Venezuela People's Power

Recent ZMag / Blogs

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• Thursday, Oct 01, 2009
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  Chomsky: Coups, UNASUR, U.S.

  

  

  ZMag Article

  Noam Chomsky's talk in Caracas, Venezuela, August 29

  Noam Chomsky ZSpace page
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• Tuesday, Feb 17, 2009
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  Cronan jr: Ven. Youth

  

  

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  Venezuelan Youth and the media

  John Cronan jr ZSpace page
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• Monday, Feb 16, 2009
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  Chavez: February 15!

  

  

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  It has been a long march to get to this date: February 15. It is a glorious, bright date to consolidate the full democratic rights and powers. Because it is the fate we have drawn up and we are willing to give our souls to reach it. It is a historical tim

  Hugo Chavez ZSpace page
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• Thursday, Feb 12, 2009
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  Wilpert: Response to COHA

  

  

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  A detailed response to all of the errors found in a recent report by the council of Hemispheric Affairs on Venezuela.

  Gregory Wilpert ZSpace page
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  Chavez: A Date

  

  

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  My spirit was always conquered by the whipping and flamenco verb of Jesus, the redeemer Christ of the oppressed peoples, since the time I was an altar boy in the humble church of Sabaneta, when the stormy decade of the 60s started last century.

  Hugo Chavez ZSpace page
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• Tuesday, Feb 10, 2009
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  Chavez: Dignity

  

  

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  February keeps moving on, always as a rebel. And the Bolivarian Government also keeps on its march, promoting the Simón Bolí­var National Project together with the people and workers.

  Hugo Chavez ZSpace page
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• Monday, Feb 09, 2009
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  Chavez: Beautiful Life

  

  

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  The fifth phase of the campaign is up and running. A real hurricane toured the people of Mariara, San Joaquí­n, Guacara and Los Guayos.

  Hugo Chavez ZSpace page
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• Wednesday, Jan 28, 2009
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  Chavez: First Column

  

  

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  My strongest hits as a baseball player always went to the right field.

  Hugo Chavez ZSpace page
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• Saturday, Apr 12, 2008
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  Spannos: Real Utopia Videos

  

  

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  Book panel at the Left Forum, March 2008.

  Chris Spannos ZSpace page
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• Monday, Dec 31, 2007
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  Chomsky: Venezuela’s Referendum

  

  

  Blog Post

  The referendum vote was about 50-50, and the slight negative outcome was immediately accepted by Chavez, a fact that should have caused some embarrassment in the editorial offices and among correspondents who have been having regular tantrums about the di

  Noam Chomsky ZSpace page
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• Sunday, Apr 01, 2007
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  Barsamian: Interview

  

  

