Attacks on Living Standards: A World Order Devouring Itself

Things are not going well for the New World Order.

In Germany, unemployment has shot up half a million in a single month, leaving the country with the same jobless rate that existed when Hitler came to power. Sharp increases in official unemployment figures have just been announced in France as well.

But to the surprise of the New World Order's rulers, the double-digit unemployment figures have only increased popular resistance to "reforms" such as "labor flexibility" and lower wages.

Protests are rapidly spreading in Europe, especially in Germany and France. Despite official efforts to blame the joblessness on workers' resistance to "reforms," the public is increasingly accusing the rightwing French and German governments, and asserting that European governments have deliberately sought to increase unemployment to make the labor force more pliable and to pit the unemployed against the still employed.

Meanwhile, Albania, characterized by the Financial Times as the International Monetary Fund's "best pupil in Eastern Europe," has imploded after the collapse of a Ponzi scheme that took with it a third of the country's gross national product.

Mexico, the previous "IMF best pupil," lost that title when its economy collapsed in December 1994. The week before the bust, Salomon Brothers, the respected Wall Street investment firm, issued a "very positive" opinion on the Mexican economy, and Moody's Investors Services gave the country a similarly laudatory classification. (Le Monde Diplomatique, March 1995). Business Week magazine had gushed with enthusiasm for the Mexican economy in articles until the crash.

Unabashed, these same disinterested experts carry on as if nothing happened, and denounce all who oppose the New World Order economic project as ignoramuses who are trying to hold back the inevitable.

In a front-page article April 3, The Washington Post presents the case of a 49-year old French lower management worker, Nicolas Duthuille, who was laid off but regained his job when a French court voided the dismissal, and reports that French workers cannot be laid off with impunity as they are in the United States. "The overturning of the layoff plan could not be better for Duthuille," the Post notes. "But is it good for France?" The Post, affecting a concern for what's good for France, concludes that it is not.

"In these difficult and competitive times, the French government and the private sector of the economy are beginning to fear that the price for protecting those already employed and keeping them at their current level of compensation and job security is fewer jobs for the nonworking," the Post explains.

Directly contradicting its expressed concern for the "nonworking," the Post adds: "In the past, personnel reductions on this side of the Atlantic were accomplished largely through early retirement and attrition. Now, companies say they must lay people off, where they can."

In other words, before they only got rid of workers by retirement and so forth, without hiring anyone new, which explains the alarmingly high French youth unemployment rate which the Post claims to be concerned about. Now, however, attrition is not enough: they need to boot out those with jobs without waiting for them to retire, which will mean high unemployment not only for young people but for mature workers as well.

The Post article, for example, reports that there is a crisis of overproduction in the European auto and steel industries, and then presents "labor flexibility" as a solution. The Post does not explain how greater "labor flexibility" will increase projected demand for autos or steel. It will obviously increase profits for transnational corporations.

The problem for New World Order propagandists, in both governments and in the media, is that nobody in Europe believes anything they say any more.

The explanations for unemployment are especially problematic. The Post refers to "these difficult and competitive times."

The French public responds that if the times are "difficult" that is not the workers' fault but the fault of those who run the economic system, or the fault of the system itself. Anyway, the big business media have been trying desperately over the past year and a half to paint the economic situation as rosy.

On the other hand, if the times are merely "competitive," the population will naturally demand to know why. Of course French or American workers cannot compete against third world police states where workers have no rights. Why should they?

It is small wonder that the European population increasingly suspects the high unemployment rate is deliberately induced by the authorities to lower wages and destroy worker resistance.

"The OECD experts had a dream one night," the paper wrote in summing up the New World Order project. "In Paris in front of their offices in the Chateau de la Muette, a crowd of angry unemployed demand the abolition of the minimum wage, a reduction in social spending, general labor flexibility and the auctioning off of the public sector."

The hope is to use the army of unemployed in Europe to roll back all of the social gains of the past 50 years. The mobilizations against unemployment in France and Germany suggests that the European public is not falling for the scam. South Korean Scandal

In South Korea, efforts by authorities to impose brutal anti-labor "reforms" despite massive worker opposition were interrupted when the Hanbo steel and construction empire collapsed, leaving $6 billion in bank debt and triggering a scandal that has left the government staggering.

Senior South Korean officials, who were piously declaring only the day before that the anti-union "reforms" were the only way to stop economic hemorrhaging, were revealed to be among the main beneficiaries of the massive loan racket that ended in the Hanbo bankruptcy.

The "reforms" had already provoked nationwide general strikes throughout South Korea. Public opinion polls give the government the support of no more than 20% of the population.

In the circumstances, the work of corporate media propagandists gets harder every day.

This would ordinarily suggest that the British economy was doing poorly and the German economy was doing well. But that's not how the Times sees it in the era of the New World Order.

In their latest role, corporate media journalists have been assigned the job of depicting the British economy as a success.

What makes it a success? Exactly the things-low wages, joblessness, a collapsed health care system-that only a few years ago would have rated it as a failure. What was so recently represented as "economic decline" has now become "necessary reform" which is being urged on the rest of us.

Even stranger has been Germany's sudden reversal of fortune.

Up to the end of the Cold War, West Germany was the showcase of postwar capitalism, a country so splendidly successful that workers from less fortunate countries like Italy and Turkey flocked there to work as "gastarbeiter" or "guest workers."

Now, according to the mass media, Germany has become a failure, for the very reasons that only six years ago made it a success: high wages, decent working conditions, good health care.