http://counterpunch.com/prashad02222011.html
Yet another revoltt against neoliberals, if not neoliberalism.
The main face of the neo-liberal agenda was Shokri Ghanem, who would be removed as Prime Minister of the cabinet in 2006 for the more important role as head of the National Oil Corporation. Ghanem aggressively pushed for foreign investment into the oil sector, and hastened to implement the Exploration and Production Sharing Agreements with companies that ranged from Occidental Petroleum to China National Petroleum. Britain’s Tony Blair and France’s Sarkozy went to kiss Ghanem’s ring and pledge finance for oil concessions. It is the reason why the British government freed the alleged Lockerbie bomber and that Berlusconi bowed down before Omar al-Mukhtar’s son in 2008 and handed over $5 billion as an apology for Italian colonialism. In his characteristic bluntness, Berlusconi said that he apologized so that Italy would get “less illegal immigrants and more oil.”
Alongside Ghanem is Qaddafi’s son, Saif, who wrote a dissertation at the London School of Economics in September 2007 on “The Role of Civil Society in the Democratization of Global Decision Making: from “soft” power to collective decision making” (the work was advised remarkably by David Held). Saif argued for the need to give NGOs voting rights at the level of international decision making, where otherwise the United States and its Atlantic allies hold sway. The “essential nature” of NGOs, he argued, is to be “independent critics and advocates of the marginal and vulnerable.” To allow NGOs to temper the ambitions of the North is far more “realistic,” Saif argued, than to hope to transform international relations. That kind of realism led to his faith in the “reforms” and in his recent call for the harshest armed violence against the protests in Tripoli and Benghazi. “Civil Society,” in the language of neo-liberalism, is restricted to the work of establishment NGOs that are loath to revise settled power equations. The ragged on the streets are not part of the “civil society”; they are Unreason afoot.
