Garvey's Ghost: Black Talk

Sources

Over a ZNet I found This article dealing with the World Social Forum.
What struck me about this article was how it paralells my discussion of the situation in Haiti that I commented on back on Tuesday, January 13, 2004. There I stated:

Maybe Aristide has become out of touch with the ordinary Haitian. Maybe Aristide, having been thrust on the international stage and learning that running a country is not like running a church has had to deal with issues that the average Haitian has no clue about. The man is in his second year of his five-year term. The parliament is supposedly now defunct and he is ruling by decree. a dictatorship? Probably, but given that Haiti's problems started long before he was put into office and before this defunct parliament, how much different was the "democracy" before it?


The ZNet article seems to have the same view. It states:

quote:
Extraordinary, charismatic men, giants in Opposition, when they seize power and become Heads of State, they become powerless on the global stage. I'm thinking here of President Lula of Brazil. Lula was the hero of the World Social Forum last year. This year he's busy implementing IMF guidelines, reducing pension benefits and purging radicals from the Workers' Party. I'm thinking also of ex-President of South Africa, Nelson Mandela. Within two years of taking office in 1994, his government genuflected with hardly a caveat to the Market God. It instituted a massive programme of privatisation and structural adjustment, which has left millions of people homeless, jobless and without water and electricity.

But the moment they cross the floor from the Opposition into Government they become hostage to a spectrum of threats - most malevolent among them the threat of capital flight, which can destroy any government overnight. To imagine that a leader's personal charisma and a c.v. of struggle will dent the Corporate Cartel is to have no understanding of how Capitalism works, or for that matter, how power works. Radical change will not be negotiated by governments; it can only be enforced by people.


Exactly my point. Some people tell me that I've mellowed out in my older age. I tell them that I merely have a view that was not available to me in my earlier days. It's a view that broke Garvey's heart as Liberia capitulated to Firestone Corp. There are some other potent ideas in that article, go read it.

Links:
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=4873