People Before Profit blog

Texas to do Business with Cuba

Sat, 31 May 2008 02:10:00 +0000

5-30-08, 10:13 am

A trade delegation led by the Texas Department of Agriculture is in Cuba to negotiate a deal between the island country's government and agribusiness in the Lone Star state, according to the Dallas Morning News.

The Department's commissioner, Todd Staples is leading the delegation, according to the Texas Department of Agriculture's Web site. 'This is a great opportunity to build long-lasting trade relationships with Cuba,' Staples said. 'We want Texas producers to have access to this growing market and for Cubans to have the chance to enjoy the best agricultural products the world offers: Texas food and fiber.'

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Texas has exported well over $100 million in agricultural products to Cuba since 2000. In 2000, the Clinton administration made some exceptions on the sale of agriculture and medical supplies to Cuba, which have continued with increased scrutiny and barriers under a tightening of the blockade by the Bush administration. Additionally, the Bush administration imposed tight restrictions on family travel and money transfers back to Cuba and more denials by the US State Department of cultural and educational exchanges.

Staples said, 'This is a great occasion for two nations to work together to improve relations and what better way to do that than through food.'

The Texas delegation to Cuba comes just days after Republican nominee John McCain announced he would enforce a tough blockade against Cuba and would apply the same Bush administration restrictions on travel. McCain also criticized presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama for calling for different diplomatic relations with Cuba. In another of what has become a habit of flip-flopping, McCain appeared to reverse his own position on easing the embargo and opening a dialogue, which he had called for in his first run for the presidency in 2000.

By contrast Barack Obama told a Cuban American organization in Miami, Florida earlier this month that he would lift the tough restrictions on family travel and money transfers, to thunderous applause. He added that he would be willing to open a dialogue with Cuba, but insisted on leaving the embargo intact.

Obama's refusal to budge on the embargo issue, earned him some criticism from some staunch supporters who want a new direction in relations with Cuba. In an op-ed for The Nation this week, Progressives for Obama co-founder Tom Hayden saw Obama's stance on Cuba and Latin America on the whole as a huge step forward from the Bush administration's treatment of the hemisphere, but also as an 'evolution to the center' and suggested Obama 'is burdened with the contradictions of the liberal national security hawks.'

Politics aside, the Texas ranchers and agribusiness corporations want to do regular business with Cuba. But some of them didn't miss the chance to insult their Cuban hosts. According to the Dallas Morning News, Farm Bureau President Kenneth Dierschke presented to Cuban host Pedro Alvarez a key chain with a 'Texas quarter.' Dierschke said, 'So when you come to Texas you can have some money to spend.'

Alvarez, however, remained polite and generous. “This is a great opportunity to renew old friendships, and what better than with Texas, a very important state with a long history in Cuba,' he reportedly responded.

--Reach Joel Wendland at

Japan: Protesters Say No to US Bases

Sat, 31 May 2008 01:59:00 +0000

5-30-08, 10:02 am

Original source: Akahata

Protesters shout ‘Don’t turn Sukumo Port into a U.S. naval base!’

On the early morning of May 21, the U.S. Aegis missile destroyer O’Kane based at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, made a call at Sukumo Port in Kochi Prefecture, western Japan.

About 180 people, including political party representatives and peace activists, held a rally in protest against the USS O’Kane’s entry into the port. They marched in demonstration holding a sign that read, “Don’t turn Sukumo Port into a U.S. naval base!” and shouting “O’Kane, go back to Hawaii!”

Speaking at the rally, Kochi Peace Committee Secretary Wada Tadaaki said, “The aim of this port call of a U.S. warship, the second since 2006, is to examine Sukumo Bay’s feasibility as a U.S. naval base serving the U.S. military strategy. Let us make efforts to frustrate the U.S. government’s attempt to accomplish this.”

Japanese Communist Party representative as well as representatives from the Democratic, Social Democratic, and New Socialist parties made speeches

JCP candidate for the House of Representative in the Kochi No.3 constituency Murakami Nobuo said, “The O’Kane is equipped with nuclear-capable Tomahawk cruise missiles. In order to prevent U.S. warships from bringing nuclear weapons into the Sukumo Bay, we will do all we can to increase our opposition and to heighten public commitment to never allow the U.S. vessels’ entry into Sukumo Port.”

The rally adopted a statement of protest against Sukumo City Mayor Nakanishi Seiji, the U.S. President, and the Commander of the O’Kane.

May 22, 2008

Sit-in against U.S. base construction marks 1500th day

On May 25, about 300 people took part in a rally to commemorate the 1500th day of the residents’ sit-in against the construction of a new U.S. base in the sea off the Henoko district of Okinawa.

May 27 is the 1500th day since the sit-in protest in the Henoko beach started on April 19, 2004.

On behalf of the organizers, Ashitomi Hiroshi, representative of the Nago Council against the Construction of the U.S. On-Sea Heliport, spoke. He stated that it has become clearer that a new base must not be built, citing the U.S. Federal District Court’s decision ordering the U.S. government to consider the impact of the base construction on dugong, the endangered species living in the Henoko area, as well as the recent discovery of a colony of blue coral there.

Speakers included representatives of other organizations and Dietmembers.

Japanese Communist Party member of the House of Representatives Akamine Seiken encouraged participants by stating, “The struggle in Henoko is shaking the Japan-U.S. military alliance.”

May 26, 2008

From Akahata

Working Families Face Growing Income Instability

Sat, 31 May 2008 01:58:00 +0000

5-30-08, 9:59 am

An increasing number of working families are 'being swamped by a rising tide of income instability,' says a new report released by labor-backed think-tank Economic Policy Institute this week.

The report, titled “The Rising Instability of American Family Incomes, 1969-2004,” demonstrates a growing trend toward income insecurity over the last 40 years despite apparent general economic growth and stable income statistics produced by government institutions.

Jacob S. Hacker and Elisabeth Jacobs, the authors of the report, examined data produced by Panel Study of Income Dynamics, which tracks income patterns, and revealed that 'income patterns for many families have become much more erratic.' “Where they might have expected to make a gradual but steady ascent up the income ladder, more Americans are finding themselves on an economic roller coaster,” explained Hacker. “Instead of being able to plan for their future, they’re left worrying about when the next big dip is coming.” The causes for the growing trend toward income volatility are numerous and there are some more recent disturbing trends since the turn of the century, the report explains. Changes in sources of income within households doubled over the course of the time period under study, with the biggest numbers of changes occurring in the mid-1980s and in the early 2000s.

Linked to this is the fact that the share of working-age people experiencing the loss of half or more of their household income rose from less than 4% in the early 1970s to nearly 10% in the 2000s. Indeed, the incidence of large income drops was much greater during the 2001 recession than in the recession of the early 1980s, which was the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.

Income volatility has more dramatically impacted men than women, with men seeing the larger and more sustained rises in earnings instability than women, the study shows. This accounts for much of the increase in family income volatility, since men’s earnings make up a larger share of household income.

These facts make the case for a more concerted push to erase the gender income gap to help ease the disproportionate impact of volatility on household incomes. Additionally, these findings also undermine right-wing critics who blame women who leave and enter the workforce to care for children or other family members for household income instability.

The report also demonstrates that higher education and skills do not necessarily prevent working families from being impacted by the growing trend of income instability. The increase in volatility crosses all major demographic and education groups. In fact, the report showed, over the past generation income volatility grew faster for those with at least four years of college than it did for those with just a high school education.

It also appears that a two-income household (or more) in recent years may not lessen the impact of income instability as it did in the 1990s. “The lessening effectiveness of some of the things families typically do to improve their situation only compounds their worries,” said Jacobs. “The end result is more uncertainty with fewer options for getting their family onto more secure ground.”

Dwindling health and pension coverage, job dislocations and high levels of involuntary job displacement, rising household debt, bankruptcy and mortgage foreclosures, and the erosion of public benefits contribute to the disturbing trends documented in this report.

--Reach Joel Wendland at

Israel refuses to issue ID cards to unregistered Palestinians

Sat, 31 May 2008 01:45:00 +0000

5-30-08, 9:48 am

Original source: B'Tselem

“I long for the day I’ll finally get an ID card. I want to pass through each and every checkpoint in the West Bank, just to show everyone I have an ID card. Sometimes I feel that death will be the only solution to my problem. In the afterlife I’m sure no one gets asked about his ID card.”

This depressing quote, from the testimony of Muhannad al-Khafash, a resident of Mardah, Nablus District, offers an insight into the lives of many other residents of the West Bank who are trapped in a similar predicament. These are persons whose parents did not register them at birth in the Palestinian population registry, usually due to ignorance or neglect of bureaucratic affairs, and consequently have no legal status. The major result of their lack of status is their inability to obtain an ID card, which is essential to accomplishing the most mundane acts in many walks of life.

Israel’s policy

Since the occupation began in 1967, Israel has exercised almost total control over the Palestinian population registry and has sole power to determine who is a Palestinian resident. In this capacity, Israel could enable children whose parents did not register them – a tendency that is more prominent as regards daughters – to obtain ID cards by applying the simple and relatively rapid solution is known as “late registration.” However, Israel refuses to authorize this procedure and insists, instead, on channeling these cases to the long and exhausting family unification procedure, which was created to enable a non-resident of the West Bank or Gaza Strip (generally spouses of residents of the Occupied Territories) to live there. Not only is the demand to apply for family unification ridiculous as regards people who have never lived apart from their families and have always resided in the West Bank, but the procedure cannot even be implemented, since Israel has frozen handling of all family unification requests over the last seven years. Furthermore, even if the freeze is removed, and the quota applied prior to the outbreak of the second intifada remains in effect, it would take dozens of years to arrange their status. B'Tselem has taken the testimonies of Palestinians without a legal status who began the family unification process when they were minors, who are now married with families, and have yet to receive a status.

Effects on daily life

Possession of an ID card is especially important in the Occupied Territories, where Israel runs a complex and cumbersome bureaucratic system. Due to the severe restrictions on movement that Israel imposes on Palestinians, many residents are required to show proof of identity on a daily basis, at the many checkpoints that are spread throughout the West Bank or at the Erez Crossing on Gaza’s border. Persons who cannot provide official proof of their identity are subjected to harassment, delays and even denial of the right to pass through checkpoints. Those unregistered persons who insist on trying to live normatively despite their lack of status are forced to deal with daily humiliation and harassment.

Raafat Abu Ra'iyeh, a resident of Tarqumya in the Hebron District, told B’Tselem about the routine he has been forced to adopt because he does not have an ID card: “About a year and a half ago, I found work in a bakery in al-‘Eizariya. I work and sleep in the bakery and almost never leave it. Each time I return to Hebron, I’m detained at the Container checkpoint until they verify my story, which takes about four hours. Sometimes, after I pass through that checkpoint, I’m detained again at the Gush Etzion checkpoint. It’s been over six months now since I last saw my family. I miss them a lot, but I’m too scared to go to Hebron because of the checkpoints.”

While Abu Ra’iyeh pays a heavy price for insisting on supporting himself, others who have no status cannot find work at all, and are forced to depend financially on their families. Mu'az Abu 'Eid, from the village of Bidu in Ramallah District, will soon be a young father but has no idea how he will support his new family: “Because I can't work outside the village and there are almost no jobs in Bidu, my financial situation is bad. I rely on support from my parents and brothers. Being a financial burden on them is very hard on me psychologically. My wife is six months' pregnant, and soon I'll be a father. The financial burden I already place on my family will grow even heavier. I don't know how I'll be able to support the newborn child. “

Mahmoud Nawaj'ah, a resident of Susiya in the Hebron District, used harsher words to describe his problems finding work due to his lack of status: “Without an ID card, I don't exist; I'm like one of my sheep. I can't work in Israel without an ID card. I earn a living only from grazing, which doesn't bring in enough money to meet my family's needs.”

Another important aspect of life without an ID card is unregistered persons’ inability to fully realize the basic right to education. Children who have no ID numbers come up against various obstacles during their formal schooling. Those who manage to overcome bureaucracy and graduate high school – usually due to pressure by the family on key figures in the education system – are then often forced to give up on hopes of higher education. Bureaucratic obstacles to registration combine with difficulty to get to the few universities and colleges that are dispersed throughout the West Bank. Safa Fuqahaa from the town of Tubas in the northern West Bank had to give up on her plans for professional training: “After I finished high school, I started to attend nursing school at the A-Rawda College in Nablus. At the beginning of the fourth semester, the second intifada began and the Israeli army set up a lot of checkpoints on the way to Nablus. I had to stop studying because I can’t pass through checkpoints without an ID card. Stopping my studies was traumatic for me, especially because I was one of the top students”.

Unregistered persons suffer also from a particularly painful repercussion of their lack of status: many find it difficult to marry, as potential partners are deterred by the daily burden and constant restrictions that accompany life without status. Lena Fuqahaa from ‘Ein al-Beida in Jenin District told B’Tselem she has almost given up hope of marrying and starting her own family: “A few men have proposed to me, but each time they changed their mind once my parents told them that I don't have an ID card. I wouldn't start a new life either with someone who doesn't have an ID number. It's just asking for trouble. It hurts me a lot that I can't marry, especially since all my girlfriends and female relatives are married.”

Intisar Abu ‘Issa, a resident of Deir al-Ghusun in the Tulkarm District, chose to have children who are now paying the price of their mother’s lack of status: “When my son Majdi was four, he suffered face burns and needed cosmetic surgery to remove the facial scars and distortions. We planned to go abroad for the operation, but I couldn’t go because I didn't have an ID card. He was a small child and very dependent on me, and we had to cancel the trip. Majdi did not get the treatment he needed.”

These testimonies, from a mere handful out of an unknown number of West Bank and Gaza Strip residents who live without ID cards, offer an insight into the absurdity of life without legal status. It is preposterous that a person be forced to depend on the random kindness of a security official, as occurred in a case witnessed by B'Tselem, in which a Palestinian without status was released from detention imposed on him after the detention facility’s computer was fed a fictitious ID number.

Israel’s obligations

International humanitarian law requires the occupier to “take all the measures in his power to restore, and ensure, as far as possible, public order and safety”. In another article, the Hague Regulations require the occupier to respect family rights in the occupied territory. These provisions are part of international customary law, which bind the military authorities in occupied territory with respect to their actions regarding the civilian population. Israel has acknowledged its obligation to comply with the humanitarian provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Article 27 of the Convention states that, “Protected persons are entitled, in all circumstances to respect for . . . their family rights.”

International human rights law stipulates that, “Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law”. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights also recognizes the right of every person to a nationality, to found a family, to social security, to free choice of employment, to an adequate standard of health and well-being, and to education.

The Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which Israel ratified, recognizes the right to liberty of movement to everyone lawfully within the territory of the state. The Convention on the Rights of the Child, also ratified by Israel, requires that a child be registered immediately after birth, and recognizes the right to “the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health”, the right to education and to higher education that is accessible to all on the basis of capacity. The Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, also ratified by Israel, recognizes the right of everyone to social security, that “the widest possible protection and assistance should be accorded to the family”, and the right to education.

In its prolonged refusal to offer a practicable and rapid solution to the problem of persons without a legal status, and its attempt to turn this humanitarian problem into a political- negotiation tool, Israel has infringed, time and again, the rights of these persons to a normal life in the territory it occupies.

B'Tselem calls on the government of Israel to arrange immediately, in the Palestinian population registry, the registration of Palestinians without a legal status.

From B'Tselem

Book Review – Darker Nations

Sat, 31 May 2008 01:42:00 +0000

Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World New York: The New Press, 2007

After the calamity of World War II the victors immediately began to fight over the spoils. The 'First World' of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)—primarily the US and Western Europe—was dedicated to spreading 'Western' political ideals and market capitalism, while the 'Second World' of the Soviet Union, East Germany, Eastern Europe, and eventually China maintained the validity of socialist planned economies. The question since then has been the place in the scheme of things for that other part of the world which was either just escaping from of still under the iron heel of western imperialism.

The strange logic of western political discourse consists of paradigms such as the following: the 'Third World' is named as such by the 'First World' because it somehow inherently inferior and developmentally backwards compared to the 'First World,' even though its shortcomings are largely due to exploitative, extractive 'First World' economic policies. Condemning the thing you exploit because of its exploited status is typical of steely capitalist logic. This condescension and labeling justifies its own exploitation, and conveniently—with much effort and bloodshed—erases the history of resistance to those policies. As the Russian Tsar told Alexander Pushkin when presented with the latter's proposal to write a history of a peasant leader: 'such a man has no history.'

But of course the peoples of the Third World do have histories that cannot be erased, and also wealth in terms of resources, culture, and in the promise of struggle against oppression and domination. Not only that, the peoples who are the subject of Vijay Prashad's /The Darker Nations:/ /A People's History of the Third World/ organized to capture and subvert that pejorative label and turn it into a liberation project. From meetings in Baku in 1920 to Havana in 1966 and beyond, in United Nations and in the streets, factories and fields, oppressed peoples caught between the bilateral poles of the Cold War landscape struggled to lead their own movements and make their own history. Prashad skillfully weaves a history that takes in the Third World project in all its guises, from those answering Lenin's call for 'self-determination of nations' to 'Arab socialism' in the Cold War to the various coups and strongmen of today.

Unfortunately, the project in its various guises leading up to the Non-Aligned Movement had an inherent weakness: after independence had been won, the conservative nationalist forces in the popular coalitions took control and the progressives, socialists, and Communists were purged and in many cases massacred. What resulted was the gradual dilution of the liberation struggle into the western neo-imperialisms, or 'structural adjustments,' of the IMF, World Bank, and US trade deals and military bases. There followed a hegemonic normalization of the traditional oligarchic forces and their classist, racist, and religious ideologies. By the 1980s the promise of the Non-Aligned Movement was eclipsed by international capitalism benefitting a new US-friendly elite, and there didn't even exist a credible political force to advocate something as clear and simple as debt relief. The suffering masses are offered the cruel consolation of cultural nationalism, racism, and religious chauvinism; the world is now seeing in clear, unmistakable terms the results of the First World victory in the resurgence of military-power-as-policy in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Prashad's work is an important contribution to Marxist historiography. He clearly elucidates what went wrong, and does an admirable job in explaining how the dominance of western imperialism never went away, but merely put on a kinder, gentler mask. Prashad's book also is a timely warning to those seeking a broad coalition with the non-Marxist left. Protests for debt relief or against globalization are extremely valuable, but those who are protesting must have a clear theoretical idea of what they might replace global capitalism with. As Prashad concludes, what allows these present regimes to operate within IMF-style rules and models is 'lack of coherence and dynamism' on the left. There is 'no lucid vision for the new dispensation' and no 'strong institutional formation to tackle US-driven primacy.' Reform within the rules and structures of capitalism is simply not enough to overturn old hierarchies and end exploitation; that's because the essence of capitalism is in fact nothing /but /exploitation.

