Planners from hell – The little bank that couldn’t

Posted on December 21, 1997 by urbanrenaissanceinst

The Next City
December 21, 1997

 

The little bank that couldn’t

BY ALL ACCOUNTS, microcredit — tiny loans that help poor entrepreneurs buy a $75 cow or a $200 sewing machine — is an overwhelming success. In the two decades since the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh started the world’s first microlending operation, more than 5,000 organizations have provided loans to 10 million people worldwide, not just in Third World countries but to disadvantaged Hispanics in the United States and aboriginals in Canada. At the Microcredit Summit held in Washington last year, the movement pledged to reach 100 million of the world’s poor with microcredit by 2005.

The Grameen Bank’s success has brought its founder, Mohammed Yunus, the 1994 World Food Prize, audiences with European royalty and luminaries such as Hillary Clinton, and international admiration for offering the poor credit — with all the respect that that implies — instead of handouts. “The only people benefiting from [foreign] aid are those already wealthy, though they do so in the name of the poor,” Yunus says in lambasting Bangladesh’s foreign aid economy. Instead of aid, Yunus touts a brand of collective capitalism promoted through profit-making microbanks.

“Conventional banks are based on the principle that the more you have, the more you can get; if you don’t have anything, you don’t get anything,” he explained. “Grameen has literally turned this principle around.”

The Grameen Bank has opened more then 1,000 branches in rural areas, where 90 per cent of Bangladeshis live. It serves over half of Bangladesh’s 68,000 villages and has more than two million borrowers — 90 per cent of them illiterate, 94 per cent of them women — who are also shareholders. To Yunus’s pride, although virtually all borrowers are landless or own less than an acre of land, and although these loan recipients could never get credit from a conventional bank, the Grameen Bank’s repayment rate far exceeds that of commercial banks — almost 98 per cent of its loans are repaid with interest.

If all this sounds too good to be true, it is: Although Yunus calls Grameen “the most sound financial institution in Bangladesh” and he abhors the thought of Grameen dispersing charity to its customers, the Grameen Bank, itself, is a big-time charity case, propped up by international aid agencies such as the World Bank, the national aid agencies of Canada, Sweden, Norway, and the Netherlands, UN agencies like the International Fund for Agricultural Development, private foundations like the Ford Foundation, and even commercial banks — together they represent 75 per cent of Grameen’s funds. Without this international largesse, Grameen would have long ago been bankrupt.

Grameen is not commercially viable, not a bank, not even the grassrootsy institution it pretends to be — the government of Bangladesh, with 25 per cent of its board members, effectively controls Grameen. Worst of all, the bank’s much lauded reliance on group responsibility and peer pressure to prevent defaults has a reprehensible underside.

Grameen’s lending process starts with five would-be borrowers who agree to form a group in which each member guarantees — and polices — one another’s borrowings. Initially, only two members may borrow; if they make their monthly payment regularly, Grameen will then extend credit to two more, and if all four continue their repayments, the fifth can borrow, and all become entitled to larger loans. From Grameen’s perspective, self-policing works wonders in preventing defaults. But critics claim Grameen promotes unprecedented levels of indebtedness among the populace, and that the low default figures mask unprecedented misery. Because the poor in Bangladesh live so close to the edge, charges Hamidul Huq, head of a Bangladeshi group attempting to alleviate poverty, large numbers inevitably fall behind in their monthly payments whenever illness prevents them from working or some unforeseen expense arises. When this happens, the fellow members — themselves also without resources and desperate not to lose their own livelihoods — can ruthlessly force would-be defaulters to sell their meagre assets or to visit the local money lender, from which escape is rare. Faced with repayments of loans at 120 per cent per annum on top of the Grameen loans at 20 per cent, the next step is bonded labor — still a widespread practice in Bangladesh. Entire families in this way become trapped — mothers and their children as servants, husbands as farmhands or factory workers.

In other cases, the members of the group convince Grameen to reschedule their loans: Grameen bankers let them take additional loans to cover the defaults, maintaining the fiction that Grameen has the world’s best repayment rate, but leading to impossibly high repayments and worse defaults down the road, along with more pressure to visit the village money lender or become a bonded worker.

IN SOME WAYS, THE GRAMEEN BANK resembles a cult. Members greet each other with a Grameen salute, recite Grameen chants, and promise to follow “The 16 Decisions of Grameen Bank” by abandoning marriage dowries, practising birth control, building latrines, and taking part in all social events collectively. Borrowers — despite having little or no disposable income — are also required to financially support the bank through forced savings programs: Grameen has so successfully commandeered the poor’s savings that its total savings — now roughly equal to the entire amount that Grameen lends — is four times larger than the combined savings recorded for five major commercial banks in Bangladesh. Yet Grameen savings accounts typically pay its customers 8.5 per cent interest — less than half the interest these same borrowers must pay Grameen. In another bank fund-raising scheme, all borrowers must buy a share in the Grameen Bank whose dividend yields about half as much as Grameen charges borrowers.

To the distress of its customers, the bank discourages withdrawals from the savings accounts, browbeating would-be withdrawers into instead borrowing more to meet the need the savings would have met. At times, thousands of desperate placard-carrying Bangladeshis have demonstrated to pressure Grameen to either return their money or grant them interest rate relief.

