West.
Yeltsin is leading the pack on pushing the “reforms.” Therefore
he’s a “democrat.” That’s what we call a democrat anywhere in the
world—someone who follows the Western business agenda.
Dead children and debt service
After you returned from a recent trip to Nicaragua, you told me it’s
becoming more difficult to tell the difference between economists
and Nazi doctors. What did you mean by that?
There’s a report from UNESCO (which I didn’t see reported in
the US media) that estimated the human cost of the “reforms” that
aim to return Eastern Europe to its Third World status.
UNESCO estimates that about half a million deaths a year in
Russia since 1989 are the direct result of the reforms, caused by
the collapse of health services, the increase in disease, the increase
in malnutrition and so on. Killing half a million people a year—that’s a
fairly substantial achievement for reformers.
The figures are similar, but not quite as bad, in the rest of
Eastern Europe. In the Third World, the numbers are fantastic. For
example, another UNESCO report estimated that about half a million
children in Africa die every year simply from debt service. Not
from the whole array of reforms—just from interest on their
countries’ debts.
It’s estimated that about eleven million children die every year
from easily curable diseases, most of which could be overcome by
treatments that cost a couple of cents. But the economists tell us
that to do this would be interference with the market system.
There’s nothing new about this. It’s very reminiscent of the
British economists who, during the Irish potato famine in the mid-
nineteenth century, dictated that Ireland must export food to Britain
—which it did right through the famine—and that it shouldn’t be
given food aid because that would violate the sacred principles of
political economy. These policies always happen to have the
curious property of benefiting the wealthy and harming the poor.