Covering Up (II)

Meanwhile, in South Africa, everything is all right. We have plans, and structures, and there are people doing inventories to determine how well the municipalities are functioning, and issuing resolute statements about making sure that they function, and the same for the national departments — and so on.
And then there is the real world.
In the real world, South Africa’s economic condition, and the capacity for the government to improve the lives of its people, are both restrained by avoidable factors.
The economy is restrained by our very large trade deficit; we import more than we export and so we need money to pay for this. Therefore we have to attract funds from outside by keeping our interest rates relatively high so that people ship money here. Logically, we could cut back on imports by import substitution and tariffs, and by improving our manufacturing industry, but we are not doing this. High interest rates mean that the government cannot afford to borrow a lot of money because of the cost of servicing debt. What is more, our currency is floating, which means that to support its value relative to other currencies (if it falls, our trade deficit becomes even larger in rand terms, since we buy from other countries in their currency) we need to attract the money of foreigners, and once again this means keeping interest rates high. We could control our currency through exchange control, as indeed we used to, and as China does, but we are not doing this.
What is often called service delivery is restrained by the fact that our civil service is very often incompetent and corrupt. As a result, money supplied to them at all levels is very often stolen or wasted. In addition, money is often not spent on important things, such as infrastructure maintenance, due to bad planning. (This is not a capacity problem; nobody is so ignorant as to think that buildings or machines do not need maintenance. It is incompetence, a failure to perform duties which those responsible could perform if they wished to do so.)
What is to be done about this incompetence and corruption? South Africa is not nineteenth-century Russia. It is not impossible for the central government to act against misbehaviour. The central government has the power, and it has, or ought to have, the desire. There are thus two major issues: to promote the desire for civil servants at all levels to take pride and responsibility in a job done to the best of one’s ability, and the fear of civil servants at all levels that if the job is done demonstrably less well than it could have been done, they will be punished in some way appropriate to their malfeasance.
On the face of it, this is what is being done. Municipalities are being asked to report on their performance of their duties. Ministers are denouncing the ineptitude of the officials in their ministries. There is now a special Ministry for evaluating performance. Surely, this means that all these problems will soon be things of the past.
Unfortunately, one cannot, should not and must not be “sure” about such things. There is no sign that the Ministry for evaluating performance is actually doing anything at all. This Ministry has been separated from the Ministry for deciding what should be performed, so there is no reason for the two to cooperate (and the SACP and COSATU are encouraging them to fight each other). As a result, the evaluation of performance, which is of course central to any effort to restrain incompetence and corruption and promote corruption and honesty, is not happening and probably will not happen.
The municipalities are being asked to report on themselves. This means that the people responsible for mismanagement and corruption, and best-informed as to how to cover it up, have been tasked with reporting on this mismanagement and corruption. Some of them have been exposed by the Auditor-General, the boss bean-counter in the government, and so they know exactly what needs to be excused and covered for.
Of course there will have to be sacrifices and scapegoats, for sometimes things cannot be covered up. Sometimes the people sacrificed and scapegoated may even be people responsible for misbehaviour. Often, however, this will not be the case. This is because ambitious people within the municipalities want to turn this crusade to their advantage; to gain jobs, they can accuse the people whose jobs they want of incompetence and corruption. The central government will be only too happy to dismiss those people in order to be seen to be acting. If, later, the evidence is wanting, and if the successor to the dismissed person is equally — or more — incompetent and corrupt, this is unlikely to get into the media.
As a result, the process currently under way is almost guaranteed to make matters worse. The reason for this is that the people at the top are corrupt and are interested only in images rather than substance. It is always easier to pretend to act, by accusing individuals, than to genuinely act by trying to change the way the system functions — to bring provincial and municipal cabals and warlords under the authority of the central state. What’s more, the biggest of these cabals, the SACP/COSATU axis, enjoys the support of the press, and the people at the top are terrified of the press. Thus the ruling class’s divide-and-rule policies are paying off in terms of corruption — which benefits a lot of the ruling class, since they are the ones paying the bribes in exchange for special treatment, and obtaining the contracts for inferior work performed, and constantly demanding that more and more of the public service be transformed into corporate cash-cows. Ultimately, therefore, the people at the top are afraid of people potentially more powerful than they are — the real ruling class.
This is also the reason why the government has no intention of turning our ramshackle fiscal policy structure into something which makes South Africa’s and its currency relatively impervious to foreign domination; the ruling class makes a lot of money out of that foreign domination.
So it appears that we are muddling along, under the cloak, provided by the press, of magnificent, if ultimately vain, heroic combat against the evil forces of corruption (who are all in the government, of course — in the press there is no such thing as private corruption, unless some rich person complains about being ripped off by some less rich person).
But in the real world we are not muddling along. The problem is twofold; these rich people do not want to pay for the services which the government provides them, and they want as much as they can get out of the government. Meanwhile, the SACP/COSATU axis, since it no longer commands any ideological allegiance, needs to bribe people into supporting them, and the government naturally goes along with this. As a result, tax revenues are falling much faster than the economic crisis justifies, suggesting that the government’s capacity to collect taxes is declining. But meanwhile, the plan is to spend more. This year the government intends to borrow somewhere between 7 and 8% of gross domestic product in order to fund its operations — that’s up from 2% last year, and a surplus before that. What’s more, this rate of borrowing is expected to increase in the next few years.
Well, isn’t that what Keynes ordered in order to spend our way out of a recession? That would be true if the money were going to the poor, but by and large it is going on conventional expenditure. In other words, there is no plan to improve the economy — it is simply that we are not earning enough to pay for what we are doing. Under such conditions, a sensible move would be to increase income and corporate taxes, especially upon the highest earners, but that isn’t going to happen.
So, with our relatively high interest rates, borrowing all this money means that in the following year the high budget deficit has left us with a need to service additional debt; if the interest rate is 14%, a deficit of 7% of GDP one year would entail paying 1% of GDP servicing that debt the next year. Actually it’s worse than that, because this year the economy is contracting. Next year, if we wanted to do the same, our deficit might be 7,5% of a reduced GDP, plus the extra 1% for debt servicing, pushing the deficit up to 8,5%. Which could entail paying 1,2% of debt servicing the next year, and even if the economy grows next year at, say, 3%, that would only increase revenue enough to push the deficit down to 8,2% — but the extra debt servicing would push that up to 9,4%.
It’s a spiral of growing expenditure and rapidly-expanding debt, without any clear way to improve economic performance. It almost exactly reverses the trend which the ANC undertook between 1994 and 2002, where the policy was to reduce the debt by restraining expenditure until the deficit no longer posed a problem and more money became available. At that time, many argued that this policy would lead to economic collapse due to slow growth, but that did not happen. Now, in contrast, a policy of unrestrained expenditure is not generating rapid growth. One reason for this is that (much as in the United States) too much of our consumer spending goes on imports, so increasing the affluence of the bourgeoisie does not generate a “multiplier effect” through their buying stuff which South Africans make. Another probable reason is that much of this spending is going into the pockets of the corrupt.
This sort of situation almost inevitably ends in collapse (as in Argentina) unless drastic economic measures are taken. One drastic solution is to take the policy decisions outlined above which would enable us to cut our interest rates — thus reducing the impact of government borrowing. Obviously that isn’t going to happen, for the reasons also outlined above. Another drastic solution will be to, once again, restrain expenditure. The last time we did this was under GEAR, when the ANC was having to sort out the mess created in the last decade of apartheid. GEAR was workable, but it wasn’t pretty; it left a huge backlog of infrastructural needs which were not altogether sorted out in the boom years of 2003-7. Do we really want to go through that again?
Maybe. There’s a lot of excited talk about abolishing social grants. We know that the Minister of Public Enterprises is a privatisation fetishist. It’s at least possible that this much-touted “left” move, jacking up the deficit with no clear idea of what can be done with it, is actually a Trojan Horse to introduce serious right-wing, neoliberal policies. That would be consistent with the general behaviour of our beloved government, covered up endlessly with manure from the media.
Unless, of course, most likely of all, they simply haven’t a clue what to do next apart from shovelling other people’s money in all directions and hoping nobody asks questions . . .

Covering Up. (I)

“The captain is in his bunk, drinking bottled ditch-water; and the crew is gambling in the forecastle. She will strike and sink and split. Do you think the laws of God will be suspended in favour of England because you were born in it?”

