Historical evidence over the last 150 years has irrefutably
shown that the West’s relationships with the developing countries of Africa and Latin America have been consistently based on self-interest, violent subjugation, followed by economic exploitation.
In their quest to protect the interests of their multinational corporations, which are viewed as synonymous with those of the national interest, Europe and the United States have over the last 20 years developed and imposed on their so called “allies” in Latin American and in some places in Africa what they call “free trade agreements.”
In reality these agreements are a mixture of liberalisation and protectionist measures that guarantee expansive monopoly pricing rights designed to serve the interests of Western corporations.
They also deprive developing countries of the mechanism employed by the countries of the West to reach their present state of development and wealth.
What they call “trade” is in part an economic fiction. It includes vast intra-company transfers among transnational corporations within highly planned economies. In the North American Free Trade Agreement, for example, the only accurate words are “North American.”
To give what is essentially a recycled form of neo-colonisation a kind face, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, were deployed as the best advisers on best practices in good national and corporate governance around the world and the guarantors of national prosperity in any country.
However the economic meltdown in Argentina in 2000 -2002 proved any beyond doubt that the IMF’s policies of the last two decades had been disastrous and were in fact instrumental in bringing about financial crises in virtually every part of the world.
Still, the organization refused to admit that as a doctor, it is a quack and we still have some economists and “financial experts” in Africa who are still offering its diagnosis and cure to patients.
Like a psychopathic doctor who practices euthanasia on his patients instead of trying to cure them, the IMF has left a trail of casualties and victims wherever it has made a house call: Mexico (1994-95), Asia (1997), Russia (1998), Brazil (1998), Turkey (1998), and beginning in 2001, Argentina.
Invariably, the IMF’s panacea for poor countries on how to break out of poverty is to tighten their belts, even when they are too poor to own any belt! Austerity measures introduced on the advice of the Fund have led to food riots, military coups and the destruction of the public services of many countries.
The IMF is like a doctor whose poor diagnosis delays urgent and appropriate treatment while the patient dies.

All this would not be important if not for the fact that over the last few years, reports of increasing evidence that big blue chip multi-national corporations are not above cheating both their suppliers and consumers in their quest for super profits. In South Africa giant food companies have been fined for the price fixing of essential goods such as bread and milk. In France, blue chip companies have been accused of using their economic muscle and monopoly power to fleece their suppliers. Anyone who has studied micro-economics knows how difficult it is to have chains of supply and demand which cannot be distorted by some calculated or concerted human action. Yet so many economic pundits and commentators are lost without those words. Now what the current economic downturn has done is to kill the geese that lay the world’s golden eggs, the small entrepreneurs. In the current  world economic climate, there are two ways of being an entrepreneur: you either kill yourself using your savings to build a company and sacrifice all immediate personal satisfaction, or you give up trying to be successful in the business world and use your savings to discover the joys of life.
Globalisation and neo-liberalism are based on an ideology where the freedom and success of the individual is what matters most in the growth of the economy. In this world, egotists who think and behave as though they were born special, are allowed to feel entitled to succeed at the expense of the community or others, as long as they spur the growth of the national economy. Yet the original American entrepreneurial spirit was driven by hyper-competition where the individual is allowed to grow a business, especially if the ultimate objective of such a business is to enhance the life of all the people that depend on it. The trouble is that in real life, we see greed triumph over the high ideals of the classical economists and capitalists who planted the seeds of globalization, leading in times of crisis to early selling without concern for term prosperity. National causes or collective achievements always suffer when the glory and interests of the individual are put ahead of those of the community, nation or the collective. The reality of our situation is that the long lunches and 35-hour weeks of the top trade and financial executives who are supposed to make our economies grow have not yielded the desired results. In the beginning of capitalism in the 15th and 16th centuries, the system was focused on production, on hard work, on charity and on deferring gratification. People saved to invest for the future and old age and entrepreneurs borrowed their money to open factories and produce goods. All this was done in the name of producing products for people with very real needs, with the reward for the investors being interest or profit. es of the last 20 years have created consumer economies, not productive economies.
The emphasis today is not on production but on consuming. For those who run our economies it is on super profits, speculation, which leads to insider trading and the cooking of company books.
So we are now a global economy producing an awful lot of goods chasing very few needs, while the real needs, such as universal nutrition, education, primary health care and others are going unmet worldwide.
Meanwhile the top 300 000 Ame r i c a n e a r ne r s collectively make as much income as the bottom 150 million Americans combined.
Last year the top 1 percent received 22.8 percent of all reported income, a record only behind that of 1928, when they received 23.9 percent.  A year later, Wall Street crashed and the Great Depression began.  Tal k about  hi story repeating itself.