Johann Hari

In the long fake boom of the Nineties and Noughties, we were sold a thousand scams. End government regulation of the financial system! Turn banks into casinos! Pay CEOs 500 times more than their staff! Bow, bow, bow before our mansion-dwelling overlords and the Total Efficiency they will bring! Yet from under the rubble left by these delusions, one of the greatest scams has skipped out unscathed, and it is now successfully selling itself as a solution to the fading of the boom-light. It is probably in your workplace now, or coming soon. Its name? Management consultancy.

There are now half a million management consultants in the world, and they all grumble that they face one question wherever they go: yes, but what is it that you actually do? They claim to be able to enter any organization, watch its workers for a short period, and then - using graphs, algorithms, and a jargon that makes quantum physics look like Sesame Street - render it dramatically more efficient, for a fee. They are everywhere: in the US, AT&T (to pluck a random company) spent $500m on them in just five years, while the British state will soon be spending more on management consultants than on upgrading its nuclear weapons.

Yet the process of management consultancy has always been shrouded in priestly secrecy. Over the past few years there has been a string of memoirs by highly successful former management consultants, finally pulling back the flow-charts.

David Craig gives a typical explanation of what the consultants Actually Do. After getting a degree specializing in romantic poetry, he was astonished to be hired by a prestigious management consultancy, given three weeks training, and then dropped into major corporations to tell them how to run their oil rigs, menswear stores, and factories, for tens of thousands of pounds a pop. In his brave memoir "Rip Off!" he explains: "We were proud of the way we used to make things up as we went along... It's like robbing a bank but legal. We could take somebody straight off the street, teach them a few simple tricks in a couple of hours and easily charge them out to our clients for more than £7000 per week." It consisted, he says, of "lies, lies and even more lies."

He worked to a simple model, which is common in the industry. He had to watch how a workforce behaved for a week - and then tell the company's bosses, every time, that they had 30 percent too many staff and only his consultancy could figure out who should be culled. If he calculated they actually had the right amount of staff, he was told by his bosses not to be so ridiculous and do his sums again: where was the money for them in a properly-staffed company? The company had to be POPed - People Off Payroll.

Of course, this advice was often disastrous. His company was sent into a chain of 500 menswear shops. They advised them to cut staff by (surprise!) 30 percent, and to replace most full-time staff with part-timers. The result? The full-time employees had been highly motivated, because they wanted a career in the company; the part-timers only wanted a little extra cash. So motivation levels in the company collapsed, and with it the standard of service. The company was bankrupt within a few years.

Yes, you might say, but surely he was just a bad management consultant. The rest must get results. The evidence suggests not. The Cranfield School of Management studied 170 companies who had used management consultants, and it discovered just 36 percent of them were happy with the outcome - while two thirds judged them to be useless or harmful. A medicine with that failure-rate would be taken off the shelves.

Matthew Stewart, another former consultant, summarizes his high flying years in the industry by saying: "I felt like a snake oil salesmen without snake oil." When he was sent into a company, he was told to use complex formulae to analyze the productivity of its staff, but he soon realized that the results were "nearly random... Similar results could have been achieved by having four monkeys throw darts at a few matrices." Yet on this basis, he was taking a fortune in payments, and firing thousands of productive people.

The recession has given a fresh burst to this industry, as corporations beg to be told where to apply the leeches. The number of senior consultants has swollen by 10 percent in the past year, while the number employed by local government has grown by 11 percent.

But there is a growing body of academic research showing that the strategies pushed by these consultancies are in fact disastrous - and hasten the collapse of a company or service. Professor Wayne Cascio of the University of Colorado has studied the relative costs and benefits of POPing your workforce. Corporations and governments are receptive to the idea that the quickest, easiest way to save money is to fire workers. But Cascio has shown that, most of the time, the costs outweigh the gains. Obviously, you have to immediately find large amounts of redundancy and severance pay. But the costs don't stop there. Your workforce becomes very nervous - and a nervous workforce is dramatically less productive and less innovative. The best people leave. The service to the customer deteriorates - so they abandon you even more.

The facts backing this up are striking. The OECD has studied developed economies over a 20-year period, and it found labor productivity growth was much higher in the countries where it is hardest to fire people. The better you treat a workforce, the better they work. Professor Peter Cappelli studied 122 companies and found that lay-offs most often shrank their future profitability, instead of swelling it.

Yet this is the antithesis of the management consultancy mindset. Stewart says "consultants are the cattle prods of the modern corporation. The chief message to be communicated, in almost all situations, is that you will be expected to work much harder than you ever have before and your chances of losing your job are infinitely greater than you have ever imagined." It's a dark, dehumanized vision of workers as cogs in a machine - and it's been there from the beginning. Frederick Taylor, the founder of management consultancy, compared workers to "an intelligent gorilla" and said "our scheme does not ask for any initiative in a man. We do not care for his initiative."

When challenged, the paltry evidence base of this industry soon becomes clear. Tom Peters, the author of management consultants' bible 'Excellence', snapped at an interviewer who asked about his way of analyzing businesses: "Of course, we all know this is to some extent phoney baloney."

David Craig suggests a simple way to call out this scam. Insist that, from now on, all management consultants are paid by their results. If they promise greater productivity or higher sales, fine: don't pay them until it comes through. Today, almost no management consultancy works on this basis. If they did, they'd all be bankrupt.

And yet, and yet... you almost have to admire the rancid chutzpah of it. As the management consultant Bruce Henderson once sniggered: "Can you think of anything more improbable than taking the world's most successful firms and hiring people just fresh out of school and telling them how to run their businesses - and [getting them] to pay millions of pounds for this advice?" It's tempting to chuckle at the absurdity - until you realize the cack-handed consultants' scythe could come for you.

At first, this isn't going to sound like a good news story, never mind one of the most inspiring stories in the world today. But trust me: it is.

Yan Li spent his life tweaking tiny bolts, on a production line, for the gadgets that make our lives zing and bling. He might have pushed a crucial component of the laptop I am writing this article on, or the mobile phone that will interrupt your reading of it. He was a typical 27-year old worker at the gigantic Foxconn factory in Shenzen, Southern China, which manufactures i-Pads and Playstations and mobile phone batteries.

Li was known to the company by his ID number: F3839667. He stood at a whirring line all day, every day, making the same tiny mechanical motion with his wrist, for 20 pence an hour. According to his family, sometimes his shifts lasted for 24 hours; sometimes they stretched to 35. If he had tried to form a free trade union to change these practices, he would have been imprisoned for twelve years. On the night of May 27th, after yet another marathon-shift, Li dropped dead.

Deaths from overwork are so common in Chinese factories they have a word for it: guolaosi. China Daily estimates 600,000 people are killed this way every year, mostly making goods for us. Li had never experienced any health problems, his family says, until he started this work schedule; Foxconn say he died of asthma and his death had nothing to do with them. The night Li died, yet another Foxconn worker committed suicide - the tenth this year.

For two decades now, you and I have shopped until Chinese workers dropped. Business has bragged about the joys of the China Price. They have been less keen for us to see the Human Price. KYE Systems Corp run a typical factory in Donguan in southern mainland China, and one of their biggest clients is Microsoft - so in 2009 the US National Labour Committee sent Chinese investigators undercover there. On the first day a teenage worker whispered to them: "We are like prisoners here."

The staff work and live in giant factory-cities that they almost never leave. Each room sleeps ten workers, and each dorm houses 5000. There are no showers; they are given a sponge to clean themselves with. A typical shift begins at 7.45am and ends at 10.55pm. Workers must report to their stations fifteen minutes ahead of schedule for a military-style drill: "Everybody, attention! Face left! Face right!" Once they begin, they are strictly forbidden from talking, listening to music, or going to the toilet. Anybody who breaks this rule is screamed at and made to clean the toilets as punishment. Then it's back to the dorm.

It's the human equivalent to battery farming. One worker said: "My job is to put rubber pads on the base of each computer mouse... This is a mind-numbing job. I am basically repeating the same motion over and over for over twelve hours a day." At a nearby Meitai factory, which made keyboards for Microsoft, a worker said: "We're really livestock and shouldn't be called workers." They are even banned from making their own food, or having sex. They live off the gruel and slop they are required to buy from the canteen, except on Fridays, when they are given a small chicken leg and foot, "to symbolize their improving life."

Even as their work has propelled China towards being a super-power, these workers got less and less. Wages as a proportion of GDP fell in China every single year from 1983 to 2005.

They can be treated this way because of a very specific kind of politics that has prevailed in China for two decades now. Very rich people are allowed to form into organizations - corporations - to ruthlessly advance their interests, but the rest of the population is forbidden by the secret police from banding together to create organizations to protect theirs. The political practices of Maoism were neatly transferred from communism to corporations: both regard human beings as dispensable instruments only there to serve economic ends.

We'll never know the names of all the people who paid with their limbs, their lungs, or their lives for the goodies in my home and yours. Here's just one: think of him as the Unknown Worker, standing for them all. Liu Pan was a 17 year old operating a machine that made cards and cardboard that were sold on to big name Western corporations, including Disney. When he tried to clear its jammed machinery, he got pulled into it. His sister said: "When we got his body, his whole head was crushed. We couldn't even see his eyes."

So you might be thinking - was it a cruel joke to bill this as a good news story? Not at all. An epic rebellion has now begun in China against this abuse - and it is beginning to succeed. Across 126,000 Chinese factories, workers have refused to live like this any more. Wildcat unions have sprung up, organized by text message, demanding higher wages, a humane work environment, and the right to organize freely. Millions of young workers across the country are blockading their factories and chanting "there are no human rights here!" and "we want freedom!" The suicides were a rebellion of despair; this is a rebellion of hope.

Last year, the Chinese dictatorship was so panicked by the widespread uprisings that they prepared an extraordinary step forward. They drafted a new labor law that would allow workers to form and elect their own trade unions. It would plant seeds of democracy across China's workplaces. Western corporations lobbied very hard against it, saying it would create a "negative investment environment" - by which they mean smaller profits. Western governments obediently backed the corporations and opposed freedom and democracy for Chinese workers. So the law was whittled down and democracy stripped out.

It wasn't enough. This year Chinese workers have risen even harder to demand a fair share of the prosperity they create. Now company after company is making massive concessions: pay rises of over 60 percent are being conceded. Even more crucially, officials in Guandong province, the manufacturing heartland of the country, have announced they are seriously considering allowing workers to elect their own representatives to carry out collective bargaining after all.

Just like last time, Western corporations and governments are lobbying frantically against this - and to keep the millions of Yan Lis stuck at their assembly lines into the 35th hour.

This isn't a distant struggle: you are at its heart, whether you like it or not. There is an electrical extension cord running from your laptop and mobile and games console to the people like Yan Li and Liu Pan dying to make them. So you have to make a choice. You can passively let the corporations and governments speak for you in trying to beat these people back into semi-servitude - or you can side with the organizations here that support their cry for freedom, like No Sweat in Britain, or the National Labour Committee in the US, by donating to them, or volunteering for their campaigns.

Yes, if this struggle succeeds, it will mean that we will have to pay a little more for some products, in exchange for the freedom and the lives of people like Yan Li and Liu Pan. But previous generations have made that choice. After slavery was abolished in 1833, Britain's GDP fell by 10 percent - but they knew that cheap goods and fat profits made from flogging people until they broke were not worth having. Do we?

Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here or here.

To read his latest article for Slate, click here

By now, you probably think your opinion of Goldman Sachs and its swarm of Wall Street allies has rock-bottomed at raw loathing. You're wrong. There's more. It turns out the most destructive of all their recent acts has barely been discussed at all. Here's the rest. This is the story of how some of the richest people in the world - Goldman, Deutsche Bank, the traders at Merrill Lynch, and more - have caused the starvation of some of the poorest people in the world, just so they could make a fatter profit.

It starts with an apparent mystery. At the end of 2006, food prices across the world started to rise, suddenly and stratospherically. Within a year, the price of wheat had shot up by 80 percent, maize by 90 percent, and rice by 320 percent. In a global jolt of hunger, 200 million people - mostly children - couldn't afford to get food any more, and sank into malnutrition or starvation. There were riots in over 30 countries, and at least one government was violently overthrown. Then, in spring 2008, prices just as mysteriously fell back to their previous level. Jean Ziegler, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, called it "a silent mass murder", entirely due to "man-made actions."

Earlier this year I was in Ethiopia, one of the worst-hit countries, and people there remember the food crisis like they were hit by a tsunami. "It was very painful," a woman my age called Abeba Getaneh, told me. "My children stopped growing. I felt like battery acid had been poured into my stomach as I starved. I took my two daughters out of school and got into debt. If it had gone on much longer, I think my baby would have died."

Most of the explanations we were given at the time have turned out to be false. It didn't happen because supply fell: the International Grain Council says global production of wheat actually increased during that period, for example. It isn't because demand grew either. We were told the swelling Chinese and Indian middle classes were pushing it up, but as Professor Jayati Ghosh of the Centre for Economic Studies in New Delhi has shown, demand from those countries for them actually fell by 3 percent over this period.

There are some smaller explanations that account for some of the price rise, but not all. It's true the growing demand for biofuels was gobbling up much-needed agricultural land - but that was a gradual process that wouldn't explain a violent spike. It's true that oil prices increased, driving up the cost of growing and distributing food - but the evidence increasingly shows that wasn't the biggest factor.

To understand the biggest cause, you have to plough through some concepts that will make your head ache - but not half as much as they made the poor world's stomachs ache.

For over a century, farmers in wealthy countries have been able to engage in a process where they protect themselves against risk. Farmer Giles can agree in January to sell his crop to a trader in August at a fixed price. If he has a great summer and the global price is high, he'll lose some cash, but if there's a lousy summer or the price collapses, he'll do well from the deal. When this process was tightly regulated and only companies with a direct interest in the field could get involved, it worked well.

Then, through the 1990s, Goldman Sachs and others lobbied hard and the regulations were abolished. Suddenly, these contracts were turned into 'derivatives' that could be bought and sold among traders who had nothing to do with agriculture. A market in "food speculation" was born.

So Farmer Giles still agrees to sell his crop in advance to a trader for £10,000. But now, that contract can be sold on to financial speculators, who treat the contract itself as an object of potential wealth. Goldman Sachs can buy it and sell it on for £20,000 to Deutschebank, who sell it on for £30,000 to Merryl Lynch - and on, and on, provided they think the price can be jacked up, until it seems to bear almost no relationship to Farmer Giles' crop at all.

If this seems mystifying, it is. John Lanchester, in his superb guide to the world of finance, 'Whoops! Why Everybody Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay', explains: "Finance, like other forms of human behaviour, underwent a change in the twentieth century, a shift equivalent to the emergence of modernism in the arts - a break with common sense, a turn towards self-referentiality and abstraction and notions that couldn't be explained in workaday English."

Poetry found its break broke with straightforward representation of reality when T.S. Eliot wrote 'The Wasteland.' Finance found its Wasteland moment in the 1970s, when it began to be dominated by complex financial instruments that even the people selling them didn't fully understand. As Lanchester puts it: "With derivatives... there is a profound break between the language of finance and that of common sense."

So what has this got to do with the bread on Abiba's plate? How could this parallel universe of speculation affect her? Until deregulation, the price for food was set by the forces of supply and demand for food itself. (This was itself deeply imperfect: it left a billion people hungry.) But after deregulation, it was no longer just a market in food. It became, at the same time, a market in contracts that were speculating on theoretical food that would be grown in the future - and the speculators drove the price through the roof.

Here's how it happened. In 2006, financial speculators like Goldman's pulled out of the collapsing US real estate market, and they were looking for somewhere else to make their stash of cash swell. They started to buy massive amounts of derivatives based on food: they reckoned that food prices would stay steady or rise while the rest of the economy tanked. Suddenly, the world's frightened investors stampeded onto this ground and decided to buy, buy, buy.

So while the supply and demand of food stayed pretty much the same, the supply and demand for contracts based on food massively rose - which meant the all-rolled-into-one price for food on people's plates massively rose. The starvation began.

The food price was now being set by speculation, rather than by real food. The hedge fund manager Michael Masters estimated that even on the regulated exchanges in the US - which take up a small part of the business - 64 percent of all wheat contracts were held by speculators with no interest whatever in real wheat. They owned it solely to inflate the price and sell it on. Even George Soros said this was "just like secretly hoarding food during a hunger crisis in order to make profits from increasing prices." The bubble only burst in March 2008 when the situation got so bad in the US that the speculators had to slash their spending to cover their losses back home.

When I asked them to comment on the charge of causing mass hunger, Merrill Lynch's spokesman said: "Huh. I didn't know about that." He later emailed to say: "I am going to decline comment." Deutsche Bank also refused to comment. Goldman Sachs were a little more detailed in their response: they said "serious analyses... have concluded index funds did not cause a bubble in commodity futures prices", offering as evidence a single statement by the OECD.

How do we know this is wrong? As Professor Ghosh points out, some vital crops are not traded on the futures markets, including millet, cassava, and potatoes. Their price rose a little during this period - but only a fraction as much as the ones affected by speculation. Her research shows this speculation was "the main cause" of the rise.

So it has come to this. The world's wealthiest speculators set up a casino where the chips were the stomachs of hundreds of millions of innocent people. They gambled on increasing starvation, and won. This is what happens when you follow the claim that unregulated markets know best to the end of the line. The finance sector's Wasteland moment created a real wasteland. What does it say about our political and economic system that we can so casually inflict such misery, and barely even notice?

If we don't re-regulate, it is only a matter of time before this all happens again. How long would it last then? How many people would it kill next time? The moves to restore the pre-1990s rules on commodities trading have been stunningly sluggish. In the US, the House has passed some regulation, but there are fears the Senate - drenched in speculator-donations - may dilute it into meaninglessness. The EU is lagging far behind even this, while in Britain, where most of this "trade" takes place, advocacy groups are worried David Cameron's government will block reform entirely to please his own friends and donors in the City.

Only one force can stop another speculation-starvation-bubble from swelling, probably soon. The decent people in developed countries need to shout louder than the lobbyists from Goldman Sachs. In the UK, the World Development Movement is launching a week of action this summer as crucial decisions on this are taken: text WDM to 82055 for your marching orders. In the US, click here to find out what you can do. The last time I spoke to her, Abiba said: "We can't go through that another time. Please - do anything you can to make sure they never, never do that to us again."

I'm taking a short break, but in the meantime here's an article from May 2007 that, in light of the epidemic of suicides in the i-Pad factories in China, might be worth revisiting:

Over the past decade, an old word once used in the Maoist gulags has come back to China. It is "gulaosi" - and it is used to describe the men and women who are literally being worked to death producing clothes, electronics and toys for you and me.

Wie Meiren was a standard-issue gulaosi, the kind you can find in every Chinese town. She was a 32-year-old woman with three kids who left her hungry village and travelled to Dongkeng, where she got a job assembling the toy cars for the British kids' market.

There, she was expected to work 360 days a year, from 7.30am to as late as 9.30pm, with only a half-hour break for lunch and fines for taking too long on the toilet. As in many Chinese factories, military drills were often yelled: "Long live the company!" If anybody argued back to the managers, they could be punched in the face.

One day, Meiren had a family crisis at home. She was forbidden by her bosses from going to take care of it - so she became angry and fainted. She forced herself to keep going to work for the next fortnight, but eventually she became so exhausted she collapsed - and died before she reached the hospital. The autopsy indicated gulaosi - heart and organ failure caused by extreme exhaustion.

Some 50,000 fingers are sliced off in China's factories every month. Tao Chun Lan was a 20-year-old woman from Sichuan province at the heart of China who moved to Shenzhen and got a job working in a handicrafts factory. One night, she discovered the factory was filling with smoke - and the workers were locked inside. Some 84 workers were burned or trampled to death. Lan jumped out of a window, irreparably damaging her legs. She has received no compensation. "They don't care if I am crippled for life," she says.

Last year, the Chinese dictatorship announced a new draft of labour laws designed finally to allow Chinese workers like her - too late - some basic rights.

The new law would permit people like Lan and Meiren to join trade unions. It would give them the right to a written contract. It would give them the right to a severance payment. It would give them the right to change jobs freely. Where previously China's labour rules were diffuse, dispersed and barely enforced, now they would be drawn together and backed with big fines.

The dissident-killing Chinese Communist Party didn't propose this change out of a sudden flush of benevolence. They did it because the Chinese people have in increasing numbers been refusing to be tethered serfs for the benefit of Western corporations. Last year, there were 300,000 illegal industrial actions in China, a huge spate of "factory kidnappings" of managers, and more than 85,000 protests.

The Chinese people were showing they did not want to leap from a Maoist gulag to a market-fundamentalists' sweatshop. They demanded a sensible compromise: strong trade and markets to generate wealth, matched by strong trade unions to stop markets devouring them. They want an end to grinding poverty, but one that doesn't kill them as they get there.

But they bumped into a huge obstacle. Groups representing Western corporations with factories in China sent armies of lobbyists to Beijing to cajole and threaten the dictatorship into abandoning these new workers' protections.

The American Chamber of Commerce - representing Microsoft, Nike, Ford, Dell and others - listed 42 pages of objections. The laws were "unaffordable" and "dangerous", they declared. The European Chamber of Commerce backed them up.

This is not the first time big business has militated to prevent basic freedoms from being extended to China. Bill Clinton came to office promising "an America that will not coddle dictators, from Beijing to Baghdad", and at first, he acted on this rhetoric, issuing an executive order that decreed trade with China could only grow if China in tandem increased its respect for human rights. Enraged American business executives subjected him to nuclear-strength lobbying - so Clinton ditched his executive order after a year.

Ever since, Western governments have been justifying business with the Chinese dictatorship by saying our corporations and trade would inevitably and inexorably bring greater freedom to China.

But now the corporations that they claimed would bring freedom and democracy are in fact lobbying to crush freedom and opposing the plain democratic will of the Chinese people. As James Mann, the former Los Angeles Times bureau chief in Beijing, puts it after years of observing the behaviour of big business in China: "The business communities of China and the United States [and, he might have added, Europe] do not harbour dreams of democracy. Both profit from a Chinese system that permits no political opposition, and both are content with it."

