|
|
CounterPunchers! We Mean It!
|
home / subscribe / donate / books / t-shirts / search / links / feedback / events / faq
CounterPunchers! We Mean It!
Please Read This, Then ActAll last week, assuming that you are among the tens of thousands of people around the world who check in at this CounterPunch site every day or two, we’ve been featuring our annual appeal for donations and saying that without the necessary $75,00 to be raised in these weeks, we’ll have to cut back drastically on what we do and what all you site readers who don’t subscribe to our newsletter, get every day for free.
We are completely serious about this. Either we meet our fundraising goal of $75,000 over the next
two weeks or we'll be forced to drastically curtail the operation of our website. And frankly, as you can judge from the donation gauge, many of you have been rather too prudent in keeping your hands in your pockets.
We know you’re out there. Our website receives millions of hits and nearly 100,000 readers each day. Why? Because CounterPunch doesn’t play the politics of make-believe. Barack Obama came into office preaching hope and promising change. Change has yet to arrive. From the bailouts for bankers to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, from warrantless wiretaps to a fatally compromised health care plan, from jobless millions here to rendition flights around the world, this new administration governs a lot like the old. In spite of this, many progressive outlets have gone soft on Obama. We haven't. That's why so many of you make us your homepage
When we ask, we mean it. Please, use our secure server make a tax-deductible donation to CounterPunch today or purchase a subscription and a gift sub for someone or one of our award winning books (or a crate of books!) as holiday presents. (We won't call you to shake you down or sell your name to any lists--even Dick Cheney's.)
To contribute by phone you can call Becky or Deva toll free at: 1-800-840-3683
Onward,
Alexander, Jeffrey, Becky, Alya, Deva, Kimberly and Marc
CounterPunch
PO Box 228, Petrolia, CA 95558
|
Today's Stories November 5, 2009 Vijay Prashad November 4, 2009 Stan Cox Andy Worthington From Gitmo to Palau: Who are the Uighurs? Robert Weissman Susan Galleymore Ralph Nader Michael Leonardi Bitta Mistofi Robert Bryce Martha Rosenberg Dave Lindorff Website of the Day November 3, 2009 Patrick Cockburn Mike Whitney Franklin C. Spinney Laura Carlsen Serge Halimi John Stanton Sophia Weeks Dave Lindorff November 2, 2009 Steven Higgs Ishmael Reed David Macaray Bouthaina Shaaban David Michael Green David Swanson Ellen Brown Adam Federman James McEnteer Stephen Fleischman Website of the Day October 30 - Nov. 1, 2009 Alexander Cockburn Jeffrey St. Clair / Carl Ginsburg Mike Whitney Joe Bageant Gareth Porter Saul Landau Anthony DiMaggio Dave Lindorff Rannie Amiri Niranjan Ramakrishnan Jayne Lyn Stahl Rev. William E. Alberts Alvaro Huerta Martha Rosenberg Binoy Kampmark Norm Kent Charles R. Larson Roth's "The Humbling:" Nothing Like a Novel From an Old Pro Ron Jacobs David Yearsley Lorenzo Wolff Kim Nicolini Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend October 29, 2009 Michael Neumann Mike Whitney Gary Leupp Conn Hallinan Marshall Auerback Laura Flanders Eamonn McCann David Macaray Mark Weisbrot Stephen Soldz Christopher Brauchli Website of the Day October 28, 2009 Moshe Adler Dave Lindorff Frank Joseph Smecker Alexandra Early M. Shahid Alam Vijay Prashad John Ross Franklin Lamb Gregory Travis Susan Galleymore Website of the Day October 27, 2009 Mike Whitney Patrick Cockburn Stewart J. Lawrence Alan Farago Ralph Nader Dave Lindorff Bouthaina Shaaban Brian M. Downing Elections in Afghanistan, the Second Time Around Iain Boal Carl Finamore Jayne Lyn Stahl Website of the Day October 26, 2009 Bill Quigley / Paul Craig Roberts Uri Avnery Mike Whitney Michael Snedeker Shamus Cooke David Michael Green Martha Rosenberg Patrick Bond Binoy Kampmark Website of the Day October 23-25, 2009 Alexander Cockburn Christopher Ketcham Jeff Gore Gareth Porter Jayne Lyn Stahl Saul Landau Mike Whitney Nikolas Kozloff Ron Jacobs Russell Mokhiber Missy Beattie Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada Stephen Lendman David Ker Thomson Rannie Amiri Ronnie Cummins Norm Kent Charles R. Larson David Yearsley Lorenzo Wolff Ben Sonnenberg Kim Nicolini Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend October 22, 2009 Dan Pearson / Jonathan Cook Paul Craig Roberts