View previous stories
	Guinea"s battle against corruption: which side is the west on? by Paul Collier RSA, University of Oxford   November 2012   Across Africa democratically elected leaders are fighting against corruption in the natural resource sector. But by various means, corruption fights back. Those under investigation hire highly paid legal guns to sue and silence, and highly paid public relations gurus to twist and smear. Impecunious governments trying to impose the rule of law find it subverted into the rule of lawyers and trial by media.   Nowhere is this struggle playing out more graphically than Guinea. The nation"s first democratically elected president, the long-exiled democracy campaigner Alpha Condé, and his distinguished finance minister, Kerfalla Yansane, are struggling against an inheritance of systemic plunder. One such inheritance, highlighted both by the Financial Times and Global Witness, is the allegation that the world"s most valuable iron ore deposits were handed over for a song, on the deathbed signature of a military dictator. The purchasers have defended the deal, but as the African telecoms billionaire Mo Ibrahim said in Dakar last weekend: "Are the Guineans who did that deal idiots, or criminals, or both?"   Within its first two years, the new government introduced a mining code, launched a review of past contracts to ensure that they complied with due process, and installed the indomitable Aissatou Boiro at the head of the treasury to impose integrity on money flows; all while regularising Guinea"s standing with the international community. The legal aggression and smearing publicity duly followed, but worse was to come. On Friday evening, Boiro was gunned down in the street. Her assassins are still at large.   For two decades the west has willed on the struggles for democracy and decent governance in Africa. But having encouraged governments such as that of President Condé to join the battle against corruption, we now have both the incentive and the responsibility to see that they succeed. The incentive is that our own major resource extraction companies are now so intensely scrutinised that they are disadvantaged by corruption: it is the competitive advantage of their rivals.   With the US election out of the way, it is time for American companies to face this reality. To date, their response to the Cardin-Lugar amendment requiring transparency in their transactions has been to mount a legal challenge. Rather than this doomed and demeaning strategy of pushing back, they would be well advised to push forward. Cardin-Lugar is being imitated: this month the European parliament is likely to adopt it across Europe. Canada, home to the world"s main financial market for second-tier resource extraction companies, is about to become an aberrant laggard that is surely not beyond the reach of influence.   The success of decent African governments in their struggle against corruption is not only in our interest, it is partly our responsibility. Inadvertently, we are currently providing much of the capacity needed for corruption to fight back. We are not, of course, complicit in the murder of Boiro, though her blood should remind us that brave people are putting their lives on the line. But the sharp lawyers and slick public relations consultants who counter the effort for clean governance are not based in countries such as Guinea: they are in London, Paris and New York.   Similarly, the clandestine flows of dirty money essential for corruption, which Boiro was trying to trace, depend on an army of facilitating lawyers, accountants and bankers. They are the people who establish shell companies and nominee bank accounts to conceal true beneficial ownership, and whip money across borders far faster than the lumbering process of inter-governmental legal co-operation. Governments such as Guinea"s bear the brunt of these ethically wretched activities, but they are beyond their capacities to address.   They are not, however, beyond our own capacities. We could turn the system of mutual legal assistance, whereby governments are supposed to co-operate to prise information out of suspected criminals and witnesses, from a sham into a reality. We could require the documents that establish shell companies and bank accounts to carry the names of the lawyers and bankers who executed them. These people could then face legal liability to ensure that the authorities could readily establish beneficial ownership. Our governments and our associations have an obligation to rein in the unscrupulous tail of our professions.   The critical global struggle of our generation will not be over the shift in economic power – it will be between our values and those of China. The contrasting processes of selection for a national leader have just dramatised this difference. In Africa, China"s mantra, publicly expressed on a presidential tour of the continent, has been, "we ask no questions" – an approach that might be exemplified by its dealings with Guinea. The military junta that preceded President Condé resorted to the gun yet more gruesomely than Boiro"s killers, mowing down 157 pro-democracy demonstrators in a stadium. Within a month a Chinese company flew in and signed a multibillion-dollar deal.   The west"s economic battle with China will be lost: power will inevitably shift. The battle of values can be won, and if it is won the shift in economic power will be less consequential. But we will only win the battle of values if we put our house in order. We must decisively end our schizophrenic stance of preaching decency while being lackeys for crooks and sharks.   * Paul Collier, is a Professor of Economics, Director for the Centre for the Study of African Economies at The University of Oxford.   http://www.thersa.org/events/video/archive/paul-collier-the-plundered-planet