Their lobbying seems to have paid off. The (unelected) Chinese National People's Congress is due to vote on the new labour laws in the next month or so, but the proposals have already been massively watered down.

Scott Slipy, the director of human resources for Microsoft in China, bragged to BusinessWeek, "We have enough investment at stake that we can usually get someone to listen to us if we are passionate about an issue."

It seems that Maoism is fine so long as its dictatorial urges are put to the service of Bill Gates and other billionaires, rather than one psychotic dictator.

These Western corporations are explicitly seeking a China where a tiny number of extremely rich people are free to organise, but the vast majority of poor people are physically prevented from doing so by the state.

Of course, these market fundamentalist economists claim this situation is in fact good for the Chinese people, because this system is the best way to enrich them. The obvious response is: let them decide. If they don't want to join trade unions, if they don't want workplace protections, nobody will force them. But give them the freedom to choose. Or are these economists saying the Chinese people are too stupid to know their own interests?

The American and European campaigns showing that we are not all willing to accept their serfdom and profit from it have already had successes. The European Chamber of Commerce has been shamed into retracting its initial opposition to the laws. After lobbying from trade unions and human rights organisations, Nike has now denounced the position of the American Chambers of Commerce to which it belongs and backed the law. The remaining Wal-Martian corporations need to be damned one by one - and subject to legal sanctions - until they relent and accept the rights of Chinese workers.

For the sake of millions of people like Lan and Meiren, we need to show these corporations that we refuse to shop until they drop.

From the smoking rubble of Wall Street and its market fundamentalism in the 1930s, a genteel English economist clambered, brushed the dust from his suit, and totally remade the way we understand economics. John Maynard Keynes discarded the old myth that the market is pure and rational and operates best when government does least. In its place, he built the intellectual foundations for a very different world—one where democratic governments intervene every day to regulate big business, prevent extreme inequality, ensure full employment, and stimulate the economy when it sags.

In the postwar world, some of Keynes’s economic ideas were finally put into place—even Richard Nixon is said to have pronounced, “We are all Keynesians now.” The result was plain: For three decades there were no global crashes. But then Keynes’s ideas were dismantled by people who said markets didn’t need such fancy management. In slow motion, the Western world fell back to a 1920s economy—deregulated and grossly unequal. Everything Keynes warned would happen came to pass. The growth rate sank. The rich mainly benefited from the growth that remained. Unemployment rose. And it ended like the old Twenties: with a Wall Street Crash and the whispers of a Great Depression.

Once more, the same man has strutted in ghostly from the wreckage, with Time magazine calling him “the Comeback Keynes.” But today’s politicians want to pick only the most immediately convenient Keynesian tools, while discarding his much more comprehensive vision. Sure, they’ll take a fiscal stimulus here and a dab of regulation there, but who needs the General Theory?

We do. Robert Skidelsky is the perfect man to excavate the real Keynes buried under the rubble. Skidelsky has written the definitive biography of him—and now, in Keynes: The Return of the Master, he shows how Keynes’s understanding of the limitations of markets is desperately needed today.

To read this essay in full over at the Progressive magazine, click here.

In the sudden slurry of revelations about Michael Ashcroft, are we missing the bigger picture – and a far larger scandal? The immediate disgrace is plain enough. The billionaire Ashcroft has jostled his way into the heart of the Conservative Party, and altered the shape of British politics, with money hoarded away in a tax haven. He evidently finds the idea of paying a small share of his fortune to keep his country's schools and hospitals and defence running so abhorrent that he would rather stash the vast majority of his cash in the bitterly poor tax haven of Belize. (He pays no tax at all there, despite the fact that 30 per cent of the country's children go hungry.) And he did it all disingenuously: when he was scraped into the House of Lords on William Hague's recommendation in 2000, he gave a "clear and unequivocal assurance" he would become a "permanent" resident in Britain.

In the weeks after a disaster like the Haiti-quake, journalists always search for an upbeat twist to the tale. You know it by now – the baby found alive after a week under wreckage. But this time, a shaft of light has parted the rubble and the corpses and the unshakable grief that could last for years. In the middle of Haiti’s nightmare, a system that has kept hundreds of millions of people like them poor and broken might just have shown its first fracture.

To understand what has happened, you have to delve into a long-suppressed history – one you are not supposed to hear. Since the 1970s, we have been told that the gospel of The Free Market has rolled out across the world because The People demand it. We have been informed that free elections will lead ineluctably to people choosing to roll back the state, privatize the essentials of life, and leave the rich to work their magic for us all. We have seen these trends wash across the world because ordinary people believe they offer the best possible system.

There’s just one snag: it’s not true. In reality, this gospel has proved impossible to impose in any democracy. Few politicians have believed in its core tents more than Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher – yet at the end of their long terms, after bitter battles, the proportion of GDP spent by the state remained the same. Why? Because these doctrines are extremely unpopular, and wherever they are tried, they are fiercely resisted. There are majorities in every free country for a mixed economy, where markets are counter-balanced by a strong and active state.

The Gospel spread across the poor world because their governments were given no choice. In her masterpiece ‘The Shock Doctrine’, Naomi Klein shows how these policies were forced on the world’s poor against their will. Sometimes rich governments did it simply by killing the elected leaders and installing a servile dictator, as in Chile. Usually the methods were more subtle. One of the most marked came in the form of “loans” from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. The IMF – an institution set up by European and American governments after the Second World War – would approach poor countries and offer them desperately needed cash. But from the 1970s on, they would, in return, require the countries to introduce “structural adjustments” to their economy. The medicine was always the same: end all subsidies for the poor, slash state spending on health and education, deregulate your financial sector, throw your markets open.

Here’s a typical example of what happened next. In Malawi in southeast Africa, the country’s soil had become badly depleted, so the government decided to subsidise fertilizer for farmers. When the IMF and World Bank came in, they called this “a market distortion”, and ordered Malawi to stop at once. They did. So the country’s crops failed, and famine began to scythe through the population. Nobody knows how many tens of thousands starved to death; nobody bothered to count. The Malawian government eventually listened to the cries of its people, kicked out the IMF, and reintroduced the subsidies – and the famine stopped that year. The country is now an exporter of food again.

When people are living so close to the edge, even small increases in prices can break them. Whenever I report from the developing world, the IMF tracks of anti-development lie like wounds across the land. They systematically disregard the fact that every country that has lifted itself out of poverty has done the opposite of their commands. For example, South Korea went from poverty to plenty in just two generations by protecting and heavily subsiding its industries and jacking up state subsidies – to the IMF’s horror.

Even Professor Jeffrey Sachs – one of their former lackeys – calls the IMF “the Typhoid Mary of emerging markets, spreading recessions in country after country.” So why do they carry on like this? Primarily, it is because IMF programmes work very well – for the rich. They ensure that we get access to the cheapest possible labour and can help ourselves to the glistening resources that inexplicably ended up under their soil.

The serve-the-rich ideology that caused our economy to crash in 2008 has been crashing poor countries for a long time. But there’s a sting. After decades of ordering poor countries to slash subsidies and state spending, the IMF reacted to the recession by urging rich countries… to spend a fortune subsidising the banks, and to increase state spending. They wouldn’t dream of drinking the medicine they have been serving out to the poor for so long. It’s not as if the IMF has learned from its mistakes: they have just forced countries from El Salvador to Ukraine to Pakistan to sign deals committing themselves to leave the state inert in the face of severe external shocks to their economies. They are forbidden from embarking on a fiscal stimulus. No: the IMF only imposes its deadly prescriptions on those too weak and too distant to matter.

Here’s where Haiti comes in. The IMF agenda has often been forced on populations when they are least able to resist – after a military coup, a massacre, or a natural disaster. For example, the people of Thailand fought for years against clearing their locals off their beaches to make way for holiday resorts, and voted against the privatisation of water and electricity. But immediately after the tsunami, both were pushed through. The drowned-out people couldn’t fight back any more.

After the earthquake, something similar was poised to happen to Haiti. The IMF announced a $100m loan, stapled onto an earlier loan – which requires Haiti to steeply raise the price for electricity, and freeze wages for the public sector workers who are needed to rebuild the country. So when people emerged from the rubble, they would find an economy rigged even more heavily against them. It was classic IMF: we’ll give you a hand, provided your people feel the back of your hand.

There is no doubt about what the Haitian people would think: they know the IMF. Until 1994, the country at least grew its own staple crop: rice. But the IMF came in and ordered the government to cut its rice tariff from 35 percent to 3 percent. Suddenly the market was flooded with rice grown in the US by hugely subsidised farmers, and Haiti’s rice farmers went bust. Hundreds of thousands swelled to the slum-cities and sweat shops of Port au Prince, where they built mud huts – and were buried in 2010. The IMF reduced the country from self-sufficiency to dependency, in a move known locally as “the Plan of Death.” It was one of the external political earthquakes that made this natural earthquake far more deadly.

But something new and startling happened this month. For the first time, the IMF was stopped from shafting a poor country – by a rebellion here in the rich world. Hours after the quake, a Facebook group called ‘No Shock Doctrine For Haiti’ had tens of thousands of members, and orchestrated a petition to the IMF of over 150,000 signatures demanding the loan become a no-strings grant. After Naomi Klein’s mega-selling expose, there was a vigilant public who wanted to see that the money they were donating to charity was not going to be cancelled out by the IMF.

And it worked. The IMF backed down. They publicly renounced their conditions – and even said they will work to cancel Haiti’s entire debt. This is the first sign that exposing and opposing the IMF’s agenda works. Klein says it is “unprecedented in my experience, and shows that public pressure in moments of disaster can seriously subvert shock doctrine tactics.” Of course, they need to be watched vigilantly for any signs of backtracking. Already they seem to be rolling back some of their panicked initial rhetoric and saying that “beyond the emergency phase” they may go back to business-as-usual. Very powerful interests want the IMF to continue to dance to their tune.

But thanks to all the ordinary Europeans and Americans who pushed back, Haiti will not be IMF-ed up now, in its darkest hour. Not this time. Not these people. Not again. These should be the first baby-steps of a campaign to finally stop the IMF’s poverty-promoting machine steam-rollering across continents. On the political Richter scale, that would mark a 7.0 – for the causes of democracy and justice.

This week, a disaster hit the United States, and the after-tremors will be shaking and breaking global politics for years. It did not grab the same press attention as the fall of liberal Kennedy-licking Massachusetts to a pick-up truck Republican, or President Obama’s first State of the Union address, or the possible break-up of Brangelina and their United Nations of adopted infants. But it took the single biggest problem dragging American politics towards brutality and dysfunction – and made it much, much worse. Yet it also showed the only path that Obama can now take to salvage his Presidency.

For over a century, the US has slowly put some limits – too few, too feeble – on how much corporations can bribe, bully or intimidate politicians. On Tuesday, they were burned away in one whoosh. The Supreme Court ruled that corporations can suddenly run political adverts during an election campaign – and there is absolutely no limit on how many, or how much they can spend. So if you anger Goldman Sachs by supporting legislation to break up the too-big-to-fail banks, you will smack into a wall of 24/7 ads exposing your every flaw. If you displease Exxon-Mobil by supporting legislation to deal with global warming, you will now be hit by a tsunami of advertising saying you are opposed to jobs and The American Way. If you rile the defence contractors by opposing the gargantuan war budget, you will face a smear-campaign calling you Soft on Terror.

Representative Alan Grayson says: “It basically institutionalizes and legalizes bribery on the largest scale imaginable. Corporations will now be able to reward the politicians that play ball with them – and beat to death the politicians that don’t… You won’t even hear any more about the Senator from Kansas. It’ll be the Senator from General Electric or the Senator from Microsoft.” In 2008, Exxon Mobil made profits of $85bn. So if they dedicated just 10 percent to backing a President who would serve their interests, they would have $8.5bn to spend – more than every candidate for President and every candidate for Senate spent at the last election. And that’s just one corporation.

To understand the impact this will have, you need to grasp how smaller sums of corporate money have already hijacked American democracy. Let’s look at a case that is simple and immediate and every American can see in front of them: healthcare. The United States is the only major industrialized democracy that doesn’t guarantee healthcare for all its citizens. The result is that, according to a detailed study by Harvard University, some 45,000 Americans die needlessly every year. That’s equivalent to 15 9/11s every year, or two Haitian earthquakes every decade.

This isn’t because the American people like it this way. Gallup has found in polls for a decade now that two-thirds believe the government should guarantee care for every American: they are as good and decent and concerned for each other as any European. No: it is because private insurance companies make a fortune today out of a system that doesn’t cover the profit-less poor, and can turn away the sickest people as “uninsurable”. So they pay for politicians to keep the system broken. They fund the election campaigns of politicians on both sides of the aisle, and in return, those politicians veto any system that doesn’t serve their paymasters. Look for example at Joe Lieberman, the former Democratic candidate for Vice-President. He has taken $448,066 in campaign contributions from private healthcare companies while his wife has raked in $2m as one of their chief lobbyists, and he has loyally blocked any attempt in the Senate to break the stranglehold of the health insurance companies and broaden coverage.

The US political system now operates within a corporate cage. If you want to run for office, you have to take corporate cash – and so you have to serve corporate interests. Corporations are often blatant in their corruption: it’s not unusual for them to give to both competing candidates in a Senate race, to ensure all sides are indebted to them. This runs so deep that Congressman James Clyburn says the US has become a “corpocracy.” It has reached the point that lobbyists now often write the country’s laws. Not metaphorically; literally. The former Republican congressman Walter Jones spoke out in disgust in 2006 when he found that drug company lobbyists were actually authoring the words of the Medicare prescription bill, and puppet-politicians were simply nodding it through.

But what happens if politicians are serving the short-term profit-hunger of corporations, and not the public interest? You only have to look at the shuttered shops outside your window for the answer. The banks were rapidly deregulated from the Eighties through the Noughties because their lobbyists paid politicians on all sides, and demanded their payback in rolled-back rules and tossed-away laws. As Senator Dick Durbin says simply: “The banks own the Senate,” so they had to obey. The result was that the banks made staggering profits – and were immediately rescued when they smashed the world economy. The only people who paid for it were the public, all over the world.

It is this corruption that has prevented Barack Obama from achieving anything substantial in his first year in office. How do you reregulate the banks, if the Senate is owned by Wall Street? How do you launch a rapid transition away from oil and coal to wind and solar, if the fossil fuel industry owns Congress? How do you break with a grab-the-oil foreign policy if Big Oil provides the invitation that gets you into the party of American politics?

His attempt at healthcare reform is dying because he thought he could only get through the Senate a system that the giant healthcare corporations and drug companies pre-approved. So he promised to keep the ban on bringing cheap drugs down from Canada, he pledged not to bargain over prices, and he dumped the idea of having a public option that would make sure ordinary Americans could actually afford it. The result was a Quasimodo healthcare proposal so feeble and misshapen that even the people of Massachusetts turned away in disgust.

Yet the corporations that caused this crisis are now being given yet more power. Bizarrely, the Supreme Court has decided that corporations are “persons”, so they have the “right” to speak during elections. But corporations are not people. Should they have the right to bear arms, or to vote? It would make as much sense. They are a legal fiction, invented by the state – and they can be fairly regulated to stop them devouring their creator. This is the same Supreme Court that ruled that the detainees at Guantanomo Bay are not “persons” under the constitution deserving basic protections. A court that says a living breathing human is less of a “person” than Lockheed Martin has gone badly awry.

Obama now faces two paths – the Clinton road, or the FDR highway. After he lost his healthcare battle, Clinton decided to simply serve the corporate interests totally. He is the one who carried out the biggest roll-back of banking laws, and saw the largest explosion of inequality since the 1920s. Some of Obama’s advisors are now nudging him down that path: the pledge for an appalling anti-Keynesian spending freeze on social programmes for the next three years to pay down the deficit is one of their triumphs.

But there is another way. Franklin Roosevelt began his Presidency trying to appease corporate interests – but he faced huge uproar and disgust at home when it became clear this left ordinary Americans stranded in the fog of a depression. He switched course. He turned his anger on “the malefactors of great wealth” and bragged: “I welcome the hatred… of the economic royalists.” He launched a programme of redistributing power from the corporations back towards the people, and put in place tough regulations that prevented economic disaster and spiralling inequality for three generations.

There were rare flashes of what Franklin Delano Obama would look like in his reaction to the Supreme Court decision. He said: “It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies, and other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americas.” But he has spent far more time coddling those interests than taking them on. The great pressure of strikes and protests put on FDR hasn’t yet arisen from a public dissipated into hopelessness by an appalling media that convinces them they are powerless and should wait passively for a Messiah.

Very little positive change can happen in the US until they clear out the temple of American democracy. In the State of the Union, Obama spent one minute on this problem, and proposed restrictions on lobbyists – but that’s only the tiniest of baby steps. He evaded the bigger issue. If Americans want a democratic system, they have to pay for it – and that means fair state funding for political candidates. Candidates are essential for the system to work: you may as well begrudge paying for the polling booths, or the lever you pull. At the same time, the Supreme Court needs to be confronted: when the Court tried to stymie the New Deal, FDR tried to pack it with justices on the side of the people. Obama needs to be pressured by Americans to be as radical in democratizing the Land of the Fee.

None of the crises facing us all – from the global banking system to global warming – can be dealt with if a tiny number of super-rich corporations have a veto over every inch of progress. If Obama funks this challenge now, he may as well put the US government on e-Bay and sell it to the highest bidder. How would we spot the difference?

It is not only David Cameron's glossy, tie-less election poster that has been airbrushed. The ugly spots and oily patches in the Tory leader's policies have also been successfully pixellated out of the public mind – by a Prime Minister with the communications skills of a malfunctioning speak-your-weight machine, by a Labour Party engaged in self-strangulation, and by a malfunctioning media pitched at the intellectual level of the Mr Men books. So nobody sees Cameron's policies; nobody knows. Most of us will only discover them after he has won, when we will wonder why nobody told us this was coming.

For example, a perfect laboratory experiment in Cameronomics has been taking place just next door, in Ireland – but who knows about it? One of the remaining real differences between Labour and the Conservatives is over how governments should behave in a recession. At first glance, David Cameron's proposal sounds like common sense. When times are bad, you – as an individual, or a family – figure out how to cut your spending and pay down your debts. No more fancy nights out. Holiday at home. Put the stuff you don't want on eBay.

Cameron says government should do the same: it should slash its debts, even if that means dramatically slashing spending. This was the view of economics that prevailed until the Great Depression – and it has only just made a comeback.

Gordon Brown has a different view. It has underpinned his economic decisions since the Great Crash of 2008 – but unfortunately, he is such an atrocious communicator that I will have to quote somebody else to explain it. Barack Obama says: "Economists on both the left and right agree that the last thing a government should do in the middle of a recession is to cut back on spending. You see, when this recession began, many families sat around their kitchen table and tried to figure out where they could cut back. That is a completely responsible and understandable reaction. But if every family in America cuts back, then no one is spending any money, which means there are more layoffs, and the economy gets even worse. That's why the government has to step in and temporarily boost spending in order to stimulate demand." You keep stimulating until we are back on our feet – and then you pay back the debt in the good times.

This is, when you first hear it, counter-intuitive. It means governments have to decide to spend more when we as individuals are deciding to spend less. It can seem hard for those of us who are not economists to figure out which of these views is right. Sure, we can listen to people like the Nobel Prize winner for Economics Paul Krugman, who told me he was "shocked" by Cameron's policies and they would worsen the recession "for sure". We can see that the Great Depression got much worse when governments took the Cameron route, and was ended by a giant programme of debt-funded government spending. But the best guide is to look at countries that are trying the Cameron approach and countries that are trying the opposite tactics now, and check the results.

Throughout the nineties and the noughties, Ireland was held up as a poster child by the right. People like John Redwood and (yes) David Cameron said its model of low taxes and almost-total deregulation showed the way forward for Britain. In fact it produced the most corrupt and over-extended banking sector outside Iceland. Just one bank – Anglo Irish – is now on course to receive a €30bn extended bailout, equivalent to every penny of tax collected in the country in 2009. The Celtic Tiger had its claws ripped out, and it's shaking at the back of its cage.

But the Irish government has continued to cleave to Tory solutions. After the crash, its government rejected the case for a stimulus package, and insisted its "number one priority" was to "cut the deficit and get the public finances back in order". It sawed deep into spending on teachers, pupils, the disabled, and childcare. Out of total annual spending of €60bn, they are en route to ditching €15bn. The government is paying off its debt as its first, second and third priority, just as Cameron demands.

So what happened? The economy has collapsed. As the economist Rob Brown writes in the latest issue of the New Statesman, the country is now embarked on "an astonishing 15 per cent shrinkage in the Irish economy overall – the sharpest contraction experienced by any advanced industrial nation in peacetime". Unemployment has soared to 12.5 per cent: it would be even higher if so many young people hadn't left the country. Only 14 per cent of Irish citizens are happy with the government's performance.

By contrast, the countries that have most strongly defied Cameronomics are pulling out of the recession first and fastest. China has ramped up state spending to 88 percent of GDP growth, paid for by increased government debt. This is Brown to the power of a hundred. If Cameron was right, this would be economic suicide, and they would be plummeting down. In fact, the recession there is now over. That's why even right-wing leaders that initially shared Cameron's instincts, like Angela Merkel, are reversing course.

Obviously, this is a crucial debate that will alter your life and mine – but have you heard it plainly expressed anywhere? Cameron states his incorrect case with his usual suave charm, while Labour isn't even putting their correct case at all. Incredibly, there has clearly been a decision by the Government that explaining the case for Keynesianism is too complicated, so they won't even try. When they are challenged about the deficit, they should reply: "Yes, we absolutely have increased the deficit. That is what you should do in a recession. And we will keep on increasing the deficit and stimulating the economy until this nightmare is over. Look at Ireland. Is that what you want?" (If they were smarter still, they'd use the stimulus money on launching Britain on a massive, labour-intensive transition to renewable energy sources, solving two crises at once.)