Grameen has done best at attracting and keeping members in the country’s most underdeveloped areas — feudal enclaves whose only other lender is the village strongman. Once areas become developed, Grameen’s borrowers drop off in droves, preferring the commercial banks who charge less interest and attach fewer strings to their loans. Because the Grameen lustre has become tarnished, its pyramiding growth in membership — by 1993 it reached 375,000 people a year — dropped to under 200,000 in 1994 and a mere 50,000 in 1995 (the last year for which figures are available). This trend could soon see Grameen lose members and spiral into bankruptcy.

To shore up its collapsing membership, the Grameen Bank juggernaut has created a string of new companies financed by Grameen and offering products to the poor on credit: GrameenCyberNet (an Internet company), GrameenTelecom (predicted to bring cellular mobile phone service to 100 million rural inhabitants within four years), GrameenShakti (a power utility to bring electricity to unelectrified villages), plus GrameenTrust, GrameenCommunications, and a flood of other Grameen offshoots. If these incestuous ventures succeed, they could rescue the Grameen Bank; if they fail, the savings of Grameen Bank’s two million borrowers-savers-shareholders — and the worldwide microcredit-financed house of cards — could come crashing down with it.

Lawrence Solomon

Revenue Canada rejigs RRSPs, keeps the change

FEBRUARY IS A FRANTIC MONTH for financial planners and their RRSP clients, but not for many immigrants and new workers who — thanks to an unadvertised tax grab several years ago — can no longer contribute to a retirement savings account or claim an RRSP tax deduction in their first year of work.

The federal government cloaked this de facto tax hike on new entrants to the workforce in a 1991 tax reform package designed to equalize RRSP contributions between pensioned and non-pensioned workers. But buried in the package is a scheme that especially short-changes the young and immigrants by basing contribution limits on a taxpayer’s previous year’s income.

For example, an immigrant who starts working in Canada in January 1997 cannot make an RRSP contribution or claim any RRSP deduction since Revenue Canada bases his contribution limit on his non-existent 1996 income. This individual loses out by not being able to invest toward his retirement in 1997, giving Revenue Canada the cash that would have been his tax refund (for someone earning $30,000 and contributing the maximum $5,400, that would amount to $1,451). Anyone who starts working in the middle of the year has it even worse: A new worker who started his $30,000-a-year job in July 1997 cannot contribute to an RRSP in 1997, and in 1998 is limited to $2,700 (18 per cent of the $15,000 he earned in 1997). In essence, this taxpayer pays taxes for a year and a half without being eligible to put money into an RRSP, and Revenue Canada grabs an additional $753 in 1998 on top of 1997’s $1,451.

Gail Vaz-Oxlade, author of the RRSP Answer Book, warns that contribution limits based on the previous year’s income can also bamboozle the unwary taxpayer who takes a year off to raise a child or who is temporarily unemployed. For example, a woman earning $75,000 in 1996 and $30,000 in 1997 could contribute $13,500 to her RRSP in 1997, but Vaz-Oxlade suggests carrying this deduction forward until she returns to a higher tax bracket, to increase her tax refund by $3,359. “Nobody knows about these tactics, not even many financial consultants,” Vaz-Oxlade says, “and the government isn’t going to advertise them.” Parents who don’t earn any income, and don’t have any contribution room accumulated from when they were working, aren’t able to contribute to their RRSPs until they’ve been back on the job for a year.

For most taxpayers who will earn more in the current year than in the previous year, the government’s tax grab continues year after year as it nickels and dimes taxpayers by giving them a deduction based on the previous, generally lower, year’s earnings. The government’s tax grab then continues to the end of a taxpayer’s career. People who retired at the end of 1996 after earning $60,000 that year could contribute $10,800 to their RRSP in 1997, but because most retirees have less taxable income, their deduction is worth less in 1997 — $871 less if this retiree has 60 per cent of his working income. Still, the compound interest this investment accrues before the RRSP matures at age 69 is minuscule compared to that of an investment working from year one. Given an eight per cent return on investment, in 40 years $5,400 would have grown to $117,312 — money that, upon withdrawal from the RRSP, would benefit both the retiree and future governments who would be taxing this saved income.

 

Amy Buskirk

 

Responses to Revenue Canada rejigs RRSPs, keeps the change

Frank Gue, Taxpayers Coalition Halton Inc., Burlington, Ontario, responds: February 2, 1998

This item took me back. At the start of my working career in 1951, I began making deposits in the system then being run by the Department of Pensions and National Health, Pensions Brands.

This was a lost cause; it was earning, if I recall, 3 to 4 per cent.

I withdrew my money. I could recover only the principal, without interest. The amount was rather small, but I objected on principle to the minister, asking by what authority the accumulated interest had been withheld. He cited an order-in-council which he acknowledged had not been publicized. He said the government was entitled to recover its costs; I checked the government’s books, and found those costs to be in the order of 0.1 per cent.

This was an early lesson in a dreary parade of devious, hidden, behind the scenes manoeuvres to which I reluctantly became accustomed, and which illustrate the eternal truth of the old adage about plucking the goose while causing a minimum of hissing.

I soon and sadly discarded the naively charitable belief that this kind of thing is merely the operation of the law of unintended consequences. Such consequences are often so obvious and elaborately contrived that they could not possibly be unintended. The political and civil service woods are obviously well stocked with folk willing and able to draft legislation and regulations so opaque, convoluted, and incomprehensible that, even if publicized, they cannot possibly be understood, nor can their consequences be warded off; check the Income Tax Act. Between such folk and the order-in-council mechanism, what hope has a taxpaying citizen? Your issues are enormously stimulating. Keep up the good work.

