Globalisation

�Our planet is not balanced. Too few control too much, and too many have too little to hope for. Too much turmoil, too many wars. Too much suffering.’ Depending on who you are, you might think that this is Mother Teresa or Sub-Commandante Marcos of the Zapatistas. Actually, it’s James Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank, speaking at the joint WB-IMF meeting in Dubai in September this year.

A few days after Wolfensohn got it off his chest, the International Herald Tribune reported that the International Monetary Fund, which bitterly attacked Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohammad during the East Asian financial crisis, has since had a rethink. Aw shucks, we were, you know, sort of wrong: �The IMF has since accepted that Mahathir’s (capital and currency controls) formula worked.’

Around the same period, the Wall Street Journal came up with this original idea. Well, original for the Journal, anyway. It wrote: �Markets are a great way to organise economic activity, but they need adult supervision.’ Now had they figured this out 20 years ago, millions of poor families might have been spared a great deal of misery. Misery brought about precisely by the idea that markets could solve every single problem of the human race. An idea propagated forcefully and ruthlessly by the World Bank, the IMF and the Wall Street Journal.

Any criticism of the market as God these past two decades led to being branded a heretic. The market had all the answers. There was no miracle it could not perform. Some, like Swaminathan Aiyer, argued that markets alone could save the environment. Others, like Time magazine, asserted that hunger was but a function of anti-market systems. Want jobs? Leave it to the market. The market wasn’t just good for democracy. It was Democracy. This was the baloney of the last 15-20 years. There were other possible positions. Such as that you might need the market. As a tool, not as a tyranny. As just one instrument amongst many, not as an all encompassing ideology. But that would have been blasphemy.

So are the high priests of the Bank, the Fund and the Wall Street Journal sincere about this realisation? That markets need adult supervision? No such luck. (Never mind that countless millions across the world believe the Bank and the Fund вЂ" not to mention the Journal вЂ" urgently require adult supervision.) One of the tenets of market fundamentalism is that the preacher is always exempted from the practice. Iraq today presents a great example. The first declaration of the American-run Iraqi governing council was to open up every single sector of the Iraqi economy to full foreign ownership.

At the same time, any Iraqi ownership was effectively pre-empted. Two local entrepreneurs for instance, had set up the country’s first cell phone network after the war. They were doing a thriving business when they were shut down physically, and the network building job was handed over to MCI of America, a company that had no experience in that field and which only months ago was caught in the biggest accounting fraud in history.

So much for free markets. The Iraqi market is now free for American corporations ranging from Halliburton and MCI to scores of others. Halliburton is importing oil into Iraq вЂ" a country with the world’s second largest reserves of oil вЂ" at a cost of $ 1.70 a gallon. It actually costs 71 cents a gallon in the region, but the Americans have established a very captive вЂ?free’ market. This вЂ?opening up’ process resembles the opium wars of the 19th century.

Let us now look at the growth of inequality. Inequality is worse in today’s world than at any point since World War II. Inequality has grown faster in the last 15 years than in the past 50. The series of United Nations Human Development Reports since 1990 establishes that very clearly. Look at just a few of its dimensions. Rich-poor divides, resource inequality, income and consumption, access to health, or even just to water, or jobs. This crisis now affects most of the planet.

Of the many trends in globalisation, the crucial one today is corporate globalism. A world driven by and for corporate profits. Based on corporate greed rather than human need. It’s a world marked by the collapse of restraint on corporate power, in every continent.

The income gap between the top 20 per cent of the world’s population and the bottom fifth has more than doubled. By 1998, the top 20 per cent consumed 86 per cent of all goods and services. The bottom fifth made do with 1.3 per cent. The world’s richest 200 people, according to the 1999 Human Development Report, �more than doubled their net worth in the four years to 1998, to over $ 1 trillion. The assets of the top three billionaires are more than the combined GNP of all least developed countries and their 600 million people together.’ By 2003, that position had worsened. To the point that the Fund and Bank are making bleats of caution (if not of remorse).

What is being termed an �economic recovery’ in the USA, as Professor Paul Krugman of Princeton points out, is a period in which the same economy has lost three million jobs. It has also happened in a period when Chief Executive Officers (CEO) salaries reached their highest ever. (Jack Welch of GE with his $ 123 million compensation and Richard Grasso of the New York Stock Exchange with his $ 140 million, for instance.) The number of Americans living in poverty rose sharply to 12.4 per cent of the population. And among minority Blacks and Hispanics, that percentage is almost double.

Russia, once the second superpower, was subjected to �shock therapy’ and other doctrines of market fundamentalism in the 1990s. The former USSR lost 42 per cent of its Gross Domestic Product in a spectacularly short period. A remarkable achievement. No country has ever done that without a famine or a war. Russia did it with just the help of Jeffrey Sachs and the IMF. Poverty in Russia skyrocketed, accompanying a rise in mortality rates and high levels of distress.

Each winter, hundreds die of the cold. In 2000-01, well over 300 died in Moscow alone of hypothermia. But in that same season sales of Mercedes Benz cars in Moscow leaped by one-third. And Giorgio