Instead, Labour offers a mumbled, evasive pledge that they too will cut the deficit, just a bit later. Without hearing the case for Keynesianism, this just sounds like incompetence or evasiveness. They have set themselves an artificial target of cutting it by half in the next four years. This throws away their best argument – and the theory that has guided their response to the recession from the start. If the global economy gets worse, we will need a lot more stimulus, funded by borrowing, to stave off terrible pain.

The idea that we can't do this because we have maxed-out the national credit card is simply false. For almost the entire time since the 1750s, Britain's national debt – now at 80 per cent of GDP – has been as high or higher than today. Japan's is currently 198 per cent, and they have no problem getting international loans at reasonable rates.

Why won't Labour say so? Why make it seem like Cameron is on to something, when he is so wrong? Brown seems to think that matching the Tory language in this way cleverly "neutralises" their argument. It doesn't. It makes it seem like they were right all along.

There are too many people's lives at stake to continue with this empty fact-free conversation. Labour's policies have been bitterly disappointing – but David Cameron's set us up for economic disaster. When will we start to say so?

Dubai is finally financially bankrupt – but it has been morally bankrupt all along. The idea that Dubai is an oasis of freedom on the Arabian peninsular is one of the great lies of our time. Yes, it has Starbucks and Dunkin' Donuts and the Gucci styles, but beneath these accoutrements, there is a dictatorship built by slaves.

If you go there with your eyes open – as I did earlier this year – the truth is hidden in plain view. The tour books and the bragging Emiratis will tell you the city was built by Sheikh Mohammed, the country's hereditary ruler.

It is untrue. The people who really built the city can be seen in long chain-gangs by the side of the road, or toiling all day at the top of the tallest buildings in the world, in heat that Westerners are told not to stay in for more than 10 minutes. They were conned into coming, and trapped into staying.

In their home country – Bangladesh or the Philippines or India – these workers are told they can earn a fortune in Dubai if they pay a large upfront fee. When they arrive, their passports are taken from them, and they are told their wages are a tenth of the rate they were promised.

They end up working in extremely dangerous conditions for years, just to pay back their initial debt. They are ringed-off in filthy tent-cities outside Dubai, where they sleep in weeping heat, next to open sewage. They have no way to go home. And if they try to strike for better conditions, they are beaten by the police.

I met so many men in this position I stopped counting, just as the embassies were told to stop counting how many workers die in these conditions every year after they figured it topped more than 1,000 among the Indians alone.

Human Rights Watch calls this system "slavery." Yet the Westerners who have flocked to Dubai brag that they "love" the city, because they don't have to pay any taxes, and they have domestic slaves to do all the hard work. They train themselves not to see the pain.

But Dubai's bankruptcy does not end there: it is ecologically bust. This is a city built in the burning desert, where everything shrivels up and blows away if it is not kept artificially cold all the time. That's why it has the highest per capita carbon emissions on earth – some 250 percent higher even than America's. The city has to ship in desalinated water – which is more costly than oil. When it runs out of cash, it will run out of water.

Today Dubai will be bailed out by the United Arab Emirates, the oil-rich country of which it is only one state. But the oil will not last forever. More importantly, there is no Bank of Morality that could provide a bailout for this sinister mirage in the desert.

Almost a year after Barack Obama ascended to the White House, many of his supporters are bemused. His healthcare bill is a hefty improvement but it still won't provide coverage for all Americans, and may not provide a public alternative to the over-charging insurance companies - if it passes at all. His environmental team is vandalising the vital Copenhagen conference by saying the US – the single biggest emitter of warming gases – will not sign up to any legally binding restrictions there. He has placed the deregulation-fanatics who caused the New Depression, like Lawrence Summers, in charge of the recovery. Despite the real improvements on Bush – such as the end of torture, the resumption of stem-cell research, and opposition to the coup in Honduras – many people are asking: why he is delivering so little, so slowly?

A pair of seemingly small stories about the forces warping American politics can help us to answer this question. At first glance, they will seem like preposterous caricatures, but the facts are plain. The institutions that are blocking progress on all these issues – Republicans in the Senate, and the mighty corporate lobbying machine that bankrolls both parties – have rallied over the past few months to defend two causes with very little popular support in the United States: rape and slavery. No, really. If we begin to explain how this came to pass, then we might see why the American political system is malfunctioning so badly, even after a landslide victory for change.

Let's start with rape. This story begins in Iraq in 2003. The private military contractors sent by the Bush administration to guard the oil pipelines didn't want to get bogged down in expensive legal cases if anything went wrong. When it came to Iraqis, the Bush team simply exempted them from all Iraqi law, in a move so sweeping one Senator called it "a license to kill". But what about if their employees attacked each other, or other Americans? The private companies insisted all their employees sign contracts saying that, whatever happens to them, they will settle it in in-house, through "arbitration". Why? While representing the company at a real legal trial costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, an arbitration panel costs a few thousand. It saves cash.

This policy came, however, with a different price tag. According to her later sworn testimony, Jamie Leigh Jones – a 20-year-old working for the contractor Halliburton/KBR – was hanging out with co-workers one night in Iraq when her drink was spiked. When she woke up, she was haemorraging blood from her vagina and her anus. Her breast implants were ripped. The damage was so severe she later needed reconstructive surgery on her genitalia. She surmised she had been gang-raped by the seven men she had been drinking with. When she approached Halliburton/KBR, she says they locked her in a metal container with no food or water for 24 hours. A doctor came to see her wounds and took DNA evidence, although it was later "lost." A guard took pity on her and loaned her his cell phone. She called her father, who called the American embassy – and only then was she released.

In an Iraq that was collapsing all around her, there was no chance of the Iraqi police investigating. Halliburton/KBR insisted that her contract required the alleged gang-rape to be addressed by the company's private arbitration process, forbidding any claim in the American courts. (If this was how they treated blonde English-speaking American girls, what did they do if Iraqis said they had been abused?) After Leigh Jones went public, many other American women came forward to say they had similar experiences working in Iraq. Her legal team argues the refusal to allow rape to be pursued through the courts created a climate where it was more likely to happen.

The Democratic Senator Al Franken, when he heard about this, was horrified, and tabled a simple amendment to the law. It demanded that no company that prevents rape victims from having their day in court should receive taxpayers' money any more. Rape is rape. A majority of Republicans in the Senate – including John McCain – voted against the amendment. Why? The private contractors are major donors to the Republican Party, but the Senators claim this didn't affect their judgement. No – they said that Franken's proposal was a "vendetta" against Halliburton/KBR with "political motives". Franken pointed out any company trying to stop rape victims getting justice would be treated exactly the same by this law. The Republicans ignored him. They voted to maintain a system where some rape is not pursuable in a court of law.

At the same time, a group of Democratic senators have tried to amend the latest customs bill to ensure that nothing produced by slaves should be sold in the United States. It sounds uncontroversial – as uncontroversial as punishing rapists, in fact. Yet corporate lobbyists are militating behind the scenes to oppose it. As the private subscription-only newsletter "Inside US Trade" reported: "Business groups are worried by the potential effects", and a source tells them there will be, "a push from lobbyists closer to the Finance Committee mark-up of the bill... US industry groups and foreign governments [ie those that use slave labour] could form ad hoc coalitions to help send a united message." They will fight for their right to use slave labour.

These examples are extreme, but they reveal a powerful undertow that is at work on all political issues (and both main parties) in the United States. To see how, you have to understand two processes. The first is the nature of corporate power. Corporations are structured to do one thing, and one thing only: to maximise profit for their shareholders. No matter how personally nice or nasty their CEOs are, if they put anything ahead of profit, they will be sacked, and replaced by somebody who doesn't. As part of a tightly regulated market, this can be a useful engine for growth. But if it is not strictly reigned in by the law and by trade unions, this pressure for profit will extend anywhere – from trashing the environment to rape and slavery, as these cases remind us. The second factor is the nature of the American political process today. If you want to run for elected office in the US, you have to raise a fortune from corporations or the super-rich to pay for TV advertising. So before you can appeal to the voters, you have to appeal to the corporations. You do this by assuring them you will serve their interests. Once you are in office, you have to keep pleasing them at every step, or they won't pay for your re-election campaign. This two-step overwhelms the positive instincts the individual politicians may have to do good – and drags the US government further and further from the will of the people.

Obama had to climb through this system, and he is currently imprisoned by it. It explains his relative failure so far. Healthcare is proving so hard because the insurance companies are paying both Republicans and right-wing Democrats in Senate to thwart any attempt to provide universal healthcare coverage. Yes, it would save the 17,000 Americans who die every year because they lack insurance but it would depress their profits. Reducing carbon emissions is proving so hard because the oil, coal and gas companies are paying Senators across the spectrum to crush any moves to reduce oil, coal and gas use. And on, and on.

So far, Obama has tried to co-opt the corporations into his agenda by ensuring they will profit from any changes, but this inevitably waters down the proposals, often to the point of uselessness. The Cap and Trade legislation before Congress, for example, will barely limit carbon emissions at all because it has been gutted to please the polluters.

He will only achieve significant progressive change if he reforms the political system itself – to make it accountable to the American people, not the corporations. He needs to change the rules of the game. Ban big business from making political donations, and replace it with state funding. Shut down the lobbying industry. Make a big populist speech announcing you are driving the money-lenders out of the temple of democracy: it'd be surprisingly popular in a country where people can see they're being ripped off every day. The alternative is to become rapidly complicit in a system where defending rape and slavery is seen as just another day's work in Washington DC.

Naomi Klein’s ‘The Shock Doctrine’ is one of the most important political books of the past decade. She takes the central myth of the right – that since the fall of Soviet tyranny, free elections and free markets have marched skipped hand in hand together towards the shimmering sunset of history – and shown that it is, simply, a lie. It is a major revisionist history of the world that Milton Friedman and the market fundamentalists have built.

In the new Depression, with their vision lying in smoking rubble, it is a thesis whose time has come – yet its film, alas, has not. The new “adaptation” of the book for Channel 4 by Michael Winterbottom is garbled and mumbled to the point of meaninglessness.

Klein argues that human beings consistently and everywhere vote for mixed economies – a mix of markets and counter-balancing welfare states. The right has been unable to accept this reality, and unable to defeat it in democratic elections. So in order to achieve their vision of “pure capitalism, cleansed of all interruptions,” they have waited for massive crises – when the population is left reeling and unable to object – to impose their vision.

Klein’s story begins with the market fundamentalists’ show-room: Chile. Milton Friedman, the apostle of pure unfettered capitalism, sent many of his finest students to Chile for years to spread the message that markets must be allowed to work their pristine logic unhindered by governments. They persuaded virtually nobody. Their parties were thumpingly defeated, and the democratic socialist Salvador Allende was elected instead. So the CIA backed an anti-democratic coup by the fascist general Augusto Pinochet – and Friedman swiftly stepped in to design “the most extreme capitalist makeover ever attempted anywhere,” as Klein puts it.

All subsidies for the poor were scrubbed away, prices were sent soaring, and unemployment reached unprecedented levels. Friedman told Pinochet to go further and cut harder. The wishes of the people could be safely ignored, because “the shock of the torture chamber terrorized anyone thinking of standing in the way of the economic shocks,” she notes. “Attacks on union leaders were often carried out in close coordination with the owners of the workplaces.” Even Margaret Thatcher tacitly admitted this vision could never be tried in a democracy. She wrote to Friedrich Hayek that much as she longed to create a similar economic outcome in Britain, “I am sure you will agree that, in Britain with our democratic institutions and the need for a high degree of consent, some of the measures adopted in Chile are quite unacceptable.”

So the right-wing vision of total markets – slice away all social protections and let the corporations rule – was born with the iron fist of state violence as its conjoined twin. In most of the places it has been tried, they have been there, inextricably stuck together. Klein tracks them across continents: in post-Soviet Russia, for example, Boris Yeltsin could only impose this extreme vision by blowing up the Parliament (with most of the elected representatives trapped inside), shredding the country’s young democracy, and starting a vast distraction-war in Chechnya that killed 100,000 people. In post-Tiananmen China, the Communist party could only turn their country into a vast export credit zone with massacres and mass imprisonment that made ordinary Chinese workers too terrified to ask for even the most meagre rights. Indeed, across the planet, “some of the most infamous human rights violations of this era… were in fact committed with the deliberate intent of terrorizing the public to prepare the ground for the introduction of free-market reforms.”

Where this uber-corporate vision has not been imposed by force, it has been imposed by blackmail at a time of crisis. One of the ugliest examples Klein exposes is the use of the tsunami – a quasi-Biblical wave that washed away 250,000 people – as a pretext to impose a Friedmanite vision. In Sri Lanka, mega-corporations had long been desperate to clear the old beach-dwelling communities of fishermen away and open up the coastline to much-more-profitable foreign tourism. But the people liked their homes, and their careers, and did not want to hand their beaches over. So these proposals prompted a wave of militant strikes and mass protests. They were then put to the Sri Lankan people in an election – and defeated by a landslide.

But then a wave washed it all away, and “underneath the rubble and carnage was what the tourism industry had been angling for all along – a pristine beach, scrubbed clean of all the messy signs of people working, a vacation Eden.” The Sri Lankan government was told that it would only receive the vast reconstruction loans they needed from the World Bank and IMF if they agreed to a “restructuring” programme – which consisted of everything the Sri Lankan people had just rejected at the polls. Reeling from the shock, the Sri Lankan government agreed. They banned people from returning to their beachfront homes, declaring a “buffer zone” for indigenous people – but not for the hotel trade, who were free to do as they please. So money donated nominally to help tsunami victims was actually used to inflict a “second tsunami” on them, handing over their land to foreign corporations and ending their historic lifestyles forever.

Similar programmes of extortion have been inflicted on other peoples reeling in shock. As the people of South Africa were fighting the last battles against Apartheid, the successor ANC was forced to haggle with the IMF and World Bank for their loans. The conditions? Ditch all the social protections included in your Freedom Charter, and leave the economic structures of Apartheid in place. As the people of Poland emerged blinking from the horror of Soviet Communism, the Solidarity government was forced to gut their social democratic vision and impose a bitter dose of ‘shock therapy’ that cut the country even further to the bone. In both countries, the will of the people was explicitly ignored.

Klein’s account of this “disaster capitalism” is written with a perfectly distilled anger, channelled through hard fact. So what on earth happened to the film?

Winterbottom has taken her simple thesis and mangled it beyond recognition. He serves up only a cold porridge of archive footage and disconnected soundbites that have some vague connection to the book, without the connecting spine of her explanations. It is though an idiot has explained the book to another idiot, who then made a film. Incredibly, the film doesn’t mention the words ‘debt’, ‘IMF’, or ‘World Bank’ a single time. It’s a bit like adapting Jaws and taking out any mention of sharks.

This film should have been another Inconvenient Truth. Instead, it’s just deeply inconvenient – and a shocking squandering of a masterpiece.

药品开发耗时数年，经费大多由民众税款支付。医药公司只是在药品开发后期介入，却能最终垄断药品专利，享受巨额市场利润，并阻止贫穷国家为了解救本国人民生产非专利药。诺贝尔经济学奖最新得主约瑟夫•斯蒂格利茨提出一种新的医药系统。应设立一个数十亿美元的奖金基金会，奖励那些开发出抵御疾病的良药或疫苗的科学家，药品使用权则归公众所有。世界任何地方的人都可以制造这些药去拯救生命。

这个故事是我们这个时代尚未公开的巨大丑闻之一。在现今这个时代，世界各地最需要救命药的人却正被禁止生产这些药。这有个最新的事例：遍布贫穷国家的各个药厂为了保护其人民，正急切地想着手生产他们自己廉价的（猪流感特效药）达菲，但他们却被严厉地告之不能这么做。为什么呢？就因为禁止生产廉价药可以让资本雄厚的各大制药公司保护他们的专利和利润。有一种能替代这种不良医药制度的方法，但我们却选择忽视这种替代方法。

为了能理解这个故事，我们要先看一个明显的费解之事。世界卫生组织已经数月发出正确的警告，如果猪流感扩散到世界最贫穷的地区，成千上万人或者更多人的生命将被剥夺。可是，世界卫生组织也不断告诫贫穷国家的政府不要擅自行生产达菲，而达菲是能减轻症状并可能挽救生命的唯一药物。

这个惊悚事件的答案涉及了我们当今世界如何运作的这种更为宏观的问题。

我们的政府几十年来选择建立一种奇怪的药品开发体系。药品开发体系的主体——科学家们将研制好的药物交给你的本地药剂师，（药剂师开药后）这些药进入了你的肺部、胃部、或腹部——是在政府资助的大学实验室完成的，是由公民的税款支付的。制药公司通常是在药品研发的后期介入的，制药公司支付成本昂贵但不再有创新的研发后期的部分费用，譬如买一些化学品和进行必要的药物测试。作为回报，这些药品公司就拥有专利以生产这些耗时数年才制成的药品并大获其利。其他人则不得生产此类药物。

虽然垄断药品生产不是在医药系统内工作的个人的目标所在，其结果往往是致命的。拥有艾滋病药物专利的那些制药公司打官司以阻止取消种族隔离制度后的南非政府生产有同等效果的仿制药，这种药一年只要100美元就能挽救南非的濒死病人。这些制药公司希望南非病人每年支付1万美元购买品牌药，否则就什么也别想得到。在贫穷国家，专利制度每天都使病人得不到药品。

这个背景就是猪流感解决方案神秘叵测的由来。民主国家里的普通公民对企图阻止南非人得到救命药物的做法非常反感，公众的压力占了上风，全球贸易规则做出了小小让步。所达成的共识是，在来势凶猛的公众健康紧急情况下，贫穷国家将可以生产非专利药品。这些非专利药品和专利药完全一样，只是没有品牌名称，也就是不向医药公司支付巨额专利费。

因此，根据新规则，贫穷世界的国家应有权开始根据需要仿制数量不限的达菲。印度和中国的制药公司都说他们渴望放手大干。但拥有专利的罗氏药物公司不希望穷国为本国生产廉价仿制药。罗氏药物公司希望人去购买该公司可获利的品牌药。并非出于义务，罗氏药物公向发展中国家的若干企业颁发了许可，以开展治疗，但这些企业必须购买许可证，而且他们也不可能满足市场需求。

世界卫生组织似乎支持罗氏制药公司，而全然不顾我们其他人。世界卫生组织最有资格判断什么是可以酌情违背专利规则的危急局面。而世界卫生组织的讯息是：不要利用政策漏洞。

药物专利的专家布鲁克·贝克教授说：“为什么世界卫生组织这么做呢？就是因为他们受到来自制药公司直接或间接的压力。这真令人震惊。”

最终结果将如何呢？发起反对当前专利系统的知识生态国际的负责人詹姆斯·拉瓦说：“贫穷国家没有象他们本来可以的那样做好准备。如果病情流行开，死亡人数将远远超过不可幸免的人数。死亡人数将大得多。这很可怕。”

由各大医药公司提供的捍卫目前这种医药制度的论点很简单，而且乍听上去也挺合理：我们要为“我们的”药品定高额价格，这样我们才可以开发更多的救命药。我们希望尽可能多地开发更多的药剂，但只有在我们有收入的情况下我们才能这么做。我们支持的很多研究不能转换为能卖的药，因此药品开发是一个花费昂贵的过程。

然而，很有声誉的《新英格兰医学杂志》前任编辑马西娅·安杰尔博士进行了一项详尽的研究，发现医药公司只将14%的预算用在开发药品上，这些投资通常是用于并无创新的药品开发后期的测试药品阶段。医药公司的其他预算则用于市场推销和赚取利润上。即使是那14%微不足道的药品开发预算，医药公司也挥霍巨资开发“再多我一个”之类的同类药品，这些药和市场上已有药的药效完全一样，只是有某个小分子上的区别，这样这些医药公司就可以获得新的专利，并分另一大杯羹。

这种医药系统造成的一个结果就是，美国政府问责局称，远非一种体制创新，药品市场已经“停滞不前。”医药公司在疟疾这类导致很多人类死亡的疾病上几乎没有任何投资，因为得这些病的人是穷人，所以几乎不能榨取任何利润。

这种药品专利的不良运作的结果就是我们大家都身受其害。欧盟的反垄断委员会专员内尔·克鲁伊斯最近得出结论认为，这种“腐朽”系统让欧洲人的药品支出费比实际应付的高出40%，这些钱如果更合理地配置，用于建立真正的医疗系统，则可以拯救许多人的生命。

如果这种医药系统这么糟糕，为什么我们要维持这种系统？在过去的十年中，仅在美国，制药公司就已在游说和政治性“贡献”上花费了30多亿美元。他们付钱给政治家让政治系统为医药公司的利益运作。如果你怀疑制药公司对政治影响到底有多深，来听听共和党议员沃尔特·伯顿的话，对于2003年美国通过的医疗立法，他坦言：“制药公司的游说家们撰写了法律条文。”

有一种远为优越的开发药品的方式，只要我们想采取这种方式。这种药品开发的方式由诺贝尔经济学奖最新得主约瑟夫·斯蒂格利茨首先提出。他说：“药品研发需要钱，但目前的制度造成了有限的资金被花在错误的地方。”

斯蒂格利茨的计划很简单。西方各国的政府应设立一个数十亿美元的奖金基金会，奖励那些开发出抵御疾病的良药或疫苗的科学家。研制出治愈那些诸如疟疾之类能夺去数百万生命的疾病的人将得到最高奖金。一旦支付了奖金，使用这种药品或疫苗的权利将归公众所有。世界任何地方的人都可以制造这种药，并用它去拯救生命。

这种系统对科学家的财政支持和以往完全一样(大部分由政府取自公众的税款支付)，但全人类都将获得好处，而不是一少数私人垄断集团和那些屈指可数的能付得起庞大的药品开发费的幸运儿。现行药品制度不合理的地方——花费巨资生产同类药品，病人得不到救命药品——将不再存在。

新的药品体系并不便宜，它将占国内生产总值的0.6%。但发展到中期，它将省我们很多钱，因为我们的卫生保健系统将不再需要向制药公司支付巨额专利使用费。同时，药品价格将大大降低到穷人能承受的范围，数以千万计的人将首次能买得起药。

然而，改变当前系统的种种行动正被制药公司和他们的说客团所阻挠。因此，我们在世界范围内规范药品生产的方式仍然是为了服务于制药公司股东的利益，而不是为了人类的健康。

把拯救生命的医药知识禁锢起来以让少数人从中获利的概念是我们这个时代最大的荒诞之一。我们必须破除这个不良制度，这样病人才能存活。只有这样，我们才能让发明了小儿麻痹症疫苗但拒绝专利的伟大科学家乔纳斯·索尔克的精神传遍全球，他拒绝的理由很简单：“给药品上专利就象是给太阳上专利。”

Translated by Rebecca Wu

On the border between Thailand and Cambodia, a mighty battle is taking place – and the outcome will determine whether millions of people live or die. If the right side falters and fails, the long list of the dead will consist overwhelmingly of children and pregnant women. But this fight is passing virtually unnoticed in the outside world. Why? Because the lives at stake are – initially, at least – “only” those of Asians and black Africans.