But in addition to describing the unfortunate cooptation of the Third World liberation project, Prashad reminds us that IMF-style globalization does have its limits, and is inspiring new movements all over the world that advocate women's rights, land and water rights, cultural dignity, indigenous rights, political representation, and basic human rights. The unanswered question is whether these movements can avoid past mistakes and assemble a sound political program that will truly change who is in the driver's seat.

Building its Ties to Colombia: Canada's Imperial Adventure in the Andes

Sat, 31 May 2008 01:38:00 +0000

5-30-08, 9:39 am

Original source: ZNet

On May 5th, 2008 Canada's Trade Minister, David Emerson, proudly declared that Canada is 'very close' to concluding free trade negotiations with Colombia. According to Foreign Affairs officials, a deal could be reached in a few short months, meaning that Canada would complete its free trade agreement with Colombia before the United States completes its own deal with the Andean country. In the U.S., Bush faces strong Congressional opposition to such a partnership.

Canada's push into Colombia is part of its broader interest and growing economic influence in Latin America going back to the 1990s. Canadian political and business leaders have been clear that economic expansion into Latin America (and the Caribbean) is a central priority of Canadian foreign policy. This agenda has been stepped up under the Stephen Harper Tory government, with cabinet ministers scurrying across the region building up Canada's political and economic ties. By 2006, Canada was the third largest foreign investor in Latin America and the Caribbean. It's the biggest investor in mining and has a strong presence in financial services, telecommunications and oil and gas among other industries.

Colombia is a centerpiece of this engagement with the Americas. Three cabinet ministers in the Harper Tory government, including Harper himself, visited Colombia and met with high ranking politicians there within an eight month period between July, 2007 and February, 2008. Harper met with Uribe in July, 2007 to discuss the free trade initiative. Beverly Oda, minister for International Cooperation, met with Colombia's Minister of Foreign Affairs in January, 2008, to discuss aid projects and mining policy. And Maxime Bernier, Minister of Foreign Affairs, met with Uribe in February, 2008 to again discuss economic relations. Aside from the U.S. (Canada's neighbor and largest trading partner) and Afghanistan (where Canada is at war) no other country has received this kind of high level attention from Canadian political leaders in recent years. Colombia: A Human Rights Disaster

Canada's effort to deepen its ties with Colombia comes despite the latter's well documented human rights problems. Privatization, foreign investment and extreme inequalities are maintained through extraordinary levels of military and paramilitary violence. This terror, primarily directed at trade unionists, and indigenous peoples and peasants whose land contains subsurface riches, has increased with neoliberal restructuring and the growing presence of foreign, including Canadian, corporations. While the main guerrilla forces, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN), have also committed violence against social movement actors, according to the Colombian Commission of Jurists state security forces and paramilitaries account for the overwhelming majority of such incidents.

Colombia stands without close rival in the world today for the number of trade unionists assassinated. Since 1991, more than 2,000 labor leaders have been killed. Forty-two percent of human rights violations against unionists take place in the mining-energy sector. Ninety-seven percent of the homicides against unionists have been perpetrated by military and paramilitary actors, with three percent being carried out by guerrillas and other armed actors.

Meanwhile, three million people have been displaced in Colombia, two million of whom were displaced from mining regions as military and paramilitary forces make way for foreign capital. This displacement is bound up with extraordinary levels of violence in the mining zones. According to mining union leader and target of paramilitary assassination attempts, Francisco Ramírez Cuellar, in the mining zones between 1995 and 2002, there were 828 homicides, 142 forced disappearances, 117 people injured, 71 people tortured, 355 death threats and 150 arbitrary detentions, every year. On top of those figures, there were also 433 massacres.

Whether or not foreign corporations are working directly with paramilitaries (and they often are), they benefit from this culture of violence. Indeed, an earlier wave of Canadian corporate expansion into Colombia in the 1990s -- including Enbridge's investment in the OCENSA pipeline, Corona Goldfield's mining investment in Simiti and Nortel's investment in the privatized telecommunications market, among others -- was directly facilitated by state and paramilitary terror against social movement actors. It was also facilitated, it's worth noting, by the Canadian state, which was helmed at the time by Liberal governments. One of the more egregious examples of this support, perhaps, was the Canadian International Development Agency's (CIDA) funding the rewriting of Colombia's mining code in a strongly pro-foreign investor fashion.

In Praise of Colombia: The Harper Government's Willful Ignorance

The Harper government defends its move to deepen Canada's relations with Colombia further by playing down the profound human rights problems plaguing the country and the Colombian state's and political leaders' intimate involvement in them.

Harper took the occasion of his visit to the country to laud Uribe, declaring that 'President Uribe and his government have made tremendous progress against the vicious cycle of conflict, violence and under-development that has plagued Colombia for decades.' Harper's praise for Uribe is actually parroted word-for-word by Bernier during his subsequent trip to the war-torn country, as if by saying it enough it may actually become true (or they are afraid of what might happen if they do not stick religiously to a simple, straightforward and easily quotable message on the subject).

After announcing in May, 2008 that a free trade deal is near at hand, Emerson also eschewed concerns about Colombia's and Uribe's rights record: 'Unless we were presented with overwhelming and solid evidence that the government is somehow behind some of the killings of labor leaders, I just don't think it's right to simply ... hold them back and to penalize them when they're trying very hard to make progress.' Instead, the problem rests with the ideological blinkers of the trade deal's critics: 'There are people who, for dogmatic reasons candidly, do not want us to do a free trade deal with Colombia.'

But shortly after Bernier's comments, and just two months before Emerson's, at least six trade unionists that participated in or helped to organize country-wide demonstrations against state and paramilitary violence on March 6, 2008 were assassinated. Four were killed within a week of the demonstration. Observers argue that the assassinations and death threats were facilitated by the comments of Uribe's close political ally and advisor, José Obdulio Gavaria, who called the protest organizers FARC guerrillas in the media. Such accusations are tantamount to placing a bounty on a person's head, given that the government and the paramilitaries are at war with the FARC and thus consider its members and supporters to be legitimate targets. It is also well known that labeling government opponents as FARC members or supporters -- and thus 'terrorists' -- is often little more than an excuse used to exterminate them.

But the murders surrounding the March 6th demonstrations, most likely done by paramilitaries, are not anomalous under Uribe. The rate of paramilitary murders each year, according to the Colombian Commission of Jurists, is between 800-900 people, and has been essentially unchanged since 2003 when the Uribe government supposedly began 'demobilizing' them. Moreover, the Uribe government is facing a corruption scandal in which seventy-seven political leaders, most of whom have strong ties to Uribe and some of whom are members of his family, are under investigation for ties to paramilitaries.

Violence and corruption are deeply entrenched in Colombian political life. Elections regularly feature assassinations of candidates, threats against candidates and voters, vote buying, illegal campaign financing, fraud and disenfranchisement of the country's significant displaced population. Following the October 28, 2007 elections for governors, mayors and municipal posts, OAS observers noted that these election irregularities, some of which they witnessed first hand, undermine democracy in the country. One observer declared that 'Colombia has the most backward electoral system in Latin America.'

Contrast that observation with that of international observers who found the recall referendum and presidential election of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez to be fair and legitimate. But according to Canadian political leaders, Chavez's Venezuela, despite having a far superior human rights and electoral record than Colombia and efforts to redistribute wealth to poorer communities, is authoritarian. Uribe's Colombia, on the other hand, is a beacon of freedom and democracy. During his visit to Colombia, Harper praised the government and presented it (and Chile, which he also visited) as an alternative to Left-Wing governments in the Andean region. 'While many nations are pursuing market reform and democratic development,' he opined, 'others [read Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia] are falling back to economic nationalism and protectionism, to political populism and authoritarianism.'

An Imperialist Client State

Harper etal.'s misleading portrayal of political developments in the Andean region, and their cozying up to Uribe despite his support for state and paramilitary violence, is not an accident. But while the caricature they paint of Colombia and its neighbours serves to justify continuing corporate investment in the country, it also serves another equally important purpose. Colombia's political leaders are proudly compliant with imperial interests in the region, while the governments around them increasingly are not; it is a reliable imperial ally in the midst of political and economic uncertainty represented by strong social movements and Left Wing governments.

Thus the United States and Canada have chosen to promote Colombia as an aggressive and heavily militarized bulwark against anti-imperialism in the region -- an Israel of the Andes. Like Israel, Colombia receives strong diplomatic support from its imperial allies despite its terrible rights record and its belligerence towards its neighbors. And like Israel, it has also been the beneficiary of American military largesse, most notably via the $4.1 billion Plan Colombia. As critics have pointed out, Plan Colombia, introduced under Bill Clinton and nominally designed to target the coca industry, has led to an increase in violence and displacement in regions where foreign companies are hoping to exploit natural resources. Despite this, Canada's Foreign Affairs publicly supports the scheme.

Canada has also contributed directly to Colombia's military build-up, if in a small way compared to the USA. At least forty-five helicopters have been sold from Canada by the military and private companies -- thirty-three by the Department of National Defence (DND) -- to the Colombian military since 1995. DND sold the Bell CH135 choppers to the U.S. State Department, which retrofitted them with machine guns and sent them to Colombia. DND knew where the helicopters were headed when it made the sale. Even though the Canadian government requires export permits for military hardware and says it's opposed to the sale of weapons to countries in conflict and with a record of human rights abuses, no export permit was required for DND's sale because the helicopters were originally sold to the USA. Another Canadian company, Vector Aerospace, was contracted in 2001 by the Colombian military for helicopter maintenance and servicing.

Recently, in a tell-all book called Nous étions invincibles (We were invincible) an ex-Joint Task Force 2 member (Canada's highly secretive commando unit) alleges that Canadian commandos battled the FARC in the late 1990s. If true -- and it's hard to independently verify given the secretive nature of JTF2, although there's no good reason for the author to make up stories about fighting the FARC in particular -- it's an astonishing revelation that the Canadian military has been actively intervening in Colombia.

Colombia's policing role in the region was bluntly demonstrated on March 1st, 2008, when its military violated Ecuadorian sovereignty and bombed a FARC camp located just inside the Ecuadorian border with Colombia. Colombian ground soldiers then crossed into Ecuador to secure the camp. Twenty-three people were killed in the attack, including the FARC's second in command and a key player in the recent release of the guerrilla group's hostages, Raul Reyes. Ecuador and Venezuela (which has been threatened by Colombia in the recent past) responded to this violation of international law by cutting off diplomatic ties and sending troops, tanks and planes to their Colombian borders.

While the Colombian and the international mainstream media reported widely that those killed were FARC guerrillas, it turns out that one was an Ecuadorian citizen and four were Mexican graduate students interviewing FARC members for their research on the country's peace process. Uribe also claims, as was widely reported in the media, that Reyes' computer, found by Colombian soldiers despite the camp being turned to rumble, contained direct evidence linking Hugo Chavez and Venezuelan money to the FARC. This claim has not been independently verified, and no illicit relations between Chavez and the FARC have ever been documented. Uribe also alleges that a picture of Reyes with Ecuador's Security minister was on the FARC leader's laptop. The photo was printed on the front page of the Colombian daily, El Tiempo, before it was revealed that the person with Reyes was in fact the secretary of the Argentine Communist Party.

Uribe steadfastly refuses to guarantee that Colombia will not violate its neighbors' sovereignty again. Instead, he maintains Colombia's right to pre-emptive intervention in the region as a supposed defense against terrorism. The intervention in Ecuador and the threat to do it again is a clear warning from Colombia to its left-leaning neighbours that it will not hesitate to throw its military might around should they get out of line.

Chavez actually claimed well before the March 1st raid that Colombia, with the backing of the United States, was trying to provoke Venezuela into a military conflict. In the last few years, the Colombian government covertly recruited Venezuelan military and security officers for the kidnapping of a Colombian leftist leader; Colombian paramilitaries infiltrated Venezuela to violently support would-be anti-Chavez plotters; and paramilitaries routinely crossed into Venezuelan to hunt down people fleeing them.

Canada supports Colombia's violation of Ecuadorian sovereignty, if not as bluntly as the United States. Despite Colombia's role as the aggressor, the serious nature of its actions and the potential instability it could cause the region, Canada's intervention at the OAS debate on the incident was a mere one minute and ten seconds. Canada's representative at the OAS, Graeme Clarke, made a brief and general call for a respect for sovereignty, without naming Colombia as the violator of international law or criticizing it for threatening to do it again. It's not a stretch to read Clarke's intervention as directed not only at Colombia but also at Venezuela and Ecuador for supposedly supporting terrorism and for sending troops to their borders with Colombia in response to the latter's aggression. He then urged dialogue between the three countries and proposed mediation if necessary, as if they are all equally at fault or Uribe has ever showed any serious interest in mediation in the past. Combine these remarks with the efforts of Canadian political leaders to strengthen ties with Colombia, and it is clear where Canada's interests in the Andes lies.

A more blunt Canadian assessment of the situation is provided by Vladimir Torres, an analyst with the Canadian Foundation for the Americas (FOCAL), a Right- Wing think tank funded by Foreign Affairs that has political leaders' ears on policy matters relating to the Americas. Torres defends Colombia's actions in Ecuador quite sharply in a Globe and Mail op-ed piece: 'One could argue that if Israel were right to bomb Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, then Colombia was right to act in self-defense in Ecuador.' The real danger in the region, according to Torres, is Venezuela, Ecuador and Nicaragua (whose president, Daniel Ortega, he claims is moving closer to Chavez) who are anti-democratic and support 'terrorism.' Despite its human rights record, then, Colombia is again presented as the defender of freedom in the Andes.

The Israel analogy is indeed apt, if not for quite the same reasons as Torres might think. Colombia, as I noted above, is clearly positioned as the regional bulwark against democracy and progressive economic policy for imperialist powers like the United States and Canada. While a direct invasion by the U.S. and Canada to defend their interests in the region is unlikely at this point, a well-armed, aggressive and compliant Colombia may help to strengthen their imperial hand in the Andes. This is what lies behind Canadian foreign policy towards Colombia.

It's crucial, therefore, that the Canadian Left opposes the proposed free trade deal with Colombia and Canada's general foreign policy orientation in the Andes. Nothing positive can come from this orientation. Its aim is to stifle progressive efforts to begin rolling back the imperialist gains made in the region in the last couple of decades. And it's being prosecuted at a tremendous cost to the rights and security of Colombia's poor majority.

From ZNet

--Todd Gordon is the author of Cops, Crime and Capitalism: The Law-and-Order Agenda in Canada and numerous articles in New Socialist magazine. He is an assistant professor of Canadian Studies at the University of Toronto, and can be reached at ts.gordon@utoronto.ca.

Bush Distorts World War II History

Sat, 31 May 2008 01:34:00 +0000

5-30-08, 9:37 am

George W. Bush may not be much of a president but his latest comments comparing his Iraq war to World War II indicate he is even less of a historian. In a speech prepared for delivery today (May 28) to more than 1,000 graduates of the U.S. Air Force Academy, Bush links the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to postwar Germany and Japan six decades ago, the AP reports. “After World War II we helped Germany and Japan build free societies and strong economies (and) …today we must do the same thing in Afghanistan and Iraq,” Bush asserts, according to text released by the White House to AP. The flaw in this analogy is that it is Bush who is the aggressor in the Middle East, not the conquering liberator out to generously rebuild vanquished foes. Bush will go down in history with Germany’s Hitler and Japan’s Tojo as a war-starter, not as anybody’s redeemer. Besides, it’s hard to rebuild a country whose people keep shooting at your “liberators.” Bush’s America is not the America of FDR, a mind-our-own-business republic with a strong streak of isolationism that went to war only when attacked. Instead, Bush, the war-maker, lied to gain public support for his attack on Iraq just as Hitler lied to the German people when he attacked Poland. After World War II, the peoples of Germany and Japan at least had the decency to acknowledge their responsibility for their slaughter of innocents. Yet Bush admits to no such crimes. It’s as though he didn’t start the war in Iraq that has turned the country into a killing zone and claimed perhaps 1 million civilian lives, wounded several million others, and forced two million from their homes, ad nauseum. It is as though he does not stoop to torture and murder. Another tiny flaw in Bush’s analogy is that where the exhausted German and Japanese publics welcomed the American post-war occupation, the people of Iraq have overwhelmingly tell pollsters they want America “out.” And where the U.S. actively helped Japan and Germany rebuild their economies after World War II, Bush is out to plunder Iraq’s oil reserves. He is, according to some reports, having the devil’s own time getting the Iraqi government to sign over their oil resources to Western oil companies at bargain prices. As for rebuilding, Bush’s hand-picked, no-bid contractors, at best, have done shoddy work; billions of dollars for reconstruction have mysteriously disappeared; and Bush is now saying let the Iraqis pay for rebuilding their own country as if he wasn’t responsible for making the war in the first place. In his talk to the airmen, Bush said, “These (rebuilding) efforts took time and patience, and as a result Germany and Japan grew in freedom and prosperity and are now allies of the United States.”

Yes, such close allies they refuse to commit any substantial force to the Iraq war. After all, their leaders know they will be driven from office if they do, just as Tony Blair was ousted by the British public. International public opinion polls today show George Bush is about the most feared and unpopular man in the world, a man who has brought our prestige to an all-time low. His regime is the exact reverse of what America, and FDR, stood for in 1945. That he dares compare his rule with FDR shows him to be a master of only one thing: deceit. --Sherwood Ross is a Miami-based writer who has contributed to World War II history magazines. Reach him at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com.

Book review: Pens and Swords

Sat, 31 May 2008 01:30:00 +0000

5-30-08, 9:33 am

Pens and Swords – How the American Mainstream Media Report the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. By Marda Dunsky. Columbia University Press, New York, 2008.

