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	The failure of neo-liberalism by Phillip Blond International Herald Tribune United Kingdom   January 22, 2008   More and more, it appears that in the 21st century we are returning to the economics of the 19th, where wealth was overwhelmingly concentrated in the hands of a few owners and astute speculators.   Neither the Right nor the Left seem capable of creating a society in which all benefit from increased prosperity and economic security.   Right-wing claims that free markets will enrich all sections of society are palpably false, while the traditional European welfare state appears to penalize innovation and wealth-creation, thereby locking the poor and unskilled into institutionalized poverty and unemployment.   Thus in the new age of globalization, both ideologies create the same phenomenon: an underclass caught between welfare and low wages, a heavily indebted middle class increasingly subject to job and pension insecurity and a new class of the super rich who escape all rules of taxation and community.   It was in Britain that neo-liberalism first emerged in its decisive form. Confronted with union advocacy, the Conservative party under Margaret Thatcher was elected in 1979. In America, Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, and the Anglo-Saxon countries have pursued and advocated free market liberalization ever since.   Today, its reach extends as far as communist China, which, while eschewing political freedom, fervently preaches economic liberalization. This year even the French acknowledged free market supremacy, electing a president who has persistently denounced the costs of Gallic welfarism and praised the economic advantages of the Anglo-Saxon model.   But the benefits of free market liberalization depend on who you are, where you are and how much money or assets you had to begin with.   In terms of economic development, free market fundamentalism has been a disaster. The free market solutions applied to Russia during the Yeltsin years succeeded only in mass impoverishment, the creation of a hugely wealthy oligarchical class and the rise of an authoritarian government.   Similarly, the growth rates of Latin America and Africa, which had been higher than other developing nations, dropped by over 60 percent after they embraced IMF-sponsored neo-liberalism in the 1980''s, and have now ground to a halt.   On an individual level, a similar story pertains. Real wage increases in the top 13 countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) have been below the rate of inflation since about 1970.   Thus wage earners - rather than asset owners - have faced a persistent 30-year downward pressure on their standard of living. It comes as no surprise to learn that the golden age for the wage worker, expressed as a percentage share of GDP, was between 1945 and 1973, and not under economic liberalization.   Nobody questions that trade increases prosperity, and that the liberalization of credit and financial services allow hitherto excluded groups to supplement their wages by buying shares or houses and thus participating in the asset economy.   But the real story of neo-liberal success is not the extension of assets to all, but the huge and disproportionate share of wealth attained by the very rich. In the United States, between 1979 and 2004 the wealthiest 1 percent saw an increase in their share of national income of 78 percent, whereas 80 percent of the population saw an overall decrease in their income share by 15 percent. That''s a wealth transfer from the large majority to a tiny minority of some $664 billion.   The traditional Left panicked in the face of neo-liberal hegemony and spoke in the 1980''s of redistribution, higher taxes and restrictions on capital transfers. But, outside of Scandinavia, they were whistling in the wind: Traditional state-regulated economies appeared locked into high unemployment and low growth.   A new path for the Left was offered by the country that first experienced the new Right: the UK. By the late 1990''s, Britain was exhausted by Thatcherism; its public services were failing and the country was socially and economically fragmented. Thus in 1997 New Labor was elected.   Under the guidance of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, the new progressives promised that the benefits of rising prosperity would be applied to the public sector and the poor. Social exclusion would be tackled by opening up education and extending opportunity to all. The rest of the world was once more transfixed by the social experiment taking place in Britain. Could this seemingly exclusive neo-liberal circle be squared for the benefit of all?   Sadly, after 10 years the conclusion has to be no.   Poverty in Britain doubled under Thatcher, and this figure has become permanent under New Labor. The share of the wealth, excluding housing, enjoyed by the bottom half of the population has fallen from 12 percent in 1976 to just 1 percent now. Thirteen million people now live in relative poverty. Social mobility has declined to pre-war levels.   The least able children from the richest 20 percent of the population now overtake the most able children from the bottom 20 percent by the age of seven. Nearly half of the richest group go on to get university degrees while only 10 percent of the poorest manage to graduate. Clearly, the New Left has entrenched class division even more firmly than the neo-liberal Right.   This in a nutshell is the problem: Both Left and Right seem incapable of challenging monopoly capitalism. Neither welfarism nor statism can transform the lives of the poor, and neither, it seems, can neo-liberalism. Only a shared economy can correct the natural tendency of the free market to favor monopolies.   But we can only share if all own. Thus there is a radical and as yet unexplored possibility - that of a general and widely distributed ownership and use of assets, credit and capital. This would dissolve the conflict between capital and labor since it would be a market without monopoly and a state where waged labor - since it was the owner of capital - did not need state welfare.   * Phillip Blond is a senior lecturer in philosophy and theology at the University of Cumbria.
