The Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation supports a “Development Dialogue” series in order to encourage and promote dialogue, communication and debate on subjects between North and South global divisions. In June 2012 the Foundation published a book edited by the Civil Society Reflection Group on Global Development Perspectives titled No Future without Justice. The civil society reflection group was established in the fall of 2010 and is comprised of members of a variety of civil society organizations (CSOs). At first the group came together informally in order to discuss the numerous global crises that are happening simultaneously. By November of 2010 the group was established formally and consists of 18 members supported by various social justice and CSOs including the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation. The writing of No Future without Justice was motivated by the incredible failure to prevent the global crises which are threatening the lives of so many people. Indeed the entire planet may be at risk due to the incapability of addressing the changes necessary to ameliorate the climate crisis.
The dominant model of development and economic progress that is oriented on a technocratic modernization path, is blind to human rights and the ecological limits of the global ecosystem, confused growth of gross domestic product (GDP) with progress in society, and regards poverty as a primarily technical challenge in which categories of inequality and social justice are neglected. (3)
This book review engages the reader in a dialogue for a new problem solving model as presented in the book, but this commentary focuses mainly on ‘What went wrong?’ The reasons that the crises were started and how they have been allowed to become worse without practical expansive measures by the world’s governments and dominate organizations to improve the situation.
The global crises are many on the earth today. Starvation and malnutrition still afflict millions if not billions of people. The disparity in quality of life is strikingly evident around the world in places such as the Niger Delta and Bangladesh. For example, in Sao Paulo the large acreage of dirty slums are next to some of the most expensive shops in the city. Natural extreme events globally have made victims destitute. The climate crisis although pressing has been alleviated very little by the solutions offered. No Future without Justice has evaluated the root problems in a clear and concise way. The book does not pass judgment, but instead factually states the reality on the ground for the majority people on the planet. The authors listed the solutions that are available and have been used by the dominant world model and found the choices sadly lacking. To be more accurate the authors list the one solution that is available. In fact no matter what the problem the only solution offered is a financial one, “Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth” (11). The failures of this approach are sadly evident in the amounts of deaths due to famine, extreme weather events, lack of jobs and poverty.
The Civil Society Reflection Group on Global Development Perspectives lays the blame squarely at the feet of neoliberals who confuse the economic market with a strategy to solve the problems of the world. The authors point to the decade of the 80s as the starting point of the rapid descent into the multiple problems that face us today. “Since the 1980s the world has experienced the dominance of a paradigm of development and societal progress that has been shaped by neoliberal concepts of market self-regulation and on overreliance on economic growth” (11). This one-size-fits-all approach to facing crises is a dismal failure to a great extent because equality and social justice are ignored by the largest institutions that could make the most impact. One example would be the justice system in the United States which has power to interpret laws and pass sentence on those people being judged in their courtrooms, but instead of looking to the needs of the citizens the majority of judges have looked after the needs of the corporations including the American prison system which has been turned into a profit making machine. The problem with putting profits over justice is that the more prisoners the more profits so the goals of social justice and equality are not even part of the equation.
The international financial and banking industries are examples of a deficit in ethical behavior that has impacted several continents including North America, Europe and Africa. The dominant global banking and financial services have “been stimulated by the absence of norms and regulations and, in turn, has boosted speculation and the search for easy, short-term profits.” (11). At one time this economic system would have been called illegal gambling but unfortunately no sweeping moves to arrest the perpetrators of these white collar crimes has been initiated. So, unfortunately the world watches as the people in Europe, for example are plagued with austerity measures, no jobs and no money while banks and financial institutions refuse to input badly needed cash into the world economy in order to jumpstart a healthy economic cycle.
The book asks the reader ‘How willing are we to define progress, development, and growth as rigid, linear models which mistakenly rely upon limitless economic growth?’ This paradigm is at the root the crisis in food security, job security and climate security. The neoliberal mindset has flooded economic decision makers and the citizenry with media for the last twenty two to thirty two years. That is a very short time in the scheme of world process changes to make such a definitively destructive impacts in so many sectors. The authors point to the two pivotal functioning instigators and purveyors of the neoliberal system: “deregulation and privatization” which lead to speculation and also has motivated a partner working side-by-side which is the “concentration of business and market power” (11). This concentration of power, for example, the shocking monopolization of information media has led to the squeezing out of useful information necessary to maintain knowledgeable, critical thinking citizenry. A recent blatant example of the uses of huge sums of money for gain was the American election for President. The elections also included voting for federal representatives in the Senate and House. A common way to predict the success of one candidate over another was the amount of funds at their disposal for campaigning. The debate over issues and legislation was non-existent as journalists, once thought of as the fourth estate of a democracy are more commonly thought of as the lap-dogs of democracy. This is not to say that excellent journalists are not still reporting with great integrity. The point is that the authors are correct in showing the influence of corporate power and one good example is the new role of reporting the news.