  ZMag Article

  P . Sainath is an award-winning journalist who writes about India. He is Rural Affairs editor of the Hindu , one of India’s most important newspapers. “I cover the people who live at the bottom end of the spectrum,” he says. He is author of the bestselling book, Everybody Loves a Good Drought: Stories from India’s Poorest Districts . I talked with him in September 2006.  BARSAMIAN: September 11, 2001 is constantly intoned as a mantra in the U.S. There is another September 11 involving Mahatma Gandhi.  SAINATH: We just marked the 100th anniversary of India’s 9/11. Mahatma Gandhi was then a practicing barrister in South Africa, representing in many cases the grievances and issues of the Indian community there. The South African government had passed extremely oppressive, racist legislation and there was widespread discontent. Gandhi addressed a meeting on September 11, 1906 in Johannesburg attended by more than 3,000 people in which he propounded for the first time his doctrine of satyagraha, the truth and power of a nonviolent form of resistance. It mystified many of his listeners in that period. In subsequent years Ghandi was to recall this as one of the most crucial moments in his life.  Everywhere you go in India today you see statues of Gandhi. What is his legacy?  I have a problem with always looking back only to what was said in the 1920s and what was said during the civil disobedience movement or during the Quit India movement. I do not believe Gandhi was the only leader of the freedom struggle. If you’re looking at statues and reverence, you would find there are far more statues of Baba Saheb Ambedkar, a PhD from Columbia University who emerged from the untouchable classes of Indian society.   In fact, the difference between Ambedkar and any other Indian leader is that the statues of Ambedkar are put up by public subscription, not by government fatwa. The freedom struggle of India gave us many leaders and luminaries of enormous standing. However, I think that on many issues I would rather look at Gandhi and Ambedkar in terms of what would their stance or their understanding of the present situation be? How would they act now? On some of the central issues of our time—oppression of the poorer castes and the so-called untouchables—I think history has proven Ambedkar to be right. Ambedkar’s prognosis of the role that caste would play in democracy, of how a lack of economic democracy would damage political democracy, has been borne out by history. What would Gandhi say about the obscene inequality that you’re looking at in the world? A man who said that for those who die of hunger the only form in which God may dare appear is food. That’s the interesting thing for me.  You spend much of your time reporting on village life. There have been severe economic and social repercussions in rural India since the so-called neoliberal economic agenda was introduced.  What you call the neoliberal era—the era of liberalization, globalization, and privatization—has been one of the most consciously cruel processes inflicted on the Indian poor. The obscene levels of inequality that now exist and that we are still promoting, we have not seen since the heyday of the colonial empire when we were enslaved and colonized by the British. India today ranks 8th in the number of billionaires in the world, but 127th in human development. India may be an emerging tiger economy, but the average Indian has a lower life expectancy than his or her counterpart in Bolivia, Mongolia, and Tajikistan. Our per capita GDP is less than that of Nicaragua, Vanuatu, and Indonesia. This was a consciously constructed process with a set of policies that have been enforced in many other countries. These policies are the typical prescriptions of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and the elites of Third World countries, who are happy to collaborate in this process of transferring huge resources from poor to rich. This happens in the Indian context whether it’s the right-wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, the BJP, or the so-called moderate, centrist Congress Party—or is there a difference?  The difference between the Congress Party and the BJP has been more on the issue of communal and sectarian violence and interreligious strife. This process was launched in 1991, when the present prime minister was then finance minister.  That’s Manmohan Singh.  The prime minister was P.V. Narasimha Rao. Then the BJP came in and took the process much further. Then the Congress comes back and again gets on the same track. In 2004 people rejected these policies decisively. I think one of the proudest moments in Indian electoral democracy was when 600 million people showed the world what electoral democracy means. It was a fantastic show of voting that shook the nation. It destroyed the reputation of many polling agencies, TV channels, and pundits who predicted that the neoliberal reforms were so popular that there was no question that the government would retain its hold. Instead, the darlings of the West, of Western corporations, and the U.S., took the biggest beating in the elections. People like Chandra Babu Naidu in Andhra Pradesh, like Krishna in Karnakata. Yet, having come to power on the backs of rural outrage and even urban anger, the Congress immediately set about going back to business as usual, with one or two modifications because there was now a huge left presence in Parliament that forced them to do a couple of decent things, like an employment guarantee program and a right to information act.  