[Neoliberalism has caused the widespread and institutional
violation of human rights.]
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TIME TO SEEK JUSTICE, NOT HAND OUT THE NOBEL PRIZE, FOR ECONOMIC
CRIMES  
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Walden Bello
June 13, 2023
Foreign Policy in Focus
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_ Neoliberalism has caused the widespread and institutional violation
of human rights. _

Trash picker in the Philippines, (Shutterstock)

 

_Amnesty International Philippines named FPIF commentator Walden Bello
“Most Distinguished Defender of Human Rights” for 2023.  This is
his acceptance speech._

I would like to thank Amnesty International for this honor of naming
me the Most Distinguished Human Rights Defender for 2023. Let me say
that while I have long been active in the protection of the right to
life, the right to be free from persecution, and the right to due
process, I would like to believe that the panel of judges are also
making a statement about my long-time engagement with economic rights.

Most of my life’s work has been devoted to intellectually and
politically demolishing the ideology and policies of neoliberalism
that have wreaked so much havoc not only among our people but in
countries throughout world.  The destruction of our manufacturing and
the devastation of our agriculture has led to so much poverty and
inequality and sheer misery, leaving so many of our youth with no
other choice but to abandon our ruined country.

To borrow the distinction made by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, there
are _negative rights_, such as the right not to be tortured,
and _positive rights_, or those that contribute to our full
development as human beings.  Human rights campaigns have
traditionally focused on negative rights, that is, the protection of
people from repression and persecution. I believe that it is time we
also campaign against individuals and institutions that violate the
people’s positive rights. Neoliberal policies such as those that
have been imposed by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund,
institutionalized in the Philippine political economy, and
rationalized by a succession of economic managers and economists have
created massive poverty and inequality that have prevented millions of
our fellow Filipinos over the last five decades from their full
development as human beings because they have destroyed,
disarticulated, and disintegrated the country’s base of physical
survival, that is, the economy. That is a crime.

Neoliberal policies are now discredited. The Washington Consensus is
in the junk heap. No self-respecting economic manager, except perhaps
in the Philippines, any longer invokes the “magic of the market”
or the so-called benefits of free trade. Yet in so many countries, and
not just in the Philippines, neoliberal policies continue to be the
default mode, like the proverbial dead hand of the engineer on the
throttle of a speeding train. They continue to inflict severe damage
on the life chances of billions of people because they have been
institutionalized.

Those who have been responsible for destroying economies cannot be
allowed to just walk away from the wreckage, just as that monster,
former President Rodrigo Duterte, cannot be allowed to just get away
with spilling the blood of 27,000 Filipinos. The bureaucrats and
technocrats of the IMF and World Bank, their local accomplices
particularly in the Department of Finance and National Economic
Development Authority, as well as the ideologues of neoliberalism that
have spread the false gospel from their perches in such institutions
as the University of Chicago and the University of the Philippines
School of Economics must also be brought before the International
Criminal Court (ICC).

Duterte’s hands are bloody, but so are the hands of these
white-collar criminals very dirty. Like those bombing crews that drop
their lethal payloads from 27,000 feet or the remote controller that
directs a drone to destroy a wedding party in Pakistan from thousands
of miles away in Nevada, USA, these people are not exempted from guilt
owing to their distance from the sites of death, destruction,
harrowing poverty, and misery.

It is high time we seek justice for economic crimes. It is high time
we cease honoring such criminals with Nobel Prizes in Economics but
bring them instead to the ICC. If the arraignment of such economic
criminals cannot immediately be done owing to the need to amend the
Rome statute, then let us at least establish a “Hall of Infamy”
where we can enshrine such dead and living stars of neoliberalism as
the Nobel Prize laureate Milton Friedman, the ideological soulmate of
the General Augusto Pinochet; Michel Camdessus and Christine Legarde,
the best known faces of IMF-imposed austerity; former World Bank
President Robert McNamara, who conspired with the dictator Marcos to
make the Philippines one of the guinea pigs of structural adjustment;
and Pascal Lamy and Mike Moore, who spearheaded the drive to imprison
the global South in the iron cage of free trade, the World Trade
Organization.

I would also push for the inclusion in such a Hall of Infamy Filipino
luminaries of technocratic neoliberalism, the people who worked with
international technocrats to condemn us to permanent debt slavery,
destroy our manufacturing, and bring our agriculture to a terminal
state. Here I would include the economic managers and economists Jesus
Estanislao, Gerry Sicat, Cesar Virata, Bernie Villegas, and Carlos
Dominguez.

And, of course, one must not forget Cielito Habito, who as National
Economic Development Authority chief almost singlehandedly wiped out
Philippine manufacturing with his push to bring down average tariffs
to 4-6 percent simply to prove that Filipinos could take economic pain
better than Pinochet’s Chicago Boys in Chile, who did not allow
tariffs to go below 11 percent. Nor must we overlook the WTO-USAID
mercenary Ramon Clarete, who famously sought to sugarcoat the
impending murder of our agricultural sector by claiming that
Philippines’ joining the WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture would
result in 500,000 new jobs every year in the countryside!

But some people might object: Habito and Clarete are such
mild-mannered individuals to deserve being tagged as economic
criminals. So was the Nazi Adolf Eichmann, whom Hannah Arendt famously
described as representing “the banality of evil.” Others might
say, well they were wrong, but were they not well intentioned? This
excuse does not even deserve an answer since the dictator Ferdinand
Marcos, Sr, and Duterte also saw themselves as well-intentioned as
they went about their grisly business. The road to hell, one must
repeat again and again, is paved with good intentions.

Being tried at the ICC or honored with membership at the Hall of
Infamy would be a lesson to all that bad ideas and bad policies have
consequences, often devastating ones—that you cannot play academic
and policy games with the lives of millions of people.

Let me end by demanding the release of my fellow Ignite awardee
Senator Leila de Lima, packing off Duterte to the ICC jail in The
Hague, an end to impunity, and the dismantling of all those neoliberal
policies that have destroyed our economy and brought so much misery to
our people.  And, again, thank you Amnesty.

_Former member of Congress Walden Bello is visiting senior researcher
at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University and
adjunct professor of sociology at the State University of New York at
Binghamton. Also the recipient in 2003 of the Right Livelihood Award
(aka Alternative Nobel Prize), Bello is the author of 25 books,
including the classic Development Debacle: The World Bank in the
Philippines (1982), Dark Victory: The United States, Structural
Adjustment and Global Poverty (1994), and Paper Dragons: China and
the Next Crash (2019)._

_Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF) is a “Think Tank Without Walls”
connecting the research and action of scholars, advocates, and
activists seeking to make the United States a more responsible global
partner. It is a project of the Institute for Policy Studies. FPIF is
supported entirely by general support from the Institute for Policy
Studies and by contributions from readers. If you value this unique
resource, please make a one-time or — better yet! — recurring
contribution
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* Phillipines
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* neo-liberalism
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* World Bank
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* IMF
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* Ferdinand Marcos
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* Rodrigo Duterte
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* Human Rights
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* Amnesty International
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