Charles Brown
>>> Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> 09/27/99 11:23PM >>>
Max Sawicky wrote:
> > . . .
> > Well, "we" have lost pretty much every regulatory battle in every
> > corner of the world over the last 20 years. Now at least we can blame
> > the WTO!
> > Doug
>
>
>That's a tad overstated.
Ok, a tad. Name some victories for the good guys, though, Max. It's late, and I'm feeling gloomy.
Doug
((((((((((
September 27, 1999
Mbeki's US Mission Impossible: Humanising Globalisation
By Patrick Bond <pbond at wn.apc.org>
Thabo Mbeki's meetings with global political and economic elites the past few days in New York and next few in Washington give us an occasion to think about how South Africa's recent liberation and ongoing democratic impulses might rub off on imperialist powers, multinational corporations and international financial agencies.
It's a mixed record, with formidable challenges ahead.
On the upside, openings for positive change are in the air, judging by the fast-shifting political terrain in which progressive initiatives are now occasionally rewarded, notwithstanding Washington's growing economic clout.
Perhaps elites have stopped worrying about the domestic credibility problems of Bill Clinton, whose humiliating congressional impeachment, serial-philandering and blatant fibbing are fresh in memory but whose main problems remain an exceptionally skewed economy -- growing to be sure, but overbloated with foreign and local debt, suffering dangerous overvaluation of New York stock market shares, and besieged by a massive trade deficit -- and a Republican Party that regularly blocks his congressional initiatives.
South Africa also reminds the US of its appalling international image, simply in the form of the bloody nose Vice President Al Gore just received at the hands of Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, now South African foreign minister but as health minister the main Third World force challenging obscene US pharmaceutical company profits and marketing strategies. After activists dogged Gore with banners and chants -- "Gore's Greed Kills!" -- during early days of presidential campaigning a few months ago, and as South Africans began demonstrating at US consular offices in Johannesburg and Cape Town, he threw in the towel last week.
In spite of what the US State Department called its "full-court press" on Mbeki, Gore has finally recognised what Dlamini-Zuma declared from the outset: South African imports and local generic production of otherwise cost-prohibitive drugs -- like the anti-viral AZT to treat HIV/AIDS -- are legal and justifiable even under the most stringent technical reading of international trade law. Millions of ailing Third World people may now begin to recuperate, if pharmaceutical firms follow through by dropping their court case against Dlamini-Zuma's Medicines Act and if more developing countries take the South African lead.
In addition, a variety of other reforms initiated by social movements around the world have begun to bear fruit. For example, popular struggles are thriving against corruption-riddled World Bank mega-dams in South and East Asia, Southern and Western Africa, and Latin America, with the Bank publicly acknowledging, earlier this month, that many big projects were fatally flawed. Education Minister Kader Asmal still retains great influence here, as chair of the World Commission on Dams.
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