In an era when American foreign policy has reached the pinnacle of unilateralism by invading other countries pre-emptively, threatening others with nuclear annihilation, and abrogating in doing so many decades if not more than a century of international law development, Marda Dunsky’s book Pens and Swords presents a very strong, well-referenced argument illuminating the bias within American media reports on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That bias develops under two main themes – a lack of historical context, and a lack of recognition of the effects of U.S. foreign policy. Along with those two major themes, are the related ideas of weaknesses in analyzing and criticizing sources, and in not providing references for what discussion there is as the arguments already fit the generally accepted ‘Washington’ consensus. Other ideas that accompany the discussion are the use of language that biases an argument, and the desire for the “amorphous if not impossible standard of objectivity.”

Overview

The book is well organized and well developed. It begins with an introduction that presents a brief summary of some current communication theory. This is followed by a discussion of the “policy mirror” between the Washington consensus and the media. Next is a limited presentation of historical context – the nakba, international law and the right of return – in order that the reader does have some background knowledge, leading into Dunsky’s first discussion on reporting on the Palestinian refugee story. From there the main presentation works through discussions of media reporting on Israeli settlements, the violence of the second intifada, the ‘war at home’ or how the local media is perceived by various sectors. The two final sections “In the Field” and “Toward a New way of Reporting…” carry significant and well-reasoned perspectives on what is happening and what could or should be happening.

There are several points along the way that deserve emphasis for their clarity and validity.

Communication theory

First is the communication theory, which defines mainstream media as “outlets that are in harmony with the prevailing direction of influence in culture at large.” In essence, “to a significant extent American mainstream journalism on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict toes the line of U.S. Mideast policy.” She discusses three theoretical constructs – hegemony, indexing, and cascading – that emphasize these points respectively: “the American mainstream media…operate in the same social and economic framework as government;” “The range of discourse is exceedingly narrow…because [it] emanates from an equally narrow range of sources;” and “the mainstream media determines the level of understanding that is possible for the public and the policy makers alike.” If that does not give the mainstream media thoughts for concern, then ironically, these definitions become all that more powerful.

Refugees

The refugee problem is defined as “a root cause of the Israeli-Palestine conflict” and to omit it from context “is to omit an important part of the story.” Dunsky briefly outlines the nakba as recently viewed by ‘revisionist’ historians who deny the official Israeli narrative while using information in a large part garnered from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) archives themselves. While these ideas “depart markedly from the familiar narrative” there are other gaps in the narrative, one of the more important being “the body of international law and consensus on refugee rights in general, and Palestinian refugee rights in particular.”[1] Accompanying this is the right of return which the Israelis claim for the Jewish people of the world, but that is denied to the Palestinians in contravention of international law.

Context as a theme is obviously a major issue for any discussion of the refugee problem. American media “routinely denies its audience the contextual tools with which to assess important historical and political aspects of the issue,” and it “largely mirrors U.S. Mideast policy,” remaining “explicitly tilted in favor of Israel in the pursuit of what is officially defined as the U.S. national interest in the region.” News reports “relate what can be seen and heard, to the exclusion or relevant contextual background.” [italics in original] The message that does come across is that of the “refugees’ own transigence and the machinations of their leaders, the Arab states, and the United Nations.” While it seems almost too obvious to state, Dunsky sums up her arguments on the refugee reporting saying “if Americans had a fuller contextual understanding of the key issues…via the mainstream media, they would be better equipped to challenge U.S. Mideast policy.”

Obvious yes, but it also signifies that American culture, American society perhaps does not want to disturb its own beliefs in its exceptionalism and perfectionism that is their gift (even if by the barrel of a gun) to the world. To admit these failings of context, to examine the context in light of foreign policy would be greatly disturbing to a society educated (or inculcated) about its own greatness, exceptionalism, perfectionism, and love of democracy and freedom. And so it should be.

Israeli settlements

Similar arguments are brought forth concerning the Israeli settlements. A brief background set of information ties in the U.S. $3 billion in aid each year that supports the ability to continue the settlements. Dunsky argues, and supports, the idea that “reporting on the settlement issue bears a striking similarity to reporting on the …refugee question,” with “more weight usually given to Israeli claims and little or no reference to international law and consensus.” Also, “dramatic description is substituted for thoroughgoing analytical reporting.” And more in the same category of context: “Contextually and substantively…the stories made little or no reference to international law and consensus or to U.S. aid to Israel.”

The media references to the Israeli side generally emphasize the perspective “that Palestinian violence must be halted before negotiations can resume,” without the context of history and the idea that the very act of settlement and “its attendant military defense have been a root cause of that violence.” Frequent comments run through the text, emphasizing and referencing the lack of context and of international law and consensus in the media reports that are studied.

The intifada

The height of the intifada violence coincided with American rhetoric and anguish after 9/11 and provided a neat tie in for the Israeli government and the IDF to try and capture the argument as one of terrorism, leaving aside completely the historical context and using the American perspective of “us against them,” of democracy versus demagoguery, of “they hate us for what we are.” For the media “political discourse focused entirely on themes that were emotional, moral, and patriotic,” providing a “period of congruence for the United States and Israel.” The IDF incursions into the West Bank relied on the concept that “the campaign was to root out the terrorist infrastructure in the West Bank.”

Palestine was no match for the well-organized Israeli “propaganda battlefield” and as events continued, “Arafat and the PA were linked to terror” as “repeatedly impressed on U.S. government officials and the American public through the media.” Another feature of these reports is what “amounted to transparent Israeli advocacy for a U.S. war in Iraq” as well as connections through to Iran. In sum, Dunsky says: “American journalists were operating within the sphere of cultural congruence – a comfort zone where journalistic skepticism and balance were often overshadowed or displaced by the political discourse of the Bush administration, in which a “war on terror” could be prosecuted by the United States, and, by extension, its closest ally.”

Ego and Access

The chapter “In the Field” provides an intriguing perspective on the reporters/journalists (I put those two descriptors together, not really sure where the lines between a reporter and a journalist meet or overlap or coincide) themselves. The section could be subtitled “Ego and Access” as those are the two main themes in the first set of self-reports.

Dunsky allows the reporters to speak for themselves and some of what they say is self-incriminating as to why there is a bias and lack of context. It would seem that the correspondents are well aware of media competition in the sense that they need a daily story. They worry about how the editors will deal with their report and they need a story with a different view to gain publication and so that their peers will take notice: “to attempt unfiltered reporting…not only is often discouraged by newsroom culture but can also result in swift and unstinting audience censure.” That is the ego part. The access part is the consistent iteration that access to Israeli sources was very easy and well organized and that communication with the Palestinians required more effort. That could be – although denied by the correspondents – because “most…choose to live among Israelis in West Jerusalem because of its higher standard of living rather than among Palestinians.” It is a hard denial to make, that their place of living has “had little or no effect on their actual work product.” If they have no sense of context, perhaps also their sense of place is…hmm…misplaced.

Before getting into these self-examinations, examinations that reveal all too much about ego and access, Dunsky reiterates her own two “key underlying contexts: the impact of U.S. policy on the trajectory of the conflict; and the importance of international law and consensus regarding the key issues of Israeli settlement and annexation policies and the right of return of Palestinian refugees.” As a result the journalistic product “frames media discourse on the conflict in a way that reinforces and supports rather than scrutinizes and challenges U.S. policy that in many ways undergirds it.”

Context and media failure

The final two writers provide a much clearer analysis of the world they lived in. Gillian Findlay, ABC correspondent from September 1997 to June 2002 says “when we did try to provide context, it became such a controversial thing, not only among viewers but also within the news organization.” She was surprised by “how little our audience understood about the roots of the conflict,” and says it is a “cop out in reporting” to say there is nothing the U.S. administration can do. Speaking more globally she hits upon another truth about American media, that “the lack of context applies to so much reporting these days. It’s not just this issue.”

Chris Hedges worked for the New York Times and the Dallas Morning News off and on from January 1988 to 2003. He says “Arab culture is incomprehensible to us because we’ve never taken the time to understand it. It’s a great failing of the press that when something is incomprehensible to us, we certify it as incomprehensible to everyone.” He continues this idea when discussing the suicide bombers, “we don’t understand the slow drip of oppression” that created them and further “We’ve never taken the time to understand them….[a] fundamental failure of the coverage of Palestinians.” As for the press as an institution he says, “bureaucracies…are driven by ambition and have very little moral sense. That’s true of every institution…. It’s not conducive of their own advancement.”

All of which leaves me wondering, as a critical reader, what exactly are the credentials of the writers/reporters/journalists who are in the field. Certainly being there provides them with first hand observation of current events, but do they have the academic background to understand the socio-political history of the region? Are they able and willing to look at what for me is the prime contradiction in the vast majority of American and Israeli foreign affairs and those who report on it - that what you do speaks so loud I can’t hear what you are saying? That democracy does not arrive at the barrel of gun, peace does not come from pre-emptive invasions and occupations, the victim cannot be blamed for the ongoing violence against the intruders, and international law deems it all illegal? More simply put, people, nations, do not like being occupied and suppressed, and no rhetoric of any kind will make it acceptable except to an elite few cronies of the occupiers. Are the reporters able and willing to step outside of the Washington consensus, willing to take the time to provide more background information for themselves as well as their readers, or will the corporate agenda over-rule any attempts at providing context, a context that more often than not goes against the grain of the Washington consensus?

The final argument is on objectivity, seen in the introduction as an “amorphous if not impossible standard,” another argument that comes back to all media tasks being “superfluous as long as one remains within the presuppositional framework of the doctrinal consensus,” with writers well aware of “rewards that accrue to conformity and the costs of honest dissidence.”

I would hope that all journalists/writers would take the time to read Pens and Swords. The books arguments are well presented and well referenced, and the work as a whole should be placed on every journalists’/reporters’ shelf alongside similar works by other well referenced and questioning media critics [2] For any journalist who is actually wishing to pursue truth rather than ego and access, consideration and action on the ideas presented in Dunsky’s work would be a great place to start. Pens and Swords is also a great read for all mass media audiences to better inform themselves and to be able to criticize and analyze the writers/producers and their products more intelligently as well as to analyze their own place and views within the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

[1] for an easily read comprehensive understanding of international law, see Michael Byers’ War Law, Understanding International Law and Armed Conflict, Douglas & McIntyre, Toronto, 2005.

[2] ]Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent (2002), and Falk and Friel Israel-Palestine on Record (2007).

Oil companies pump profits: governments sit by and watch

Fri, 30 May 2008 01:49:00 +0000

5-29-08, 9:52 am

Original source: The Guardian (Australia)

The price of crude oil more than doubled in 12 months and more than quadrupled in five yeas since May 2003. The big oil corporations empty people’s pockets and pump out record profits, while the government sits by and says there is little else it can do. Debates about reducing the GST or excise on petrol avoid the real issues and genuine solutions. So too does the blame game which points the finger at China and India for using more oil and creating demand beyond capacity as they develop their economies.

The record profits being raked in by the five largest global oil corporations show where most of the price rises went. ExxonMobil turned out the largest net profit ever made by a publicly listed US company of US$40.7 billion in 2007. Shell also had a record-breaking year of riches.

Wallowing in profits

The top five feasted on a total of more than US$123 billion in net profits last year, and continue their price gouging in 2008. BP last month reported a whopping 63 percent surge in net profit for the first quarter of 2008, a record US$7.6 billion. Shell reported a 25 percent rise to US$4.1 billion.

Every price rise is another windfall for the oil sharks and another rise in the cost of living for the people. The cost of extracting and shipping a barrel of oil is less than US$10 and the cost of research and exploration ranges from US$5 a barrel upwards in the Middle East to over US$50 off the US cost. The price of oil affects flows throughout the economy, whether it is an input in production, keeps the machinery running or is a fuel for heating or transportation.

Capitalist economists and other apologists for the oil corporations say it is not the fault of these companies. They claim it is a matter of supply and demand. At present there is excess demand.

In reality, it is the oil companies that raise the price, as they realise they can get more for their product because of high demand and their monopoly control of markets. They manipulate the markets, they put the prices up. They are not innocent victims of some anonymous or mystical market forces.

Left to 'market forces', oil sales are not made according to need or some rational plan of usage. Allocation and purchase become a question of ability to pay, and the higher prices are passed on to consumers.

Oil guzzlers

These same apologists even go further and say the short supply is the fault of developing countries, China and India in particular, as consumption of oil rises.

The US uses 25 percent of the world’s oil supplies. Car and truck usage have been deliberately encouraged to the detriment of public transport and rail freight. Successive Australian governments, in receipt of generous political donations from the oil and auto industries, have also pursued similar policies, building freeways, closing rail lines and failing to provide comprehensive and efficient public transport.

The US military’s tanks, planes and ships guzzle 340,000 barrels of oil a day, National Public Radio told listeners in the US (14-11-2007). They are the largest single purchaser and consumer of oil in the world. The C-130 Hercules transport plane does three gallons to the mile (1.28 km to the litre). The Abrams battle tank, which the Howard government decided to order, does two gallons to the mile.

One of the few positive outcomes of the higher prices in Australia is that more people are turning to public transport and more fuel efficient means of transport. Public transport systems are showing signs of strain and many suburbs and towns are just not serviced with public transport. It will take years to overcome these shortcomings, and the sooner governments get on with it the better.

The pursuit of alternative energy sources could be of environmental benefit if it is in the direction of low-greenhouse emitting, renewable energy.

The oil corporations are very aware that they are fast approaching a situation where they cannot sustain current levels of production as the planet’s resources become depleted.

Inflationary pressures

In the recent federal budget pensioners, carers, the unemployed and other welfare recipients were denied increases in their benefits, not because they did not need them, but because it would be inflationary. Workers are always being told that wage rises are inflationary. These claims are now exposed for what they are — myths.

Oil prices and higher interest rates are the main factors, creating inflationary pressures, along with the monopoly pricing practices of the two major supermarket chains.

Political pressure has seen Prime Minister Kevin Rudd acknowledge there is a problem. But the government’s solution, FuelWatch, a system of monitoring and giving advance notice of price changes, lacks teeth and will not solve anything. The operations of the oil corporations will not be curbed without stronger measures that control oil prices.

The government is also considering the possibility of a reduction in GST for petrol. This will only create another GST bookkeeping nightmare for small business and bring claims for compensation from the states. Neither a reduction in the GST nor a reduction in fuel excise would address the causes of rocketing petrol prices — at best they might reduce the weekly petrol bill by a few dollars until the oil companies raised the price again.

The practices of oil dependency and excessive consumption by western nations, monopoly pricing by oil giants, and allocation based on who can afford to pay the most, need to be addressed along with the crucial climate change factor. The needs of third world countries pursuing development must be recognised, and not cast off as the cause of the crisis or oil prices put beyond their reach.

The pricing and distribution of oil cannot be left to the markets to determine. Long-term measures to reduce reliance on oil products and develop economically and environmentally sustainable transport systems, and alternatives to oil are required. This will take planning and resources. There is plenty of money to invest, billions of dollars in the Future and Building Australia Funds.

Crude oil prices are running profits so far this year

From The Guardian (Australia)

Buffalo Policewoman Fired

Fri, 30 May 2008 01:46:00 +0000

5-29-08, 9:50 am

During the first week of this month there was good news and bad news. The good news is Cariol Horne's gag-order was lifted. The bad news: she was found guilty of nine of the 11 charges against her by hearing officer Thomas Rinaldo (who seemed pretty biased against Horne and her attorneys near the end) and was subsequently fired a few days later by Buffalo Police Chief H. McCarthy Gipson. His decision doesn't come as a shock either. Many people assume he is still upset over being called a 'crackhead' last fall by Horne's defense attorney Anthony Pendergrass. In spite of last week's rulings this controversy is far from over. No way does Kwatkowski get rewarded for reckless behavior especially if it's part of a long pattern. Reportedly he is number five on a list to be promoted to lieutenant. It is up to District Attorney Frank Clark to charge, prosecute and initiate Kwiatkowski's perp-walk out of his precinct independent of any recent Buffalo Police decision against Horne.

Gipson could have made this easier and put an end to the whole affair way before the hearings by exonerating Horne and suspending Kwiatkowski. Firing him would not have upset local officers in particular, but it would have upset the BPD continuum and that's the prime reason he is still on the job. Between Horne's firing and Gipson's recent PR campaign as a champion of battered women, white Buffalo looks eager to accept whatever the Buffalo Police Department tells them. Therein lies the greatest tragedy. Since Horne has been ousted, its clear now that the Black community has to be allowed to voice more anger towards its city officials at public forums given by some of Buffalo's Black leaders. People have to be allowed to reveal their experiences with police misconduct absent of any overemphasis on being respectful toward city officials just because they are Black.

Particularly galling is the complete absence and silence of the Black policemen. Why are you letting the sisters out-man you like that? If it weren't for someone Black taking a stand decades ago, you wouldn't even have that job. With a Black mayor looking on, Buffalo's Black police chief fires a Black female officer for intervening in a situation where a white cop is choking a Black suspect whose charges were later dropped. This is shameful, disgraceful and unacceptable.

I've noticed in the past the Commissioner's and other Black city officials' efforts to gain the attention of Al Sharpton during a limited vist to Buffalo. Word is they want to get Minister Louis Farrakhan to have the BLAC to back off of the Horne situation. They don't want these figures to make this a national issue. The shame is purely within the decision making of some of Buffalo's key black lpolitical officials just a week before Malcolm X's birthday. 'What the matter boss, we sick... we sick?' How true his words ring today. --Chris Stevenson is a columnist for the Buffalo Challenger, email him at

Brazil Spearheads UNASUR Defense Council, but Colombia Withdraws

Fri, 30 May 2008 01:41:00 +0000

5-29-08, 9:44 am

Original source: Council on Hemispheric Affairs

Member states of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) signed a pact on Friday, May 23 in Brasília to establish judicial and political components for the emerging, limited union. On the docket was a plan to create a military coordinating component of UNASUR, the Conselho Sul-Americano de Defesa (CSD). However, the CSD was destined to be founded without the important exception of Colombia, which recently confused its neighbors by revoking its intention to join. Brazil, in collaboration with Venezuela, spearheaded the creation of the defense portion of the pact, which will be increasingly NATO-like in structure.

Successfully founding the CSD, which had been scheduled to include Colombia, would have represented an enormous victory for what has been called President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva’s “pragmatic left” leadership. It was no secret that Brasília hoped to use the CSD to strengthen regional ties across highly sensitive boundaries, with Colombia on the right, Venezuela on the left, and Brazil hoping to act as the mediating middle. However, the withdrawal of Bogotá, with one of the region’s most advanced militaries, has significantly weakened the pact from its onset. Brazilian defense minister, Nelson Jobim, described the basic tenets of the CSD as an integrated alliance without an operating field capability. CSD forces would cooperate, for example, in contributing to UN and other humanitarian missions if necessary. The alliance will also be expected to coordinate military technology and resources.

