Critiques of “Making Poverty History” and Live 8
three articles follow - by:
- Naomi Klein
- George Monbiot
- Patrick Bond, et al
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Idea of resisting the unspeakably rich lives on
by Naomi Klein
from the Georgia Straight - June 16, 2005Gordon Brown has a new idea about how to “make poverty history” in time for the G8 summit in Scotland. With Washington so far refusing to double its aid to Africa by 2015, the British chancellor is appealing to the “richer oil-producing states” of the Middle East to fill the funding gap. “Oil wealth urged to save Africa”, read the headline in London’s Observer.
Here is a better idea: instead of Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth being used to “save Africa”, how about if Africa’s oil wealth was used to save Africa-along with its gas, diamond, gold, platinum, chromium, ferroalloy, and coal wealth?
With all this noblesse oblige focused on saving Africa from its misery, it seems like a good time to remember someone else who tried to make poverty history: Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was killed 10 years ago this November by the Nigerian government, along with eight other Ogoni activists, sentenced to death by hanging. Their crime was daring to insist that Nigeria was not poor at all but rich, and that it was political decisions made in the interests of western multinational corporations that kept its people in desperate poverty. Saro-Wiwa gave his life to the idea that the vast oil wealth of the Niger Delta must leave behind more than polluted rivers, charred farmland, rancid air, and crumbling schools. He asked not for charity, pity, or “relief” but for justice.
The Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People demanded that Shell compensate the people from whose land it had pumped roughly $30 billion worth of oil since the 1950s. The company turned to the government for help, and the Nigerian military turned its guns on demonstrators. Before his state-ordered hanging, Saro-Wiwa told the tribunal: “I and my colleagues are not the only ones on trial. Shell is here on trial..The company has, indeed, ducked this particular trial, but its day will surely come.”
Ten years later, 70 percent of Nigerians still live on less than $1 a day and Shell is still making superprofits. Equatorial Guinea, which has a major oil deal with ExxonMobil, “got to keep a mere 12 percent of the oil revenues in the first year of its contract”, according to a 60 Minutes report-a share so low it would have been scandalous even at the height of colonial oil pillage.
This is what keeps Africa poor: not a lack of political will but the tremendous profitability of the current arrangement. The poorest place on Earth, sub-Saharan Africa, is also its most profitable investment destination: it offers, according to the World Bank’s 2003 Global Development Finance report, “the highest returns on foreign direct investment of any region in the world”. Africa is poor because its investors and its creditors are so unspeakably rich.
The idea for which Saro-Wiwa died fighting-that the resources of the land should be used to benefit the people of that land-lies at the heart of every anticolonial struggle in history, from the Boston Tea Party to Iran’s turfing of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in Abadan. This idea has been declared dead by the European Union’s Constitution, by the National Security Strategy of the United States of America (which describes “free trade” not only as an economic policy but a “moral principle”), and by countless trade agreements. And yet it simply refuses to die.
You can see it most clearly in the relentless protests that drove Bolivia’s president, Carlos Mesa, to offer his resignation. A decade ago, Bolivia was forced by the IMF to privatize its oil and gas industries on the promise that it would increase growth and spread prosperity. When that didn’t work, the lenders demanded that Bolivia make up its budget shortfall by increasing taxes on the working poor. Bolivians had a better idea: take back the gas and use it for the benefit of the country. The debate now is over how much to take back. Evo Morales’s Movement Toward Socialism favours taxing foreign profits by 50 percent. More radical indigenous groups, which have already seen their land stripped of its mineral wealth, want full nationalization and far more participation, what they call “nationalizing the government”.
You can see it too in Iraq. On June 2 Laith Kubba, spokesman for the Iraqi prime minister, told journalists that the IMF had forced Iraq to increase the price of electricity and fuel in exchange for writing off past debts: “Iraq has $10 billions of debts, and I think we cannot avoid this.” But days before, in Basra, a historic gathering of independent trade unionists, most of them with the General Union of Oil Employees, insisted that the government could avoid it. At Iraq’s first antiprivatization conference, the delegates demanded that the government simply refuse to pay Saddam’s “odious” debts and opposed any attempts to privatize state assets, including oil.
