Human rights: Food for a disastrous thought  ‘HR and autocratic control’

Human Rights Reader 541

-(Globalization): I know your enemy well; he is the same we have here. (Nicolás Guillén)

[TLDR (too long didn’t read): This Reader is about the failings of economists and of the UN, the game of TNCs in globalization, about corporate capture and the implications for human rights. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text].

Autocratic control? Who does the dirty work?

-Economists are unlike physicists or chemists in that they wield tremendous power over lay people without being subject to almost any democratic accountability. (Aparna Gopalan)

1. Economists make their work look apolitical, if not downright ‘benevolent’ (adopting what looks an ever more pro-poor veneer while still advocating policies that are ever more pro-wealthy). To grant them unthinking adulation is a dangerous thing. Yet economists’ efforts to pass themselves off as scientists continue. More people are coming to see that economics is not a science. Unlike particles and the forces within them, ‘economies’ and markets are people’s concoctions. Economists come up with systems they claim to merely be describing. Their research advances their own, often pro-rich, answers to the political and moral questions of ‘How we should distribute power and resources’ while it purports only to be explaining the technical question of ‘how the economy works’.*

*: Mind you, the wealthy have rarely, if ever, been seriously researched-on by economists in order to explain how and why they became wealthy.

2. People are slowly but surely realizing that things can be otherwise. As disparity reduction policies are ever slowly becoming understood in the North as a-political-matter-having-to-do-with-power-and-inequality, poverty in the Global South continues to be treated as a ‘scientific’ matter --economists calling for data rather than democracy and thus giving voice to dissent. For example, the IMF and the World Bank barely discuss the efficacy of its underpinning neoliberal market orthodoxy. If the injustice of global poverty is to be challenged, their work deserves intense scrutiny, not uncritical celebration. Their ‘small solutions’, not only let the government off the hook and fail to solve the political problems at the heart of the matter, but they also tend to make those problems worse by advocating for further privatization and deregulation.

3. The vision painted by economists are also responsible for external funders ending up paying dearly if the wrong choices were/are made. Basically, these are not development questions that need to be left to experts. They are political questions that require political solutions particularly in the Global South.** International development organizations are joining-in, recognizing that being liberals at home and capitalists abroad will not solve poverty. The message is clear: Good economics is not rocket science for those who have an understanding of structural injustice and of a moral compass; it is time to stop delegating our thinking on poverty to the seemingly benevolent development economists, especially those who seem to have neither. (A. Gopalan) [Somebody facetiously said about economists: An economic fact is easier to predict when it has already come to pass or has materialized].

**: How fun it is to be rich in a rich country, but it is more fun to be rich in a poor country!

Autocratic control? Who, among other, carries out the dirty work?

-We are facing what is called an Angulo Muerto (‘legal dead end’) whereby national and international law not only fails human rights (HR) violations victims, and allows TNCs to go free, but even further, encourages HR violations to persist in their transnational businesses. (Jennifer Zerk)

4. Key to corporate power today is the way corporations have helped forge national and international law to protect themselves from accountability for HR violations and to bolster a politics of ‘market authoritarianism’. (A. Guamán)

5. True: It is ultimately state capture that allows corporations to establish and maintain the market authoritarianism that enables corporate HR violations to occur. With corporate capture, the state’s inability to respect, promote and protect HR is a foregone conclusion. When governments are captured by --or complicit in-- the competition to attract foreign direct investment (FDI) this quickly becomes a race to the bottom, meaning a gradual and widespread reduction in HR principles and standards and their protection. (Adoracion Guaman)

6. Conflicts of interest (CoI) and TNC influence are different entities! An example will clarify: A senator having shares in Coca Cola is a CoI, but not a form of influence (because the industry could have nothing to do in a decision from the Senator). On the other hand, Nestlé distributing education materials to kids in schools does not lead to a CoI for the kids, but this form of influence is super important in shaping a positive public opinion for Nestle. It is important to, both, cover CoI and industry influence if we are to move forward, being clear about what these are and how we have to resist them. (Melissa Mialon)

7. Holding TNCs to account for HR harms still leaves a good number of other businesses to escape responsibility. Here is a call to tackle the growing concentration of corporate power, the outsized political influence of capital, the entrenched primacy of the profit motive for boards of directors and managers and the norm of shielding parent companies (mostly in the North) from the HR impacts of their subsidiaries. (Joanne Bauer)

Autocratic control? Who really holds my stake?

-The UN is clearly helping to establish ‘stakeholder capitalism’ as a governance model for the entire planet. This clearly lacks democratic legitimacy and focus….Sad.

8. The term stakeholder is part of the language of the plutocracy and the takeover by the private sector of yet more public spheres (such as health, education, agriculture…). To hold a stake is to have an interest in something, (meaning a monetary interest) and in its original meaning, this is no different from holding a share (i.e., to be a shareholder). It is extraordinary how this absurd language has been adopted uncritically even among genuine NGOs and academics.

9. If we were to apply it to education, I think the absurdity would be more apparent. Children are not stakeholders in primary education. No more are they stakeholders in health. They are rights/claim holders as, of course, are all adults. The language of stakeholders is dishonest. It attempts to remove politics and interests from the analysis by blocking any distinctions in people's relationship to the fields of health, education and many other. (Alison Katz) [As a cat lover, I have long experience observing the interactions between cats and birds or small rodents. All are stakeholders in these interactions, but the birds and rodents have far more ‘at stake’ ... ‘nuff said. (Ted Schrecker)].

For Whom the Markets Toll (Reed Hundt)

10. Corporate capture, has allowed the rise of a global legal order known as Lex Mercatoria. According to a widely accepted definition, Lex Mercatoria can be defined as a new global economic and legal order that comprises a broad set of norms in international law, along with an extensive web of national legislation, aimed primarily at promoting trade*** and protecting the interests of foreign investors. This allows transnational capital to constantly choose the national laws that benefit it. Governments committed to the IMF line, therefore, need to use force to impose the economic and social measures demanded by market authoritarianism. Making market authoritarianism effective can be achieved only at the cost of strangling democracy and silencing the voice of the people through the use of state-endorsed force. (A. Guaman)

***: If we consider all migrations around the world, globalization, as well as the many free trade agreements (FTAs) signed, these have unleashed complex processes that make a potential universal integration, i.e., a world citizenship united by the principles of HR, much more unlikely. (Carlos Escudero N.) (In case you did not know, between 1890 and1910, Europe sent 25% of its population to the new world).

Bottom line

11. We need to seek ways to overcome the obstacles and to obtain remedy for HR violations. I know: progress here can feel like an illusion. Despite ongoing claim holder pressures, companies continue to seek a presence in a competitive market that demands fast and high returns --only to result in more harm to people. (J. Bauer) Elemental Watson: Much more pressure is needed…

Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City

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Postscript/Marginalia

-The welfare and progress of Europe were and have been achieved through the sweat and the dead bodies of blacks, yellows, Arabs and indigenous peoples. We have decided not to forget this. Europe has grown thanks to the gold and raw materials of its colonies in all continents. And when we listen to a European head of a state declare, with his right hand over his heart, that they have to go out there to help those pitifully underdeveloped peoples, we do not shiver in eternal gratitude. On the contrary, we tell ourselves “it is nothing but a fair reparation that you Europeans owe us”. (Frantz Fanon, 1963) The Fanonian thinking of the last 50 years has brought forward to us the need for struggling to denounce and tare down the processes and models of colonialism in its modern forms.