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•Œpoor People Can't Be Engineersâ•Š “poor People Can't Be Engineers― Extrait du CADTM http://cadtm.org/poor-People-Can-t-Be-Engineers Free Market Corruption, Neo-liberal Pretexts “poor People Can't Be Engineers― Date de mise en ligne : Wednesday 25 February 2004 Description : Newsweek recently ran an article on money laundering in Latin America. It identified Nicaragua's ex-President Arnoldo Aleman as one of a super-corrupt elite along with Mexico's Carlos Salinas and Guatemala's Alfonso Portillo. But, these individuals barely reach the ankles of their United States and European counterparts. Corruption has a history, context and consequences the self-censoring corporate media seldom connect. CADTM Copyleft CADTM Page 1/6 “poor People Can't Be Engineers― Toni Solo is an activist based in Central America. He can be reached at: tonisolo52 at yahoo.com. Newsweek recently ran an article on money laundering in Latin America. It identified Nicaragua's ex-President Arnoldo Aleman as one of a super-corrupt elite along with Mexico's Carlos Salinas and Guatemala's Alfonso Portillo. Portillo recently high-tailed it to Mexico. Aleman is in gaol. But, these individuals barely reach the ankles of their United States and European counterparts. Corruption has a history, context and consequences the self-censoring corporate media seldom connect. Some context |1| To put Portillo's and Aleman's fraud in context one just has to recall the puny US$1.5 billion fines imposed on Citigroup's Salomon Smith Barney, Credit Suisse First Boston, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, UBS Warburg, and Goldman Sachs, after an investigation into foreign exchange fraud by the Attorney General of New York. Or the multi-billion dollar tax frauds organized by major US banks to shelter income for their super rich clients. More recently in one of the United States' favorite satrapies, the Dominican Republic, when Banco Intercontinental - the country's second largest private bank - went bust, the government bailed out wealthy shareholders to the tune of US$2.2 billion, equivalent to over 60% of the country's annual budget. The New York Times had the nerve to accuse the Dominican Republic of being incapable of making necessary structural reforms to the country's economy. Meanwhile under the de-regulator's favorite regulator, Alan Greenspan, the US is currently relieving its international creditors of tens of billions having let the dollar fall in value by 20% over the last year. The Nicaraguan variety - small cerveza in the isthmus In December 2003, Arnoldo Aleman, former Nicaraguan President and strong man of the country's right wing Liberal Alliance, was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment for fraud. He had leeched the public finances of tens of millions dollars during his six year presidency. Even without his stupendous larceny, Nicaragua, unable to sustain basic services, faced intractable socio-economic problems. Begun in the war years of the 1980s, social and economic failure deepened through misconceived neo-liberal policies in the 1990s. That failure continues to this day, accompanied by a profound moral failure manifest in the endemic corruption that bedevils Nicaragua and its Central American neighbours. The very institutions that decry corruption are the ones that engendered it in the first place - the IMF, the World Bank, USAID. Corruption has become an easy excuse for these institutions to explain away their depressing track record of failure. Education - now you see it, now you don't |2| Education is emblematic of Nicaragua's difficulties. Neo-liberal policies have destroyed Nicaragua's education system since the late 1980s. With the national education system in crisis, the government has bowed to yet more stringent “free market― medicine from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. For 2004 it is cutting back the already inadequate education budget by over 10%. Last September in the northern Nicaraguan city of Esteli, hundreds of local students protested about increased charges imposed by the prestigious local agricultural college (run by the local Catholic diocese). They occupied the city's cathedral for over a week and strung a huge banner between the twin cupolas. It read “Un pobre no puede ser ingeniero― (a poor person can't be an engineer). It was what the rector of the college had told them when they Copyleft CADTM Page 2/6 “poor People Can't Be Engineers― protested against the increased charges. At the end of 2003, only 6000 students were able to pass the main national university admissions exams for a total of 22,000 available places. 