The Largest Minority

June 26th, 2009 by Manila Ryce

President Rafael Correa of Ecuador is unlike career politicians in the United States. He actually sees his job as not an end in itself but as a means to accomplish social justice. Correa is also an economist who was educated in the US and has displayed his Chavez-sized balls by rejecting his nation’s national debt as illegitimate and pledging to fight creditors in international courts. Democrats, take note. This is what an actual liberal looks and sounds like.

The president of Ecuador has criticised capitalism for its role in the global financial crisis, in a speech to delegates attending a United Nations conference on the state of the world economy.

Raphael Correa also suggested on Thursday that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, two bodies within the group of so-called Bretton Woods institutions, be dismantled.

“Patching up the Bretton Woods system, which we do not control, makes no sense for [developing] countries,” Correa said on the second day of the summit at the UN General Assembly in New York.

Making changes to the IMF and World Bank “would be an insufficient stop-gap solution,” he said.

“We are faced with a crisis unlike those [previously] provoked by capitalism.”

If the Bretton Woods bodies, which were set up in the aftermath of World War II, cannot be abolished they should at least hold less power over the world’s poor countries, Correa said.

Decisions on how to manage the global economy should instead be transferred to the United Nations, he said.

The three-day UN Conference on the World Financial and Economic Crisis is being attended by 140 developing nations, with most of them calling for changes to be made to the global economic system.

Scores of countries attending the conference have argued that the global downturn is due to reckless economic liberalisation and de-regulation of financial systems by Western nations.

But not a single representative of a developed country is attending the summit, highlighting the divide between richer and poorer nations on how the global financial system should be managed.

“We are now dealing with the consequences of excluding the majority from the decision-making process, but it is the majority that has to pay the worst consequences and the worst price for the errors made by - I’m sorry to say it - a greedy minority,” Miguel D’Escoto, the president of the UN General Assembly, told Al Jazeera.

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June 9th, 2009 by Guest

A CNN headline, reporting Obama’s plans for his June 4 Cairo address, reads “Obama looks to reach the soul of the Muslim world.” Perhaps that captures his intent, but more significant is the content hidden in the rhetorical stance, or more accurately, omitted.

Keeping just to Israel-Palestine — there was nothing substantive about anything else — Obama called on Arabs and Israelis not to ‘point fingers’ at each other or to “see this conflict only from one side or the other.” There is, however, a third side, that of the United States, which has played a decisive role in sustaining the current conflict. Obama gave no indication that its role should change or even be considered.

Those familiar with the history will rationally conclude, then, that Obama will continue in the path of unilateral U.S. rejectionism.

Obama once again praised the Arab Peace Initiative, saying only that Arabs should see it as “an important beginning, but not the end of their responsibilities.” How should the Obama administration see it? Obama and his advisers are surely aware that the Initiative reiterates the long-standing international consensus calling for a two-state settlement on the international (pre-June ‘67) border, perhaps with “minor and mutual modifications,” to borrow U.S. government usage before it departed sharply from world opinion in the 1970s, vetoing a Security Council resolution backed by the Arab “confrontation states” (Egypt, Iran, Syria), and tacitly by the PLO, with the same essential content as the Arab Peace Initiative except that the latter goes beyond by calling on Arab states to normalize relations with Israel in the context of this political settlement. Obama has called on the Arab states to proceed with normalization, studiously ignoring, however, the crucial political settlement that is its precondition. The Initiative cannot be a “beginning” if the U.S. continues to refuse to accept its core principles, even to acknowledge them.

In the background is the Obama administration’s goal, enunciated most clearly by Senator John Kerry, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to forge an alliance of Israel and the “moderate” Arab states against Iran. The term “moderate” has nothing to do with the character of the state, but rather signals its willingness to conform to U.S. demands.

What is Israel to do in return for Arab steps to normalize relations? The strongest position so far enunciated by the Obama administration is that Israel should conform to Phase I of the 2003 Road Map, which states: “Israel freezes all settlement activity (including natural growth of settlements).” All sides claim to accept the Road Map, overlooking the fact that Israel instantly added 14 reservations that render it inoperable.