Posted in Regulation | Leave a comment

Black Magic

Posted on October 11, 1997 by Other News Sources

Antonia Zerbisias
Toronto Star
October 11, 1997

BLACK MAGIC: Lawrence Solomon, editor of The Next City, comes up with a rather startling notion in his magazine’s fall issue

In “Maude And Conrad: Behind Every Successful Man There’s A Good Woman,” he describes how Maude Barlow, chair of the Council of Canadians, has, through her cultural nationalism, helped Conrad Black assume control of most of this country’s, English-language newspapers.

This, even though she led the legal battle against Black’s takeover of the Southam newspaper chain.

Is Maude Barlow actually helping Conrad Black?

Because Barlow has fought so long and hard against the foreign ownership of Canadian media, Solomon argues, she cleared the way for Black’s buying spree.

“Banks and other financiers knew that ownership restrictions made Canadian newspapers illiquid and poor credit risks ….” he writes. “Barlow helped cheapen Southam and other Canadian newspaper companies, helping to deliver them into Black’s embrace. Barlow has many commendable qualities: She is sincere, articulate, passionate and well meaning. She is also Black’s dupe.”

Barlow, along with James Winter, a University of Windsor journalism prof, just put out The Big Black Book: The Essential Views Of Conrad And Barbara Amiel Black (Stoddard), which uses the couple’s own words against them.

If Solomon’s hypothesis is correct, one shudders to think how Barlow could be unwittingly aiding and abetting Black’s next move.