That’s one of the Creator’s favourite quotations, Captain Shotover’s voice from Shaw’s Heartbreak House, and one of that old vegetarian hoopla artiste’s few true prophecies. When you are in big trouble, run and hide. Delay, deny and deceive. And, above all, do your best to cover it up and hope nobody notices.
Is it, then, big trouble now for the United States? One hopes so. The great laid low make for good television. Lefties the world over have been panting for something bad to happen, partly because they hope to profit by it (though they are not now, and never have been, prepared to lift a finger to earn such profits) and partly because they hope such a collapse would make up for all their failures of nerve, thought and (much more rarely) action.
Take a quick look at Central Asia. The Americans are in occupation of an immense country of thirty million people, most of whom loathe and despise foreigners in general, most particularly Christian foreigners, especially Americans. They are being killed like flies as they scatter across the mountainous redoubts, and make up for this by sending in the gunships and the drones to slaughter wedding parties and gatherings of goatherds. What’s to be done?
President Obama appears to have the answer: foment civil war in Pakistan. Once the Pakistani government is sufficiently unpopular with its people, it will have to control them by terrorism. The soft people of the plains are invading the mountains to butcher the hard people of the hills. Do that often enough, and the war will become so serious that the plain people of Pakistan, hopes Obama, will have to take charge of the war in Afghanistan, too. That’s why they’re massacring civilians from Swat to Waziristan — all those places which we remember from nineteenth-century British imperial history.
Oh — massacring civilians in Pakistan, like doing the same in Afghanistan, is of course a very good way to encourage the survivors to join the resistance. There are a hundred and forty million people in Pakistan, most of whom are gradually growing pissed off with their government. Suicide bombs are exploding in the cities of the plain, matching the roadside bombs going off in the mountains.
All this is very politically convenient for Obama.
Where does a wise man hide a leaf? In a forest. Where does a wise man hide a book? In a library. Where does a wise man hide a war?
In a bigger war. And so Obama hopes that in the catastrophic bloodbath engulfing the region, everybody in the United States will gradually lose focus on Afghanistan and thus he will be able to escape political destruction at the hands of his commitment there. It could get rather big, of course — the vast shipments of arms now going to Pakistan are provided on the understanding that they won’t be used on India, although how that is going to be guaranteed, nobody knows. Meanwhile, the Americans are quietly running a terrorist campaign in south-east Iran through an organisation called the Jundallah, which operates out of Pakistan. Yea, verily Pakistan is making itself popular in the region, as is the United States. Maybe they will need their nukes yet.
But all that serves to pull only one of Obama’s chestnuts out of the electric blast furnace. There is, unfortunately, another one. This is the much bigger war between classes in the United States, and especially the war between the American ruling class and reality.
What happened in 2008 was that very large corporations and financial institutions had been surviving for a decade on deceit, incompetence and luck. The luck ran out, the deceit was exposed, the incompetence was there for all to see. These corporations and institutions should therefore, according to the rules of economics, have collapsed, and in fact a few did so.
There were, however, problems. There was pious concern about these institutions being “too big to fail” — of course they had already failed, so this was nonsense. However, there was much media hype around the collapse of the banking system in the early 1930s, when the buckets and benches were being kicked over from coast to coast and millions lost their life savings. At that time, something had to be done (what was done was the introduction of a system of banking regulation, which the banks spent the next few decades circumventing and dismantling). Today, however, Americans don’t have savings, for they are mostly heavily in debt. They owe big money to the banks — this was part of the problem, for Americans no longer had the cash to service their debts to the banks. Hence, if the banks failed, average Americans would become much richer. But the people who owned the banks would lose their incomes, and the people who owned the banks also owned the U.S. government, most particularly two tools of the financial service industry, Governor George Bush and Senator Barack Obama.
What was done was to borrow immense amounts of money — many trillions of dollars — and give virtually all of it to the banks and the failing companies (a few billions were earmarked for other projects as window-dressing, though it is not clear how much was paid). A trillion dollars is three thousand dollars for every American. The kind of money Bush and Obama were splashing around would have rescued every working-class and lower-middle-class American’s savings account. But instead it was going to a tiny minority who proceeded to use the money to further their private interests — protecting banks and corporations from the consequences of their mismanagement and greed. As a result the banks and corporations went ahead and did what one might expect them to do — pay their top managers huge bonuses and shut down their least profitable enterprises, which were usually to do with manufacturing and services to the general public.
So the “bailout” accelerated the rise in unemployment, which is now at levels not seen since the slump of the 1940s. Officially it’s around 11%, but unemployment figures have been fudged for decades and probably the real figure is something like 15%. Not up at Great Depression or South African levels yet, but still, the trend is in that direction.
An obvious consequence of the bailout which nobody mentioned was that the U.S. government was creating money without creating extra production. This means that they were creating inflation. This didn’t show up at first, because the money was going to such a narrow group of people, but gradually the cost of living in America has started to rise and the international value of the dollar has started falling.
Bonehead economics would tell you that this should be good for America, since now it can sell its goods cheaply. Unfortunately, America doesn’t manufacture much that the world wants. Also, the rest of the world is also in recession and therefore isn’t buying much. Even more unfortunately, big American companies used the crisis as an excuse to shut down some manufacturing industry which they considered unprofitable. So, as the dollar falls, the result is that the dollar cost of imports — the trade deficit — gets bigger. Prices go up for American consumers, so possibly they will eventually buy less (especially since they can no longer borrow as they used to) but that means they have to get used to a lower standard of living (those who have jobs at all). Hence they have less money for services which have been America’s biggest job-creators. Obama and Bush have saved the stock exchange for the moment, but it looks as if they have ruined everything else.
This is because of international confidence. America has operated the world’s reserve currency, the dollar, meaning the currency which other countries fell back on for security when their own currencies became unstable. But the American currency is not stable; it has been free-floating since 1971. That only worked because America had the power to rig the world’s money-markets in the dollar’s favour. What now seems to be happening is that this power is dwindling fast.
In the last decade there has been much talk about many countries moving away from dependence on the dollar, but this was mostly nationalist hype due to the well-founded detestation which most people felt for the American government. It wasn’t supported by global banks. But now it is starting to look as if the dollar is no longer a particularly sound investment. It is blindingly clear that the American financial industry, their biggest foreign earner, has absolutely no idea what it is doing and cannot be trusted to deliver the goods. International banks are heavily invested in that industry, so they cannot pull out overnight, but increasingly, they probably would want to. Hence new talk about moving towards the euro or the yen or the renmenbi makes economic sense as well as political sense.
But if America loses control of the world’s financial markets and the dollar falls, there is no sign that it can recover its lost manufacturing industry. The financial system in America has been exposed as a bunch of incompetent crooks, but partly thanks to Bush and Obama it is powerful enough to continue running the show. Obama happily and repeatedly supported financial aid to the American insurance industry which has prevented him from introducing a sane health-care policy (his current plan reproduces most of the flaws of the present system, except that the medical-legal-insurance complex will soon be more able to bleed the American taxpayer as well as the sick and injured). Basically, the American elite does not want to be a competitive country; they want to make money and would be happy doing this anywhere else in the world.
Unfortunately, without financial muscle, and with their military muscle increasingly inept, demoralised, under-equipped and dispersed across half a dozen worthless little wars, it does not look as if being an uncompetitive country is going to be a winning strategy for the United States. These are the little facts which President Obama has to cover up with his rhetoric of hope and his live webcam footage of his kids playing with their new puppy. Maybe he can get away with it for the three years he has left — so long as there are no more economic shocks in store. History, however, suggests that there are such shocks, and that he won’t get away with it.

Trying Times.

This week Jackie Selebi went on trial for corruption and defeating the ends of justice. Selebi was the Commissioner of the South African Police Service until the beginning of 2008, when he was sent on special leave after being charged. The allegation is that the businessman (who turns out to have certainly been a drug smuggler and probably a murderer) Glenn Agliotti, who was certainly Selebi’s friend, bribed Selebi in order to protect him from police investigations. (There may be other allegations, but Agliotti was the principal witness in the trial.)
It’s bad enough, isn’t it? The top cop in the country is chummy with a man who turned out to be a crook. He publicly declared that he didn’t accept that Agliotti was a crook and stood by the man until he was arrested. He refused to resign even though he was linked with someone who turned out to be, effectively, a gangster. Ouchie. On the other hand, of course, it’s not criminal to be friends with a crook. Lots of other ANC people were friends with Agliotti, although not a lot has been made of this.
Then again, lots and lots of ANC people were friends with Brett Kebble, who was another friend of Agliotti’s. (Agliotti allegedly murdered Kebble, or ordered Kebble’s murder. The Scorpions, before they were disbanded, blackmailed Agliotti into testifying against Selebi in exchange for his not being charged with Kebble’s murder.) Indeed, the Deputy Minister of Police, Fikile Mbalula, was previously the President of the ANC Youth League, at the time when it was sponsored by Kebble. And it transpires that Kebble was a crook; not only did he plunder the pension fund, but apparently he knew that Agliotti was a crook, and worked with him, setting up a secret bank account from which bribes could be paid to Selebi. But nobody is saying that the Deputy Minister of Police, having taken money from a known criminal, is therefore unfit to be Deputy Minister of Police. It would seem that there is a double standard operating.
Of course that doesn’t mean that Selebi should be left alone. Better to try someone than nobody, one might say; the others might be tried later. On the other hand, why was Selebi singled out for investigation? Is there a political agenda operating here, or is it just coincidence? Obviously, Selebi’s defense will try to make much of this. But are there grounds?
Well, firstly, we know that someone was out to get Selebi from the moment he was appointed. There was a big fuss about nothing when he got the job, supposed claims that he was unfit, or that he had foolishly said things which the white press didn’t like. He was the first black man to hold the job, which maybe had something to do with it.
Secondly, there was a lot of odd behaviour around his investigation and eventual charging. Selebi was threatened with being charged for more than a year before he was charged. The force investigating him — the Directorate of Special Operations of the Public Prosecutor’s Office — eventually obtained arrest warrants and search warrants in a manner which suggested a publicity stunt. That led to the dismissal of the Public Prosecutor, whose successor then charged Selebi in January 2008. He came to trial in October 2009 — a delay of 21 months. This delay is remarkable, especially considering that Selebi was all in favour of being tried. It was the state which delayed matters, claiming that it was not ready yet — in which case, why did it charge him? What if there had happened to be a vacant court the day after Selebi was arrested — the DSO would have been terribly humiliated if it had taken this huge step for nothing.
As a result, there are grounds for wondering what is going on, and yet there are also grounds for suspecting that Selebi might be guilty. It’s not impossible (of course, the former Commissioner Fivaz may well have been corrupt, too, to judge by his private detective agency’s habit of hiring organised criminals to do their dirty work, but nobody investigated him, possibly because he was white and had powerful connections in the white oligarchy) but how can we be sure?
Undeniably, Agliotti in the witness-box painted a grim picture for Selebi, initially. He claimed that he had bribed Selebi, in exchange for which Selebi had protected him against police investigation over his crimes, particularly his drug smuggling. The bribes sounded substantial; at first he claimed to have paid a million rand, but subsequently it transpired that there was more; according to Agliotti he had been paid a million US dollars, or something like eight or nine million rand at the time, by Brett Kebble to provide access to Selebi. Billy Rautenbach, road haulage entrepreneur and mysterious fugitive from justice (as well as friend to the Zimbabwean government) supposedly paid a fifth as much for similar access. There was reference to a bank account which Agliotti helped to set up and partly controlled which had twenty-eight million rand in it, to be disbursed at Selebi’s request.
All this sounds painfully like the trial of Schabir Shaik, where similar information about bribes and access were revealed relating to the Deputy President and the Minister of Transport and sleazy businessmen around the Shaik family. In other words, it sounds as if Selebi is a terrific crook like Shaik and Zuma and Maharaj (and let’s not forget that Zuma and Maharaj were appointed by Mbeki, who also appointed Selebi — either Mbeki is a really lousy judge of people, a crook himself, or else he had a rather limited pool of honest talent available).
But of course there is the problem that Agliotti is himself a crook, which means that he might not be telling the truth. Also, Agliotti is confessedly under tremendous pressure, having been given the alternative of putting Selebi in jail or spending the rest of his natural life behind bars (in theory — the example of Schabir Shaik shows what cash and connections can do given the corruption in Correctional Services).
Plus, there is also the striking absence of hard evidence. Actual evidence of Agliotti giving Selebi money, and Selebi doing actual favours for Agliotti, seems lacking here. Perhaps it will come later, but it seems odd that the star witness doesn’t make reference to such things. Indeed, the evidence which Agliotti provides suggests that many people wanted to bribe Selebi, but didn’t actually show that people had done so, or that Selebi had done much in return — certainly, if Rautenbach had bribed Selebi, Selebi did signally little in return for the cash. What, precisely, was Kebble bribing Selebi to do for him? Was Selebi investigating Kebble, and if so, what about? Fraudulent prospectuses? Insider trading? Income tax evasion? Or something smellier? (And all these things were precisely what the Scorpions were set up to investigate, of course, but seem not to have done much in respect of until Kebble was shot dead in his car — not that the police investigation was competent, of course.)
The only truly damning indication was that Agliotti said that Selebi had shown him secret documentation about the British government’s monitoring of Agliotti and about the National Intelligence Agency’s espionage on Selebi. That was definitely illegal, and would probably justify the charge of defeating the ends of justice.
And then there came Agliotti’s performance under cross-examination. Rather suddenly he acted as if a victim of the Stockholm Syndrome. Having been a captive of the Scorpions he was abruptly captivated by Selebi’s lawyers. No, he said, Selebi had, as far as he knew, never known that he was a criminal and had always believed that he was an honest businessman, guv’nor. But then in that case where was the corruption? If Selebi didn’t know that Agliotti was a crook then Selebi couldn’t have been corrupted by him. Agliotti abruptly retracted all claims of having actually paid bribes to Selebi (which had been insinuated and hinted at earlier). Then what had he set up that account for? If bribes have been paid to Selebi and there is hard evidence of it (like what the Scorpions had against Zuma) then how could Agliotti possibly withdraw his evidence like that — won’t he later be charged with perjury when the facts come out? Or doesn’t he know?
We shall have to see. Apparently Selebi’s lawyers are going to say that Selebi did not show Agliotti that secret documentation because Selebi did not have the documentation at the time Agliotti claims he was shown it. If Selebi’s lawyers can prove that, it looks very bad for Agliotti; maybe the Public Prosecutor will end up charging him with Kebble’s murder after all. (Although if Agliotti did what he was told, can he be charged? How do plea-bargains work — is the bargain null and void if the case collapses through no direct fault of the bargainer’s?) But also, if Agliotti was lying about that, who told him to lie? Surely it wouldn’t have been his own idea. It must have been something which he was primed to say.
We shall have to wait and see. It is tremendously unpleasant stuff. If Selebi is guilty then it means our boss policeman was a bad guy. But if Selebi is innocent, then it means that the Scorpions have framed him. Why did they do that? Who told them to do that? Certainly not Mbeki, who seems to have done his best to protect Selebi. We shall probably never know; if the case against Selebi collapses there will almost certainly be a huge cover-up and an out-of-court settlement to conceal the people who trumped up the charges. Zuma and his merry men will declare that the fact that charges are trumped up somewhere proves that the charges against them were trumped up, whereas if Selebi turns out to be a crook they will say that this proves that the criminal justice system which tried to charge them could not be trusted; they can’t lose.
Unfortunately, it also seems that we can’t win.

