The World
According to Power
TFF PressInfo 27
Over the last few months, JONATHAN
POWER has devoted his thought-provoking weekly columns to
issues such as American policies towards Israel, Hong Kong's
fate, Mexico's elections, and the chances of economic
take-off in the Congo. He has argued that it is time to take
Turkey into Europe and highlighted the fact that the world's
income distribution is worsening, thanks to globalisation
and liberalization.
He syndicates his articles with
more than 50 newspapers around the world. For 30 years a
journalist, of which 17 as columnist for the International
Herald Tribune 1974-1991.
The value of these critically
constructive analyses extend way beyond your transient daily
newspaper.
Catch up and read them on TFF's
website at http://www.transnational.org.
For Jonathan Power is an adviser to
and a friend of TFF.
They are also frequently featured
on the leading alternative news service, OneWorld
http://www.oneworld.org/news/.
Here are some excerpts reflecting his
grip of world affairs:
ON GLOBALISATION
"The U.S. President, Bill Clinton and British prime
minister, Tony Blair are a source of danger. They are riding
high. They look good. They smile a lot and they owe much of
their success to the remarkably prolonged era of economic
expansion and renewed sense of prosperity they preside over.
And, since they dominate the ubiquitous Anglo-Saxon press,
they are spreading their globalisation message with enormous
effect."
ON THE ILLUSION OF
TRICKLE-DOWN GROWTH
"...Students of economics have been taught for decades
that the rich getting richer is usually a prelude to rapid
growth and the trickling down of income gains to the poor.
This theory holds less water by the year. The evidence is
accumulating that concentrating national income in the hands
of the few does not lead to higher investment and faster
growth."
ON THE MANIPULATION OF FINANCIAL
MARKETS
"The slambang attack on this situation by Malaysian
prime minister Mahathir Mohamad, speaking at the joint World
Bank/IMF meeting in Hong Kong this week, was right on the
mark."
ON DIANA AND LANDMINES - BEFORE THE
NOBEL PEACE PRIZE
"The anti-landmine movement is her immediate legacy, the
campaign she was most engaged in when she died. It was both
important in itself and important in that it is chipping
away at mankind's long tolerance of the evils of war. War,
the systematic and organized use of violence, is peculiar to
the most advanced of animals, man. To quote Erasmus:
"Whoever heard of 100,000 animals rushing together to
butcher each other, as men do everywhere?
Diana was lobbying us, pushing us, to take a small but
significant step towards the outlawing of war and the
improvement of peace. If the time when kings and dukes
fought wars and knights duels over nothing more than their
reputations now seems part of a distant past, it is time
overdue, as the millenium approaches, to progress even
further. With the abolition and removal of landmines it will
be a small step for the generals but a very important one
for mankind.
ON THE BANANA CRISIS
"The facts of the case are straightforward. The U.S. fruit
multinationals, Chiquita and Del Monte, already dominate the
world banana trade, even in Europe. Grown on their highly
mechanized Latin American estates bananas can be harvested
for $150 a ton, compared with $500 a ton in the Caribbean.
In a perfectly competitive world there would be no case to
answer--the Caribbean islands should be left to go under.
But in the world we inhabit right now where agricultural
protectionism is rife, particularly in Europe and Japan, why
pick on the small fry (who supply only 7% of the European
market) as an important target?"
ON AID AS A FOREIGN POLICY
TOOL
"What on earth is America doing poking around in African
civil wars? Were the old-time marxist analysts right after
all--the capitalist countries will slit each other's throats
in order to win favored access to African minerals? This
policy was discredited by the killing fields of Angola where
east and west competed for the prize of its post-colonial
government and its diamond fields. The murderous
consequences of Africa's worst war still linger on. Surely
Washington doesn't believe it should compete with capitalist
Paris as it did for so long with communist Moscow? (And vice
versa.)
ON NEGOTIATIONS AND WARFARE
"What we do know, alas, is that negotiated settlements
have led to renewed warfare within five years in about 50%
of cases. Most civil wars in history have ended with the
outright military victory of one side over another. And the
most stable peace settlements in civil wars have been those
achieved by military victory, rather than by negotiations.
If it weren't for the fact that these military victories
usually come with wide-spread human rights abuses,
atrocities, genocide and environmental degradation, then we
should probably just let nature run its course. Indeed, this
was effectively the outside world's attitude during the
recent crisis in Zaire, as it was not so long ago in Uganda
and, more recently, in liberalization, both now, as it
happens, very successful economic recovery stories.
Nevertheless, in eight out of ten cases the results of
military victory are not as in Uganda or Ethiopia. It is
on-going murder and mayhem, as it is right now in Zaire,
Rwanda and Afghanistan and, as it shows all the signs of
being, in Cambodia. If peacemaking is an infant industry,
all the more reason to try and fashion some new
tools..."