Posted in Regulation | Leave a comment

Discussion Group, A grande dame out to deinstitutionalize death

Posted on September 21, 1997 by Other News Sources

Patricia Murphy

September 21, 1997

Local Heroes
AT A RECENT ROTARY CLUBMEETING, MARGARET ANDERSON was introduced as a woman who formerly “never did anything.” She will tell you herself that she has no medical background, that she hadn’t worked outside the home since 1959, and that in her 60-odd years she has never even volunteered. But her inexperience doesn’t matter: There is, after all, no formal program of study for a local heroine, especially if she makes her mission founding a free-standing cancer hospice.
You might say Margaret Anderson gained her real managerial expertise and medical training on the job: For three years, she nursed her husband, Ian, through his struggle with the disease until he died, as was his wish, at home. Through her husband’s illness, particularly in its final stages, Margaret came, firsthand, to appreciate the toll that living with cancer takes on individuals and their loved ones, who tend increasingly to be also their caregivers. And she became aware of the distress of other cancer patients who wanted to leave hospital but could not be cared for at home. She responded by building a home for people dying of cancer — Ian Anderson House.
During one of his hospital stays, Ian shared a room with a man dying a dreadful death just on the other side of the curtain. The man’s wife, bewildered in the midst of her trauma, nevertheless came around to the end of Ian’s bed to apologize for his screams; the thought that her own husband’s anguish was contributing to that of Margaret and her husband only added to her burdens. Later, when the curtain was drawn, Margaret, too, became alarmed: Not only did this couple have no privacy and no power over life and death, but the woman, there by the bedside day after day, didn’t even have a chair. The hospital hadn’t provided one, and in her distressed state, she didn’t have the gumption to demand one.
Why fuss over such a small oversight on the part of a large institution with so many other priorities? “Someone with a terminal illness has already lost so much, especially control,” Margaret argues, in explaining the large importance of little touches. With no defence against death, these individuals must be free to exercise the subtle daily choices that constitute life itself. “They need as much autonomy as possible. They should be able to eat dinner when they want to. They should also have time alone with their loved ones before they die.”
But an individual with terminal cancer often cannot be cared for at home, even when the government provides home care: The main caregiver may be elderly or unable to get time off work, or the family may have small children who also need constant care. Often, the principal caregiver becomes emotionally and physically burned-out and needs a break too.
To let terminal cancer patients eat dinner when and where they like — to deinstitutionalize death — two years ago Margaret established the Ian Anderson House Foundation as a charitable foundation. She endowed it with $1 million from Ian’s estate to allow terminal cancer patients to get palliative care in a homelike setting, and to provide their families and friends with support. Margaret sees her act as part of a larger trend in the deinstitutionalization and deregulation of the behemoth that is now modern medicine: “The simple and instinctive idea of helping each other out has become too complicated,” she shrugs. “We should just get on with it and fill a need in some small way.”
From hospice to hospital — and back again
The concept of hospice is ancient. By the Middle Ages, the hospice became a place of sanctuary or charitable refuge, offering kindness and generosity to the poor, the sick, and the dying, and especially the pilgrim or traveller. Typically associated with a monastery, hospices or “guesthouses” also provided compassionate care and palliation for the aged and infirm.
The famous hospice of St. Bernard, which still shelters those crossing the Pennine Alps between Italy and Switzerland, was built by St. Bernard of Menthon, a 10th century monk. Since the 12th century, it has been run by Augustinian monks who, with the help of St. Bernard dogs, have saved many stranded travellers.
While hospices were “homes away from home,” hospitals provided a more clinical environment. The oldest hospital still in existence is the Hôtel Dieu in Paris, founded some time in the seventh century. The Spanish government of Hispaniola built the first hospital in the Western Hemisphere in the Dominican Republic in 1503. Canada‘s first hospital opened in Quebec in 1639.
Hospitals in European cities and towns in the early 1700s operated as charities, serving mainly the poor or the victims of contagious diseases. Because the early hospitals were dark, dirty and crowded, and the principles of sanitation unknown, they were themselves hotbeds for disease. The wealthy were treated at home.
But once an illness became incurable, physicians weren’t welcome at a dying person’s bedside, partly because it was considered unethical to take money when a cure was impossible, but mostly because death was a religious event. To assure a “good death,” English parishes paid “watchers of the dying” to keep the dying poor company throughout the night. Only later that century did doctors begin to “manage” death by the use of opiates.
By the late 1800s, biological and medical discoveries such as germ therapy, antisepsis and anesthesia had made medicine, and particularly surgery, much safer and less traumatic. However, the hospital remained a place for the poor, and most sick people of any means still preferred to be treated at home.
The growth of the modern hospital followed the rapid growth of cities during the industrial revolution. As the health needs of a burgeoning urban population expanded and the medical profession required teaching and research facilities, medical skills and facilities centralized in the hospital. Because doctors could not obtain the necessary standard of sanitation in private homes, more and more people, rich and poor, began to visit the hospital for treatment. The charity hospital gave way to a place for private patients who paid at least part of their hospitalization costs.
In the 1930s and early 1940s, antibiotics further reduced excessive death and disease from surgical infection, enhancing the modern hospital’s stature. After the Second World War, a rapidly advancing medical technology, accompanied by government funds for hospitals and publicly funded health insurance, expanded the hospital’s role. It became the choice for the majority of people of all social and economic classes, and it assumed responsibility for two processes previously confined to the home — being born and dying.
SEVEN YEARS AGO, AFTER IAN’S DEATH, Margaret had no intention of building a hospice. Wanting both to thank her fellow citizens in Mississauga, Ontario, and to honor her husband, she offered to donate the $1 million to build a palliative care wing in the local hospital that had treated him. But the hospital politely refused Margaret’s offer, because governments don’t compensate hospitals well for palliative care: A palliative care wing would only drain the hospital’s resources. Margaret gave the hospital a new lift instead to thank it for its trouble, then offered the money to a local home hospice group. The group jumped at the offer but six months later Margaret balked when she saw the site it chose: a commercial lot beside a gas station at a major intersection. Margaret decided she’d do it herself.
She found the setting for Ian Anderson House in a 1.8 acre treed lot that backs on to a ravine and creek in the neighboring Town of Oakville. The land required rezoning — and the permission of town council. Margaret acquired a developer’s skills, shepherding her project through the rulemaking rigamarole. Before the new bylaw could even be written, the Oakville planning committee had to come up with a working definition for the very idea of “hospice.” It finally did and changed the zoning from park belt and light industry to a “site specific” hospice zone.
The 4,700 square foot house has six private bedrooms, each with its own washroom, individual heating controls, and call button to a central nursing station — designed not to look like a nursing station. It has a state-of-the-art therapeutic tub, central vacuum system, and sprinkler, alarm, and emergency lighting systems throughout. With one fully adjustable, hand-controlled bed already in place, Margaret hopes that the remaining five will be donated.
The bungalow style, with wide corridors and doors, lets residents move easily to common areas such as the living room, kitchen and dining area, and the lounge at the back that opens to a covered patio. From the patio, they can enjoy the sunken flower garden, which will have benches, paths, bird feeders, and if Margaret has her way, a vegetable garden. The Oakville Junior League is building a children’s play house.
Admission to Ian Anderson House, limited to those with cancer and less than six months to live, is free. Those with home support, but whose caregivers need rest from the strain of looking after them, will also be admitted for two weeks. As a former caregiver, Margaret appreciates the importance of this respite care.
Margaret has built a home, not a clinic, where residents receive 24 hours a day care by staff and volunteers trained in palliative care. Needless to say, Ian Anderson House will have few planned meals but plenty of chairs. It will draw on and complement the existing community resources: Each resident will remain under the care of his family physician and if he qualifies for government-provided home care services, a case manager will arrange for services such as physiotherapy, nursing, homemaking and supplies and equipment. Ian Anderson House plans to offer free seminars on such subjects as the art of palliation, the spiritual and psychosocial aspects of illness, and bereavement.
While Margaret put up the capital for the project, the home’s annual operating funds — estimated at about $350,000 — will have to come from private donations, community initiatives, fund-raising events, and especially from families or friends of residents. She wants Ian Anderson House to be a living model of “a community looking after its own.” Margaret is confident that as the ancient idea of hospice — of neighborly concern, generosity, and a special kind of hospitality — makes a modern comeback, governments will take note. Perhaps death will begin to seem less foreign too.
Thus far, community support for the project has been overwhelming. Margaret has received so many donations — over 200 already — that it’s difficult to find enough things to put plaques on. A gala held in Oakville in May raised almost $40,000. To date, over 75 people, including a number of registered nurses, have volunteered their time.
THE IDEA OF A FREE-STANDING HOSPICE shines in many ways. Often, hospitals place palliative care beds in an acute ward or scatter them throughout the hospital, ruling out a peaceful, homelike environment for patients and their families. More typically, those palliative care wards that do exist are disappearing altogether due to government cutbacks. Nursing homes are hard pressed to provide beds for the chronically ill and aged, not to mention meeting the burgeoning need for palliative care. As a general rule, they do not take palliative care patients. In this era of health care restructuring, the delivery of health care shifts increasingly from hospital to home.
An acute care hospital bed, not including doctors or surgery, costs an average of $600 per day. Ian Anderson House estimates its daily cost at $169, even less than hospice care in people’s homes. The low cost comes of eliminating overhead — Ian Anderson House doesn’t even have a paid executive director — without skimping on amenities that residents want. Ian Anderson House will provide round-the-clock care, something government health services, even when complemented by volunteers, find difficult to provide in a private home setting. And it offers an invaluable, yet intangible benefit — a free-standing hospice creates a natural community of support and expertise in all aspects of care for both the patients and their loved ones.
ALTHOUGH BORN INCANADA, MARGARET AND HER FAMILY moved to Edinburgh when she was nine. Ten years later, she moved back to Canada and worked throughout her 20s in Toronto, first for Yardley’s and then for Shell Oil. Ian, who was born in Glasgow, Scotland, came to Canada in 1953, at age 22. A chemist, he found a job with Canada Packers, working first in the laboratory and then in sales and marketing. Nineteen years after joining, Ian took the gamble of his life by leaving his secure job to enter into a partnership with Alkaril Chemicals in Mississauga.
Margaret says that she didn’t have to go out looking for a husband — she just had to answer the door. One day she found a rather cocky young man and his school chum on the stoop, looking for friends from Scotland who were staying with her. The rest, as they say, was chemistry.
After the birth of her son, Stuart, Margaret decided not to return to the workforce — in the early ’60s, few women with young children worked outside the home. But nothing prevented her from studying at home. Margaret finished high school by getting copies of the Grade 13 curriculum from the local collegiate and home-schooling herself. Twenty years later, she graduated from the University of Toronto with a BA in politics and economics.