The US as Failed State Mark Engler Johann Hari Brian M. Downing Eric Toussaint Tom Mountain Israel Shamir Charles Thomson Website of the Day October 21, 2009 Pam Martens Linn Washington, Jr. Liaquat Ali Khan D. K. Wilson Franklin Lamb Norman Solomon Stephen Fleischman Patrice Higonnet Binoy Kampmark Kevin Coval / Website of the Day October 20, 2009 Sharon Smith Tariq Ali Mark Brenner Bouthaina Shaaban Michael D. Yates Dean Baker Dave Lindorff John Ross Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada Kevin Zeese Gilad Atzmon Website of the Day October 19, 2009 Mike Whitney Greg Moses John Ross Michael Donnelly Jayne Lyn Stahl Eric Walberg Russell Mokhiber Barbara Rose Johnston John V. Whitbeck Christopher Ketcham Website of the Day October 16-18, 2009 Alexander Cockburn Saul Landau Paul Craig Roberts Carl Ginsburg Ralph Nader Nikolas Kozloff Carlo Galli Dave Lindorff Catherine Rottenberg
/ Neve Gordon Marshall Auerback Nicola Nasser Windy Cooler James L. Secor Ron Jacobs Wes Jackson Jesse Lerner-Kinglake David Ker Thomson Against Leaders Missy Beattie Emily Ratner Stephen Martin Michael Snedeker Charles R. Larson David Yearsley Peter Stone Brown Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend October 15, 2009 Andrew Cockburn Brian M. Downing Ramzy Baroud Danny Weil M. Idrees Ahmad Margaret Kimberley Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada Harvey Wasserman Nirmal Ghosh Charles R. Larson Website of the Day October 14, 2009 Michael Neumann M. Reza Pirbhai Gareth Porter Paul Craig Roberts John Strausbaugh Fortress Moon Ralph Nader Dean Baker Charles Modiano Nadia Hijab Walter Brasch Website of the Day October 13, 2009 Peter Linebaugh Shamus Cooke John Ross Brendan Cooney Frida Berrigan Yves Engler David Macaray Dave Lindorff Mark Weisbrot Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada Binoy Kampmark Website of the Day October 12, 2009 Pam Martens Mike Whitney Martha Rosenberg Jessica Arents Eamonn McCann Bill Hatch Sen. Russell Feingold Niranjan Ramakrishnan Gideon Levy Iyad Burnat Alan Cabal Dan Bacher Website of the Day October 9-11, 2009 Alexander Cockburn James Bovard Kathleen and Bill Christison Andy Worthington Marc Levy Tariq Ali Mike Whitney Paul Craig Roberts Alan Nasser Jack Z. Bratich Steve Breyman David Michael Green Dave Lindorff Paul Buchheit Jim Goodman Missy Beattie Michael Leonardi Nadia Hijab Mel Packer David Macaray James T. Phillips Charles R. Larson Michael Donnelly David Yearsley Lorenzo Wolff Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend October 8, 2009 Saul Landau Paul Fitzgerald / Linn Washington, Jr. Marshall Auerback Dave Lindorff David Rosen Chris Darimont / Misty MacDuffee John V. Walsh Stewart Lawrence Charles R. Larson Website of the Day October 7, 2009 Brendan Cooney Paul Craig Roberts Dean Baker Jonathan Cook John Stanton Joanne Mariner Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada Stephen Lendman Sen. Russell Feingold Mary Lynn Cramer Website of the Day October 6, 2009 Mike Whitney Gareth Porter Jonathan Cook Boris Kagarlitsky Iain Boal Ron Jacobs John Ross Michael Dickinson Stephen Fleischman Ira Glunts Missy Beattie Website of the Day October 5, 2009 Pam Martens Mike Whitney Paul Craig Roberts Harry Browne Sara Mann Omar Barghouti Shamus Cooke Brenda Norrell Fred Gardner Binoy Kampmark Copenhagen Blues: McChrystal and the Afghan Trap Website of the Day October 2-4, 2009 Alexander Cockburn Saul Landau Diana Johnstone Greg Moses William Blum Brian Cloughley Russell Mokhiber John Ross Ellen Brown David Ker Thomson David Macaray Gary Engler Robert Fantina Lisa Stolarski / Naomi Archer Anthony Papa Joe Allen Harry Browne Ron Jacobs Charles R. Larson David Yearsley Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend
|
The Story of Raul Prebisch, Implacable Foe for First World PowerThe Great HereticBy VIJAY PRASHAD Raul Prebisch was not born in Buenos Aires. His father was a German immigrant who married into a declasse branch of a prominent Argentine family. Advantages did not come to him by the accident of birth. He had to make his own career, pushing against insuperable odds in a society given over to the bloodlines of the haute bourgeoisie. Coming to the capital from provincial Tucuman, Prebisch studied hard, avoiding all society for the library. He caught the eye of liberal intellectuals who hailed from among the privileged but were in search of talent among those who had few connections. They took him up and pushed