Eduardo Galeano - Upside Down - A Primer for the Looking-Glass World

GLOBALITARIAN POWER

In the twelve years of her government, from 1979 on, Margaret Thatcher ran a dictatorship of finance capital in the British Isles. The iron lady, much praised for her masculine virtues, brought an end to the era of polite behavior, crushed workers on strike, and reestablished a rigid class society with astonishing speed. Thus Great Britain became the model for Europe. Meanwhile, Chile, under the military dictatorship of General Pinochet, had become the model for Latin America. These two models figure today among the most unjust countries in the world. According to World Bank statistics on income distribution and consumption, a deep chasm currently separates those Britons and Chileans who have plenty left over from the Britons and Chileans who survive on leftovers. In those two countries, incredible as it seems, social inequality is greater than in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, or Sri Lanka. Just as incredibly, since Ronald Reagan took the helm in 1980, the United States has achieved even greater inequality than Rwanda.

Grease

German companies are prohibited from paying bribes to Germans. On the other hand, up until a short while ago, when companies bought off politicians, military officers, or officials from other countries, they were rewarded by the tax man. Bribes could be taken as deductions. According to journalist Martin Spiewak, telecommunications giant Siemens and metals conglomerate Klöckner paid $32 million to officers close to Indonesian dictator Suharto.

In 1997, a spokesman for the Social Democratic Party, Ingomar Hauchler, estimated that German companies spend $3 billion a year to grease the wheels of their businesses abroad. Officials justified the practice as protecting jobs and good trade relations, and they also invoked respect for cultural identity: buying favors is, after all, a way to respect the cultures of countries where corruption is customary.

The logic of the market imposes totalitarian dogmas on a global scale. Ignacio Ramonet, editor of Le Monda Diplomatique, calls them “globalitarian.” This logic has become a religion that obliges us all to follow its commandments: sit up straight, don’t raise your voice, do your chores without asking why. What time is it? Whatever you say, sir.

In the pummeled countries of the South, those on the bottom pay the piper but those on top call the tune, and the consequences are plain to see: hospitals without medicine, schools without roofs, food without subsidies. No judge can send a global system to jail for killing by hunger, but a crime is a crime even when it’s carried out as the most normal thing in the world. “Bread is life to the destitute, and to deprive them of it is murder,” says Ecclesiasticus, and as theologian Leonardo Boff points out, the market celebrates more human sacrifices than the Aztecs did at the Great Temple or the Canaanites before the idol of Moloch.

The globalitarian order steals with its trade hand what it lends with its finance hand. Tell me how much you sell and I’ll tell you what you’re worth. Latin America’s exports aren’t even 5 percent of the world’s total, and Africa’s add up to 2 percent; what the South buys costs more and more, and what it sells is worth less and less. To buy, governments go further and further into debt, and to comply with the usury on the loans, they sell grandma’s jewelry and then grandma herself.

The market gives the order and the state is privatized. Shouldn’t we rather “deprivatize” the state, seeing as it’s controlled by the international banking cartel and by local politicians who do nothing but slander it so they can unload it at bargain-basement prices? Trafficking in favors and handing out jobs in return for votes has distended the parasite-ridden bellies of Latin America’s governments. The insufferable “burrocracy” acts as a procurer, in the original sense of the word: two thousand years ago “procurator” referred to those who arranged administrative transactions in exchange for a tip. Thanks to such inefficiency and corruption, privatizations meet with the approval or indifference of public opinion.

Latin America’s countries are being denationalized at a dizzying pace, with the exception of Cuba and of Uruguay, where in a plebiscite at the end of 1992, 72 percent of the country voted to halt the sale of public enterprises. Presidents go about the world like traveling salesmen, selling what doesn’t belong to them. “My country is a product, I offer a product called Peru,” President Alberto Fujimori has proclaimed on more than one occasion.

Profits are privatized, losses are socialized. In 1990, President Carlos Menem ordered Aerolíneas Argentinas to die. That profitable public enterprise was sold or, better put, given away to another public enterprise, Spain’s Iberia, which was a model of poor administration. The Argentine airline’s national and international routes were ceded for one-fifteenth their value, and two Boeing 707 planes, still perfectly airworthy, were purchased for the modest price of $1.54 apiece.

On January 31, 1998, the Uruguayan daily El Observador congratulated the Brazilian government on its decision to sell the national telephone company, Telebras. On page 2, the paper applauded President Fernando Henrique Cardoso “for getting rid of companies and services that had become a burden on the treasury and on consumers.” On page 16 that day, the paper reported that Telebras, “the most profitable company in Brazil, last year made liquid profits of $3.9 billion, a record in the country’s history.”

The Brazilian government mobilized an army of 660 lawyers to defeat a fusillade of lawsuits against the privatization of Telebras, and it justified its program of denationalization by citing the need to show the world “signs that we are an open country.” Writer Luis Fernando Verissimo noted that such signs were “like the pointy caps they put on village idiots in the Middle Ages.”

THE POWER OF THE CASINO

They say astrology was invented to give the impression that economics is an exact science. Economists never know tomorrow why the predictions they made yesterday didn’t pan out today. It’s not their fault. Frankly, they’ve been left without much to do since the real economy closed up shop and made way for the virtual economy. Today, finance rules, and frenzy and speculation fall more into the bailiwick of psychiatrists than into that of economists.

The Rothschilds learned of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo by carrier pigeon. Now news travels faster than the speed of light, and flying alongside it on the computer screen is money. A ring worthy of Saturn spins wildly around the earth: the $2,000,000,000,000 that move on world financial markets every day. Of all those many zeros, so many you get dizzy looking at them, only a minuscule portion corresponds to commercial transactions or productive investments. In 1997, of every $100 in currency transactions, only $2.50 had anything to do with the exchange of goods and services. That same year, on the eve of the hurricane that battered stock markets in Asia and the world, the Malaysian government suggested a commonsense measure: outlawing currency trading for noncommercial purposes. The shouting of floor traders makes a lot of noise, and understandably those who benefit from currency speculation were deaf to the idea. In 1995, only three of the ten largest fortunes in Japan were linked to the real economy. The other seven multimillionaires were speculators.

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