What are the characteristics of the neoliberal agenda?  There are five or six things that you can say have taken place everywhere in the world, including maybe in the U.S. One is huge cuts in public spending on anything to do with poor people, like agriculture in India, followed by the withdrawal of the state from vital public services, like health or education or literacy or transportation, followed by a massive wave of privatization of just about everything, including intellect and soul. So then you have an increasing preference and bias given to corporations, which are privileged over ordinary people. You have food subsidies for poor people being slashed. You have the entire emphasis in resources and credit being given to the top 10 percent of society. You can call it free market fundamentalism. To my mind, the most dangerous form of fundamentalism in the world because it adds millions of recruits to the armies of the dispossessed who are then vulnerable to religious fundamentalists.  So while India is experiencing very high so-called growth rates, there is also a huge surge in inequality.  There has been a huge surge in inequality in virtually every sphere. Hunger, for instance. The Food and Agriculture Organization’s reports of the United Nations shows that India between 1997 and 2002 added more hungry people than the rest of the world put together. The average rural family in India today consumes 100 kilograms of grain less than it did five to seven years ago. The per capita availability of food grain, which is the food available per Indian, has collapsed by millions of tons, from 510 grams per Indian in 1991 to 437 grams a year ago. Mind you, all these are averages. If you’re looking at the bottom 40 percent, the compression of the diet of the poor has been barbaric.  The International Labor Organization brought out a report recently that shows how hypocritical the stuff about labor efficiency is. In both Pakistan and India during the period of the reforms, labor efficiency went up 84 percent while real wages fell 22 percent. Paul Krugman, in his essay “The Gilded Age,” argued that obscene gaps between the top CEOs and ordinary workers were a threat not only to economic well-being, but damaging to democracy. If you have people who are virtually your slaves, that’s going to affect the mindset in which you work and relate to them. So you have Krugman saying that, “Look, the gap has gone above 100 to 1, maybe 1,000 to 1.” In India the gap is 30,000 to 1, 50,000 to 1, if you take the salaries of the top CEOs and those of the average laborer.  One of the shocking phenomena occurring in the Indian countryside has been suicides among farmers. Is it directly related to economic policies?  It is largely policy-driven. It’s also the reflection of what’s happening in globalism. Even that is policy-driven. It starts around the mid-1990s and in a small way picks up by 1998, 1999. By 2000 the suicides are raging in particular regions dealing in cash crops, which are linked to the volatility of global prices. They are regions where the safety nets have been removed by state and central governments for poor farmers. According to the government, it’s a process that has led to over 100,000 farmers committing suicide between 1993 and 2003. That’s a huge underestimate. It doesn’t take into account regional concentrations of suicides, which are extremely high.  It’s just terrible to watch this go on because I know that I’m covering people who have been pushed over the edge by the collapse of public investment in agriculture and the withdrawal of the state in terms of assistance to farmers. The Agricultural Extension Ministry is closed, the agricultural universities are acting as appendages of foreign multinational corporations and are not serving the farmers. Deregulation has meant that Monsanto can come and charge three times what it actually needs to on a bag of seed until it is forced by the courts to reduce its price to one-third of what it was—and it’s still making a profit at that price.  Explain how indebtedness works.  India was one of the pioneers of what we call social banking. Social banking means that society recognizes there are some areas from which you cannot expect profits in lending. You don’t want to lose money, but you’re not trying to make huge profits out of farmers or out of primary education or out of services for pregnant mothers. So in the social banking philosophy that India adopted when it nationalized the banking industry in the late 1960s, banks did significant amount of lending to farmers, recognizing that these are the people who place the food on your table, on the nation’s table. Once we went into the brave new world of economic reforms, the banks progressively stopped lending money to farmers, so much so that something like 3,800 to 4,000 bank branches in rural India closed during the reform years.  