Situating the District.

District 9 is an extremely interesting film, one which, naturally, everybody has tried to co-opt for their own purposes and nobody has attempted to honestly politically analyse. (If anyone is capable of honest political analysis, they are hiding the fact remarkably well.)
Broadly speaking, the movie is about some aliens who are stranded in Johannesburg by the breakdown of their gigantic spacecraft. For some reason they can neither help themselves nor seek help from elsewhere, so they throw themselves upon the mercy of the humans, which proves to be somewhat strained in its quality.
In the movie, it is twenty years after the aliens were dumped in a slum called District 9; following massive public protests and violent clashes, they are to be forcibly moved to a distant resettlement camp, District 10. The aliens are slightly mysterious; they have enormous technical powers, but they choose not to exercise these, or perhaps they cannot (at one point it is hinted that the aliens who survived the breakdown of their spacecraft are the inferiors and hence are incapable of independent action).
The ambiguity of the affair is that the aliens arrived in 1982 and the movie is set in 2002, although filmed in 2008. Meanwhile, the aliens are under the authority of an apparent state bureaucracy, but the real power lies with the mysterious Multi-National United, which has its own private army (the First Battalion). These forces are almost all white; even the mercenary troops are mainly whites, apart from a couple of ineffectual Africans. Has the arrival of the aliens prevented the liberation of South Africa?
That’s not clear at all. On the other hand, the ill-treatment of the aliens by the locals (and vice-versa) is almost invariably shown through images of blacks. The whites are safe from the aliens, safe rather to exploit whatever they have to offer (which is purely military). Blacks have to deal with the aliens. This makes the whole affair seem rather like immigration, and to relate to the “xenophobic” violence of 2008.
Perhaps to take the curse off this, the bulk of the trouble is blamed on the “Nigerians”. This is a bit odd, since South African shacklands are not exactly overpopulated with Nigerians. For fairly obvious reasons, the Nigerians who have come to South Africa tend to be fairly affluent people. On the other hand, Nigerians are probably the only African grouping about whom South Africans feel real xenophobia, attributing to them a massive degree of criminality (very obvious in the “Madam and Eve” comic strip, where references were made to “District 419″ and to Nigerians being willing to drop their hostility to the movie in exchange for PIN numbers and banking details). This xenophobia is not normally based on personal experience (though admittedly some Nigerian gangsters have arrived in South Africa and are undeniably extremely scary people). It is possible that the South African government, which must have helped in the making of the film (dozens of South African military armoured vehicles, as well as military and police helicopters, all resprayed with Multi-National United’s logo, are employed) insisted that the bad guys not be South Africans — but of course this only complicated the problem.
So how to analyse what all this really means behind the hype? Is it a reflection of apartheid activities, or xenophobia, or the post-apartheid state’s behaviour? Conceivably it is a conflation of all of these.
The premise of the movie is not plausible. Granted it is an interesting notion (a poor nation flooded with desperate alien refugees) but for one thing, what would the aliens eat? Mercifully they breathe air, and presumably drink water, but their biochemistry would surely be different from ours. (Hence their capacity to get high on cat food.) But even if they could eat our food usefully, how would they obtain it? If the government were to provide them with food and shelter, it would certainly have demanded something in return, and all that the aliens have in the movie is labour. But it is nowhere suggested that they are doing anything — there are no “prawn” sweatshops or workfarms. All they have to trade is guns, which for some reason they have immense amounts of (but seemingly cannot replace). It is as if refugees come to a country and then just sit there, absorbing but not producing.
So the movie is mystifying the refugee situation, and simultaneously mystifying xenophobia (as the term itself does). The assumption is that the locals will hate the aliens because they look funny. They certainly look funny enough, with their barnacle heads and crayfish hands, and they are intimidating and irritating (grabbing whatever they can get from humans and bounding around like jackrabbits, since they come from a high-gravity planet). This is not, by and large, the reason why South Africans dislike foreigners (since we all look rather similar) although it is very much a part of the reason why white South Africans discriminated against black South Africans (funny-looking people who jumped around and did not respect our property rights). So maybe the movie is more about apartheid than about xenophobia, and therefore District 10 becomes something like moving the inhabitants of Crossroads out to Khayelitsha.
That helps to explain the whiteness of the rulers of the country. Interestingly, this erases black South Africans almost absolutely. They exist only in the background of the central character, a caricatured Afrikaner bureaucrat. It also virtually erases politics. The aliens have no objective; apart from one alien who has the mysterious substance which wi

Brown Battalions and a Brown World.

Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction is a fairly odd book for a number of reasons. The chief reason for this is the subject-matter. The history of the Nazi state, like every other issue around which the Western ruling class has a guilty conscience (which is most, these days) is planted thick with taboos. You are not supposed to talk objectively about that history; you must identify yourself with the ruling-class line, meaning that you must begin by establishing yourself as a Zionist and an anti-Communist; thus the Nazis were bad because they killed the Jews and not because they killed the Slavs. You must also not discuss the way in which the West used the Nazis, before, during and after the war, against the Left. Therefore it is almost impossible to discuss ideology, policy or the implementation of that policy (apart from the Holocaust, but you have to be careful, in discussing that, for it is easy to accidentally say things which Zionists won’t like).
A J P Taylor’s The Origins of the Second World War was heretical simply because it attempted to analyse the foreign and diplomatic policy of the Nazi state as if it were any other state. Using this material, Taylor concluded that the Nazis almost certainly had not possessed a clear plan of action; that their territorial expansion was opportunistic and inept, and that they blundered into war with the West without anticipating or desiring it. This is plausible, although Taylor over-eggs his pudding (he soft-pedals the very clear indications that the Nazis definitely wanted a shooting war with Poland, though they had known for five months that this would very probably lead to war with the West, as it did — and the fact that they established the Nazi-Soviet Pact beforehand was clearly insurance against a war with the East as well). The point about Taylor’s analysis, however, was to torpedo the notion that Hitler was a uniquely evil person simply because everybody had said so at the Nürnburg trials.
(It should be pointed out that not only the Right are idiots in this respect; recently two British Trotskyites, Andy Newman and Richard Seymour, virtually came to blows over the question of whether anyone should have supported Winston Churchill during the Second World War. Seymour felt that Britain should rather have lost the war because it was a capitalist war and true socialists had a duty to refuse to fight. To be fair, Seymour also seemingly feels that the Soviet Union should have lost the war because Stalin was bad; that is, the Soviet Union should not have wasted so much energy on militarising and then its people would have had a much better time of it — apart from the probability of a fascist coup in the early 1930s and the extermination of the inhabitants in the 1940s, of course, but you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, murdering the kitchen staff, burning down the restaurant and bulldozing the rubble. All this does not make Seymour an absolute idiot or Newman a genius or Churchill a democrat, but it does show what ideological bigotry can accomplish when matched with money-sheltered ignorance.)
The thing which Tooze does is to perform essentially the same procedure in economic analysis. What did the Nazis want to do? What did they say, and what actions did they take? What limits restrained their activities? How would a rational actor have acted in pursuit of those goals and under those circumstances?
Another advantage which Tooze has is that, unlike Taylor and many British historians before the 1980s, his horizons are not limited to Europe but expand to include the United States. Between 1945 and 1979 Britain continually pretended that it was not a satellite of the United States; only after Thatcher came to power was this satellite status turned into a badge of self-fantasised glory. As a result, Tooze can acknowledge that the Nazis were very worried about, and also envious of, the Americans. Comparison between the Nazis’ performance and the Americans’ performance is extremely politically helpful to Tooze, because it enables his critics to see him as pro-American; if he says nice things about America, he must be “one of us”, and therefore such American propagandists as Niall Ferguson, not to speak of the Daily Telegraph, happily endorse him.
Of course, this shows the shallow ignorance of Tooze’s critics but that should come as no surprise to anyone who has ever read either Ferguson or the Telegraph.
The gist of Tooze’s argument is contained in the simple fact that Germany wanted to be an independent actor but lacked the energy to do so. By the 1920s, Germany had a great economic potential which it could not easily realise because the global economy was controlled by an Anglo-American financial axis. At the same time, because of grotesque maldistribution of wealth, Germany had trouble with indigenous growth; Germans were producing for export rather than for a domestic market, and it was politically difficult to pursue genuine redistribution (nor did the left-wing parties in Germany have any clear idea what that meant, although the Left brownshirts seem to have had some idea). Germany’s economic growth in the 1930s was based on American portfolio investment, which evaporated like a will-o’-the-wisp when the American economy collapsed between 1928 and 1931. Meanwhile, Germany could not be considered truly independent because it was militarily weak and surrounded by militarily strong nations which forbade it to expand its armed forces.
Wow. Does that remind one of anything? Very clearly, it is the contemporary situation of any ambitious impoverished nation today. Foreign financiers prise open the currency market and thus constantly raise the spectre of inflation (which paralyses the central bank). Domestic financiers are in thrall to foreign capitalists while domestic manufacturers and miners madly chase an export drive as commodity, goods and service prices plummet. The ruling class wants so large a slice of the national income that it obstructs all efforts to build an internal market, preferring foreign imports (shoving up the current account deficit). And, of course, there is the constant threat of foreign invasion if the government tries anything funny, while a whole panoply of dictated treaties and rigged “international agencies” serve as means and pretext for interference in internal affairs to prevent the government from expanding its armed forces — most particularly, from developing weapons of mass destruction (in the 1930s aircraft fulfilled the same role as nukes today).
It’s no wonder that the Americans and their puppets invariably invoke Hitler whenever they are planning aggression and genocide against some weak state. Hitler is, quite bizarrely, what Noam Chomsky once called the “threat of a good example” — simply because Hitler’s regime managed to effectively break out of the ring. Germany bought off its opponents with fraudulent currency and then made the currency real by a massive programme of national development. Tooze makes everything clear; the Nazis really were concerned with socio-economic development even though their big goal was to spend on armaments. They were also constantly concerned with their lack of foreign exchange, and managed it by doing barter deals with other impoverished countries (much as Zimbabwe managed its own foreign exchange crisis this century) along with utterly ruthless exchange control regulations, which are almost always the sign of a poor country trying to go places.
Most particularly, the Nazis managed to promote industrial development by allowing profits to float free, but then obstructing dividends. You could make as much money as you wanted, so long as you didn’t put it in your own pocket or that of the shareholders. This harnessed the natural greed of capitalism — every capitalist wants profits, and with trade unions abolished profits were easy to come by — but made financialisation impossible. (The leftist and anti-Semitic elements of the Nazis were united against usury, which meant they were suspicious of banks.) As a result, since you couldn’t import goodies and you couldn’t stuff your pockets, all you could do was reinvest your capital productively, and the Nazis were only too eager to help you do this — both investment and return on investment soared in the late 1930s to unprecedented heights, and the investment was especially on hi-tech industry; aviation, synthetic chemicals and machine tools. But for the war, Germany would have dominated Europe in the 1940s.
Tooze observes that all this was happening sustainably, but that military activity was not so sustainable. By about 1940 the Nazis were hitting the buffers because they didn’t have the personpower to run agriculture and industry simultaneously. (Contrary to propaganda, German women were much more fully employed than British; Nazi misogyny was real, but not significant as a brake on production.) In addition, they now had five million people in uniform and were frenetically trying to equip these ramshackle armed forces — focussing only on army and air force, since they knew they had no chance of building a world-class navy). They had set themselves production targets which could not possibly be met given their resources. As a result, Tooze argues, going to war in late 1939 was probably inevitable; had they waited, they would have had to scale back their plans and the Anglo-French forces, backed by the United States, would have surged ahead of them and made war increasingly dodgy.
Tooze also argues that the invasion of the USSR was equally inevitable. Here he is probably on shakier ground. Had the Nazi state really focussed its attention on crushing the United Kingdom after June 1940, it could probably have conquered Britain in 1941. Deciding instead to wage a strictly limited war against the UK while preparing for unlimited war against the USSR gave the UK time to weaken the Italians beyond hope and to build up solid defenses as an ultimate American base for invasion of the Continent. As it turned out, the failure to conquer the USSR meant that the war was lost by November 1941, the rest being essentially detail.
Once Germany was prepared to be a loyal and obedient satellite of the United States it could realise many of its goals within the narrow confines of U.S. policy. However, it appears that this was a temporary issue. The Americans did not anticipate that Germany and Japan would develop as rapidly as they did; on the other hand, the Americans, because of their military monopoly, were able to prevent Germany from developing genuine independence. More than sixty years after defeat, Germany has no more real autonomy than Haiti or Samoa. Meanwhile, the United States does what it can to crush or co-opt any other autonomous nations.
Which, then, seems to be the message which Tooze is providing for us. On one hand, independence requires a determination to act with independence. On the other, powerful states will obviously try to prevent this. Germany managed, for seven years, to use a combination of economic and military muscle to develop a degree of independence, but then lost this, probably irretrievably, over the following five years. This was not because Nazi Germany was specially evil (even though in many ways it was). Germany’s failure was a natural product of the political and economic conditions in which it operated. It may have ascribed British, American and Soviet hostility to mad fantasies of Jewish, Freemason and Bolshevik conspiracies which did not actually exist, but the hostility was real.
The point is that surrender is failure, and unthinking resistance is also failure. Tooze’s message is that one needs both to acknowledge economic and diplomatic factors if one wants to be a successful nation, and therefore balance national interest against what is actually attainable. The Nazis ultimately attempted too much and thus failed. What this means for the nascent anti-American coalition of the twenty-first century is curious and intriguing. It also appears, now that South Africa is dropping out of that quasi- imaginary coalition, that South Africa is undertaking to finally lose the race for national independence.

Whence did the Weirdness Come?