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May 26th, 2009 by Guest

Socialism is better than capitalism. So say 20 percent of Americans, and another 27 percent say they can’t say which is better, according to an April 9 Rasmussen poll.

There’s hope.

When you consider that virtually no newspaper, broadcaster, well-funded think tank, teacher, or anybody’s boss or commander ever said something nice about socialism, it’s remarkable that only 53 percent of us still favor rule by the moneyed class. Perhaps folks are learning how capitalism sacrifices happiness for individual gain.

As Billy Bragg exhorts us in his update of the socialist anthem “The Internationale”: “Stand up, all victims of oppression/for tyrants fear your might/Don’t cling so hard to your possessions/For you have nothing if you have no rights.”

No less a “capitalist tool” than Forbes Magazine let a red cat out of the bag with a report this month that the happiest countries tend to be Scandinavian socialist democracies. High per-capita GDP certainly plays a role in their felicity, but even social democratic New Zealand, with per-capita GDP only 64 percent of the United States’, ranks with the 10 democracies above us in the happiness index. They pay high taxes in these pinkotopias, but folks enjoy entitlements like free college, extensive elder care, and 52-week paid maternity leave.

The 2005 poll measured personal reports of enjoyment, pride in achievement and learning, being respected, among other things. Forbes suggests that such happiness derives from family, social and community networks, and a decent work-life balance, noting that the average workweek in Scandinavia is 37 hours.

Nice dream, but how do we get there? Most of these countries dumped capitalist exploitation long ago and instituted mixed economies with socialist ideals. More contemporary models are the 11 Latin America countries pursuing “Socialism in the 21st Century.” They too reject top-down Leninism for a system based on participatory democracy and solidarity.

In Ecuador, a land I have studied and worked in, a broad coalition of indigenous, environmentalists, trade unions, professional organizations, feminists, gay activists, left parties, and students laid the groundwork for transformation. They just re-elected Rafael Correa, their leftist standard-bearer, as president. They fought racism, oligarchs, oil companies, and corrupt politicians for decades.

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May 4th, 2009 by Manila Ryce

Democrats, take note. This is what an actual progressive leader sounds like. Your psuedo-leftist piecemeal reforms over the decades have meant victory for your party but defeat for your country.

Chrysler has filed for federal bankruptcy protection, becoming the first major American automaker to do so since 1933. The arrangement came after an intensive round of White House-sponsored negotiations among the Treasury Department, the union and Chryslers executives and creditors. We get reaction from consumer advocate Ralph Nader, who says President Obama has failed to assert adequate control over Chryslers woes.

May 2nd, 2009 by Manila Ryce

As these words are being written, the G20 meeting is taking place in the world’s second major banking city (London), and US president Barack Obama has arrived with a retinue not seen since an imperial king visited his dominions in the hinterlands, to impress upon the rabble the power and splendor of Empire.

But, as always, looks can be deceiving, for the true princes wear no diadems, and sport no trains. They are the princes of Capital, and as Marx has aptly observed, they occupy the ‘commanding heights’ of economic power, and thus, the political leaders meet to kiss their rings, in private and in silence.

But, for the last 5 months or so, those ‘commanding heights’ don’t seem so commanding any more.

As banks crumble overnight, and as long-term businesses and firms dissolve; as foreclosures gather speed, and unemployment rises like a thermometer in hell, capital’s place hasn’t seemed this insecure in several lifetimes.

If we lived in a world ruled by logic and reason, it would appear that this should be the time of left ascendancy, when socialist ideas stormed the barricades of capital, sending their stone idols crashing to the earth.

Yet, this is hardly our reality.

Why, we wonder?

It seems to me that some fundamentals need recounting here, as they’ve been no doubt through days of your panel and workshop meetings.

Capital is like a vampire; it has many faces and many lives.