The war is against a tiny parasite that is suddenly – and rapidly – stripping away our ability to treat one of the deadliest diseases known to man. If the war fails, we will be left defenceless before it.

Malaria is already the biggest killer in the world after AIDS and tuberculosis. It infects 250 million people a year – the vast majority in Africa – and kills 1.5 million of them. In the Central African Republic last year, I met a woman the same age as me, thirty, who was stalking her village, howling and ripping at her hair. She stopped long enough to tell me she had given birth to four children, and three had died spasming and shrieking of malaria. Now her youngest baby had all the symptoms, and she couldn’t bear it. “Why is this happening? Why?” she kept yelling, to herself, to the sky, to no-one.

It is caused by a parasite carried in the salvia of female mosquitoes. Once they inject it into your blood with a bite, the parasite heads for your liver and slows your blood flow. Within a few days, your organs fail. This happens to an equivalent of seven jumbo jets full of children every day.

The great Polish war correspondent Ryszard Kapuscinski described what it feels like. “The first signal of an imminent malaria attack is a feeling of anxiety, which comes on suddenly and for no clear reason. Something has happened to you, something bad,” he wrote. Then comes “the dullness, the weakness, the heaviness… Everything is irritating. First and foremost the light; you hate the light. But you don’t have a lot of time for these loathings. For the attack arrives quickly. It is a sudden, violent onset of cold. Someone has taken you naked and thrown you into the icy highlands of Greenland.”

At this point, “You begin to tremble, quake, thrash about. You immediately recognize, however, this is not a trembling you are familiar with; these tremors and convulsions tossing you around are of a kind that at any moment now will tear you to shreds.” He said it is like being imprisoned “inside a mountain of ice” and slowly crushed.

Up until this year, the world was making remarkable progress in whittling down this disease. Since the year 2000, seven of the worst-afflicted countries in sub-Saharan Africa have slashed malaria-deaths by 50 percent. It has a great knock0on effect too: for every £1 spent on malaria prevention, Africa gains £12 in economic growth, because people can work instead of lying sick and dying. It was a sign that aid, matched by good African government, can produce inspirational results.

But then something began to change – at first imperceptibly – in the forgotten forests of Western Cambodia, where the Khmer Rouge held their last stand-off. The drug that is most effective at treating malaria is called artemisinin: it shocks the parasite out of your system and saves your life. But in South-East Asia, horrified doctors have discovered that the malaria parasite is becoming resistant to it. In a Darwinian arms race, it has begun to evolve a way to beat the treatment. It is taking twice as long to work – and soon it will have defeated the medicine altogether.

We have been here before. In exactly the same place in the 1960s, the malaria parasite outraced the best available treatment of its day, choloroquine, and rendered it useless. The new super-parasite then spread rapidly to Africa. Across the map of the world, the ability to treat malaria was blacked out, region by region. Nick Day, Professor of Tropical Medicine at the Mahidol Oxford Clinical Research Unit working on the ground, says: “It caused millions of deaths. If we let it happen again, we will face a major public health catastrophe.”

It took twenty years for another medicine as effective as choloroquine to be developed. Millions of Africans died waiting. If we lose artemisinin, we will face another deadly interlude – and given that pharmaceutical companies are doing virtually no work on diseases that afflict poor countries because there is no profit in it, it could last indefinitely. Professor Day says: “There are no new malaria drugs coming down the pipeline. There is nothing to replace them for the foreseeable future.” The broken mother I saw in Central Africa would then be one of many, many more.

Nobody knows why Cambodia’s malaria parasites are such buffed-up hyper-Darwinian winners – the Mr Universe of the parasite world. They have in the past rendered other treatments like SP and DDT far less effective by evolving resistance to them too. Some scientists think it is because the treatments have been used there longer than anywhere else, giving their parasites a head-start.

But it is not inevitable that this super-malaria will spread to Africa and cull millions. The scientists on the ground say we can contain them in Cambodia and prevent a disaster – if we act fast.

The scientists’ plan is simple. It is to first of all massively suppress the spread of malaria in this area by a vast distribution of insecticide-treated mosquito nets, which have been shown to cut transmission by 80 percent. Then it is to ease the “drug pressure” on the parasite. At the moment, heavy doses of artemisinin are pushing the malaria parasite to evolve fast. So the scientists are drastically slashing the doses of artemisinin in the area, and complementing it with a cocktail of weaker malaria drugs that in combination can have some compensatory effect. They calculate that this will reduce the evolutionary pressure on the parasite and make it revert back to type.

But Cambodia is a desperately poor country recovering from a genocide. It is impossible for them to do it alone. The World Health Organization has stepped in with funding – but scientists are warning this project will require large and sustained funds.

The cost of not acting will be catastrophic for Africa – and, in time, we would all live to regret it. One of the most frequently anticipated effects of global warming is a spreading of the parts of the world vulnerable to malaria. The World Health Organisation has advised European governments and the Southern states of the US to take “urgent action” to prepare for “the spread of malaria” to its territory as warming accelerates. If we are going to make the planet tropical, we had better start paying attention to tropical diseases.

But this is a moment for excitement as much as despair. This is a chance to save the most precious medicine humanity has from destruction. This is a chance to save millions of people from dying “in a mountain of ice.” This is a chance to do something heroic – for Africa, and for our own future. If we make this happen, we can be energized to keep on eradicating malaria, step-by-step, from the human condition: Dr. Robert Koch has shown that for just $10bn over five years, we could reduce deaths from the disease to a few thousand a year.

So will we seize the opportunity – or will we stand by, limp and passive, and wait for the advance of a super-charged killer?

POSTSCRIPT: There is a hard-right myth that environmentalists “banned DDT in Africa” and “killed Africans”. It is possible some people will try to revive it in response to this article.

It is not true. There is no ban. African governments can still use DDT as much as they like. Many use it in moderation for indoor spraying. But they do not see it as a magic bullet, because it is less effective than other options, like insecticide-treated bednets, because mosquitoes have developed a significant degree of resistance to it, and because it can have dangerous side-effects, like contributing to premature births and killing off local fish populations.

Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here . You can email him at johann -at- johannhari.com

Het is een van de grote doodgezwegen schandalen van de moderne tijd. Overal ter wereld worden mensen die levensreddende medicijnen het meest nodig hebben, verhinderd om ze te produceren. Dit is het recentste voorbeeld: in tal van arme landen zijn er fabrieken die niets liever zouden willen dan een goedkopere versie van Tamiflu te produceren, maar het wordt hen ten strengste verboden. Waarom? Omdat rijke farmaceutische bedrijven hun patenten en hun winsten willen veiligstellen. Er bestaat nochtans een alternatief voor dit perverse systeem, maar we negeren het bewust.

Om dit verhaaltje duidelijk te maken, moeten we beginnen bij een mysterie. De Wereldgezondheidsorganisatie trekt al maanden terecht aan de alarmbel: als de varkensgriep zich in de armste regio's ter wereld verspreidt, zouden honderdduizenden mensen, of meer nog, getroffen kunnen worden. Volgens diezelfde organisatie moeten regeringen anderzijds niet volop Tamiflu produceren, nochtans het enige geneesmiddel dat de symptomen kan verlichten en levens kan redden.

Gedurende tientallen jaren is een vreemd systeem op poten gezet om medicijnen te ontwikkelen - een bewuste keuze van onze beleidsmakers. Vooraleer een medicijn bij uw lokale apotheek in de rekken ligt en zich een weg baant tot in uw longen, maag of darmen, wordt het door wetenschappers ontwikkeld in laboratoria met overheidssubsidies, met uw belastinggeld dus.

Farmaceutische bedrijven zijn vaak pas in een latere fase van het ontwikkelingsproces betrokken, en financieren deels de dure maar weinig creatieve laatste stappen, zoals de aankoop van chemicaliën en proeftesten. In ruil verkrijgen ze jarenlang het exclusieve recht om het medicijn te produceren en er winst uit te slaan. Niemand anders mag het vervaardigen.

Het mag dan niet de bedoeling zijn van degenen die dat systeem in stand houden, maar de gevolgen zijn vaak dodelijk. De farmabedrijven die eigenaar waren van het patent op het aidsmedicijn stapten naar de rechtbank om te verhinderen dat de post-Apartheidsregering in Zuid-Afrika generische geneesmiddelen op de markt zou brengen om de stervende burgers te redden. Die geneesmiddelen zijn net zo doeltreffend en kosten 100 dollar per jaar. De bedrijven wilden dat de mensen 10.000 dollar per jaar ophoestten voor de gepatenteerde versie - het was dat of niks. Door het patentsysteem hebben elke dag opnieuw zieken in arme landen geen toegang tot medicijnen.

Winstbejag

En dat brengt ons bij de oplossing voor de varkensgriep. Gewone burgers walgden van de pogingen om Zuid-Afrika van levensreddende medicijnen te beroven. Onder druk van de publieke opinie kwam er zelfs een kleine versoepeling van de mondiale handelsregels. Voortaan mogen arme landen, in geval van buitengewone noden in de openbare gezondheid, generische geneesmiddelen produceren. Het zijn net dezelfde producten, maar zonder de merknaam - of de vette patentvergoedingen aan farmabedrijven in Zwitserland of de Kaaimaneilanden.

Volgens de nieuwe regels zouden de arme landen dus het recht hebben om zo veel Tamiflu te maken als ze maar willen. Er zijn bedrijven in India en China die staan te trappelen van ongeduld. Maar Roche, de patenthouder, wil niet dat de arme wereld goedkopere versies maakt voor eigen gebruik. Ze willen dat mensen het merkproduct kopen, zodat zij winst maken. Hoewel Roche er niet toe verplicht was, heeft een handvol bedrijven in de ontwikkelingswereld de toelating gekregen om onder licentie het geneesmiddel te vervaardigen. Maar het geld voor de licentie kunnen die bedrijven niet ophoesten.

En de Wereldgezondheidsorganisatie lijkt Roche te steunen. Die organisatie is het best geplaatst om te bepalen wat buitengewone noden zijn en kan een versoepeling van de patentregels verrechtvaardigen. Maar wat predikt ze? "Neem deze uitweg niet."

Professor Brook Baker, een specialist op het gebied van geneesmiddelenpatentering zegt: "Waarom doen jullie dit? Omdat jullie rechtstreeks of onrechtstreeks onder druk staan van de farmaceutische industrie. Schokkend."

Wat wordt het eindresultaat? James Love, directeur van het Knowledge Economy International, dat campagne voert tegen het patentsysteem, zegt: "Arme landen zijn minder goed voorbereid dan mogelijk was. Als er een pandemie uitbreekt, zullen er veel meer mensen sterven dan nodig was geweest. Veel meer. Verschrikkelijk".

Het bedrijf Big Pharma pleit voor dit systeem en zijn argument lijkt op het eerste gezicht aannemelijk: we moeten veel geld vragen voor "onze" medicijnen zodat we nog meer levensreddende geneesmiddelen kunnen ontwikkelen. We willen zo veel mogelijk behandelingen ontwikkelen, maar kunnen dat niet zonder inkomsten. We ondersteunen bovendien heel wat onderzoek dat niet tot de lancering van een nieuw medicijn leidt. Het is dus een duur proces."

Maar in een gedetailleerde studie van dokter Maria Angell, oud-redactrice van het prestigieuze New England Journal of Medicine, staat dat farmabedrijven slechts 14 procent van hun budget aan de ontwikkeling van geneesmiddelen besteden, en meestal dan nog aan de minder creatieve stappen op het einde. De rest van het budget gaat naar marketing en winsten. En zelfs met die miezerige 14 procent verkwisten farmabedrijven een fortuin aan de ontwikkeling van "me too"-geneesmiddelen, medicijnen die net hetzelfde doen als een medicijn dat al bestaat. Het nieuwe medicijn verschilt slechts in één molecule van het oude, maar de bedrijven kunnen wel een nieuw patent aanvragen en nog eens dikke winsten opstrijken.

Daarom zegt de Amerikaanse rekenkamer dat de farmaceutische markt verre van innovatief is, maar "stagneert". De farmabedrijven besteden bijna geen geld aan de ziektes die de meeste mensen doden, zoals malaria, omdat de slachtoffers arm zijn. Er valt dus weinig geld te rapen.

We lijden allemaal onder deze problematiek. Eurocommissaris voor Concurrentie Neelie Kroes zei onlangs nog dat Europeanen 40 procent meer betalen voor hun medicijnen dan nodig is, door dat "bedorven" systeem. Met dat geld zouden we nochtans heel wat levens kunnen redden als het in echte gezondheidszorg werd geïnvesteerd.

Waarom zouden we dit systeem behouden, als het zo slecht is? In de Verenigde Staten alleen al hebben farmabedrijven de afgelopen tien jaar meer dan 3 miljard dollar uitgegeven aan lobbyisten en politieke "steun". Ze hebben politici betaald om het systeem naar hun hand te zetten. Als u twijfelt hoeveel invloed ze precies hebben, luister dan naar Walter Burton, een Republikeins congreslid. In 2003 werd de laatste belangrijke wetgeving in verband met de openbare gezondheid goedgekeurd in de VS. Daarover zegt Walter Burton: "Toen de wet werd opgesteld, hielden de lobbyisten van de farmaceutische industrie de pen vast."

Prijzenfonds

Er is een veel betere manier om medicijnen te ontwikkelen, als we ze maar willen toepassen. Ze werd voor het eerst voorgesteld door Joseph Stiglitz, Nobelprijswinnaar Economie. Hij zegt: "Voor onderzoek is geld nodig, maar het huidige systeem zorgt er enkel voor dat beperkte middelen verkeerd worden gebruikt."

Zijn plan is eenvoudig. De westerse regeringen moeten een prijzenfonds van ettelijke miljarden dollars oprichten dat wetenschappers financieel beloont wanneer ze geneesmiddelen of vaccins ontwikkelen. Wie een geneesmiddel ontwikkelt voor ziektes die veel slachtoffers maken, zoals malaria, zou meer geld ontvangen. Zodra de betrokken wetenschappers betaald zijn, worden de rechten op het geneesmiddel publiek. Iedereen, waar ook ter wereld, zou het medicijn mogen vervaardigen en er levens mee redden.

In dit systeem blijft de financiële stimulans voor wetenschappers precies dezelfde, maar de hele mensheid vaart er wel bij, niet alleen een klein privémonopolie en enkele gelukkigen die zich de dure medicijnen kunnen veroorloven. Er zou een einde komen aan de absurditeiten in het huidige systeem - namelijk een fortuin uitgeven aan "me too"-drugs en voorkomen dat zieken de medicijnen vervaardigen die hen kunnen redden.

Het is niet goedkoop - het zou 0,6 procent van het Amerikaanse bruto binnenlands product kosten - maar op middellange termijn zou het ons allemaal een fortuin besparen omdat onze gezondheidszorg niet langer enorme vergoedingen moet betalen aan farmabedrijven. Intussen zou de prijs van de geneesmiddelen helemaal kelderen, waardoor tientallen miljoenen armen zich voor het eerst medicijnen zouden kunnen veroorloven.

Pogingen om het huidige systeem te veranderen worden afgeblokt door de farmabedrijven en hun leger lobbyisten. Daarom is de productie van medicijnen wereldwijd nog steeds geregeld in het belang van de aandeelhouders van de farmabedrijven en niet in het belang van de gezondheid van de mens.

Medische kennis afschermen zodat slechts enkelen er beter van worden, is één van de meest groteske praktijken van de moderne tijd. We moeten dat ziekelijke systeem omverwerpen, zodat de zieken kunnen blijven leven. Toen Jonas Stalk, een groot wetenschapper, een vaccin tegen polio uitvond, weigerde hij het te patenteren. Laten we zijn filosofie over de hele wereld verspreiden met de woorden: "Het is alsof je een patent zou nemen op de zon."

This is the story of one of the great unspoken scandals of our times. Today, the people across the world who most need life-saving medicine are being prevented from producing it. Here’s the latest example: factories across the poor world are desperate to start producing their own cheaper Tamiflu to protect their populations – but they are being sternly told not to. Why? So rich drug companies can protect their patents – and profits. There is an alternative to this sick system – but we are choosing to ignore it.

To understand this tale, we have to start with an apparent mystery. The World Health Organization (WHO) has been correctly warning for months that if swine flu spreads to the poorest parts of the world, it could cull hundreds of thousands of people – or more. Yet they have also been telling the governments of the poor world not to go ahead and produce as much Tamiflu – the only drug we have to reduce the symptoms, and potentially save lives – as they possibly can.

In the answer to this whodunit, there lies a much bigger story about how our world works today.

Our governments have chosen, over decades, to allow a strange system for developing medicines to build up. Most of the work carried out by scientists to bring a drug to your local pharmacist – and into your lungs, or stomach, or bowels – is done in government-funded university labs, paid for by your taxes. Drug companies usually come in late in the process of development, and pay for part of the expensive but largely uncreative final stages, like buying some of the chemicals and trials that are needed. In return, then they own the exclusive rights to manufacture and profit from the resulting medicine for years. Nobody else can make it.

Although it’s not the goal of the individuals working within the system, the outcome is often deadly. The drug companies who owned the patent for AIDS drugs went to court to stop the post-Apartheid government of South Africa producing generic copies of it – which are just as effective – for $100 a year to save their dying citizens. They wanted them to pay the full $10,000 a year to buy the branded version – or nothing. In the poor world, the patenting system every day puts medicines beyond the reach of sick people.

This is where the solution to the swine flu mystery comes in. Ordinary democratic citizens were so disgusted by the attempt to deprive South Africa of life-saving medicine that public pressure won a small concession in the global trading rules. It was agreed that in an overwhelming public health emergency, poor countries would be allowed to produce generic drugs. They are the exact same product, but without the brand name – or the fat patent payments to drug companies.

So under the new rules, the countries of the poor world should be entitled to start making as much generic Tamiflu as they want. There are companies across India and China who say they are raring to go. But Roche – the drug company that owns the patent – doesn’t want the poor world making cheaper copies for themselves. They want people to buy the branded version, from which they receive profits. Although not obliged to, they have licensed a handful of companies in the developing world to make the treatment – but they have to pay for license, and they can’t possibly meet the demand.

And the WHO seems to be backing Roche – against the rest of us. They are the ones best qualified to judge what constitutes an overwhelming emergency, justifying a breaching of the patent rules. And their message is: Don’t use the loophole.

Professor Brook Baker, an expert on drug patenting, says: “Why do they behave like this? Because of direct or indirect pressure from the pharmaceutical companies. It’s shocking.”

What will be the end-result? James Love, director of Knowledge Ecology International which campaigns against the current patenting system, says: “Poor countries are not as prepared as they could have been. If there’s a pandemic, the number of people who die will be much greater than it had to be. Much greater. It’s horrible.”

The argument in defence of this system offered by Big Pharma is simple, and sounds reasonable at first: we need to charge large sums for “our” drugs so we can develop more life-saving medicines. We want to develop as many treatments as we can, and we can only do that if we have revenue. A lot of the research we back doesn’t result in a marketable drug, so it’s an expensive process.

But a detailed study by Dr Marcia Angell, the former editor of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, says that only 14 percent of their budgets go on developing drugs – usually at the uncreative final part of the drug-trail. The rest goes on marketing and profits. And even with that puny 14 percent, drug companies squander a fortune developing “me-too” drugs – medicines that do exactly the same job as a drug that already exists, but has one molecule different, so they can take out a new patent, and receive another avalanche of profits.

As a result, the US Government Accountability Office says that far from being a font of innovation, the drug market has become “stagnant.” They spend virtually nothing on the diseases that kill the most human beings, like malaria, because the victims are poor, so there’s hardly any profit to be sucked out.

We all suffer as a result of this patent dysfunction. The European Union’s competition commissioner, Neelie Kroes, recently concluded that Europeans pay 40 percent more for their medicines than they should because of this “rotten” system – money that could be saving many lives if it was redirected towards real healthcare.

Why would we keep this system, if it is so bad? The drug companies have spent more than $3bn on lobbyists and political “contributions” over the past decade in the US alone. They have paid politicians to make the system work in their interests. If you doubt how deeply this influence goes, listen to a Republican congressman, Walter Burton, who admitted of the last big healthcare legislation passed in the US in 2003: “The pharmaceutical lobbyists wrote the bill.”

There is a far better way to develop medicines, if only we will take it. It was first proposed by Joseph Stiglitz, the recent Nobel Prize winner for economics. He says: “Research needs money, but the current system results in limited funds being spent in the wrong way.”

Stiglitz’s plan is simple. The governments of the Western world should establish a multi-billion dollar prize fund that will give payments to scientists who develop cures or vaccines for diseases. The highest prizes would go to cures for diseases that kill millions of people, like malaria. Once the pay-out is made, the rights to use the treatment will be in the public domain. Anybody anywhere in the world could manufacture the drug and use it to save lives.