	Burmese Junta achieves Food Shortages amidst Plenty by EarthRights International / IPS Inter Press Service   April 2008   The Yadana Pipeline. (EarthRights International)   EarthRights International’s new report, "The Human Cost of Energy: Chevron’s continuing role in financing and profiting from Human Rights Abuses in Military-Ruled Burma" (Myanmar), documents Chevron’s ongoing role in financing and profiting from the military regime in Burma.   This is the first comprehensive report on conditions in the Yadana pipeline region since Chevron acquired Unocal’s interest in 2005, and documents the continued serious human rights violations by pipeline security forces, including forced labor, murder, rape and torture. The report also describes Chevron’s continuing legal liability associated with abuses in the pipeline region.   The Yadana Gas Pipeline Project represents the single largest foreign investment project in Burma and the single largest source of income for the Burmese military. Run by a consortium including Chevron, Thai company PTT Exploration and Production Public Company Limited (PTTEP), Total (operator), and the Myanmar Oil and Gas Enterprise (MOGE), the project does little to benefit the Burmese economy or its people.   Abuses including extrajudicial killings, torture, rape and extortion by pipeline security forces have dramatically increased since the Yadana Project was initiated in the early 1990s. Violations committed in furtherance of the project have included forced labor; forced portering, whereby villagers are made to carry arms and supplies for soldiers patrolling the pipeline route; and forced relocation of entire villages to clear the way for the pipeline and provide ready pools of forced laborers.   The influx of soldiers to the previously isolated region has also caused an increase in illegal hunting, logging, and wildlife trade. The Tenasserim region is one of the largest rainforest tracts left in mainland Southeast Asia, home to wild elephants, tigers, rhinos and great hornbills, to name just a few of the rare and important species that inhabit this region. It is also the home to numerous indigenous peoples, including the Mon, Karen, and Tavoyans.   These peoples are experiencing the negative impacts of the environmental destruction as well as the human rights abuses that they must regularly suffer at the hands of the soldiers brought into the pipeline consortium partners, including Chevron and Total.   Jan 2008 (IPS)   By announcing a new programme to expand its work in military-ruled Burma, a U.N. food agency has shed more light on the dire economic realities faced by that country’s impoverished people.   The World Food Programme (WFP) plans to feed 1.6 million people living in remote, rural areas over a three-year period, beginning this year. It is a marked increase from the 500,000 people the agency has catered to so far in helping ‘’vulnerable communities to overcome chronic food shortages.’’   Most of the communities due to benefit belong to ethnic minorities in the South-east Asian nation. These regions were plagued by conflict for years, where Burmese troops fought ethnic rebels. Peace deals signed between the warring parties through the 1990s saw an end to the separatist struggles.   According to the WFP, a steady supply of rice will feature in the basket of food due to the minorities living in, among other places, the Kachin State, in north-eastern Burma, near the Chinese border. The other items include pulses, vegetable oil, salt and high-protein blended food.   But such a U.N. intervention comes despite Burma, also called Myanmar, being a substantial producer of rice. ‘’Myanmar produces large amounts of rice, much of it grown in the central delta region,’’ Paul Risley, spokesman for the WFP’s Asia office in Bangkok, said in an interview. ‘’All the rice for our programmes is domestically purchased.’’   Yet what has come in the way of the home-grown grain getting to the needy is a vast network of security checkpoints set up by the military and, in some areas, by ethnic militias. Such roadblocks have forced the movement of food by local traders to a trickle, at times. Clearance to move food in trucks from one state to another requires the approval of the military’s local area commander, for which bribes have become mandatory.   