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> "Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank, shook up the world of > international finance As he is wont to do. I've had occasion, while campaigning against WB finance for coal, to consider Z's background. This is from a forthcoming article in the Australian Journal of Political Economy, about Climate Justice (CJ) analysis, strategy and tactics: ...In questioning the World Bank’s ability to reform away from its fossil fuel portfolion and extreme market-based orientation, the CJ movement came to the conclusion in 2010 that the Bank should have no role in climate-related financing. One reason was the institution’s leadership. Robert Zoellick, the 58-year old World Bank president, replaced Paul Wolfowitz, who in 2007 was forced to resign due to nepotism. US foreign policy analyst Tom Barry (2005) summed up his mission, and why he would prove useful to both George W. Bush and Barack Obama: "At first glance, Zoellick could be mistaken for an ideologue, as an evangelist for free trade and a member of the neoconservative vanguard. But when his political trajectory is more closely observed, Zoellick is better understood as a can-do member of the Republican foreign policy elite - a diplomat who always keeps his eye on the prize, namely the interests of Corporate America and U.S. global hegemony." Ideologically, the man stood hand in hand with Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Wolfowitz, John Bolton, John Negroponte and the other neoconservatives, Barry observes: "Zoellick was perhaps the first Bush associate to introduce the concept of evil into the construct of Bush’s radical overhaul of US grand strategy. A year before Bush was inaugurated, Zoellick wrote: 'A modern Republican foreign policy recognizes that there is still evil in the world - people who hate America and the ideas for which it stands.'" While Zoellick’s narrative appears merely as banal Washington rhetoric, it should not distract us from his deeper capacity to reproduce and restructure imperial power. As Central American activist Toni Solo (2003) explained, "Zoellick is neither blind nor crazy. He simply has no interest in the massive human cost, whether in the United States or abroad, of his lucrative global evangelical mission on behalf of corporate monopoly capitalism." Zoellick is of interest to the CJ movement because he represents a global trend of Empire in crisis, featuring at least three traits which he brings to climate negotiations. First is the ideological fusion of neoconservatism and neoliberalism that Zoellick shares with his predecessor Wolfowitz. Both strains are bankrupt, by any reasonable accounting, given the failure of the Bush petro-militarist agenda of imposing ‘democracy’, and the 2008-present financial meltdown catalysed by neoliberal deregulation. Representing the former, Zoellick was at the outset a proud member of the Project for a New American Century, as early as January 1998 going on record in a letter to then president Bill Clinton that Iraq should be illegally overthrown. As for the latter ideology, the ‘Washington Consensus’, Zoellick and IMF managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn spent 2009 beating a hasty retreat from the austerity-oriented economics their institutions intrinsically favor, so as to maintain global liquidity and effective demand with crony-Keynesian financial bailouts during capitalist crisis. Yet by 2010 it was evident in sites once as wealthy as California, Greece, Ireland, France and Britain, that the Washington Consensus was only temporarily in retreat. Austerity immediately returned, with a vengeance, sometimes facing intense opposition. The second trait of interest was Zoellick’s inability to arrange the global-scale deals required to manage the US Empire’s smooth dismantling. This was witnessed in the World Trade Organisation’s (WTO’s) demise, on his 2001-05 watch as the US Trade Representative. Zoellick’s inability to forge consensus for capital’s larger agenda was on display at the Cancun ministerial summit in 2003, in disputes with the European Union over the US genetic engineering fetish, and in his insistence upon bilateral and regional alternatives to multilateralism, which generated durable anti-Washington economic sentiment across Latin America. Then, as one of the most senior Bush Administration officials in 2005-06, second-in-command at the State Department, Zoellick achieved practically no improvement to Washington’s wrecked image abroad. And as Bank president, appointed after Wolfowitz’s fall by Bush, Zoellick’s efforts during the 2008-09 G20 deliberations on the world economy and at the December 2009 UN Copenhagen climate summit were equally unsuccessful. The third trait, at a more profound level, was Zoellick’s tendency to deal with economic and ecological crises by ‘shifting’ and ‘stalling’ them, while ‘stealing’ from those least able to defend. As a theoretical aside, what can be called the shifting-stalling-stealing strategy (Bond 2010, 2011) is at the heart of the problem, and can be summed up in David Harvey’s (2003) phrase: ‘accumulation by dispossession’. This stage arrives when capital exhausts the options it usually has to address crises - such as those of 1973-75, 1980-82, 1989-92, 1997-2001 and 2007-09, with more to come - through traditional means: work speed-up (absolute surplus value), replacing workers with machines (relative surplus value), shifting the problems around geographically (the ‘spatial fix’), and building up vast debt and blowing speculative bubbles so as to stall crises until later (the ‘temporal fix’). At this stage, capital needs to also loot the non-capitalist spheres of society and nature through extra-economic, imperialist techniques, the way Rosa Luxemburg (1913) described stealing so well a century ago in The Accumulation of Capital and Naomi Klein (2007) updated in Shock Doctrine. To shift-stall-steal