90% of students failed their exams. Amid much public soul searching in Nicaragua, the main culprits for this colossal policy failure have escaped attention. For over a decade, neo-liberal ideologues have ground down health, education and social spending to levels far below the level capable of sustaining adequate services. Miscreants like Aleman are convenient scapegoats for the neo-liberal failure to deliver social justice for the 70% of Nicaraguans living in poverty. “He may be a son of a bitch - but he's our son of a bitch― Whether or not he serves his sentence, as seems increasingly unlikely, the main reason Aleman is currently behind bars may have little to do with stealing millions of dollars of public money. Roosevelt's reported quote about Nicaragua's corrupt dictator Anastasio Somoza has applied to many US clients over the years and still applies today. The parade of corrupt US clients is familiar by now. The US supported the Shah of Iran, General Noriega in Panama, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Ceausescu in Rumania, the Duvaliers in Haiti, Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, President Suharto of Indonesia, Sese Mobutu in the Congo, Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, the list is long and tedious. US and European government support for corruption has a long, dishonourable history and Aleman's debacle is merely one of the latest chapters. Like Manuel Noriega and Saddam Hussein, Aleman is a creature of the United States who got too smart for his own good and went out of control. His main crime was probably to displease the United States government by negotiating quotas of power with Daniel Ortega and the Sandinista opposition party. How these things are done in Old Europe |3| Aleman may well have modelled his deeds on big names in European politics. In Germany, Helmut Kohl and his right-wing Christian Democratic subordinates illegally accepted millions of dollars for political campaigning from wealthy individuals and businesses. Much of that money was lodged in personal accounts in Switzerland and may have been used in private business deals. In France, the recent conviction of Alain Juppe does little to enhance the image of his political patron Jacques Chirac, himself implicated in more than one corruption case. Chirac enjoys immunity from prosecution as a result of a decision in December 2000 to grant him that perk by a commission he himself appointed. Before Chirac, socialist President Francois Mitterand helped assure the re-election of Germany's right wing Christian Democrat leader - yes, that Helmut Kohl again - with tens of millions of francs. Mitterand's fellow socialist Edith Cresson's nepotistic ways led to the mass resignation of the European Commission in 1999. Cresson was also caught up in the Elf scandal in the early 1990s, being paid over three million francs by Elf - the French oil multinational. A spin off from Mitterand's help for Kohl's re-election campaign was a favourable deal for Elf to buy the Leuna oil refinery in the former east Germany. During the second period of Mitterand's presidency (1988-1995), Elf's senior managers stripped out over 305 million euro. The company was rotten right through. Of 37 officials accused 30 were convicted. Elf was created by De Gaulle in 1963. Intimately linked to structures of government in France and its former colonies, it played a king-making role in Africa from the start. It has been described as “a parallel Oil Ministry―. Elf was also involved in the sale of six frigates to Taiwan under the second Mitterand presidency involving the payment of 780 million euros in illicit commissions - bribes. Foreign Minister Roland Dumas was convicted in that particular scam Copyleft CADTM Page 3/6 “poor People Can't Be Engineers― in 2001. Elf offered Europe-wide welfare for top politicians. Not only did the company help finance Kohl's election campaigning but also that of Felipe Gonzalez, former Spanish Prime Minister. Inside France itself, it emerged during legal proceedings against Elf that Mitterand struck a deal with Elf's chief so as to spread its political funds more equally among the rival political parties. Before, Elf had favoured only the Gaullists. Judicial examination of the Leuna refinery deal elicited this memorable saying from one of the accused, Alfred Sirven “Lobbying without cash - that doesn't exist.― Mitterand's successor Jacques Chirac has his own history of dodgy transactions to explain. Despite the conviction of his ally Alain Juppe, Chirac himself remains untouched. To borrow Gaullist writer Andre Maurois' quote from Montesquieu “The law is like a web, big insects fly right through it, only the little ones get caught...― The Italian Job - all too human comedy |4| When Bettino Craxi died in Tunisia in January 2000, he was on the run from Italian justice. Craxi had led the centre-left coalition that ruled Italy during the 1980s. His government was a political mafia that was exposed after the arrest of a leading socialist politician in Milan on corruption charges. Craxi had been sentenced to 27 years when he fled the country. Silvio Berlusconi along with many other leaders of the Italian business and political Right attended the funeral.
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