[Nettime-bold] Beware of the Moderates (fwd ex nettime-nl)

[Patrice Riemens <patrice@xs4all.nl>]

Comes from the Dutch language nettime-list (en Anglais dans le texte ;-)
Might be of interest for nettimers 'at large'...
cheers, patrice (& Diiiino!)

----- Forwarded message from Han Speckens <persgal@casema.net> -----

Delivered-To: nettime-nl@nettime.org
Date: Tue, 17 Jul 2001 20:15:13 +0200
Subject: [Nettime-nl] Beware of the Moderates


It was the triumphant American state that fashioned the present "global
economy" at Bretton Woods in 1944, so that its military and corporate arms
would have unlimited access to minerals, oil, markets and cheap labour. In
1948, the State Department's senior imperial planner, George Kennan,
wrote: "We have 50 per cent of the world's wealth, but only 6.3 per cent
of its population. In this situation, our real job in the coming period is
to devise a pattern of relationships which permit us to maintain this
position of disparity. To do so, we have to dispense with all
sentimentality . . . we should cease thinking about human rights, the
raising of living standards and democratisation." The World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund were invented to implement this strategy.
Their base is Washington, where they are joined by an umbilical cord to
the US Treasury, a few blocks away. This is where the globalisation of
poverty and the use of debt as a weapon of control was conceived. When
John Maynard Keynes, the British representative at Bretton Woods, proposed
a tax on creditor nations, designed to prevent poor countries falling into
perpetual debt, he was told by the Americans that if he persisted, Britain
would not get its desperately needed war loans. More than half a century
later, the gap between the richest 20 per cent of humanity and the poorest
20 per cent has doubled; and "structural adjustment programmes" have
secured an indebted imperium greater than the British empire at its
height.

The danger of the "moderate" view, which refuses to contemplate the sheer
rapacity of western state power, is that it can be co-opted. The World
Bank and the IMF, now under siege as never before, have devised their
survival tactics in relation to this. Overnight, the IMF, the greatest of
the loan sharks, has begun to sound like an institutional Mother Teresa,
with a "mission to defeat poverty". Together with the World Bank, and the
World Trade Organisation, it now promotes "dialogue" with "moderate"
non-governmental organisations (NGOs) opposed to globalisation, anointing
them as "serious opponents", in contrast to the "hooligans" on the
streets. Clare Short's Department for International Development employs
this tactic, co-opting leading NGOs for "consultation", even commissioning
them to contribute to government white papers. This collaboration should
not be underestimated. Following the successful attack on the WTO in
Seattle two years ago, more than 1,200 groups and organisations from 85
countries called for a "moratorium" on further liberalisation of trade and
an "audit" of WTO policies as the first stage of reforming it. The WTO and
its creators in Washington were delighted, for its legitimacy was not in
question. Yet, this secretive, entirely undemocratic body is the most
rapacious predator devised by the imperial powers. The Economist calls it
an "embryo world government" - which no one has voted for. Beware of
moderates.


----- End forwarded message -----


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