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For International Relations Class
Terence Todman and James Cheek were U.S. ambassadors to Argentina in recent years. One after the other, they followed the same trajectory: for love of the tango, they came right back. As soon as their diplomatic stints ended, they returned to Buenos Aires as lobbyists.
Both of them used their influence with the Argentine government to assist private companies eager to pocket the country’s airports. Shortly afterward, a picture of Cheek with a doll in his lap was all over television and the papers. With his victorious airport campaign behind him, Cheek went to work for Barbie, the little woman who tempts us to commit the sin of plastic.
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Generous Souls
In the United States, the sale of political favors is legal and can be carried on openly—no need to pretend, no risk of scandal.
Over ten thousand bribery pros work in Washington, plying their trade with members of Congress and the tenants of the White House. In an account that was certainly not exhaustive, the Center for Responsive Politics recorded $1.2 billion legally paid out in 1997 by numerous business and professional organizations, an average of $100 million a month. Leading the long list of “donors” was the American Medical Association, which is linked to the private health care business, the Chamber of Commerce, and the companies Philip Morris, General Motors, and Edison Electric Institute.
The figure, which rises year after year, does not include payments made under the table. As Johnnie Chung, a businessman who acknowledged making illegal donations, explained in 1998, “The White House is like a subway: You have to put in coins to open the gates.”
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Exemplary Lives/1
In September 1994, in the Brasilia studios of Globo television, Treasury Minister Rubens Ricupero was waiting to be interviewed. While the lights and microphones were adjusted, he chatted with the journalist. Relaxed and speaking off the record, the minister admitted he only gives out economic information favorable to the government and hides figures that aren’t. “I have no scruples,” he said.
And he told the journalist confidentially: “Once the elections are over, we’ll sic the police on the strikers.”
But there was a mix-up. This private chat was picked up by satellite and transmitted to every parabolic antenna in Brazil. The words of the minister were broadcast throughout the country. On that historic occasion, Brazilians heard the truth. For once, and by mistake, they heard the truth.
Afterward, the minister didn’t crawl the path of Saint James on his knees or flagellate himself or throw ash on his head; nor did he seek refuge in the heights of the Himalayas. Rubens Ricupero became secretary-general of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).
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Money isn’t all they steal. Sometimes they steal elections too, as occurred in Mexico in 1988, when the presidency was snatched away from the left-wing opposition candidate, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, who had won a majority at the polls. Years later, in 1997, several legislators from the governing party accused the leader of the right-wing opposition, Diego Fernández de Cevallos, of receiving fourteen million dollars in return for his complicity in that electoral fraud. The press had a field day because an exchange of blows turned the parliamentary session into a boxing match, and the accusation of bribery got a lot of publicity. But passed over as hardly worth mentioning was something much more serious: the accusation itself was an implicit confession of electoral fraud by congressmen from the party that had committed it.
The greatest crimes are on the order of bad habits considered normal. While democracy gets besmirched, the ethic of anything goes is embraced: no one succeeds by pissing holy water. How many North Americans believe their senators have “very high morals”? All of 2 percent. At the end of 1996, the Buenos Aires daily Página 12 published a Gallup poll: seven of every ten Argentine youth claimed that dishonesty is the only way to succeed. And of all those polled, young and old, nine out of ten acknowledged that evading taxes and bribing officials or the police are common practices.
What is rewarded above is punished below. Petty robbery is a crime against property; grand larceny is a property owner’s right. Unscrupulous politicians do no more than act in accordance with a system where success justifies the means that make it possible, dirty as they may be: cheating the tax man and your neighbor, falsifying accounts, hiding assets, looting companies, inventing fictitious enterprises, underbilling, overbilling, fraudulent commissions …
THE POWER OF KIDNAPPERS
According to the dictionary, “kidnap” means to hold someone illegally in order to obtain a ransom. The crime draws a stiff sentence in every penal code, but no one would dream of jailing the financial bigwigs who hold countries hostage and, delightfully immune to consequences, collect fabulous ransoms day after day.
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Exemplary Lives/2
At the end of the eighties, all young men in Spain wanted to be like him. The polls agreed: this star from Spain’s financial world, this King Midas of the banks, had eclipsed El Cid and Don Quixote as the model of choice for generations to come. An acrobat who did high jumps up the social ladder, this native of a little town in Galicia had reached the summits of power and success. The readers of romance magazines showered him with praise, calling him the most attractive man in Spain, the most marriageable. Always smiling, every hair in place, he looked fresh from the dry cleaners whether they photographed him reading spreadsheets, dancing sevillanas, or yachting in the Mediterranean. “I Want to Be Mario Conde” was the name of a hit song.
In 1997, the prosecutor demanded forty-four years for Mario Conde, not much for the man who masterminded the greatest financial swindle in the history of Spain.
