Mainly, Sorkin is flailing, it seems to me... and though I wouldn't disagree with the bigger narrative, the devil in the details are the giveaway about a certain level of smug triumphalism, unearned:
On 12/10/2013 1:19 PM, Louis Proyect wrote: > NY Times December 9, 2013, 8:58 pm > How Mandela Shifted Views on Freedom of Markets > By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN ... > When Mr. Mandela was released from prison in 1990, he told his followers > in the African National Congress that he believed in the nationalization > of South Africa’s main businesses. Of course he had to. Otherwise the followers would think he'd sold out in the secret prison talks he initiated. Having seen this process quite close at hand, I am comfortable with the timeline that by April 1990 (3 months later), Mandela had authorised post-Freedom Charter economics and by January 1992 he announced this to his followers. To lots of grumbling. They kept bringing nationalisation back in - such as in the 1994 Reconstruction and Development Programme. Mandela's first post-election interview, published 1 May 1994, included his insistence that the RDP did not include the word nationalisation. He obviously hadn't read as far as page 80. > ... However, according to Tito Mboweni, a former governor of the South > African Reserve Bank, who accompanied Mr. Mandela to Davos, Mr. > Mandela’s change of heart was genuine. Amongst the guys who signed the 'Faustian Pact' (that Ronnie Kasrils termed the 1990-96 sell-out), I've always considered Mboweni the least reliable in terms of memory. I've had one direct one-on-one debate with him about his faulty memory, but he still relies on it to do spin-doctoring. Details available if anyone wants. Prior to being fired by Zuma because he was such a stanch Mbekite, Mboweni was the SA Reserve Bank Governor from 1999-2009 - and there are a good many amusing stories about his reign still to be told. How come Sorkin doesn't reveal his current employer? It's GS, that's why - sorry, no street cred for "Tito". But here's where things get really silly: > Mr. Mandela’s push toward free markets opened up his country to become > the fastest growing in Africa Actually, it's one of the slowest growing. > and eventually brought in billions of > dollars of investment from large companies outside the country. The vast bulk is portfolio capital, hot money looking to score off SA's status as having about the world's highest real long-term interest rates. > Barclays, for example, acquired Absa, South Africa’s largest consumer > bank, in 2005. Iscor, the country’s largest steel maker, was sold to > Lakshmi Mittal’s LNM in 2004. Industrial and Commercial Bank of China > bought a big stake in Standard Bank, South Africa’s largest financial > services company, in 2008. And Massmart, a South African supermarket > chain, sold a majority stake to Walmart in 2011. That's all M&A, in the worst way, the imposition of Western ultra-capitalist asset-stripping, financial gaming and retail-based deindustrialisation. No FDI greenfield investments to point to, Mr Sorkin? That's rather telling. > Mr. Mandela himself also embraced the big money charity that can only be > delivered by billionaire capitalists. This is one of the worst legacies of Mandela's 1990's rule: whimsical Corporate Social Responsibility instead of solid social policy. > But for all of Mr. Mandela’s embrace of capitalism and free markets, as > demonstrated though his policy called GEAR (Growth, Employment and > Redistribution), the results raise more questions than answers about its > success. Ok, now we can talk. > ... The official unemployment rate hovers at about 25 percent and may, in > truth, be much higher. Yes, truth means counting people who have given up looking for work because it's so hopeless. That raises the truthful rate by at least 10%. Ok, can't really complain about the punchline, below, especially reference to the country's leading class warrior. But sad that so much intermediate material is so flawed... it makes one suspect that the mediocre research and strange reporting, with the conclusion below, is such a strange and mysterious hodgepodge that the NYT reader's central assumptions are not really disturbed, are they. ... > “There is still a war between capital and labor,” Irvin Jim, the general > secretary of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa, said... > Mr. Mandela may have ended apartheid and years of awful violence, but > his dream of creating a country that, as he said, is “a democratic and > free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with > equal opportunities” may still remain a dream that capitalism and free > markets have yet to solve. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