What happened to the money that they took away from the farmer? It went to fueling the consumption and lifestyles of the top 10 percent. So the farmer could not buy a tractor except at 15 percent interest. But I can buy a Mercedes-Benz at 4 percent or 5 percent interest with no collateral. Huge resources were siphoned away. That happened from policy. So as this happened, farmers were turning more and more to private money lenders. But the reforms process has brought entirely new classes of moneylenders—not your own village sahukar, who is actually cutting a very pathetic figure these days—but huge new moneylenders in the form of input dealers, those who sell seed and pesticides.  India has traditionally been a grower and exporter of cotton. What’s been happening in that sector?  It’s a complete disaster, especially in the region that I was mentioning, Maharashtra. In the late 1990s the European Union, and more particularly the U.S., threw billions and billions of dollars into their corporations that are cotton growers. I won’t call them cotton farmers because these are businesses. Cotton prices were rather high in the mid-1990s on the New York Cotton Exchange, maybe about 90 cents to $1.10 a pound. After 1997, cotton prices start tumbling because the U.S. government is putting more subsidies into cotton for its corporations than the actual value of the cotton. Last year, the U.S. cotton crop was worth something like $3.9 billion, but you got subsidies of $4.7 billion. This went to 20,000 growers. Cotton-based economies, from Vidarbha in Maharashtra to cotton-based economies in West Africa—Burkina Faso, Mali, Benin—all these countries collapsed under the onslaught of these subsidies. The EU, which doesn’t have that much cotton growing also got into the act. So with these huge subsidies you’re seeing farm suicides among cotton growers in Burkina Faso. The Indian farmer is a million times more efficient in growing these things than U.S. corporations. But who the heck can fight against those kinds of subsidies?  Cotton is a mess also because of the promotion of technologies that are unsuitable to these regions. Bt cotton, for instance, is what Monsanto has been promoting in Maharashtra. It is much costlier to cultivate than hybrid cotton, let alone to cultivate organically. So you’ve had this huge rise in input costs. People could charge anything they want because of deregulation of the markets.  Another key issue in India is water.  Pepsi and Coke made their first huge inroads into the Indian market, which was the fastest-growing soft drinks market in the world anyway, by buying out local companies and expanding their influence and power. One of the problems, though, is that these are highly water-intensive industries in a country experiencing severe water stress. So their factories have shown up in rural areas where they sunk God knows how many deep, mechanized wells, which drain the water away from the dug wells of the traditional farmers that don’t run that deep. All over India, struggles and agitations and movements have broken out against Coca-Cola, against Pepsi, or whichever the local soft drink manufacturer is. They get groundwater almost free. There is a place in Maharashtra where the soft drink companies were getting water at 4 paise a liter. It’s not possible to translate 4 paise into cents. It’s a negative amount; it’s maybe minus 10 cents or something like that. Then they shove this into a bottle, the only value added being plastic, and sell it for $12. The looting of groundwater has been a major problem and therefore there is very strong tension and resentment against these corporations.  Besides which, an Indian nongovernmental organization, the Center for Science and Environment, had a report showing the presence of a high level of pesticide content in these soft drinks. That led to a flurry of government actions. Different governments acted for different reasons. Many of them withdrew Coke and Pepsi from government institutions and banned them from educational institutions. In the southern state of Kerala, because of a whole series of clashes with Coke, the newly elected government there actually banned Coca-Cola and Pepsi in the entire state, including production and distribution. That ban has now been overturned by the high court of that state.  As to energy, there is the notorious, now defunct Houston-based energy company, Enron, which has had some involvement in India.  Enron blew a hole the size of the Titanic in the economy of the richest state in the country, Maharashtra, where all these other problems that we have been discussing were going on. In 1991 Maharashtra had a state electricity board, which was one of only two in the whole country that was making a profit. Today that state electricity board is in the red in billions of rupees, having been forced to get into a contract with Enron that destroyed it. Enron, Bechtel, and GE were the sponsors of a project called the Dabhol Power Corporation, the biggest white elephant that we ever inaugurated. It has caused such severe economic problems in the Maharashtra economy that it has led governments to cut a number of programs, including midday meals for the children of indigenous people. All those programs have suffered because of the bankruptcy of the Maharashtra government. We’re talking about thousands of billions of rupees going down the drain. And Enron remained a legitimate entity in India long after it was being chased by the FBI in the U.S.  