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In the olden days, the marines would take over the customs houses in Central America and the islands of the Caribbean to collect the debts those countries owed. The U.S. occupation of Haiti lasted nineteen years, from 1915 to 1934. The invaders did not leave until Citibank had collected on all its loans, multiplied several times over by usurious interest rates. In their place, the marines left a national army created to prop up the dictatorship and keep the payments flowing. Today, in these democratic times, international technocrats are more effective than military expeditions. The Haitian people did not elect, did not even cast a single vote for, the directors of the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank, but that’s who decides the fate of every dollar that enters Haiti’s public coffers. As in all other poor countries, more powerful than the vote is the veto: the democratic vote proposes and the financial veto disposes.
The Monetary Fund is called International, just as the Bank is called World, but these twin brothers live, collect, and decide in Washington, and their well-populated technocracy never spits in the plate from which they eat. Although the United States is by far the most indebted country in the world, no outsider orders it to put a FOR SALE sign on the White House; such an act of insolence would never occur to any international bureaucrat. In contrast, the countries of the South, which service their debts at the rate of $250,000 per minute, are captives, and creditors cut their sovereignty to ribbons just as Roman patricians in previous imperial times cut their plebeian debtors to ribbons in the public plaza. No matter how much these countries pay, there is no way to quench the thirst of that huge leaky jug called the foreign debt. The more they pay, the more they owe; and the more they owe, the more they are obliged to obey orders to dismantle the state, mortgage their political independence, and alienate the national economy. “He lived paying and he died owing” could be written on their gravestones.
Saint Hedwig, patron saint of the indebted, is the saint who garners the most prayers in Brazil. Thousands upon thousands of desperate debtors make their pilgrimage to her, pleading for her to keep creditors from taking away their televisions, cars, or homes. Sometimes Saint Hedwig performs a miracle. But how can the saint hel
p countries when creditors have already carted off the government, countries free to do whatever they’re told by faceless, far-off men who practice financial blackmail by remote control? Creditors open and close stock exchanges, depending on the degree of submissiveness to the “right economic track.” The one and only truth is imposed with a fanaticism worthy of the Inquisition, single-party commissars, or Islamic fundamentalists; exactly the same policy is dictated to countries as diverse as Bolivia and Russia, Mongolia and Nigeria, South Korea and Mexico.
At the end of 1997, Michel Camdessus, president of the International Monetary Fund, declared: “The state should not give orders to the banks.” Translated, this means: “It’s the banks who ought to give orders to the state.” Nearly two years earlier, German banker Hans Tietmeyer, president of the Bundesbank, put it this way: “Financial markets more and more play the role of gendarmes. Politicians should understand that from now on they are under the control of financial markets.” Brazilian sociologist Hebert de Souza, “Betinho,” once suggested sending all the presidents off on a luxury cruise. Governments govern less and less, and the people who voted for them feel less and less represented by them. Polls reveal this lack of faith: fewer than half of all Brazilians and just over half of all Chileans, Mexicans, Paraguayans, and Peruvians believe in democracy. In the 1997 legislative elections, Chile recorded the largest number of blank ballots in the country’s history. And never have so many young people not bothered to register to vote.
GLOBALITARIAN POWER
In the twelve years of her government, from 1979 on, Margaret Thatcher ran a dictatorship of finance capital in the British Isles. The iron lady, much praised for her masculine virtues, brought an end to the era of polite behavior, crushed workers on strike, and reestablished a rigid class society with astonishing speed. Thus Great Britain became the model for Europe. Meanwhile, Chile, under the military dictatorship of General Pinochet, had become the model for Latin America. These two models figure today among the most unjust countries in the world. According to World Bank statistics on income distribution and consumption, a deep chasm currently separates those Britons and Chileans who have plenty left over from the Britons and Chileans who survive on leftovers. In those two countries, incredible as it seems, social inequality is greater than in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, or Sri Lanka. Just as incredibly, since Ronald Reagan took the helm in 1980, the United States has achieved even greater inequality than Rwanda.
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Grease
German companies are prohibited from paying bribes to Germans. On the other hand, up until a short while ago, when companies bought off politicians, military officers, or officials from other countries, they were rewarded by the tax man. Bribes could be taken as deductions. According to journalist Martin Spiewak, telecommunications giant Siemens and metals conglomerate Klöckner paid $32 million to officers close to Indonesian dictator Suharto.
In 1997, a spokesman for the Social Democratic Party, Ingomar Hauchler, estimated that German companies spend $3 billion a year to grease the wheels of their businesses abroad. Officials justified the practice as protecting jobs and good trade relations, and they also invoked respect for cultural identity: buying favors is, after all, a way to respect the cultures of countries where corruption is customary.
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The logic of the market imposes totalitarian dogmas on a global scale. Ignacio Ramonet, editor of Le Monda Diplomatique, calls them “globalitarian.” This logic has become a religion that obliges us all to follow its commandments: sit up straight, don’t raise your voice, do your chores without asking why. What time is it? Whatever you say, sir.