Quite recently, the Democratic Alliance spokesperson for Defense and Military Veterans (although the
DA does not give two hoots for military veterans, it has copied the rather silly title given the job by
Zuma and his boys) made a shocking announcement. The announcement was that South Africa was
supplying arms to dictatorial governments That brought the house down, or at least it was supposed to.
The horror, the horror!
Now, before we have to start changing our trousers from the shock, let’s think for a moment about the
crime of supplying arms to dictatorial governments. The biggest single arms deal in British history was
the Al Yamamah deal with Saudi Arabia, which is an absolute monarchy. Another massive British deal
was the supply of warships to the Argentinian Navy at the time when Argentina was controlled by a
military junta led by General Galtieri. (Ironically, those weapons were later used against the British
Navy.) France has supplied warships to apartheid South Africa, and warplanes to Libya and Iraq. Italy
supplied warplanes to apartheid South Africa and would doubtless have supplied them more widely had
anyone else wanted them. The United States has armed up such paragons of democracy as Indonesia
under Suharto, Greece under Papadopolous, and Uzbekistan under whoever could be found to accept
the weapons.
So it seems as if supplying arms to dictatorships is pretty much par for the course in arms deals. One
may, of course, say that because the West does it doesn’t make it right, and that is perfectly true. On the
other hand, dictatorships come and go, as South Africa has experienced, and the weapons remain.
(Indeed, the West forced our apartheid junta to dismantle its nuclear weapons so that they would not fall
into the hands of a democratic but black government, which could not be trusted with such toys.) Also,
even dictatorships might need to defend their country; the USSR in June 1941 was a dictatorship which
needed all the help it could get.
So our Conventional Arms Control Committee (why are only conventional arms controlled — do we
intend to sell nukes, germs and gas to all and sundry?) follows fairly strict rules. Don’t sell arms to
countries which are engaged in wars or in civil wars. Don’t sell arms which are likely to engage in wars
or civil wars. Then, if the arms get used in the end, you can at least say that you didn’t expect it.
Of course, these rules are ground rules. They can be bent at the pleasure of the government’s foreign
policy. For instance, when Haiti was invaded by American-backed gunmen in 2003, South Africa tried
to send them a shipment of arms (though the Americans had kidnapped President Aristide before they
arrived). The inverse of that is where South Africa sold the Americans a shipment of armoured
personnel carriers, knowing that these would be used in the occupation of Iraq, which South Africa
opposes, but sucking up to America trumps moral judgement. Sigh.
Well, then, how have these rules been broken?
They haven’t.
Nothing in the DA’s declaration shows that these rules have been broken in any way. Everything in the
declaration is smoke and mirrors behind which nothing concrete exists. South Africa has supplied arms
to Libya (which it is entitled to do) and to Venezuela (which it is entitled to do) and to Syria (which it is
entitled to do). None of these three countries is engaged in wars or civil wars, nor seems likely to do so.
All of these three countries have reasonable grounds for fearing foreign aggression (all have been
victims of foreign aggression in recent decades). The policy of the DA in a-hootin’ and a-hollerin’ about
all this amounts to one simple fact: the DA believes that there are political grounds for making this huge
noise.
What are these grounds? All three countries are basically brown-skinned. The DA’s core constituency is
white South Africans who are historically suspicious of brown people. Therefore, racism gives the DA a
boost here. Perhaps more importantly, all three countries are ones which have been historically
demonised by the United States, and therefore by Britain which is a political annexe to the United
States. South Africa worked quite hard to get the ridiculous sanctions against Libya lifted. (Under
American pressure, the British framed the Libyan government when the Iranian government bombed an
American Boeing 747 over Lockerbie in Scotland, in revenge against the Americans shooting down an
Iranian Airbus in the Arabian Gulf.) Syria was defined as a terrorist state by the Americans in the
1980s, at the behest of Israel, and then suddenly undefined in 1990 when the Americans wanted to
invade Iraq from Syrian bases, but then redefined as terrorists after 2003 when the Americans needed
someone to blame for the failure of their occupation of Iraq that year. Venezuela has been defined as an
evil terrorist state ever since the failure of the American-backed military coup in that country in 2002.
Sigh.
So, insofar as one may understand it, the DA is beating the drum for racism and for subservience to
American foreign policy disasters — not just support for American foreign policy, but particular support
for areas where no sane person would support the Americans. This is, er, interesting.
It is backed up by two other points. The DA also makes a great fuss over the fact that South Africa
supposedly sold, or contemplated selling, arms to North Korea before sanctions were imposed. (Again,
sanctions have been off and on according to how badly the Americans were in breach of their treaty
with North Korea; they are currently on, as a result of the Bush administration’s mishandling of the
entire affair.) Now, the Creator does not think that North Korea is in any real military danger from
anybody; the Chinese wouldn’t permit anyone to attack them. The Creator does not consider North
Korea a beautiful state for all to envy and emulate. Hence, we probably should not sell arms to them,
and they don’t need arms from us anyway. But having sold arms to them in the past, if the North
Koreans were at peace with the world, was not a big issue. Here the DA seems to be boosting the
Americans’ policy-of-the-week (Obama putting the U.S. military on alert in defense against nonexistent
North Korean missiles was an amazing return to the policies of George W Bush, and a striking sign of
what a gutless little creep the man really is.)
Then the DA makes a great fuss over South Africa contemplating selling flying suits to Iran. Flying
suits are suitable for high-performance aircraft. They are, thus, useful only for major combat operations.
Iran is under threat from Israel and the United States. As such, providing Iran with arms for self-defense
could well be a good idea, for it would potentially discourage an Israeli/US attack, both because of the
arms themselves and because of the sign that Iran was not without allies.
Of course, there are sanctions against Iran (imposed by the US and EU, so not mandatory for South
Africa, but still worth thinking about.) These sanctions were imposed because Iran is developing
uranium enrichment technology. There is no evidence that this is being used for making nuclear
weapons (although the technology can, of course, be so used, as can nuclear reactors) and theoretically
any country in the world is entitled to develop nuclear technology for peaceful purposes. Therefore
there is no reason to impose, or support, such sanctions. Indeed, there might be good reasons to
challenge them because they are obnoxious and foolish.
But the DA, apparently, prefers to follow the American line with the utmost slavishness, even though
nothing has actually been done which challenges this line. The DA considers it unthinkable that anyone
can legitimately differ with Washington, and therefore discourages people from such thoughts.
This is not a good basis from which to run an effective political opposition. It creates the unseemly
impression that the DA leadership are moving at the guidance of little strings leading up to a puppeteer
under orders from the American ruling class.
The last issue is the DA denouncing the South African government because the Zimbabwean
government has applied to buy ammunition from South Africa. South Africa does not manufacture
ammunition for the AKM rifle which Zimbabwe uses, but we do produce 9mm ammunition and
ammunition for the FN rifle which Zimbabwe has in storage; also we have a lot of old AKM
ammunition which the apartheid regime captured in raids into Angola. Hence we could supply
Zimbabwe if we wanted to, provided Zimbabwe didn’t ask for too much.
Should we?
In terms of the guidelines, most certainly we should. Zimbabwe poses no threat to its neighbours. It has
a government of national unity. Hence, with no threat of foreign or domestic war, we can safely supply
it with military equipment which, a few years ago, we could not have supplied without fearing that it
might be used in a clampdown on the MDC opposition party. There are arms sanctions, again, imposed
by the West against Zimbabwe, but these sanctions were imposed because Zimbabwe helped to defend
the Democratic Republic of the Congo against Western-backed aggression from Uganda and Rwanda.
South Africa opposed that aggression, and so we should disregard those sanctions.
If Zimbabwe were not our neighbour, that would end the matter. However, since Zimbabwe is nearby,
we must watch more closely. Inarguably there are tensions within the government of national unity
there. Might the government collapse and civil war break out, with our ammunition being used?
Alternatively, might providing ammunition be seen as a gesture of goodwill, thus promoting trust and
national security in Zimbabwe? It’s a tricky question. Armies need ammunition in order to fight, but
also in order to train, and the Zimbabwean army probably uses up over a million rounds a month just to
keep its troops in fighting order. Last year, in order to embarrass the South African government,
COSATU bragged about preventing a shipment of Chinese small-arms ammunition through South
Africa to Zimbabwe. However, the shipment eventually went to Zimbabwe (it was so insignificant that
it was flown into the country from Angola). No bloodbath ensued; as suspected by all serious observers,
the ammunition was needed for training.
Hence, the DA’s position, which happens to coincide with the position taken by COSATU a year go, is
one of unthinking hostility to Zimbabwe. To be fair to COSATU, at the time the government of national
unity was not in place; they may have been wrong on specific details, and they were effectively serving
the interests of Western imperialists (one of COSATU’s unfortunate little hobbies) but they were not
conspicuously evil. The DA, however, appears to be trying to break up the Zimbabwean government of
national unity. This was made all the more plain when they held a press conference to announce that the
Zimbabwean government was “planning war”. It is inconceivable that Zimbabwe, in its present
condition, could plan war against anybody. Nor is there any sign that the Zimbabwean government is
breaking up, nor that the Zimbabwean military is making serious preparations against such a prospect.
The DA was simply trying to increase tensions in Zimbabwe for mischievous purposes, and trying to
encourage hostility against Zimbabwe among its white conservative — and often racist — constituency in
South Africa, while scoring brownie points with its Western backers, especially in Britain and the
United States, who hate the Zimbabwean unity government and want to see it broken up.
Sometimes the Creator wonders what South Africans did to deserve President Zuma. However, it is
worth noting that he has his points. Perhaps the most important positive thing about President Zuma is
that he at least protects us from the catastrophe which would ensue if any of the filthy scum leading the
Democratic Alliance opposition ever attained any real measure of power in South Africa, as they had
before 1994.

The Evaporation of Global Warming.

The Creator was recently reading Michael Crichton’s State of Fear. This was Crichton’s final book, since he recently died, and it is a most passionate work indeed, dealing with global warming. Crichton was a science fiction writer of a sort, and the work has an extensive bibliography and is chock-a-block with graphs and quotations from scientific papers.
But Crichton was a science fiction writer of a quite specific sort. One of his first novels dealt with people having computer chips implanted in their brains, along the lines believed by demented street people in New York. More recently, Crichton has pursued a gleeful faith in gee-whiz technology, combined with an awestruck admiration for the United States’ military and its power. Or, to be more succinct, he combines conspiracy theory with power-fetishism, in the good old fashioned Robert A Heinlein tradition.
This seems to be why State of Fear is a disturbing book in ways different from those that Crichton seemed to have intended. Crichton declares that there is no such thing as global warming; it is a myth, a concept falsely disseminated without any solid basis in reality. He demonstrates this through the voice of an American espionage agent closely linked to the military, who confronts a handsome, courageous environmentalist and his beautiful, courageous and athletic female associate (Crichton seems to be a sucker for muscular women) with the truth — that they have been working for all their lives on a falsehood. There is no such thing as global warming, and also environmentalism is calamitously wrong. It is impossible to save the environment, and anyway the environment is under no threat, and if it were, the best thing to do would be to hand it over to big business, which would manage it better than anybody else conceivable could.
This is an interesting thesis. The obvious question to ask would be why anyone should think that the environment is under threat if it isn’t, or why global warming should exist if it doesn’t. Crichton’s answer is that there is a vast conspiracy, which would certainly be required to accomplish the thesis — a conspiracy of the media and of affluent celebrities together with environmentalists who are enormously sponsored by mysterious financial elements and therefore need to sustain an environmental threat in order to keep the cash flowing. Of course the scientists are involved, and so are the liberal politicians. These people are all obsessed with anti-capitalist philosophy, and so they are hostile to business and therefore pretend that business endangers the environment when it does not. The myth of global warming is just the most extreme version of the environmentalist lie.
It is still not quite clear why, for instance, celebrities are so concerned to be anti-capitalist, or why scientists are so deeply concerned to falsify the facts when their grants will remain the same no matter what they discover. There are, after all, no huge corporations ploughing money into the notion that huge corporations ought to be abolished. Crichton vaguely suggests that part of the problem is the government, which keeps on setting up things like national parks that ought instead to be handed over to business’s sensible hands.
All this falls short of being sufficiently alarming, apparently, so in addition to all this, Crichton invents an “Environment Liberation Front” which is trying to destroy the world in order to save the environment. Among other things, it is trying to break up the Ross Ice Shelf using shaped charges (in the same way that the Larsen B ice shelf broke up a few years earlier), to provoke enormous floods by using wire-guided missiles and genetically engineered bacteria to control storms (in much the same way that Hurricane Mitch devastated Nicaragua a few years earlier) and to generate a tsunami in the Pacific by using acoustic “cavitators” and more shaped charges to engineer a massive undersea mudslide (in approximately the same way that an earthquake generated a tsunami in the Indian a few years earlier). Given that Crichton insists that neither the collapse of Larsen B nor the growing intensity of hurricanes and typhoons can have anything to do with global warming, he seems to be all but insisting that all major global environmental calamities are the fault of an evil conspiracy of environmentalists.
In the real world, humanity doesn’t have the capacity to do these things; the environment just isn’t that fragile. (Oddly, Crichton simultaneously claims that the environment is too tough to be influenced by gigantic issues like a massive increase in global carbon dioxide, and yet so fragile that a few bombs or missiles can destabilise it completely.) Crichton’s core message is thus extremely silly.
Of course, there is a degree of truth to it. There was room for debate around some of the scientific content of the anthropogenic global warming discussion, especially since scientists tend to rush into print to boost their careers. Granted, many of the opponents of anthropogenic global warming were funded by big business (some of them are in Crichton’s bibliography, although he does not admit this). However, the fact that one is funded by big business does not prove that one is wrong, it merely shows that one is biased. What is more, many of the supporters of anthropogenic global warming were scientifically illiterate and got their facts wrong. Of course, this says nothing about the facts themselves; virtually all of the opponents of anthropogenic global warming were also scientifically illiterate and got their facts wrong, and it seems clear that Crichton is one of these, despite his constant claim to possess scientific knowledge beyond the realms of the rest of us, for his careful cherry-picking of information is contradicted by vast amounts of other information which he does not share with his audience. The fact that most of the supporters of antiretrovirals were knowingly or unknowingly working for the companies making them, and were blissfully ignorant of the scientific meaning of the words they used in the propaganda they had written for them, does not mean that antiretrovirals don’t work.
But a more important degree of truth is one which Crichton lets out almost accidentally. He talks about the way in which governments use a culture of fear to control their populations. One of his characters, a nutty radical professor, points out that during the Cold War, there was a convenient enemy upon which a culture of fear could be based which justified repression and mobilised the public. (Eighty years earlier, H L Mencken had spoken of the “imaginary hobgoblins” which politicians used to terrorise the public into supporting them.) With the end of the Cold War, another basis for such a culture of fear would be needed.
Crichton’s military men lets the cat out of the bag, as military men do, by saying that of course after 9/11 there is a real enemy with a real basis for fear. Obviously, al-Qaeda is a far less robust basis for promoting fear than the Soviet Union was; if the Cold War was essentially a device for terrorizing the American public into submission to their rulers, surely the War On Terror is much more obviously such a device? It then seems obvious that if George W Bush simply wanted to terrorise the public, why should he have failed to deploy such a juicy source of fear as global warming? Surely there was a reason why he chose to minimise it? It would appear, however, that Crichton’s political standpoint prevents him from admitting this. (Likewise, when he talks about the way in which politicians and others fabricate issues to manipulate people, Crichton ignores the biggest such episode in his recent history, the “weapons of mass destruction in Iraq” fabrication.)
But this raises an interesting possibility, one which Crichton cannot deal with because of his ideological bias. What if global warming were simultaneously real, and a source of conscious political manipulation? In other words, what if there were a real danger both from the thing itself and from the politicians making use of it for their own purposes? Of course the immediate problem might be politicians denying that the thing existed at all. However, if the issue were real, might environmentalism be something less than capable of dealing with it? Has environmentalism, after all, been conspicuously successful in dominating the political landscape, or has, rather, the alternative been the case?
A natural example of this was Al Gore. He campaigned for high political office on the basis of being an environmentalist and “author” of Earth in the Balance (of course, being a Tennessee tobacco farmer with strong connections with the oil lobby didn’t hurt). After he failed to win the 2000 Presidential election he reinvented himself as an environmental activist and eventual promoter of the movie An Inconvenient Truth, which Crichton obviously loathes. However, in between these little episodes he happened to be Vice-President of the United States, and an unusually powerful one given that he served under a competent and politically astute President. As Vice-President, he did approximately nothing for the environment. Does this suggest that some of Crichton’s points about the way in which politicians and some of their environmentalist allies manipulate the situation for their own benefit, might be true?
Well, take a look at the media today. A few years ago the issue was extraordinarily clear. There was a flood of books coming out, many of them written by people who were obviously serious, if laypeople, like Monbiot, Pearce, Leggett et al, telling us that we were doomed if we didn’t do something. But they were also telling us, en passant, that the central source of the problem was the United States Government (George W Bush, CEO and prop.) What has happened to all those books? Why haven’t they been reissued? Where are all the articles about global warming (now renamed “global climate change” as if by calling it “climate change” you can disregard the fact that the issue is warming)? Is everything all right now?
No.
In the last decade, things have definitely grown worse. The Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets continue to shrink alarmingly, as do the glaciers. Sea level is not rising significantly, but then it wasn’t before. However, huge hurricanes and general bad weather continue to manifest themselves in the Caribbean and south China. Droughts are more extreme, rainfall patterns more exaggerated. Food production has become significantly less secure in many parts of the world. And, of course, the amount of carbon dioxide and methane dumped into the atmosphere is increasing at a growing rate, year by year. Monbiot, writing in 2005, wanted a two-thirds cut in carbon-equivalent emissions by 2030; twenty-five years. (He actually wanted much more, but he put this forward for debating purposes.) Four of those years have elapsed; under the Monbiot timetable we have twenty-one years in which to cut more carbon-equivalent emissions. That means that the cuts would have to be more savage, more damaging, than if we had not wasted those four years.
But where is Monbiot? Indeed, where is the issue? Buried, it would seem. There are no marches in the streets complaining about the weather. The whole global warming issue is on the back burner. What matters is the Global War on Terror, or on the Taliban, or on the Somali resistance or the mysterious absence of African enthusiasm for American military bases or the bizarre desire of the North Koreans to defend themselves. And, of course, the Global War on Middle Class People, also known as the credit crunch, that titanic act of daylight robbery of anyone who pays taxes in any affluent country in the world. Between these vitally important struggles against enemies who either don’t exist or were manufactured wholesale by the United States government and its friends, allies and collaborators, the struggle against the destruction of the environment is unimportant.
So, it seems that Crichton had a point. There are, indeed, cynical and manipulative people at work in the global warming debate. They made use of global warming when it suited them, and when the time has come to do something, they have always quietly turned out the lights and turned on the gas. If Crichton were right, of course, these people wouldn’t be a problem. Ironically, if there were no such thing as global warming or environmental dangers, as Crichton pretends, then all would be well in the world apart from the whimpering and wittering of the irrelevant and the dishonest.
But, unfortunately . . .

