Wangari Maathai (1 April, 1940 0 25 September, 2011) was a dear friend, a beautiful woman that was also one of the world’s great leaders. My heart goes out to her children, whose loss is so great.
Wangari stands shoulder to shoulder with Nelson Mandela and Julius Nyerere as one of Africa’s – and the world’s – wisest and most effective leaders.
I was privileged to know her as a friend; and as a colleague (when she invited me to Princeton University during her sabbatical year there). But above all I was privileged to work closely with her during the Jubilee 2000 campaign. Not only was she Jubilee 2000′s representative in Kenya, but she helped lead the Jubilee 2000 Africa campaign. And then in March, 1999 she came to London to address a huge meeting that Jubilee 2000′s supporters had mobilised at St. Paul’s Cathedral, and that was also addressed by Chancellor Gordon Brown. I remember that visit well. On arrival she told me that she doubted she would ever visit Britain again, because of the way in which she had been interrogated at airport customs. Fortunately she was not to be daunted by British racism and, just two years ago, on one of her many trips to Europe, this picture was taken. We were trying to arrange for her to address another event – this time Operation Noah’s pre-Copenhagen event at Southwark Cathedral with Archbishop Rowan Williams. Sadly, but by then her schedule was so heavy, it proved impossible.
I appeared on Newsnight last night, to discuss the Eurozone crisis – and Greece in particular. (You can watch it with the BBC’s iPlayer..our slot is about 7 minutes into the show.)
As mayhem breaks out on stock markets; as Eurozone banks freeze up; and as the global financial system approaches a frightening ‘danger zone,’ the champions of the globalised ‘free market’ and of the Euro are in search of a scapegoat.
Instead of accepting that it is the broken banking system; the de-regulated financial Eurozone, and the deflationary monetarist policies of the Maastricht Treaty that are the roots of the crisis, the Troika (the IMF/EU/ECB) want to identify a convenient whipping boy.
Instead of going after the real culprits — un-regulated bankers that lent recklessly, confident they would always be bailed out by taxpayers — the approach of the Troika is to scapegoat Greece. The implication is that the whole fabric of the Euro, and with it the global economy, is torn apart because one poor country, Greece, will not enforce ever-deeper austerity on her people.
Below please find a piece I wrote on the vulnerability of Australia’s banks to problems in the Eurozone. It has appeared on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s site here.
Readers please note: Australia’s is not the only central bank to outsource the funding of its banks to the private sector. European governments have done the same. Greece, Ireland, Spain etc do not, like the UK, have their own domestic central bank, serving the interests of the domestic economy. Instead they have a central bank, the ECB, that is forbidden by statute from providing liquidity to banks and governments. These are instead obliged to borrow from foreign private banks in the Eurozone, the US and Asia. A lucrative trade the banks welcomed until the loans turned sour.
By Ann Pettifor. An edited version of this piece was published on Left Foot Forward, 14 September, 2011. This original, longer version posted 19 September, 2011.
The game is up. The 2007-9 private banking crisis that started with the unpayable debts of the US sub-prime sector, was never over. The crisis has now moved on to include the unpayable debts of sovereigns owed to private European bankers. It is increasingly clear that there is declining political and institutional support for further private bank bailouts. The dramatic resignation on Friday 9th September of Jürgen Stark, architect of Europe’s equivalent of the Gold Standard – the Growth and Stability Pact – marks an important step in the resistance to bailouts by the ECB; in the inevitable collapse of the Maastricht Pact, and with it, the utopian vision of the neoliberal Euro.
And so the age of liberalised, de-regulated finance appears to be over – at least in Europe. That is the conclusion of investors in both Wall St and the City of London and explains the collapse of confidence in banks and the volatility of stock markets as investors rush for the exits, transferring speculative gains into the safety of government bonds.
So, five of the world’s biggest central banks have decided on co-ordinated action to bail out – once again – the European private banking sector. In other words, central bankers are hoping to shore up private bankers, help their defer their losses, and prevent them being disciplined by market forces for their reckless lending to EU sovereigns.
Shareholders and investors in these banks must be delighted. Once again, reckless speculation and lending has paid off. Once again the world’s taxpayers have ridden to the rescue.
Victoria St is now a prosperous, gentrified suburb of Sydney. But ’twas not always so. In the 1970s an enormous struggle took place to protect it from developers – one led by trade unionists in the building workers union, and that resulted in the disappearance (and alleged kidnapping and murder) of activist resident journalist Juanita Nielsen.
Stunning as Sydney Harbour may be, it was the politics that riveted my attention as I flew out of the historic, watery and lively capital of the ‘Lucky Country’. I had spent the morning before my flight indulging in a little tourism. We walked the path named after the good-hearted wife of the 1830s Governor General: Mrs McQuarrie’s Road. It circles a beautiful park and lines the harbour. There, my host, Peter Murphy and I happened upon the vast tanker pictured above.
Commissioned to deal with about 500 asylum seekers that head, it is estimated, each month for the Oz coast (6,789 arrived in 2010 compared to e.g. 1.75 million refugees in Pakistan) it seems big enough and ugly enough for the grisly task of hauling people off leaky boats or out of the sea, and then screening. As Peter noted, naming it Customs and Border Protection is a tautology: Customs is border protection.
Prime Minister Gillard has called a special cabinet meeting for Monday, 12th September, and all the signs are that she is about to do a deal with a rabidly right-wing and racist opponent in order to keep asylum seekers from stepping by boat on to this vast territory she governs precariously. (These refugees are less than 50% of Australia’s annual total. The rest arrive by plane, but don’t seem to invite the same sort of moral panic.) The ‘White Australia’ policy of the past seems to be rearing its ugly head again.
It has been a busy week in Australia – I will be posting in more detail very soon. But for now you can listen to an interview with me on ABC Radio National Breakfast:
For any of you in Sydney – come along to the Catalyst event: ‘Making the boom pay… if not now, when?‘. I will be speaking along with others, more details are here:
