Measuring Victory

While we were looking at humpbacked whales a few months ago, my companion asked me if I ever thought about how Moby Dick's narrator, Ishmael, survived -- by floating away from the destroyed ship Pequod in his friend Queequeg's coffin.

Whales themselves survived into the twenty-first century in part because of petroleum, the black stuff seeping out of the Pennsylvania earth that made the Rockefellers rich and whale oil unnecessary for lighting lamps (and because of the first international whaling treaty in 1949).

Of course, petroleum went on to create the climate change that threatens habitat for whales and trashes their world in other ways. Typically, there isn't an easy moral to this, any more than there is to Ishmael floating away safely because his friend had terrible premonitions of death. And that's part of the richness of Herman Melville's telling.

The world is full of tales in which morals are hard to extract from facts. There is the delightful fact that Viagra has been good for endangered species like elk whose antlers now are less at risk of being ground up for Chinese aphrodisiacs, surely the greatest inadvertent contribution of big pharmaceuticals in our time.

Casinos have provided many Native American tribes with revenue and clout, though gambling is another kind of social problem and outside groups are the principal profiteers from some of the casinos.

McDonald's has (under intense pressure from animal rights activists) led the way in reforming how meat animals are raised and slaughtered.

Many military sites have become de facto wildlife refuges, saving huge swathes of land from civilian development (even if bombing endangered species is part of the drill).

Then there are those interesting moments when otherwise appalling politicians do something decent for whatever reason or when the principled and the sinister are weirdly mixed -- like anti-abortion, pro-death-penalty Arizona Senator John McCain's passion for addressing climate change or the recently deceased Pope John Paul II's condemnation of neoliberalism. To say nothing of our one great environmental president, Richard Nixon (and, yes, it wasn't out of purity of heart that Nixon got us the Environmental Protection Agency, the Endangered Species Act, and the Clean Air and Water Acts, but purity of water and air matter more).

Sometimes, though, I think my compatriots are looking for the real world to provide stories as simple as Sunday school and sports, not as complex as Moby Dick. I would like those victories too. I would have liked it a lot if, after returning from the G8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, earlier this month, George W. Bush had -- in a live global telecast like the Oscars -- fallen to his knees, apologized profusely to everyone for everything, condemned capitalism, violence and himself, promised to dismantle the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, stop the war in Iraq immediately, and dedicate some of the billions thus saved to African poverty. And that's just for starters. But let's look instead at what we got.

The Baby or the Baby-killer?

Bush, as ever, refused to deal with climate change and was dragged along only grudgingly on aid and debt-relief measures for Africa. Even so, in the lead-up to the summit, 18 of the world's poorest nations, including Bolivia, Ethiopia, Ghana, Nicaragua, Rwanda, and Uganda, received 100% debt cancellation -- a $40 billion write-off from the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the African Development Bank. Nine more countries will receive debt cancellation in the next 18 months. Of course there were strings attached -- preexisting policies obliging those nations to play by some of the rules that made them destitute to begin with. A lot of radicals excoriated the whole business of the G8 taking up debt relief and African poverty. John Pilger wrote in the New Statesman:

It is a fraud -- actually a setback to reducing poverty in Africa. Entirely conditional on vicious, discredited economic programmes imposed by the World Bank and the IMF, the 'package' will ensure that the 'chosen' countries slip deeper into poverty. Is it any surprise that this is backed by Blair and his treasurer, Gordon Brown, and George Bush; even the White House calls it a 'milestone.'

Others disagreed. Foreign Policy in Focus analyst Mark Engler wrote:

Those progressives who have attacked the debt deal emphasize that, even in announcing the cancellation, G8 finance ministers explicitly reaffirm a neoliberal economic paradigm. Under the new G8 agreement, 18 countries do receive full debt cancellation from the IMF and World Bank, and nine other countries may be granted similar relief at a later date.

He went on to discuss the "conditionalities," or terms, that the countries granted debt cancellation under the Highly Indebted Poor Countries program, or HIPC, are required to accept, including various measures increasing privatization and corporate access to their resources. Engler concluded:

Obviously, this is a problem. That said, it is clearly better for poor countries that have already suffered HIPC conditions to receive full cancellation, rather than inadequate, partial relief. Full, 100 percent cancellation has been one of the foundational demands of the debt relief movement. It is something that has been resisted by wealthy nations through years of mass protests and persistent lobbying. By affirming the legitimacy of this long-denied demand, the G8 agreement sets a landmark precedent. This breakthrough represents a significant victory.... In one example, some 2.2 million people in Uganda gained access to water as a result of a post-1997 debt cancellation.

The debate seems to be over whether this is capitulation or incremental victory. The majority of victories we win are likely to be muddled, compromised, incomplete, and uncredited. It is no surprise that Blair and Bush failed to excoriate themselves or the system that creates poverty. Of course, they avoided systemic analysis while claiming to have always been on the side of the angels.