Human Rights Watch
I am absolutely astounded that the request is coming out at the beginning of August and the report is due to be presented in September. But then if you look at the proposed plan, it’s mostly “voices” and “vignettes,” with the data, whether aggregated or disaggregated, relegated to a secondary tier and an occluding haze of vagueness. There isn’t going to be any macroeconomic analysis, and there aren’t going to be any new (or even revitalized and relevant old ) policy alternatives arrived at through that kind of process. What one will get is something a long-distance philanthropic initiative and a expanded new UNICEF card.
It’s not transparently clear what the benefit of something like this is. But I suspect that “social enterprise” is a key. The report is meant to do for the G-20 what the whole vague “social enterprise” construct is meant to do for the rawer forms of capitalism: give it the trappings, if not the reality, of conscience. Maybe there’s a point to participating in that overarching project, but as a leftist and as someone searching for programmatic rather than random and sporadic directions for social change, I don’t really well see it.
If the “voices and experiences of the poor” are in desperate need of something like this as a vehicle to be communicated, they’re in even worse trouble.
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Scott Long
mailto:longs@hrw.org