Many years ago, a close friend of mine was living in a block of apartments in Durban. One morning, while she was in the lift, an explosion ripped through the building and killed a lot of residents. She was lucky that the lift-shaft provided protection, but one minute either way could have made her a casualty. The bomb was planted by the ANC.

How, exactly, is that any different from what the IRA did?

http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2013/12/good-bye-lenin-ukraines-revolution-pro-european-pro-oligarchic.html

I think one of the most striking things about modern mainstream media is their deafening silence about the vested interests behind the ‘politics’ of policy decisions.

That and the fact that such glaring omission from the discourse is so completely ‘normalised’ in the media. Journalism so effectively self censored now that most journalists are barely aware of it themselves, and would deny it to the rooftops if asked.

Circus ‘Mandela’ just shows how slick and vacuous it all is.

https://fbcdn-sphotos-b-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-frc3/384003_348571438490447_182029952_n.jpg

I think i’ll settle for Captain Mannering.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0V3SqxUomwk

Thanks David – I’d been meaning to look this up.

Mandela was an incredibly brave and principled leader but his whole life had been geared towards fighting an enemy whose methods were brutal and direct.

The methods of the Chicago School were equally brutal but much, much more subtle and they steamrollered the ANC.

Cheers Mike – got the book and looking forward to reading it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2u5wonVVFdY

These excerpts are from a chapter in “The Shock Doctrine” which I’ve finally found on Kline’s blog. If you can’t read the book, click the link to get a good idea of how the shock doctrine works all over the world, with this example from the transition from apartheid to ‘democracy’ in the Republic of South Africa. ds

http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2011/02/democracy-born-chains

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What was taken as a given by all factions of the liberation struggle was that apartheid was not only a political system regulating who was allowed to vote and move freely. It was also an economic system that used racism to enforce a highly lucrative arrangement: a small white elite had been able to amass enormous profits from South Africa’s mines, farms and factories because a large black majority was prevented from owning land and forced to provide its labour for far less than it was worth—and was beaten and imprisoned when it dared to rebel. In the mines, whites were paid up to ten times more than blacks, and, as in Latin America, the large industrialists worked closely with the military to have unruly workers disappeared.7

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What happened in those negotiations is that the ANC found itself caught in a new kind of web, one made of arcane rules and regulations, all designed to confine and constrain the power of elected leaders. As the web descended on the country, only a few people even noticed it was there, but when the new government came to power and tried to move freely, to give its voters the tangible benefits of liberation they expected and thought they had voted for, the strands of the web tightened and the administration discovered that its powers were tightly bound. Patrick Bond, who worked as an economic adviser in Mandela’s office during the first years of ANC rule, recalls that the in-house quip was “Hey, we’ve got the state, where’s the power?” As the new government attempted to make tangible the dreams of the Freedom Charter, it discovered that the power was elsewhere.

Want to redistribute land? Impossible—at the last minute, the negotiators agreed to add a clause to the new constitution that protects all private property, making land reform virtually impossible. Want to create jobs for millions of unemployed workers? Can’t—hundreds of factories were actually about to close because the ANC had signed on to the GATT, the precursor to the World Trade Organization, which made it illegal to subsidize the auto plants and textile factories. Want to get free AIDS drugs to the townships, where the disease is spreading with terrifying speed? That violates an intellectual property rights commitment under the WTO, which the ANC joined with no public debate as a continuation of the GATT. Need money to build more and larger houses for the poor and to bring free electricity to the townships? Sorry—the budget is being eaten up servicing the massive debt, passed on quietly by the apartheid government. Print more money? Tell that to the apartheid-era head of the central bank. Free water for all? Not likely. The World Bank, with its large in-country contingent of economists, researchers and trainers (a self-proclaimed “Knowledge Bank”), is making private-sector partnerships the service norm. Want to impose currency controls to guard against wild speculation? That would violate the $850 million IMF deal, signed, conveniently enough, right before the elections. Raise the minimum wage to close the apartheid income gap? Nope. The IMF deal promises “wage restraint.”12 And don’t even think about ignoring these commitments— any change will be regarded as evidence of dangerous national untrustworthiness, a lack of commitment to “reform,” an absence of a “rules-based system.” All of which will lead to currency crashes, aid cuts and capital flight. The bottom line was that South Africa was free but simultaneously captured; each one of these arcane acronyms represented a different thread in the web that pinned down the limbs of the new government.

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Underlying all these facts and figures is a fateful choice made by the ANC after the leadership realized it had been outmanoeuvred in the economic negotiations. At that point, the party could have attempted to launch a second liberation movement and break free of the asphyxiating web that had been spun during the transition. Or it could simply accept its restricted power and embrace the new economic order. The ANC’s leadership chose the second option. Rather than making the centrepiece of its policy the redistribution of wealth that was already in the country— the core of the Freedom Charter on which it had been elected—the ANC, once it became the government, accepted the dominant logic that its only hope was to pursue new foreign investors who would create new wealth, the benefits of which would trickle down to the poor. But for the trickle-down model to have a hope of working, the ANC government had to radically alter its behaviour to make itself appealing to investors.

This was not an easy task, as Mandela had learned when he walked out of prison. As soon as he was released, the South African stock market collapsed in panic; South Africa’s currency, the rand, dropped by 10 percent.21 A few weeks later, De Beers, the diamond corporation, moved its headquarters from South Africa to Switzerland.22 This kind of instant punishment from the markets would have been unimaginable three decades earlier, when Mandela was first imprisoned. In the sixties, it was unheard of for multinationals to switch nationalities on a whim and, back then, the world money system was still firmly linked to the gold standard. Now South Africa’s currency had been stripped of controls, trade barriers were down, and most trading was short-term speculation.

Of all the constraints on the new government, it was the market that proved most confining—and this, in a way, is the genius of unfettered capitalism: it’s self-enforcing. Once countries have opened themselves up to the global market’s temperamental moods, any departure from Chicago School orthodoxy is instantly punished by traders in New York and London who bet against the offending country’s currency, causing a deeper crisis and the need for more loans, with more conditions attached. Mandela acknowledged the trap in 1997, telling the ANC’s national conference, “The very mobility of capital and the globalisation of the capital and other markets, make it impossible for countries, for instance, to decide national economic policy without regard to the likely response of these markets.”26

The person inside the ANC who seemed to understand how to make the shocks stop was Thabo Mbeki, Mandela’s right hand during his presidency and soon to be his successor. Mbeki had spent many of his years of exile in England, studying at the University of Sussex, then moving to London. In the eighties, while the townships of his country were flooded with tear gas, he was breathing in the fumes of Thatcherism. Of all the ANC leaders, Mbeki was the one who mingled most easily with business leaders, and before Mandela’s release, he organized several secret meetings with corporate executives who were afraid of the prospect of black majority rule. In 1985, after a night of drinking Scotch with Mbeki and a group of South African businesspeople at a Zambian game lodge, Hugh Murray, the editor of a prestigious business magazine, commented, “The ANC supremo has a remarkable ability to instill confidence, even in the most fraught circumstances.”27

Just a heads up for a two day promotion on an interesting e-book ‘Sack The Economists’, free today and tomorrow. Looks interesting, get’s a nice plug from Steve Keen.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/SACK-ECONOMISTS-disband-their-departments-ebook/dp/B00GS01GE0

Intended to be accessible to all.

Tangential relation to Mandela and SA maybe, as well as most everywhere just as ‘neo liberal’ ?

What chance have reforming politicians got if the entire mainstream of economics is peddling cr@p ? (Not that many have any desire to reform what works nicely for them, as things stand.)