There was much resistance to World Bank big dam projects in the Narmada Valley region. Did that inspire other movements?  There is no doubt that the struggle against the Narmada projects was a major inspiration for a number of other movements fighting similar battles. What’s happened, though, is that a recent ruling of the Supreme Court of India has gone against those fighting the dam. It’s a very regressive ruling. It is going to hurt a lot of people and set a very bad precedent for similar struggles against displacement.  The Indian middle and upper middle classes are sold on this idea of a techno fix, that technology and engineering can answer every problem in the world. “Oh, we’ve got a problem with water? Let’s interlink 37 rivers.” For God’s sake, it took millions of years for those rivers to work out their own courses and our engineers are going to set them right in a couple of decades? It’s insane. But the idea that somehow you can control nature with engineering, whether it’s the networks of dams on the Narmada or anywhere else, and will prove disastrous.  We’re still obsessed with this techno-fix solution rather than looking at issues of equity in water sharing, looking at issues of priority in water sharing. Why should there be hundreds of water amusement theme parks in India drawing water away from drinking and farming, spending billions of liters of water, probably, each year in operating these amusement parks and water theme parks?  There was a plan once to start golf courses as a food-for-work program in Rajasthan, which got shot down after we did a story in the Hindu on it. The average golf course takes between 1.8 to 2.3 million liters of water a day. Rajasthan is mostly desert. On that amount of water the people of many villages could live through the entire summer season. You have incredible problems of pesticides getting into the food and water in a very adverse way for the farmers’ whose plots neighbor these golf courses.  What are the points of resistance to these neoliberal policies? For example, there is a militia movement in central and eastern India.  Let me put it this way. I think there are far more interesting and far bigger things happening than the Naxalite movement which you are referring to. The Naxalites basically had a big base in parts of Bihar, Jharkhand, and Andhra Pradesh. What’s happened is that sucessive Andhra governments have very substantially damaged them, so badly that they have fled to neighboring states and there seems to be a spurt of activity in these states. In public the governments make a huge thing about them because it’s good for governments to keep exaggerating the threat that people face. Then you can build your security apparatus, you can arm yourself to the teeth, you can pass regressive and repressive laws, and suspend civil liberties, as they have done in Chhattisgarh.  But let’s move to something more optimistic. I look at the world today and I see a restless and unquiet world. Americans maybe first noticed the protests during the WTO meeting in Seattle in 1999. I was thinking at the time, where do you guys live? There have been a thousand Seattles in India, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Long before you guys had Seattle, people were out battling privatization and unfair trade on the streets of Delhi, Mumbai, Calcutta.  That said, I’m very pleased that Seattle happened. It gave people an idea that something was fundamentally wrong. It’s a very restless world. Look at the wave of changes in Latin America, suppressed and held down for so long. Look at the fact that your armies of spin doctors sent out to defeat Evo Morales could not pull it off. Look at the fact that all the attempts, including coups and whatnot, have flopped in Venezuela. All these show you that the world is a stubborn place and it’s not willing to be kicked around so easily. It kicks back.  So there is huge resistance taking place in India. The farmers’ suicides are a form of protest and a very negative one. But there are also movements of farmers taking on governments in various places when their land has been forcibly acquired for some corporation. There is resistance. The trick will be, how do you use that energy on a program that benefits people?  Remember, too, that in 2004 India showed the world what democratic resistance was about when 600 million people threw out the government that implemented classic neoliberal policies. The public has shown its distaste, its contempt for these policies.  India had a reputation for an independent foreign policy, particularly during the years right after independence. What trends do you see now ?  