BOOK REVIEW Himalayan heights of disingenuousness The Anti-Globalization Breakfast Club by Laurence J
Brahm
Reviewed by Muhammad Cohen
Gary LaMoshi's 2003 review of Laurence Brahm's
biography of Zhu Rongji noted relentless attacks on "the Washington
Consensus" marring an otherwise insightful and revealing work. In one case,
Brahm praised Zhu for resisting that Washington Consensus when he refused to
devalue China's currency in the wake of the Asian economic meltdown that began
in 1997. In fact, the Bill Clinton administration dispatched then-deputy
Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers, now a key economic adviser to President
Barack Obama, to Beijing to persuade China not to devalue the renminbi
(also known as the yuan).
After reading Brahm's latest book, The Anti-Globalization Breakfast Club,
it's clear that Brahm's misplaced jabs at the
Washington Consensus weren't innocent oversights or misunderstandings - they
were Brahm's real point. His penchant to play loose with facts undermines a
potentially stimulating book. Add either extraordinary naivete or outright
intellectual dishonesty, and this tome that takes itself so seriously becomes
less thought provoking than laugh inducing.
Few things about Brahm's book are delivered as advertised. For starters, it's
not about the anti-globalization movement, because, as Brahm states, pro- and
anti-globalization are meaningless terms. The mobs that turn up to protest at
economic summits, International Monetary Fund (IMF) meetings and World Trade
Organization talks use the tools of globalization to organize and express their
disparate views. So they're not against globalization, but how the process is
unfolding. Brahm prefers to call the protests part of a "global justice
movement".
Market madness
They're seeking justice, according to Brahm, against the Washington Consensus,
the great white whale he sees lurking behind every poverty statistic and
underdeveloped country. The concept of a Washington Consensus emerged in the
1980s to describe development policy prescriptions for Latin America, though
these days it's as tough to define as anti-globalization.
For Brahm, the term describes the one-size-fits-all neo-liberal policies of the
World Bank, the IMF and other US-dominated institutions, including
privatization, balanced budgets and removing barriers to free trade and foreign
investment. That means valuing profits over people and enabling multinational
corporations to plunder and exploit poor countries and their people. The
Washington Consensus mantra, which evolved in the age when the dinosaurs Ronald
Reagan and Margaret Thatcher ruled, is that the market always knows best.
These policies have held sway in the US for the past three decades, pursued
with religious fervor - and large dollops of cronyism that often accompany them
- during the presidency of George W Bush. They delivered an extraordinary
global financial crisis resulting from excesses the Bush people implicitly
encouraged and endorsed. For Brahm, the current crisis shows that the
Washington Consensus, however defined, has failed and should no longer guide
international development policy.
Brahm is preaching what most of the international development community has
practiced for at least a decade. His portrayal of World Bank advisers as
1950s-style efficiency experts, Stepford economists proposing academic
solutions without regard for local circumstances, is about as up-to-date as
bell-bottoms. These days, the World Bank is awash with the concepts of
community empowerment and appropriate solutions in terms of geography, culture
and technology, under the guiding principle of "whatever works".
Those who rail aboutmaking
the world safe for Wal-Mart have become more shrill precisely because
the tide has turned against them. Free-market ideologues have been losing
ground since the fall of the Soviet Union and its empire. Key neo-liberal ideas
such as shock therapy privatization of state enterprises through public share
distribution produced mixed results at best.
The Asian economic crisis raised doubts about the IMF's austerity prescriptions
(as if the Great Depression of the1930s hadn't). Elsewhere in Asia, the
spectacular growth of China has graphically demonstrated that free-market
purity and democracy aren't the only paths to eradicating poverty. The
developed world's responses to this latest crisis - deficit spending to
stimulate the economy, bank bailouts and renewed regulation - indicate that
even in the belly of the beast they don't believe that freer markets are the
only answer in all circumstances.
Are you high?
Brahm's alternative to his mythic foe is a Himalayan Consensus. This new
paradigm is the product of Brahm's personal journey from business attorney in
China to international economic consultant to Shambala Buddhist living in
Lhasa, raising Siberian huskies and supporting a range of community self-help
projects.