The “Return” of the “Repressed”.

In Jacob Zuma’s first few months he has accomplished essentially nothing. There has been a massive expansion of the Cabinet accompanied by the establishment of vaingloriously titled impotent new organisations. There have been numerous empty pledges and promises. There has been an incessant and unhealthy caving-in to whoever shouts loudest in the vacuous public chamber. However, apart from the level of discourse there has been no solid shifts towards reactionary or especially conservative forces, and this is a good thing. The fact that Zuma was backed by the reactionaries in the ANC proves to mean no more than that he was backed by the purported leftists; Zuma is not interested in doing any work, and his chief allies are not interested in anything except their own enrichment and basking in the ephemeral fame which high office provides.
But the shift in discourse is not altogether innocuous, because it portends danger for the future.
A simple example would be Moeletsi Mbeki’s recent declaration in the nation’s biggest-selling weekly that the United States has always been a true friend of South Africa, but that the South African government, because of the ANC’s foolish commitment to the USSR in the past, refuses to see this, whereas the people of South Africa can see this. Mbeki’s observation was ridiculous and fooled nobody; obviously Mbeki lacks the diplomatic and intellectual skills to couch white racist propaganda in terms which can be tolerated by the broader South African public (or, to be fair, he is too lazy and too contemptuous of the public to bother to exercise what skills he possesses). Again obviously, the white proponents of right-wing discourse have yet to learn that you cannot assume that just because a person has a black skin, he is capable of effectually instilling reactionary political ideas into black minds. Like Mbeki, people like Seepe and Mangcu are incapable of generating statements which pass the public smell test. Arguably, they exist in part to reassure white racists that “the blacks really agree with us” — thus fulfilling the same function that Justus Tshungu used to fulfil in the 1970s for the National Party’s propaganda machine.
However, it is pretty scary to see the cat let out of the bag like that. Effectively, the genocidal racism of “constructive engagement” is being redesignated as the kind of policy which South Africa ought to pursue. Apparently, a proper relationship between South Africa and foreign Western powers is one of subservience and toadying. As a corollary, Mbeki called on South Africa to cut itself off from the rest of Africa. One can only assume that there will soon be a comedy series called “The Adventures of Thabo Mbeki’s Smarter Brother”, with Leon Schuster playing Moeletsi.
Incidentally — not all that incidentally — Moeletsi Mbeki is also a businessman. There does seem to be a direct connection between BEE and reactionary politics. Of course one does not have to abandon all ideals and principles in order to be a businessman. Nevertheless, it does seem to happen.
Now, this is not altogether a simple process. It is obviously important for Zuma to pretend to be concerned about the plight of the poor, for he wants to be popular, he wants to win elections, and he appears to be understandably nervous about his control of the ANC without popular support backing him. Hence, in addition to his attacks on the structure of the party in the Western Cape and the North West Provinces, and also in various municipalities, he is charging around, or sending his allies and agents charging around, pretending to show concern for the people. Here Sexwale spends a night in an actual township; there Nzimande comes up with a plan to spend .003 of gross domestic product on the suffering newly-unemployed workers. Behold! We care!
But although this is hypocrisy at its most naked, it is also strangely reassuring. Zuma and his allies may well be entirely cynical and manipulative, but they believe that it is important to cynically manipulate such things. There are checks on the behaviour of Zuma and his comrades which are completely unrelated to conventional politics; they relate to the way in which it is “proper” for an ANC politician to behave, and “improper” behaviour leads to sanctions despite whatever the NEC or Luthuli House might have to say about it.
Obvious examples arise from foreign policy. This might seem strange, since foreign policy was the last thing on Zuma’s mind when he decided to seize power. Also, of course, if Zuma is to be seen as a tool of foreign interests, then one would expect foreign policy to be the thing which would alter most conspicuously. Instead, foreign policy, despite the change of leadership of the Ministry (of course Zuma could not allow his ex-wife, the Mbeki supporter, to hold that Ministry despite the magnificent performance she has put on and the fact that there was no competent alternative to her) — foreign policy has been remarkably consistent.
The first point was about the Sudan. It will be remembered that the “International Criminal Court”. the Star Chamber of global neoliberalism which no opponent of global neoliberalism dares to oppose, decided to charge Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir with genocide and violations of international law relating to the treatment of captives and civilians. Of course the Sudanese government has not committed genocide, and although it has undoubtedly violated international law relating to the treatment of captives and civilians (as, of course, have the guerrilla forces fighting the Sudanese government in Darfur) there is undoubtedly no proof that Al-Bashir s responsible for any of this. However, since nobody who has once disappeared into the dungeons of the “International Criminal Court” has ever emerged, this is not important; what matters it that the President of Sudan must either be sent off to die in durance vile, or the Sudanese government must show that it does not care about the “International Criminal Court” but only about trivial things like the Charter of Human Rights, which the “International Criminal Court” exists to violate.
Well, everybody in South Africa who matters, i.e. the white-skinned bumsuckers of global colonialist imperialism and their own private blackskinned bumsuckers, decreed that the Sudanese issue had been a catastrophe solely and singly and purely because of the evil Thabo Mbeki who had alone been running around stripping every possible system and structure of its human rights. Now that Mbeki was rightly sent off to Purgatory, our hero Jacob Zuma would at once set things to rights by doing whatever Gordon Brown and George W Bush — whoops, sorry, it isn’t George W Bush, it’s his stand-in, Barack Obama — told him to do.
But he didn’t. Instead, he went along, foolishly and incomprehensibly, with the African Union, the Non-Aligned Movement and every sane person in the world, and said that he didn’t think it was a smart idea to accuse Al-Bashir of charges which were manifestly trumped up around the bloody conflict in Darfur while the Sudanese government headed by Al-Bashir was involved in negotiations with a view towards ending the bloody conflict in Darfur. In other words, rather than have a publicity stunt, get real. Understandably, all those white-skinned bumsuckers went ahead and declared in favour of the publicity stunt, especially if it were obviously corrupt, dishonest and favoured the depraved murder gangs promoted by Western spy networks. Well, they would, wouldn’t they? But it was clear that they had expected that Zuma was their man, and instead he wasn’t — or, at least, if he was their man, he was also the man of some other people as well.
Which the white bumsuckers didn’t like.
Then there was the whole affair of Hillary Clinton and Zimbabwe. Clinton’s visit was a direct insult to South Africa. This was partly because Clinton is an evil person who should be chained to a triangle in the public square and lashed fiercely before being shipped back to America in an ironbound sewerage transport. Backwards. However, in addition to this, Clinton had come to Africa to try to bully and bribe weakling African nations to allow America to set up occupation forces on their territory — forces which are ultimately aimed against South Africa, as the only seriously potentially independent-from-America country in Africa. So she should not have visited the country which her trip to the continent was meant as a declaration of modest, cowardly war against. (O, how grammar suffers when the person using the grammar is grumpy.)
Well, the official line was that, glory be unto the magnificent and munificent financiers of American press propaganda, Clinton was here to rescue Zimbabwe from the bad, bad policies of the South African government before Zuma came to save our souls. And, alongside His Zumacity, we were told, would be the sensible policy of, er, doing whatever the Americans and British told us to do, which was not clear, but would, of course, be “tough”. We were even told that Clinton would not meet Zuma. Was this because the press considered Clinton liable to discredit Zuma, or because the press considered Zuma likely to discredit Clinton? In either case it was wrong; one only wants to know from which direction the poisonous wind is blowing.
Basically, Zuma seems to have told Clinton that — strictly entre nous — the policy of the South African government would be exactly the same as it had been under Thabo Mbeki; namely, that the Zimbabwean situation could best be solved by Zimbabweans, with as little interference by Western colonial imperialism, or by the global banking system which serves that imperialism, as possible. There would be no specific pressure on Mugabe, so long as Mugabe did not conspicuously do anything notably worse than the egregious and ludicrous Tsvangirai. The argument that Tsvangirai was discriminated against by Mbeki (which is exactly back to front — Tsvangirai either hated Mbeki or was commanded by his political handlers to pretend to hate Mbeki) fell apart, unless one assumes that Zuma is covertly under Mbeki’s control.
Fundamentally, Zuma’s foreign policy is the same as Mbeki’s. This is a little conspicuous because Western countries want Zuma’s foreign policy to be whatever they command it to be. Therefore, there is a little more obviousness in the field of foreign policy than in, say, safety and security policy. Otherwise the policy has not changed.
This is a bit problematic for those of us who believe that Mbeki’s policies were not perfect. It is, however, far more problematic for those of them who are paid to pretend that Zuma’s policies are perfect but that Mbeki’s policies were evil. It is necessary for such people to make an enormous amount of stuff up and to suppress other stuff. Luckily there are a lot of e-mails circulating to enable people to do such things without having to perform actual work. Hence the post-Mbeki government is not so problematic for the press that they actually have to do anything.
All the same, the fact is that Zuma is not so dramatically different from his predecessor that things are getting conspicuously worse. In the short term. No doubt in the longer term things will become worse, because the forces seeking corruption and evil are powerful, whereas no forces are seeking integrity and good governance except the general public, whose authority is discounted. However, for the moment people would ask in bewilderment what the whole revolution was about — and therefore the media has to lie about the entire situation. Luckily they have plenty of experience in this respect.