The financial incentive in this system for scientists remains exactly the same – but all humanity reaps the benefits, not a tiny private monopoly and those lucky few who can afford to pay their bloated prices. The irrationalities of the current system – spending a fortune on me-too drugs, and preventing sick people from making the medicines that would save them – would end.

It isn’t cheap – it would cost 0.6 percent of GDP – but in the medium-term, it would save us all a fortune, because our healthcare systems would no longer have to pay huge premiums to drug companies. Meanwhile, the cost of medicine would come crashing down for the poor – and tens of millions would be able to afford it for the first time.

Yet moves to change the current system are blocked by the drug companies and their armies of lobbyists. That’s why the way we regulate the production of medicines across the world is still designed to serve the interests of the shareholders of the drug companies – not the health of humanity.

The idea of ring-fencing life-saving medical knowledge so a few people can profit from it is one of the great grotesqueries of our age. We have to tear down this sick system – so the sick can live. Only then we can globalize the spirit of Jonas Salk, the great scientist who invented the polio vaccine, but refused to patent it, saying simply: “It would be like patenting the sun.”

Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here . You can email him at johann -at- johannhari.com

To read Johann's article about how swine flu was caused by our hunger for cheap meat, click here.

Un nombre croissant de scientifiques estime que, non, cette grippe porcine n’est pas survenue accidentellement. Ils affirment au contraire que cette pandémie globale - et toutes les morts qui vont suivre - est une conséquence directe de la demande de viande bon marché. Serait-ce donc la manière dont nous produisons cette viande qui nous rend malades comme des cochons ? A première vue, cela a l’air absurde. De tous temps, les virus ont muté, et ils ont parfois pris des formes dangereuses, fauchant alors les vies humaines. C’est une réalité à laquelle on ne peut échapper, comme les tsunamis ou les tremblements de terre. Mais de plus en plus, les données scientifiques suggèrent que nous avons involontairement inventé une méhode artificielle d’accélérer l’évolution de ces virus mortels - et de les disperser à travers le monde. Il s’agit des élevages industriels, produisant de la viande à bon compte, avec en prime, des virus qui se propagent.

Pour comprendre comment tout ceci est arrivé, il faut comparer deux types de fermes. Mes grand-parents avaient une porcherie dans les montagnes suisses, avec tout au plus 20 porcs à la fois. Que serait-il arrivé, si dans les intestins de l’un de ces porcs, un virus avait muté et pris une forme plus mortelle ? Le virus aurait rencontré en chemin la vigoureuse résistance du système immunitaire des porcs. Ces animaux vivaient en plein air, sans stress et avec une alimentation qui leur convenait - ils avaient donc une robustesse leur permettant de résister. Si le virus s’était installé, il ne serait pas allé plus loin que là où le cochon infecté ne le pouvait. Ainsi, le virus ne disposait que de 20 autres porcs alentour pour se développer et y muter - et atteindre le terme de son évolution avant de s’éteindre.

Un virus vraiment chanceux et aventureux pouvait sans doute aller rejoindre le marché au bestiaux et s’attaquer à d’autres petits groupes de porcs en bonne santé. Mais il avait très peu de chances de se propager sur une importante population porcine ou d’évoluer vers un type de virus transmissible aux humains.

Comparons maintenant avec ce qui se passe quand un virus évolue dans un grand élevage moderne. Dans la plupart de ces porcheries industrielles, 6 000 porcs sont entassés museau contre museau dans des cages étroites où ils peuvent à peine bouger, et sont nourris en permanence d’une espèce de bouillie artificielle, vivant au dessus de leurs propres immondices.

Au lieu de n’avoir que 20 porcs dans lesquels se développer, le virus en a maintenant des milliers, qui sans arrêt s’infectent et se réinfectent les uns les autres. Il peut se combiner et se recombiner. L’ammoniac du lisier au dessus duquel ils vivent brûle les voies respiratoires des porcs, rendant ainsi plus facile l’accès des virus. Autant dire que le système immunitaire de ces porcs est en chute libre. Ils sont stressés, déprimés et en panique permanente, et sont bien plus aisément victime de l’infection. Il n’y a ni air frais, ni lumière du jour pour renforcer leur défenses naturelles. Ils vivent dans un air chargé de virus, et ils y sont exposés chaque fois qu’ils respirent.

Comme l’explique le Docteur Michael Greger, responsable du secteur Santé Publique et Agriculture Animale de la Humane Society, aux Etats-Unis : « rassemblez tout ceci, et vous créez un environnement parfait pour ces souches résistantes. Si on voulait créer une pandémie mondiale, il faudrait construire le plus d’élevages industriels possible. Voilà pourquoi le développement de la grippe porcine n’est vraiment pas une surprise pour les professionnels de la santé publique. En 2003, l’American Public Health Association - la plus ancienne et la plus importante au monde - a appelé à un moratoire sur les élevages industriels parce qu’elle entrevoyait que quelque chose allait arriver. Il faudra sans doute quelque chose d’aussi sérieux qu’une pandémie pour nous faire prendre conscience du coût réel de l’élevage industriel. »

De nombreuses études détaillées sur les élevages industriels qui sont parues ces dernières années viennent appuyer cet avis. Le docteur Ellen Silbergeld est professeur des sciences de la santé environnementale à la Johns Hopkins University. Elle m’a indiqué que ses études détaillées, proches du terrain l’ont amenée à la conclusion qu’il y a un « lien très fort » entre les élevages industriels et les nouvelles formes de grippe plus puissantes que nous connaissons aujourd’hui. « Au lieu que le virus ne dispose que d’un seul essai sur la roulette [évolutive], il en a des milliers et des milliers, pour le même prix. C’est ce qui détermine l’évolution de nouvelles maladies. »

Hier encore, on ne pouvait que spéculer sur l’origine du virus mortel H1N1 - mais aujourd’hui on en sait davantage. Le centre d’informatique biologique de la Columbia University a analysé les virus et estime maintenant qu’il n’y a pas émergence d’un triple virus de grippe aviaire porcine et humaine. C’est une variante proche d’une souche connue précédemment. On peut étudier son arbre généalogique - et son aieul était un virus qui a muté dans l’environnement artificiel d’un grand élevage industriel en Caroline du Nord.

Est-ce que cette nouvelle souche a également muté dans les mêmes circonstances ? On est tenté de le croire aujourd’hui, mais il est difficile de conclure. Nous savons que la ville où la grippe porcine s’est déclarée au départ - Perote, au Mexique - abrite une énorme ferme industrielle, et compte 950 000 porcs. Le Dr Silbergeld ajoute : « les élevages industriels n’offrent aucune sécurité sur le plan biologique. Il y a des gens faisant des allées et venues sans arrêt. Si vous vous tenez à quelques kilomètres sous le vent d’un élevage industriel, vous pouvez facilement attraper des virus pathogènes. Et le lisier n’est pas toujours éliminé. »

Ce n’est pas par hasard si l’on a assisté pendant les dix dernières années à une explosion de nouveaux virus, précisément au moment où l’élevage industriel s’est tellement développé. Par exemple, entre 1994 et 2001, le pourcentage de porcs américains qui vivent et meurent dans d’immenses fermes industrielles a grimpé de 10% à 72%. La grippe porcine, qui était stable depuis 1918, a soudain pris un essor extraordinaire pendant cette période.

Quel maux allons-nous nous infliger pour cause de viande à bas prix ? Nous savons que la grippe aviaire s’est développée dans les très grands poulaillers industriels. Et nous savons que l’usage massif de nourriture animale pleine d’antibiotiques a donné naissance à une nouvelle sorte de staphylocoque doré résistant [1] . C’est un procédé simple, horrible. Le meilleur moyen de maintenir en vie ces animaux est de les gaver d’antibiotiques. Mais ceci a généré un combat au corps à corps avec les bactéries, qui deviennent de plus en plus résistantes aux antibiotiques - d’où émergent enfin de compte des virus super-forts, invulnérables à nos armes médicales. Ce système a engendré un nouveau genre de staphylocoque doré, responsable maintenant de 20% des infections humaines dues aux virus. Sir Liam Donaldson, le Médecin Chef du gouvernement britannique, met en garde : « chaque usage inapproprié [des antibiotiques] pour les animaux ou en agriculture représente une condamnation à mort potentielle pour un futur patient. »

Bien entendu, l’industrie agroalimentaire tente désespérément de nier que tout ceci soit vrai : leurs résultats financiers dépendent du maintien sur ses rails de ce système bancal. Mais lorsque l’on prend en compte le coût de toutes les maladies et pandémies, cette viande à bon marché se révèle soudainement être une illusion. Nous avons toujours su que l’élevage industriel était une faute sur la conscience de l’humanité - mais nous craignons désormais que ce ne soit aussi le cas pour notre santé. Si nous poursuivons dans cette voie, la grippe aviaire et la grippe porcine ne seront que les premières manifestation d’un siècle de mutations de virus.

Maintenant que nous sommes les témoins d’une pandémie globale, balayant le monde, nous devons mettre un terme à ces fabriques de virus - avant qu’elles ne mettent fin à de nombreuses vies humaines.

Publication originale The Independent, traduction Madeleine Chevassus pour Contre Info

A swelling number of scientists believe swine flu has not happened by accident. No: they argue this global pandemic – and all the deaths we are about to see – is the direct result of our demand for cheap meat. So is the way we produce our food really making us sick as a pig?

At first glance, this seems wrong. All through history, viruses have mutated, and sometimes they have taken nasty forms that scythe through the human population. This is an inescapable reality we just have to live with, like earthquakes and tsunamis. But the scientific evidence increasingly suggests that we have unwittingly invented an artificial way to accelerate the evolution of these deadly viruses – and pump them out across the world. They are called factory farms. They manufacture low-cost flesh, with a side-dish of viruses to go.

To understand how this happens, you have to compare two farms. My grandparents had a pig farm in the Swiss mountains, with around twenty swine at any one time. What happened there if, in the bowels of one of their pigs, a virus mutated and took on a deadlier form? At every stage, the virus would meet stiff resistance from the pigs’ immune systems. They were living in fresh air, on the diet they evolved with, and without stress – so they had a robust ability to fight back. If the virus did take hold, it would travel only as far as the sick hog could walk. So if the virus would then have around twenty other pigs to spread and mutate in – before it would hit the end of its own evolutionary path, and die off.

If it was a really lucky, plucky virus, it might make it to market – where it would come up against more healthy pigs living in small herds. It has little opportunity to fan out across a large population of pigs or evolve a strain that could be transmitted to humans.

Now compare this to what happens when a virus evolves in a modern factory farm. In most swine farms today, six thousand pigs are crammed snout-to-snout in tiny cages where they can barely move, and are fed for life on an artificial pulp, while living on top of cess-pools of their own stale faeces.

Instead of having just twenty pigs to experiment and evolve in, the virus now has a pool of thousands, constantly infecting and reinfecting each other. The virus can combine and recombine again and again. The ammonium from the waste they live above burns the pigs’ respiratory tracts, making it easier yet for viruses to enter them. Better still, the pigs’ immune systems are in free-fall. They are stressed, depressed, and permanently in panic, making them far easier to infect. There is no fresh air or sunlight to bolster their natural powers of resistance. They live in air thick with viral loads, and they are exposed every time they breathe in.

As Dr Michael Greger, director of Public Health and Animal Agriculture at the Humane Society of the United States, explains: “Put all this together, and you have a perfect storm environment for these super-strains. If you wanted to create global pandemics, you’d build as many of these factory farms as possible. That’s why the development of swine flu isn’t a surprise to those of us in public health community. Back in 2003, the American Public Health Association – the oldest and largest in world – called for a moratorium of factory farming because they saw something like this would happen. It may take something as serious as a pandemic to make us realise the real cost of factory farming.”

Many of the detailed studies of factory farms that have been emerging in the past few years reinforce this argument. Dr Ellen Silbergeld is Professor of Environmental Health Sciences at Johns Hopkins University. She tells me her detailed on-the-ground studies led her to conclude there is “very much” a link from factory farms to the new, more powerful forms of flu we are experiencing. “Instead of a virus only having one spin of the roulette wheel, it has thousands and thousands of spins, for no extra cost. It drives the evolution of new diseases.”

Until yesterday, we could only speculate about the origins of the current H1N1 virus killing human beings – but now we know more. The Centre for Computational Biology at Columbia University has studied the virus and found that it is not a new emergence of a triple human-swine-bird flu virus. It is a slight variant on a virus we have seen before. We can see its family tree – and its daddy was a virus that evolved in the artificial breeding ground of a vast factory farm in North Carolina.

Did this strain evolve, too, in the same circumstances? Already, the evidence is suggestive, although far from conclusive. We know that the city where this swine flu first emerged – Perote, Mexico – contains a massive industrial pig farm, and houses 950,000 pigs. Dr Silbergeld adds: “Factory farms are not biosecure at all. People are going in and out all the time. If you stand a few miles down-wind from a factory farm, you can pick up the pathogens easily. And, like in the US, the manure from these farms isn’t disposed of according to any regulations, even though we know viruses can remain alive in it for more than a month. They can just sit in cesspools. The viruses can be transmitted from there by flies.”

It’s no coincidence that we have seen a sudden surge of new viruses in the past decade at precisely the moment when factory farming has intensified so dramatically. For example, between 1994 and 2001, the number of American pigs that live and die in vast industrial farms in the US spiked from 10 percent to 72 percent. Swine flu had been stable since 1918 – and then suddenly, in this period, went super-charged.

How much harm will we do to ourselves in the name of cheap meat? We know that bird flu developed in the world’s vast poultry farms. And we know that pumping animal feed full of antibiotics in factory farms has given us a new strain of MRSA. It’s a simple, horrible process. The only way to keep animals alive in such dirty conditions is to pump their feed full of antibiotics. But this has triggered an arms race with bacteria, which start evolving to beat the antibiotics – and emerge as in the end as pumped-up, super-charged bacteria invulnerable to our medical weapons. This system gave birth to a new kind of MRSA that now makes up 20 percent of all human infections with the virus. Sir Liam Donaldson, the British government’s Chief Scientist, warns: “Every inappropriate use in animals or agriculture [of antibiotics] is potentially a death warrant for a future patient.”

Of course, agribusinesses is desperate to deny all this is happening: their bottom line depends on keeping this model on its shaky trotters. But once you factor in the cost of all these diseases and pandemics, cheap meat suddenly looks like an illusion.

We always knew that factory farms were a scar on humanity’s conscience – but now we know they are a scar on our health. If we carry on like this, bird flu and swine flu will be just the beginning of a century of viral outbreaks. As we witness a global pandemic washing across the world, we need to shut down these virus factories – before they shut down even more human lives.

Steeds meer wetenschappers denken dat de varkensgriep het directe resultaat van onze vraag naar goedkoop vlees. Hebben zij gelijk en is het werkelijk de manier waarop wij ons voedsel produceren die ons zo ziek maakt als een varken? Independent-columnist Johann Hari heeft een sterk vermoeden: 'Het is geen toeval dat de opstoot van nieuwe virussen in het voorbije decennium samenviel met een sterke intensivering van de industriële landbouw.'

Op het eerste gezicht lijkt het niet te kloppen. Virussen hebben altijd gemuteerd, soms in nare vormen die menselijke populaties decimeerden. Dat is een onontkoombare realiteit waarmee we moeten leren leven, een natuurverschijnsel zoals aardbevingen en tsunami's. Maar wetenschappelijke vaststellingen doen nu steeds sterker vermoeden dat wij ongewild een kunstmatige manier hebben gevonden om de evolutie van dodelijke virussen te versnellen en ze over heel de wereld te verspreiden. Die uitvinding heet de fabrieksboerderij. Ze produceert goedkoop vlees met een gratis portie virussen erbij.

Om te begrijpen hoe dat kan gebeuren, moeten we twee soorten boerderijen met elkaar vergelijken. Mijn grootouders hadden een kwekerij met een twintigtal varkens in de Zwitserse bergen. Wat zou er gebeuren wanneer in de ingewanden van een van hun beesten een virus in een gevaarlijkere vorm muteerde? Het virus zou in elk stadium moeten opboksen tegen het immuunsysteem van de varkens. De dieren leefden in de open lucht, op het dieet waarmee ze geëvolueerd waren en zonder stress. Dat gaf hen een sterk vermogen om terug te vechten. Als het virus toch zou winnen, zou het niet verder kunnen reizen dan een ziek varken kon lopen. Het kon ten hoogste een twintigtal andere dieren aansteken en daar verder muteren. Daarna was het aan het einde van zijn eigen evolutionaire weg en stierf het uit. Een echt heel sterk virus, met buitengewoon veel geluk, zou in het beste geval tot op de markt geraken, waar het opnieuw met kleine kuddes gezonde varkens te maken zou krijgen. Het zou erg weinig kans krijgen om een grote populatie varkens aan te steken of zich te ontwikkelen tot een stam die mensen kon infecteren.

Vergelijk dat met wat er gebeurt met een virus dat in een fabrieksboerderij evolueert. In de meeste moderne varkenskwekerijen zitten 6.000 dieren snuit tegen snuit op elkaar gepakt in kleine kooien waarin ze amper kunnen bewegen. Ze krijgen levenslang kunstmatig voeder en leven boven een beerput met hun eigen uitwerpselen.

In plaats van 20 varkens om mee te experimenteren en in te evolueren, heeft het virus nu een populatie van duizenden dieren die elkaar onophoudelijk besmetten en herbesmetten. Het kan keer op keer combineren en recombineren. De ammoniak uit de mest verbrandt de luchtwegen van de varkens, zodat virussen gemakkelijker in hun organisme dringen. Nog mooier, het immuunsysteem van de varkens is in vrije val. De beesten zijn overspannen, lijden aan depressies en leven in voortdurende paniek, zodat ze gemakkelijker te infecteren zijn. Ze hebben geen frisse lucht of zon om hun natuurlijke weerstand te versterken. Ze leven in een lucht vol virussen, die ze bij elke ademtocht in hun longen krijgen.

Dokter Michael Greger, directeur Public Health and Animal Agriculture van de Humane Society of the United States, legt uit: "Als je al die elementen samenvoegt, krijg je de ideale omgeving voor supervirussen. Als je opzettelijk een wereldwijde pandemie zou willen veroorzaken, zou je zoveel mogelijk fabrieksboerderijen bouwen. De Mexicaanse griep is dan ook geen verrassing voor de gezondheidsexperts. De American Public Health Association - de oudste en grootste vereniging van deze sector - pleitte al in 2003 voor een moratorium op fabriekslandbouw, omdat ze kon voorspellen dat zoiets als dit zou gebeuren. Er zal een ernstige pandemie nodig zijn om ons de reële kosten van de bio-industrie te doen beseffen."

Een groot aantal gedetailleerde studies heeft dat argument in de jongste jaren bevestigd. Dokter Ellen Silbergeld is Professor of Environmental Health Sciences aan de Johns Hopkins University. Ze vertelt me dat haar onderzoek op het terrein haar tot het besluit heeft gebracht dat er "een uitgesproken verband" bestaat tussen de fabrieksboerderijen en het opduiken van nieuwe, meer virulente griepvirussen. "Het virus krijgt niet langer één enkele draai van de roulette maar duizenden en duizenden, elke keer opnieuw. Dat werkt de ontwikkeling van nieuwe ziekten in de hand."

Biologisch onveilig

Tot gisteren konden we alleen paar speculeren over de oorsprong van het huidige H1N1-virus dat mensen doodt. Nu weten we meer. Het Centre for Computational Biology van Columbia University heeft het virus bestudeerd en denkt dat dit geen nieuwe combinatie van een mensen-, varkens- en vogelgriepvirus is, maar wel een enigszins afwijkende variant van een virus dat we al hebben gezien. We kennen zijn stamboom - en papa was een virus dat zich in de kunstmatige voedingsbodem van een grote fabrieksboerderij in North Carolina heeft ontwikkeld.

Is de huidige virusstam in dezelfde omstandigheden geëvolueerd? Het bewijsmateriaal doet het vermoeden maar is nog lang niet overtuigend. We weten dat de stad waar deze varkensgriep voor het eerst opdook - Perote, in Mexico - een gigantische fabriek met 950.000 varkens heeft. Dokter Silbergeld: "Fabrieksboerderijen zijn allesbehalve biologisch veilig. Er lopen voortdurend mensen in en uit. Als je op een paar kilometer van een industriële boerderij staat en de wind jouw kant uitwaait, kun je gemakkelijk pathogenen opdoen. En de mest van deze boerderijen wordt niet altijd verwerkt."

Het is geen toeval dat de opstoot van nieuwe virussen in het voorbije decennium samenviel met een sterke intensivering van de industriële landbouw. Van 1994 tot 2001 steeg de verhouding Amerikaanse varkens die in grootschalige fabrieksboerderijen leefden en stierven spectaculair, van 10 naar 72 procent. De sinds 1918 stabiel gebleven varkensgriep kreeg in dezelfde periode opeens spierballen.

Hoeveel schade zullen wij onszelf nog in de naam van goedkoop vlees toebrengen? We weten dat de vogelgriep zich in de bio-industrie ontwikkeld heeft. En we weten dat de antibiotica die de industrie door het veevoeder mengt een nieuwe variant van de MRSA-bacterie heeft doen ontstaan. Men kan dieren in dergelijke omstandigheden alleen in leven houden door hun voedsel vol antibiotica te pompen. Maar dat heeft een wapenwedloop gestart met de bacteriën, die evolueren om de antibiotica te verslaan en uiteindelijk zo sterk worden dat onze medische wapens hen niet meer kunnen raken. Zo is er een nieuwe MRSA-stam ontstaan die nu goed is voor twintig procent van de menselijke besmettingen met deze bacterie. Sir Liam Donaldson, het hoofd van de Britse gezondheidsdienst, waarschuwt: "Elk ongepast gebruik van antibiotica bij dieren of landbouwproducten is een potentieel doodvonnis voor een toekomstige patiënt."

De landbouwindustrie weert zich natuurlijk als een duivel in een wijwatervat om te ontkennen dat dit alles gebeurt. Haar winsten hangen immers af van dit verziekte model. Maar als je rekening houdt met de kosten van alle ziekten en pandemieën, lijkt goedkoop vlees opeens een illusie.