him into their circles. Prebisch’s own difficult ascent up the ladder of Argentine society taught this young man an important lesson: that his country’s backwardness could be traced to the insularity of its elite. He had other ideas for his country, and himself. Influenced by the Italian intellectual Vilfredo Pareto, Prebisch withdrew from the partisan disputes that wracked inter-war Argentina and hoped instead for the emergence of a technocratic, modernizing elite to take charge of things. Prebisch was only 21 when he came to this view. It would not change for his entire career, taking him from being the pioneer banker of his native land to be the most revered United Nations’ economist as the first head of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). As he put it to his godson in 1934, “I am not a politician, Marucho. I am a technocrat and believe in technocracy, and technicians are politically neutral.” The remarkable thing is that Prebisch never had any advanced degrees. He liked to be called “Dr Prebisch”, but his enemies taunted him with lesser titles (“Prebisch the public accountant”). He was not born into privilege, and without the traditional authority of descent or degrees he rose to Olympian heights. Finally, two decades after his death, Edgar Dosman has given us a biography worthy of this man, the “great heretic” of international political economy. Prebisch went to Buenos Aires in 1914. He burrowed in his lodgings, taking his books with him everywhere, reading everything he could lay his hands on. He enrolled in the Faculty of Economic Sciences, but nothing there impressed him. The scholarship was decidedly pro-British, which is to say it had taken the logic of David Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage as dogma. Argentina, they felt, must remain a producer of agricultural goods and meat products because it is this that the country excels in producing. Sold to England, the unprocessed beef in particular brought Argentina its foreign exchange. England, in turn, sold Argentina manufactured goods. There was a deadened refusal to engage with reality and, so, to take things as they were. Prebisch found this incomprehensible. The Great War, which took England’s market off-line, forced Argentina to develop some industry. One result of this industrialization was that meat began to be processed in Argentina, and this itself quickly made up 17 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP). Prebisch sat in the seminar run by Alejandro Bunge, who used these facts to lodge a sustained critique of Ricardo’s theory. He gave Prebisch the tools to think about alternatives to laissez faire or at least to contemplate the conundrum of places like Argentina, stuck producing raw materials and buying finished products. Prebisch took Bunje’s insights and his own thirst for reality to his new job at the Argentine Rural Society, a lobby of the largest cattle ranchers who were basically Argentina’s oligarchy. The Argentine cattle barons wanted to know whether the British and United States meat-packers were manipulating them. This gave Prebisch the perfect opportunity to study the data on trade and to open him up to a lifelong fascination with good statistical data as the basis for analysis and policy. For the next several years, Prebisch would work on the problem of the beef trade, first for the cattle lobby and after they fired him, for the government. He displayed his independence when he refused to provide the ranchers the conclusion they wanted, but even they remained impressed with his research. It was this commitment to research and to the truth that kept Prebisch in the halls of power for a decade after he began to rub the oligarchy the wrong way. Taken into Argentina’s main bank to run its research wing, Prebisch brought together the best talent around. They had to sort out Argentina’s statistics, as well as produce the Revista Económica (Economic Journal). Their active work coincided with the Great Depression so that Prebisch and his team had to conceptualize the problems of the Argentine economy at a time of great planetary financial turbulence. Prebisch wrote explanatory essays in the journal, providing his readers with a map to navigate the crisis. The government saw his skills and brought him into the Finance Ministry. Here Prebisch proposed orthodox means to shield Argentina from the worst of the problems, although when Britain abandoned the gold standard in 1931, Prebisch