Organizations such as Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) and Media Watch have been calling for accurate news reports and media literacy for about 30 years. Media Watch was established 26 years ago and its mission is “challenging racism, sexism, and violence in media.” Although the United States has had many ongoing wars in the Middle East and Africa for the past two decades, the number of journalists reporting from the locations of the wars is minimal. The use of jingoism is as strong as the historical days of Hearst and yellow journalism. A current example is the call for a military attack on the people of Libya due to at the assassination of the Libyan ambassador, an information officer, and two marines killed in Benghazi on September 11, 2012. (Sengupta) Yet debate on the advantages and disadvantages of such a move are difficult to impossible since most Americans do not understand that the United States was recently the leader in initiating NATO preemptive attacks which destroyed the dreams of many Libyan families. Doctors Without Borders’ webpage has visual evidence from a photograph of a street in downtown Tripoli which shows that all the buildings were destroyed. Unfortunately according to Doctors Without Borders on February 14, 2012, refugee camps were inhabited by about 4000 people, formerly citizens of Tawargha, who will not be able to return to a home. (Bergstand) On the other hand TIMEWorld reports the celebrations of Libyans although many are now vulnerable to mental illness. (Subramanian) The changes implemented by the West immediately upon taking control were over the banking system and oil production; the privatization of those types of foreign entities have become national security goals important enough to start preemptive wars. This is probably the greatest misuse of the dominant theory of GDP growth model as the singly used factor for global crises problem-solving.
Socialization of services such as health care for the welfare of citizens has been deemed an enemy of the GDP growth model. Socialism has in fact become a ‘dirty word’ not unlike ‘liberal’ in the America political system. Yet the welfare, making sure the citizens of a country ‘fare well’ should be the number one concern of a government in a democracy. The money gathered from the people through the tax system is saved for their use in old age or hard times through the Medicaid and Social Security systems. But sometimes for no other reason than being examples of social services are these types of safety nets for people being vilified. The only alternative offered unfortunately is privatization. In the past thirty years the redistribution of wealth has been a flow of more money to the richest to the point that the middle class is eroding. Too many in the middle class are falling into poverty or are close to falling into a state of poverty. Sadly people who need the safety-net social services the most are some of the loudest critics. Another example of how the current paradigm of GDP growth has shattered equality and justice has been in the health care sector. The impetus to make a profit has led to a health care system which cannot put the welfare of the patients first because that would be detrimental to the profit making capabilities of the system.
The authors of the book point out that the largest growth has been global corporate growth and that type of growth does not bode well for populations that are already poverty stricken. One of the interesting facts pointed out was that earnings are no longer one percent associated with labor because “a growing percentage of earnings come from investments in securities rather than dividends from productive activities” (13). This seems to be a very danger precedent to set since the viability of investments has not proven to be reliable. deMause (2012) pointed out that the presidential debates on the economy were not very substantial and the offerings from media before the election were possibly even less substantial. That is unfortunate because securities nvestment instead of labor is a staggering problem. The lack of debate on the economy is a difficult paradox to comprehend because one of the biggest issues for the 2012 presidential elections was understood to be the economy. deMause (2012) reports that the discussion from the Romney camp focused on the ‘looming debt crisis.’ Media focused on the inability of Obama to create jobs such as the LA Times reporting in July about ‘Obama’s apparent ability to defy economic gravity.’ (deMause) On the other hand deMause reports (2012) that whether the economic stimulus worked or not is not questioned if one studies the facts.
The Congressional Budget office determined that at the peak of stimulus the spending in the third quarter of 2010, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act had created and preserved as many as 3.6 million jobs, almost exactly what had been projected by Obama in 2009; by mid-2012, though more than 90 percent of ARRA money had been spent, between 200,000 and 1.2 million people still owed their jobs to Obama’s policies. And a poll of economists across the political spectrum by the Initiative on Global Markets found that they agreed by a 20-to-1 margin that the stimulus had lowered the unemployment rate. (deMaus)
Unfortunately the most popular news station in the United States FoxNews was continuing to disparage the stimulus package. In the month before the election FoxNews (Oct. 2012) was reporting that Obama’s economic stimulus package was one of his scariest domestic policies.
This essay has tried to demonstrate that the ideas shared in the book No Future without Justice are based on real world problems. Although the authors describe themselves as a CGO reflective group their reflections and discussions on the roots of the problems facing the world today are based on facts and insightful observations. The observation that the only solution the dominant powers have to offer over the last thirty years has been the neo-liberal call to measure progress by GDP is a shocking but true statement. The arguments in the book demonstrate the accurateness of this conclusion. Their recommendations for change include changing the Mindset and this is a very good goal to try to accomplish but it may be the most difficult goal to successfully reach. They call for using new tools for measurement; the economy, of course, still needs to be measured as does well-being, human rights and sustainability. In that way more useful measurable goals can be assessed which are good, practical and common sense policies including but not limited to (a) make sustainability an integral part of fiscal policy, (b) using sovereign wealth funds for sustainable projects investment, and (c)establish a universal lower limit so people who need a safety net can take advantage of aid. I highly recommend this book for new ideas on solving some of the seemingly most intransigent problems in the world today; the book includes the facts to back up its arguments and proposals.
Work Cited
Bergstrand, N. “Libya: A Precarious Situation for Vulnerable Populations.” Doctors Without Borders. 27 March 2012. Web. 13 October 2012. http://doctorswithoutborders.
Civil Society Reflection Group on Global Development Perspectives, No future without justice, No. 59, Upsala, Sweden: Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation, June 2012. Print.
deMause, Neil. “Economy is the issue that isn’t.” Extra! October 2012. Web. 9 November 2012. http://www.fair.org
FAIR. http://www.fair.org
“For Halloween, Obama’s Scariest Domestic Policies.” FoxNews. 31 October 2012. Web. 12 November 2012. http://nation.foxnews.com
Media Watch. http://www.mediawatch.com
Sengupta, Kim. “Revealed: Inside story of US envoy’s assassination.” The Independent, 14 Sepember 2012. Web. 14 October 2012. http://www.independent.co.uk
Subramanian, Courtney. “Invisible Wounds: Libya’s Battle for Mental Health.” Time World, 1 November 2011. Web. 16 October 2012.
