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Saturday, June 11, 2005

Commonality of Africa and Bolivia

[W]hat keeps Africa poor [is] not a lack of political will but the tremendous profitability of the current arrangement. Sub-Saharan Africa, the poorest place on earth, 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... 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 favors 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."

If you understand global economics -- which is really colonialism in another form -- much of what happens in the world will make more sense to you.

Jack Clark 3:57 PM [+]   
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