Neoliberalism, an ideology so powerful it tries to pass itself off as “modernity” while its maniacal true believers masquerade as disinterested technocrats, can no longer claim to be a consensus. It was decisively rejected by French voters when they said No to the EU Constitution, and you can see how hated it has become in Russia, where large majorities despise the profiteers of the disastrous 1990s privatizations and few mourned the recent sentencing of oil oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
All of this makes for interesting timing for the G8 summit. Bob Geldof and the Make Poverty History crew have called for tens of thousands of people to go to Edinburgh and form a giant white band around the city centre on July 2-a reference to the ubiquitous Make Poverty History bracelets.
But it seems a shame for a million people to travel all that way to be a giant bauble, a collective accessory to power. How about if, when all those people join hands, they declare themselves not a bracelet but a noose-a noose around the lethal economic policies that have already taken so many lives, for lack of medicine and clean water, for lack of justice.
A noose like the one that killed Ken.
This is the first in a series of monthly commentaries by Naomi Klein, an author, journalist, and activist originally from Montreal. Klein’s No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies has been an important element in the antiglobalization movement. This column was first published in the Nation
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Bards of the powerful
Far from challenging the G8’s role in Africa’s poverty, Geldof and Bono are giving legitimacy to those responsible
by George Monbiot
from The Guardian - Tuesday June 21 2005‘Hackers bombard financial networks”, the Financial Times reported on Thursday. Government departments and businesses “have been bombarded with a sophisticated electronic attack for several months”. It is being organised by an Asian criminal network, and is “aimed at stealing commercially and economically sensitive information”. By Thursday afternoon, the story had mutated. “G8 hackers target banks and ministries”, said the headline in the Evening Standard. Their purpose was “to cripple the systems as a protest before the G8 summit.” The Standard advanced no evidence to justify this metamorphosis.
This is just one instance of the reams of twaddle about the dark designs of the G8 protesters codded up by the corporate press. That the same stories have been told about almost every impending public protest planned in the past 30 years and that they have invariably fallen apart under examination appears to present no impediment to their repetition. The real danger at the G8 summit is not that the protests will turn violent - the appetite for that pretty well disappeared in September 2001 - but that they will be far too polite.
Let me be more precise. The danger is that we will follow the agenda set by Bono and Bob Geldof.
The two musicians are genuinely committed to the cause of poverty reduction. They have helped secure aid and debt-relief packages worth billions of dollars. They have helped to keep the issue of global poverty on the political agenda. They have mobilised people all over the world. These are astonishing achievements, and it would be stupid to disregard them.
The problem is that they have assumed the role of arbiters: of determining on our behalf whether the leaders of the G8 nations should be congratulated or condemned for the decisions they make. They are not qualified to do so, and I fear that they will sell us down the river.
Take their response to the debt-relief package for the world’s poorest countries that the G7 finance ministers announced 10 days ago. Anyone with a grasp of development politics who had read and understood the ministers’ statement could see that the conditions it contains - enforced liberalisation and privatisation - are as onerous as the debts it relieves. But Bob Geldof praised it as “a victory for the millions of people in the campaigns around the world” and Bono pronounced it “a little piece of history”. Like many of those who have been trying to highlight the harm done by such conditions - especially the African campaigners I know - I feel betrayed by these statements. Bono and Geldof have made our job more difficult.
I understand the game they’re playing. They believe that praising the world’s most powerful men is more persuasive than criticising them. The problem is that in doing so they turn the political campaign developed by the global justice movement into a philanthropic one. They urge the G8 leaders to do more to help the poor. But they say nothing about ceasing to do harm.
It is true that Bono has criticised George Bush for failing to deliver the money he promised for Aids victims in Africa. But he has never, as far as I can discover, said a word about the capture of that funding by “faith-based groups”: the code Bush uses for fundamentalist Christian missions that preach against the use of condoms. Indeed, Bono seems to be comfortable in the company of fundamentalists. Jesse Helms, the racist, homophobic former senator who helped engineer the switch to faith-based government, is, according to his aides, “very much a fan of Bono”. This is testament to the singer’s remarkable powers of persuasion. But if people like Helms are friends, who are the enemies? Is exploitation something that just happens? Does it have no perpetrators?
This, of course, is how George Bush and Tony Blair would like us to see it. Blair speaks about Africa as if its problems are the result of some inscrutable force of nature, compounded only by the corruption of its dictators. He laments that “it is the only continent in the world over the past few decades that has moved backwards”. But he has never acknowledged that - as even the World Bank’s studies show - it has moved backwards partly because of the neoliberal policies it has been forced to follow by the powerful nations: policies that have just been extended by the debt-relief package Bono and Geldof praised.