Brazil’s Vision

Considerable disparity exists in the distribution of military resources throughout the region. At the top, is Brazil with its major military capabilities, then supposedly closely followed by Colombia’s highly modernized military, which enjoys major U.S. support. In contrast, Guyana and several of the other smaller countries have meager forces. Once the CSD is operational, the coordination of technology and resources will be joined by a greater emphasis on arms sales among the signatory states. Brazil, the major weapons producer in the region (which turns out tanks, ships, fighter planes, and light arms) is set to be the primary beneficiary from renewed shipment of weapons to its neighbors.

Brasília hopes that increasing arms sales to non-traditional markets around the world, and the coordination of technology resulting from this newly formed alliance, will in the long run lessen dependence on the United States. In recent months, Brazil’s foreign policy has quietly shifted away from Washington towards autonomy, as it becomes an increasingly active player in a multipolar world.

In addition to acquiring new technology from Russia in various fields, Brasília has specifically attempted to obtain the technology needed to construct a nuclear submarine from Paris. However, France will only sell marginally-related, non-nuclear technology, and does so warily, to the frustration of Brazilian officials. Similarly, the restrictions on the sale of United States military hardware have angered officials.

The advent of the CSD and its anticipated increase in arms sales comes amidst the heated climate of a recently mounting arms race in South America; the continent’s powerhouses Colombia, Chile, Brazil and Venezuela are all significantly increasing their arms spending. Of this group, Bogotá’s spending constitutes the highest proportion of its GDP compared to the others.

The Attack Against the FARC

This arms race has recently taken on a new dimension. On March 1st, Colombia bombed a site just within Ecuador’s territory in which a secret camp occupied by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) had been layed out. The resulting flap eventually also implicated Venezuela. Interpol’s vouchsafing of the integrity of thousands of files, found on several FARC laptops that had been apprehended (but not necessarily their contents) makes the case that the Chávez government could have been somehow involved in supplying both finances and arms to the FARC. The political radicalization of these three regional antagonists is manifested in the broadening nature of the Colombia face-off against Venezuela and Ecuador. All three countries were slated to join the CSD, but Bogotá’s withdrawal shows the extent to which the existing rift among the countries has grown, and that the nature of the diplomatic price being paid is mounting.

If Colombia as well as Venezuela had joined the CSD, it would have symbolized an easing of tensions between the two increasingly ferocious foes. For this to happen, it would have required Brazil to have increased its commitment to playing the role of the area’s pivotal mediator. Brazil’s Lula would seem to have been in a good position to broker such a deal, as he is seen as being a socialist and the leader of the leftist Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) Workers’ Party. But he also is a lame duck president and a man with profound leadership ambitions constrained by adverse local factors. In both of Brazil’s parliamentary houses he must appease conservative-dominated, multi-party bodies. Lula’s administration is also, by necessity, bipartisan or multi-partisan, with ministers in Lula’s cabinet (who are fueled by various political leanings) operating with a high degree of autonomy. Again, this may help to provide a compass function to Brazil’s role and gain credibil ity for it to be a pluralistic fac tor when it comes to the arbitration of regional disputes.

Lula’s foreign policy stance has been based on the determination to maintain cordial relations with all parties, while trying to promote the country’s emergence as a military and economic power. He seeks economic growth for the country through encouraging foreign investment in Brazil and its expansion as a major export platform. But, Lula also reflects a profound strain in the country’s ambition to maintain its admittedly meteoric emergence as a country that thinks in global terms and which is out to obtain a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council, yet at the same time not appear as projecting any threat to its neighbors.

The moving force behind the CSD in Lula’s government has been defense minister Nestor Jobim, who has traveled the continent meeting with local leaders to promote CSD’s maturation. Jobim is more conservative than Lula but has made known his desire to distance Brazil from dependence on the United States. When questioned whether the CSD would allow a place for Washington, a seemingly flustered Jobim answered that the United States will not be asked to join the alliance as it is not located in South America. Brazil and other South American signatory members need not ask the White House’s approval to form such an alliance.

CSD will be good for South America’s Stability

Simply put, regional stability is of transcendent importance for a country that borders all but two of South America’s other states. One goal of Brazil’s foreign policy is to maintain stability along its borders, especially along its sparsely populated Amazonian boundaries. Of these, the border with Colombia currently has been of greatest concern. In early May, the Brazilian armed forces announced plans to station 21,000 troops along the Colombian border to ensure that insurgents did not infiltrate the Brazilian Amazon. These forces will operate with the mandate to shoot all rebels entering the country.

Brasília is also interested in coordinating with other South American militaries to control the massive influx of drugs which are being trafficked into and through Brazil in increasing volume. The country’s federal police director for fighting organized crime, Roberto Troncon, has welcomed the inception of the CSD, saying that the coordination of the South American armed forces should indirectly help in the battle against organized crime, particularly in relation to drug trafficking. However, the withdrawal of Colombia from the pact eliminates the cooperation of a major drug-fighting military in the most notorious drug producing country, in a hugely strategic part of the continent.

Last February, the UN declared that Brazil has become a major “thoroughfare” for cocaine trafficking. According to the UN’s finding, cocaine is smuggled from drug producing countries (Bolivia, Peru and Colombia) into Brazil, where 15% of the world’s cocaine is consumed. Rates of domestic drug use in Brazil are high and climbing; cocaine usage alone increased 30% last year. Domestic use, however, only comprises half of the cocaine that reaches Brazil soil. The other half (of the estimated 80 tons of cocaine entering the country per year) is then shipped to Africa, largely to be redistributed throughout Europe.

Chávez Links CSD to Bolívar

Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez shows enthusiasm for the CSD. He applauds Brazil’s efforts for a continental defense organization and has invoked the aspirations of Simón Bolívar—the historical figure for whom he named and dedicated his movement—saying it was Bolívar’s wish to form a political, economic, and military union among all the nations of South America. Chávez has said with enthusiasm that the alliance will help in the formation of a “big South America.” To Chávez and the like-minded leaders, the CSD means greater autonomy for South America from the United States.

But an inconsistency may exist between Chávez championing a “big South America,” while simultaneously continuing his attacks against the Uribe government. This ongoing assault (which one can appreciate given Uribe’s persistence, negativity, and obstructionism) reflects Bogotá’s refusal to seek membership in the organization and instead its turn to the United States for military aid and diplomatic ardency. The cost is not cheap for this sort of politics; Colombia is being increasingly identified as a super-gringo country by its increasingly critical, Latin American neighbors.

Chávez’s Vision Thins

Some would say that Chávez’s vision of a “big South America” is illusory because Jobim and perhaps Lula are really seeking a specifically Brazilian caste to their country’s efforts to seek independence from the United States. They would rather see this relative autonomy from the U.S. on its own than be part of a broader geopolitical development that has implications for the entirety of South America. It is not that Jobim and Lula (for that matter) would want to discourage other countries from seeking their autonomy from Washington individually, but that they look to the CSD more as a vehicle that helps Brazil in its goal to achieve self-development rather than focusing on how it helps South America as a whole to do the same.

Chávez, for his part, has a much more synoptic view of the arrangement. He invokes Bolívar in the CSD discussions in order to promote the idea of exporting the Bolivarian movement throughout the continent. Ideally, Chávez has said he hopes that the CSD will come to mean more than the transference of military logistics and intelligence between nations. This is why he begins his Bolivarian invocation by stating that Bolívar sought the political and economic unification of “big South America” in addition to the region’s military unification. This dream of a greater Bolivarian South America is most likely one in which Venezuela, like a force of nature, would be pre-eminent—Brasília is not likely to subscribe to this leftist sloganizing with enthusiasm, feeling that the Venezuelans have not copywrited “Bolívar.” Brazil also seeks some degree of autonomy from Spanish-speaking South America in order for it to better take advantage of opportunities elsewhere.

In dealing with Chávez and the CSD, Jobim has not responded with a Bolivarian invocation of his own. Brasília simply sought Chávez’s signature and knew there would be a price to pay, in terms of a call to arms, for his Bolivarian exhortations.

The Fourth Fleet in part a Likely U.S. Response to the CSD

Although U.S. Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, stated that Washington welcomes the creation of the CSD, the recent executive order re-founding the Fourth Fleet is likely to have been, at least in part, a response to the regional arms race and the outlining of the Brasília-led, new alliance. It also serves as a political statement indicating that Washington is capable of projecting its authority throughout the hemisphere—particularly against left-leaning nations and leaders it sees as being recalcitrants to its cause including: Chavéz, Morales of Bolivia, Correa of Ecuador and, of course, Raúl Castro of Cuba.

But the development of the Fourth Fleet was also likely to be seen by some Washington strategists as a counter to the Brazilian initiative. As recently as late April, the Bush administration has said that it considers Brazil a great ally. Nonetheless, Washington’s activation of the Fourth Fleet must be interpreted in Brasília as a partial response to Brazil’s armament drive and its de facto influence over the region. It was most likely influenced by the advent of the CSD—representing one more step in the direction of regional autonomy, shucking Latin America’s traditional tendency to automatically defer to Washington.

Colombia’s Policy Change, a bow to Washington, a slap in the face Against Brazil The recent 180 degree turn in Colombia’s policy highlights the depth of the Bush administration’s financial tug on Bogotá and its ability to influence some parts of the region, particularly when it deals with like-minded conservative governments, like those of Colombia and Peru. Unfortunately for Brazil, and its desire to secure its borders through cooperation with the Colombian military, Bogotá has concluded that it stands to gain more from military cooperation with the United States than it could collect from any other arrangements at this time. At this point, there are few who believe that if Washington wants a replacement for Manta, Uribe, unlike Correa, will prove to be a flexible servitor. It is more than likely that Bogotá will agree to facilitate a U.S. military base in Colombia in order to continue to receive U.S. assistance rather than join its neighbors in an act of regional solidarity that is not being particularly welcomed by the White House.

From Council on Hemispheric Affairs

La crisis economica hoy: Entrevista con Douglas Henwood

Fri, 30 May 2008 01:38:00 +0000

5-29-08, 9:39 am

PA: ¿Qué tan grave es la crisis económica que estamos enfrentando? ¿Hasta dónde puede llegar?

Douglas Henwood: Puede llegar a ser muy malo. Sería muy fácil confeccionar escenarios de desastre, si eso es lo que deseas. Surgirían esos si llega el pánico actual en los mercados de crédito afectar a los préstamos comerciales normales y cotidianos, los tal llamados préstamos industriales comerciales que hacen los bancos, por ejemplo, u bien si se afecta el crédito rutinario del consumidor; no solamente hipotecas pero hasta las tarjetas de crédito y otras clases de deuda de consumidor. Si eso llega a congelarse, entonces sí creo que habrá una crisis económica muy grave.

Pero a eso no hemos llegado. El crédito normal comercial y de consumidor, aparte de unos sectores especializados, parece seguir funcionando, y hasta ahora apuntan los índices económicos reales a una recesión ligera, no muy grave; pero todavía andamos en las primeras etapas del problema y es muy difícil precisar la gravedad de la situación.

Además, esta clase de desorden financiero que estamos viendo no tiene precedente en realidad, y por eso no hay templetes históricos fáciles de aplicar para esta situación. Hay el ejemplo del Japón en los 1990, en donde había un estancamiento económico muy prolongado luego del colapse de su manía especulativa de la década de los 1980; y eso tiene bastantes paralelos con EEUU.

Argumentando en contra de eso sería el hecho de que la Reserva Federal y demás autoridades han reaccionado con mucho más rapidez para combatir los efectos deflacionarios de la crisis del crédito, en contraste al Japón en donde tardaron mucho las autoridades en intervenir. La verdad es que hasta hicieron aumentar los impuestos de consumo a mediados de los 1990, medida que no hizo más que prolongar al sufrimiento.

Pero si yo tuviera que resumirlo y proyectar un escenario, creo que nos enfrentamos a varios años con una economía muy débil y temblorosa que para mucha gente equivaldrá a una recesión prolongada, aunque no lo será formalmente.

PA: El esfuerzo apresurado por rescatarla a Bear Stearns les indica a mucha gente que hay una laguna entre el punto de vista del gobierno sobre el manejo de esta crisis en particular a un lado, y los problemas que nos enfrentan a los norteamericanos ordinarios al otro. ¿Por qué parece haber tanta desconexión entre Wall Street y el pueblo?

HENWOOD: Yo diría al comenzar que las autoridades sí tienen que tomar acción para rescatar a sistema financiero. Desafortunadamente, de cierta manera nos tiene como rehenes. Cualquier naufragio del sistema financiero nos llevaría a la picada a nosotros también. A la otra mano, a ellos les importa muy poco ese sufrimiento popular del cual estás hablando.

Las acciones tomadas hasta el momento, por ejemplo, para protegerles a las familias al borde de la ejecución hipotecaria o a las que ya la están sufriendo; resultan esas acciones bastante insuficientes. Casi no ayudan a nadie. Dado la gran escala del problema en donde millones de gente ya sufren ejecución hipotecaria o gran riesgo de la misma, el tamaño microscópico de la respuesta es algo ridículo. Queda bien claro que los sufrimientos de los banqueros provocan más simpatía en Washington y en los cañones de Wall Street que las penas de la gente ordinaria.

Lo cierto es que existe un perjuicio de clase en todo lo que se ha hecho hasta ahora. Podemos imaginar algún estilo de actividad muy vigorosa para ayudarle a la gente con problemas hipotecarios. Por ejemplo, el gobierno pudiera comprar a un descuento las hipotecas problemáticas, y pudieran los bancos absorber una pérdida, haciéndose responsable el gobierno de una parte de esa pérdida pero salvándose a los que están al borde del desalojo.

PA: La acción que acaba de tomar el gobierno británico con rescatar a Northern Rock fue la nacionalización del banco. ¿Hay una diferencia sustantiva entre lo que hicieron ellos y lo que aquí hicieron la Reserva Federal y la J.P. Morgan?

HENWOOD: Creo que estaríamos algo equivocados si tomamos a Northern Rock como ejemplo u precedente para algo que se hace por acá. En primero, Northern Rock era una institución bastante pequeña. Tenía en la mayor parte depósitos de menudeo. Bear Stearns era un banco de inversión gigantesco ligado a muchos otros jugadores en Wall Street. Si hubiera ido a la picada, hubiera llevado con él a mucha otra gente, creando así una situación real de pánico. En verdad, no creo que fuera nada similar la situación de esos dos bancos.

Es más, el gobierno británico se quedaba indeciso durante semanas y semanas, hasta rechazando una oferta de compra de parte de otro banco, la cual hubiera salvado a todo y a muchísima gente. Ahora el gobierno británico debe potencialmente miles de millones de libras esterlinas, así que no sale sin pérdida el gobierno británico.

PA: Otros críticos con quienes he platicado sobre eso de la crisis del crédito en EEUU hablan de la falta de reglamento y supervisión a los bancos, a las casas de bolsa y a Wall Street.

HENWOOD, Esa es una parte bastante grande del problema. Ya hemos tenido como 5 o 6, ni recuerdo cuantas de esas crisis financieras de gran envergadura en el curso de las últimas dos décadas, pero no ha habido ningún revés en la tendencia política hacia la desregulación de las finanzas. Dado que el sector financiero es tan esencial a la economía y dado que el gobierno reaccionará con un rescate cada vez que se encuentre amenazado ese sector, se muestra que esos tipos pueden actuar a su antojo sin cuidado ninguno en tiempos de vacas gordas, con absoluta seguridad de que serán rescatados cuando lleguen los tiempos de vacas flacas.

Esta combinación de desregulación y falta de supervisión gubernamental, junto a toda la cultura de rescate que se ha desarrollado, forma una receta casi perfecta para la crisis financiera. Luego de la crisis “punto-com,” y del desastre de Enron a comienzos de esta década, hubiéramos pensado que habrían aprendido algo, y que se habrían impuesto siquiera unos pocos requisitos mínimos de transparencia a las corporaciones que toman grandes posiciones tan especulativas. Pero ni eso vimos, mucho menos cualquier clase de acción reglamentaria. Luego ahora, ya que la gente lo está discutiendo, espero que sirva de algo porque si no queremos que vuelva a pasar esto dentro de unos cuantos años más; eso si no entramos a alguna clase de crisis depresiva a largo plazo, para evitar que vuelva pasar, realmente hace falta alguna forma de re-reglamentación.

Y el público debe recibir algo en cambio: eso quiere decir, que salgan de esta crisis nuevas y distintas formas de instituciones financieras: organizaciones comunitarias sin fines de lucro; instituciones cooperativas que les ofrecen servicios financieros básicos con cuotas mínimas a gente de bajos y medianos recursos, y que se quedan afuera de los mercados especulativos. Eso crearía a un sector financiero mucho menos especulativo y menos motivado por las ganancias.

Sería interesante ver los efectos de esta competencia a los grandes bancos. Quizás ofrecerían estas nuevas instituciones servicios financieros básicos a un costo más bajo que lo que cobran los bancos grandes. Lo que se cobra ahora para los servicios financieros más básicos es un ultraje. Si existiera alguna competencia por parte de instituciones públicas o cooperativas, sería una utilización interesante de los mecanismos de competencia del mercado para promover el bienestar público.

PA: Los problemas de Wall Street, la crisis del crédito, la crisis de la vivienda, ¿Son el límite de nuestros problemas económicos? O, ¿estamos hablando de algo más profundo y más estructural?

HENWOOD: Cuando yo hablaba antes de confeccionar escenarios de desastre, eso fue lo que implicaba, más o menos. Hay muchos problemas más que afectan a la economía norteamericana: entre ellos, básicamente, no tenemos ahorro doméstico en este país. En años recientes las familias han estado gastando todo lo que ganan y más. Una parte de eso es por el débil crecimiento de salarios, débil creación de empleos, y porque la gente ha recurrido al mercado hipotecario para compensar. Pero, ya que tuvimos como recurso tan poco ahorro doméstico, todo eso fue financiado desde el exterior. Ya tenemos una deuda externa enorme que ha crecido en billones de dólares durante los últimos años, mucho de ella financiada por bancos centrales asiáticos.

