WORLD NEWS TRUST: World Food Day: Global Crises’ Double Standards (Ramzy Baroud)

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Ramzy Baroud -- World News Trust

Oct. 23, 2008 -- The 25th annual World Food Day, marked Oct. 16, was an occasion whose arrival and passing received little media attention or governmental fanfare. Evidently, much of the world media and governments are consumed with an economic crisis of epic proportions, which is perceived in the United States as the worst such upheaval since the Great Depression. In the rest of the world, it's depicted as the worst economic crisis in recent memory or, as the BBC termed it, "the most tumultuous times on record in the global financial markets."

There is hardly any disagreement that Wall Street's woes are manmade. Regardless of what terminology one wishes to apply (miscalculations, greed, or wholesale failure in the U.S. capitalist system, rooted in the economic philosophies of Milton Friedman and his ultra laissez- faire approach), the fact is the U.S. economic crisis is not a fleeting phenomenon and no quick fixes can provide a magic remedy.

In an interview with Fox Business Network, U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson expressed regret, unusual to any top U.S. official, for the economic "mistakes" made and which are promising a global recession for years to come. "We're not proud of all the mistakes that were made by many different people, different parties, failures of our regulatory system, failures of market discipline that got us here." However, he promised that the United States "will mitigate the impact on the real economy and we'll get this financial system working again."

There is no reason to doubt Paulson's commitment to the financial system. In fact, when it's the rich and powerful whose wealth and influence are at stake, the US government, if not most world governments, hold true to their word. While the IMF had repudiated governments in Asia, Africa and South America for many years for any slight intervention in their country's economies (for a "free market economy" has to be entirely unregulated in order for natural checks and balances to resolve whatever crisis is at hand, they were told), the Bush administration and leading Western powers moved with no hesitation to nationalise some of the largest institutions in their own markets. Like China's brand of capitalism that operates under communist symbols, the United States, the UK and others are becoming increasingly socialist under the banner of capitalism. Of course, it's not socialism for the downtrodden, but corporate welfare in its most stark manifestations.

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