ON WARS IN THE POST-COLD
WORLD
"Since 1988 major civil wars in Namibia, El Salvador,
Nicaragua, Mozambique, Guatemala and South Africa have been
wound up, all, apart from South Africa, because of direct
outside assistance. The actual number of hot wars--both
inter-state and intra-state--has decreased considerably
since 1989. Without a shadow of doubt the new environment of
international cooperation has produced a more benign world
than existed in the dark days of the Cold War. No superpower
is there to stir things up in order to throw mud in its
rival's eyes. According to a 1996 U.S. government report the
number of persons threatened by on-going wars is now down to
42 million. Despite Rwanda, despite Zaire, Afghanistan,
Liberia, Bosnia and Cambodia, and all the other places that
grabbed the headlines, only around 0.7% of humanity is being
hurt by war at the present time, the lowest figure in its
recorded history.
ON INDIA'S GROWTH AND
VISION
Four states, Andhra Pradesh, Maryana, Kerala and Punjab in
recent years have reduced their income poverty by an
astonishing 50%. If all of India had Kerala's birth and
child death rates there would be 1.5 million fewer infant
deaths each year and a quite dramatic reduction in
population growth. India, tomorrow's could-be giant, has to
decide its future. Wise decisions could insure a stunning
success that would leave China envious and America
open-mouthed. But a lack of confidence in the political
arena, leading to botched economic and social decisions and
to increased tension, war, with Pakistan, would throw this
promise to the wind.
ON NATO EXPANSION AND MISSED
OPPORTUNITIES FOR PEACE
The western nations are making a mistake of far reaching
consequences, one they stand a more than even chance of
living to rue. They missed one historic chance to change for
the better the face of Europe in 1991-93, when the radical
democrats held the strings of power in Moscow, by refusing
to provide Russia with the economic wherewithal to make its
transition to capitalism a less debilitating and wrenching
experience. And now they are missing another, to insure that
the majority of Russians feel that the hatchet between East
and West is truly buried and that Russia's place, to use
Mikhail Gorbachev's phrase, is in a ``common European
home.''
ON 'ROGUE STATES' AND HYSTERIA
"Attempts to isolate so-called "rogue-regimes" can, if
allowed to fester unresolved for too long, curdle all sense
of proportion, by both perpetrator and object alike... the
U.S. and its western allies are also at fault for seeing
Libya and other rogue states, Iran, Cuba, North Korea and
Iraq as irredeemably outcast, not as manageable problems but
as all-consuming threats. This is really to overdo it. All
are basket-case economies. All are diplomatically isolated.
All are bordered by states possessing great military
potential. Endless confrontation is endlessly
counterproductive (what Washington, paradoxically, has
decided with what is arguably the greatest "rogue" state of
them all, Syria). There is no evidence that isolating or
cornering a state succeeds in moderating its behavior.
Engagement is the only way, short of war, to produce results
that move nations out of their entrenched
positions..."
ON JIMMY CARTER AND NORTH
KOREA
"This was ex-President Jimmy Carter's great contribution to
the North Korean nuclear stand-off three years ago: Just
when President Clinton was about to launch a full-scale
confrontation with Pyongyang over its apparent nuclear bomb
program, egged on by the likes of former National Security
Adviser Brent Scowcroft and ex-CIA Director Robert Gates
telling him to hurry up and bomb the North Korean
reprocessing plant, Carter went to North Korea, engaged the
leadership in negotiations and won a deal to freeze all
nuclear developments, a deal still satisfactorily being
implemented.
ON THE SITUATION OF THE UN
With the end of the Cold War and with the number of smaller
wars declining dramatically each year, this should be the
time for great UN activism in pursuit of helping the world
peace process along. Instead, this quite unique historical
opportunity for a great peace and the advancement of
universal human rights is being wasted and frittered
away.
JONATHAN POWER
- is a columnist, film-maker and writer. M.Sc in
economics, trained as a geographer and agricultural
economist. For the first ten years after graduate school
community work in slum neighborhoods in Chicago and London.
Worked for Martin Luther King 1966-1967. He has been a
regular guest columnist in New York Times and Encounter.
Author of several books on economic development, world
hunger and on Amnesty International and human rights issues.
Co-edited the UN 50th Anniversary book, Visions of
Hope. Consultant to numerous international organizations and
editorial adviser on the Independent Commission on
Disarmament and Security chaired by Olof Palme.
Go to TFF News and read Jonathan
Power's TWO LATEST COLUMNS! In one he maintains that we
continue to have an inadequate response to the real nuclear
danger: not rogue states but nuclear terrorists - which the
West could have prevented through a wiser policy vis-a-vis
Russia.
In the newest he challenges us to
ponder: "How could the UN just decide to buckle and pull out
its human rights investigators when the (fairly) new
strongman of the Congo, Laurent Kabile, told them to?
October 18, 1997
 
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