	Goodbye future? by Stephen Holmes, Charles Postel Eurozine: - a network of European cultural journals   Structural problems in conventional democracies are alienating citizens worldwide, writes Stephen Holmes, Walter E. Meyer Professor of Law at the New York University School of Law.   Political marketing, cross-party compromise and elite withdrawal threaten to rob democracy of its original role as an instrument of justice.   Almost a quarter century has passed since the citizens of central and eastern Europe took to the streets to demand more democracy. Though the memory remains fresh in reunified Berlin, I wonder whether, elsewhere, 1989 and its aftermath are still debated with any real urgency. So much has happened in the last 23 years that, throughout the world, the democratic struggle of central and eastern Europeans seems somehow remote or visible only through a clutter of intervening traumas.   I would therefore like to try to rethink some aspects of the disappointments of democracy after communism, in the context of what I think can only be called a global dissatisfaction with democracy today.   I want to do this because I believe that post-communist countries, even though they still bear the traces of their unique histories, have now joined the rest of the democratic world in this sense, that their problems with democracy resemble ours more and more.   For one thing, all of us are living in the shadow of the Chinese economic rise, which has dramatically dissociated economic prosperity from democratic governance at the very moment when western democracies seem less and less able to stave off their own economic decline.   I begin by following that most important principle of political theory: if you can"t make an argument, make a distinction. The distinction I have in mind is between two types of disappointment with democracy, first, disappointment with the specific form that democracy takes in a given country, and second, a more general dissatisfaction that seems to afflict all or most democracies in the world for more or less similar reasons.   As an American observing the US electoral season, which we have now thankfully survived, I was naturally appalled by the way gerrymandered "safe seats" and the low-turnout primary system conspired to push the candidates of one of our two major national parties into ideological extremism and a refusal to seek any middle ground.   Similarly, as a part-time resident of Italy, I am disturbed to see that multi-party competition cannot produce a government that behaves rationally; and, of course, I have been hearing more and more of my Italian friends and neighbours complain that voting means nothing because elected parliaments are reduced to ratifying decisions made by markets and the European Central Bank or, even more provocatively, that all important decisions are being taken by a Herrenvolk from the North and its local technocratic appointees.   What I want to examine, however, are not these sources of dissatisfaction with specific democracies, but rather some general sources of dissatisfaction with democracy as such, and to ask what light such a discussion sheds on disappointments with democratization after communism.   From transition to trauma   Already in the 1990s, I think it is fair to say, most of us had stopped being euphoric. No sooner had Poland exited the communist bloc than Leszek Kolakowski published an article reminding us that euphoria never lasts very long. Anyone following the aftermath of the Arab Spring will appreciate what he had in mind; and democratic euphoria after 1989 was similarly short-lived. True, no one back then predicted that Hungary would lapse ominously back into single-party rule as it has today, with devastating personal consequences for many ordinary Hungarians.   By the late 1990s, students of post-communism had started seeing themselves less as transitologists than as traumatologists. That was certainly true for Claus Offe, who wrote extensively about the peculiarly non-revolutionary nature of the post-communist transitions and especially about the fateful absence (with the possible exception of Poland) of an organized counter-elite that, having overthrown the old regime would therefore have had the public credibility and organizational experience to act as an agent of directional change, steering the process of post-communist development.   The consequence of this lack was political drift ungoverned by any shared concept of public purpose. My point, in any case, is that already in the 1990s, students of post-communism were perfectly aware that when autocracy collapses, democracy does not arise automatically to take its place, like toast popping out of a toaster.   As post-1989 euphoria wore off, the elementary lessons learned earlier by students of European decolonization reasserted themselves: the absence of obstacles is not the same as the presence of preconditions; less state does not mean more freedom; gaining influence over legislation is pointless if no one obeys the law; and, since democracy is a tiny spot in human history, it must have many complex preconditions.   So one interesting question is: What separates our understanding of democratizatio"s difficulties and dysfunctions today from our understanding of these difficulties and dysfunctions in the late 1990s, when the initial post-communist euphoria had worn off? Many factors could be mentioned in this regard, of which by far the most important is the rapid progress of globalization.   * Access the full transcript via the link below.   http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2012-11-21-holmes-en.html   Occupy: A populist response to the crisis of inequality.   The Occupy movement resembles nineteenth-century American populism in its anger at the avarice of bankers and financiers and in its notions of majoritarian democracy. Where it differs from the old Populists is in its attitude to the state, writes Charles Postel, assistant professor at the History Department of San Francisco State University.   