(My 'correspondence' follows...)
Warm greetings Dan,
Hey, you're an excellent advertisement for those pop-on gadgets that shield laptop screens from nosy airplane neighbours. Still, I'm flattered to have inspired your IHT column today, even if I'd have preferred if you'd struck up a conversation with your ideological opponent in person.
Some of your argument is fine, but a bit behind the curve, not so? In the column below, I've added "*!" beside lines I like - and "*?" beside those you have to defend more thoroughly before I'll buy.
Activists in the global justice movement (and in a much less effective, thoroughly armchair-academic way, me too) have long campaigned against the hypocrisy associated with US protectionism. That's a crucial point of my trade chapter in a 2004 book "Talk Left, Walk Right: South Africa's Frustrated Global Reforms" which I can have a London publisher send you as evidence you're not the first to call the G8 on their subsidies. If next time around, you ask a more aggressive group of research assistants to try googling keywords like "Patrick Bond protectionist tariffs agricultural subsidies", they might click the first entry and find me making your very argument just before the Cancun fiasco, in the e-publication "Focus on Trade" from Bangkok thinktank Focus on the Global South:
"Faced with a protectionist onslaught from the US mere weeks after Doha--huge steel, apparel and footware tariffs and agricultural subsidies which negated claims of progress at the WTO summit--Pretoria's trade minister announced an alliance with Brazil, Australia, and the 18-nation Cairns group of food exporting countries: 'We will fight this out.' (33) Yet a year later, Erwin confessed defeat: 'The position is not particularly favourable... I think we are heading for a very difficult time in Cancun.' (34) In 2002, other deadlines were also missed by trade negotiators concerning the 'special and differential treatment' required by the Third World, and the health sector's need for exemptions from Trade in Intellectual Property Rights pharmaceutical patent provisions. Even in mid-2003, there were still no clear rules of procedure, a Cancun chairman's text was being foisted upon Cancun delegates (instead of the chair facilitating a member's text), and invitation-only mini-ministerials further eroded the legitimacy of the decision-making processes. Difficulties with the US in particular were obvious throughout the post-Doha period. US Treasury undersecretary John Taylor explained the Bush regime's hypocrisy quite casually, 'You take steps forward and move back. That's always the case.' (35) Just before the G8 Summit at Evian, France, Bush and Blair announced their opposition to host president Jacques Chirac's plan to halt dumping of subsidised Western food in Africa. (36) Yet Bush proposed increasing his own government's aid-related subsidies on agricultural exports and also argued that 'European governments should join--not hinder--the great cause of ending hunger in Africa,' by both dropping their internal agricultural subsidies and permitting trade in genetically-modified foodstuffs.(37) As a result, according to six leading African Global justice movements that met near Evian, 'The 2003 G8 was ultimately a disaster for African farmers. It failed to adopt even limited proposals for a moratorium on reducing European and American tariff duties and subsidies for US and European agriculture. These policies are perverse. While millions of African farmers, most women's livelihoods, are ruined by these policies, European livestock are ensured major state subsidies.' (38)"
In short, neither you nor me nor the sane world approves of this hypocrisy, yet the Washington Consensus continues to be imposed upon the Third World but not the First. (If you don't believe that the WashCon still rules in the Third World, read the June 11 G8 debt relief statement, or just watch regular footage of Latin American, African and Asian protests, riots and government overthrows.)
Tom Frank's book "What's the Matter with Kansas" has taught me a little about your midwestern and Deep South agrocorps, which mainly benefit. (Maybe you'll find these firms in your own personal investment portfolio - so a call to their CEOs would remind you that they're simply following the bottom line, to benefit the shareholders, and to hell with the West African peasants they dump their subsidised cotton on. Then your next column could be about how to overcome your own potential conflicts of interest?)
Dan, since the G8, WTO and even the World Bank - itself rhetorically anti-protectionist the last five years of Wolfensohn's rule, and Wolfowitz has also made the right noises - have not made progress on this problem so far, it seems to me you'd want to win some allies, and I'll bet the lefty critics of global power I know are more fun and effective in raising this issue than the suits you know better. So why your bad attitude?
No matter. Taking the distinctions in your column seriously, it's also logical to posit - as I do throughout the book Talk Left, Walk Right - that there is indeed a growing fusion between the projects of the neocons and neoliberals, especially in Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti and other shocked/awed sites. Contemporary US 'paleomercantilism' (bravo, not a bad turn of phrase) isn't the first time imperialism has dressed this way, I'm sure you know.
What three of my 86 slides in that Oxford presentation asked - had you wanted to look at them before you wrote this column, I'd have immediately sent an ascii version - is whether the World Bank's drive to commodify everything under the sun may be modified by Wolfowitz's unilateralist, petro-militarist record and orientation. The intro slide of those three posed these two queries: "Will the Wolfowitz World Bank revert to neoliberalism? What is his long-term agenda?" And I answered that though the Iraqi operation explicitly combines neoliberalism (Bremer's total privatisation agenda) with military occupation, the contradictions within neoliberalism applied to the water sector are really insurmountable (and the coffins show that militarism applied to Iraq may also be untenable). Not an irrelevant connection, or am I wrong?
One day maybe you can do a column on privatised water, to test your faith in markets. Or visit the activists who have taught me so much in Soweto or other SA townships, where the class struggle over this issue is amongst the most advanced in the world.