The 10-point manifesto is an amalgam of good ideas: top polluters the US, China
and India should take the lead in environmental protection; platitudes:
"Grassroots approaches are need to solve real problems"; wishful thinking:
"Bhutan's goal of 'Gross National Happiness' provides valuable lessons"; and
outright fantasies: the "timeless philosophies" of Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism
and Taoism support non-violence, egalitarianism and equality, as Brahm claims
they do in exemplary peaceful, egalitarian countries Pakistan, Sri Lanka and
Bangladesh.
The reader's climb to Himalayan Consensus is also littered with rampant
namedropping. There's Brahm in Arundhati Roy's kitchen in New Delhi,
brainstorming in Dacca on how to "protect the small from being bulldozed by
Wall Street capital" with Nobel Prize winning micro-financier Muhammad Yunus,
decrying the Western media's inaccurate portrayal of Nepal's Maoist leader
Prachanda during a martial arts demonstration at his jungle camp and Brahm
sharing his bon mot that serves as the book's title over, of all things,
breakfast with World Bank rejectionist economist Jeffrey Sachs.
Any useful thoughts garnered along the road are marred by Brahm's war on his
Washington Consensus straw man and by intellectual sloth. He's an
ideologue, not a scholar, and there's plenty of fuzzy thinking on display. The
book frequently reads like a report from the smartest kid in junior high
school, larded with commendably chosen quotes from others who believe America
and corporation are dirty words, but in sum almost quaintly naive. To support
his 21st-century model for development, Brahm quotes South American
revolutionarily Che Guevara. At one particularly laughable juncture, Brahm
calls on readers to use religion as an antidote to blind faith in flawed
ideologies.
J'accuse!
More troubling is Brahm's use of unsubstantiated assertions that he tries to
pass off as indisputable facts. For example, he repeatedly blames the Bali
bombings on the IMF - about as valid as saying Henry Ford caused global
warming. Brahm contends that "more aid money is spent on consultants' expense
accounts, or on missions to evaluate and re-evaluate what other missions have
already assessed, than finds it way to hardcore aid and poverty-relief
programs", without a single example to back it up.
While praising China's unprecedented growth but ignoring the Washington
Consensus under Zhu Rongji (though Brahm laments the Middle Kingdom has now
strayed to the dark side of global orthodoxy), Brahm mentions that he was an
advisor to Zhu and his team when Zhu served as premier. Brahm says his role put
him "in the thick of China's massive economic reforms and social
re-engineering".
But Brahm never mentioned that role in his earlier book about Zhu, and that's
awfully strange. No self-respecting publisher would have ignored the chance to
market and promote that book as the work of a key insider on Zhu's reform team.
Moreover, an inveterate namedropper such as Brahm would have been unlikely to
resist the opportunity to mention his ties to Zhu and the policies he thinks
helped sink the evil Washington Consensus.
On the other hand, if Brahm was an advisor to Zhu as he claims and then wrote a
book praising his boss and policies Brahm himself helped craft without
revealing that relationship, he's got an even bigger credibility problem as an
author. Either way, The Anti-Globalization Breakfast Club confirms that,
along with his flawed thinking, Brahm is a writer whose words can't be trusted.
The Anti-Globalization Breakfast Club: Manifesto for a Peaceful Revolution
by Laurence J Brahm. Singapore, John Wiley & Sons (Asia), August 2009.
ISBN: 978-0470-82317-0. US$27.95; 220 pages.
Former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen told America’s story to the
world as a US diplomat and is author of
Hong Kong On Air,
a novel set during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal,
financial crisis, and cheap lingerie. Follow
Muhammad Cohen’s blog for more on the media and Asia, his adopted home.
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Few things about Brahm's book are delivered as advertised. For starters, it's
not about the anti-globalization movement, because, as Brahm states, pro- and
anti-globalization are meaningless terms. The mobs that turn up to protest at
economic summits, International Monetary Fund (IMF) meetings and World Trade
Organization talks use the tools of globalization to organize and express their
disparate views. So they're not against globalization, but how the process is
unfolding. Brahm prefers to call the protests part of a "global justice
movement".
,
a novel set during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal,
financial crisis, and cheap lingerie. Follow 
