Right Wing Economic Orthodoxy Brings Death And Destruction To Africa

For over a hundred years the American Republican Party has embodied right wing economic fundamentals-- basically, the Law of the Jungle. One of its premises is that business regulations just hamper economic development and personal freedoms and that it's all so unnecessary because everything rights itself in the end without government intervention.

So, for example, if an airline company, eager to fatten the bottom line-- and make the managers wealthier-- starts cutting back on "needless" maintenance procedures and, as a result, its planes start falling out of the sky, investors-- and eventually perhaps even informed consumers ("informed" being key here)-- will not want anything to do with the company. Meanwhile unregulated insurance companies, or even the semi-regulated ones we have now, won't suffer unduly because no one will force them to pay for the hundreds or even thousands of deaths. Hey, a plane falling out of the sky? What could be more an act of God rather than an act of GOP? Just ask Donald Trump.

Anyway, I dare anyone to find a more fitting place to set the Law of the Jungle into stone than Nigeria, an authoritarian hellhole beloved of plutocrats and wingnuts the world over. Right now, by chance, I'm reading a powerful and brilliant book, cleverly disguised as spoof, by investigative journalist Ken Silverstein, Turkmeniscam-- How Washington Lobbyists Fought to Flack for a Stalinist Dictatorship. And the key isn't Stalinist really, but "dictatorship." The model for the entire Inside the Beltway lobbying "industry" and how it sanitizes even the world's most despicable regimes-- for a price-- is Ivy "Poison Ivy" Lee, "the father of modern public relations," whose most notorious crusade was favorably influencing American public opinion on behalf of Big Business and their pals, the Third Reich.

This kind of endeavor is completely bipartisan, I'm afraid, with Democrats proving themselves not one bit more ethical or less morally bankrupt than Republicans. There are a quarter-million parasites working in this criminal sector, and it isn't one likely to be hit by layoffs, neither by the economy nor by the ascension of Democrats to power. And among the most beloved and well-served clients are brutal, oil-rich fascist regimes in Africa, particularly Equitorial Guinea and Nigeria, two of the most corrupt places on earth.

Improved technology has improved oil production in sub-Saharan Africa, but the boom there has bred massive government corruption. "Global oil is a mixed picture, predominantly negative, and African oil is the most negative of all the stories," David Gordon, head of the CIA's Office of Transnational Issues, said at an energy conference... Gordon, who had recently traveled to Nigeria, said that the consensus among people he spoke with was that the country would have been better off if its oil had been left in the ground. That is a reasonable conclusion when one considers that Nigeria had exported more than $200 billion worth of oil during the last few decades but the overwhelming majority of its people live in poverty.

Extremely well paid lobbyists, devoid of any sense of moral bearing whatsoever, have set out to create an image of a vibrant free economy coming along just swimmingly. And it's a very deceptive image indeed that these politically connected slimebags have concocted. A month after a gaggle of lobbyist-paid opinion-making junketeers returned from Lagos singing the praises of Nigeria's vicious Orwellian dictatorship-- of which one wrote that there is "no evidence of a dictatorship"-- their hosts hanged a well-known democracy advocate, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and eight other would be reformers. Meanwhile, despite "no evidence of a dictatorship," there were no elections in that country until after the dictator, Sani Abacha, died one evening in 1998 while enjoying two prostitutes. The average Nigerian subsists on $1 per day.

So... Nigeria, 2008. Like corrupt, bribe-loving politicians in Chicago, Houston or anywhere else-- and particularly "free market" fanatics and die-hard rightists-- the Nigerians aren't keen on meaningful regulatory agencies. Republican Party polemicists should go live there. Their "free market" fanaticism has been so successful that yesterday the news across Africa was about dozens of children who have died because of unregulated pharmaceuticals. In one case, infants were given anti-freeze by their parents, said parents thinking they were administering teething medicine to their babies. It was pure, unadulterated poison under the consumer-friendly name MyPikin.

Probably no one-- at least no one who hears about this tragedy-- will buy MyPikin in the future, proving, presumably, how wonderfully the "free market" works. And the company executives may be fined. No businessmen nor their political enablers, however, were lined up against any walls and shot.

Most counterfeit drugs come from those burgeoning exemplars of "free market" greed and selfishness capitalism, China and India. Their counterfeit pharmaceutical exports will reach $75 billion by 2010, worth 50 percent more than Bernie Madoff swindled under the benign good graces of Bush's toothless, Nigerian-style regulatory agency in charge of protecting the public from ruthless predators like him and his friends and family. No one has been put up against any walls and shot in that case either, but Madoff is reported to be under electronic survellance and under house arrest in his $7 million dollar Manhattan apartment.

And SEC chief Cox and Bush and the bureaucrats in charge of preventing this sort of thing? They're shocked and dismayed... and unpunished.

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