Scapegoating “Inflation Targeting”.

In the past couple of years, “Inflation Targeting” by the Reserve Bank has become a kind of mantra for COSATU and the SACP. It is bad, they say. It is an evil conspiracy between the fat-cat Governor Tito Mboweni and the ruling classes to defraud the poor. Arise, ye wretched of the earth, and destroy inflation targeting!
Oddly enough, the ruling classes say almost the same thing. They do not say that they are conspiring with Mboweni. They say, instead, that they want to get rid of Mboweni because “inflation targeting” is not working and he is wrongly applying it when and where it should not be applied.
When the ruling classes and the purported leftists are all in agreement about economic policy, it’s time to put both hands in your pockets to protect your cash.
Let’s ask a simple question: what is inflation? Inflation is when the increase in money supply outstrips the accepted value of work done within an economy. “Accepted” is a loaded term, because who is doing the accepting? Usually it’s the rich and the ruling class, usually within a country but sometimes much broader. Thus in Zimbabwe the value of work done within the economy fell to virtually zero between 2000 and 2008, even though there were still plenty of people producing commodities and ready to buy them. The global ruling class had decided that the Zimbabwean dollar should be worth nothing, and they weren’t going to let the supposed laws of economics get in their way.
Inflation means you have to spend more money to buy stuff. Therefore, you have to be paid more in order to live the same life. If you have money in the bank, the bank has to raise the rate of interest on that money proportionally to the rate of inflation, or your money will gradually become worthless.
Part of the problem with inflation is that people won’t just raise their salaries in accordance with inflation. They’ll raise them more, for fear that inflation will accelerate. The trouble is that then they’re being paid even more for the same work, increasing the discrepancy between money supply and productivity, and so inflation does indeed accelerate. Inflation tends to breed more inflation.
More seriously, however, sometimes people don’t get their salaries raised in accordance with inflation and don’t get their interest rates increased. Inflation provides a great excuse for a manager to rip off the workers; if you give salary increases below the rate of inflation, meanwhile raising the price for your goods or services at or above the rate of inflation, your profits go up. Ditto banks; if you don’t increase interest rates along with inflation, you don’t have to pay so much money into your clients’ accounts and can spend it on other things, such as Honduran war bonds. That tends to rip off the middle class, who tend to be the people who keep their money in savings accounts. The rich can usually ensure that everything they do is linked to inflation — the return on bonds is almost inevitably linked to inflation, for instance — and the rich, of course, are always the ones doing the ripping-off.
Hence inflation is almost invariably better for the rich than for the middle class or the poor. In Germany in 1923, when hyperinflation destroyed everyone’s savings and people were taking shopping-trolleys full of banknotes to the market, the rich made out very nicely, thank you. Nor do we see the Zimbabwean ruling class rattling tin cups on Harare sidewalks; they’re doing just fine preparing to privatise what remains of Zimbabwe’s state industries. Don’t believe the balderdash which says that inflation hurts everybody; that’s strictly spin.
But on the whole inflation is bad because it provides occasions for people to be ripped off. Also, it creates economic uncertainty; should I do anything at all, if inflation might make it worthless? It pushes up bank interest rates, which creates the impression (not necessarily true) that it’s a bad time to borrow or invest money. It’s worst for the rich but not good for the poor, so it needs to be combatted. But how to do this?
The best way to ensure that inflation does not happen is to ensure that the creation of money does not outstrip the creation of value. In other words, money must be sensibly invested. This is a difficult thing to ensure, of course. If a fool borrows billions and wastes them, inflation is almost inevitably created. Worse still, a great deal of financial speculation entails borrowing money and then artificially creating more money, and this also leads to inflation in the end.
Meanwhile, if the currency weakens against more powerful foreign currencies in which international trade is performed, then the currency becomes less valuable, relatively more of the currency has to be spent on buying the same foreign goods — and that fuels inflation.
So the currency has to be kept stable relative to other currencies, and wastage of finance capital has to be kept to a minimum. It might seem easy to do both. It might seem ideal to do both with one instrument. But how would this be possible?
Interest rates.
How in the world can controlling the rate at which banks lend money possibly have anything to do with a) the value of that money, or b) the way that money is spent? Welcome to the magical world of monetarist economics, where such things are possible.
The idea is that people will borrow money sensibly if they have to pay it off at a high interest rate. At low interest rates, people will borrow money frivolously, and just waste it on silly things, and that creates inflation. Of course, at high interest rates, people are also discouraged from borrowing money at all, and if they don’t borrow any money, then of course no money is created relative to production and therefore there should be low inflation. High interest rates therefore mean that your money is worth more. Of course, you can’t get hold of it because the interest rates are so high, but if you only could afford to borrow any, the things you could buy with it!
Now, if interest rates are high, the banks are supposed to pay you a lot of money in return for your sticking your cash in them. Therefore, you would expect more and more people to put their money in the bank. Of course, that creates money, which theoretically might create inflation, too. But it won’t be perceived as inflationary so long as it isn’t spent (which it probably won’t be — because reinvesting it in the bank will be more valuable — to a financier, anyway — than buying a crate of Laphroaig). So money will be pouring into the banks faster than it will be flowing out in interest payments. Of course, if everybody wanted to spend their money, there would be a run on the banks, which wouldn’t have enough money to sustain that rate of withdrawal — but there’s always a danger of that, since no bank keeps its whole reserve of cash on hand.
If people want to put money in the bank, that money is perceived as hard and stable. If it’s hard and stable, and if there’s a bigger return on investment than in other economies thanks to the high interest rates, then presently people will start to want to put their money in those banks from elsewhere. You will have people with dollars and euroes buying rands. To be precise, they will be buying South African securities, which are repaid in rates related to the interest rate. That means that hard foreign currencies will be propping up the South African currency, perceived as hard. And therefore, high interest rates tend to strengthen the currency.
Aha! That makes high interest rates look good. Except for the bit about not being able to borrow money to invest in anything productive. That doesn’t look so good. It basically means that with high interest rates you are almost necessarily putting the brakes on economic growth. Low economic growth should mean low inflation — although, interestingly, it doesn’t have to be. Contrary to the monetarist economists, it is actually possible to have both — if you have high inflation coming into the system (say because of increasing prices of essential commodities such as oil), and you jack up interest rates but the inflation doesn’t go away immediately, people will want to be paid more and that extra pay (for no extra production) creates inflation. Meanwhile, you can’t run a functional economy without any investment at all, so someone has to borrow money, at those high interest rates, and the high interest rates create extra expenditure which, if the money borrowed doesn’t create a lot of extra value, will generate extra inflation. This used to be called “stagflation” in the 1970s, and high interest rates didn’t manage to stop it. Eventually they solved the problem (after a fashion) by jacking up unemployment and then pretending they hadn’t. Ouch.
So this is what they are trying to do with “inflation targeting”. Well, fair enough. But wouldn’t it be sensible to bring down the interest rates a lot? Then people can borrow money for productive investment and the economy will boom. Admittedly, if the interest rates come down then the foreigners will pull their money out of the country. That means that the value of the currency will fall. That means that imported goods will cost more, in rand terms, which means that inflation will go up. Which means that you will have to borrow more money to make the same investment. But, at least you won’t have to pay loads of interest on it.
But there’s a problem. With low interest rates, people are liable to put the money into bad investments because they don’t have to pay interest on it. Banks are liable to lend money to people who can’t pay it back, because the interest rates are low and it isn’t a problem. This is exactly the problem which led to the banking crashes in America and Western Europe, because the banks eventually got into the habit of playing silly buggers with money until someone asked for it back and they didn’t have it.
OK, that might not be, doesn’t have to be, could conceivably be seen as other than, a problem. The other problem, the crucial problem, is that while you’re dropping interest rates and thus fuelling inflation (and causing problems for the foreign exchange reserves), how do you know that the money borrowed is being used productively? In recent years, South African interest rates were a lot lower than they are now, or than they were in the 1990s. Yet, strangely enough, the rate of capital investment in South Africa was remarkably low during that period, apart from government-sourced investment. It seems as if the South African business community doesn’t much like spending its money at home. If it does spend its money at home, it likes spending it on socially unproductive investments, such as shopping centres, luxury accommodation, golf courses and suchlike things, because the return on such things is greater than the return on factories or fleets of trucks.
In other words, reducing interest rates is liable, paradoxically, to create a situation where money is being invested, yes, and invested on profit-making enterprises, no doubt, but that these enterprises do not create jobs, nor do they significantly add to the gross domestic product. Simply put, if you invest in a golf course or a gated residential complex rather than a factory or a farm or a mine, the end result is that little money is circulated, and therefore you are not truly contributing to economic growth even if you appear to have added value to the country.
The conclusion is that cutting interest rates is only part of the issue. What is really needed is, firstly, to abandon the floating of the currency, to peg the currency to an arbitrary level and keep it there and prevent speculation in the currency — which means that inflation from the changing relative value of the currency ceases to be a problem. Having done that, you prevent currency from being sent out of the country, and that ensures, again, that money generated in the country stays here and can be put to good use; part of our problem is that so much of our money gets used elsewhere. (The profits from many of our industries go abroad, too, but that’s another story.)
Then, it should be possible to bring expenditure under control. Subsidies don’t seem to work. However, if you can control the way money is lent — if the central bank has the right to slap special interest rates on certain loans, for instance — then you can, for instance, allow easy credit for some loans and tough credit for others. You can say “Here’s a five per cent loan for your manganese smelting plant, you splendid wench!” at the same time as you say “Here, take your damned loan for your polo lounge, but you’re paying fifteen per cent, you atrocious trollop!”. Under such conditions, manufacturing could boom and luxury consumption contract. This, more or less, is the way that Japan and South Korea and Taiwan got to where they are today.
Isn’t it strange that people are getting so excited about “inflation targeting”, but making absolutely no effort to promote either currency controls or credit regulation? Maybe this is because those people in the SACP and COSATU and suchlike places are almost all speculating in currency and in luxury property deals? Or is this just some kind of coincidence?

