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'Show me the money' now global motto
Jim Hoagland
April 13, 1997 SundayLove once made the world go around. Politics had its Cold War day. But today money is the overwhelming driving force for world leaders and political wannabes, as romance, revolution, high-minded strategy and the rest fade into the background.
Economic self-interest has always been central to the organization of societies and the advancement of individuals. But the defining characteristic of the postmodern political era is the absolute domination of money as the organizing principle of human and international relations. Some days there seems to be nothing else.
Consider these three snapshots from one day of headlines last week:
In Hanoi, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, fresh from lecturing Chinese and Japanese officials about buying more American goods, tells Vietnam's leaders his career as a bond salesman on Wall Street makes him an expert guide for them on how "to compete effectively for Vietnam's share of global investment."
Zairean rebel leader Laurent Kabila - once an ideological ally of Hanoi and seen in Europe and America as a dangerous threat to civilization - flies from his base in Goma to the captured diamond-producing town of Mbuji-Mayi on an aircraft owned by a private Western investor. De Beers, the South African organizer of the global uncut diamonds cartel, confirms that it has already held talks with Kabila in Goma.
Finance Minister Theo Waigel utters words that the specialists and markets interpret to mean that Germany has decided that the European Monetary Union and the creation of a single European currency, the Euro, will definitely go ahead in 1999. Waigel later insists his comments represent nothing new, but he has stirred a heated debate on the only big political subject on the European horizon today.
That subject is money - its value, its provenance and its control.
For the sake of brevity and to spare the children, I pass over the Clinton campaign-finance scandals and other obvious examples of how the dominant business of political leadership around the globe has become business, on an unprecedented scale.
Our snapshots result in large part from the Soviet collapse and the disappearance of an alternative economic model to capitalism. The Vietnamese have no alternative to Rubin - as Kabila has no true alternative to De Beers - as a foreign source of economic help and advice in the current crisis and of mutual profitability tomorrow.
Technology has shrunk labor and product markets (once known as countries) to a point where the marketing plans of multinational corporations overwhelm government entities and their boundaries. De Beers' implicit blessing of Kabila to replace the kleptocrat Mobutu - instead of having the CIA do the job this time - cuts out an expensive middleman.
President Clinton presumably will embrace this logical extension of his campaign to do away with big government, close down the spook shop and subcontract U.S. covert action in Africa to De Beers and associated firms.
As for the Zairean population - it is about to discover the validity of The Who's School of Business Management: Meet the New Boss. Same as the Old Boss.
It is in Asia, of course, that the new emphasis on trade and opening markets as the primary work of government abroad surfaces most emphatically. On his visit to Hanoi and to Ho Chi Minh City, Rubin seemed to treat the savage Vietnam War as a recent unpleasantness that both sides had overcome to get on with business.
More surprisingly, so did the Vietnamese. They signed an agreement with Rubin to pay $ 145 million in U.S. debts incurred by the South Vietnamese government. This put Hanoi "in the position of retroactively footing part of the bill for a war against itself," The Washington Post reported. I feel embarrassed both for Rubin and the Vietnamese. This agreement, and the concomitant chance for Nike, et al, to turn Vietnamese workers into sweatshop employees, is not why 55,000 Americans gave up their lives in the rice paddies. Rubin knows it, the Vietnamese know it. But life must go on.
It should go on with more attention by our leaders to history, ethics, morality and the larger purposes of politics and public service. Capitalism's triumph should not be turned into a license for piracy in the international marketplace. That outcome would erode and then destroy the true entrepreneurial spirit that has made America a beacon for the world, a symbol of values far broader than the value of money.
Jim Hoagland writes on foreign affairs for the Washington Post.The Washington Post SECTION: PERSPECTIVE; Pg. D-02 LENGTH: 754 words HEADLINE: BYLINE: BODY:
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