Cheers, Patrick
PS, I recommend you get the IHT to carry cartoons by the brilliant South African cartoonist Zapiro, like these:
***
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/07/15/business/wbmarket16.php
Neoliberalism? It doesn't exist Daniel Altman International Herald Tribune
SATURDAY, JULY 16, 2005
Not long ago, Patrick Bond, an author and professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, was sitting on an airplane, working on a presentation he was soon to make at Oxford. For one particular slide, he spent several minutes rearranging pictures of American troops' flag-draped caskets aboard a cargo plane and of the World Bank president, Paul Wolfowitz, dressed as an astronaut.
*! Never mind that this was a presentation about water commodification in South Africa - to opponents of "neoliberalism" like Bond, the supposed evils of free markets and expansionist foreign policy are one and the same.
*? With globalization having somewhat rehabilitated its image, opponents of free markets have settled on a new bugbear, neoliberalism. As with globalization, the word's interpretation is rather flexible.
*! But to its enemies, neoliberalism apparently refers to an American-born urge to create unrestrained markets for everything, everywhere, even if it means overthrowing a government.
The problem is, the real neoliberals don't seem to exist. The U.S. government does not want open markets everywhere, nor do its main economic competitors. If they did, the poor countries so avidly defended by the anti-neoliberals might be in much better shape. The world's wealthy countries simply aren't serious about free markets across borders, and sometimes they struggle to create them on their own turf.
One can forgive poor countries for being fooled, at least initially. When President Bill Clinton signed the African Growth and Opportunity Act, which eliminated tariffs for dozens of African countries' exports, it certainly seemed like the United States was opening its markets wide. The Andean Trade Preference Act and the proposed Central America Free Trade Agreement looked like more steps in that direction.
For its part, the European Union has stuck to a range of special trade deals for its former colonies in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific while promising free trade agreements to its Mediterranean neighbors. Japan, the laggard, continues to impose heavy tariffs, especially on rice.
But tariffs and quotas are just two weapons in a country's protectionist arsenal.
*! Other barriers, like overly strict sanitary standards and country-of-origin rules, continue to keep poor countries' exports off American and European shelves. Corporate lobbyists also clamp the cuffs on specific products. Just ask a farmer in Mexico why avocados sell for pennies there but for dollars north of the U.S. border. Or ask a British wine merchant why California red wines cost three times as much in London as they do in New York.
*! In addition, subsidies for Western farmers give them a competitive advantage that has nothing to do with their fundamental ability to produce. At the recent Group of 8 summit meeting in Scotland, the rich countries agreed to end these subsidies, but they wouldn't say when. Even if they did, it might not matter. After the global textile trade agreement expired this year, supposedly ending tariffs and quotas after a 10-year phase-out, the United States and EU sought new restrictions almost instantly.
Many markets for services delivered from inside the wealthy countries also remain tightly closed. In Europe and Japan, the government still plays a role in important industries like energy and transport. And even among themselves, the wealthy countries can't agree whether to allow each other to compete in markets for air travel, insurance and other services. When was the last time you took an Air France plane from New York to Chicago?
In other words, opponents of free trade under the banner of neoliberalism must be dreaming - they've never seen free trade in real life, and neither has anyone else.
*! What seems to irk campaigners against globalization or a supposed neoliberalism is the idea that rich people are going to get richer at the expense of poor people.
*? Yet this is not what free markets do.
*? When big companies find cheaper labor or raw materials outside their wealthy homes, they may make a profit in the short term. But when their competitors - a feature of free markets - do the same, then the savings are passed on to consumers as lower prices.
*? And it's not as though the poorer people who sold that labor and those raw materials did so unwillingly; though the working conditions and bargaining power of poor people employed by big foreign companies may be subpar, their only alternatives often are subsistence farming or no work at all.
Meanwhile, the restriction of markets is responsible for keeping plenty of people poor, be they fruit farmers in Africa or the long-term unemployed in Western Europe. That is why demands for access to wealthy countries' export markets have crept their way into the vocabulary of the antipoverty lobbies. Yet strangely, the parties that claim to represent the poor in rich countries tirelessly defend the cumbersome labor regulations that prevent the young and the marginalized from finding work.
In short, the world is much further from free trade then either leftist protesters or glad-handing politicians would have you believe.
If the invasion of Iraq by the United States and its allies is, as some anti-neoliberals complain, merely aimed at securing cheap oil, then it fits perfectly with these other jingoist policies. Calling this package of economic and political initiatives neoliberal doesn't make sense, though. It's not new, and it's not liberal. Paleomercantilist, anyone?
Daniel Altman can be reached at daltman at iht.com.
----- Original Message ----- From: Patrick Bond To: DAltman at iht.com Sent: Thursday, July 14, 2005 11:58 AM Subject: Re: From Daniel Altman / International Herald Tribune
Warm greetings Dan,
I'm traveling from Europe to Johannesburg now, and will have only dial-up until Sunday. The file in question is 9 megs. I can send it then by a broadband connection if your email inbox can take it?
Ciao, Patrick
----- Original Message ----- From: DAltman at iht.com To: bondp at ukzn.ac.za ; pbond at wn.apc.org Sent: Wednesday, July 13, 2005 9:17 PM Subject: From Daniel Altman / International Herald Tribune
Professor Bond,
A couple of months ago I sat next to you on a United Airlines flight from New York to London. I couldn't help but notice that you were working on a PowerPoint slide pack for a lecture, apparently at Oxford on water commodification. I'd be grateful if you would email me a copy of the slide pack, as I'm interested in how you presented the issues.
Thanks very much, Dan Altman
Daniel Altman, Ph.D. Global Economics Correspondent, International Herald-Tribune Economics Columnist, The New York Times daltman at iht.com daltman at nytimes.com