Washington Style Democratic Economics

Post date: Jan 02, 2011 5:14:58 PM

With Washington-style democracy and proper economic practice restored, the country sank more deeply into political and socioeconomic ruin while attention lapsed in the US. A decade after the US had regained control, half the economically active population had left the country, "often the boldest, most capable, most determined," either legally or as illegal migrant workers. Their remittances, estimated at some $800 million annually, "are what keep the damper down on uncontrollable social upheaval," the research journal of the Jesuit University reported. It also estimated that "Nicaragua's gross domestic product would have to grow 5 percent annually for the next fifty years to reattain the productive levels of 1978, before our historic underdevelopment was intensified to the extreme by the US-financed war to destroy the revolution," by the wreckage left by subsequent "globalization," and by the "massive corruption" of the post-1990 US-backed governments. That issue of the journal appeared just as the US suffered its first international terrorist atrocity on home soil¹ (p104).

... The "unimaginable and singular tragedy of September 11 surely felt like the end of the world ... in the targeted country," the editors [of Envio] observed. But "Nicaragua experiences the end of the world every day [after] the destruction the US government has repeatedly wreaked on this country and its people." The atrocities of 9-11 may well be denounced as "Armageddon," but Nicaraguans recall that their country "lived its own Armageddon in excruciating slow motion [under US assault] and is now submerged in its dismal aftermath," having been reduced to the second poorest country in the hemisphere (after Haiti), vying with Guatamala for the distinction, also enjoying perhaps the world record for concentration of wealth² (105-6).

1. Envío (Managua, Nicaragua), March 2003; September 2001.

2. Envio, October 2001.

Noam Chomsky.

Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance.

New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt & Co., LLC (Macmillan) 2003. ISBN 0-8050-7400-7