what's new

Between 1980 and 1989 some thirty-three African countries received 241 structural adjustment loans. During that same period, average GDP per capita in those countries fell 1.1% per year, whilst per capita food production also experienced steady decline. The real value of the minimum wage dropped by over 25%, government expenditure on education fell from $11 billion to $7 billion and primary school enrolments dropped from 80% in 1980 to 69% in 1990. The number of poor people in these countries rose from 184 million in 1985 to 216 million in 1990, an increase of 17%.

Brazil increased its GDP fourfold between 1960 and 1980, but found that her debt was far greater at the end of this period than it was at the beginning...

Brazil is a net exporter, but the increase in her debt meant whereas in 1960, 30% of her export revenues went on debt repayments, by 1980 this had risen to 78%. And Brazil has been one of the success stories. Many developing nations have found that their entire export revenues have been insufficient to repay the interest on their debts. By 1990, Brazil had reached this position. The country exported $31.4 billion worth of goods and imported $22.5 billions, but her debt repayments were so massive that they took all her gain from exports, and still left her showing a huge loss. In 1970, the total debts carried by developing nations stood at $68 billion, equivalent to 13% of those countries’ total GDP. By 1989, this debt had reached $1,262 billion, equivalent to 31% of total GDP. By 1997, the total stood at $2,100 billion.

In 1895, Theodor Herzl, Zionism's chief prophet, confided in his diary that he did not favour sharing Palestine with the natives. Better, he wrote, to "try to spirit the penniless [Palestinian] population across the border by denying it any employment in our own country... Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly."

Intimately linked to the debt crisis is the enormous burden that capital flight from Africa has imposed on this poorest continent. Recent work by Léonce Ndikumana and James K. Boyce of the University of Massachusetts reaches the conclusion that Africa’s wealthy have, during the period from 1970 to 2004, exported a total of $420 billion, nearly double the total debt burden of Sub-Saharan Africa in 2004, which in 2004 was $227 billion. Most of this money was not acquired legally. With the interest this capital could have accumulated over the 35 year period, the authors estimate the total loss to Africa at $607 billion.

Today it is almost a privilege to be exploited. The real problem is that globalisation takes the best and leaves the rest. Of course it exploits, but more than that, it excludes. We must face such facts however much we may deplore them. There are huge regions in which the drivers of globalisation take little or no interest. Present day globalisation is not interested either in the hundreds of millions of people who do not produce within the market system and consume so little that they scarcely register.

We cannot have an expansive monetary policy, not because we voted for a restrictive policy, but because the European Central Bank makes the rules, even for member states outside the euro-zone.
We cannot write to ask a government minister or our MEP to propose a particular change in European law unless there happens to be a relevant proposal before the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament, because only the unelected European Commission has the right to propose new legislation.
We cannot refuse to have genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in our country because an EU directive says that, except under extremely limited conditions, we have to have them.
And we cannot elect a government on the basis of manifesto commitments to defend public ownership, propose democratising changes in the way European laws are made or keep GMOs out of our farms and food shops, unless that government proposes to withdraw from the EU.

19 years have passed [since the Exxon Valdez oil spill, but] ExxonMobil still refuses to pay all of the court-ordered, $2.5 billion in damages...

This is the same company that reported the largest annual profit in U.S. history in 2006, with $39.5 billion. It followed up 2006, by besting its record of the previous year by reporting $40.61 billion in profit for 2007. And as the Washington Post noted, ExxonMobil's 2006 "revenue of $377.6 billion exceeded the gross domestic product of all but 25 countries."

So what does ExxonMobil do with all of the money it rakes in? Former CEO Lee Raymond knows, and it isn't anything that provides the customer relief at the pump. Raymond was the beneficiary of a "$69.7 million compensation package and $98 million pension payout" when he retired in 2006.

it seems safe to estimate that the entire disposable wealth of the Irrawaddy Delta before the storm, that of its 3.5 million residents, could have been less than that of one table-full of diners at New York's Four Seasons Grill Room...

Working with figures from Forbes magazine, the IMF, and the UNDP, it's possible to estimate that there are between three hundred and a thousand individuals whose accumulated wealth is so vast that any one of them alone could pay each person in the Irrawaddy Delta for a year, and in the case of the richest, like Warren Buffett, could do it for six decades running and still have billions left.

In 1998 and 1999, the Malawi government initiated a program to give each smallholder family a “starter pack” of free fertilizers and seeds. This followed several years of successful experimentation in which the packs were provided only to the poorest families. The result was a national surplus of corn...

The World Bank and other aid donors forced the drastic scaling down and eventual scrapping of the program, arguing that the subsidy distorted trade. Without the free packs, food output plummeted. In the meantime, the IMF insisted that the government sell off a large portion of its strategic grain reserves to enable the food reserve agency to settle its commercial debts. The government complied. When the crisis in food production turned into a famine in 2001-2002, there were hardly any reserves left to rush to the countryside. About 1,500 people perished.

The social consequences of structural adjustment [imposed by the WTO] cum agricultural dumping were predictable. According to Oxfam, the number of Africans living on less than a dollar a day more than doubled to 313 million people between 1981 and 2001 – or 46% of the whole continent. The role of structural adjustment in creating poverty, as well as severely weakening the continent’s agricultural base and consolidating import dependency, was hard to deny. As the World Bank’s chief economist for Africa admitted, “We did not think that the human costs of these programs could be so great, and the economic gains would be so slow in coming.”

- Approximately 18.5% U.S. service members who have returned from Afghanistan and Iraq currently have post-traumatic stress disorder or depression; and 19.5% report experiencing a traumatic brain injury during deployment.
- Roughly half of those who need treatment for these conditions seek it, but only slightly more than half who receive treatment get minimally adequate care.

If these numbers are representative, of the 1.64 million deployed to date... approximately 300,000 veterans who have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan are currently suffering from PTSD or major depression, and about 320,000 may have experienced TBI during deployment.

The files clearly show that British planners in Santiago and London totally welcomed the coup [in Chile] and immediately set about conducting good relations with the military rulers as repression increased, even secretly conniving with the junta to mislead the British public.

British officials were completely aware of the scale of atrocities. Three days after the coup, Ambassador Seconde reported to the Foreign Office that ‘it is likely that casualties run into the thousands, certainly it has been far from a bloodless coup’. Six days after, he noted that ‘stories of military excesses and mounting casualties have begun increasingly to circulate. The extent of the bloodshed has shocked people’.

The language of resolution 1441 leaves the position unclear ...Arguments can be made on both sides... I accept that a reasonable case can be made that resolution 1441 is capable in principle of reviving the authorisation in 678 without a further resolution... but a "reasonable case" does not mean that if the matter ever came before a court I would be confident that the court would agree with this view.

I judge that, having regard to the arguments on both sides, and considering the resolution as a whole in the light of the statements made on adoption and subsequently, a court might well conclude that OPs 4 and 12 do require a further Council decision in order to revive the authorisation in resolution 678. But equally I consider that the counter view can be reasonably maintained.'