On the foreign policy issue, I think that you’re right. India’s stature has eroded considerably among nations which once looked up to India as the leader. A year before independence in 1946, under Pandit Nehru, India closed down relations with South Africa in protest against racism there. We lost between 5 percent and 10 percent of our total external trade. But you know what? I’m extremely proud of the old Indian passport, the first passport in the world which said “All countries except Republic of South Africa.” So that was the kind of foreign policy that gave India stature. If you ask Nelson Mandela which country he looked to, he will not tell you the U.S. or the UK. He will tell you he looked to India in the years that he was in prison. He knew that India would represent the case of the South African people. You will find this in many parts of the world, how people were influenced by the freedom struggle generation of India.  The last 15 years have seen significant departures from India’s independent standing as a leader in what was called the nonaligned world. Now we are aligned. Whether it’s on the Iraq war or on the dispute with Iran, we are invariably on the side of—I won’t say on the side of America, I will say on the side of the most conservative sections of the U.S. establishment. That’s where we are as a nation in foreign policy.  But India didn’t send troops to Iraq.  Not for want of trying. The BJP government of the time was fully willing to send troops. I think the deputy prime minister, when he visited the U.S., even struck a verbal deal that he would send troops. But the Indian public would have none of it. India has at least one and a half million people working legally and probably an equal number working illegally in the Gulf. Imagine what would happen to all those families if there were a war there. In any case, why do we want to fight someone else’s wars? We have had excellent relations in these past decades with the people of Iran and Iraq. And we nearly got dragged into a war that wasn’t ours. In March 2006 George W. Bush visited New Delhi and negotiated a controversial deal with India. India is not a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Nevertheless, it has weapons of mass destruction.  There is a significant amount of resistance and resentment against this deal in the Indian public. It’s interesting that the strands of discontent come from very different parts of the spectrum. Several of India’s top nuclear scientists are totally opposed to it. They think it takes away their independence, it curbs their freedom, it curbs their rights and their direction in their program. But another section just wonders, Why are we getting into this at all? And there is also the section that thought all along that nuclear blasts were a bad idea, as I do. It’s also seen as part of the overall Indo-U.S. embrace and that makes the left extremely unhappy. We’re worried about what’s happening and we don’t know because there is no transparency to much of these negotiations. We don’t know what has been conceded in return for what.  What can people in the U.S. do to forge links of solidarity with rural India?  I think it’s a process of self-education in the first instance because whenever I’m speaking in the U.S., I’m finding that people are genuinely shocked to learn who gets agricultural subsidies—that it’s the beautiful people in the corporations that get it and not struggling farmers in Iowa or Minnesota. They’re shocked to learn what kinds of things this achieves in the Third World. So I think the power of corporations and the damage they’re doing to people’s lives in the U.S. and abroad is something that people in the U.S. need to ponder. How do you create that common ground? After all, corporations have also destroyed smal farming in this country. So that, I think, is a very significant area on taming the power of the corporations where U.S. activists have some experience and can work very well with those in India and in people-to-people movements.  I must say that in several universities in the U.S. there were lots of sympathetic actions for poor farmers in Kerala and Uttar Pradesh fighting against Coca-Cola on the issue of water. Activists in this country managed to get a few universities to stop selling these products and started boycotts. It was a significant psychological support if nothing else. But it also raises local level consciousness here. For another matter, the policies of the World Bank, which are driven by the interests of the U.S. and a few other Western countries create incredible damage. There should be more discussion on whose interests these institutions represent. Do they represent the interests of the American people? I think not.  What is the P in P. Sainath?  It stands for Palagummi. People find it very hard to pronounce. Palagummi is the name of a now-nonexistent village in Andhra Pradesh. In India, in my part of the country we write our family or village name first and our own name second. So Sainath is really what you call my Christian name. Palagummi is my surname. My granddad used to tell me that Palagummi was a village in the Godavari area, which was always a hotbed of revolt against one empire after the other, particularly the British Empire. The Brits once razed d a number of villages to the groun in that area. A bad idea. It spread us all over the countryside to foment rebellion and revolt.  David Barsamian, founder and director of Alternative Radio, is the author of The Decline & Fall of Public Broadcasting as well as a number of books, such as Propaganda & the Public Mind with Noam Chomsky , Confronting Empire with Eqbal Ahmad, and Culture & Resistance with Edward Said . 