Das Glasperlenspiel.

Das Glasperlenspiel.

Thomas Mann’s The Glass-bead Game, completed immediately after World War II, understandably deals with a future in which war, poverty, social injustice, tyranny and all the other unnatural shocks that flesh is heir to have been swept aside. Instead, the focus of the book is on secular monasteries where the world focusses its attention. Inside the monasteries, old men move glass beads around. This is what is important for those of the people of the world who have any leisure to think. Politics, social development, ambition, greed, honour — all is abandoned (except, of course, for those very old men, who bear the weight of all these things on their shoulders as they toy with their beads).
Fantasy. Never happen. Or has it happened?
At the moment, the Confederation Cup is being played. Many of the world’s least interesting soccer teams are coming to South Africa to play dull games in largely-empty stadia. (Foolishly, some of the photographs of the games are inadequately cropped so that the ranks and files of bare seats serve as an impressive background.) This is not surprising. Nobody cared about the Confederation Cup. Nobody, previously, cared that the Indian Premier League were playing in South Africa (because they were afraid of the Taliban or the Maoists or the Hindu nationalists blowing them up if they played in India). Muddied oafs at the goal in echoing empty structures; Samuel Beckett, thou shouldst be living at this hour. (Beckett might also have appreciated the echoing empty structures across the country where no spectators can sit, because the stadia remain unfinished as a result of the National Union of Mineworkers going on strike for more money, less work or just for the sake of a line in the news. Perhaps these stadia could themselves be considered as Theatres of the Absurd.)
The fact that nobody cares about these games is an obstacle which has been heroically overcome by the media, which has done its best to simulate enthusiasm. However, there is something more; when it comes to soccer, the government has been hopping about like grasshoppers on amphetamines. The Minister of Home Affairs personally ensured that there would be sufficient personnel to oversee the gigantic swarms of soccer fans who were not coming. The Minister of Police devoted immense amount of time to planning the protection of nonexistent tourists and also to making excuses for the failure to protect those few tourists who arrived. Periodically the President and the organised crime boss in charge of making money out of world football hold meetings and agree that everything is wonderful. The Ministry of Justice is proposing to temporarily legalise prostitution during the 2010 World Cup so that people can come to South Africa to fuck our whores instead of just watching soccer. (South Africa, as is well known, is a magnificent place to fuck whores because of human trafficking, child prostitution and a glorious garland of sexually transmitted diseases.)
So it would appear, then, that South Africa’s Beautiful Game is substituting for Mann’s glass-bead game. Now that we have sorted out all our other problems we are expected to focus our attention on people playing with round things. Admittedly they are playing in stadia rather than in monasteries, watched by cheering throngs (in their dreams, anyway). But it is certainly a focus of attention . . .
But wait a moment. What are these problems which we have sorted out? Health care? Safety and security? Foreign policy? Provincial and local government? The economy? Education?
In health care, we have the plan to set up a system of health insurance. It is difficult to call it a plan because it seems not to take account of any realities, such as the way in which huge structures of private medical care are funded by huge medical aid schemes, all linked to global financial institutions. The health insurance system represents a frontal attack on these schemes. It is also, of course, a plan for a grotesque bureaucratic pyramid which would offer immense opportunities for corruption and abuse (like the medical aid schemes themselves). It will waste vast amounts of money on administration, added to the vast amounts wasted on administration of actual health care, and will delay payment. There is nothing good to say about this scheme (while no real details have been released it looks at a distance rather like the bad scheme which Clinton tried to introduce to the United States in the 1990s). On the positive side it is quite certain that it will not be implemented because too many powerful players are opposed to it. It exists, therefore, purely to create the illusion that the government is doing something about the problem.
Meanwhile, in this not unimportant field, we have the enormous problem that too much is being spent on personnel and not enough on infrastructure. This problem is being addressed by spending another percent of the budget on personnel (through the doctors’ salary increase). This action will not stop the flood of medical personnel abroad or to private medical structures, but it does create the illusion that the government is doing something about the problem, and since nobody is mentioning the problem of overspending on personnel, this can be kept under the carpet for the moment.
On the economy, we have the firm promise to create half a million jobs by the end of the year. As one newspaper pointed out, this means 1,369 jobs a day for the next year. In the 60 days since the election, 82,000 jobs should have been created. Instead, a comparable number of jobs have been lost. The pledge is also to create four million jobs by 2014. Iraj Ibadian is not the Creator’s favourite economist, but he is quite correct to point out that it is impossible for anyone to gauge the merits of this promise because nobody has put forward any plan, nor even the skeleton of a plan, for creating any such jobs at all. It appears that what the government is doing as regard to the economy is to make promises which it probably cannot keep, but which it appears to have no intention of keeping. The only other thing which the government has made clear is that it is opposed to the 34% increase in the price of electricity proposed by ESKOM — apart from the neoliberal AIDS-patient-killer Minister for Public Enterprises, Barbara Hogan, who supports this increase. (Since she is a big fan of privatisation, presumably she feels this will make it easier to privatise ESKOM, which will simplify her job.)
And on the other issues? That is interesting; there is, or appears to be, nothing. No health-care plan. No plan for improving policing (other than hangovers from the past). No plan to improve provincial or local government (on the contrary, what is being done, under the cloak of such a plan, seems calculated to make conditions worse, since the activity entails purging anyone suspected of disloyalty to Zuma and ensuring the perpetuation of multiple centres of power in provinces so as to make them more controllable). No plan for education (apart from the disastrous step of splitting it into two pieces). No plan for foreign policy (apart from an apparent pledge to suck up more to the United States).
Above all there is no central vision to guide anyone into developing their own plan. The ANC’s policy statements are vapid pledges to do everything that everyone likes all at once, not prioritising anything, and especially not undertaking to explain how any of these things can or should be done. One thing which one must admit about Zuma’s ANC, they are consistent; none of the leading lights of the party has taken responsibility for anything which might lead to criticism.
Meanwhile, of course, South Africa does have a couple of problems. We have no coherent strategy for dealing with the AIDS epidemic, having wasted a decade on pretending that throwing antiretrovirals in every direction was the answer. We have no coherent strategy for coping with global warming. We have no coherent strategy for replacing the impending shortage of liquid fuels. And, in the short term, we have no coherent strategy for dealing with the economic depression. Oh, and there are little things like bad education, inadequate general health care, weakening transport infrastructure, loosening social cohesion, rising crime rates, unsatisfactory military force — all that sort of thing. Many of these are problems which could have been addressed in the past ten years but were not because of shifting priorities and inadequate planning or central authority. Over the past five years, in any event, in-fighting within the ANC has taken priority over solving any national problem.
But now we have, supposedly, an opportunity to solve the problems. We have a Planning Ministry, headed by one of Zuma’s enemies who could not be easily fired, and we have a Ministry for Performance Management, although it appears to have neither the power nor the competence to manage performance (and it lacks the structures through which this would be done). We actually have less time than we think, since within a few years at most our window of opportunity to resolve problems will be gone. Meanwhile the problems mount up. Spending an extra half of one percent of the budget on unemployment is not much of an accomplishment (it is one-sixth of one percent of gross domestic product) especially when it is to be spent on unspecified “training” of a kind which the SETA programme on which it is apparently based has signally failed to provide, or to generate jobs out of.
Instead, we are watching the government play with its costly beads (so pretty, and so useful as trade goods in exchange for ivory or rubber or cotton or diamonds). We should be horrified. But we are told that all that matters is the game. Play up! Play up!
Until game over.