(c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 43)  | |||
| Summer 2002 |
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Issue 43 | |
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The Best Democracy Money Can Buy
Greg Palast
London: Pluto Press, 2002, £18.99
This is great book. Palast is right there, at the hinge where business meets the politicians. Palast's concerns are the main agenda: America, the power of the corporations; the institutions of the new world order - and, almost a sideshow, New Labour. In the last few years he has exposed the nature of the New Labour government in the 'cash for access' affair; discovered how the Republicans stole the election in Florida; and exposed how the IMF actually works, with irrefutable internal documents. All of which, and a great deal more, is in this book. Most of this has appeared else-where, in the Observer and on Newsnight, but there are also pieces here from less mainstream outlets: his account of the New Labour 'project' originally published in The Ecologist, for example, and a piece from Index on Censorship. And these aren't all simple reprints: the big pieces have been revisited and revised.
The really important material here will probably turn out to be his exposure of the IMF as nothing more than a set of gangsters, stealing the third world's resources. We knew this before but this is the first time we have been given access to the IMF's internal documents. (17)
I read/watched much of this when it appeared the first time and, reading it again, I was struck by one startling feature of his account of exposing New Labour's cash-for-access system. Palast went to the first tier of New Labour advisors, wired for sound, and offered to pay for access to government thinking and people. But did he go in disguise as an American businessman? No, he couldn't do that, too many of the New Labour people knew him. He went as himself, Greg Palast, the journalist, and told them that he was just like them: yes, he was a journalist but he also liked to do deals and make money. He mirrored them and the poor shmucks bought it. Reading this I was reminded of the scene in Mel Brooks' wonderful Blazing Saddles in which the black sheriff, played by Cleveland Little, cons the white citizens of the town into not lynching him by threatening to shoot himself. As he walks away he says to camera something like this: 'Boy, you are beautiful; but those white folks are so dumb!'
Palast is revealing the real America and the global institutions which front its power - the real world about which the New Labour tendency appear to know almost nothing. They've believed the hype. At its core New Labour bought the story, from the Clinton people, that America was a more dynamic, open, egalitarian society which - crucially - created more jobs than other western industrialised economies. Most of this is false. US unemployment figures are distorted by the prison gulag in which 2 million men, mostly black, are kept off the unemployment figures - and, increasingly, forced to work for poverty wages within the prison system. Nor is it as egalitarian or as dynamic as its naive fans in New Labour apparently believe. Will Hutton, who contributes a forward to the book, made this point recently. (18)
Notes
17 In 'IMF's "one size" fits few', The Observer (Business) 28 April 2002, Nick Mathiason noted that a report by the World Development Movement the week before had revealed that 23 countries had experienced serious civil unrest in the previous year as a result of implementing IMF policies. In retrospect, the Thatcher economic programme of 1980-83, riots and all, was the standard IMF 'structural adjustments'.
18 Will Hutton, 'Log cabin to White House? Not any more' in The Observer 28 April 2002.
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