PHM-Exch> Galeano’s iron laws on Globalization

[Claudio Schuftan]

1. The international labor division consists of some countries specializing
in winning and others in losing; the latter continue to work as servants of
the former.



2. The defeat of the have-nots has always been implicit in the victory of
the haves; the labor of the have-nots has always generated their own poverty
since it has fed the wealth of the haves.



3. The strength of the globalized system rests on the necessary inequality
of the parties that make it up --and this inequality assumes ever more
dramatic proportions. The dominant classes in poor countries have no
interest in finding out whether patriotism could be more profitable than
treason or if begging and dependence are the only possible way for their
countries’ international politics. Countries thus end up mortgaging their
sovereignty, because we are told ‘there is no other way’.



4. The globalized system is very rational from the point of view of their
foreign owners and of our ‘hambourgeoisies’ that have sold their soul to the
devil at a price that would have shamed even Faust.



5. But the globalized system failed to foresee a minor thorn in its side:
what we have too much of is people. And people reproduce. They make love
with enthusiasm and without precautions. More and more, people are left on
the verge of the road, jobless. This systematic violence, not always
apparent, but real, is mounting: its crimes cannot be read in the red press,
but in UN statistics. So, the empire gets worried: unable to produce more
bread, it does what it can to get rid of those sitting around the table. “
Fight poverty! Kill a beggar!”, a master of black humor wrote on a wall in
the city of La Paz.



6. The globalized  system thus convinces poor people that poverty is the
result of not avoiding having children. So it now proposes, with more panic
than generosity, resolving the problems: Population control measures are the
preferred policy.



7. We have social classes, and the oppression of one class by another; the
system calls that ‘adopting a Western lifestyle’.



8. The ‘order of the day’ is the daily-humiliation-of-the-masses --like it
or not, an order nonetheless, we must say.



9. But Poverty is not written in the stars; underdevelopment is not the
result of an obscure will of God. People are waking up, and are demanding
changes.  (Eduardo Galeano, Las Venas Abiertas de America Latina)
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