Neoliberalismo, desarrollo y Seguridad Social
by Juan Jované
CEASPA, Panama 2003
88 pages, paperback
order through ceaspa@sinfo.net
This little book ought to have a big impact on next year’s elections. Odds are, however, that it won’t.
One reason why it probably won’t is that most of Panama’s news corporations have dedicated a lot of time and effort to vilifying the author and don’t care to present the other side. At Jované’s presentation at the Colegio de Abogados, The Panama News, El Panama America’s Siete weekend supplement and the Catholic FETV television network were present. The majority of the mainstream media were not. When you look at the partisan orientations of most of those media, and the interlocking ownerships and managements of most of these corporations with the two large insurance groups that stand to benefit from the private management of a large part of Panama’s now state-run retirement system, you should not be surprised.
Another reason why this book probably won’t affect next year’s elections is that the labor unions and community groups whose members packed the room for the presentation of Dr. Jované’s book have no electoral expression of their own. Privatization, globalization, the “Washington Consensus,” George W. Bush’s intentions in bilateral “free trade” negotiations between Panama and the United States, and market worship don’t seem to be issues among Mireyismo, which is headed toward spectacular extinction, and the alternatives posed its two potential successors embodied in the campaigns of Martín Torrijos and Guillermo Endara. Panama’s political class has rarely had so little to say about a subject with such profound implications for our future.
But then comes this book by the man who was fired as director of Panama’s Social Security Fund and unanimously dismissed on MEDCOM’s misnamed “Debate Abierto” as an “inflexible leftist ideologue.”
I read “Neoliberalismo, desarrollo y Seguridad Social” very carefully --- I read economics, especially when it’s in Spanish, more slowly than I get through my usual literary fare --- and looked in vain for references to Invincible Red Banners or calls to smash the imperialist US fascist aggressors and all their running dogs. I didn’t even find the words “proletariat” or “bourgeoisie,” nor citations to Marx or Lenin. I guess that Dr. Jované won’t win the Stalin Prize for this opus.
In form, this book is a series of three economics lectures, footnoted with citations mostly to Nobel laureates and other renowned economists, by a professor whose academic specialty is econometrics. But this is not a dry economics text by an abstruse number-crunching academic for similarly specialized colleagues. It’s written in Spanish that the Panamanian working man or woman who pays attention to the forces that affect his or her economic future, or the journalist who uses Spanish as a second language, can readily understand.
The first lecture, about the nature the worldwide neoliberal school of economic philosophy and the intentions of its proponents, sets the context for the second, about the real-world problems that Panama’s Social Security Fund faces, and the third, about the contrasting business/government and labor/left proposals about what to do about Seguro Social.
Quoting its outstanding advocates, particularly Friedrich A. Hayek, Jované demonstrates the millenarian, anti-democratic and unscientific nature of the economic philosophy that has for some years now been imposed on Latin America through outfits like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. “[T]his philosophical scaffolding that is neoliberalism constitutes a fundamentalist defense of freedom of the market,” Jované concludes. And then the professor offers the proofs of this philosophy’s performance throughout Latin America.
Such a “the proof is in the pudding” argument should suffice in the minds of working people anywhere in this region. But Jované doesn’t stop there. He proceeds to demolish the central postulates, theorems and assumptions upon which neoliberalism as an economic theory rests. “You’re dealing,” he concludes, “with a collection of extremely unreal assumptions.” He supports this conclusion not only with observed facts, but with the opinions of former World Bank economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and a number of other renowned scholars as well.
In the second chapter, Jované explains the realities of Panama’s economy and its social security system. We have an economy in which urban unemployment has hovered around 16 percent for many years, in which underemployment is endemic, and in which working people in their tens of thousands are being forced out of “regular” jobs that pay into the Social Security Fund and into self-employment and the informal economy. We have a government accustomed to using Seguro Social as a petty cash box. There is widespread evasion and non-payment of social security deductions.
Jované takes the point of view of a taxman, which a Seguro Social director must take. If there is anything dogmatic or inflexible about the thinking he shows in this book, it would be at this point, which rests upon a not entirely accurate presumption that the people and businesses who have been forced into arrears with the Social Security Fund or into the underground economy can afford to pay. Sure, many can pay, but that option just wasn’t available to many others who got caught in the economic free-fall that marked the beginning of this decade --- particularly as Panama has no bankruptcy reorganization laws of any consequence. But then, they don’t pay tax collectors to understand such concerns.
The final chapter is about international lenders’ insistence upon and the Pérez Balladares and Moscoso administrations’ acquiescence in moves to privatize our social security system.
Now I recall just a few weeks ago Mireya Moscoso calling in the nation’s religious leader and all but swearing on a stack of Bibles --- maybe even with copies of the Quran and the Bhagavad Gita tossed in for good measure --- that she wouldn’t privatize Seguro. Then Jované’s successor announced that the fund’s cash would be invested in a variety of private securities, by private brokers who would be hand-picked by the corrupt and nepotistic Mireyista regime without the formality of bidding procedures. And of course, under Mireya’s “transparency” regulations, the public will have no right to know how much of the fund the “brokers” will be siphoning off for “management fees” and such.
As Jované explains it:
“[Y]ou can talk of privatization when one of the two following situations occurs: a) assets of the public sector are transferred to the private sector, whether by sale or in some other form; or b) when the production of goods or services that was previously generated by public organisms comes to be realized, although with [public] financing... by the private sector.
“The second element is crucial to understand what’s happening, in that it constitutes a less visible, but no less real or profound, form of privatization.”
It’s not just a semantic argument, and, as Jované demonstrates, the stakes are enormous. The bottom line is that, if the international lenders, insurance groups and Moscoso administration get their way, there will be no retirement pensions of any sort for a large portion of Panama’s working class.
And what of the alternative that Jované offers? We have already heard the slurs and misrepresentations. However, stated by its proponent rather than by a gang of sneering rent-a-pundits, the labor/left alternative sounds remarkably unlike the Bolshevik Revolution. It does, however, imply the abandonment of neoliberal economic policies and a profound political democratization. Such reforms would inevitably upset the gravy train for the modern heirs of Pedrarias the Cruel, and surely disappoint the wannabes.
That’s why the observations and arguments put forward in this book are denied a fair hearing by most of Panama’s corporate maintstream media, and why the members of a bitterly divided and seriously threatened political class make common cause to so cavalierly and frivolously dismiss Jované as something that he’s not.
Come to think of it, this kind of reception from that particular crowd make a pretty good recommendation for Dr. Jované’s little book.
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