  David Barsamian ZSpace page
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• Thursday, Mar 01, 2007
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  Herman: Fog Watch

  

  

  ZMag Article

  T he U.S. establishment takes a “pragmatic” view of the merits of elections, with approval or disapproval depending on how well it “works,” as perceived by the dominant interests. Call it “establishment relativism.” We know that the right wing hates relativism, but there are some relativisms that they can accept, mainly by playing dumb. When the good guys win—and “good” means serviceable to U.S. interests as seen by the corporate/political establishment—there is endless generosity and looking-the-other-way in evaluating that win. In Mexico, for example, when Salinas won by a fraudulent recount in 1988 and Calderon won by probable fraud in 2006, there were no serious complaints here. When Yeltsin won a true laugher in 1996, helping consolidate the triumph of the looting oligarchs and death of any possible meaningful democracy in Russia, there was positive enthusiasm in this country. But when a Chavez or Hamas wins, pragmatism calls for doubts about the honesty of the election (Chavez) and/or questions about the threat to peace in a victory of “terrorists” (Hamas).  In the Chavez case, the doubts and threats of his electoral legitimacy were so severe that the United States colluded in a coup in 2002 that was quickly reversed, but demonstrated the extremely obvious fact that U.S. leaders are not about to respect election results when the wrong party wins. Much fault was found with Chavez’s further electoral victories, but it became very difficult to claim unfairness with his solid majorities, no evidence of tampering, and with the bulk of the Venezuelan media furiously anti-Chavez. (Of course, for the U.S. establishment Chavez is showing his true colors by possibly refusing to renew the license of a TV station that openly supported the 2002 coup—an action for which a station in the United States in an analogous situation would almost surely have been closed down immediately and its top officers prosecuted for treason.)  The Hamas case is equally interesting. Instead of respecting what seems to have been a quite honest vote, with the wrong party winning, Israel began a brutal military assault on the Palestinians, arrested Hamas legislators, and cut off funds owed the Palestinians. These and other actions were designed to beat and starve the Palestinians into ousting Hamas, but the Israelis were also using Hamas as an excuse to crush any resistance to ethnic cleansing and to induce a greater “voluntary” exit from the territory. The United States and EU cooperated in this brutal process, the former along with Israel also giving financial support and arms to Fatah in order to strengthen the opposition to Hamas, and possibly encourage a civil war—recall the U.S. and Israeli encouragement and support of the Iraq-Iran war, with occasional explicit mention of the merit of mutual killing between these problematic states.  In this same time frame Israel was committing major war crimes in a genocidal process in Gaza that violated Western “enlightenment values” as well as all kinds of international laws and steadily advanced their ethnic cleansing on the West Bank and in Jerusalem. Despite this, in a historically unique action the EU actually imposed sanctions on the victims of the occupation for voting the wrong way. Hamas’s terrorist record and refusal to recognize Israel is the rationale here. Israel’s vastly greater state terror and steady law violations produce no negative actions and Israel’s voting Ariel Sharon in as president in 2001—the butcher of Sabra-Shatila and Qibya, whose terroristic killings exceeded that of Hamas by a wide margin, and were greater than those of Carlos the Jackal by better than 10-1—again elicited no complaints or penalties.  It is also of interest that in Palestine, Hamas opponent and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas is calling for new elections, which Israel and the United States support as they rush money as well as arms to Abbas. There is no legal basis for such a call, but because the election produced the wrong result a new election is pressed. On the other hand, in Lebanon where, with Hezbollah representatives leaving the government there is solid legal grounds for the calling of a new election, the United States and its allies demur and oppose the idea. It would very likely give Hezbollah more political power and reduce that of a Western-supported client—so the attitude toward an election to ascertain the people’s will is different from the Palestine case. Another interesting case of election pragmatics is the way the 2006 mid-term U.S. election is working out. Bush was free to escalate the Iraq war after the 2004 election because he won and thus had an election go-ahead. The Democrats and media put up little opposition. In the 2006 election the Republicans lost heavily and both direct verbal evidence of voter sentiment and poll results show that a strong majority of the public want the United States out of Iraq in two years or less. But the corporate/political establishment does not want a quick exit. The same lobby that produced Western support for Israel’s violent response to the Hamas electoral victory, and that gives its imprimatur to Israeli apartheid and ethnic cleansing, wants the United States to stay and even to broaden the war to Iran. The result is that Bush, having just suffered a crushing election loss, and with a popularity rating in the 28-31 percent range, is still able to “decide” and escalate the Iraq war. The last election had a “bad” result from the elite viewpoint, and it will therefore have little effect on policy in the Middle East. After all, this is a democracy constrained to work for the “national interest.”  