Occupy the Global Black Market!

The Times of India on 10 December had a front-page story explaining why Britain had refused to join a European Union deal to move towards closer economic cooperation. It said that Prime Minister David Cameron had been unable to “secure a halt in ongoing EU efforts to curb the City of London’s huge financial services sector.”

It quoted Cameron saying he had failed to get “safeguards” from EU colleagues. French premier Nicolas Sarkozy noted that the British had asked for “something we all judged unacceptable – for a protocol to be inserted into the treaty granting the United Kingdom a certain number of exonerations on financial services regulations.”

None of them – Cameron, Sarkozy or TOI – explained what exactly the British were trying to protect. A keyword Internet search yielded not a single story, Indian or foreign, that spelled out the matter.

This is not because the issue is too difficult to explain.

The City (financial center) of London is the Wild West of international finance, where drug runners, organized crime groups, dictators, mega-corporations and garden-variety tax cheats can all invest with the greatest of ease. What Cameron wanted to protect was Britain's role as the manager and epicenter of the global black market. Without exemption from EU regulations, that cannot continue.  

Among the many interesting questions that float around this situation is how, given the much touted “freedom of the Press” in democratic countries, this total media blackout has been achieved.

There are several factors. One is that the rich won’t talk about it, and the poor can't. Another is British propaganda presenting London as the center of virtuous “free enterprise.” A third is that most media bigwigs probably have a secret stash in some tax haven.

There is no one to bell the cat.

In this situation, the London Olympics offers civil society activists an unprecedented opportunity to draw attention to the black hole of criminality in The City. It would be a perfect time to launch "Occupy the Global Black Market!"

Clueless UN Debate

The United Nations is engaged in its annual "General Debate" in New York. It is the opening ritual of the gathering of the organization's 193 members, meant to map the world's problems and set the context for the work to be done in the next three months.


In theory, a "Report on the Work of the Organization" from the Secretary-General is meant to give focus and substance to the talk. That does not happen, for the Report has for decades been a scissors and paste job reflecting the morally challenged world view of weak-kneed UN bureaucrats.

As a result, the debate is a collection of national speeches, each centred on the concerns of the ruling elite, without coherence or focus. Attempts to give it focus by setting a "theme" for the debate ("mediation" this year), have been ineffective. The only focusing factor is media coverage by the major news agencies, all Western except for Xinhua, which caters to the global underdog with its own special blend of propaganda and (mis)information.

For the rest, the media, represented at the UN by some 600 correspondents (some more notional than real), report what they are paid for; that is to say, they report mainly for national outlets with very narrow interests.

Not surprisingly, the net result is a "debate" out of Bizzaro World, providing a fractured, incoherent view of a deeply troubled time.

In keeping with tradition, the debate began this year with speeches by Brazil (represented for the first time by a woman, newly elected President Dilma Rousseff), and the United States in the person of President Barack Obama, one sounding the keynotes for the underprivileged majority of the world's countries, the other the view of the most powerful member State.

The global media majors focused on one element in the US speech, Washington's refusal to back a bid by the Palestinian Observer Delegation to upgrade its membership to that of full statehood. They genuflected disbelievingly in the direction of Brazil's call for Security Council reform.

The coverage of the Palestine item was entirely without meaningful background. Not a single major spent any time on what the Palestine issue is really about, how it was manufactured, and the uses to which it has been put. It was as if they were covering a football game. Who ran the ball, who kicked in the goals. Except, of course, there are no goals in this endlessly futile game.

Not that the major interventions on the subject provided any historical perspective. Nicolas Sarkozy of France offered to host a time-bound negotiating process to resolve the problem of statehood without spending a second on the deeply negative French/British role in the region. Britain's David Cameron was similarly lacking in hindsight.

On another aspect of Britain's manipulative record in the region, he credited the UN (i.e. Britain and France), for avoiding a "Srebrenica" in Libya. He forgot to mention that Mouammar Gadhafi was a British proxy, replacing "King Idriss" who its Secret Intelligence Service had earlier placed on the throne of Libya.

In general, the debate was soporific.

Manmohan Singh made a pitch for international cooperation to face the current spate of global economic problems. It had as much impact as Antigua and Barbuda calling for compensation for the slave trade out of Africa.