Margaret Anderson is quick to tell you that Ian always believed in giving back to his community. Through Ian Anderson House, they both have.

Posted in Culture, Regulation | Leave a comment

Book Reviews – If this is paradise, why does if feel like hell?

Posted on September 21, 1997 by Other News Sources

The Next City
September 21, 1997

Sex in the Snow: Canadian Social Values at the End of the Millennium

by Michael Adams
(Viking, 1997. 220 pages) $27.99

IN TIMES OF SOCIAL UPHEAVAL, demographics take on special importance. No longer do traditional guideposts — age, gender, ethnicity, family background — tell us who we are. Adrift, without sure compass in working out our values and beliefs, we look to pollsters to help us find our place on the new social map. In Sex in the Snow, Michael Adams, the high-profile pollster from Environics Research, describes social values in 12 tribes of Canadians spread across three generations — Boomers and the generation of Elders who preceded them, and the Generation Xers who followed them.

Canadians, once shy and deferential, are now throwing off our dependence on traditional values and institutions. Our individual priorities take precedence over a sense of duty to others or any social order. We expect the world to accommodate our desire for choice and control. We are dedicated to the unabashed pursuit of our own pleasure and gratification. Adams describes young people living only for today and with as much intensity as possible. But complementing the trend toward personal autonomy and hedonism is another: a yearning for personal meaning and spiritual fulfilment.

To explain these mixed findings, Adams imports a metaphor from a 1960s theological movement and pronounces that Canadians have “killed God” and taken over paradise. Adams notes the steep decline in religious faith, particularly among Boomers and Gen-Xers. Although 83 per cent of Canadians still believe in God, increasingly, “Canadians are giving up on traditional religious dogma in favor of a less guilt-ridden spirituality,” letting us pursue our own pleasures and gratifications without feeling shame, guilt, or the threat of judgment in an afterlife. Having killed God, answering no longer to a higher authority, we were free to replace him. Thus Boomers have inherited the earth: They saw it was theirs, and they saw that it was good.

In fact, Adams has it exactly backward: It was not the act of killing God that opened the door to earthly delights. Rather the rise of the consumer society numbed religious sensibilities. Our new hedonism and personal autonomy stem from becoming enlisted and trained members of the consumer society. Adams ignores the great uncertainty and emptiness that Canadians experience in that part of our psyche formerly occupied by religious faith. But whatever our quest for “spiritual fulfilment” may mean, it evidently does not mean, for Adams, anything beyond a paradise on earth.

ADAMS HAS A BREATHTAKING OPTIMISM, a remarkably upbeat, cheery, all-is-right-with-the-world outlook. “I believe, beyond doubt, that we can live quite happily in a secular world.” He quotes Douglas Coupland’s Life after God to characterize his worldview: “Life was charmed, but without politics or religion. It was the life of children of the children of the pioneers — life after God — a life of earthly salvation on the edge of heaven.” Canada, the secular paradise. But how ironic and telling that Adams doesn’t get Coupland’s point. Coupland — best known as the author of Generation X — laments the emptiness of his life, and in particular his sense of loss of God and the spiritual. As a teenager all was well with the world. But at 30 he lost the intensity of his youth, and life seemed to hold no new revelations. His predicament is spiritual. “Ours was a life lived in paradise and thus it rendered any discussion of transcendental ideas pointless.” Coupland asserts his “religious impulses,” which he considers natural and necessary in any human being, “and yet,” he reflects, “into what cracks do these impulses flow in a world without religion? It is something I think about every day. Sometimes I think it is the only thing I should be thinking about.”