convinced his government to introduce exchange controls and insulate Argentina from the wave of competitive devaluations that struck many countries. None of his good work protected Prebisch. His fate rested with the oligarchy and the military, and when it suited them he went into the political wilderness. Luckily for Prebisch, one of his exiles was in Geneva, where he was sent to help prepare the League of Nations. The advantage of this visit was that Prebisch not only got to interact with other innovators but he also found common company among a group of Swedish economists (such as Charles Rist and Gustav Cassel) who had been worried about the “terms of trade”. The prices of industrial and agricultural goods had widened over the years, they had found, with the “chief sufferers” being the agricultural-raw material producing countries. This insight would remain with Prebisch for his entire career, indeed becoming the foundation for the Prebisch-Singer thesis for which he is best known. It was also in Geneva that Prebisch came to understand, as Dosman puts it, that “the currency of international trade was power, and the ‘market’ concealed the power relationships that stratified the global system into a core of dominant subjects with a band of heterogeneous peripheral objects.” From 1921, Prebisch began to use the metaphor of core and periphery to describe the geography of international trade, with the core being Europe and the U.S. and the periphery being the rest of the planet (what Marx called the “peasant nations”). A brief stay in London, negotiating with the English over a new trade treaty, showed Prebisch real power: Montagu Norman, the Governor of the Bank of England, who answered neither to the political parties nor to the monarch. Prebisch wanted such a post in Argentina, one that would allow him to put his insights over monetary policy and international trade to work without the vacillation of electoral politics. He did get a sinecure at the Central Bank of Argentina after his plan (the Economy Recovery Plan of 1933) allowed his country to tread a middle ground between protectionism and “free trade”. As Dosman puts it, “Prebisch certainly cared less about textbooks than evolving a new balance between industry and agriculture in the uncharted waters of the Great Depression.” From his perch as the Director of the Central Bank, Prebisch spent the next decade developing a monetary policy for the periphery, which was largely based on pragmatism rather than on any established theory. For this he earned few friends and many enemies, notably among the permanent bureaucracy in the U.S. Prebisch’s ferocious nationalism prevented him from allowing Argentina’s economy to bend its knee before either London or Washington, and this bothered the latter so greatly that Prebisch was barred from attending the Bretton Woods conference to set up the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. He soldiered on, with new thinking on the merits and demerits of hacia adentro, or inward-directed growth. Enforced import substitution during the war years had resulted in the growth of an industrial sector, but this was low in productivity. Heavy industry had not taken root and the problem lay in how to move surplus capital into such productive investment. Prebisch saw a role for the Central Bank, drawing here from his reading of John Maynard Keynes. However, unrest in the political sphere threw him off. Before he could set his experiments in motion, Prebisch found himself without a job. Fortunately for Prebisch, he had married a remarkable companion, Adelita Moll de Prebisch. She sorted out their finances at these times of distress and produced the social conditions necessary for Prebisch to go into a period of contemplation. Dosman lays out in great detail Adelita’s domestic labour, the thankless task of refreshing Prebisch so that he could go on with his own intellectual and political work. In Adelita’s arms, Prebisch began work on his major reconstruction of Keynes’ work, to be called “Money and the Rhythms of Economic Activity”. Prebisch’s magnum opus would never be completed, but this work set the stage for him to think about the role of the business cycle in the periphery (which is different from the business cycle in the core) and to redouble his efforts on the matter of trade in international development. Prebisch had worked on the business cycle as early as 1921 (when he was only 20), coming to the conclusion 