Seguimos ese modelo económico muy perverso bajo la cual importamos mucho, mandamos muchos dólares al exterior, y luego los exportadores nos vuelven a prestar nuestro dinero para dejarnos comprar más y más. Obviamente, se ha desarrollado un tipo de dependencia mutua malsana entre EEUU y los exportadores de petróleo del Medio Oriente a una mano, y los exportadores asiáticos de bienes de fabricación a la otra. Esas entidades han estado acumulando montones inmensas de dólares y luego adquieren con ellos activos norteamericanos. No puede seguir así para siempre. No podemos seguir endrogándonos al ritmo actual. Eso significa según el pensamiento económico ortodoxo que a EEUU ya nos toca recurrir al FMI a pedir algún programa de reajuste estructural. Tendremos que apretarnos las cinturas, crecer lentamente, restringir al consumo, y sufrir un período prolongado de debilidad económica para poner en balance las cuentas externas.

Esto se puede lograr por lo bueno. Podríamos aplicarles impuestos a los más ricos, establecer un programa de desarrollo estructural, mejorar la calidad de nuestros servicios sociales y proporcionar apoyo a los ingresos a la gente; o podríamos hacerlo por lo feo, al estilo del mercado, que significaría una profundísima recesión, la posibilidad de una grave crisis financiera, un período extendido de gran desempleo y un crecimiento bastante débil de trabajos y de salarios.

Pero algo tiene que cambiar. No podemos seguir consumiendo y endrogándonos al ritmo actual. Ya están los presupuestos familiares en una situación realmente terrible. Tenemos décadas sacando emprestado cantidades enormes para compensar por un débil crecimiento de salarios, pero ha crecido el ritmo enormemente durante los últimos 5 a 10 años. Algo tiene que cambiar. Nos hace muchísima falta un modelo económico distinto.

Además de eso, nuestras corporaciones, a pesar de sus ganancias estratosféricas durante esta época de expansión, han reinvertido muy poco y han ocupado a pocos, así que mientras hayan logrado acumular mucho dinero, iba la mayor parte de esos fondos a sus accionistas. Si deseamos una economía mas sana en el futuro tendremos que aumentar a ese ritmo de reinversión, algo que a Wall Street no lo va a agradar nada; quizás hará falta acción pública concertada para realizarlo. Añadido a eso, la infraestructura física y social del país no se encuentra en muy buenas condiciones y tendremos que gastar dinero en eso también.

Más allá de eso, hay que hacer algo si va seguir la vida en la tierra; hay que dirigirnos al cambio de clima, y creo que en eso nos enfrentamos a un caso afortunado, ya que los gastos de investigación científica y desarrollo para hacer más “verde” nuestra infraestructura beneficiarían tanto a la economía que al medio ambiente. Pero en la vida pública hace falta gente que hable de esto; sí hay quienes ya hablan de ello, pero de una manera muy débil y manso, y creo que necesitamos una medicina mucho más fuerte que la que nos recetaría cualquier figura de la vida pública actual.

The 'R' Word: An Interview with Doug Henwood on the Economy

Fri, 30 May 2008 01:29:00 +0000

5-29-08, 9:32 am

Editor's Note: Doug Henwood publishes Left Business Observer and hosts the weekly radio talk show Behind the News with Doug Henwood on New York's WBAI radio.

PA: How severe is the economic crisis we are facing? How bad could it get?

HENWOOD: It could get very bad. The disaster scenarios are easy to spin out if you want to. They would arise if the current turmoil in the credit markets spreads to real day-to-day business kinds of lending, the so-called commercial industrial loans that banks make, for example, or routine consumer credit – not just mortgages, but credit cards and other kinds of consumer debt. If that were to freeze up, then I think the economy could go into a very serious tailspin.

We are not there yet. Regular consumer and business lending, aside from a couple of specialized sectors, looks like it is continuing, and the real economic indicators so far are consistent with a mild recession, not a severe one – but we are still in the early stages of this, so it’s very hard to say just how bad it’s going to turn out. There is also really no precedent for the kind of financial turmoil we are seeing, so there are no easy historical templates we can apply to this situation. There is the example of Japan in the 1990s, which experienced a very long economic stagnation after the collapse of their speculative mania of the 1980s: that has a lot of parallels with the United States.

Arguing against that would be the fact that the Federal Reserve and other authorities have acted much more quickly to counteract the deflationary effects of the credit crisis, in contrast with Japan, where the authorities took a very long time to intervene. They actually raised consumption taxes in the mid-1990s, which only prolonged the suffering.

But if I had to put it all together and lay out a scenario, I think we are facing years of a very weak and stumbling economy that will feel to many people like an extended recession, even if it is not formally one.

PA: The speedy effort to bail out Bear Stearns indicates to a lot of people that there is a gap in the government’s view of how to handle this particular crisis compared with the problems that ordinary Americans face. Why does there seem to be such a disconnect between Wall Street and Main Street?

HENWOOD: I would say, first of all, that bail out the financial system. Unfortunately, they are kind of holding the rest of us hostage. If the financial system implodes, it will take the rest of us down with it. On the other hand the public suffering you are talking about is just not being paid much attention to.

The actions so far – for example, to protect homeowners on the verge of mortgage foreclosure or who are already in foreclosure – those actions so far are very, very weak, affecting almost no one. Given the scale of the problem – millions of people are either in or at near risk of foreclosure, the scale of the response is just ridiculously small. It is clear that the sufferings of bankers excite more sympathy in Washington and in the canyons of Wall Street than do the pain of regular people.

There is certainly a distinct class bias to everything that has been done so far. We could imagine some sort of very vigorous activity to assist people who are in mortgage trouble. For example, the government could buy up the mortgages that are in trouble at a discount, and the banks could take a loss, with the government having to take up some of the loss, but sparing the folks who are at risk of losing their houses.

PA: The action the British government took in bailing out Northern Rock was to nationalize the bank. Is there a substantive difference between what they did and what the Federal Reserve and J.P. Morgan did here?

HENWOOD: I think it is a little mistaken to take Northern Rock as an example or precedent for anything done here. First of all, Northern Rock was a pretty small institution. It held mainly retail deposits. Bear Stearns was a very large investment bank that was connected to many other players on Wall Street. If they had gone down, it could have taken a lot of other people with them and really created a panic situation. I just don’t think the situation of the two banks is similar. Also, the British government dithered for weeks and weeks and actually rejected a takeover offer from another bank – which could have saved everything and also saved everyone a lot of trouble. Now the British government is on the hook for potentially billions of pounds, so this is not a lossless transaction for the British government.

PA: Other critics I have spoken to about the credit crisis in the US, talk about the lack of regulation and oversight of banking, brokers and Wall Street.

HENWOOD: That is a very, very large part of the problem. We have had five or six – I’ve kind of lost count – of these major financial crises over the last couple of decades, and there has been no reversal of the political trend toward deregulation of finance. Given that the financial sector is so crucial to the economy and that the government will react with a bailout whenever that sector is threatened, this shows that these guys can be just as reckless as they want to in boom times and then have themselves bailed out when it turns to bust times.

This combination of deregulation and lack of governmental supervision, along with the whole bailout culture that has developed, is almost a perfect prescription for financial crisis. After the dot-com and the Enron disaster in the early part of this decade, you might have thought that some lessons had been learned, and that there might have been at least some degree of disclosure requirements imposed on corporations that were building up such large speculative financial positions. We didn’t even see that, much less any kind of regulatory action. So now that people are again talking about this, I hope that it actually comes to something, because in order to prevent this kind of thing from happening again several years down the road – assuming we do not enter some kind of long-term depressive crisis – to pre the authorities do have to take action to vent it happening again, we really need some kind of re-regulation.

The public should get something in return: that means different kinds of financial institutions emerging from this crisis: community, nonprofit organizations – cooperative institutions that would provide basic financial services at low fees to lower and middle-income people, and stay out of speculative markets. This would create a much less speculative and profit-driven financial sector.

It would be interesting to see what effect that would have in competition with the big banks. These new institutions could conceivably offer basic financial services at lower cost than the big guys do. People are paying fees through the nose for basic financial services now. If there were some competition coming from public or cooperative institutions, that would be an interesting use of market competition to promote the public welfare.

PA: Are Wall Street’s financial problems, the credit crunch, the housing crisis – is that the limit of our economic problems, or are we talking about something deeper and more structural?

HENWOOD: When I was talking earlier about spinning out disaster scenarios, that is kind of what I was implying. There are many other things wrong with the American economy: one is that we have basically no domestic savings in this country. Households have been spending all their income and then some in recent years. Part of that is because of weak wage growth, weak job growth, and because people have used the mortgage market to borrow money to compensate. But since we had so small a pool of domestic savings to draw on, this was financed from abroad. So now we have an enormous foreign debt that has grown by trillions of dollars over the last several years, much of it financed by Asian central banks.

We have this very perverse economic model in which we import a lot, send a lot of dollars abroad, and then the people we import things from lend us the money back, so we can buy more stuff. Obviously there is a kind of mutually dependent, but not very healthy, relationship that has developed between the US and Middle Eastern oil exporters, on the one hand, and Asian exporters of manufactured goods on the other. Those entities have been accumulating large piles of dollars and then acquiring US assets with them. That can’t go on forever. We cannot keep accumulating foreign debt at the rate we have been. That now means, according to orthodox economic thinking, that the United States has become a country that needs to go to the IMF and get a structural adjustment program. We’ll need to tighten our belts, grow slowly, squeeze consumption, and have an extended period of a very weak economy in order to put the foreign books back into balance.

There are good ways we could do that sort of thing. We could tax rich people, have an infrastructure development program, improve the quality of our welfare state, and provide income supports for people – or we could do it the ugly, market-based way, which would mean a very deep recession, a possible severe financial crisis, an extended period of high unemployment, and very weak job and income growth.

But something’s got to give. We cannot continue to consume at the rate we have and borrow at the rate we have. Household balance sheets are really in terrible shape. There has been an enormous amount of borrowing to compensate for weak income growth for decades, but it has really accelerated in the last 5-10 years. Something has to change there. We badly need a different kind of economic model.

Also, our corporations, despite having very high profits during this expansion, have re-invested at very low rates and hired at very low rates, so while they have accumulated lots of money, they have mostly shipped that money out to their shareholders. If we are going to see a healthier economy in the future, we need to get that rate of investment up – but Wall Street won’t be very happy about it, and it may take concerted public action to make it happen. Added to that, the physical and social infrastructure in the country is in pretty rough shape, and we need to spend money on that sort of thing.

We also need to do something, if we are going to continue to have life on earth, about climate change, and I think we may have a fortunate case where spending money on R&D and greening our infrastructure would be both good economic policy and good environmental policy. But we need to have more people in public life talking about this sort of thing; some people are talking about it, but in a very weak and mild way, and I think we need much stronger medicine than what is likely to be prescribed by anybody now in public life.

It's Time for a New Deal

Fri, 30 May 2008 01:22:00 +0000

5-29-08, 9:25 am

Prominent New Dealer, Rexford Guy Tugwell, author of The Battle for Democracy, was a 'brain truster' or policy advisor to Franklin D. Roosevelt and served under Department of Agriculture Secretary Henry A. Wallace. Tugwell was typical of the “new people” who had come to Washington in 1933 with Roosevelt’s election. They were independent progressives, and many were academics or activists who had been outside mainstream politics. Some were even mocked as “tired radicals” from the 1920s, but after Roosevelt’s election came to be seen as dangerous radicals, even socialists and communists, by the retreating, yet powerful right-wing political forces in the country.

In his book, Tugwell saw the “battle for democracy” in depression America as a struggle for long-term economic planning in the public interest. He urged the creation of a political economy that would restrain the predatory forces on Wall Street and in corporate boardrooms whose unregulated accumulation of wealth, speculation and profiteering had produced the Great Depression. Tugwell tied the battle for the future of democracy itself to the ability to develop new forms of planning for the economy and social welfare for the people.

The New Deal government moved forward in 1935 to advance a democratic people’s program in response to enormous pressure from the working class. The most ambitious public employment program for the unemployed was the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The Roosevelt administration created it in response to demands from unemployed councils, social worker groups, and community-based groups who called for “work relief.”

Additionally, the New Deal government enacted national anti-poverty legislation to provide public assistance for working families, called Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). With the growing New Deal coalition behind him, Roosevelt also established the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) for the mostly rural, poor one-third of the nation who lacked access to electricity because private power companies saw little profitability in providing electricity to those areas.

The National Labor Relations Act, establishing the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), created a mechanism to provide a democratic process enabling workers to establish unions. The NLRB was also given authority to prevent employers from using criminal or threatening tactics against workers to block union organizing and to compel bosses to bargain collectively with workers. Social Security and unemployment insurance legislation, the latter particularly championed by a nationwide network of Unemployed Councils, often organized by Communists were enacted.

Another major achievement of the New Deal coalition on the labor front was the formation of a new way of organizing workers. In 1935, the Committee (later Congress) of Industrial Unions (CIO) was formed by industrial unionists to organize the mass production industries and millions of unorganized semiskilled and unskilled workers. Communist Party USA activists, who for years had been engaged in campaigns to build inclusive industrial unions, played a leading role in this development.

New Deal forces won a huge political victory in the reelection of Roosevelt in 1936. That electoral victory accelerated the drive by CIO organizers to successfully lead a sit down strike against General Motors and then won union recognition from US Steel by threatening a sit-down strike. These victories against what were at the time the two largest industrial corporations in the world were quantitatively and qualitatively the greatest victories won by the labor movement in its history, before or since.

While there were also major defeats particularly in the South and New Deal progress was uneven (the capitalist class used vigilante violence and sympathetic local and state police forces and everything else they could to defeat the working class offensive), the gains were not reversed. In 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act established minimum wages, the 40-hour work week, timeand-a-half for overtime work and outlawed child labor. Pilot programs for federally supported public housing and a program to provide aid to small farmers and agricultural laborers were also enacted. A food stamp program providing poor people with subsidies to purchase food through coupons that store keepers could redeem passed into law in 1939.

Although this list isn’t complete, it is most of what Americans came to see as the New Deal. It was the accomplishment of the center-left coalition that advanced labor’s rights at home, strengthened the working-class and people’s movements generally, and also advanced at the grassroots an anti-fascist policy that would play a major role in the victory over fascism in the World War II.

This historical perspective of the New Deal helps us understand the present, as the anti-New Deal forces who came to power with Reagan’s victory in 1980 and who have been hegemonic since, face a possible devastating defeat in 2008 as a result of their disastrous and discredited policies. Since the 1930s, there has been an ongoing struggle between the New Deal and the anti-New Deal, broadly put, a struggle which has been an essential part of the class struggle and the struggle for democracy. World War II and the developing Cold War contained but stopped short of dismantling the pro-working-class policies called for and enacted by the New Deal coalition. The Taft-Hartley law of 1947, for example, amended the NLRA to establish anti-union shop and so-called “right to work” laws in Southern and agricultural western states, to weaken the right to strike, and, until recently, to deny Communist Party USA members the right to hold any union office.

Harry Truman’s attempt to enact a New Deal program that he called the “Fair Deal” in 1948, including a national health program, federal aid for education, and a repeal of Taft-Hartley, helped bring an unexpected election victory for himself and congressional Democrats that year. But the program was a casualty to both his own Cold War policies and the general Cold War mindset that linked such policies with socialism. Also the domestic effects of the Cold War led to massive purges and blacklisting of left activists whose work would have been necessary to make those programs work even if they had been signed into law.

Less than two decades later, Lyndon Johnson succeeded in passing New Deal-inspired programs he repackaged as the “Great Society.” These programs included Medicare and Medicaid, substantial federal aid for education programs, a Department of Housing and Urban Development, consumer and environmental protection legislation, and, of course, the most significant civil rights legislation since the Civil War.

While these programs passed in Congress, Johnson’s Cold War inspired involvement in and escalation of the Vietnam War lost him the support of many people who had formed the original center-left New Deal coalition: civil rights, women’s rights, environmental, and especially anti-war activists who united around the goal of “participatory democracy.” This fragmenting of the New Deal coalition combined with the organized racist right-wing backlash against civil rights and antipoverty legislation greatly undermined the implementation of the Great Society and set the stage for the future successes of the anti-New Deal.

Richard Nixon, for example, was able to gain the presidency by campaigning for law and order against those whom he accused the retreating New Deal coalition of harboring and unleashing, that is, cultural and social radicals attacking the American “silent majority.” Although Truman’s and Johnson’s attempts to advance the New Deal clearly failed by the 1970s, it still appeared that the postwar synthesis of New Deal and corporate Cold War institutional arrangements remained in place.

Though the labor movement stagnated, no major piece of New Deal legislation had been repealed, nor were Great Society programs like Medicare and Medicaid eliminated. Civil rights legislation and policy was more complicated. While the Civil Rights Acts of 1964, 1965 (voting rights), and 1968 (affirmative action) were not repealed, right-wing forces blocked new civil rights legislation to expand and develop their scope. Subsequent Republican administrations filled federal judicial appointments with activist right-wing judges, undermining judicial support for labor’s rights, civil rights and civil liberties won as a part of the New Deal and its subsequent extensions.

At the beginning of the 1980s, the forces long centered in the Republican Party who had fought to dismantle the New Deal institutionally and destroy the influence of the New Deal coalition gained political power in Washington. Most establishment scholars and analysts had concluded by the 1970s that the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations, along with leading sections of business, had accepted the New Deal as an accomplished fact, satisfied to prevent as far as was possible new progressive social legislation, but either uninterested in or afraid to try to dismantle existing programs.

But the ultra right signaled its intention to destroy the New Deal with the presidential candidacy of Barry Goldwater in 1964. Though soundly defeated that year, Goldwater advocated privatizing Social Security and publicly-owned development projects and electrification programs and greatly expanding anti-labor “right to work” laws.

Ronald Reagan emerged as Barry Goldwater’s successor in right-wing politics, and he used the inflation crisis of the late 1970s to gain the presidency on an irrational program of tax cuts, social spending cuts, increases in military spending, while promising to balance the budget. Reagan won crossover voters pretending to be what he called a “Truman Democrat,” but the whole aim of his presidency was to starve New Deal programs of funding and squeeze them out of existence and appeal to the racist backlash against the civil rights movement that had gained momentum a decade earlier.

Reagan and his successor George H.W. Bush blocked minimum wage increases for 12 years. Reagan attacked the trade union movement in 1981 when he broke the air traffic controllers strike by firing them and blacklisting them from any federal employment. With the active support of the NLRB, employers began the most extensive union busting campaigns since the 1920s. As a result, the trade union movement, which had long stagnated under conservative leadership, began to decline sharply both in terms of union density and the nature of the contracts that unions were signing. Reagan also reduced over 80 percent of all HUD aid for public and low-income housing, carried out the most extensive cuts in domestic social spending in history, punished local authorities that sought to sustain rent controls, pushed for the deregulation of energy and banking that undermined New Deal controls, and enacted the most extensive tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy ever.

