Beginning with Chile in 1973, the United States forced all the economies of the Western Hemisphere, with the notable exception of Cuba, to go neoliberal. Neoliberalism was the model of so-called development which had been built by Milton Friedman and his economist colleagues at the University of Chicago. Neoliberalism involved the throwing open of national markets to international finance and ownership, privatization of public utilities, curtailment of government spending, slashing of state bureaucracies, crushing of militant labor unions, and the abandonment of state subsidies for education, health care, housing, and food.
America gave the Americas a crash course in total, unfettered capitalism. (We will not today discuss the military force which accompanied that crash course.) The United States had itself begun to turn away from the so-called New Deal approach with which Franklin Delano Roosevelt had rebuilt the United States after Wall Street had brought the catastrophe of the Great Depression upon them in 1929. By the 1970’s, the United States was entering the phase of empire. They already owned the Western Hemisphere, whereas they would take over the rest of the world in the 1990’s.
FDR’s New Deal would have been considered socialist on Wall Street a few months ago, but now Wall Street, the cradle of crazy capitalism, has been crying out like a baby for government bailouts for the same financial institutions through which they looted the United States and the world over the last three decades.
One Wall Street commentator was saying this week on CNBC, “There are no atheists in the foxhole.” The metaphor was by way of saying that the financial markets, which, on principle, had condemned all government intervention, now had no choice but to run to the state for help. In the foxhole, when bullets and shells are flying all around, all soldiers believe in God. This week, Wall Street and Washington went socialist. Late Tuesday, the United States government, through the Federal Reserve, used 85 billion American dollars (taxpayers’ moneys) to save AIG, the world’s largest insurance company. That’s just two weeks after bailing out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. By Thursday morning, the news on world financial market was that European and Asian central banks had poured 185 billion American dollars into saving their key financial institutions and markets. The West has gone socialist.
There was an ideological battle at the core of the so-called Cold War, which began in the 1950’s and featured the capitalist United States, United Kingdom, West Germany, France, Italy, Japan, etc., on the one side, and communist Russia, China, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, East Germany, etc., on the other. The capitalist states argued that the less government involvement in the economy, the better. The communist states claimed that the government should own and control the means of production so as to protect the masses of the working poor from the depredations of the capitalist minority. As time went on, however, some capitalist states, like Great Britain and Canada, took on elements of socialism, while Russia and China, the communist giants, began to seem like capitalist economies in the 1990’s.
Under Ralph Fonseca, Belize became totally neoliberal. This was only possible because Fonseca was protected politically by the populist credibility of the former socialist, Said Musa, and the former trade unionist, George Price. The same thing happened in Belize which happened in the United States. Greed inside the ranks of the capitalist class and the financial speculators drove these two economies to the brink of bankruptcy. When there is crisis, crisis which they themselves create, the capitalists and the speculators always take their money and run. It is left to the people to pick up the pieces.
The people of the United States will have to pay the bills for the trillions looted by Wall Street, while the people of Belize have to pay for the hundreds of millions looted by PUP cronies who called themselves “investors,” but who were, always and incorrigibly, speculators.
People of Belize, we have to educate ourselves in these money matters so that we can sleep “wid wi own eye.” The neoliberal myth has always been that we have to allow and encourage the rich to become richer, because that is the only way the poor will be assisted. When the rich get richer, they are supposed to let off some crumbs for the poor. But our generation can plainly see that when the rich get richer, all they do is get greedier. This was a European problem from the time of the Conquest and the time of slavery. Greedy choke puppy. Now their world is blowing up in their faces. Our problem is that we have to find a piece of this planet that we can call our very own. Figure it out.
All power to the people.