20 years later that “to resist subordination of the national economy to foreign movements and contingencies, we must strengthen our internal structure and achieve an autonomous functioning of our economy”. To create “inward development” (desarrollo hacia adentro), the country had to cease being a producer of low-value commodities. This of course raised the question of the terms of trade, of import substitution industrialization and of the reconfiguration of the world trade rules. All this did not preclude the matter of growth, for “one must bear in mind that the common denominator of social policy is the increase in production. Without this a stable increase in the level of income for the masses cannot be sustained.” Keynes, for Prebisch, was of great interest, but the Englishman did not break from the premises of neoclassical economics. This was why Keynes did not raise the question of why there was “always disequilibrium” in the periphery, why the business cycle worked in a lopsided way there. These brilliant insights appear in Prebisch’s book proposal. The book itself was not written. To compensate for it, and to make some money, Prebisch travelled across Latin America, advising central bankers and meeting with economists. This was a tonic for him, but it also kept him away from his intellectual work. Or, indeed, his lack of formal training in economics stifled him, and he fled his writing desk for these consultations in Mexico City, Bogata, Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo and elsewhere. In 1949, the United Nations created a series of economic commissions, one for Europe (ECE), one for Asia (ECAFE) and one for Latin America (ECLA). The search for a leader of ECLA ended at Prebisch’s door. His journeys around Latin America had alerted the leading economists both to his intellectual talent and to his nationalist instincts. He was their man. Washington was unhappy with this choice (it had earlier prevented Prebisch from getting an IMF job). It could not get its way. He prevailed. ECLA took lodgings in Santiago, Chile. Prebisch cleverly selected a staff of brilliant economists whose own political affiliations ran the gamut from Christian Conservatives to Marxists (such as the Brazilians Celso Furtado and Fernando Henrique Cardoso). To set ECLA’s agenda, Prebisch decided to write a synthesis of the work he had already accomplished. In three days, he wrote The Economic Development of Latin America and its Principal Problems, a text later known as the ECLA Manifesto. This essay summarised his experiences in government and his critique of Keynes. Prebisch laid out the fundamental asymmetry of international development, with the industrial countries gaining as a result of the unequal terms of trade that benefited them as against the agricultural countries. To break this cycle Prebisch recommended industrialization, with caution by central banks to avoid inflation and any structural distortions in the economy. “One of the conspicuous deficiencies of general economic theory, from the point of view of the periphery,” Prebisch wrote, “is its false sense of universality.” When Prebisch delivered this address at ECLA’s Havana conference it was a sensation. From then on, as the Brazilian newspaper O Estado do Såo Paulo put it, Prebisch was “a living symbol of Latin American industrialisation”. The U.S. government tried its best to undermine ECLA, cutting its funding through pressure in the U.N. and by shifting its responsibilities to the U.S.-dominated Organisation of American States. But Prebisch was undaunted. He managed to hold onto his funds and set ECLA’s course to produce a viable Economic Survey of Latin American countries (which meant to collect data on each) to train economists from across the region, and to push a set of coherent policies that he had laid out in his 1949 address. Those ideas were extended in two more central ECLA documents, Theoretical and Practical Problems of Economic Growth (1951), which traced the mechanism by which Latin America might produce its own planning model, and International Cooperation for a Latin American Development Strategy (1951), which Dosman says is the “operational counterpoint to the Havana Manifesto”. In this latter document, Prebisch’s team laid out a cocktail of means for Latin America’s development, including “the creation of a regional development bank; the strengthening of economic planning to avoid turbulence; stability for commodity