Wealth's Apostles (naming the names)

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http://counterpunch.com/


Absent at the Creation
Wealth's Apostles

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Part I: Wealth’s Apostles.

Petrified by the imminent collapse of the entire financial architecture, the Finance Ministers of the Group of Seven (G7) countries hastened to Washington for an emergency meeting, summoned to their Rome, to find a quick solution. The smiles that littered the faces of the ministers in their February meeting in Osaka were absent. Instead, they reverted to type. America’s Henry Paulson had a pinched nose in the official photograph, as he frowned toward the camera as it to say, get this over with, and get me out of here. Two of the men in the room had been bred in the left, only to have walked right-ward: Britain’s Alistair Darling, once a 4th Internationalist and now another Scotsman for Brown, walked around with the typical smug look of New Labour, while Italy’s Giulio Tremonti, once of the Italian Socialist Party and then of Berlusconi’s disreputable Forza Italia, walked around at a forward angle, as if to display his eagerness to please with his body’s slant. Tremonti, at least is an intellectual, one who has perversely adopted some of the anti-globalization rhetoric to smash the remnants of Italy’s social wage. France’s Christine LeGarde trained as a labor lawyer, but gave little of herself to the working-class. A twenty-year career in the Chicago law firm of Baker & McKenzie trained her well for her job in the Sarkozy cabinet, pushing an agenda to make the French worker “work harder.” But she is the opposite of Tremonti, having said early into her term that like her boss, she believes that the French think too much and don’t do enough. No intellectualism or big ideas from her desk. But at least she could say as much. The Japanese Finance Minister, Soichi Nakagawa, has a thing for the bottle, and it might be expected that the tension sent him in search of the nearest bar. This is the cast of characters that wants to determine the destiny of our times.

Germany’s Peer Steinbruck looked ill. A long-time SPD man, now in charge of his country’s checkbook in this grand alliance of hard right and right, Steinbruck came to Washington having made the strongest statement on the crisis. “The world will never be as it was before the crisis. The United States will lose its superpower status in the world financial system.” The system would, he argued, “become more multi-polar.” These are fierce words, and it is doubtful that Steinbruck earned any smiles from Paulson or his team. World Bank president Robert Zoellick, the stooge of James Baker who took an active role in stealing the 2000 election for Bush, was seen in his company. Zoellick’s smile is like a cattle-prod, a warning to get in line. Any other dissent could not be brooked. IMF Chief, the Frenchman Dominique Strauss-Kahn said of the crisis that it is “the result of regulatory failure to guard against excessive risk-taking in the financial system, especially in the U. S.” (September 22). A few days after the October meeting, Strauss-Kahn faced charges that he had, what the Japanese call, a “lower half problem.” The IMF began investigations into an affair Strauss-Kahn had with a senior official of the IMF’s Africa division, Piroska Nagy. The dirty tricks squad released its file on him.

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Part II: The Lion’s Den.

Bretton Woods is the name of a small town in the beautiful White Mountains of New Hampshire. As you drive along Route 302 from Vermont, you pass by the road that can take you to Franconia, where Robert Frost wrote some of his best verse (“Stopping by the Woods,” but also the 1916, “The Line Gang,” with the unforgettable “With a laugh, an oath of towns that set the wild at naught, they bring the telephone and telegraph”). You brush by Bethlehem, where the pollen count is so low that people used to come here to shelter before antihistamines. And then, before you can breathe, you enter the area of the mountains, the Crawford Notch region that brings you within sight of Mt. Washington. Little wonder then that in the early 1900s, the railways ran a service that linked the barons of New York, Boston and Philadelphia to their own private Switzerland. Joseph Stickney wanted to build a major hotel on an immense plain between Crawford Notch and Twin Mountain. To design the hotel, he hired Charles Alling Gifford, already a pioneer of the “millionaires’ cottages” on Jekyll Island, Georgia. Gifford designed well for the landscape, and a series of “busy Italians” built the Mount Washington Hotel, a “mountain colossus” (Among the Clouds, August 13, 1901). Grandness embossed the hotel. One guidebook from the time gushed, “There is an indoor scene comparable in brilliancy with a reception to the diplomatic corps at the White House or a levee at the Court of St. James”

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While in the White Mountains last week I casually asked someone if he knew anything about the Abenaki Indians. He didn’t. Nor are their any signs to indicate that they were ever alive. Except a ski resort named for them. The Abenaki were exterminated by the plague of 1616-1618, then the slow, painful encroachment of the Massachusetts settlers up the Merrimack River (including a series of wars that devastated the Abenaki and other peoples: King Philip’s War, 1675-78, Lovewell’s War, 1723-25 and the French and Indian War, 1754-63, during which Major Robert Rogers conducted his bloody raid of the village of St. Francis), and by finally by the long cultural war that fully cleansed the landscape of them. Bretton Woods was built on the homeland of the Abenaki, taken by the colonialists for its resources (the trees became raw material for the ships) and for the land. It is fitting then that Bretton Woods, built on colonial amnesia, is the name of a conference that the G7 wants to revive, once more forgetting the silenced billions.

By all means a conference, but not one that shuts out the many. Chavez gets this. After meeting Sarkozy in Paris in late September, Chavez told the press that such a meeting must “not be confined to the Group of Eight.” He’s having a good laugh. Reflecting on the equity stake in the banks, Chavez said, “Comrade Bush is to the left of me now.”
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