In the last several decades, we’ve seen the erection of so-called think tanks, the well-capitalized repositories of court scholars, whose jobs it is to defend capitalist ideas and promote all manner of retrograde, anti-social and indeed, repressive ideas. Because of their wealth and influence, they have ready access to the mikes of media, and are thus able to amplify their volume and influence, and achieve the status of ubiquitous expert — on all matters, big and small. Such figures such as these proved pivotal in the 2001 and 2002 selling of the Iraq War, and their voices peppered the aural universe like wallpaper, with claims that now seem quite ridiculous: “Americans will be greeted like liberators”: “They’ll toss flowers at our feet”: “A garden of democracy will spring from our efforts”, and the like.

Now, of course, this was bull-manure, but the point is, it doesn’t matter. They’re back. Many are out of government, yet thanks to billions socked into the think tanks, they are a kind of shadow government, who still are able to bum rush the mike, now as think-tankers, immune from failure, for they have lifetime sinecures from capital.

Not surprisingly, there is no left counterpoint (as far as I know).

In part, I think, because the left doesn’t possess the right’s resources, or alternatively, such resources aren’t utilized in this fashion.

Thus, at a time when capital has come under serious question, few are the voices primed to offer any mass alternative, or if present, (as in this conference) how does it reach a mass audience? Or does it?

We just saw a general election several months ago in which one party repeatedly tried to accuse the other of being “socialist.” Of course, to a forum such as this, that’s hardly a slur; but didn’t you wish that the candidate really was a socialist?

Of course, if he were, he could hardly have enjoyed the corporate largesse that made his candidacy possible (not to mention the support of the party apparatus).

But, ultimately, it matters little what’s at top, as long as folks at the bottom are mobilized and organized and militant in defense of their class and social interests.

In a nutshell, there is no alternative to social movements.

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April 13th, 2009 by Manila Ryce

April 13th, 2009 by Guest

by Johann Hari

Who imagined that in 2009, the world’s governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy - backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the U.S. to China - is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth.

But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labeling as “one of the great menaces of our times” have an extraordinary story to tell - and some justice on their side.

Pirates have never been quite who we think they are. In the “golden age of piracy” - from 1650 to 1730 - the idea of the pirate as the senseless, savage thief that lingers today was created by the British government in a great propaganda heave. Many ordinary people believed it was false: Pirates were often rescued from the gallows by supportive crowds. Why? What did they see that we can’t?

In his book “Villains of All Nations,” the historian Marcus Rediker pores through the evidence to find out. If you became a merchant or navy sailor then - plucked from the docks of London’s East End, young and hungry - you ended up in a floating wooden Hell. You worked all hours on a cramped, half-starved ship, and if you slacked off for a second, the all-powerful captain would whip you with the cat o’ nine tails. If you slacked consistently, you could be thrown overboard. And at the end of months or years of this, you were often cheated of your wages.

Pirates were the first people to rebel against this world. They mutinied against their tyrannical captains - and created a different way of working on the seas. Once they had a ship, the pirates elected their captains, and made all their decisions collectively. They shared their bounty out in what Rediker calls “one of the most egalitarian plans for the disposition of resources to be found anywhere in the 18th century.”

They even took in escaped African slaves and lived with them as equals. The pirates showed “quite clearly - and subversively - that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal navy.” This is why they were popular, despite being unproductive thieves.

The words of one pirate from that lost age - a young British man called William Scott - should echo into this new age of piracy. Just before he was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina, he said: “What I did was to keep me from perishing. I was forced to go a-pirating to live.”

In 1991, the government of Somalia - in the Horn of Africa - collapsed. Its 9 million people have been teetering on starvation ever since - and many of the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country’s food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.

Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died.

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April 3rd, 2009 by Manila Ryce

Thousands flooded London’s financial district to make demands on the world leaders attending the G20 summit. Dozens were arrested Wednesday as thousands of demonstrators jammed the streets. Former British MP Tony Benn, the current president of the Stop the War Coalition, speaks with Amy Goodman. After the G20 talks, President Obama will stop in France and Germany to take part in a NATO summit marking its sixtieth anniversary. Mass demonstrations are expected with thousands of protesters from over twenty European countries and the United States.