Another path, the inverse one, was taken by developed countries. They never had Herod to their childhood birthday parties. The free market is the only commodity they produce without any subsidies, but it’s only for export. They sell it, the South buys it. Their governments generously aid national agricultural production so that they can flood the South with food at ridiculously low prices despite ridiculously high costs, and so condemn the farmers of the South to ruin. The average rural producer in the United States receives state subsidies a hundred times greater than the income of a farmer in the Philippines, according to UN figures. And don’t forget the ferocious protectionism practiced by developed countries when it’s a matter of what they want most: a monopoly on state-of-the-art technologies, biotechnology, and the knowledge and communications industries. These privileges are defended at all cost so that the North will continue to know and the South will continue to repeat, and thus may it be for centuries upon centuries.
Many economic barriers remain high, and human barriers higher yet. No need to look further than Europe’s new immigration laws or the steel wall being erected by the United States along its border with Mexico. This is no homage to the Berlin Wall but one more door slammed in the face of Mexican workers who refuse to acknowledge that the freedom to change countries is money’s privilege. (To make the wall less unpleasant, the plan is to paint it a salmon color, display tiles of children’s artwork on it, and leave little holes to peek through.)
Language/1
Companies are called “multinationals” because they operate in many countries at once, but they belong to the few countries that monopolize wealth; political, military, and cultural power; scientific knowledge; and advanced technology. The ten biggest multinationals today earn more than a hundred countries put together do.
“Developing countries” is the name that experts use to designate countries trampled by someone else’s development. According to the United Nations, developing countries send developed countries ten times as much money through unequal trade and financial relations as they receive through foreign aid.
In international relations, “foreign aid” is what they call the little tax that vice pays to virtue. Foreign aid is generally distributed in ways that confirm injustice, rarely in ways that counter it. In 1995, black Africa suffered 75 percent of the world’s AIDS cases but received 3 percent of the funds spent by international organizations on AIDS prevention.
Every time they get together, and they get together with pointless frequency, the presidents of the Americas issue resolutions insisting that “the free market will contribute to prosperity.” Whose prosperity, they don’t say. Reality — which exists even if sometimes barely noted and which is not mute even if sometimes it keeps its mouth shut — tells us that the free flow of capital only fattens drug traffickers and the bankers who offer refuge to their narco-dollars. The collapse of public financial and economic controls provides good cover, allowing for the more efficient organization of drug distribution and money-laundering networks. Reality also tells us that the green light of the free market helps the North express its generosity, by offering the South and East as gifts its most polluting industries, its nuclear waste, and other garbage.
Language/2
In 1995, the Argentine press discovered that certain directors of the state-owned Banco Nación had received $37 million from IBM in return for a service contract $120 million above the usual price.
Three years later, the directors acknowledged that they had taken the money and deposited it in Swiss bank accounts, but they had the good taste to avoid using the word “bribe” or the rude expression “payoff”: one of them used the word “gratuity,” another said it was a “douceur,” and the most delicate among them explained that it was just “a sign of IBM’s happiness.”
Language/3
In the Victorian period, one did not speak of trousers in the presence of an unmarried woman. Today, there are certain things one can’t say in the face of public opinion:
• capitalism wears the stage name “market economy”
• imperialism is called “globalization”
• the victims of imperialism are called “developing countries,” much as a dwarf might be called a “child”
• opportunism is called “pragmatism”
• treason is called “realism”
• poor people are called “low-income people”
• the expulsion of poor children from the school system is measured by the “dropout rate”
• the right of bosses to lay off workers with neither severance nor explanation is called “a flexible labor market”
• official rhetoric acknowledges women’s rights among those of “minorities,” as if the masculine half of humanity were the majority
• instead of military dictatorship, people say “process”
• torture is called “illegal compulsion” or “physical and psychological pressure”
• when thieves belong to a good family they’re “kleptomaniacs”
• the looting of the public treasury by corrupt politicians answers to the name of “illicit enrichment”
• “accidents” are what they call crimes committed by cars
• for the blind, they say “the unseeing”
• a black man is “a man of color”
• where it says “long and difficult illness,” it means cancer or AIDS
• “sudden illness” means heart attack
• people annihilated in military operations aren’t dead: those killed in battle are “casualties,” and civilians who get it are “collateral damage”
• in 1995, when France set off nuclear tests in the South Pacific, the French ambassador to New Zealand declared, “I don’t like that word ‘bomb.’ They aren’t bombs. They’re exploding artifacts”
• “Getting Along” is what they call some of the death squads that operate under military protection in Colombia
• “Dignity” was what the Chilean dictatorship called one of its concentration camps, while “Liberty” was the largest jail of the Uruguayan dictatorship
• “Peace and Justice” is the name of the paramilitary group that in 1997 shot forty-five peasants, nearly all of them women and children, in the back as they prayed in the town church in Acteal, Chiapas, Mexico.
RACISM AND SEXISM 101
Subordinates owe eternal obedience to superiors, just as women owe obedience to men. Some are born to rule, others to be ruled.
Racism, like sexism, is justified by genetic inheritance. The poor are damned not by history but by biology. Their fate is written in the blood, and worse yet, their inferiority chromosomes carry the evil seeds of crime. When a poor, dark-skinned man approaches, red lights flash and alarm bells ring.