In contrast to the philosophy of the New Deal, Reagan contended that the more government did to increase the wealth of capital, the better off low-income people would be, reviving the long discredited “trickle down” theory of economic development. Social Security, unemployment insurance, and subsequent programs like Medicare, which New Dealers saw as rights, Reagan disparaged as “entitlements” that prevented the “trickle down” theory from being fully implemented. While the New Deal looked to the cities as centers of culture and job creation, the anti-New Deal either ignored or punished the cities with endless cutbacks and encouraging investment in racially segregated suburbs, compelling beleaguered city governments to make deals with developers to make up for lost revenues at the expense of working families.

Whereas the New Deal connected economic growth to expanding public sector funding and programs, the anti-New Deal connected economic growth to reducing those programs, replacing public employees with private consultants, outsourcing a wide variety of public sector services (even prisons and support services for the military, leading directly to the excesses of corporations like Blackwater USA).

Just as analysts contended that the Republican administrations of Eisenhower and Nixon had grudgingly accepted the New Deal, the Democratic administration of Bill Clinton accepted and sought to moderate the anti-New Deal. Clinton’s policies greatly strengthened the anti-New Deal, giving the right-wing dominated Republican Party control of Congress. Clinton also negotiated NAFTA, which had the general support of corporations and conservatives and the general opposition of labor and progressives, further dividing the Democrats and strengthening the Republicans. Clinton also joined with the forces of the anti-New Deal to implement what even Reagan had not done, the complete elimination of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (ADFC). Clinton’s collaboration with the anti-New Deal laid the groundwork for the George W. Bush administration, which pushed forward the worst policies of the anti-New Deal ideologues.

Today, it should be clear that the anti-New Deal has failed. Between the 1930s and the 1970s, income inequality narrowed because a relatively stronger labor movement, more progressive taxation, and significantly better social benefits connected economic growth to a substantial rise in real living standards. Income inequality between the 1980s and today, however, has risen sharply, producing homelessness at the bottom, the construction of multimillion dollar luxury developments at the top, and a huge debt crisis in the middle.

In addition to this, while the national debt rose from nearly $250 billion in 1945 to $1 trillion in 1980, the “supply side” economics and “trickle down” theory of the anti-New Deal has seen the national debt rise to over $10 trillion dollars in the 28 years since. Interest payments on the debt have become the second largest expense in the budget funded by general revenues after military spending.

The elections of 1932 and 1936 that swept New Deal forces into power represented one watershed in history. The election of 1980 another. And the election of 2008 will, however it ends, represent a third. In 1980, the long-term containment of the New Deal and the profoundly negative effects of the Cold War mindset led a major section of the electorate to be convinced that tax cuts for the wealthy were really tax cuts for them; that social spending was spending for minorities and the poor that took money out of their pockets, rather than social investments in services and infrastructure that benefited everyone; that domestic social problems could be solved by police and prisons; and that complex international problems could be solved only by war or the threat of military might.

Today, the anti-New Deal is in tatters. And the New Deal broadly defined as the movements for workers’ right, a progressive tax policy, a public sector that invests in housing, health care, education, transportation, environmental protection, and energy in order to provide affordable services for the whole people, is emerging.

For the 21st century version of the New Deal to be successful, the Republican Party must suffer the kind of smashing defeat that it suffered in 1932 at all levels. A Democratic president with a strengthened progressive caucus in Congress must come to power in a landslide. A united labor-led people’s movements for workers’ rights, peace, equality, universal health care reform, energy and environmental alternatives and so on must be involved in ensuring such a victory whenever and wherever possible. Only then will a period of large working-class and people’s victories, rather than defensive battles, become possible. Such victories would profoundly improve the quality of life for the overwhelming majority of Americans, producing greater economic and social equality, which as Rexford Guy Tugwell contended in 1935, is the foundation for modern democracy.

--Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor of Political Affairs.

Nazis Under the Wing of Operation Condor

Fri, 30 May 2008 01:19:00 +0000

5-29-08, 9:22 am

Investigators and researchers have long shown operational connections between exiled Nazis and US intelligence services who collaborated to target progressive movements in Latin American, reports the Cuban News Agency.

The forces that participated in Operation Condor — many of them former Nazi officers — were advised by US intelligence operatives.

Despite 40 years having passed since that brutal torrent of kidnappings and assassinations, many people continue to decry such incidents and continue looking for their “disappeared” relatives.

Writer Juan Gelman participated in the “Rally in Silence” this month. For the last 13 years, this has been held in the center of Montevideo, Uruguay, demanding truth and justice for what occurred during the 1973-1985 dictatorship.

Gelman, who is among those who spent years investigating that period, discovered the whereabouts of his granddaughter Macarena in 2000. After several attempts at negotiation, in 2005 he found that the family of an Uruguayan police officer had raised the child.

May 20 was selected to hold the “Rally in Silence” because on that same date in 1976, former Uruguayan legislators Zelmar Michelini and Hector Gutierrez Ruiz and left militants Rosario Berredo and William Whitelaw were kidnapped and assassinated in Buenos Aires. That case was never solved.

Through the “Rat Route,” under the orders of Adolf Hitler a number of war criminals who committed atrocities in Europe were transferred to Latin American nations.

Their lives in remote areas of Latin America with different names provided them with safety, although their moral conduct continued as assassins, and many continued to enjoy torturing and killing their victims.

During the month of May, while families of the disappeared marched through Latin American cities demanding justice for the loss of loved ones during the military dictatorships, new evidence came out to light about former Nazi criminals that found refuge thanks to the so-called Rat Route.

International news agencies report that Dr. Aribert Heim, the most wanted Nazi war criminal, is alive and is living in the Chilean or Argentinean Patagonia.

According to Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, the criminal may well be living in the Patagonia because a daughter of his lives in Puerto Montt, some 600 kilometers south of Santiago de Chile.

There is also the probability that he is living in Bariloche, Argentina – a nation that was the home to Nazi war criminals and the stage at the time of the dictatorship for the torture and massacre of young revolutionaries.

Heim, 93, killed hundreds of people in the Mauthausen Concentration Camp using direct injections of gasoline into their hearts.

This “Dr. Death” was almost arrested in 1962 in the former West Germany, but someone warned him and was able to escape.

Although his family says he has passed away, a German police operation revealed that there was a bank account in his name in Berlin with over 1 million Euros.

If his children had proven that Heim was dead, they could have withdrawn the money from the account – but they did not, so investigators suspect that he remains alive.

The demand for justice by the victims of Operation Condor in Latin America continues, as does the condemnation of those individuals linked to the CIA and the former Gestapo who participated in those crimes.

Cuban News Agency

Surge Against the Occupation

Thu, 29 May 2008 04:15:00 +0000

5-28-08, 1:00 pm

General Petraeus painted a rosy picture when he went back to Congress in early April requesting more cash and presenting a plan to extend the occupation. Petraeus recommended a “pause” in the withdrawal of “surge” troops mandated for this year, despite claims of “success.” In a cynical gesture, George W. Bush chose to put off changes in Iraq war policy until the next administration.

Congressional Democrats laid into the general questioning why earlier he and the administration had argued the occupation needed to be expanded due to ongoing violence, and now insist the “surge” must be extended because of its successes. Many members of Congress focused critical comments at the Bush administration for lacking a viable strategy to end the war and the Iraqi government for refusing to take steps toward national reconciliation and unity.

Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) averred that the administration’s thinking is an irrational recipe for endless war and occupation. “An open-ended pause starting in July (referring to the administration’s refusal to withdraw surge troops) would be just the next page in a war plan with no exit strategy,” he said. Levin wondered why the Iraqis would ever adopt different political or security efforts if they knew they could always rely on the US for both cash and military forces.

Sen. Barack Obama agreed and insisted that the best way to escape the Bush administration’s catch-22 is to create a timeline for bringing the troops home. Referring to the failure to produce political reconciliation among competing Iraqi sects Obama said, “I also think that the surge has reduced violence and provided breathing room, but that breathing room has not been taken the way we would all like it to be taken.”

He added, “I think that increased pressure in a measured way ... includes a timetable for withdrawal. Nobody’s asking for a precipitous withdrawal, but I do think that it has to be a measured but increased pressure; and a diplomatic surge that includes Iran.” Talking to Iran about security in Iraq and humanitarian assistance there is crucial, as many analysts believe that Iran has as much if not more influence in Iraq’s ruling coalition as the Bush administration.

Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) put the point more sharply. “The Iraqi government has failed to make their country safer or more stable,” she said, “[T]hey have failed to hold provisional elections, reform their oil laws or disarm the militias. This is a failure in leadership.”

For his part, Republican nominee Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who supports the administration’s refusal to change course in Iraq and even has said that he would support a 100-year occupation of Iraq – even a 1,000 years, he told one group – appeared to be confused about the political dynamics in Iraq. After repeatedly mistaking the various religious sects during a campaign trip to the Middle East in March, McCain said that Al Qaeda was “not some obscure sect of the Shi’ites overall.”

Of course, Al Qaeda is a Sunni group and by the best estimates of the Pentagon itself is responsible for only a tiny sliver of the hundreds of weekly violent attacks. In fact, groups that have been funded or supported politically by the US government are more responsible for sectarian conflict.

McCain’s goal in making such blatantly wrong statements may be to confuse voters into accepting his plan to continue the war. The Republican nominee along with Bush administration talking heads and right-wing media pundits have also argued that leaving Iraq would set the stage for a civil war and even genocide. The presence of US forces, they insist, are needed to avert that. When pressed, however, they also freely admit they are mainly interested in pursuing strategic military goals against Iran and other Middle Eastern countries labeled as members of the “axis of evil” as well controlling dwindling oil reserves.

Center for American Progress national security analyst Lawrence Korb rejected the idea that any one group in Iraq is powerful enough to fulfill McCain’s worst case scenario fantasies. Said Korb, “There’s no group strong enough to do it.”

Brian Katulis, also of the Center for American Progress and a co-author with Korb of a report titled, “How does this End?”, pointed out the illogic of the Bush-McCain endless war argument. “The cruel irony is that many of the things that those who want to stay the course ... say they want to guard against, whether its sectarian cleansing ... happened while we were there with the largest presence we’ve had,” he said. “This fact raises some serious questions about what a continued presence will do in absence of any political measures to get the competing Iraqi factions to settle their differences over power sharing,” he added.

Indeed, the Center for American Progress report concluded that the 2006 elections, which were widely regarded as a popular mandate to end the war, put the most pressure on Iraqi groups to move closer to taking on violent factions, improving their own security efforts, and taking steps toward reunification and reconciliation. Bush administration and now McCain assurances that the occupation will continue, however, have had a harmful impact on those efforts, convincing some factions that postponing political reconciliation during a US occupation will improve their own standing relative to others.

A regional diplomatic surge combined with a massive international humanitarian effort are the best ways to prevent worst case scenarios from occurring when US troops come home, argued Katulis and Korb.

Judith LeBlanc, organizing director for United for Peace and Justice, agreed that these steps are needed, but she saw a diplomatic surge, a massive international humanitarian effort in Iraq, and US troop withdrawal and closing US military installations as not just ways to fend off disaster scenarios but as the only alternative to continued war. “Unless the peace movement is pro-actively advocating a way out of Iraq,” she said, “it is very hard for those who are running for office to go much further than to vaguely say we want the troops out, or we’ll bring the troops out in 2009.”

She further argued that success in bringing the war to an end depends on how well the antiwar movement is able to make a clear case for ending the war in the public arena and winning the debate with solid alternatives to neoconservative pro-war ideas: We have to advocate, in a very pro-active way, what the steps are toward ending the war: The first step is to set deadlines for troop withdrawal. The next step is to begin the withdrawal and begin to open up a diplomatic surge, one where those who are running to be a part of the new Congress and the next president of the United States say to the world, “We made a big mistake and we need your help so that the Iraqi people and the Iraqi government can regain control of their country.”

Huge shifts in public opinion against the war and the overwhelming popular enthusiasm for ending the Bush administration are the direct result of the work of the peace movement. “We have come a long way,” LeBlanc asserted, “in exposing the Bush lies about launching this war, the corruption in the Bush administration, and all the corporate profiteering that has gone on in the five years of the war.”

There is little chance that the war in Iraq, the lies that started it, its ongoing failures, the humanitarian crisis it provoked, and the massive cost in lives and treasure for both the US and Iraq would have created an urgent demand for political change if there had been no peace movement to mobilize public opinion against the war.

Even with about seven in 10 Americans wanting the war to come to an end and almost as many supporting the idea of establishing a timetable for withdrawal, ending the war isn’t automatic however. LeBlanc stated, “Now the big challenge is how you take this new level of awareness about the Bush administration and the neoconservative agenda and turn it into a very organized presence in the electoral struggle.”

There is some disillusionment in some sections of the peace movement with the Democratic Congress. Many people feel that “the Congress elected in 2006 had a mandate to end the war, and some feel frustrated that the war has not been brought to an end under this Democratically-controlled Congress,” LeBlanc added. Still, there is a strong current in the peace movement that sees its role as having a positive affect, LeBlanc said. “Historically a majority of the American people have not participated in elections, but what we have seen in 2008 is that there are many people who, through their own personal involvement, now believe that the government’s polices can be changed, and that in particular the war can be brought to an end.”

LeBlanc also put forward the idea of the link between the cost of war and the growing domestic crises, a notion gaining increasing currency among Americans, who now overwhelmingly, according to recent polls, tie the war to the recession. “Because the war is a key element in the present economic crisis,” she said, “the majority of the people understand that billions for war, when healthcare and jobs are being cut, just does not make any sense.”

Rev. Osagyefo Sekou, a New York-based Christian minister who works with United for Peace and Justice, speaking to Political Affairs in a recent interview, agreed with LeBlanc’s assertion and said, “To paraphrase Dr. King in another way, the bombs in Iraq blew up the levees in New Orleans.”

He added that a more fundamental philosophical and moral transformation has to happen in America to make peace permanent and to fundamentally alter US foreign policy. “I believe that nothing less than an epistemic break that has the depth of the founding of Christianity and the breadth of the Reformation can change the course that we’re on,” Sekou said.

To get on the path to accomplishing this, Sekou exhorted the progressive faith community to challenge more directly the moral hegemony of the religious right, which has dominated public discourse in the country for decades. “It has hindered us in thinking in ways that are different and unique,” Sekou said. “As a result, we do not have a viable political discourse around, race, religion, around politics in America.”

From the battles in Congress to the organizing of the broadly conceived peace movement, to delivering a landslide in November along with working to transform the philosophical and moral landscape, the current moment is full of promise and challenge.

The November 4 election, in no small way, will be a decisive factor in whether this moment takes us in a forward direction or keeps us mired in this war and a government that refuses to come to the aid of the majority of Americans. As LeBlanc concluded, “Many people already understand the danger of a McCain administration.

People understand the danger of pursuing a military solution to the situation in Iraq, and people understand the danger of a military solution to all of the huge political and economic problems that exist in the world.”

The presidential election will be a choice between one candidate who ties diminished economic vitality and ruined national prestige to a war based on lies, and another who has so closely identified himself with the lobbyist culture of Washington and the dismal policies of the Bush administration that he is promising little more than a third Bush term.

Our task: help agitate, educate, and mobilize people everywhere we can to make the right choice on November 4th.

--Joel Wendland is managing editor of Political Affairs.net

Financial Crisis and Class Struggle

Thu, 29 May 2008 04:01:00 +0000

5-28-08, 1:00 pm

Marxists and non-Marxist economists have predicted the current financial crisis for some time. Its conditions have been in operation since the acceleration of the deregulation processes in the monetary and financial markets. It is impossible to determine the exact day it all began, but it first affected Mexico in 1994 – at the very beginning of its integration into NAFTA – then the “emerging” Asian countries (South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, and others), Russia and Brazil in 1997-1998, and Argentina in 2001. Its main manifestations in the United States and in Europe should not cause us to forget its global repercussions. Since 2006, the present troubles in the housing sector have their own self-feeding mechanisms, but they can’t be separated from the implosion of the “dot-com” bubble in 2001 or the deregulation and free trade projects of the 1990s.

On August 9, 2007, the European Central Bank agreed to grant an amount of $130 billion of new loans to the banking system there to improve liquidity and avoid a credit crunch. The US Federal Reserve followed with $24 billion and the Central Bank of Japan with $8.4 billion. The goal was to stop the fall in the stock market exchanges, especially after the suspension of the business of three investment funds of the French bank BNP Paribas involved with faulty real estate investments.

After five days of intervention, the Central Banks had injected more than $350 billion into the monetary and financial markets. During the second half of that year, the financial markets still exhibited a strong volatility each time that one of the largest US-based banks, like Citigroup or Morgan and Stanley, announced staggering losses. In London, the Bank of England was forced to help Northern Rock which underwent a run on the bank, the first one in a European country in almost a century – and the British government is discussing the possibilities of its nationalization.

January 21, 2008 was a new day of panic in the financial markets, just after the discovery of a record fraud in the French bank Société Générale. Stock markets from Frankfurt and Paris, to São Paulo and Buenos Aires, Hong Kong and Shanghai, to Mexico and New York collapsed. The following day, the Fed reduced its prime rate from 4.25 percent to 3.50 percent, then to 3.0 percent, in an extraordinarily aggressive ten-day period.

In the US, George W. Bush eventually announced a weak plan to aid some homeowners to pay their mortgages and, a few months later, tax rebates. These two schemes, however, have been criticized as insufficient to cope with the full extent of the crisis. The first one would concern only a restricted number of families, and the second would focus principally on those earning sufficiently high enough wages to pay income tax and would serve to do little more than temporarily fend off mounting personal debts for most recipients.

The origins of the crisis

Economic crisis is a “normal” mode of functioning of the capitalist system, even if in each historical period the mechanisms can vary. Since the dismantling of the Bretton Woods institutions and financial deregulation, the credit system underwent tremendous changes, especially with the creation of “derivatives,” or speculative contracts on exchange rates, interest rates, stock exchange prices, among other things, created by financial institutions and sold on the international monetary or financial markets.

