Neoliberalism has been buried - Martinez

Neoliberalism has been buries - Martinez
Written by Larry Moonze in Havana, Cuba
Wednesday, December 31, 2008 10:14:41 AM

NEO-LIBERALISM has been buried, Cuban National Assembly economic commission chairperson Osvaldo Martinez has said.

In his submission to the National Assembly of People’s Power, Martinez said the capitalist theory and policy which barely a decade ago dominated in all of Latin American countries except Cuba today lie buried while the Cuban revolution demonstrated its strength and received respect and admiration.

He said because the speculation was so substantial and sophisticated in secrecy, diverse sources consider that the global economic meltdown could last between two and five years with severe effects on the entire world economy.

It is not possible to analyze here something so extended and complex as this process but certain conclusions can be drawn from what has occurred so far, Martinez said.

One of them is that the capitalist economy ratifies its tendency to cyclically generate destructive economic crises and these are most intense when the private market is least regulated.

The so-called market’s invisible hand based on the non-intervention of the state and the absolute freedom of the private agents led to a crisis in 1929 and has now repeated itself.

Moreover, in the US under the Bush administration, the champion of the neo-liberalism doctrine, the state changed from villain to savior in a few weeks.

Another lesson could be the naked exposure of the moral insensitivity, the greed and hypocrisy of the system now in grave crisis. For now, its first impacts manifest themselves in the real economy where the number of the starving in the world increased from 859 million a little over a year ago to 963 million, in the US at least 1.2 million people have lost their jobs and the three former symbols of American industrial power, General Motors, Ford and Chrysler are in the process of being rescued from bankruptcy by the government.

Martinez, who also leads the Cuban Economists Association, likened capitalism to a casino.

The current [financial] crisis has buried neo-liberalism for its responsibility in the fracas, he said.

Martinez said for decades Latin America was the USA’s complacent backyard.

Most [Latin American] presidents considered it an unavoidable duty to visit Washington in their first trip to make flattery, receive some credit and ensure that they had nothing in common with the Cuban Revolution, he said. [Cuban national hero Jose] Marti and Bolivar [Simon Venezuelan national hero] were then no more than salon rhetoric. Latina American governments only met when summoned by Washington or Europe. They all embraced neo-liberalism with fervor in order to feel modern, talk about the virtues of privatization, be in tune the US and look upon Cuba as a piece from the past.

However, Martinez said the firmness of a popular revolution during five decades of unrepeatable history took down the structure of isolation and exclusion.

He said so far it was estimated that more than US $14 trillion has evaporated between losses and declines in the financial market values while North American and European state resuscitation plans of the failed speculators ascend to some US $3 trillion.

Martinez said those resources were immediately available to save the speculative structure while the developed north had failed to fulfill the promise to allocate barely 0.7 per cent of their GDP for official development aid to poor countries.

The last conclusion to draw from the current crisis could be that dealing with a phenomenon so complex that has been incubated for almost 80 years and could have a diffusion multiplied by globalization, no economic school of thought, no international organ can tell how long it will last or how far it’s intensity will go because the speculation was so substantial and sophisticated in secrecy that it is very difficult to know how many unbacked values circulate the world economy, said Martinez.