exports; technical cooperation and training; taxation and agrarian reform; financing for development with a minimum target of one billion dollars a year in development assistance to accelerate industrialization; and the holding of the long-promised Inter-American Economic Conference in 1956”. Each individual element was not itself overly controversial, but the package was unthinkable to Washington. When John F. Kennedy came to the White House, he recognized that the U.S. government had made a hash of its Latin America policy. Vice-President Richard Nixon’s trip to Latin America in 1958 had resulted in street riots. To revise the impression, Kennedy’s liberals went South to search for reasonable allies. They found Prebisch. He was charmed by the Kennedy moment and came to Washington to advise them as they created the Alliance for Progress (Prebisch drafted a part of the document). But, without a blink of an eye, the U.S. set into motion the attack on Cuba (at the Bay of Pigs) and it began once more to favour military dictatorships. All this bode ill for ECLA and for Prebisch. He began to look for different work. In 1962, Prebisch went to Cairo as U.N. Secretary-General U Thant’s representative at a Conference on the Problems of Economic Development. This conference was part of the Bandung and Non-Aligned Movement dynamic from which Prebisch had until now been absent. He was thrilled to be among the representatives from 36 non-aligned states, most of whom had ideas similar to those developed at ECLA. They saw things on the global scale, particularly the way in which the core countries had barricaded themselves into the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) since 1947, pretending that this body was international when it was in fact the representative of the core. When these countries pushed the U.N. to create the UNCTAD, Prebisch was their choice for Secretary-General. He accepted, with the mandate to make UNCTAD “a global version of ECLA in its diagnosis of structural inequality and global transformation, the need for planning and proposed remedies”. Prebisch was helped along by some superb people, including Sidney Dell and R. Krishnamurti, whom Dosman rightly calls “infinitely discreet” and a “master of U.N. institutional intricacies”. In 1963, as UNCTAD was being formed, Prebisch went on the assault against what he called “a conspiracy against the laws of the market” by the GATT countries. A “new order in the international economy” had to be created “so that the market functions properly not only for the big countries but the developing countries in their relations with the developed”. No shortcuts, no gimmicks, but a genuine reconstruction of the global political economy. This was an enormous agenda. UNCTAD’s role As UNCTAD laid out its agenda, it pressured the core to respond. GATT began to absorb many of UNCTAD’s positions, including that of “special and differentiated responsibilities”, a standard that enabled the periphery to demand partial treatment in negotiations (this is also the phrase that appears in the current climate change negotiations, as a way for the low carbon emitters to demand concessions for their own development agenda). Prebisch and U Thant wanted UNCTAD to operate as the principal arena for trade negotiations, but the core countries would not have that. They preferred GATT, which had already been set up to their advantage. “Nothing important can come from the South,” said Henry Kissinger in 1964, and he meant it. UNCTAD’s efforts led to the 1973 General Assembly call for the creation of a “new international economic order”, or NIEO, a proposal that would be countered by the core with vehemence (in 1974, the core would create the Library Group, a meeting of its foreign ministers to coordinate policy against the South; this association became the Group of 7, the G-7). Dosman does not go into the very significant role that UNCTAD played in and just after Prebisch’s tenure at its helm. For that, the interested reader might want to turn to the useful series, the United Nations Intellectual History Project, from which John and Richard Toye’s The UN and Global Political Economy: Trade, Finance and Development is a good introduction (as well, there is Karen Smith and Ian Taylor’s book on UNCTAD for the Routledge series on Global Institutions). UNCTAD was Prebisch’s last hurrah. It is also the perch from which he began to reconsider his ECLA work. This part of Prebisch’s life is least