If we truly live in the ultimate secular paradise, why should Coupland feel so empty and sad about his life? Maybe there is something aberrant about him — he speaks of being treated for depression and anxiety. Maybe, some will say, he is just temperamentally disposed to such states of negative feeling. Or, others may say, less sympathetically, why doesn’t he just grow up?

But growing up, in a way, is precisely Coupland’s point. He is sad about the prospect of a normal life — a life of just fitting in to a consumer society. To him, it looks like taking a pass on living your own life. “I think I am a broken person. I seriously question the road my life has taken and I endlessly rehash the compromises I have made in life. I have an unsecure and vaguely crappy job with an amoral corporation so that I don’t have to worry about money. I put up with halfway relationships so as not to have to worry about loneliness. I have lost the ability to recapture the purer feelings of my younger years in exchange for a streamlined narrow-mindedness that I assumed would propel me to ‘the top.’ What a joke.”

Coupland’s inner voice says that happiness should include a growing sense of wonder, curiosity, discovery and play, and a deepening sense of meaning as life progresses. But unlike earlier generations, who found what they longed for within religious tradition, Coupland has nowhere to go. For him, traditional religion seems dead, a non-option. He finds himself in a spiritual cul de sac, in the time “after God.”

The real demographic question is, “How many other people, young and old, feel a similar emptiness and longing?” But Adams doesn’t ask this question in his 220 pages devoted to our social values. His blind spot reflects the bias of demographics toward the consumer society and economic life.

While Adams does point out the increasing search for meaning and spiritual fulfilment among the Boomers and Gen-Xers — their search is one of the three defining megatrends of changing generational values — Adams stops short of asking what this quest means. Are these groups simply looking for satisfying lifestyles? He tells us that many Gen-Xers will decline better paying jobs in large corporations for more interesting work where they can have an impact. Are they simply trying to fill the void once inhabited by traditions? Or does their spiritual hunger point to a deeper anxiety over the very relevance of life in their new paradise?

TO ADAMS, “CANADIAN MORALITY transcends traditional religious definitions; it can be characterized as a secular, pluralistic and ecological morality, a greater responsibility for the other.” Younger Canadians are bound not by common, universal, institutionally based values but by a kind of “values tribalism.” He sees Canada as “the harbinger of a more utopian future [evolving into] . . . a post-modern tribalism based on social values.”

Adams’ confidence in this set of values to carry Canadians through the next century is awesome. He sees our commitment to the Canadian identity in terms of an indifferent commitment to our institutions: Canadians “feel strongly about their weak attachments to Canada, its political institutions and their fellow citizens.” Their moral commitment to others, their egalitarianism and multiculturalism, seems to come down to, “I’m going to do my own thing, but I recognize your right to do your own thing too.” You do not have to look to the writings of sensitive “artist” types to see how his upbeat utopianism systematically ignores or understates the inarticulate emptiness that many people feel. Ordinary, middle-class wage earners and many middle managers worry about their place in the economy, feeling their participation in it has become altogether precarious, at the mercy of the chilling forces of downsizing and global competition. Despite all the recent talk about corporations building happy, loyal, unstressed workers through empowerment, training, career development, and benefits, there is little defence against these raging forces.

The crisis in jobs and the economy represents for countless individuals a crisis of soul. They are forced, often against their wills, to acknowledge that the values of consumerism and the media do not serve their deepest interests as human beings. They look for something permanent and transcendent. They know that one day they will be leaving all this, absolutely alone, with complete finality. They long for a means of connecting directly to this mysterious process of life which leads to that great unknown.

While Sex in the Snow helps Canadians see ourselves, often brilliantly so, demographics do not show us much. The human being is too complex, too full of contradictions, unresolved conflicts, and unconscious dynamics to be explained by off-the-top-of-your-head replies to a yes/no questionnaire — particularly if it is driving at clarifying a set of preconceived options. The metaphor of the “death of God” assumes that religious faith is likewise dying out. And here Adams’s interpretation is totally devoid of conviction. Simultaneous trends toward hedonism and greater spiritual meaning just don’t quite fit.

Debtor’s Bank

by Andrea Davis

Masters of Illusion: The World Bank and the Poverty of Nations

by Catherine Caufield
(Henry Holt, 1996. 432 pages) $38.50

MASTERS OF ILLUSION TRACES THE HISTORY of the World Bank, from its beginnings as a financier for war-torn Europe, to its missionary role today as eradicator of Third World poverty. Using compelling examples of specific projects the bank has funded over its 51-year history, Caufield demonstrates how miserably the bank has failed in its various missions and, in so doing, paints an alarming picture of a massive institution gone wrong.

The World Bank was the brainchild of the eminent English economist John Maynard Keynes. In July 1944, Keynes and more than 400 delegates from 44 Allied countries descended on rural New England, in a resort town called Bretton Woods, to devise a plan that would shape the postwar economy. The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development — later to be known as the World Bank — was born, along with the International Monetary Fund, which was intended to create a stable climate for international trade.

