. The weak and sickly will become more so. More will die while the speculators sip the delectable nectar of their profits. This is just the beginning. As financial speculators gain more control of agricultural markets, they will dictate the quantities and types of crops cultivated. Those with the highest profit margins will be encouraged. Those with lower yields will be ignored. Lamentably, the interests of the financialists will not always coincide with those of the people. Moreover, there already is a move afoot whereby massive international agricultural concerns acquire large tracts of arable African land, in the process displacing peoples from their ancient homesteads. These firms, now abetted by speculative investors, will not be geared toward commodities for the local African market. The African consumer does not possess the money these companies seek. These concerns will produce for abroad. More and more African land will be used to feed and furnish others while displaced African will be left to taste of the compound bitterness of being displaced yet having no alternative location to farm for their livelihoods.

    Financialism continues to dominate the global political economy despite the vast damage it has brought so recently. Developed nations abhor the only practical remedy — fiscal stimuli through deficit spending – that would enliven the broadest base of their economies. Instead, these governments cosset the financial sector and leave orphan the productive economy. The lax monetary policies of the developed nation constitute a nearly perfect storm of financialist malevolence against the humble masses in both developed and developing worlds.

    In the developed world, these policies stifle fuller employment while exacerbating the inequitable power balance between the financial sector and the productive one. In the developing world, the policies have placed international speculators in a position where they can unduly influence food prices to the detriment of the billions already living at the edge of poverty and malnourishment. The speculators will push tens of millions into the grip of starvation in the coming years.

    Once they have done their handiwork with food, water supplies may be next. More and more, it seems the financialist elite so lacks humanity that it sees the quickest route to poverty eradication is to do away with poor people.

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