The take-off of these products, associated with the integration of the stock exchanges and banks into globalized markets, has transferred economic decision-making to financial groups, submitting economic logic to a purely financial one. The credit system, including banks, stock exchanges, insurance companies, pension funds, hedge funds and other institutions, is the center of the creation of the so-called fictitious capital – the state and the firms representing the two extremities of this channel. According to Marx’s Capital Vol. III, banking capital, stock exchanges and credit and debt systems, among others, are the main forms of fictitious capital.

“Derivatives” markets began in the 1960- 70s with the over-accumulation of money capital, taking the form of euro-dollars and petro-dollars on interbank markets, under the impulse of London. After the October 1979 Fed’s “coup,” which characterized the return to the power of finance, by the sudden increase in the prime rate, the expansion of this capital provoked the external debt crisis of the 1980s, starting in Mexico in 1982. The attempts to escape this crisis took the form of the financial deregulation and a securitization of loans.

In order to get an idea of the volume of this fictitious capital, let’s say that the external (public and private) debts consolidated by all the countries of the world were estimated to $5.26 trillion at the end of 2004. In late 2007, the reserves – including those financed by internal debts – accumulated by Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC), Japan, South Korea and Mexico alone exceeded $3.6 trillion. Most of these debts are transformed into fictitious capital and marketized and sold. The reserves, coming from deposits in the banks, are converted into loans or lent to the US government to finance its twin (fiscal and trade) deficits. As to the sole currency sector of the markets of derivatives, the average amounts exchanged each day were about $3.2 trillion, and the per-day sales of over-the-counter derivative contracts (OTC, directly negotiated between private agents, without mediation by the stock exchanges or any intermediary) were $4.2 trillion in 2007.

By comparison, the world aggregated GDP estimated in purchasing power parities reached $65.82 trillion in 2007, and the total international trade $13.72 trillion in exports and $13.64 trillion in imports in 2006. A rising part of this fictitious capital becomes parasitic; its amount exceeded that destined for the reproduction of industrial capital. Furthermore, in spite of no participation in productive output, it grows from surplus redistribution, and fuels the creation of more fictitious capital as a means of its own regeneration. As a consequence, the financial crisis should devaluate a gigantic amount of this parasitic fictitious capital in order to allow a new cycle of capital accumulation. But the contradiction is such that this devaluation could push the capitalist world system into a global collapse, whose consequences cannot be precisely evaluated by anyone.

Current manifestations

What is called today the housing crisis is the result of several years of accumulation of fictitious capital starting from loans to US households to buy houses. Commercial banks or institutions specialized in the financing of investments in real estate granted loans with mortgages, and transformed them into securities by creating new derivatives sold on financial markets.

The default risks were downplayed and credit over-extended, the borrowing capacity of the households artificially boosted, and the housing prices raised. From the end of 2004 to the beginning of 2006, more and more loans have been provided to lower-income families without favorable credit profiles (“subprime”), by contracts begun with payments at very low interest rates (often at one percent), then increasing (up to more than 15 percent sometimes) after a couple of years.

To make all these mortgage-backed derivatives marketable, insurance companies created other financial products, securing the refunding and a participation in interest. For their part, credit rating agencies gave the best marks to these financial products and to the institutions issuing them, which facilitated their sales everywhere to financial institutions, such as the funds of BNP Paribas or Northern Rock, among many others. In the US, they were sold to municipalities and even to schools.

The current crisis exploded when a portion of the debtors began to have difficulties paying their interest charges, because of the rise of the prime rate by the Fed. One of the reasons for this increase in the prime was the need to attract investment in order to finance the US deficits, mainly associated with the enormous expenditure caused by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In a context where the security prices and the real risks could no longer accurately be evaluated by professionals, the troubles quickly moved from the subprime mortgages sector to the “safer” prime one. The bursting of the mortgage-backed products bubble logically contaminated other segments of the markets. Nevertheless, the reasons for the crisis are not just financial; loan defaults by many households are due to wage cuts, longer working duration, job insecurity, unemployment, and increased costs of other necessities like health care. This picture is made even more complicated by the systemic need to devaluate a considerable volume of fictitious capital accumulated.

Consequently, the present monetary and financial system is full of paradoxes. The first one lies in the illusion of finding solutions by continuing the neoliberal management of the crisis of capital expansion. We left one financial bubble (the “dot-com” crisis of 2001) to go to another one (housing), even more dangerous than the previous one. All the solutions proposed – as in the new Basel II regulatory regime – are inherent in the system and rely on the market institutions without imposing limits by new mechanisms external to the logic of profit maximization.

A second paradox is the appearance of a liquidity crisis, like during summer 2007 and the loan injections by the Central Banks, in a world economy brimming with over-liquidity. The replacement of a negotiated wage-profit sharing model (requiring a strong trade union movement and workers’ rights laws) with spiraling household over-consumption and over-indebtedness makes reducing inequality and avoiding stagnation impossible without breaking the engine of economic growth. A third paradox is that “independent” Central Banks refuse any intervention in “free markets” by the state, but intervene themselves massively when the whole system is threatened.

The prospects for the class struggle

As usual during a capitalist crisis, the bourgeoisie has to accept huge losses, while trying to avoid too severe ones. Crises are moments when more capital – generally the less productive or innovative and that which presents too much risk in terms of credit – goes into bankruptcy, then can be incorporated into a more concentrated capitalist ownership structure. By this, the dominant classes leave the crisis stronger than before, even if fractions of them dropped to the middle-class. During each period of such major capital reorganization in the 20th century, the improvement of the macro-economic policies has created stronger tools to try to smooth the effects of the crisis, but it did not allow the system to prevent the deepening of its internal contradictions and a trajectory towards stagnation or a more severe depression in the future.

Nevertheless, the worst effects of the current crisis in the United States will be suffered by the poorest households. As the crisis is presently centered on real estate, millions of US families are expected to lose their homes (in addition to the 2.5 million estimated up to now), the rate of exploitation of the labor force, unemployment and poverty are going up, while wages fall. Without universal health insurance or expansion of unemployment benefits, along with the financial difficulties encountered by some states and municipalities, the living conditions will become even more difficult for working families. And the devaluation of fictitious capital will cause serious trouble for those who kept their savings in bankrupted pension funds and health insurance, e.g. Enron. But the crisis in the United States and in Europe will spread all around the world.

Through the channels of surplus transfers from the South to the North, it will hit the poor countries of the South and the peripheral labor forces. The present situation is complicated, however, by the fact that a number of countries own significant amounts of foreign reserves, which means that their governments are helping the United States to avoid a general collapse. As a matter of fact, a fall of the dollar would strongly devaluate their own reserves. Some of them already helped banks in difficulties thanks to their sovereign funds. In one way or other, the deepening crisis and the military defeats of the US in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is shifting world hegemony from the United States – likely in favor of China.

Concerning the prospects for class struggle, a systemic crisis could theoretically open the opportunity to shift political and economic power from the bourgeoisie, in particular by expropriating the means of production, to the working class. Unfortunately, the workers and their organizations, trade unions, leftist parties, and even social movements, did not recover from their defeats following the victory of neoliberalism and the collapse of the USSR. Until now, they remain without organization and direction to fight for socialism. In Latin America, the regression of the imperialist centers may be the moment to go ahead and to open new spaces for socialism.

But this direction is not inevitable. The fact is that the poor suffer most during capitalist crises, and there comes the risk that they may submit to the dominant ideology and support anti-crisis, but pro-systemic measures. In times of economic crisis, capitalists are often successful at substituting the demand for the workers’ emancipation with the call for the right of employment, i.e. the right to be exploited. Crises are moments when it becomes possible to push the contradictions to their maximum, until the end of the domination of capital and of the ruling classes – that is the destruction, not of the means of production, but of the capitalist relations of production. So, it is urgent to rebuild programs for socialist transitions, against the exploitation of labor and for the end of capitalism.

The Horror Behind the Horror

Thu, 29 May 2008 03:58:00 +0000

5-28-08, 1:00 pm

I often wonder if our popular-culture addiction to violence derives less from a desire to slake some inward void, or from the so-called “CSI effect” that primes us to expect pseudo-scientific explanations for all manners of cruelty, than from the logic of the market. This year, Bush referred to war as “romantic,” a characterization (mildly) disputed even by überhawk John McCain, but I wonder if the Chimp-in-Chief may have unwittingly hit upon a truism.

When I write fiction, which I do in strange, spasmodic, and often multi-year intervals, I invariably find myself trafficking in the supernatural: ghosts, resurrections, even a satirical vampire or two. Partly due to a species of adolescent angst still not outgrown in middle age, and partly due to the inevitable losses that come with lived experience, I recognize that like many a hack and many a genius, I find in the supernatural ways to explore that great theme of death. And I suppose I’m drawn to the supernatural, too, partly because it’s an element of my favorite kind of reading, whether Stephen King’s Pet Sematary or Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Yet in writing and thinking about the horror genre, I find myself ironically confronting another, unanticipated marker of my own mortality in the vast generational divide between my own sensibilities and those of friends in their '20s and early '30s as to what counts as scary. For much of the younger half of that key 18-49 demographic, the genre “horror” in both text and film denotes what has come to be called “torture porn” and “splatter-punk,” often as not devoid of any supernatural soliciting.

Although this “joie de gore” is not unique to our cultural moment – ever read Jacobean tragedy – I struggle to historicize it. After all, it’s either historicize or admit to myself I may be an out-of-touch old fogy still listening to the Cure while the young and tragically hip are embracing Vampire Weekend. The simplistic explanation, which might indeed horrify the radical right that rails against “secular humanism,” is that for the popular imagination the ladder is gone; lip-service is paid to religious orthodoxies about souls and the afterlife but despite the unseemly dominance of religion in the American public sphere, ours is nonetheless a post-theological era. Or perhaps the old conventions of horror – yes, those ghosts, walking dead folks, and vampires – are too damn tame compared with the graphically violent images disseminated by the 24-hour news cycle and viral video of real-life beheadings, massacre victims, even Princess Diana dying in her mangled car. Yet I must allow that the supernatural still claims an avid following, evidenced by the eponymous CW series on TV, by Cormac McCarthy’s postapocalyptic novel The Road, and countless, interchangeable Hollywood popcorn movies.

Zombies in particular seem to be enjoying something of a revival, if the bad pun may be pardoned, those walking cadavers animated only by their corporeal appetites and thus, at least since George Romero, apt metaphors for our own mindless consumerism and conventionality. But when I ask my younger friends about their favorite “horror” fiction or film, they generally cite what used to be called “thrillers” such as the Hannibal Lecter novels of Thomas Harris, grisly movies from Scream to Saw, narratives in which savage but definitively earthly madmen incite festivals of dismemberment and death. Stephen King hasn’t had a blockbuster novel this century; Anne Rice has moved from fetishizing vampires to “Christ the Lord”; and I know of no one, myself included, who watches such mainstream horror fare as The Ghost Whisperer or Medium. But even if we grant a possible (and, I hope, temporary) exhaustion of the old bogeymen of goblins and ghouls in our popular fictions, I remain unnerved by their replacement by narratives offering sadistic and graphic violence as the source of that uniquely pleasurable frisson of make-believe horror.

I must grant, too, that I’m the most squeamish person on the planet when it comes to gore, cursed with a brain incapable of viscerally differentiating between imaginary and actual threat when the former is rendered with extreme verisimilitude. Old fogy. But I often wonder if our popular-culture addiction to violence derives less from a desire to slake some inward void, or from the so-called “CSI effect” that primes us to expect pseudo-scientific explanations for all manners of cruelty, than from the logic of the market. That is, a market strategy similar to that employed by the English to hook the Chinese on opium for trade leverage, and in the last century by Big Oil and Big Tobacco to confound want and need for their destructive products. (Full disclosure: I smoke, I love to smoke, and I will probably die from it, but that’s for another rant.) Feed us enough violence and of course, we’ll get hooked; far from inured to sadistic gore, we thrill to it. And just as my psyche can’t distinguish between Frederic Forrest’s severed head in Apocalypse, Now (one of my favorite movies) and grainy images of Daniel Pearl I can’t and won’t look at, it seems that something of the collective American consciousness, nurtured on torture and death as entertainment, cannot separate imaginary from actual, indeed, privileges the simulation over the event, to follow Baudrillard, to the extent that the latter seems both too fantastical and too mundane to fear or believe.

For years, my sister and I have been saying that if Columbine wasn’t sufficient to sway public sentiment in favor of restricting guns, nothing would ever be. Last year’s Virginia Tech massacre received breathless media coverage but even Senator Edward M. Kennedy demurred from raising the topic of gun control, and both remaining Democratic candidates, as well as my initial choice, John Edwards, have proudly proclaimed their belief in the constitutional right to bear arms. The realities of thousands of disfigured, dismembered, and desecrated bodies, living and dead, Iraqi and American, not only don’t provoke a mass demand, not mere request, for the immediate withdrawal of US forces from Bush’s illegal and immoral war, they serve as fodder to transform the American aggressors into saviors. Inconveniently the occupied Iraqis failed to fulfill the Bush administration’s candy-and-flowers scenario, but soon enough, triumphalist, self-congratulatory reports appeared about American benevolence in providing prosthetics and reconstructive surgery to children maimed by our forces.

This year, Bush referred to war as “romantic,” a characterization (mildly) disputed even by überhawk John McCain, but I wonder if the Chimp-in-Chief may have unwittingly hit upon a truism. For modern horror fiction developed largely the from late-18th and early-19th century “Gothic” romance novel, and the supernatural sublime became a hallmark of the Romantic movement. Today, in the post-Columbine, post- 9/11 United States, the sublime has been evacuated while the gross substance of horror has been literalized, commodified; those pleasurable chills once roused by apparitions and succubi are now evoked by a grisly imaginary no longer situated in the imagination.

The supernatural that once teased us as an uncontainable excess flitting just beyond the boundaries of bourgeois scientism is now all but subsumed by the efficient production of the “hyper-natural,” to again paraphrase Baudrillard, a hyperviolence so intoxicating as to render literal violence a banal imitation of life. Brecht’s bold critique of mimetic naturalism still resonates as a reminder of the complicity of conventional realist aesthetics in the production of false consciousness. The desacralization, if you will, of the horror genre speaks less of a cultural taste for realism than of our devaluation of our own violent realities, a devaluation that numbs us to the potential for resistance to those who literally traffic in – and profit from – torture, dismemberment, and death. Why attend to what’s happening at Gitmo when you can happily watch the Hostel movies?

Call me anachronistic, but as a reader and writer, I prefer to seek comfort as well as thrills in an imaginary that, however quaintly, revels in death’s mysteries rather than in its grisly, hyperreal mechanics.

--Karin Coddon frequently contributes to Political Affairs.

New Times, New Opportunities

Thu, 29 May 2008 03:33:00 +0000

5-28-08, 1:00 pm

Editor's Note: Excerpted from CPUSA National Committee report, March 2008. Comments are welcome.

The political upsurge ricocheting across the country has no counterpart in recent decades. Its breadth and depth are remarkable. Its politics are progressive. It is framing the nation’s political conversation. It rejects the old racist and sexist stereotypes. It is a mass rebellion against the policies of the Bush administration. It is seeking a political leader – one who gives priority to “lunch pail” issues, appeals to our better angels and visualizes a country that is decent, just, united and at peace with the rest of the world. And it’s the necessary groundswell and kinetic energy for a smashing victory in November.

The setting of this upheaval is the Democratic presidential primaries. So far, the turnout has been far beyond anybody’s expectations. Records are being broken in nearly every state primary. Every sector of the people is marching to the polls. Young voters are grabbing the electoral bull by the horns. Twice as many Democrats have voted as Republicans, an ominous sign for the GOP this fall.

The high octane of this upsurge is simply breathtaking. In every place where people gather, the candidates, the primaries and the issues are the subject of animated conversations. If anyone thinks that issues are getting short shrift or that it is all about personalities, I can only guess that they are just watching, but not feeling and listening to the whirlwind that is blowing across the country.

Aren’t the most pressing concerns of the American people structuring the “give and take” of candidates as well as voters? This is anything but an issueless campaign. It contrasts sharply with the last presidential elections when the “War on Terror” took up nearly all the oxygen in the room.

Thanks to this surge, a woman or an African American is on track to become the presidential nominee. This reflects the growing political maturity of the American people. It should be celebrated as a great democratic achievement. Anything that is done to diminish this fact should be vigorously challenged.

In short, tens of millions of voters have turned the Democratic primaries and the November general elections, into the main, if not the singular, terrain on which millions hope to draw down the final curtain on the whole right-wing project and set the country on a new course. No matter whether voters support Obama or Clinton in the Democratic primaries, the political intent of their votes is clear: people want change and not any kind of change, but change that puts people’s needs before war-making, division, sleaze and corporate profits.

Struggles in other arenas will continue to be sure, but all of them should find their part in the great drama that is now unfolding on the stage of electoral politics. While an ending to this drama is still to be written, it is fair to say that a decisive people’s victory will reconfigure every arena of struggle to the advantage of the people’s movement. Any mass organizations or movements that don’t insert themselves in a full-blooded and practical way into this very dynamic process will be left behind by their own constituencies and by events. They will miss an opportunity that comes along rarely in political life.

Thus, every communist should become an active participant in this electoral upsurge, if he or she hasn’t already done so. The avenues are many and the possibilities are nearly limitless.

Let’s seize the moment.

Spontaneous factor

While the working class and every other section of the people’s movement are engaged in this upheaval, it reaches well beyond their organized structures and constituencies. That it is more spontaneous than organized should startle no one.

Any upheaval of this magnitude is a work in progress and has a large element of spontaneity. The entry of people in their millions, and especially many who have been passive and disillusioned with politics up to now, cannot be explained solely or even mainly by the actions of the existing network of people’s organizations. Any mass upsurge has its own independent dynamic.

Triggering this one are a slow buildup of combustible feelings of injustice and insecurity and a deeply felt perception by millions that the 2008 elections could change their life prospects in deep-going ways. Like everything else in nature and society, a mass upsurge should be viewed dynamically, that is, in its contradictory motion. Life, to paraphrase Lenin, is always much more complicated and multifaceted than we can ever imagine. Theory, as necessary as it is, is only a guide to action.

Unfortunately, this lesson has yet to be fully learned by some on the left. Seeing little, if any, progressive potential in electoral politics or the Democratic Party, they have a difficult time taking proper measure of and responding to unfamiliar political patterns, such as the current upsurge in the Democratic Party primaries. It doesn’t fit, nor can it be easily shoehorned to fit, their political model of social change. Needless to say, we don’t share such views. In fact, this upsurge in the electoral arena is the main political vector of struggle for the year ahead.