In the pummeled countries of the South, those on the bottom pay the piper but those on top call the tune, and the consequences are plain to see: hospitals without medicine, schools without roofs, food without subsidies. No judge can send a global system to jail for killing by hunger, but a crime is a crime even when it’s carried out as the most normal thing in the world. “Bread is life to the destitute, and to deprive them of it is murder,” says Ecclesiasticus, and as theologian Leonardo Boff points out, the market celebrates more human sacrifices than the Aztecs did at the Great Temple or the Canaanites before the idol of Moloch.
The globalitarian order steals with its trade hand what it lends with its finance hand. Tell me how much you sell and I’ll tell you what you’re worth. Latin America’s exports aren’t even 5 percent of the world’s total, and Africa’s add up to 2 percent; what the South buys costs more and more, and what it sells is worth less and less. To buy, governments go further and further into debt, and to comply with the usury on the loans, they sell grandma’s jewelry and then grandma herself.
The market gives the order and the state is privatized. Shouldn’t we rather “deprivatize” the state, seeing as it’s controlled by the international banking cartel and by local politicians who do nothing but slander it so they can unload it at bargain-basement prices? Trafficking in favors and handing out jobs in return for votes has distended the parasite-ridden bellies of Latin America’s governments. The insufferable “burrocracy” acts as a procurer, in the original sense of the word: two thousand years ago “procurator” referred to those who arranged administrative transactions in exchange for a tip. Thanks to such inefficiency and corruption, privatizations meet with the approval or indifference of public opinion.
Latin America’s countries are being denationalized at a dizzying pace, with the exception of Cuba and of Uruguay, where in a plebiscite at the end of 1992, 72 percent of the country voted to halt the sale of public enterprises. Presidents go about the world like traveling salesmen, selling what doesn’t belong to them. “My country is a product, I offer a product called Peru,” President Alberto Fujimori has proclaimed on more than one occasion.
Profits are privatized, losses are socialized. In 1990, President Carlos Menem ordered Aerolíneas Argentinas to die. That profitable public enterprise was sold or, better put, given away to another public enterprise, Spain’s Iberia, which was a model of poor administration. The Argentine airline’s national and international routes were ceded for one-fifteenth their value, and two Boeing 707 planes, still perfectly airworthy, were purchased for the modest price of $1.54 apiece.
On January 31, 1998, the Uruguayan daily El Observador congratulated the Brazilian government on its decision to sell the national telephone company, Telebras. On page 2, the paper applauded President Fernando Henrique Cardoso “for getting rid of companies and services that had become a burden on the treasury and on consumers.” On page 16 that day, the paper reported that Telebras, “the most profitable company in Brazil, last year made liquid profits of $3.9 billion, a record in the country’s history.”
The Brazilian government mobilized an army of 660 lawyers to defeat a fusillade of lawsuits against the privatization of Telebras, and it justified its program of denationalization by citing the need to show the world “signs that we are an open country.” Writer Luis Fernando Verissimo noted that such signs were “like the pointy caps they put on village idiots in the Middle Ages.”
THE POWER OF THE CASINO
They say astrology was invented to give the impression that economics is an exact science. Economists never know tomorrow why the predictions they made yesterday didn’t pan out today. It’s not their fault. Frankly, they’ve been left without much to do since the real economy closed up shop and made way for the virtual economy. Today, finance rules, and frenzy and speculation fall more into the bailiwick of psychiatrists than into that of economists.
The Rothschilds learned of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo by carrier pigeon. Now news travels faster than the speed of light, and flying alongside it on the computer screen is money. A ring worthy of Saturn spins wildly around the earth: the $2,000,000,000,000 that move on world financial markets every day. Of all those many zeros, so many you get dizzy looking at them, only a minuscule portion corresponds to commercial transactions or productive investments. In 1997, of every $100 in cur
rency transactions, only $2.50 had anything to do with the exchange of goods and services. That same year, on the eve of the hurricane that battered stock markets in Asia and the world, the Malaysian government suggested a commonsense measure: outlawing currency trading for noncommercial purposes. The shouting of floor traders makes a lot of noise, and understandably those who benefit from currency speculation were deaf to the idea. In 1995, only three of the ten largest fortunes in Japan were linked to the real economy. The other seven multimillionaires were speculators.
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Language/4
The language of the business world, the universal language, gives new meanings to old words, enriching human communication in the tongue of Shakespeare.
“Options” define not the freedom to chose but rather the right to buy. “Futures” have dropped their mystery and become contracts. “Markets” are no longer boisterous plazas but computer screens. A “lobby” is no longer used to wait for friends but to buy politicians. Not only do ships travel “offshore,” now money does too, to evade taxes and questions. “Laundries” that once upon a time washed clothes now wash dirty money.
“Lifting” no longer consists of raising weights or spirits: “lifting” is surgery that keeps the authors of all these good deeds from growing old.