In the late nineteenth century, the telecommunications revolution and steam power "annihilated time and space" and made possible large-scale organization and centralization. In the Unites States, the new technologies unfolded in the midst of what Mark Twain described as the "Gilded Age". Corporate power grew exponentially, a handful of business executives amassed immense fortunes, financial panics took a devastating toll, and the society was split by an unprecedented chasm of economic inequality. The farmers, labourers and other citizens at the short end of these wrenching changes responded with the Populist movement of the 1890s, the most powerful challenge to corporate power in American history.   Over the last thirty years, we have witnessed a new telecommunications revolution, a resurgence of corporate power, and a growing crisis of inequality. For good reason, many commentators have noted that the United States is experiencing a "Second Gilded Age". Yet, the challenges to corporate power have been tentative and sporadic. "The Battle in Seattle", the mass protest at the 1999 World Trade Organization conference, promised to be the start of a movement against global corporate malfeasance.   But the 2000 election, 9/11, the invasion of Iraq and "the war on terror" pushed other issues to the fore. Then, in February of 2011, tens of the thousands of workers, students, and activists converged on the Wisconsin state capitol in Madison to protest a new law restricting the collective bargaining rights of public employees.   For the first time since the onset of the Great Recession of 2008, citizens had boldly taken to the streets to defend their rights and livelihoods from the encroachments of corporate power.   Taking inspiration from Tahir Square and the Arab Spring, as well as the Wisconsin protests, the Occupy Wall Street Movement was born in September 2011 with the encampment in Zuccotti Park in New York"s financial district. The movement quickly spread to hundreds of American cities and dozens of countries. Many of those involved in the encampments have been young people – students, as well as employed, semi-unemployed, and unemployed graduates with too much student debt. And they have been joined by teachers, nurses, transit workers, and other sections of the labour movement, along with a broad array of activists involved in housing, education, women"s rights, immigration and other causes.   Although the Occupy Movement has no specific set of demands, and is ideologically and organizationally amorphous, it represents the most strikingly populist response to the present crisis. The Occupy Movement corresponds to the Populism of the last Gilded Age in three interrelated ways.   First, Occupy Wall Street, as its name implies, lays the blame for the financial crisis and the economic wreckage produced in its wake at the feet of the bankers and financiers and their speculative avarice. Here it needs to be kept in mind that one of the most critical decisions made by the Obama administration on taking office was that it would not investigate the Wall Street executives who had pushed the global economy to the edge of the abyss. Moreover, the Tea Party-backed Republicans have been fighting strenuously against any regulations or other measures to check the power of corporate finance.   If nothing else, the Occupy Movement has accomplished something important by putting the focus on the corporate interests most responsible for the present financial and economic suffering. The old Populists would be proud.   Second, the Occupy Movement slogan, "We are the 99 per cent" corresponds to populist notions of majoritarian democracy. In their day, the Populists used variations of the 99 per cent slogan, convinced that the bankers, railroad corporation executives, and other "robber barons" only represented a small fraction of the population. If democracy meant anything, it meant majority rule, that is rule of "the people." The Occupy Movement has effectively wielded the 99 per cent slogan to similar effect.   Indeed, the slogan itself has proven both more accurate and more effective than its critics have allowed. A major study of the Congressional Budget Office has confirmed that during the thirty-year period from 1977 to 2007, Americans who receive the top one percent of incomes have seen their earnings rise by over 270 per cent. For most everyone else, incomes have stagnated and their portion of the national income has declined.   This reality is especially striking given that these decades have also witnessed rapid increases in productivity and wealth creation. It might be argued that the "We are the 99 per cent" slogan does not add up because, of course, there are tens of millions of Americans who identify with the wealthy or who otherwise embrace the taxation, regulation, and other policies that have so benefited the top 1 per cent. But this is a problem of political arithmetic that plagued the old Populists as well.   Third, the Occupy Movement has let light into the deep crevasse of economic inequality. The late nineteenth century produced levels of inequality unparalleled in American history. Fantastic fortunes provoked fears of a new aristocracy or plutocracy that would sit astride a society fixed by class and station.   In the Populist critique, the crisis of inequality was a result of corporate bribery of the courts and legislatures; a monetary and tax policy that favoured banks and corporations at the expense of the people; and the destruction of the rights of labour. "From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice," exclaimed the Populist Platform of 1892, "we breed the two great classes – tramps and millionaires."   Similarly, the Occupy Movement has put into the public debate the idea that today"s vast chasm of inequality is not the product of a natural law, but the result of the influence of corporate cash on the political process and resulting pro-corporate tax and regulatory policies. Again, the old Populists would be proud.   * Access the full transcript via the link below.   http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2012-11-07-postel-en.html Visit the related web page
	View more stories