Michel Chossudovsky

Michel Chossudovsky (born 1946) is a Canadian economist and author. He is a professor of economics at the University of Ottawa^[1] and the president and director of the Centre for Research on Globalization. He has acted as an economic adviser to governments of developing countries and has worked as a consultant for international organizations including the United Nations Development Programme, the African Development Bank, the United Nations African Institute for Economic Development and Planning, the United Nations Population Fund, the International Labour Organization, the World Health Organisation, and the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. ^[2]

Biography

Chossudovsky is the son of a Russian Jewish émigré, the career United Nations diplomat and academic Evgeny Chossudovsky, and an Irish Protestant, Rachel Sullivan.^[3]

Chossudovsky joined the University of Ottawa in 1968.^[4] He was a visiting professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile during the 1970–1973 government of Salvador Allende. It was the effects of General Augusto Pinochet's post-coup policies which sparked his interest in what he termed "economic repression".^[4] Among other measures, Pinochet's government quadrupled the price of bread, and Chossudovsky set out to examine the social effects, concluding that the government was engaging in more than just conventional political repression. He subsequently examined similar economic policies in a wide range of countries, often those associated with International Monetary Fund and/or World Bank programs. One of Chossudovsky's policy conclusions was that tax havens, in a world of increasingly mobile capital, had facilitated the "criminalization" of the global economy through movements of large amounts of drug money and other illegal finance: "This critical drain of billions of dollars in capital flight dramatically reduces state tax revenues, paralyses social programs, drives up budget deficits and spurs the accumulation of large public debts."^[4]

In 1993 Chossudovsky wrote an article in the New York Times saying that Boris Yeltsin's neoliberal reforms and privatization policies would lead to disaster.^[5] He has also contributed to the French magazine Le Monde diplomatique,^[6] and, more recently, to RT,^[7] as well as regularly being interviewed on Iran's Press TV.^[8] Chossudovsky was interviewed in the documentary film The Weight of Chains, which the Centre for Research on Globalization amongst others sponsored.^[9] In 2014 he was awarded the Gold Medal of Merit by the government of Serbia.^[10]

Centre for Research on Globalization

In 2001, Chossudovsky founded the Centre for Research on Globalization, becoming its editor and director. Located in Montreal, Canada, it describes itself as an "independent research and media organization" that provides "analysis on issues which are barely covered by the mainstream media".^[11] It maintains websites in several languages, including the English-language GlobalResearch.ca, which are critical of United States foreign policy and NATO as well as the official explanation of the September 11 attacks in 2001 and the war on terror. In a January 2012 article, he characterized the Free Syrian Army as "a de facto paramilitary creation of NATO."^[12] According to The Guardian newspaper, a cache of intercepted emails to and from Syrian president Bashar al-Assad's private account included one from his father-in-law, Fawaz Akhras, citing Chossudovsky's claims and asking Assad how true they were.^[13] Chossudovsky claimed that deaths of protesters during the Euromaidan demonstrations in Ukraine were "triggered by Neo-Nazi elements", used "to break the legitimacy of a duly elected government."^[14]

Criticism

In his book 2000 Bosnia, Kosova, and the West, Mike Karadjis refers to Chossudovsky as a "noted apologist for the Milošević regime".^[15] At the time of the Kosovo war, Karadjis accused Chossudovsky of setting out a 'meticulous frame-up', 'full of half-truths, assumptions, and innuendoes about the Kosovo Liberation Army's (KLA) alleged use of drug money', which sought to discredit the KLA.^[16]

In the National Post, Terry Glavin accused Chossudovsky of 'mouthing Baathist propaganda'.^[17] Glavin quotes Chossudovsky's characterisation of the 'Syrian revolt' as a revolt of 'Islamists, Salafi as well as Muslim Brotherhood gunmen, [-] death squads supported directly by Turkey and Israel”.^[17]

A 2005 article in The Jewish Tribune criticized the Centre for Research on Globalization's website as "rife with anti-Jewish conspiracy theory and Holocaust denial." Michel Chossudovsky responded that he is of Jewish heritage and would be one of the last people to condone antisemitic views.^[18] The same article also reported that B'nai B'rith Canada wrote a letter to the University of Ottawa asking for the university "to conduct its own investigation of this propagandist site."^[18]

In a 2006 Western Standard article by Terry O'Neill, Chossudovsky was included among "Canada's nuttiest professors", "whose absurdity stands head and shoulders above their colleagues" and who were "peddling half-baked or discredited theories or plain old bigotry".^[19] Chussodovsky was said to hold that the U.S. had fore-knowledge of the September 11 attacks and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami; that Washington had weapons that could influence climate change; and that the large banking institutions are the cause of the collapse of smaller economies, characterised by O'Neill as " more like wild-eyed conspiracy theories than serious political discourse".^[19]

Bibliography

• With Fred Caloren and Paul Gingrich, Is the Canadian Economy Closing Down? (Montreal: Black Rose, 1978) ISBN 0-919618-80-4
• Towards Capitalist Restoration? Chinese Socialism After Mao (New York: St Martin's, 1986 and London: Macmillan, 1986) ISBN 0-333-38441-5
• The Globalization of Poverty: Impacts of IMF and World Bank Reforms, (Penang: Third World Network, 1997) and (London: Zed, 1997) ISBN 81-85569-34-7 and ISBN 1-85649-402-0
• Exporting Apartheid to Sub-Saharan Africa (New Delhi: Madhyam, 1997) ISBN 81-86816-06-2
• 'Washington's New World Order Weapons Can Trigger Climate Change', (26 November 2000)
• War and Globalization: The Truth Behind 11 September (Global Outlook and the Centre for Research on Globalization, 2002)^[20]
  • in French as: Guerres et Mondialisation: A Qui Profite Le 11 Septembre? (Serpent a Plume, 2002) ISBN 2-84261-387-2
• The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order (Oro, Ontario: Global Outlook, 2003) ISBN 0-9731109-1-0 – Excerpt.
• America's "War on Terrorism" (Pincourt, Quebec: Global Research, 2005) ISBN 0-9737147-1-9^[21]
• (with Andrew Gavin Marshall, eds) The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century (Global Research Publishers, 2010)
• Towards a World War III Scenario. The Dangers of Nuclear War (2012)^[22]

References

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Michel Chossudovsky

• Chossudovsky's articles at Centre for Research on Globalization
• A list of audio interviews. French Connection Audio Archive