Bad debts bite the eraser

It seems like its good news week this week, Sojo reports:

"The G8 recently announced that, finally, 18 desperately poor countries will receive full cancellation of their debt to the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and African Development Fund. This is fantastic news for those countries, many of which now spend more on debt service than on health care or education."

I think this is the last meeting before, God-willing, we see some action. Obviously, the Jubilee and associated campaigns will be keeping up the pressure for the remaining heavily indebted countries as well.

This decision will not wipe out neocolonialism, even in the countries affected, there'll still be private lenders and foreign investors leaching money out of these countries, but the difference to health care and education for a whole big bunch of people is going to be pretty significant on a personal level.

Also note that this campaign was largely about broad-based community campaigning, without any violence, without any militant direct action. Which is to say instead of a small group of very angry, very aggressive socialists staging sit-ins, bloackades and other disruptive and exclusive protests this involved community and church groups collecting petitions, raising awareness, holding meetings, talking to officials and writing lots of letters. It almost makes you think democracy might be viable. Of course the other obvious player was star-talent - everyone has seen Bono of U2, but recently everyone from Brad Pitt to Pat Robertson (yes, that Pat Robertson) not to mention the Dalai Lama and a pretty reasonable effort from Tony Blair and his Chancellor Gavin Brown.

The point is that the campaign was not about polarizing the political scene into the righteous who agreed with the debt relief cause (or the campaigners broader political values) and the evil who disagreed. Instead it was a process of creating a very broad support base at a grass roots level - ie. Bible belt to trendy liberals and everyone in between - and then leveraging that support whenever a political figure acted or failed to act on debt relief, thus this bizarre scenario:

"Bono applauded Mr. Bush one minute, then chastised Paul Martin, the Canadian prime minister, for failing to pledge more money for global poverty reduction."

He doesn't call Paul Martin names, he just tutt-tutts him. He doesn't judge him as a person, he just judges his action and calls for a change in behaviour, not necessarily government. This approach makes the campaign a lot more flexible and gives them a lot more sway. Ultimately this approach seems to understand politics a lot better. So will we see this campaign model replicated?

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