Since 1946, according to Caufield, the bank lent more than a third of a trillion dollars — an impressive amount, considering the bank’s early difficulties enticing investors to purchase its bonds. When Europe needed much more money than the bank could provide, the bank left Europe for the Third World, becoming, in Caufield’s words, its “banker of last resort.”

But by the late 1950s, the World Bank ran out of new creditworthy clients and into trouble with once creditworthy clients that threatened to default. It created the International Development Association in 1960 to take over its most uncreditworthy clients and to provide money to other poor countries on very easy terms.

Although the IBRD and IDA are two legally and financially distinct entities, they publish one joint annual report, and the staff who prepare loans and the executive directors who approve them are identical. But they differ in the nature of their lending and the source of their funds. The IBRD issues bonds with 100 per cent backing by its member governments to finance its lending operations. It then lends developing countries money at just below commercial interest rates. IDA, in contrast, finances its lending operations through foreign aid — triennial grants from Canada and its other rich-country members — and then provides interest-free “soft loans” (but with a .75 per cent annual “service charge”) to the bank’s poorest members.

By the late ’60s, the bank’s annual lending neared US$1 billion. Its president, Robert McNamara, former U.S. secretary of defense, then drove its annual lending to more than US$12 billion by increasing social lending for health and education projects, by boosting spending for agricultural projects, and by tripling the bank’s staff, all in the name of poverty reduction. But by the time he left the bank in 1981, the gap between the rich and the poor was greater than ever, and many of the bank’s clients were on the verge of defaulting.

MASTERS OF ILLUSION IS AT ITS BEST when describing the devastating social and environmental consequences of particular bank-funded projects. Whether funding Thailand’s Bhumipol dam, which forcibly displaced 20,000 people from their farming villages, or Ghana’s Akosombo dam, whose reservoir created such a breeding ground for disease-bearing flies that 100,000 people in the region were afflicted with river blindness, or India’s Sardar Sarovar dam, which is expected to bring “malaria to the doorsteps of the villagers,” the World Bank has shown a blatant disregard for the rights of the people and communities most affected by its projects. Masters of Illusion will outrage even the most ardent supporters of foreign aid with its moving accounts of families and communities that have had their livelihoods and environments destroyed by World Bank-funded projects.

One of the bank’s most notorious calamities was Polonoroeste. Beginning in 1981, the bank lent this massive highway-building and colonization project in the Brazilian Amazon more than half a billion dollars. Hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic settlers poured into the area, only to find it bereft of the schools, health clinics, water wells, and other promised services. After clearing thousands of square kilometres of rain forest with axes and fire, and finding the soils unsuitable for farming, the colonists moved on, clearing more forest and then abandoning it. Displaced indigenous communities, meanwhile, were killed by newly introduced diseases. In 1987, after Polonoroeste’s loans had been paid out, the World Bank admitted its problems. But with characteristic enthusiasm, it boasted, in its first annual report on the environment in 1990, that “Polonoroeste . . . has fostered a growing political and public commitment to preserve the Amazon’s remaining natural resources.” As Caufield comments dryly, “a smaller and less spectacular debacle might not have achieved that.”

MASTERS OF ILLUSION IS NOT MERELY a blow-by-blow account of disastrous projects. It tells the intriguing story of the people behind the bank’s imposing edifice. Bank technocrats — the economists, engineers, anthropologists, ecologists, and a plethora of consultants who work for the bank — impose their brand of “development,” irrespective of need or benefit. And it is these technocrats, these masters of illusion, who have made the bank what it is: a billion-dollar lender, accountable to no one, least of all to the people who are most affected by its loans.

According to Caufield, the bank created the Third World debt crisis. For years, the bank had ignored all evidence that Third World debt was getting out of control, consistently increasing its lending and encouraging commercial banks and other private investors to do the same. It had encouraged its clients to boost their borrowings and measured its own success by the extent of their indebtedness. As the 1980s dawned, many of its clients teetered toward bankruptcy, threatening the bank’s reputation as a sound financial institution, and alarming Western shareholders in commercial banks that — at the World Bank’s behest — had helped finance World Bank projects.

But the bank, seeing opportunity where catastrophe loomed, capitalized on the debt crisis by making ever larger loans to help countries on the verge of default. The borrowing countries would then use these loans to pay off their debts to private creditors, thus converting private debt held by commercial banks to public debt held by the World Bank. Private sector lenders in the West loved it.

These bigger bail-outs — called structural adjustments — failed dismally. Of the 88 countries that bought into adjustment programs by 1995, not one had kept to the adjustment plan. The bank itself admitted in 1991 that “instead of disappearing, adjustment lending intensified.” Nor can the bank quantify, with any degree of certainty, whether borrowers have actually undertaken the reforms it advocated.

Masters of Illusion shows that the World Bank has learned nothing from its past mistakes and will continue to merrily dole out cash to corrupt regimes for bad projects. This should be a sobering thought to Canadian taxpayers, who contribute more than one-third of a billion dollars annually to the World Bank.

Against the Gods:
The Remarkable Story of Risk

by Peter L. Bernstein
(John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1996. 383 pages) $38.95

MOVE OVER RELIGION, POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES, gender wars, and racism theories of development. Peter Bernstein’s Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk tells us as much about where we are and where we’ve been as any tome. This delightful history shows how our attitudes to risk drive decisions that shape the very essence of society.

