PHM-Exch> Urgent request for information: UN SG Report on global financial crisis impacts on the poor (2)

[Claudio Schuftan]

>From Scott Long: longs at hrw.org

Human Rights Watch



I am absolutely astounded that the request is coming out at the beginning of
August and the report is due to be presented in September. But then if you
look at the proposed plan, it’s mostly “voices” and “vignettes,” with the
data, whether aggregated or disaggregated, relegated to a secondary tier and
an occluding haze of vagueness.   There isn’t going to be any macroeconomic
analysis, and there aren’t going to be any new (or even revitalized
and  relevant
old ) policy alternatives arrived  at through that kind of process.  What
one will get is something a long-distance philanthropic initiative and a
expanded new UNICEF card.



It’s not transparently clear what the benefit of something like this is.  But
I suspect that “social enterprise” is a key.  The report is meant to do for
the G-20 what the whole vague “social enterprise” construct is meant to do
for the rawer forms of capitalism: give it the trappings, if not the
reality, of conscience.   Maybe there’s a point to participating in that
overarching project, but as a leftist and as someone searching for
programmatic rather than random and sporadic directions for social change, I
don’t really well see it.



If the “voices and experiences of the poor” are in desperate need of
something like this as a vehicle to be communicated, they’re in even worse
trouble.
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