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ECUADOR

by Kevin Carey

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KEVIN CAREY's week started with Gore's smoke and insider trading scares but ended in the jungles of Ecuador.

I would like to say something profound about the G21 exposé that Al Gore Jr. was partial in former times to the wacky baccy but neither Gore nor that particular substance fill me with the same emotional stimulus as, say, President Lionel Jospin and armagnac; nor, I must be scrupulously fair, does putting the elements together make much more of an impression. With or without Armagnac Jospin is an interesting politician, with or without marijuana Al Gore is boring.

I never yet saw any substance, legal or otherwise, alter a person so much that they changed from boring to profound or, for that matter, vice versa.

I would go further. A politician under serious stress who does not resort to stimulants of some kind is likely to be so at odds with himself that he will be a bad politician.

We use stimulants because we are gregarious beings in a complex society where we exploit and are exploited; if we were to stop doing so our society would descend into incontrollable violence as the only form of release from pent up pressure.

I can see them coming: boom! Alcohol and 'drugs' cause violence. Yes, they often exacerbate violent temperaments but think how ill tempered many of us would be without them, and that goes for smoking tobacco, that sin even greater than filling the atmosphere with automobile fumes.

Next: Islamic societies manage without booze. True, but look how they manage themselves and what substitutes they use; so do you want no booze and Iran or Iraq, or what you've got?

That is quite enough of that; the Gore gore would not be on the floor were it not for a piece of socio-political hypocrisy that every democratic society is allowed to perpetrate on itself; still, better Jack Kennedy on cocaine than Al Gore on cranberry juice.

I also briefly considered the story of the financial authorities around the world expressing their regret that naughty people on the Internet are using chat facilities to pump and dump stocks and bonds; these "Amateurs", not qualified to give advice on companies, are saying so many unhelpful and untidy things about major corporations that it has put Wall Street and the City of London quite out of humour.

I can't remember having seen quite such a piece of incompetently blatant special pleading since, well, the proposal of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI).

Here are some simple propositions:

• whereas people who make and sell things require stable prices, stable exchange rates and stable markets, people who make their money from speculation require unstable prices, unstable exchange rates and unstable markets because it is only the unstable differential that facilitates gambling.
• Whereas 'insider trading' is permitted inside - an odd contradiction - it's certainly forbidden outside, particularly on the Internet which is inhabited by all sorts of oddballs, anarchists and people who are hard faced enough to boast that their aim is to make money.
• Finally - I've got fed up of whereases - you will have noted that this story appeared in newspapers which, you will recall, were hardly full of prescience before any crash you care to think of.

For fun, why not count the number of times your favoured journal uses the phrase "In a surprise development" during the next month. Our Editor here should give the G21 Award for Gullibility to a really sound outfit like the BBC or CNN.

My outrage at these two blowsy stories subsided, however, when an old companion returned in the shape of a coup in Ecuador.

As I write, the outcome is not clear but what is of deepest concern is the general malaise in Latin America. The shoddy militarism of Reagan has been succeeded by democracy, as vulnerable and variegated as the birds of its jungles, but our fellow human beings, treated like crawling vermin, hardly notice whether they are crushed by a jack-boot or a Gucci slip-on.

I recently paid fulsome praise to the White House for beginning to take an enlightened self-interest in the affairs of sub Saharan Africa but an indifference to the fundamentals, as opposed to surface changes, in Uncle Sam's back yard appears somewhat puzzling.

Of course, the implementation of World Bank and IMF monetarist policies (which the United States under Reagan constantly eschewed, choosing instead to borrow its way out of crises) and the promotion of interlocking trade agreements from the WTO down to NAFTA are all very good for rich Americans - no, that's wrong, for VERY rich Americans - but such mass poverty and oppression is ultimately bound to produce intolerable pressure on United States immigration.

In the second half of the Twentieth Century the United States need for immigrant labour could be controlled through varying surveillance on its Southern border; but most of Latin America is about to undergo the population bulge which comes of basic health care improving faster than basic income.

This causes there to be a larger number of fertile women, a lower rate of infant mortality and increased longevity. It is only much later that higher incomes begin to control fertility.

Meantime, there will be increased oppression, resentment and a Northward population push which will be irresistible without a degree of draconian practice which will, in turn, deepen the resentment and increase the oppression. The 'Old Empires' of Europe have learned to their cost that immigration might initially have been encouraged to supply unskilled labour but that now its pressure results from unfinished business in former colonies. It is not too late for Washington to identify the pattern, learn the lessons.

The only way to keep people where they are is to make it comfortable enough for them not to want to move; but give them poverty and satellite television so that they can watch you throwing more food in the trash after brunch than they eat in a week and trouble must be expected.

KEVIN CAREY is social entrepreneur, economist and Director of the UK's humanITy. He can be reached via e-mail at "humanity@atlas.co.uk".

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