A world plundered by greed and double standards

Sunday Herald, The, Jun 30, 2002

SITTING in the office on this miserable summer holiday weekend, our thoughts turn once again to filling this slot. After another roller-coaster week it certainly feels as though the world has turned upside down. It seems all week that men have been preaching one gospel and practising another in a world in which power and wealth remain firmly with the few while the many - the poor, the innocent and the dispossessed - are left powerless and without hope.

It has become a world in which greed is taken for granted, in which profit is the yardstick and in which power is used casually to create ever greater reaches of authority. It is a world in which men such as George W Bush and WorldCom's Bernie Ebbers are the masters of all they survey. It is a world in which the certainties are suddenly absent - a world in which a doubtfully elected, all-powerful president can demand the removal of a democratically elected leader and in which a greedy corporate robber baron can destroy economies and plunder the savings of millions of ordinary people through his own criminal cupidity.

At the end of a week which saw the world stock market shuddering, Bush finally lost his cool and admitted that he was as "mad as hell" about the latest scandal to rock corporate America. He was right to be furious. Coming on top of the Enron scandal, the WorldCom revelations are a further indictment of the feeding frenzy which accompanied the dotcom boom at the end of the 20th century. It was a time when many entrepreneurs cynically took advantage of deregulation to plunder the markets and line their own pockets.

Working just inside the limits of legality, they used every accounting trick available to fudge the numbers, play fast and loose with profit and loss accounts, shift imaginary amounts of money, print worthless share issues and make untold profits for their own benefit. They worked in a hall of mirrors where sleight of hand was commonplace and deceit was considered if not noble then at least acceptable. What happened inside Enron, WorldCom, Xerox and perhaps many other corporations made a nonsense of the integrity of the US accounting system and exposed American corporate policy as, at worst, the domain of the criminal.

Small wonder that Bush attacked the accountants who think nothing of spiriting away billions of dollars and producing ever more grandiose schemes for investments which turn out to be mirages. As president he was honour-bound to criticise the rapacity of his fellow Americans in the corporate sector - anything less would have exposed him as a moral coward - but perhaps he spoke without thinking. Bush makes much of his downhome Christian simplicity, but before making his attack he might have had the humility to read St John on the scribes and Pharisees' treatment of adulteresses. "He that is without sin among you," admonished Jesus Christ, "let him first cast a stone at her."

In the same week that WorldCom's frauds were uncovered, Bush attended the G8 summit in Canada. This meeting of the world's richest nations exists to frame policy, tackle global issues and, as it turns out, protect the expansionist policies of globalisation. The leaders meet in secluded splendour to decide economic policies and to make sure that they succour their own kind. At this year's summit they decided to drop some crumbs from their table by way of throwing some dollars at the world's trouble-spots.

Russia was promised $20 billion to put its house in order by cleaning up the sites of its weapons of mass destruction. Much was made of the environmental issues and, although these are vital to the future security of the planet, the largesse was not just a disinterested act of charity. It was prompted by the US to protect their homeland from attack by a terrorist's dirty bomb manufactured out of nuclear waste.

Money was also pushed in Africa's direction but, far from attacking the real problems of African poverty - the need to reduce huge debt repayments, the removal of protectionist tariff barriers that cripple the export trade - the money will simply shore up global corporations' capacity for making money from the continent and paying off debts to the West. Countries will see their economies bolstered; once they are softened up, the corporate robber barons will move in for the kill. Greater profits for them and more misery for the Africans.

The G8 leaders are only helping to create a world in which large swaths of the globe will be populated by those without hope of ever being able to exist without want. That absence of any achievable goals undermines the one subject the G8 leaders should have discussed but failed to tackle, because any debate would have disturbed their harmony: the continuing problem of Israel and the Palestinians.

To Bush there are only good guys and bad guys. The bad guys are the terrorists; the good guys are those who have declared war on terrorism. This stark policy allows him to say that there can be no negotiation until the Palestinians get rid of their leader, Yasser Arafat. It allows him to promise that he will make war on Iraq, a country that has never attacked the US. Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon - who takes his cue from his country's greatest patron - uses the same rhetoric and puts it into practice by sending in tanks and warplanes to subjugate the Palestinians and to blow up their headquarters.