Before the Renaissance, people encountered little change in their day-to-day lives apart from the vagaries of the weather and the occasional upheavals when one despot replaced another. To get rich required exploitation or plundering another’s wealth. The Renaissance began to replace superstition and tradition — forces that made us captive to the mysterious will of the gods — with the notion that we could shape our own future by forecasting events. In this period of unprecedented innovation, exploration, and trade, the accumulation of wealth was opened up to the many rather than to the few. “The newly rich were now the smart, the adventuresome, the innovators — most of them businessmen — instead of just the hereditary princes and their minions.”

With trade, both parties perceive themselves wealthier for the transaction. But trade is risky business — before shipping goods across the ocean or purchasing merchandise for sale, a businessman must decide what the future holds in store. The forecasting revolution unleashed by trade, as Bernstein shows, has given us progressively more control over our lives and, in the very profoundest sense, has helped define what makes us human.

To show us how, Bernstein assembles an all-star cast of characters: Socrates and Hammurabi, Mohammed and Omar Khayyám, Frederick II and Pope Gregory IX, Copernicus and Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Pascal, Descartes, Fermat, Halley, Lloyd (of London), Bernoulli, Newton, Leibniz, Gauss, Laplace, Darwin. This history of civilization reads like People magazine and unfolds like a familiar text.

Lawrence Solomon

One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism

by William Greider
(Simon & Schuster, 1997. 528 pages) $37

WITH A TONE AND A MESSAGE somewhat similar to those of the anchorman-turned-prophet in Chayefsky’s film Network, William Greider takes the reader on an exhilarating, insightful, and sometimes disturbing trip across several levels of the new global economic realities, with ever present intimations of apocalypse. The ideas, from this national editor of Rolling Stone, delivered against the broad canvas of his globe-trotting explorations, will challenge many boosters of international capitalism.

Greider argues that economic globalization creates a downward spiral of wage reductions from which escape is almost impossible since multinationals can always relocate in poorer countries. To counter the ensuing massive economic and environmental disaster, Greider seeks a new “worker-owner” and ecological understanding.

Mark Wegierski

Posted in Culture, Regulation | Leave a comment

What would happen if . . . party politics came to municipalities?

Posted on September 21, 1997 by urbanrenaissanceinst

David Siegel and Eugene Plawiuk
The Next City
September 21, 1997

The Next City asked David Siegel, associate professor of politics, and Eugene Plawiuk, the NDP’s co-chair of strategy and communications in Alberta’s recent provincial election, to comment

 

David Siegel

Local politicians would be less directly accountable. Currently, local politicians must answer directly to their constituents without the defence of “I had to do it for party discipline.” Party labels just get in the way of local government’s relationship with the people. Although party discipline can be a useful organizing tool at federal or provincial levels, where issues are larger and more complex, they are overrated as accountability tools. Remember the axiom about the federal Liberals running on the left and governing on the right.

Party politics would complicate relationships between municipalities and provincial and federal governments. The relationships are already tense, but a strong dose of partisanship would complicate matters even more. Although many local politicians do have political party affiliations, a municipal position from an entire council, which usually has politicians of many stripes, is rarely viewed as partisan.

Political campaigns would become more costly, ruling out people who don’t have access to large amounts of money. Currently, local politicians fight local campaigns on shoe leather and stamina. Thank heavens no one has enough money to hire “spin doctors” or produce slick advertising. Since candidates for local office can’t afford expensive opinion polls, they have no choice but to spend time standing on a lot of front porches talking to real people instead of pollsters. Sophisticated political parties with large budgets would soon obliterate this aspect of local campaigns, and further distance local politicians from their constituents.

Municipal government would lose its diversity. Since only politicians with the financial backing of parties could run, voters would be restricted to voting for party platforms rather than for candidates with diverse and independent viewpoints. This might suit career politicians working their way up the party ladder but not true municipal reformers who want to bring about meaningful change.

Eugene Plawiuk

We would be acknowledging history and reality. Party politics have traditionally been part of municipal elections. Labor candidates in Edmonton elections ran as members of a Labour/CCF slate in the 1930s, gaining control of the mayor’s seat and the majority of city council. Only in the latter half of the ’50s and early ’60s, when progressives feared being labelled “red,” did party politics disappear from municipal elections. But the need to show solidarity soon gave birth to municipal coalitions such as the Urban Reform Group of Edmonton (URGE), Vancouver’s Committee of Progressive Electors (COPE), and the Montreal Citizens’ Movement (MCM). Whether coalitions of the right or left, they were merely party politics by another name.

Even without a party label, municipal politics are partisan. Local elections, whether for school boards, hospital boards, or city councils, provide candidates with a stepping stone — they later use their “name recognition” to advantage when running for a higher-level office. However, whatever the name of the candidate, his politics are no secret to everyone in the know. When politicians bill themselves as the “voice of business,” as a “progressive,” or as a “labor activist,” voters can often predict what “party” they represent.

Voters would know exactly what they were getting. While municipal politicians are less bound by party discipline than their provincial or federal counterparts, they still have a political agenda. By acknowledging their party affiliation, candidates would give voters the opportunity to set a clear political direction for city hall.

Municipal politics would become more transparent and accountable. Only politicians with hidden agendas benefit from hiding their politics, and they nearly always come from a right-wing, pro-developer, pro-privatization perspective. Let’s be honest about party politics at the civic level.

Posted in City states | Leave a comment