Even the country’s majority Burmans are not immune to these military-imposed hurdles, consequently increasing the number of people enduring food shortages. The WFP estimates that in all nearly five million people, just under 10 percent of the country’s 54 million population, suffer from food insecurity. The impact of the restrictions on transporting food and the poverty rates has resulted in nearly 36 percent of children under five years being underweight and malnourished, according to some studies.   Such limits placed on the movement of food have little to do with security concerns of the notoriously oppressive Burmese junta. They are a military solution to control the price of food commodities, including rice, across the country. ‘’The junta has very little understanding of economics. These roadblocks have been around for decades,’’ says Win Min, a Burmese national security expert teaching at Payap University in Thailand’s northern city of Chiang Mai.   ‘’They have little security value for the junta. They were introduced to keep a check on the price of rice going up,’’ he explained in an interview. ‘’But the situation has become worse today. More checkpoints have come up. So the price of rice in one state is different to the price in the next.’’   The junta’s mishandling of the domestic rice trade is just one in a litany errors it has committed that has dismantled a once promising economy. When British colonisation ended in Burma 60 years ago, the country was known as a one of the world’s major rice exporters. ‘’(At) independence, in 1948, Burma was regarded as the South-east Asian nation ‘most likely to succeed’,’’ states ALTSEAN, a regional human rights lobby on Burma, in a recent report.   The decay set in after the military grabbed power in a 1962 coup. The strongman at the time, Gen. Ne Win, opted for a socialist agenda, titled the ‘Burmese Way to Socialism.’ It led to the nationalisation of all the major industries, banks and the international trading sector. Ne Win’s successors, including the current military leaders, opted for a more open economic agenda once they came to power, including a bow to more private sector activity.   The shift, however, produced little difference. ‘’The economic mismanagement of the current military junta, the State Peace and Development Council, is causing the collapse of social infrastructure and perpetuating serious threats to human security,’’ states ALTSEAN, which stands for the Alternative ASEAN Network on Burma. ‘’The military regimes that have ruled the country since 1962 have dragged the country into disgrace and economic ruin through gross economic mismanagement (and) corruption.’’   "The U.N. estimates that households are (currently) spending 70 percent of their incomes on food, with more than 90 percent of the population already living on less than one US dollar a day,’’ it adds.   Such dismal figures have brought into relief the paradox in the country, since Burma is awash with natural wealth, ranging from extensive oil and gas reserves to the world-renowned pigeon-blood rubies. The rewards from such wealth, however, have been denied to the public.   The pro-democracy protests on the streets of Rangoon and elsewhere in August and September last year revealed the public anger towards unbearable economic woes. The protests, which were brutally crushed, were triggered after the junta raised the price of oil by 500 percent in mid-August with no warning.   Thailand’s estimated two million registered and unregistered migrant workers from Burma also echo a tale of economic hardship. What began as a trickle in the 1980s, largely involving workers from ethnic communities along the border, turned into a flood by the end of the 1990s, with more Burmans from the centre of the country crossing the border in search of jobs.   ‘’They have left because of unemployment and a lack of money to buy food and other items for their daily needs,’’ says Moe Swe, secretary-general of Yaung Chi Oo Workers Association, a Burmese labour rights group based along the Thai-Burma border. ‘’The economy has deteriorated and the people have to leave Burma if they want to survive.’’   The profile of Burmese who have entered Thailand in search of work to feed themselves illustrates the current predicament. ‘’Some of the migrant workers here used to be teachers, nurses, government sector employees, factory workers and farmers,’’ he told IPS. Visit the related web page
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