in his various positions since achieving international prominence in 2001, Zoellick’s neocon-neolib worldview provided cover, yet only up to a point, which we now appear to be reaching. That point comes sooner than later in part because the institutions needed to keep the game in play are cracking up. To illustrate this problem of institutional incapacity, consider the fate of several major US financiers: Fannie Mae, Enron, Alliance Capital and Goldman Sachs. These were all crucial US imperial financial institutions, instrumental in generating the fictitious capital in real estate, energy and other sectors which proved so important to the Clinton-Bush era’s internal displacement and eventual amplification of crises. Goldman continues in this role today. First, Fannie Mae was led by Zoellick - its mid-1990s executive vice president – into dangerous real estate circuitry after his stint as a senior aide in James Baker’s Treasury, at one point Deputy Assistant Secretary for Financial Institutions Policy just prior to the 1988-90 Savings&Loan (S&L) crisis, itself a function of the financial-deregulatory era that gave us mortgage-backed securities. Fannie Mae was soon so far in the red due to subprime lending through those securities, that a massive state bailout was needed in 2008. (And Baker also found Zoellick invaluable when he served as the Texan’s main assistant during the notorious December 2000 presidential vote recount in Florida, destructive of those last vestiges of US democracy, thanks to open racism and right-wing bullying by Zoellick’s assistants.) The second of these financial firms, which cracked in 2002, boasted Zoellick as a senior political and economic advisor in 1999. Records are not available as to how implicated Zoellick was in Enron’s gambles, so painful to Californians (subject to extreme electricity price manipulations) and investors (who suffered Kenneth Lay’s illegal share price manipulation). However, as Board member of the third firm, Alliance Capital, Zoellick was party to late 1990s oversight of its investments in Enron which led to multiple fraud lawsuits and vast losses for Alliance’s clients, including the state of Florida, led by Governor Jeb Bush. The fourth bank, Goldman Sachs, which Zoellick served as a leading international official in 2006-07, did well only through morally-questionable and allegedly-illegal deals, followed by crony-capitalist bailouts linking Bush/Obama adminstration officials Hank Paulson, Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner and Larry Summers. In sum, the mix of institutional incapacity and personal dereliction of formal duty, helped to birth a CJ movement even amidst the death of a CJ campaign, because Zoellick’s record conclusively shows the reluctance and outright failure of elites to establish a longer-term perspective on systemic self-interest. This extreme degree of open, transparent ineptitude augurs well for a future struggle against those elites. It is, in short, easy to show that men like Zoellick break everything they touch, including large institutions. Conclusion Had the Kyoto Protocol and its arcane climate financing strategies succeeded over the past 13 years, and had centrist non-governmental organizations and environmentalists not themselves failed to offer visionary advocacy on what is the world’s most serious threat, there would not have been a need for the CJ movement to emerge and gel (Vlachou and Konstantinidis 2010). Had global governance firmly established itself in the 1990s-2000s based on the Montreal Protocol’s example of decisive action in which global public goods were taken seriously, the kinds of subsequent elite gatherings that produced, at best, the likes of a Copenhagen Accord would instead have had more legitimacy and efficacy. Had South African elites paid attention to the variety of extreme contradictions unveiled by the Medupi power plant and World Bank financing, the campaign that generated a South African CJ movement – so crucial to build upon ahead of the COP 17 in South Africa in November-December 2011 – would not have been necessary. Finally, the overarching point about Robert Zoellick’s background – his relationship to S&Ls, FannieMae, the Project for a New American Century (now formally defunct), Florida vote-counting, Enron, Alliance Capital, the WTO, Bush-era foreign/military policy (not to mention a million Iraqis and thousands of US soldiers), Goldman Sachs’ reputation, the World Bank, South African finances, and the climate - is that instead of generating despair, what CJ observers would take instead is a sense of the consistent geopolitical, economic, environmental and diplomatic self-destructiveness associated with recent elite managerialism. Zoellick is merely a personification of the way global governance, neoliberal-neoconservative ideological fusion, the failing green-market project and the responsibility for financing a transition from climate chaos are not capable of working under present circumstances. CJ marks a double effort to imagine other possible worlds and deliver them through struggle. Bolivian president Evo Morales (2009) offered his perspective on the movement’s momentum well before he convened the historic Cochabamba summit: “We can't look back; we have to look forward. Looking forward means that we have to review everything that capitalism has done. These are things that cannot just be solved with money. We have to resolve problems of life and humanity. And that's the problem that planet earth faces today. And this means ending capitalism.” Accordingly, only the continuing rise of CJ activism from below – notwithstanding an occasional defeat, and indeed spurned on by the knowledge and anger thereby generated - will suffice to reverse the course of fossil fuel consumption and, more broadly, of a mode of production based on the utterly unsustainable accumulation of capital. ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
