The old-fashioned credit boom airplane erratically dumps bogus
cycle-data-fuel before lurching toward whatever landing - crash or
bumpy - awaits. Alarmed, the UK government's top war-crimes financier
Gordon Brown has reached for that vision thing, most probably to
confuse people in the run up to military aggression against Iran. Even
the title of his recent article "Our final goal must be to offer a new
global deal"(1) smacks you in the gob with its assumption that the G-8
imperialist global Cosa Nostra will define some ultimate world social
and economic settlement.
One hurries to the end of the piece looking for a happy ending. But one
trips over something, one's feet entangled - bloodied and slimy
forced-feeding tubes. The finale turns out to be radioactive with
depleted uranium and stinking from scattered, forlorn, brutally
bombarded corpses. Like their mass-murdering cronies in Washington, the
Thameside Blair-Brown duumvirate have dumped the UN Universal
Declaration of Human Rights in the trash can.
Self-determination of peoples, universal free education and health
care, accountable civil and political process are no longer basic
universally recognised rights. People are to access them by permission,
with ID cards presumably, as client-beneficiaries of a "new
global deal". What if people want some other deal? What if they want
the old deal most of the world agreed in that UN Declaration of 1948?
One only has to look at Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine or Haiti for the
answer.
Brown's use of language is a window into the soul of a ruthlessly
insistent, globally-designing shyster-marketeer pushing anything he can
sell : dreams, tales, lies, torture, war-crimes. Brown is the sinister
G-8 version of the perky local grocer who chats you up while keeping
one finger pressed surreptitiously on the scales. Or those butcher
wholesalers who bloat their meat products with fluid, chortling among
themselves "why sell 'em meat when you can sell 'em water...?" Like the
corporate company truck-shop made global he fronts for, Gordon Brown
offers high-priced fraudulent tat via cheap public relations cant.
Right now he is chasing after the vanished credibility of last year's
Gleneagles agreement. Remember? - the cancellation of poor country debt
trumpeted by neo-liberal minstrels and jongleurs - Geldof, Bono and
their trendy Make Poverty History bandwagon? Even back in the celebrity
mistiness of 2005, that particular "new deal" specified very clearly
any benefits were to be clawed back in adjustments to aid flows. Before
swallowing Brown's latest recipe one should read the implicit "buyer
beware" notices hidden away in the glib New Labour verbiage. He writes:
"If Make Poverty History shifted from the old calls for charity to the
new demand for justice, 2006 must see campaigners and governments
moving the agenda beyond addressing the consequences of poverty to
attacking its root causes. The delivery of aid is not the final goal,
but just the first stage in the process of empowerment.
That is why all developing countries must now produce their own
poverty-reduction and development plans - not just for economic
empowerment through transparent monetary, fiscal and corporate policies
to tackle corruption, but for social empowerment through universal free
schooling and healthcare."
Justice may be "the new demand" for the rotten European political and
NGO managerial classes at whose apex sit people like Gordon Brown and
Tony Blair. They know very well that the successful anti-colonialist
struggles of the second half of the 20th Century were the culmination
of centuries-old calls for justice against aggressive, immoral European
and US imperialism. So when Brown then talks about attacking the "root
causes" of poverty he is being extremely obtuse and insincere. It is
worth asking why it is that two words - "reparations" and "indemnity" -
seldom appear in this kind of self-congratulatory, narcissistic
political drivel about development.
When Gordon Brown puffs and enthuses "all developing countries must now
produce their own poverty-reduction and development plans" one can be
forgiven for thinking back to wars like those in Mozambique, Angola and
Nicaragua and beyond that to the invasion of East Timor, to the Vietnam
war and beyond that to the coup against Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala and
the earlier coup in Iran against Mohammed Mossadeq. Back in those days
all those countries had their own "poverty-reduction and development"
plans. Nicaragua had universal free health care and free universal
education when it was attacked by the Reagan administration in the
early 1980s.
In all these countries normal life was destroyed by the United States
and allies like Britain using military aggression preferably through
local proxies, along with the use where necessary of vicious trade and
financial measures. In 1986 the International Court of Justice
declared the United States guilty of unlawful aggression - terrorism -
against Nicaragua. Subsequently, the Court ordered the United States to
pay Nicaragua an indemnity totalling US$17 billion. (Yes, Gordon Brown,
that's B for Billion) The US vetoed a vote on the ruling in the UN
Security Council and the rest is now playing out in Afghanistan, Iraq
and Palestine and very likely before too long in Iran.
Likewise, Iraq's secular society was the most advanced in the region in
terms of education and healthcare. Its people had their health and
education systems progressively eroded and finally systematically
destroyed by a decade of genocidal sanctions and now by years of
criminal aggressive war. Given that undeniable history, when the Right
Honourable Gordon Brown starts talking about justice and the root
causes of poverty one might assume he means something like turning
himself and his global corporate colleagues over to the International
Criminal Court and entering a guilty plea with a request for time to
pay.