known. In 1957, Prebisch’s colleague Celso Furtado looked at the Mexican economy and concluded that import substitution in a semi-feudal context had led to growing inequality in the country. Its proximity to the U.S., and close interrelation of the two economies, as well as its import substitution had provided Mexico with high growth rates. However, the upper classes enjoyed the fruits of the growth and Furtado recommended a government regulatory policy to prevent this distortion. Prebisch would not allow this report to be published because it displeased the Mexican government. The censorship did not mean that the idea had not become clear, that import substitution without a commitment to equality would not solve the developmental challenges. What was needed, Prebisch wrote in his own book on Latin America (Change and Development: Latin America’s Great Task, 1971) was not simply a high growth rate, “but profound changes in the economic and social structure and in attitudes toward the development process”. How these changes would be brought about, Prebisch had little idea. He advocated land reforms but hastened to distance himself from the very regimes that would conduct these policies (such as his friend Salvador Allende’s short-lived government in Chile). In 1971, Prebisch told El Tiempo that he had no faith in the “masses” and indeed in politics because “the danger of social mobilisation in a capitalist society” is that “it destroys its leaders”. As a technocrat, Prebisch wanted the people to simply accept his Solomonic pronouncements. This was not to be. By 1976, Prebisch became a sharp critic of debt-led growth. He found commonality with the fulminations of Cuba’s Fidel Castro, who also spent these years trying to raise awareness about the toxicity of the oncoming debt crisis. But while Castro urged the countries of the periphery to go on a global debt strike, Prebisch wanted to prescribe his own kind of economic medicine. Here Prebisch’s journey resembles that of other UNCTAD-ECLA stalwarts, such as Brazil’s Fernando Henrique Cardoso and India’s Manmohan Singh. Prebisch worried about the “elephantiasis of the state”, the growth of public-sector spending to almost half of the GDP. “Thirty years of industrialization, accompanied by high rates of growth, have left 40 per cent of the population lagging behind. For them there has been no progress,” Prebisch wrote. “Inadequacies of state enterprises have not only contributed to leaving the masses behind but are also affecting the middle sectors of the social structure.” But he would not accept the sum total of the Washington Consensus. He did not have to govern a state. Prebisch had become a prophet. “Equitable distribution, vigorous economic growth and new institutional patterns in a genuinely participatory democracy: these are the major objectives.” This mantra remained with him until he slipped into the night in 1986. Dosman has written a tour de force: its title correctly points out that Dosman will give us the story not only of this remarkable man but of the equally tumultuous times that produced him and that he helped shape. As well, one should consider the intellectual legacy that Prebisch left behind as one that could profit those who want to make sense of the current financial crisis. Vijay Prashad is the George and Martha Kellner Chair of South Asian History and Director of International Studies at Trinity College, Hartford, CT His new book is The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World, New York: The New Press, 2007. He can be reached at: vijay.prashad@trincoll.edu Inside the New Print Edition of Our Subscriber-Only Newsletter! Obama and Black America Ten months into Obama-time, the plight of black Americans is terrible. Yet overwhelmingly they rally behind the president. In a powerful report from the Deep South Kevin Alexander Gray asks the question: what should the black political agenda be? Mark Rudd counterposes “organizing” with “activism” and describes what it will take to build a movement. H. Bruce Franklin gives a chronology of the march into Afghanistan. Get your new edition today by subscribing online or calling 1-800-840-3683 Contributions to CounterPunch are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! CounterPunch books and t-shirts make great presents.Order CounterPunch By Email For Only $35 a Year !
|
Now Available from CounterPunch Books! Yellowstone Drift:
"Powerful and shocking ..
Waiting for
Lightning
|
