LIFE AFTER DEBT

Bono was quoted in The Guardian saying he s been working out the angles on Third World debt. He d be better off working out the Engels.
Engels explained almost 150 years ago that, under capitalism, debt between countries doesn t really exist. It s an ideological construct , insisted the marginally less hirsute of the Marxian twosome.

Today, levellers, diggers, Chumbawamba and Chomsky agree.
Interviewed on US college radio last month, Chomsky, professor of linguistics at MIT and cool guru of guerrilla gardeners everywhere, played the Engels for almost an hour.
If I borrow money from you, I am in your debt? Not necessarily so. Maybe it s some chap from a thousand miles away up country that neither of us has ever set eyes on who owes you the money.
If he cannot pay, you beat the crap out of him, leave him for dead. Other people will pay up in his stead. You can t lose.
That s the way it works in the wacky world of capitalism.
In his radio piece (check it out: www.alternativeradio.org) Chomsky cited Indonesia, where debt to Western institutions is running at 140 percent of GDP. The money was borrowed under the Suharto dictatorship, which came to power in the 1960s as a result of a coup (half a million dead) supported by all of the Western powers.
Chomsky reckoned that the Indonesians who organised the loans numbered fewer than 200.
Much of the debt has now been socialised through the IMF. That is, western governments have underwritten it. So, it s the tax-payers of Europe and north America who take the hit if all goes wrong.
Suharto was overthrown in 1998 by a huge upsurge of ordinary people who risked everything, including their lives, to be rid of dictatorship. The big-time borrowers of the Suharto years scarpered abroad with their associates and accoutrements to live off the loot they d squirrelled away.
So who owes the money, and to whom?
International financial institutions and governments the world over are in no doubt. They maintain that it s owed by the generality of people in Indonesia, who number not 200 but 200 million: people who didn t borrow it or get any benefit from it and who drove out those who did borrow it and did get benefit from it.
The new government, anxious to show that it is responsible, reasonable and means no harm to the world order, accepts all this fully. Its ability to rebuild the country and generate new growth is drastically curtailed by the resultant necessity to honour the debt.
But, and this was Engels point, to see the debt in this light is to make an ideological, not an economic, judgment. The debt is an ideological construct,
The question which arose for Engels was, what sort of society would see debt differently, and repudiate it?
In the debtor country, it would have to be a society which had gotten rid not just of the policies of the old regime but of its entire economic rationale. It would have to have broken with global capitalism, not resolved to show itself a reliable ally of the world system.
Likewise in the creditor country: for as long as the political representatives of the bankers hold sway, the impoverished mass overseas will be squeezed to repay the debt they never incurred. And if the wherewithal isn't there to be extracted from them, the unknowing guarantors, the tax-payers at home, will have to be made to cough up instead.
The society which would see international debt in accurate, rational perspective would be a society from which the role and influence of the bankers had been extirpated.
Thus, to campaign for the cancellation of Third World debt without explicitly urging revolt against capitalism is futile.
Chumbawamba across the water, like Rage Against the Machine across the pond, have recognised this truth. How long before the local hero sees the issue straight?

Events which sent a shudder of horror across the country just a few years ago have now become so commonplace they don t excite comment.
Last month, a Donegal priest was sentenced to 12 years for a catalogue of sexual offences against children. Fr. Eugene Greene pleaded guilty to 40 sample charges of indecent assault, buggery and gross indecency. The people of the parish he served in are angry at what they suspect was the complicity of others.
They had hoped that court revelations would lead to an investigation of who in the Church knew what and when. But that now seems unlikely.
I have the impression that the media and everyone else have grown weary of these cases, says one local parent. I don t mean it cynically, but I suppose there s nothing in it any more for them.
If there was a cover-up, those responsible have got away with it. That s what s really angering.
Originally, 108 charges were laid against the 71-year-old priest, involving offences over a period of 17 years up to 1982 against 26 victims, mostly altar boys who had been between 10 and 12 at the time of the assaults.
The case came to light when one of the victims, now an adult, asked Greene for money in late 1998. In an act of either arrant stupidity or sheer arrogance, the priest made a complaint of blackmail to the local gardai. When the alleged blackmailer was questioned, he said that he had been looking for compensation, and explained what for. Others were then approached, and the story tumbled out.
It is fair to say that the defendant wreaked havoc in the community, commented Judge Matthew Deery.
Judge Deery also noted that at the time of the offences, reports were made to the Church authorities, but that a lack of courage had allowed the abuse to continue.
The court had earlier heard that the father of one of the victims had become aware of what was happening in 1977 and had given the facts to his parish priest. Greene was moved out of the parish for a period, but returned, and resumed the abuse. When the father complained to the parish priest, he was told: I can t shift the problem from one place to another.
Another victim told the court that he d once returned home from serving mass, also in 1977, to be assked by his mother whether he d been touched by Fr. Greene. The word was out about him, said the victim.
The court heard of an incident in which a priest had entered a room in the parochial house to find Greene in an act of indecent assault. According to the victim, the priest turned away, pretending not to see.
Judge Deery commented on the horrific descriptions of some of the acts of rape. In one case, the victim had haemorrhaged from the anus for weeks.
Greene had carried out many of the acts just before or just after saying mass.
In a statement read out at all masses in the diocese of Raphoe, Bishop Philip Boyce apologised to the victims and their families.
In a local radio interview, the bishop said that at the time, Church structures were not equipped to deal with such abuse.
He added: It certainly was a different era and people didn t understand the harm this had on victims.
Although the word was out about Greene since at least 1977, Bishop Boyce insisted that there was no mention of the allegations in diocesean files, no reference to the complaint made to the parish priest, no indication of any kind that there was something amiss. I cannot verify what the priest or even the bishop knew about it at the time, he claimed.