We hebben altijd geweten dat de industriële veeteelt een smet is op het geweten van de mensheid. Nu weten we dat hij ook een smet is op onze gezondheid. Als we op deze manier verder gaan, zullen de vogelgriep en de varkensgriep slechts het begin zijn van een eeuw van virusuitbarstingen. Terwijl de pandemie de wereld in haar greep krijgt, moeten wij de virusfabrieken sluiten - voor ze nog meer slachtoffers maken.

Als we op deze manier verder gaan, zullen de vogelgriep en de varkensgriep slechts het begin zijn van een eeuw van virusuitbarstingen

Wie had ooit gedacht dat de regeringen van de wereld in 2009 ten oorlog zouden trekken tegen de piraterij? De Britse Royal Navy, met in haar kielzog een dertigtal onder meer Chinese en Amerikaanse schepen, zette begin deze week koers naar Somalische wateren om het op te nemen tegen een paar mannen die er in onze verbeelding nog helemaal uitzien als schurken met een papegaai op hun schouder. Ze zal weldra in gevechten verwikkeld zijn met Somalische schepen en de piraten zelfs aan wal achtervolgen, op het grondgebied van een van de meest geruïneerde landen ter wereld. Achter dat piratenvertelseltje gaat een onbelicht schandaal schuil. De mensen die onze regeringen bestempelen als "een van de grootste bedreigingen van onze tijd" hebben een heel bijzonder verhaal te vertellen. En ook een beetje het recht aan hun zijde.

Piraten waren nooit helemaal wie we denken dat ze waren. In de 'gouden eeuw van de piraterij' - tussen 1650 en 1730 - werd het beeld van de piraat als de dolzinnige, woeste Blauwbaard dat nu nog leeft gecreëerd door de Britse overheid als onderdeel van een propagandaoffensief. Vele gewone mensen waren het daar niet mee eens: vaak werden piraten van de galg gered door mensenmassa's die het voor hen opnamen. Waarom? In zijn boek Villains of All Nations doet historicus Marcus Rediker een paar feiten uit de doeken.

Houten hel

Als je toen koopman of zeematroos werd - jong en hongerig werd aangemonsterd aan de dokken van de Londense East-End - dan kwam je terecht in je reinste drijvende houten hel. Je werkte 24 uur per dag op een volgepakt, half verhongerd schip. Als je niet hard genoeg werkte, trakteerde de almachtige kapitein je op een geseling met de kat met negen staarten. Als je al te vaak versaagde, kon je overboord gekieperd worden. Na maanden of jaren van dat kreeg je vaak zelfs je volledige loon niet uitbetaald.

Piraten waren vaak de eersten die in opstand kwamen tegen die wereld. Ze muitten en creëerden een nieuwe manier om op zee te werken. Zodra ze een schip in handen hadden, verkozen de piraten hun kapitein, en namen ze alle beslissingen in samenspraak, zonder folteren. Ze deelden de opbrengsten volgens wat Rediker "een van de meest egalitaire plannen voor de verdeling van inkomsten in de achttiende eeuw" noemt. Ze namen zelfs ontsnapte Afrikaanse slaven aan, en behandelden hen als gelijken. De piraten "toonden heel duidelijk - en op subversieve wijze - aan dat je schepen niet op de gewelddadige en tirannieke wijze van de handelsmaatschappijen en de Royal Navy moest leiden". Dat is de reden waarom ze romantische helden waren, ook al schoten ze tekort als dieven.

De woorden van één piraat uit dat verloren tijdvak, een Britse jongeman genaamd William Scott, zouden moeten nazinderen in deze nieuwe tijd van piraterij. Net voor hij werd opgehangen in Charleston, in South Carolina, zei hij: "Wat ik deed, deed ik om er niet onderdoor te gaan. Ik was gedwongen om piraat te worden om te overleven." In 1991 viel de regering in Somalië. Negen miljoen mensen vechten sindsdien tegen de uithongering. De vunzigste elementen in de westerse wereld beschouwen dat als een uitgelezen kans om de voedselvoorraden van het land te stelen en hun nucleair afval in hun zee te dumpen.

Ja, nucleair afval. Zodra de regering weg was, doken er voor de Somalische kust mysterieuze Europese schepen op die hun vaten in zee dumpten. De kustbevolking werd ziek. In het begin kregen ze een vreemde uitslag, werden ze misselijk en bevielen ze van misvormde baby's. Daarna, na de tsunami van 2005, spoelden honderden geloosde en lekkende vaten aan op de kust. De mensen werden ziek door de straling, meer dan 300 stierven.

Radioactief materiaal

Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, de Somalische gezant bij de VN, vertelt me: "Iemand dumpt hier radioactief materiaal. Er zijn ook lood en zware metalen als cadmium en kwik, noem maar op." Veel ervan kan teruggevoerd worden naar Europese ziekenhuizen en fabrieken die het verpatsen aan de Italiaanse maffia om er goedkoop 'van af te zijn'. Toen ik Ould-Abdallah vroeg wat de Europese overheden eraan doen, zei hij met een zucht: "Niets."

Terzelfder tijd beroven Europese schepen de Somalische zee van haar grootste rijkdom: vis, schaal- en schelpdieren. We hebben ons eigen visbestand vernietigd door overbevissing, nu gaan we het bij hen halen. Elk jaar stelen illegale vissers voor meer dan 300 miljoen dollar tonijn, garnalen en kreeft uit Somalische wateren. De plaatselijke vissers komen om van de honger. Mohammed Hussein, een visser uit Marka, 100 kilometer ten zuiden van Mogadishu, zei tegen Reuters: "Als er niets gebeurt, dan zal er weldra niet veel vis meer overblijven in onze kustwateren."

Dat is de context waarin de 'piraten' zijn opgedoken. Somalische vissers gebruikten speedboten om lozers en illegale vissers af te schrikken, of op zijn minst een 'belasting' te heffen. Ze noemen zich de 'vrijwillige Somalische kustwacht', en de Somali in de straat steunt hen. De onafhankelijke Somalische nieuwssite WardheerNews berekende dat 70 procent "erg gewonnen is voor piraterij als een vorm van verdediging van het vaderland".

Nee, dat praat gijzelnemingen niet goed, en ja, sommigen zijn wel degelijk gangsters - vooral zij die leveringen van het Wereldvoedselprogramma aanvallen. Maar in een telefonisch interview zei piratenleider Sugule Ali: "We beschouwen onszelf niet als zeebandieten. Voor ons zijn zeebandieten zij die illegaal in onze zeeën vissen en afval dumpen." William Scott zou dat begrijpen.

Hadden we nu echt verwacht dat uitgehongerde Somali's passief op hun stranden zouden staan, pootje zouden baden in ons giftig afval, en zouden toekijken hoe wij de vis van hun bord stelen om hem te serveren in restaurants in Londen, Parijs en Rome? Tegen die misdaden doen we niets - de enige verstandige oplossing voor het probleem. Maar toen een paar vissers reageerden door de transitroute voor 20 procent van de oliebevoorrading in de wereld te verstoren, sturen we wel snel oorlogsbodems.

Het verhaal van de oorlog tegen de piraterij van 2009 wordt nog het best geresumeerd door een piraat die leefde en stierf in de vierde eeuw voor Christus. Hij werd gevangengenomen en voor Alexander De Grote gebracht. Die wilde weten "wat er de bedoeling van is de zee voor zich op te eisen". De piraat glimlachte en antwoordde: "Wat uw bedoeling is met de hele aarde. Maar omdat ik dat doe met een onbeduidend schip, word ik een dief genoemd. Terwijl u, die hetzelfde doet met een hele vloot, een keizer genoemd wordt." Eens te meer is onze grootse imperiale vloot op weg. Maar wie is de dief?

And now for the great news – from Africa. Yes, I know that seems like a perverse opener, with Robert Mugabe perpetuating his oozing Alzheimocracy, a looming famine in Ethiopia, and international peacekeepers failing to prevent genocidal massacres in Darfur. The cynics who jeer that Africa is a black hole for help feel they have the wind of no-change at their back. But some time next year – or soon after – a beautiful moment in the history of humanity will come to pass on the Western shores of Africa. An excruciatingly painful disease that has stalked humans for millennia will end – forever.

The story of how this came to pass begins just twenty years ago, in a tiny village in Ghana. The former US President Jimmy Carter stumbled across a crying woman who appeared to be cradling a baby to her right breast. He stepped forward to talk to her – but he reeled back when he realised a three-foot-long worm was inching its way out of her nipple, at the centre of an engorged purpling breast. It was one of eleven guinea worms taking a month or more to crawl out of the young woman’s body that summer. One was burrowing out from her vagina. The woman couldn’t speak; she could only howl.

She was living through a guinea worm infestation. One survivor, Hyacinth Igelle, says: “The pain is like if you stab somebody. It is like fire. You feel it even in your heart.” After seeing some victims, the journalist Nicholas Kristof called it “torture by worms.” The worm’s head causes a blister that often develop deadly tetanus; if the victims survive, they can starve because they have not been able to farm their fields for months. Most scholars now believe that when the Old Testament Israelites were afflicted by “fiery serpents” in their flesh, they were meeting this worm for the first time.

When Jimmy Carter first encountered the disease, some 3.5 million people were riddled with guinea worm. Tens of millions of people had endured it, from Europe to Asia; it was regarded as an intractable, eternal problem. The idea of eradicating it was mocked as “utopian”. But today, the number has been slashed by more than 99 percent. Fewer than 10,000 people in a few remaining pockets of Ghana and Sudan still suffer – and soon, there will be none at all.

This achievement is all the more startling when you realise there is no vaccination or cure for the disease. Guinea worm eggs are carried on the backs of a tiny water-flea, and glugged down by humans with their drinking water. The eggs hatch in your abdomen, growing over a year to three feet in length – and then they begin to dig their way out. They can choose any point of your body to emerge from: your eyeball, your penis, your feet, destroying as it goes. As it does, it spews millions more eggs into any water it comes into contact with. Once the worm is within you, the only help doctors can offer is to wait until it bursts out and wrap the worm’s head round a stick to try to very gently tug it out a little faster.

But you can stop people contracting the parasite in the first place – and Carter has, on a massive scale. The practices are startlingly simple: the distribution of egg-catching water filters that cost around sixty pence each, and mass education about why they matter. But it took a vast effort to get them in place, including brokering a ‘Guinea Worm Ceasefire’ to the Sudanese civil war that allowed aid workers free access. So Carter raised $225m from governments and private donors, and used it to drive the worms off the earth one village at a time. At 84, he is determined to outlive the last of these little parasites.

This Carter-led programme is sending guinea worm to the mourner-free graveyard of eradicated diseases, along with smallpox and (soon) polio. But it doesn’t end there. In a cynicism-drugged age, it is a reminder of what we can do, if we have the determination. Our governments are very good at building Weapons of Destruction – but for a fraction of the cash they could unleash Weapons of Mass Salvation, eradicating disease after disease. This programme should flush away the glib cynicism about aid to Africa along with the worm-eggs. It proves money from outside, if used intelligently, can massively improve the lives of ordinary Africans. Indeed, it can achieve goals that seemed at the start like utopian fantasies; it can reverse the curses of millennia.

One day soon, the last guinea worm will burrow out of its last victim. I want to take all those shallow, callow contrarians who say aid to Africa is worthless to witness that moment – and see if they still shrug quite so casually.

Whenever the world trade talks begin to seem like a coma-inducing bore-a-thon, I am jolted back to consciousness by the throat-stripping smell of rubbish; miles of rotting rubbish. A few years ago I found Adelina – a skinny little scrap of an eight-year-old – living in a rubbish dump, where this stench made her eyes water all the time. It is this smell – and her sore, salty eyes – that hung over the corpse of the Doha trade talks this week.

Just outside the Peruvian capital of Lima, there is a groaning valley of trash, and, inside it, hordes of children try to stay alive. Adelina spends her days picking through the refuse looking for something – anything – she can sell on for a few pennies. Then she returns to the few steel sheets she calls home to sleep on a crunchy carpet of cans. She has never left the rubbish dump; its walls are the walls of her consciousness. She told me three of her friends had recently died by falling into the rubbish, or being pricked by fetid needles, or slipping on to broken glass. I asked her how often she eats, and she shrugged: "I don't like to eat much anyway." She will be 10 now, if she has survived.

When we juggle the dry, dull statistics of world trade, we are really asking if Adelina will remain in her rubbish dump – and if her children, and grandchildren, will live and die there.

The way we – the rich world – organise the world trading system today traps Adelina. But it just broke. This week, in Switzerland, the poor countries of the world refused to play along with the Doha trade negotiations. The mass movement of ordinary people demanding our governments Make Poverty History that rose up in 2005 needs urgently to reconvene.

To help Adelina, we need to start with a basic question: how do poor countries turn into rich countries? The institutions that dominate world trade – especially the World Trade Organisation (WTO) – have a simple answer: all markets, all the time. They tell poor countries to abolish all subsidies, protections and tariffs that protect their own goods. If you fling yourself naked at the global market, you will rise. If the poor countries disagree, they are cajoled to do as we say.

There's just one problem: every rich country got rich by ignoring the advice we now so aggressively offer. If we had listened to it, Britain would still be an agrarian economy manufacturing raw wool, and the US would be primarily farming cotton.

Look at the most startling eradication of poverty in the 20th century: South Korea. In 1963, the average South Korean earned just $179 a year, less than half the income of a Ghanaian. Its main export was wigs made of human hair, and Samsung was a fishmonger's. Today, it is one of the richest countries on earth. The country has been transformed from Senegal to Spain in one human lifetime. How?

South Korea did everything we were pressing the poor at Doha not to do. Dr Ha-Joon Chang, a South Korean economist at Cambridge University, explains in his book Bad Samaritans: "The Korean state nurtured certain new industries selected by the government through tariff protection, subsidies and other forms of government support, until they 'grew up' enough to withstand international competition." They owned all the banks; they controlled foreign investment tightly. The state controlled and guided the economy to the international marketplace.

But we are so pickled in market fundamentalist ideology that we have blotted out this history – and even our own. Until the Tudors, Britain was a backward rural country dependent on exporting raw wool. Turning that wool profitably into clothes happened elsewhere. Henry VII wanted Britain to catch up – so he set up manufacturing bases, and banned the export of wool, so clothes were manufactured here. It's called protectionism. His successors kept it up: by 1820, our average tariff rate was 50 per cent. Within a century, protected British industries had spurted ahead of their European competitors – so the walls could finally be dismantled. Dr Chang explains: "Trade liberalisation has been the outcome of economic development – not its cause."

The US did the same. By 1820, the average tariff was 40 per cent; Abraham Lincoln then pushed them higher, and they stayed there until the First World War. Yet if Lincoln had been at the Doha trade talks, the United States of 2008 would have described him as a "fool" who was "harming his own people" with "despicable policies".

Before you make your child work, you give him an education and skills and abilities. Before a country pushes its infant industries on to the world market, it needs to do just that. Nokia, Samsung and Toyota all had to be cushioned with subsidies and tariffs for decades before they made a cent. Every one of these companies would have been stampeded to death on the open market as a toddler otherwise.

Yet the reaction to the poor world's rejection of Doha in our media has been mostly bemusement. Why have these simple-minded povvos declined our medicine? Are they mad? Amy Barry of Oxfam provides a quiet counter-balance, pointing out that if the agreement on the table at Doha had gone through, Brazil alone would have lost 1.2 million jobs, and "most poor countries would have deindustrialised, or never industrialised at all".

From the rubble of Doha, a new world trade system needs to be built – on the principle of fair trade, not free trade. If we really want to end extreme poverty, then we need to open up the markets of rich countries, while allowing poor countries to protect and subsidise theirs. It is the recipe that ensured you, today, are not hungry and tilling the fields.

But the WTO can only ever achieve half of that goal, at best. It is built on the market vision that there should be no trade barriers or "distortions" anywhere. That means opening up rich markets, which is great. But for each step in that direction, they demand a symmetrical concession from the poor. It is like telling Bill Gates and Adelina they both have to make sacrifices – and Gates won't shift until she does.

Here in the EU and US, there are hefty forces determined to smother fair trade in its cot. The current system works well for corporations, who get to wrench open poor economies without any risk of local competitors rising up. It works well for some slivers of workers here too, who thrive on rich-world subsidies. These forces are regrouping, but their system is lying in a crunched-up heap by the side of the road.

Our governments will always find a way to put these powerful sectional interests first – unless we, the people, make them do otherwise. Today, Adelina needs Make Poverty History to rise again to demand fair trade, not on a few fancy supermarket shelves, but as the principle governing world trade. Let the poor do what we did. Let them rise. Otherwise, those rivers of rubbish will be home to generation after generation of Adelinas the world over, and the stench will never clear.

You can comment on this article, and read the comments of others, here.

POSTSCRIPT: In all the reports about the collapse of the Doha trade round, there has been a lie. A big, fat, propagandistic lie. It has been claimed that the US offered to cut its agricultural subsidies by 70 percent, and the EU by 80 percent. This makes it sound all the more shocking that the poor world rejected the package on offer, in a process I describe in my column today. The catch? They didn’t offer these cuts. At all.

Let’s start by looking at why cutting agricultural subsidies in the rich world is so important. At the moment, the EU and US spend more than $16bn a year on propping up our farmers. The poor world can barely afford to spend anything on theirs, and when they try, they are hectored and bullied by the World Trade Organisation to stop this “trade distortion”. So when African farmers compete with European and American farmers on the international market, they start $14bn behind.

Here’s what it means on the ground. If you are a farmer in Malawi and you take your chicken to market to sell, you are competing against European and American chickens that are being sold way below the market price. You can never catch up. African business dies there, at the moment of birth. The people who most need help get a kick in the gut instead.

So if the US and EU really were cutting most of their agricultural subsidies, it would be a great advance for humanity. Millions of Africans who will live hungry and die young today suddenly would have a chance at a decent life.

But the US and EU were not doing this. They were not offering to cut the actual levels of subsidy they pay. No – they were offering to cut the theoretical maximum they could pay – a massive figure that has been plucked from the air.

This trick becomes clear if you look at the figures. The US currently spends $7bn a year on farm subsidies. When they offer a 70 percent cut, it sounds to the ordinary public like they are saying they will bring this down to $2.1bn – right? But that isn’t the case at all. In fact, they have created a bizarre fictitious number – the maximum amount they could subsidize their farmers at every year, which they have declared is $48bn. They are offering to cut that number – which they don’t pay – by 70 percent. It is a fantasy-cut, slicing away money that is not spent.

Even after this fantasy cut, the US would still be able to subsidize its farmers by $14.5bn. So instead of a cut of 70 percent, the US were leaving open the possibility of a doubling of their real-world subsidies. The news reports of a “generous offer” were an outrageous lie – as shameful as the buying of US propaganda on Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq.

The European Union was more subtle, but just as shameful. They simply reclassified many of their farm subsidies – and claimed they had made cuts. Farming activity that used to be labelled as trade-distorting was suddenly relabelled as non-trade distorting. So instead of paying a farmer to grow wheat, the EU will now pay him to tend his fields – even though the fields are still growing wheat, and still shipping them out to poor countries where they bankrupt African farmers. The EU’s “cuts” were overwhelmingly in labelling, not in reality.

In return for this Enron-accounting, the poor world was supposed to crowbar open its markets and allow its indigenous businesses to shrivel. And we are surprised they walked away in disgust? Enough with the pompous lectures about the “irresponsibility” of the Africans and Indians and Chinese. At these trade talks, it is our own governments’ irresponsibility we should scorn.

You can read the comments on this postscript, and leave your own, here.

The sound of scenery collapsing and actors staggering off the stage on Wall Street and in the City of London is echoing all over the world. The reporting of these events is mostly couched here in the anodyne language of economic cycles – there is “market turbulence” and “a down-turn on the way.” This makes us think of it all as the economic equivalent of the tsunami – one of those horrible things that erupts every now and then, beyond our control. But this is a lie.

The financial crises of the past year, culminating in the de-clawing of the Bear Stearns bear-pit over the past week, are the direct result of pursuing an ideology to its logical end-point. This financial bubble could only take place because we have been living in an ideological bubble – one of market fundamentalism.

From the trauma of the Great Depression to 1973, there was a broad consensus across the democratic world that markets were absolutely essential to generate wealth, but they will also cause all sorts of problems if they are left unregulated. Economics like J.M. Keynes and J.K. Galbraith taught us that if you abolish markets, you get starvation; but if you abolish all the democratic checks and balances on markets, you get a system that eats itself. Unregulated businesses will cause unsustainable levels of pollution and inequality, and ultimately start pursuing unhinged business models that cause the whole system to collapse.

But since the 1970s, we have been lectured that these ideas are stale left-overs. Markets work best when all the fetters on them – a democratic state, and democratic trade unions – shrivel like fruit in the sun. Whatever the problem, the solution is to release businesses from all check and balances.

So we tried it. We now have a global business system that is virtually unregulated, with trade unions crippled and politicians largely bought by the super-rich to serve their interests. And what is the result? Inequality has returned to 1920s levels, and movement between the classes has collapsed. We have bank runs unseen in a century. And now even senior Wall Street figures mutter – with only a hint of hyperbole – about a looming Depression and “the worst crisis since 1929.” All we need now is rising unemployment and Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald boozily waltzing through Wall Street, and we are back where this story began.

The sub-prime mortgage crisis that started the stock market tremors was entirely and exclusively the child of the deregulation mania. Until the Bush era, banks were forbidden by the state from offering unpayably vast mortgages to the poorest people in America. It was plain such a system would be unfair to consumers, and introduced a wild instability into the financial system. But – hey! – state regulation is always a problem, and market freedom is always the solution – right?

Now the deregulated market has begun to collapse in on itself, the state has had to step back in with a far heavier hand than before, throwing tens of billions at failed banks.