But that is not what he means. Brown means that now the United States
and its allies have destroyed countries like Mozambique, Nicaragua,
Haiti, Palestine and Iraq the countries will have to be
"empowered". Having driven them relentlessly down into the dirt,
now the global corporate plutocrat elite and their cohort of political
valets will instruct their victims to "empower" themselves to a decent
life. Brown proposes,
"· a new $4bn-5bn on-call facility for disaster relief and
reconstruction
· full debt relief for not 38 but all the world's poorest
countries
· a new environmental fund for developing countries
· a delivery plan produced by developing countries themselves
for achieving the millennium development goals
· a push by world leaders to restart and complete the trade
talks"
The UK Chancellor must have read some aid NGO information pack and
recycled the component headings on the back of a Treasury envelope -
Disasters, Debt, Environment, Poverty, Trade.
Brown is smart to begin with natural disasters. Anything smacking of
human agency would have the prints of him and his accomplices all over
it. In fact, US$5 billion is chicken feed in the context of the natural
disasters generated recently by the accelerating climate change
provoked by unconstrained corporate capitalism. After Hurricane Mitch
devastated Central America in 1998, Nicaragua alone required US$3
billion for its reconstruction effort. Who will administer these
fortunes? Brown seems to have the UN in mind, but most likely the job
will be assigned to some entity like the World Bank.
Some such supranational structure controlled by rich countries to apply
political and economic intimidation to their victims will be necessary
to complement adjustments in rich country leverage caused by "Full debt
relief for .....all the world's poorest countries." With
conditionalities to match, because as Brown himself writes in his
piece, "The IMF's surveillance work - monitoring how countries
implement the codes and standards vital to economic stability and
growth - must be stepped up and conducted independent of politics."
Saint Gordon says, "Rise up and walk...", as he breaks a stout IMF
timber over the latest victim's barely stirring head.
Brown's remaining nostrums are hardly worth a glance. Faced with
environmental pollution and damage on the scale caused by his beloved
energy, mining and agri-business multinationals, what use is some
cosmetic "new environmental fund"? It will be another tombstone on the
long death march planned by the global elite for the principle of
self-determination of peoples while polluting corporations do what they
like. Similarly, the idea of "A delivery plan produced by the countries
themselves for achieving the millenium development goals" is
superfluous and fake.
Cuba has long beaten the Millenium Development Goals in health and
education despite forty five years of despicable, futile economic
blockade by the United States. So clearly, it all depends what the
"delivery plan" consists of, does it not? If it has anything like
"self-determination" or "socialism" written into it then Brown and his
European colleagues are likely to collude with the United States in
illegal aggression to destroy it.
The article's cupboard is now bare for globalization's Grocer Brown.
But from under the counter, he pulls up, stale and rancid ",,,a push by
world leaders to restart and complete trade talks". Come buy! Come buy!
More of yesterday and the day before's strong-arming, menaces and
subornment. Come buy! More wormy rich country wriggle-jargon. Come buy!
Brown's grocer routine resembles that of the wicked creatures in
Christina Rossetti's allegory "Goblin Market". The protagonist,
enchanted, falls for the charming pitch of strange little creatures
selling apparently luscious fruits. But they are poison after all. She
might have died had her faithful sister not tricked the faery folk to
save her
Brown and the other corporate globalization twilight-zone denizens have
had over twenty years to prove their claims that corporate capitalism
can deliver juicy prosperity and luscious democracy instead of
bitter-as-wormwood misery, death and exclusion. They have failed
wretchedly. Now their failure is obvious they want to erase the 1948 UN
Declaration and the International Covenants it yielded on Civil and
Political and on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
They want it from the bottom of their narcissistic hearts. They want it
because they abhor the deep underlying legitimating principle of all
those documents - the self-determination of peoples. That principle
stymies corporate capitalism's drive to dominate world markets so as to
rig them for the benefit of a small global elite.
At the same time Gordon Brown is publishing unconvincing sanctimonious
development blueprints in the Guardian he is certainly planning ways to
finance military and economic conflict with Iran. His article in the
Guardian is a diversionary piece of mediocre imperialist apologetics in
the context of insane preparations for another strategic energy war.
The ultimate indirect target of aggression against Iran can only be
China, Iran's most important energy customer(2).
Countries like Iran, or like Cuba and Venezuela have their own
legitimate ideas about poverty reduction. Their development plans need
nothing from the ideological scraps and left-overs purveyed by global
corporate grocers like Gordon Brown. They insist on the visionary
settlement reached in 1948 not some corporate-approved “new deal”. That
is why they are targets for criminal aggression by the United States,
Britain and their allies.
Note
1. "Our final goal must be to offer a global new deal " Gordon
Brown, Guardian, January 11 2006
2. "The ties that bind - China, Russia and Iran" Jephraim P Gundzik
(http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/GF04Ad07.html)