Listen to these men - Bush, Blair and their two bards - and you could forget that the rich nations had played any role in Africa’s accumulation of debt, or accumulation of weapons, or loss of resources, or collapse in public services, or concentration of wealth and power by unaccountable leaders. Listen to them and you would imagine that the G8 was conceived as a project to help the world’s poor.
I have yet to read a statement by either rock star that suggests a critique of power. They appear to believe that a consensus can be achieved between the powerful and the powerless, that they can assemble a great global chorus of rich and poor to sing from the same sheet. They do not seem to understand that, while the G8 maintains its grip on the instruments of global governance, a shared anthem of peace and love is about as meaningful as the old Coca-Cola ad.
The answer to the problem of power is to build political movements that deny the legitimacy of the powerful and seek to prise control from their hands: to do, in other words, what people are doing in Bolivia right now. But Bono and Geldof are doing the opposite: they are lending legitimacy to power. From the point of view of men like Bush and Blair, the deal is straightforward: we let these hairy people share a platform with us, we make a few cost-free gestures, and in return we receive their praise and capture their fans. The sanctity of our collaborators rubs off on us. If the trick works, the movements ranged against us will disperse, imagining that the world’s problems have been solved. We will be publicly rehabilitated, after our little adventure in Iraq and our indiscretions at Bagram and Guantánamo Bay. The countries we wish to keep exploiting will see us as their friends rather than their enemies.
At what point do Bono and Geldof call time on the leaders of the G8? At what point does Bono stop pretending that George Bush is “passionate and sincere” about world poverty, and does Geldof stop claiming that he “has actually done more than any American president for Africa”? At what point does Bono revise his estimate of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown as “the John and Paul of the global-development stage” or as leaders in the tradition of Keir Hardie and Clement Attlee? How much damage do Bush and Blair have to do before the rock stars will acknowledge it?
Geldof and Bono’s campaign for philanthropy portrays the enemies of the poor as their saviours. The good these two remarkable men have done is in danger of being outweighed by the harm.
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How Glo-Bono-Phonies and Trojan Horse NGOs Sabotage the Struggle Against Neoliberalism
by PATRICK BOND, DENNIS BRUTUS and VIRGINIA SETSHEDI
Despite the global hype associated with reversing aid, debt and trade injustices during the past few days, it hasn’t been an easy time for the huge Non-Governmental Organizations at the centre of the action.
A front-page London New Statesman article on May 30 revealed that Oxfam’s revolving-door relationship with chancellor Gordon Brown has neutered the demands, strategies and tactics of the 450-member NGO campaign, ‘Make Poverty History’. The website of the British magazine Red Pepper followed up with a devastating political critique of the campaign, including a refusal to countenance any anti-war message that will embarrass Brown and Tony Blair.
Embarrassment of this sort seems endemic amongst the charity-minded. The Bob Geldof superstar concert series ‘Live 8’ correctly stood accused of being ‘hideously white’ (as Black Information Link put it), since only one band from Africa was scheduled amongst dozens at the five major performances. (A hastily arranged additional concert in Johannesburg may lead to a kind of outsourcing for black bands.) In any case, Sir Bob’s mid-1980s Live Aid famine relief strategy is widely understood to have flopped because it ignored the countervailing roles of imperial power relations, capital accumulation, unreformable global institutions and venal local elites - problems repeated and indeed amplified in Live 8.
There was another PR disaster in early June, just a month before the Group of 8 (G8) leaders meet in Gleneagles, Scotland: white wristbands favoured by Blair as a mark of his commitment to Africa were revealed as products of Chinese forced labor at a Shenzhen firm, Tat Shing. According to the London Telegrap, ‘Christian Aid, which bought more than 500,000 wristbands from Tat Shing, claims that Oxfam failed to tell other charities that it had decided to stop ordering from the Shenzhen company. Oxfam said it told its coalition partners of its decision, but “perhaps could have put it in writing”.’
Do these gaffes signify something deeper? Merely careless paternalism? Or perhaps a sense that the main outcomes of this campaign are to be celebrated in media buzz, fashion statements, celebrity chasing and the NGOs’ proximity to power?