To our credit, we said two years ago that the midterm elections and their results were a dress rehearsal for the 2008 elections. And at our National Committee meeting last fall we went further, saying that this year’s elections could set in motion a process leading to a new era of class and democratic struggle on much higher ground.

At the same time, we have to admit that we underestimated the fury and the scope of this surge. Nor did we anticipate the Obama phenomenon.

Youth and independents

One of the most hopeful aspects of this people’s surge is the entry of young people who either were not of voting age in the last election or were old enough to vote but chose not to do so. In injecting themselves en masse into the Democratic primary process, today’s younger generation is becoming an agent of change. Not since the sixties have we seen young people bring their energy and idealism to the political process on such a scale.

The beginnings of this change were evident in recent years. More young people participated in the 2004 elections and the majority of youth voted for Kerry. Furthermore, young people were a sizeable part of the anti-war movement as well as participants in other social movements. But what we are seeing today is on an entirely different scale and level of intensity.

The reasons for this qualitative change seem clear enough. Young people are saddled with enormous debt, horrified by the Iraq war and the pervasiveness of violence, alienated from the policies of division and intolerance of the Bush administration, and turned off by a political culture that is opaque, money driven and seemingly empty of higher ideals and aims. Sensing something different in Obama’s candidacy, they are flocking into the Democratic Party primaries in record numbers as organizers and voters.

Unlike some older people, the pressures and grind of everyday life haven’t yet worn them down. “Keep on keeping on” is not a slogan they embrace. “Yes we can” better captures their mood. They eagerly desire and embrace change. They not only imagine the possibility of another world; they imagine its realization in their lifetime.

Befitting their youth, they take inspiration from yesterday’s struggles but they are not prisoners to them. The Sixties, even the Reagan years, are history, not lived or vivid experiences for them.

Finally, the young are less inclined to be cynical. This election might not begin the world anew, but for millions of young people it is a first step.

Independents are entering this upheaval, too. For many of them the Democratic presidential primaries are where the action and fresh ideas are. The politics of yesteryear no longer resonate for them; they are looking for answers to stubborn problems such as the impossible costs of health care that weigh heavily on the quality of their lives. Not least, the working class, the nationally and racially oppressed and women are leaping into this upsurge in a way not seen for many years. Each of these constituencies went to the polls in record numbers.

Voting patterns

What do voting patterns reveal? First, working people divided their vote largely between Obama, Clinton, Edwards, Kucinich and Richardson. To say that Clinton has garnered nearly all of the working class vote is simply wrong. For one thing, Black people are overwhelmingly working class and cast their vote for Obama. For another thing, Obama received the lion’s share of the working-class vote, understanding working class broadly, in many primaries and overall. At the same time, it appears that Clinton polled well among trade unionists, women workers and Latino workers.

Second, the African American people gave their overwhelming support to Obama. In nearly every primary, roughly nine of 10 African American voters cast their ballot for him. This is explained not only because of understandable pride in the possibility of electing an African American to the presidency for the first time, but also because Obama would represent their interests, unite our country and usher in a new era of fairness, justice and peace for all.

Third, most women voters supported Clinton, although younger women and African American women of all ages tended to vote for Obama. But what is really notable is the massive turnout of women of all nationalities, races and social circumstances. If one obvious reason was their deeply felt opposition to the Bush administration, the other was their excitement over the possibility of electing a woman president. No doubt both desires energized women to go to the polls and assure that women as organizers and voters will be a powerful force against the right in the fall.

Fourth, many white people, male and female, cast their votes for an African American. This might be the most notable feature of the vote so far, as quiet as it is kept by the mass media. In fact, from media reports it seems as if Obama has become the front-runner on the basis of the Black vote alone. But anyone who thinks about it for a moment knows this is ludicrous. Obama carried several states with small African American populations, and did well in the southern states and especially Virginia, where a majority of white voters supported him.

Furthermore, the millions of white people, the majority of whom were workers, who voted for Obama did so because they liked him – his manner, his style, his opposition to the war, his concern about lunch pail issues, his ability to unify our country along racial and other lines, his fresh appeal, his youthfulness and so forth.

Were some white men (not to mention other men) motivated to vote for Obama because they would never vote for a woman? Of course, but I suspect when voting patterns are studied more closely, greater explanatory weight will be given to the first set of reasons – that is, they cast their vote for Obama because they liked him.

Fifth, the Latino vote in its majority went to Clinton. But what is most striking is the increase of the Latino vote in the 2008 Democratic primaries. So far the Latino percentage of the overall primary vote is over 10 percent, whereas in the 2004 general election the percentage was 6.7 percent. In California, the Latino percentage of the Democratic Party 2008 primary vote was 30 percent compared to 16 percent in 2004; in Texas, 32 percent this year compared to 24 percent in 2004. Similar changes have occurred in other southwest states.

Equally striking is that in the primaries Latinos have voted Democratic over Republican 78 percent to 22 percent, while in the 2004 general election, the spread was much less, roughly 63 to 37 percent. With nearly five million Latinos voting in the primaries, it is becoming more likely that the Latino vote in November could reach 10 million or more and thus provide a cushion of four to five million votes for the Democrats over Republicans compared to less than two million in 2004.

The implications are obvious: the Latino vote is an essential and growing part of a larger effort to win a landslide victory over the right wing in the presidential and congressional races in November. One would never get this impression, however, from the mass media’s reportage of the primaries so far. Instead, the media spin is that Latinos flinched at the option of voting for Obama, because of anti-Black feeling. I can’t go into this in great detail, other than to say that we should take issue with this interpretation. The vast majority of Latinos voted for Clinton to be sure, but it doesn’t follow that they are anti-Obama, anti-Black. Most did because they liked her concern about economic issues, her experience, her familiarity and her connections with the Mexican American community and its leadership. Many have positive feelings toward Bill Clinton’s administration.

To bring more evidence to bear on this point, in recent decades Mexican Americans and Latinos have given support to African American big city mayors by clear and in some cases overwhelming majorities. Look at the facts: Harold Washington won 80 percent of the Latino vote in Chicago in his successful mayoral run in 1983; David Dinkins 73 percent in New York in 1989; Wellington Webb more than 70 percent in Denver in 1991; Ron Kirk big majorities in Dallas in 1995, 1997 and 1999. In Los Angeles, Tom Bradley got a good share in his first run in 1973 and clear majorities the next four times he ran. In addition, African American members of Congress in heavily Latino districts in Los Angeles and elsewhere get significant Latino support. And in Illinois, where Obama is a known entity, he has received strong support from Latino voters.Thus this divisive media spin should be vigorously contested.

Sixth, the youth and senior votes swung in different directions, with young people enthusiastically supporting Obama and senior citizens, except for Black seniors, casting their vote for Clinton. This is not too hard to explain. Older voters prefer a candidate who is a known quantity, which Clinton is. Obama, by contrast, is new on the scene. He doesn’t have the long-standing ties to the Democratic Party. His promise of change is appealing for many to be sure, and especially the young. But for others living on the edge, change can be unnerving. In hard times, we sometimes assume that working people are eager to roll the dice and say, “Come what may.”

As appealing and as seductive as that idea is to left-minded people, I am not sure the factual evidence for it exists. There are moments when ruptures occur and people embrace a radical path of action, but it is also true that in response to deteriorating conditions of life, some sections of working people have sought incremental, protective and less ambitious courses of action, some of which have taken a negative form. Instead of manning the barricades, they built fortresses to protect themselves in stormy times. This dynamic is something to consider.

My breakdown of the vote makes no claim to be comprehensive or in depth. Many categories of voters, for example, were left out who will surely have an impact on the election’s outcome – other nationally and racially oppressed people, Jews, and peace and environmental activists to name a few. Nor did I make a precise estimate of the degree to which or how sexist and racist attitudes influenced voting patterns. That still is to be done.

Nevertheless, voting patterns bode well for the general election. The turnout was far more than anyone predicted and never before on a national level have so many crossed racial and gender boundaries to cast their vote, boundaries that a few years ago seemed impenetrable. Moreover, where voters didn’t do so – say, white workers voting for Clinton, men voting for Obama, women voting for Clinton or Black people voting for Obama – their motivations can be explained more easily in a positive than a negative way.

The Obama phenomenon

The clearest expression of this developing movement pivots around the candidacy of Barack Obama, whose inspirational message and politics have captured the imagination of millions. So much so that many commentators and politicians use the words “transformational” or “transforming” to describe his candidacy – that is, a candidacy capable of assembling a broad people’s majority to reconfigure the terms and terrain of politics in this country in a fundamental way. The Obama campaign has not only brought new forces into the political process, it has also catalyzed new organizational forms.

The surge around Obama’s candidacy, much like the larger surge in the Democratic presidential primary, has a large spontaneous quality. But what makes it different is that it has the feel of “a movement.” Its supporters see in Obama someone who is without the baggage of an older generation of politicians, and who speaks to their desires.

I have heard political commentators say that Obama mania has no spelled-out political program, lacks organizational coherence and offers no guarantees it will continue after Election Day. Hearing such observations, I ask myself why on earth anyone would think this developing movement whose life span can be measured in months would be a well-oiled machine?

Anybody with any historical sense knows that movements in their early, and sometimes later, stages aren’t neat and tidy. Ideal types never find concrete representation in real life.

While this movement has its own dynamic, it is inseparable from the personality and politics of Barak Obama. While he is not a candidate of the left or someone we would endorse – since we don’t endorse candidates of either party – he is, nonetheless, a fresh voice on the political scene. His strategic and tactical concepts are broad in their sweep and his politics are forward looking. His appeal for change resonates with millions who are fed up with things as they are. And his desire to overcome divisions between Black and white, Black and brown, white and non-white, red state and blue state, immigrant and native born, Christian and Muslim, Muslim and Jew, blue collar and white collar, male and female, gay and straight, urban and rural strikes a deep responsive chord among Americans. After three decades of acrimonious rancor and division, people yearn for a kinder, gentler and more just country.

While much has been said about his own personal journey and its formative impact on his values and outlook, what has been greatly understated is that the struggles of the African American people and the larger movement against the right also have left their mark on his sensibilities and politics. Not since Bobby Kennedy has a leader stepped on the stage with as much promise to reconfigure politics and the underlying assumptions that inform debate and policy choices. His ability to articulate a vision, give voice to people’s hopes, and use the platform of politics to educate millions is extraordinary. On paper, it’s true that some of Clinton’s positions, not to mention those of Edwards and Kucinich, are better than Obama’s. But in many ways policy statements and party platforms are not the main things that should shape judgments about a presidential candidate’s potential or the prospects for change.

This is looking at politics too narrowly. It doesn’t take into account who can inspire and unite this massive upsurge, or who can articulate a moral and political vision to tens of millions, or who has the capacity to assemble political majorities in the post election period, or who has the ability to win a landslide victory against McCain and the Republicans in November.

On these counts, advantage goes to Obama in the eyes of many voters. That isn’t to say that Clinton wouldn’t be a worthy adversary to McCain. She would. Nor is it to suggest that she couldn’t win in a landslide. She can. But it would be much more difficult.

I also suspect that she would govern to the left of Bill Clinton’s administration, in large measure because the conditions and expectations are so different now. But I have heard it asked, isn’t Obama a bourgeois politician? Hasn’t he raised a lot of money from Wall St.? And isn’t he is a centrist and a creature of the Democratic Party? All of these assertions are worth discussing, but none of them can be easily answered with a yes or no reply. And even if they could, these questions by themselves wouldn’t necessarily tell us who Obama is, what his presidency would look like and how he would interact with the broader labor led people’s movement.

Class categories

We don’t want to dispense with the categories of class and class struggle for sure, but we don’t want to turn them into frozen, lifeless categories either. Class and class struggle should be understood as dynamic processes and open-ended categories and not simply as a fixed relation to the means of production that inexorably gives rise to class struggle and consciousness.

Employed properly, class categories give us clues to attitudes, tendencies, predispositions and behaviors of political actors, whether one individual or a social group. But they don’t inscribe on these same actors a mental mindset and an irrevocable course of action. To claim they do leaves out the larger political, economic and cultural processes in which class formation takes place and turns Marxism into a dogma.

To illuminate this point further, let me mention three examples. If Frederick Douglass, the great African American abolitionist leader, posed more or less the same set of questions to Lincoln in the late 1850s and early 1860s and ignored the wider political environment and the interaction between that environment and Lincoln’s shifting views, he might well have remained with the wing of the Abolitionist movement that refrained from electoral politics, was deeply suspicious of the Republican Party, and attached little significance to Lincoln’s victory in 1860.

Or if William Z. Foster posed more or less the same questions to the “Blue Blood” aristocrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt just prior to the 1936 elections and disregarded the new dynamics of struggle taking shape at the time, including Roosevelt’s understanding of these dynamics from his own class viewpoint, he might have argued against our participation in the massive coalition to reelect Roosevelt and New Deal Congressional candidates.

Or if Martin Luther King posed more or less the same questions to Lyndon Johnson and overlooked the convulsions going on in the country and Johnson’s capacity to change, he might not have supported his election bid in 1964 – a landslide victory that undeniably and significantly contributed to the passage of the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, immigration reform and the War on Poverty.

In asking only narrowly constructed questions and in not considering the fluidity of the political terrain, the overall logic of struggle and the facility of the individual to change in each of these periods, the people’s movement would have cut itself off from openings and opportunities to secure historic victories in each instance. To employ a similar methodology today with regard to Obama runs the same danger.

Struggle for unity

For some time supporters of both Clinton and Obama have said unambiguously that they would rally around the eventual nominee. Assuming for the moment that this happens, it is easy to imagine the formation of an electoral movement that in its scope and depth has no equal in the 20th century. Moreover, such a broad-based political formation has the potential to inflict an overwhelming defeat on McCain and the Republican Party at the polls and to journey down a new highway.

Whether or not that happens, however, isn’t a foregone conclusion. Setting aside for now the divisive role of the right, tensions have cropped up in the Democratic primary contest making it far less certain that supporters of each candidate will seamlessly migrate to the other’s opponent in the event their candidate isn’t the standard bearer. To a large extent, the tensions did not arise spontaneously nor are they the inevitable product of the rough and tumble of the primary process.

How then do we explain them? Earlier I said it is a great tribute to the democratic spirit and sense of decency of the often-maligned American people that a woman and an African American man are contesting for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. At the same time, racial and gender prejudice have not been absent from the presidential primaries. This should be acknowledged and vigorously opposed as having no place at this uplifting moment in our nation’s political life.

All democratic minded people should have no truck with debasing images, double standards, demeaning words, small slights and false opposition of one form of oppression to another or, worse still, the privileging of one over the other.

All of them impede the struggle for equality and unity and weaken the struggle against the right by the whole people.

We should never forget that the struggle for equality and against racism and male supremacy in its ideological and material forms is as much in the interests of white and male workers as it is in the interests of nationally and racially oppressed and women workers. As Marx wrote, “Labor in the white skin can never be free, as long as labor in the Black skin is branded.” Much the same could be said about the struggle against gender oppression.

It is precisely this that the ruling class goes to great lengths to obscure. Working class advance is always portrayed as a zero sum game, meaning the advancement of nationally and racially oppressed workers comes at the expense of white workers or the advancement of women workers comes at the cost of male workers or the securing of rights of immigrant workers comes at the expense of native born workers, and so on.

That your political adversaries on the right would exacerbate racial and gender tensions is to be expected. It has been, after all, the main way along with narrow nationalism that the extreme right has exploited white people’s feelings and resentments in order to mobilize them around their ruling class goals.

But what is unexpected is when someone you thought was on your side employs similar if not identical tactics, which is what the Clinton campaign is doing in the primaries. So that there is no misunderstanding, I’m not talking about her wider ring of labor, women, Latino and other supporters, nearly all of whom, I’m sure, object to such tactics as harmful.

The racialization of the campaign began with former President Bill Clinton in New Hampshire and South Carolina. In both primaries his assignment was to be the bad cop, no small part of which was to introduce a racial subtext in the charged atmosphere of the primaries.

After that episode it seemed to subside momentarily, in part because of the negative reaction to it. But the pause was only temporary. Going into Super Tuesday and since then, Clinton and her campaign have acted as if nothing matters except her nomination in August. Concerns about unity seem to have been cast aside.

There is a racial subtext to remarks such as only Clinton and McCain have the experience to be commander-in-chief, or “as far as she knows” Obama isn’t a Muslim, or when she offered Obama the vice presidency on her ticket, or when her TV ads show a blond young girl next to the phone ringing at 3 a.m., or when her campaign circulated tapes of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright to the media, or when Bill Clinton said how good it would be if two candidates running for the presidency were both patriotic and loved their country – all of this panders to the American people’s worst fears and stirs the embers of racial feelings at a moment when tens of millions of white people are showing their willingness to transcend them.

The Clinton campaign doesn’t seem to realize what the stakes are in this election. They are playing a dangerous game. Supporters of both candidates should strongly insist that it cease its increasingly transparent attempt to polarize the electorate along racial lines. Unless resisted, this could turn a moment of opportunity and victory into a bitter defeat with all the demoralization, division, and name calling that would inevitably follow such an outcome. Thus, we cannot be silent.

Accommodation to racial and gender disunity in the name of unity is not a communist approach. Our strategic policy is to defeat the right decisively in this election. Only a united movement can do that.

--Sam Webb chairs the Communist Party USA. Write to with your letters to the editor.

June/July, 2008 – 4 months to McCain's landslide defeat

Thu, 29 May 2008 03:24:00 +0000

Features:

Cover Story

New Times, New Opportunities By Sam Webb

22 It's Time for a New Deal By Norman Markowitz

26 Surge against the Occupation By Joel Wendland

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03 Letters

04 Film and Music Reviews The Horror Behind the Horror By Karin Coddon

05 Marxist IQ

06 Murder in the Andes By Owen Williamson

08 Chiapas and Mexico's Stolen Wealth By Alejandra Juarez

10 Problems in Marxism Financial Crisis and Class Struggle By Paulo Nakatani and Remy Herrera

13 The 'R' Word: An Interview with Doug Henwood By Political Affairs

28 Poetry A Victory is Claimed in Somalia By Janine Lanina

29 Book Reviews The Firecracker Boys: H-Bombs, Inupiat Eskimos, and the Roots of the Environmental Movement, 1919-1960 Reviewed by Ben Sears