So as we enter a recession – or worse – caused by market fundamentalism, how will our politics change? The world economy now needs an era of re-regulation akin to Franklin Roosevelt’s, which regulated the banks, legalized trade unions and made taxation progressive. This will be harder to do because the economy is now globalized. But with political will, it can be done.

Yet this is not necessarily what will happen. The super-rich speak louder than the rest of us – politicians are dependent on their party donations, for one – and are determined to defend their privileges. As an economy contracts, stress-lines open up in a society – and by looking at British politics today, we can see the conflicting directions these fractures could run in.

When the funds for public services dry up, the right instinctively looks downward for places to save cash. The Tories are pledging a crackdown on disability-benefit recipients, and the abolition of services for the poor like SureStart centres and Educational Maintenance Allowances. Refugees are rarely far behind: remember, David Cameron wrote the last Tory manifesto, which committed to end the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees founded in the wake of the Holocaust.

But there is another place for our anger to be directed. Buried in the many dense footnotes to the budget last week, there was an extraordinary figure. The Treasury has calculated that the super-rich are using avoidance and evasion techniques to wriggle out of paying £41bn in taxes to the British Exchequer every year. To put this in context: if every single disability benefit claimant and every single refugee was a fraud, they would still be ripping us off for less than the super-rich.

If the super-rich paid their taxes as the rest of us are required to, we could increase every pension by nearly 50 percent, or treble spending on primary schools. (You can read some of my suggestions for how to make them do this on our blog.) We are always hearing about the tiny number of dishonest disability and refugee claimants, but hardly anything about this far larger scandal.

As funds for public services dry up in a recession, our politicians can go after the weak people at the bottom, or they can require the strong people at the top – who caused this crisis with their demands for deregulation – to start paying their fair share. Imagine an election poster bearing the faces of the ten richest men in Britain, asking: you pay your taxes, why shouldn’t they? Some European governments are already making this choice: Germany and Italy are engaged in huge programmes of loop-hole closing and prosecutions.

Of course, the cheerleaders for deregulation who unrepentantly led us into this mess announce that requiring the rich to pay their fair share will only drive away investment and send productivity plummeting. An intelligent writer once answered this point, writing: “The Chancellor has been generous in the deployment of new and lucrative tax shelters for the very rich. The theory is that capital will flourish, that industry and innovation will thereby profit and enterprise will be justly rewarded. The realities are more mundane and more squalid. The rewards are for ingenuity in tax avoidance only. The only beneficiaries are the very rich, who show no sign of becoming more productive – only richer.”

The writer’s name was the Labour MP Gordon Brown, in 1987. Perhaps somebody could show it to the current Prime Minister, who had to be jostled into charging the likes of Mohammed Al-Fayed a pittance of £30,000 a year. (Cameron would be even worse: his political career has been bankrolled by a man based in the tax haven of Belize, and his ‘competitiveness’ spokesman John Redwood has actually suggested copying the US deregulation of mortgages here.) In the US, both Hillary and Obama are similarly cautious, looking over their shoulders nervously to their big-money donors.

The 1920s nostalgia of the market fundamentalists has brought us to this crisis, where we could be facing our own 1930s. This should shift global politics dramatically to the left – but not if our politicians’ responses are as sub-prime as our mortgages.

POSTSCRIPT:

So what do we do about the fact the super-rich are scamming the British tax system for £41bn a year? There is a kind of pessimism about our ability to stop the rich unilaterally exempting themselves from the tax system. Even where governments don’t give them tax cuts, they often simply claim them anyway by refusing to pay. For example, the average tax rate paid by the top 700 corporations in the UK fell by more than 0.5 percent a year every year from 1999 to 2006 – even though the rate approved by parliament remained constant at 30 percent.

The super-rich live in our societies, dependent on the same police and army and emergency rooms – but they increasingly refuse to pay the membership fees. Indeed, they demand we show “gratitude” just for them gracing us with their presence. The BBC’s budget coverage was littered with ultra-wealthy non-doms complaining about the “persecution” of the government asking them to make a tiny contribution to the society in which they live.

A superb recent report by the tax specialist Richard Murphy for the British TUC – ‘The Missing Billions’ [http://www.tuc.org.uk/economy/tuc-14238-f0.cfm] – details a rich range of options to make it much harder for these people to scam us.

The most simple is to introduce into British law something called a general anti-avoidance principle. It is simply stated that if any step is added into a commercial arrangement for the sole or main purpose of avoiding tax, then this step will be ignored by HM Revenue and Customs. They will tax it anyway. So if you transfer you earnings into your wife or child’s name just to scam us; if you relocate your business on paper just to scam us; if you enter into contorted paper-shuffling just to scam us; we’ll ignore it.

This is not a magic bullet – but it changes the terms of the debate. Instead of the Inland Revenue chasing retrospectively to close loopholes, accountants have to justify them as being more than mere tax avoidance every time. Great swathes of tricks disappear overnight, and the spirit of the system changes.

The next move is to stop the perverse staff cuts at HM Revenue and Customs. By 2011, three hundred tax offices will have been shuttered, and 25,000 staff laid off. This is a totally false economy: each staff member brings in £2,636,588 a year – more than 96.5 times their wages. But if there’s nobody to track down the tax avoiders, we can’t net the cash.

And we can crack down on tax havens. The German government is now using its equivalent of MI5 to track people dodgily shifting their cash to Liechtenstein. Britain needs to be as proactive. We were constantly being told that it was impossible to restrain tax havens, because the money would simply leech to another haven, then another; there would always be somebody prepared to snub the world and reap the rewards. But after September 11th the US demanded every al Qaeda-related bank account be closed – and it happened overnight. If money stashed away to kill people can be tracked, why not money that could save lives too?

The Tax Justice Network has calculated there is enough tax money hoarded in the world’s tax havens – equivalent to $255bn a year – to provide everyone in the world with free primary education and clean water. An international campaign to end this corrupt system is in the interests of the 99.9 percent of humanity who will never use a tax haven.

This isn’t about persecuting the super-rich; it’s about requiring them to pay their fair share for the privilege of living and working in a stable democratic society. I pay my taxes; you pay yours. It is time for the people who can most afford it to do the same.

You can comment on this article, and read the comments of others, here.

You can e-mail me at j.hari -at- independent.co.uk

Ah, Christmas time, mistletoe and wine… As we begin to drink ourselves into a gleeful Yuletide coma, our minds whiz through an array of reassuring festive customs – cheese-soaked Cliff Richard lyrics, mince pies (why? why?), and giving to charity. Some 40 percent of our charitable giving takes place in the month when the snow should fall and the turkeys should die. This week alone, millions of people will give money to help the poorest people alive – and from the barrios of Latin America to the mud-towns of sub-Saharan Africa, I’ve seen how this cash keeps people alive.

But as we give money to help the world’s poor onto their feet, this month the European Union – acting on demands from the World Trade Organisation (WTO) – is kicking millions of them back to the ground. We are in the middle of a trade negotiation that is undoing our charity and setting great swathes of Africa up to fail.

The story of how this came to pass begins fifty years ago, as the European colonial powers were being forced to leave the African colonies they had pillaged and decimated. In a parting spasm of guilt, we Europeans gave our ex-colonies a handful of special trade deals. We agreed, for example, to let Kenya sell us its green beans without charging any tariffs or taxes. Over time, these niches collectively became some of the most thriving parts of Africa’s economy, employing hundreds of millions of people. These special deals continued uncontested until the year 2000 – when the WTO demanded they be axed forever, by the deadline of the 1st January 2008.

Why? The WTO was following a tightly-prescribed and blinkered ideology. Since the 1980s, it has enforced the market fundamentalist belief that all tariffs, all subsidies and all protections for poor countries are “market distortions” that need to be abolished. Never mind that every rich country protected its own industries while they were taking their baby-steps. Never mind that the electorates in poor countries democratically oppose this premature crow-barring open of their economies. The WTO – backed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund – demands they must go, for all but the impossibly weak.

The practical effects of forcing this ideology down the throats of poor countries has been plain for decades now. It kills. Look at Malawi’s recent experience. The country’s soil has been depleted and corroded by desperate overuse, so the government adopted a sensible policy of subsidising fertilizer. The country’s desperately poor farmers were given sacks of fertilizer at a third of the real cost, because without it they couldn’t get their plants couldn’t grow. Then the market fundamentalists of the World Bank arrived, and announced this was a “market distortion” that had to stop if Malawi wanted to continue receiving loans and aid. So the subsidies were ended – and the crops began to fail in feeble soil, en masse, year after year. The country descended into famine. Mothers watched their children starve.

Then, two years ago, the Malawian government finally had enough. They told the World Bank and IMF and WTO to stick their conditions and their loans, and began to subsidize fertilizer once again. The result? Malawi is now the single biggest seller of corn to the World Food Programme in southern Africa, and so successful it is actually giving hundreds of thousands of tons of corn to Zimbabwe. The nightmare of famine has been replaced by an embarrassment of plenty, showing once again that mixed social democratic economies work best.

We all know (rightly) about the famines caused by Communism – Stalin’s starvation of Ukraine, Mao’s thirty million murdered by collectivisation, and Mengitsu’s Ethiopian sequel to them both. But who knows about these, the famines of market fundamentalism?

And yet this month, the WTO has forced the EU to ram this failed ideology further into Africa. For hardline free traders, there is no difference between the poor world protecting its feeble industries and the rich world protecting its fattened lobbies. They demand there has to be parity between the two – as if they are competing as equals. So they have ruled that if the African countries are to be allowed to retain their protected access to European markets, they have to give something equally precious in return: they have to “liberalise” their economies by a whopping 80 percent, allowing EU goods in untariffed and untaxed. Only the very poorest are exempt.

This leaves African countries with a vicious dilemma. If (say) Kenya wants to save its green beans and flower-growing industries – whose protected export to Europe employs millions – it has to now allow European industrial goods to flood into their country in return. This will crush any attempt to develop an industrial base of its own, because there is no way fledgling Kenyan companies can compete with the swish products churned out cheap by Europe. This isn’t even a Hobson’s choice, it’s Sophie’s choice – which of your children do you condemn to economic death? The farmers, or the industrial workers?

As if that was not harsh enough, the victim-countries are also being forced to rapidly abolish their tariffs on incoming European goods. For Ghana and Cape Verde, this is 20 percent of their income – more than their entire health budget.

A few African countries are independent enough of Europe to resist. Nigeria has oil, so they can say no. South Africa has enough trade with other developed parts of the world to hold out. But most African countries have been forced – with the gun of being locked out of European markets after the January 1st deadline at their heads – to give in and sign. Tetteh Hormeku, one of Africa’s most distinguished trade campaigners, says: “The EU is a bandit in international negotiations. It is no different to the Americans. The Americans say, ‘Give me your beer, or I’ll shoot you.’ The Europeans say, ‘Give me your beer, it is for your own good.’”

The result will be more poverty and more hunger – and you will end up guiltily sending some cash to the victims in Christmases to come. But it makes no sense to give to charity this way and yet not campaign against the acts of economic mutilation by our own governments that make that charity necessary.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t give to charity – you absolutely should – but it’s not enough. We need a global movement, building on Make Poverty History, to replace this WTO-led market fundamentalism of free trade. The alternative is fair trade: an end to subsidies and tariff walls protecting the rich, but a careful extension of them to the poor, where their governments ask for it. Now that would make for a very merry Christmas present – instead of the stinking package Europe has left under Africa’s bare and battered tree.

You can read my other articles about global market fundamentalism here.

The pictures of a small, smiling Madeleine McCann that are plastered across Britain and Portugal today never fail to do it. They always give me a slap-in-the-face flashback to a place where it is not an exception to have your child stolen away to abuse you can't stop imagining. No - it is an everyday event.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, more than 70,000 children have been seized at gunpoint by militias in the past six years. Each one of those children is as terrified as Madeleine, and each one of their parents is as wrought and desperate as the McCanns.

As I travelled through the trashed Congolese warzones last year, in every shell-village there was a slew of grief-wrecked mothers. One, a lined, stooped 29 year-old called Marie-Jean, told me simply: "The Mai-Mai [one of the miltias] came and stole my babies last year. They raided our village and shot my husband and took my kids away at gunpoint. Two boys and a little girl. The oldest is eleven, the youngest is seven... We hear stories about what happens. The boys will be soldiers now. The girl..."

She couldn't finish the sentence. She knew that the girls are taken as "wives" by the militiamen and repeatedly raped. If they try to escape they are whipped, often to death.

These kidnapping militiamen are, in effect, working for us. The war in Congo - the deadliest since Hitler marched across Europe, claiming four million lives in the past six years - has been a war for the resources that make our technological society zing and bling.

These miltia are pillaging Congo's gold and diamonds and coltan - the metal in your mobile, your laptop, your remote control - and selling them on to us in the rich world. It is why they fight. The UN calls them "armies of business". The war still stutters on in the East, killing 1200 people every day.

Some people are getting sniffy about the reaction to Madeleine's kidnapping, seeing it as a Dianafied act of mass hysteria. I don't agree. We should never be snobbish about spontaneous shows of solidarity with suffering strangers; they are what keep us human. But we should try to spread that solidarity ever-wider, to other mothers pining for their stolen babies across the world.

There isn't, alas, much we can do to help the McCanns now. Yet if every person who has lit a candle for Madeleine gives just £5 to Warchild and joins the campaign to save the Congo, we can help thousands of Congolese parents like the McCanns.

In Bukavu, a wrecked mud-city, I tried to find out what was happening to the snatched Madeleines who were lucky enough to escape the hands of the militias. Some had been "demobilised" as part of the official peace process where the various militias are being slowly smelted into one large national army. Some had run away, escaping the whip.

Most end up as street-children, robbing and sleeping in the dirt. I visited the "lucky" ones, who make it into an orphanage, even though most have living parents they couldn't reach. It was a string of three large crumbling white buildings, with emaciated kids tumbling and dashing about, screaming merrily.

After being shown around, I asked what the last building - which they steered me away from - was for. "That's the morgue," my guide said. "We send about three children a week there." Their parents never find out their kids survived, for a while.

Then I went to meet the children who were genuinely lucky - or as lucky as you get in these circumstances. They had made it into the centres for child soldiers set up by Warchild, a brilliant Dutch charity dedicated to rehabilitating child soldiers.

There I learned what happened to them after they were kidnapped. A fifteen year old boy called Kolonzo talked blankly about "taking out" a village full of civilians on his thirteenth birthday. The militia had given him drugs and trained him up to rape and kill.

But he still dreamed about his family through it all, and he has a heroic story about how all this fighting has been for their sake. "My mother was kidnapped by the Mai-Mai," he says, "so I went and joined the Mai-Mai forces, even though I hated them, so I could find her and save her and we could go back to living in our village with my sisters."

When Kolonzo leaves the room - to go back to kicking around a ball with his mates like any teenager anywhere - the orphanage director tells me, "It is not true. All the boys invent stories like this, because they are ashamed to have been kidnapped and brainwashed. The stories are a way of keeping some kind of connection with their family."

The orphanage is tracing Kolonzo's mother - not easy in a country where millions have been scattered and displaced by war. They will keep on trying to make his dream of return finally come true. Every week, children leave here to return to their parents at last.

For some of the kids, it's not so simple. In order to stop the child-warriors from escaping and running back home, several militias adopted a new tactic. As they captured a child, they would force him to murder a relative - usually their father or mother - so the family would never accept him back.

I watch the scrambling, gangly kids playing football and wondered which ones had been forced to murder their mums.

Since we caused this war through our unhindered greed, we have a responsibility to put it right. The first step is to give money so we can finally reunite these children with their parents. The best charities doing this are the Red Cross and Warchild.

But we also have a responsibility to bring the businesses who fuelled and funded the Congolese war to justice. The UN advised national governments to investigate some of the biggest names in British and American finance for their role, including Barclay's and Anglo-American. Yet the ivestigation was derisory.

The companies named by UN should be investigated now, and any guilty CEOs should be tried in the Hague for Crimes Against Humanity. It will take a lot of public pressure to change our governments' priorities so drastically - especially since they are engage in resource-looting of their own in Iraq - but if enough of us demand it, it can be done.

We comfort ourselves by imagining that while the McCanns are People Like Us, women like Marie-Jean are somehow different, hardened by the horror of the rest of their lives. But when you look into their eyes, you see that Kolonzo and the stolen children of Congo mean just as much as Madeleine.

POSTSCRIPT: You can read my reporting from Congo here.

While the world's press has been fixated on the teeny-weeny scandal over whether World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz helped to get his girlfriend a $300,000-a-year gig next door, they have been ignoring the rancid stench of a far bigger scandal wafting from Wolfie's Washington offices.

This slow-mo scandal isn't about apparent petty corruption in DC. It's about how

Let's start with the victims. Meet Hawa Amadu, a seventy-something living in the muddy slums of Accra, the capital of Ghana, and trying to raise her grandkids as best she can.

Hawa has a problem - a massive problem - and the World Bank put it there. She can't afford water or electricity any more. Why? The World Bank threatened to refuse to lend any more money to her government, which would effectively make it a leper to governmental donors and international business, unless they stopped subsidizing the cost of these necessities.

The subsidies stopped. The cost doubled. Now Hawa goes thirsty so her grandchildren can drink, and weeps, "Am I supposed to drink air?"

She is not alone. Half a world away, in Bolivia, Maxima Cari - a mother - is also thirsty. "The World Bank took away my right to clean water," she explains. In 1997 the World Bank demanded the Bolivian government privatise the country's water supply. So Maxima couldn't afford it any more. Now she has to use dirty water from a well her villagers dug themselves. This dirty water is making her children sick, and she is sullen.

"I wash my children weekly," Maxima says. "Sometimes there's only enough water to wash their hands and faces, not their whole body.... This is not a nice way to live." The newly elected socialist government of Evo Morales is planning to take the water back - and he is, of course, condemned and threatened by the World Bank.

Meet some more victims. I have met hundreds, from Africa to Latin America to the Middle East. Muracin Claircin is a rice farmer in Haiti - only he can't grow rice any more. In 1995, the World Bank demanded Haiti drop all restrictions on imports. The country was immediately flooded with rice from the US, which has been lavishly subsidised by the American government. The Haitian government barely exists and can't offer rival subsidies anyway: the World Bank forbids it. So now Muracin is jobless and his family are starving.

Some 5000 miles away, Charles Avaala in Ghana is watching his tomatoes rot. He used to grow them for a government-owned community tomato cannery that provided employment for his entire community. The World Bank ordered his government to close it down, and to tear open the country's markets to international competition. Now he can't compete with the subsidy-fattened tomatoes from Europe. He, too, is starving.

How would Hawa and Maxima and Muracin and Charles feel if you told them that none of this is considered a scandal, but business as usual?

These victims are not merely an anecdote soup; they are an accurate summary of the World Bank's effect on the poor. Don't take my word for it. The World Bank's own Independent Evaluation Group just found that barely one in ten of their borrowers experienced persistent growth between 1995 and 2005 - a much smaller proportion than those who stagnated or slid deeper into poverty. The Bank's own former chief economist, Nobel-prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, says this approach "has condemned people to death... They don't care if people live or die."

Why? Why would a body that claims to help the poor actually thrash them? Because its mission to end poverty has always been mythical. As George Monbiot explains in his book 'The Age of Consent', the World Bank was created in the 1940s by US economist Henry Dexter White to be a further projection of US power. The bank's head is invariably American, the bank is based in Washington, and the US has a permenant veto on policies. They do not promote a sensible mix of markets and state action - the real path to development. No: the World Bank pursues the interests of US corporations over the poor, every time.

The Bank's staff salve their consciences by pickling themselves in an ideology - neoliberalism - that says there is never a conflict between business rights and human rights. If it's good for Shell, it must be good for poor people - right?

This ideology also backfires on us in the rich world. In 2000, the World Bank was finally forced to undertake a review of its energy policies. It did its best to rig it, putting the former energy minister of the corporation-licking Indonesian dictator General Suharto. Emil Salim was even serving on the board of a coal company at the time he was appointed.

But - to everyone's astonishment - Salim concluded by opposing the carbon-pumping oil and gas projects that make up 94 percent of all the Bank's energy projects. He said they should be stopped altogether by 2008.

The Bank's response? It ignored its own report and carried on warming. The business climate, it seems, trumps the actual climate. Feel the heat.

While the elites huff and puff about Wolfowitz's alleged small corruptions and ignore his organization's proven immense corruptions, there is something we - ordinary citizens - can do. In the summer of 2001, at the global justice protests in Genoa, I met with Dennis Brutus, a former inmate of Robben Island Prison alongside Nelson Mandela. He had been repelled by the Bank's actions in South Africa, and started his protests against them by asking a very basic question: who owns the World Bank?

It turns out we do. Ordinary people in the west - through their trade unions, churches, town councils, universities and private investments - own it. The bank raises nearly all its funds by issuing bonds on the private market. They are often held by socially minded institutions, the kind who signed up to Make Poverty History.

So, Brutus realised, we have a simple power: to sell the bonds and bankrupt the World Bank. "We need to break the power of the World Bank over developing countries just as the disinvestment movement helped break the power of the apartheid regime in South Africa," he explained.

The campaign to make World Bank bonds as untouchable as aparthied-era investments has already begun. The cities of San Francisco, Boulder, Oakland and Berkeley have sold theirs. Several US unions have also joined. Even this small ripple has caused anxiety within the bank about the threat to its "AAA" bond rating.

In the Genoa sun, as tear gas fired by the Italian police hissed in the background, Brutus told me, "I lived to see the death of political apartheid. Now I want to live to see the end of global financial apartheid."

This is the fight we should join - not some petty squabble over which Washington technocrat is morally pure enough to lead the forces of subsidy-slashing and starvation.

POSTSCRIPT: You can send letters about this article for publication in the Independent to letters@independent.co.uk or just to me to johann -at- johannhari.com

You can read more articles I've written about the World Bank, IMF and global justice issues here.

This week, in one of the glittering courthouses of the New India, a judge will continue to weigh a case that, at first glance, looks dry and technical, but is in fact wet with blood. The verdict will determine whether millions of human beings - from the tip of South America to the top of Africa - live or die.

India today is the developing world's branch of Boots, the place where the poorest people on earth get their medicines. This is because it is, along with Brazil, the only country willing to manufacture cheap copies of corporate-owned drug treatments for cancer, AIDS and other killers, and big enough to do it. Their policy has brought the cost of treating a woman with AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa crashing down from an impossible $10,000 a year in 2000 to a still-tough-but-possible $130 a year today. They can only save so much money - and so many lives - because the Indian government insist they will only pay money to the multi-billion-dollar corporations who own the drug patents if they can show they have really created something genuinely new. Most of the time, they can't - so the Indians sell them to the poor at cost-price.

The court case currently wending through the Indian justice system, launched by the Swiss phramaceutical company Novartis, is an attempt to close down the poor's world pharmacy. Novartis have created a very slightly different version of their leukemia drug Gleevec, and they are trying to force the Indian government to allow them to patent it. The Indian government says the drug isn't really new. It's just a tweak, enabling Novartis to keep the patent "evergreen", continue raking in the profits, and stop the Indians from making a cheap copy at less than a tenth of the price.

If Novartis succeed, the developing world will hit a Pharmageddon, with drug supplies drying up to dying people. AIDS drugs will be particularly vulnerable to this "evergreen" patenting, since they have to be regularly tweaked to deal with an evolving virus. The panicking aid agency Medicin Sans Frontiers (MSF) - who treat 80,000 people in Africa with cheap Indian generics - warn it could mean "the end of affordable medicines in developing countries." In sub-Sharan Africa last year, I held a little lesion-covered six year old girl who lived in an orphanage with two buildings: one for the kids to live in, and the other a morgue. In a typical week, three children move from the first building to the second. This case would put a concrete wall between those kids and the current slow progress in rolling out AIDS treatments.

Of course, Novartis and the other druggernauts say simply: if you don't respect our patents, we can't invent more drugs to save more lives. We are only launching this case out of humanitarian concern. There are several flaws with this. In reality, the pharmaceutical companies don't actually do the vast majority of the research heavy-lifting. As Professor Carlos Maria Correa, the Director of the Centre of Interdisciplinary Studies of Industrial and Economic Law, explains: "In most cases, the discovery of important new drugs is made by public institutions, which later license their development and exploitation to private firms. Basic research that lead to the discovery of 'drug leads' has almost always been publicly funded at universities, in-house government facilities, or research institutes."

This life-saving research will continue whatever happens to Big Pharma's attempted profit-sucking from the developing world. The billions of pounds of profit pharmaceutical companies can make here, in the rich world, is more than enough incentive for the extra (and worthwhile) development work they do on top. Some defenders of the pharmaceutical companies call India's actions "theft". But you don't respect property rights in an imminent public emergency. During the Second World War, the government requistitioned great swathes of public property. In the AIDS crisis, in countries that are facing the death of a whole generation of people, isn't it legitimate to requisition a life-saving idea?

Watching passively while Novartis attacks the poor would be repulsive. Twenty years ago this week, a group was formed to show what we can do to stop them. The American gay activist Larry Kramer founded ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power) with the motto "Silence Equals Death". His supporters lay down at the intersection of Wall Street and Broadway, holding up cardboard tombstones. They threw the ashes of their loved ones onto the lawn of the indifferent Reaganite White House. They raided the New York Stock Exchnage to shame pharmaceutical companies failing to act. Today, Kramer says: "There are treatments that can be made available [to the poor] for a pittance, and for the pharmaceutical companies to stop that out of greed is just evil."

We should be following his example. The ashes of African AIDS victims should be thrown onto the Novartis corporate headquarters' lawn. Pensions funds should be lobbied to disinvest. This kind of pressure works: Novartis was one of the 39 companies trying to force South Africa to limit drugs to the poor, until a mass campaign forced them to quit the case in 2001. In the long-term, focusing on one corporation isn't enough: we need to force our governments to change the over-arching international structure - the World Trade Organisation - that coerces poor countries to obey the will of Big Pharma rather than their own dying citizens. Countries like Britain and the US didn't respect international patents until the early twentieth century, when we were far wealthier than Africa today.

But we still have four weeks to force Novartis to pull out of the legal action before the verdict . Go to http://www.msf.org/petition_india/international.html to sign the petition. There is a month - just a month - to save millions of lives.

After the landslide victory comes the landslide of lies. Last week, Hugo Chavez was re-elected as President of Venezuela with 63 percent of the vote – in an election declared "totally free and fair" by the international legal monitors, in a country where almost all of the media militantly opposes him.

I know the reason why. Her name is Maria Gonzalez. She is a lined, stooped 60 year-old grandmother I stumbled across last year in Barrio Neuva Tacagua, a fetid slum made of tin and mud in the high hills around Caracas. Maria grew up in a Venezuela that was dripping in oil wealth – but she never went to school and she never saw a doctor, because the country's petro-profits surged only into the bank accounts of the country's twenty-five richest families. Like the vast majority of Venezuelans, she was left to live and die in makeshift rust-and-cardboard shacks.

The day I met her, Maria wrote her name – in shaky handwriting, on a blackboard – for the first time in her life. Since Hugo Chavez was first elected, in another free and open election in 1998, Maria's world had begun to change. The new President stopped the country's oil wealth being used to enrich a tiny oligarchy. Instead, he used it for something radical: to build clinics where Maria could be treated free of charge, to subsidise food prices for the 70 percent of Venezuelans who live like her in grinding, binding poverty, and to establish mass literacy programmes to teach his country – and a million Marias – how to read.

But somehow, somewhere inbetween Maria's Venezuela and the newspapers and TV screens of the US and Britain, Chavez undergoes a strange transformation. He ceases to be the most popular leader in the democratic world, and instead morphs into "a grotesque dictator", "a madman", "like Hitler, Stalin or Mao." Why is that? I know of only one persuasive explanation. These people reporting on Chavez are deeply ingrained in a political culture that views the rest of the world as a trough for corporate profit. When a developing-world regime funnels its profits to a handful of rich white men in BP or Haliburton, they instinctively describe it as aiding "regional stability" and "democratic." But when a government uses its resource-riches for people who live in slums, they become suspect and "a threat to stability."

Let's go through the myths and lies about Hugo Chavez one by one to see how this deception occurs:

Lie Number One: Chavez is a dictator. In reality, he has been chosen by the Venezuelan people in elections praised by the Carter Center – the gold standard for election monitoring across the world – as "impressively open." This is hardly – as some critics who have never visited Venezuela jeer – because the people are pickled in Chavista propaganda. Pick up any of Venezuela's seven national newspapers any day, and six of them will blast you with ferocious anti-Chavez invective. Switch on the television, and you will hear the same on all the TV networks except Telesur, the alternative established by Chavez. Sit in any Caracas bar, and you will hear people argue openly and at the top of their voices about the government. I have been to dictatorships – from Saddam Hussein's to Bassar al-Asad's – and they are nothing like this.

Lie Number Two: You can tell what Chavez is really like by looking at his allies. It is true Chavez has allied himself with some repellent dictatorships, praising Fidel Castro and – when I met up with him earlier this year – Robert Mugabe. Similarly, Tony Blair has allied himself with the torturers and murderers Vladimir Putin, the Chinese Communist Party and the House of Saud, and found praise for them all. Does this mean Britain is not a democracy? All democratic governments make unsavoury alliances. I find it disgusting and condemn them both, but it does not reveal the true nature of the government in Caracas any more than in Westminster.

Lie Number Three: Chavez is supressing human rights. The people who make this allegation shriek loudly but offer little evidence. They of course never mention the new hospitals across Venezuela, which have saved tens of thousands of dirt-poor people from (to name just a few I witnessed myself) blindness, paralysis and death.

They sometimes point to the fact the police force in Venezuela is often both corrupt and brutal. This is true, and appalling – but it was the case long before Chavez came to power, and it is the case in almost every Latin American country today. The evidence from Amnesty International shows both supporters of Chavez and his opponents are mistreated by the police in equal measure. I am not making excuses for a second: Chavez should sort it out, and fast. But the problem did not begin with him, and he is not using the corrupt police force for political ends.

Once this is pointed out, the anti-Chavez demonisers try to prop up this lie by claiming there are political prisoners in Venezuela. Here's the reality. In 2002, an anti-democratic junta consisting of oil barons, media bosses and a few disgruntled generals kidnapped Hugo Chavez and announed they were taking over the country. They dissolved parliament and the courts, and announced a military lock-down on the streets, threatening to shoot anybody who came out. The Bush administration jumped in praising the coup with suspicious speed, and there is evidence that – at the very least – they had foreknowledge. (The very same people who claim Chavez is undemocratic almost always support this coup, incidentally). With incredible courage, more than a million democrats descended from the barrios onto the streets around the Miraflores Palace in Caracas, refusing to allow their elected President to be toppled. The soldiers holding Chavez joined the rebellion, and he was returned to power.

The only "political prisoners" in Venezuela – the so-called 200 – are the people who directly planned and participated in this attempt to destroy the country's democracy. If a foreign-funded group had kidnapped Tony Blair, trashed Parliament and the Old Bailey, and placed Britain under military curfew, would we imprison so few of the guilty?

(It's true Chavez's rhetoric can seem extreme. Much as I loathe George Bush, I would not call him "the devil" and say he smells of sulphur, as Chavez does. But George Bush has not supported a group of gangsters who kidnapped and threatened to kill me, while placing my country under lockdown and dictatorship. We should bear this in mind when gauging Chavez's statements about Bush).

Lie Number Four: Chavez's policies are not helping the poor. Some in the Venezuelan opposition claim that women like Maria do not know what is good for them – stupid illiterates! – and are voting against their own interests by choosing Chavez. To support this, they point to the fact Venezuela's economic growth (and the avergae wages of the poor) collapsed after Chavez came to power.

They fail to mention why Venezuela's growth collapsed. In an Ayn Rand wet-dream, the wealthiest twenty percent of Venezuelans reacted to the election of Chavez by staging a massive strike of their own. They locked their factories and refused to let the workers in. The heads of the state oil company – left over from previous regimes – refused to allow the petrol to flow. They smashed and trashed the Venezuelan economy, and then pointed at the damage and shouted, "See what Chavez does!" The Venezuelan people were too smart to fall for this; they stuck with Chavez, and now the strike is over, growth is booming and poverty is plumetting.

Lie Number Five: Chavez is a communist who is determined to nationalise the whole of the country's economy. This is a Rumsfeldian lie that, ironically, is also reinforced by some of Chavez's old left supporters in Britain, like the Trotskyite Tariq Ali or that smirking Stalinist carbuncle George Galloway. In reality, Chavez is a European-style social democrat who believes in an active government that lifts up the poor alongside a vigorous market economy. He calls this "twenty-first century socialism." The tragedy is that in Latin America, under the heel of the IMF and US power, it take a revolutionary to be a social democrat.

The evidence for this is pretty overwhelming. During Chavez's presidency, the proportion of Venezuela's GDP that is in the private sector has actually increased, and the Caracas stock exchange is at an all-time high. Chavez has not nationalised land; instead, he has redistributed it, breaking the vast unused landed estates of the rich into smaller packages for landless peasants. For all his rhetorical praise for Fidel Castro, Chavez's policies are much more like Abraham Lincoln's Homestead Act of 1862, which doled out the land in the West to poor people who wanted to settle there.

While market fundamentalism and communism both dreadfully deflate an economy – look at the history of Latin America for cruelly abundant proof – mixed social democratic states work: Venezuela grew by 12 percent last year. The anti-Chavez critics carp this is due to soaring global petrol prices. How do they explain that in the 1970s when the oil price was – adjusted for inflation – just as high, the old Venezuelan economy hardly grew at all?

No, it's not just the size of your oil money that counts, it's what you do with it. Chavez is using his petro-dollars to carry out the will of the Venezuelan people – to lift them out of their slums. A woman like Maria does not need to be tricked or intimidated into voting for Chavez. She is doing it for a simple reason: he has kept his promises to her. No amount of lies can bury this bright, shimmering reality.

Recently I had a disagreement in print with my friend Nick Cohen about why Hillary Benn is withholding money from the World Bank.

One side - represented by me, all the world's aid agencies, and, rather more importantly, Benn himself - say it is because of the Bank's policy of undemocratically forcing privatisations on poor countries. Nick says it is because Wolfowitz is too tough on corruption and because everyone has an irrational loathing of Wolfowitz that has scrambled their brains.

A blogger writes on this row:

"It occurs to me that there may be more in a Nick Cohen post than previously suspected.
I'll try to keep things straight by concentrating on the part of Nick's paean to Paul Wolfowitz which mentions Hilary Benn because that's where the consequences of Nick's arguments become practical politics.

'In a speech last week, Hilary Benn, the International Development Minister, did much better [than other critics of Wolfowitz] when he acknowledged the problem and tried to find a way out by emphasising good governance.

He opposed Wolfowitz by asking: 'Why should a child be denied education; why should a mother be denied healthcare; or an HIV positive person Aids treatment, just because someone or something in their government is corrupt?' Rather than suspend loans, the World Bank should help build responsive and accountable governments. The trouble for Benn is that regimes that inflict the greatest suffering don’t want to be responsive. For Sudan's genocidal rulers and the kleptomaniacs of Zimbabwe, reform would mean loss of power.

I hope you can see that Wolfowitz agitates so many people because he raises questions that have no easy answers. I’m not fit to provide them. All I can suggest is that it would be a mistake for the French, Oxfam, Christian Aid, Benn and all the rest of them to get into the position where it is 'neoconservative' to oppose corruption.'

It doesn't seem from to me than Hilary Benn fails to oppose or supports corruption. And Johann Hari makes it clear that he thinks Benn is honest:

'This decision has been greeted with some astonishingly dishonest criticisms. My colleague Dominic Lawson and my friend Nick Cohen have responded by serving up a dish of red herrings with a side-order of straw men. They have angrily asked why Hilary Benn and the Bank's critics are so keen to remove the conditionalities which prevent loans going to the corrupt and the dictatorial. There's a simple answer: we aren't. You made it up. We are in favour of removing the conditionalities that force privatisation on the poor. They. Are. Totally. Different. Things.'

Nick has now responded in the Letters page of the Independent. Nick helpfully provides a link to Improving Governance, Fighting Corruption, which he describes as "a long speech by Hilary Benn on the danger that rigorous anti-corruption campaigns will stop at least some aid trickling down to the needy."

Blinks. This doesn't seem to be the point under discussion at all. Hari and Benn want there to be foreign aid (I think Wolfowitz and Cohen do so too, but I'm less sure). What Nick calls "rigourous anti-corruption campaigns" here means no more or less than turning off aid. Benn is against that - but you knew that. Being against aid being turned off, is not the same thing as being against having conditions for aid:

'Walking away from our responsibilities to poor people is not, in my view, the right thing to do. If necessary, we will change the way we give our aid. ...

Corruption is an outcome; it is one of the symptoms of poor governance and can involve the abuse of public office for private gain. It can also take place in the private sector.
Thus any plan to fight corruption in a country must be part of a programme to improve governance. The two go hand in hand. The best check on corruption is to strengthen the governance with which to prevent it from happening, and to fight it when it does.
And that means encouraging demand for good governance by supporting civil society and the media, parliaments and trade unions, and communities so that people’s voices are heard and governments are held to account.'

Benn here seems very keen on conditions. It seems to me that he is, as Nick says in his letter to the Independent, "opposed to the World Bank’s zero tolerance campaign". Nick wants us to believe that Hari denies this when Hari very clearly doesn't. Nick is defending himself against a charge which was not made.

Johann Hari posts another letter to the Indy - this time from James Levine.

"Then Nick Cohen today claims it was "hurtful" for Johann Hari to call him "startlingly dishonest" after Cohen claimed Hillary Benn was with-holding £50m from the World Bank because its new head, Paul Wolfowitz, is "too tough on corruption." Yet Hari was absolutely right. Benn is withholding the money because of the privatisation conditionalities, not corruption. Cohen conspicuously failed to tell his readers about this, and clearly implied that Benn was motivated by anxieties about Wolfowitz’s corruption charges. For Cohen to shed crocodile tears now he has been called on this is a bit much."

Finally, Captain Cabernet noted that "Nick would like us to know that he's met Jeremy Clarkson and hates Piers Morgan". Fans of feuds may want to read Johann's post on Clarkson. I don't watch Top Gear, but my sympathies are closer to Nick's on this. I loathe Morgan and Clarkson is a far better writer than anyone in this dispute."

You can read the whole thing and comment on it at:

http://aaronovitch.blogspot.com/2006/09/tough-on-corruption.html

Which gathering of smart- suited, smart-minded men will lead to the largest amount of death this week? The answer seems obvious. Later today, foreign ministers from the African Union will meet at the United Nations in New York. Their job is to decide whether the two million black people left in Darfur live or die.

For the past year, a paltry 7,000 of the AU's soldiers have been standing between the terrorised, terrified black population of Darfur and the Janjaweed militiamen determined to genocide them from the face of the earth. The AU is scheduled to withdraw even this dismal little army at the end of this month. If the nations of the world do not provide a UN peacekeeping force to replace it, we can expect a string of sequels to Hotel Rwanda.

Yet - amazingly - this meeting has a competitor for the Grim Reaper Award for Meeting Most Likely to Lead to Mass Death. Starting today, the World Bank is holding its week-long annual rendezvous. Some critics have said it was inappropriate for the Bank to meet in Singapore, that shiny city-state whose citizens had better shut up Or Else, that Disneyland with capital punishment. I think it is wholly appropriate, because the World Bank "has condemned people to death ... They don't care if people live or die."

These are not the words of a leftie-liberal. They are the words of Jospeh Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist - and the Bank's own former chief economist.

Across the developing world, there are trashed nations who curse the memory of the World Bank, like victims weeping at the memory of a confidence trickster. Argentina, Russia, Indonesia - all did exactly as the Bank demanded for the entire 1990s. All sold off every last scrap of state-owned services. All slashed taxes and made their citizens pay for schools and hospitals and water up-front, or go without. All worshiped at the feet of market fundamentalism. And all ended up plunged far deeper into poverty. Argentina was reduced by the Bank's dictates from a middle class country whose kids gorged on American fast food to a bankrupt nation whose kids eat from trashcans.

Many people believe the World Bank has ditched its old poor-trashing, structural-adjusting ways. The evidence, alas, suggests otherwise. Christian Aid has conducted a massive study of the Bank's loans under its new head, Paul Wolfowitz, and found the change has been "a grand exercise in spin ... Far from reforming their practices, [they] have found new and more intrusive ways of forcing their agenda on poor countries."

Of course, sometimes privatisation is a good policy, just as sometimes state provision is a good policy. Like everyone else in between Kim Jong Il and Dick Cheney, I believe in a mixed economy where you judge each case on its merits. But the World Bank forces privatisation as the solution to each and every problem, no matter how inappropriate. And this approach kills.

Look at water. We have seen in Britain how privatising this natural monopoly simply leads to massive corporate profits and a deteriorating service. Now imagine this was imposed undemocratically by a foreign power, and the cost was not simply spiralling water bills but outbreaks of cholera and e-coli in a country with barely any doctors.

Across the planet, the World Bank has refused to hand over cash to bitterly poor countries unless they price their water at market rates. Ghana - a country so poor one in 20 children is stillborn - was recently loaned $110m (£59m) by the Bank, on the condition that it doubles the price of water and electricity for ordinary Ghanaians. The desperate government felt it had no choice but to obey.

Women such as Hawa Amadu - a creased, crumpled widow in her seventies interviewed by the World Development Movement - were sent into panic. She already spends almost all her income on water and some days, like many Ghanaian women, went without water so her grandchildren could drink. If water increases in cost, she could die. "Am I supposed to drink air?" she asked.

There are women like Hawa all over the world. In South American barrios, I have seen children drinking from filthy, rusty barrels because the World Bank has priced clean water out of their reach. Following water privatisation, cholera has returned to the continent after a century. The World Bank does not do this because it is evil. It does it because it was set up by the American economist Henry Dexter White in the Forties to ensure "the more money you put in, the more votes you have" and "the US should have enough votes to block any decision". Some 51 per cent is still owned by the US Treasury, and its structures are geared to serve their interests, not the interests of the poor.

The British Government used to support enthusiastically this policy of no-aid-until-you-privatise, including in Ghana. But in 2005 they responded to pressure from Make Poverty History - who says the campaign made no difference? - and decoupled aid from these market fundamentalist conditions. Now the International Development Secretary, Hilary Benn, is trying to force the World Bank to do the same. He has withheld the (too small) sum of £50m from Britain's £1.3bn contribution to the Bank in protest.

This decision has been greeted with some astonishingly dishonest criticisms. My colleague Dominic Lawson and my friend Nick Cohen have responded by serving up a dish of red herrings with a side-order of straw men. They have angrily asked why Hilary Benn and the Bank's critics are so keen to remove the conditionalities which prevent loans going to the corrupt and the dictatorial. There's a simple answer: we aren't. You made it up. We are in favour of removing the conditionalities that force privatisation on the poor. They. Are. Totally. Different. Things. In a further act of obfuscation, they have talked at length about Paul Wolfowitz's personality, as if international finance institutions can be debated at the level of Heat magazine. They tell us all about Wolfowitz's childhood and his personal kindness, as if this is a match for hard statistics about the World Bank's effects. But even on their own terms, it seems strange to hold up as a poster-boy for anti-corruption the man whose job throughout the 1980s was to funnel money on behalf of the US government to Haji Mohammed Suharto, the genocidal dictator of Indonesia. It seems stranger still when you remember he came to the World Bank fresh from an administration blocking all attempts to deal with the biggest threat to our species - global warming - because it is in hock to Big Oil.

The opponents of the World Bank are, in reality, standing against the corruption concentrated this week in Singapore. Does anyone doubt it is corrupt to demand the poorest people in the world pay twice as much to a private monopoly for their buckets of clean water or drink from filthy, contaminated barrels, just so your corporate friends can get richer? Isn't that the greatest and most deadly corruption of all - imposed on the world by the Bank every day of the week?