Principle of Non-Intervention  U .S. intervention in elections in Palestine, Venezuela, Russia, Yugoslavia, the Ukraine, Nicaragua (etc.) has been massive and so has intervention in the forms of military and economic aid and direct military attack. There are almost no holds barred, and almost nothing in the way of subversion and military attack that the mainstream media won’t normalize. After all we are WE, the good and necessary police in service to global interests. It’s revealing that although the invasion-occupation of Iraq was not only based on lies but was a classic case of aggression in violation of the UN Charter, this is unmentionable in the media—WE have aggression rights, by patriotic premise.  Of course we still believe in the principle of non-intervention, but as in the case of elections, with that special pragmatic-relativistic touch. Thus the United States joined with seven Middle Eastern states (Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, and the UAE) in January to issue a statement which affirmed, among other things, that “disputes among states should be settled peacefully and in accordance with international norms, and that relations among all countries should be based on mutual respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all states, and on the principle of noninterference in the internal affairs of other nations” (“Gulf Cooperation Council—Plus Two’s Ministerial Statement,” U.S. Department of State, January 16, 2007). It is obvious that this accolade to the principles of sovereignty and noninterference was directed not against the March 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq or a possible U.S.-Israeli military attack on Iran, but rather against Iran and Syria, which have faced the U.S. charge that they are interfering in the internal affairs of the newly liberated Iraq. Their interventions in a struggle in a next door neighbor destabilized by an aggression from across the ocean are illicit—the big and ongoing one from a distant power is not only licit, it isn’t even intervention.  Bush and his associates are now warning Iran on a daily basis against intervening in Iraq. They ignore that Iraq is now supposedly a sovereign state whose leaders are supposedly in charge of deciding who can and who cannot intervene and do business in Iraq territory.  This is not hypocrisy: it reflects that internalized belief that the Global Godfather has an inherent right to straighten out the world’s unruly children. His interventions are in a separate class. When Paul Wolfowitz stated,“I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq” ( NYT , July 22, 2003), he took for granted the Global Godfather’s right to be at home anywhere within his domains.  Rule of Law  T he same point holds for the rule of law. We believe in the rule of law and our leaders refer to it regularly as something that we want to provide, along with “stability.” But, as with non-intervention, the rule of law doesn’t apply to us by our self-designated rights as the most powerful, implicitly good, and self-appointed global police. It might interfere with our bringing peace and stability everywhere. The new classic is of course the invasion-occupation of Iraq, 2003-2007, where we ran roughshod over the UN charter and hence over U.S. law as well, given that the Charter is an international agreement that becomes part of U.S. law. The same is true of the violations of the international conventions against torture. The Military Commissions Act tries to exempt U.S. officials from the reach of international laws on torture, but it remains a constitutional issue as to whether this can be done even in its application at home.  Of course, if you are strong enough and your elite supports you, the rule of law can be ignored simply by virtue of superior force. Thus when the International Court found against the United States in a case brought by Nicaragua in 1986, and called for reparations for the “unlawful use of force,” the United States paid no attention to the court ruling. And, importantly, the U.S. establishment didn’t complain, but implicitly or explicitly sanctioned this brazen refusal to abide by the rule of law. In a dramatic illustration, the New York Times supported this refusal editorially, declaring the International Court a “hostile forum” (“America’s Guilt—or Default,” July 1, 1986)—a lie, and its editorial larded with errors of fact and silly chauvinistic bias, but demonstrating the paper’s own integration into the imperial enterprise and resultant willingness to disregard mere matters of law (repeated in 2002-2003 when the editors never mentioned the problem of UN Charter prohibitions against aggression).  The international community—that is, governments and international institutions, as opposed to the world’s people—also accepts and even supports the U.S. refusal to abide by the rule of law. Not only did it do nothing to stop the Iraq aggression in 2003, or to punish the aggressors, the Security Council soon gave its sanction to the U.S. occupation in a classic case of rewarding the villain. The Security Council also cooperates with the United States in supporting Israel’s illegal occupation and massive ethnic cleansing. And now it is helping prepare the ground for an Israeli-U.S. attack on Iran by imposing sanctions and Chapter VII demands on Iran. The rule of law internationally is dead in the water.  It is also highly relevant that the Bush administration has been replacing the rule of law at home with the superior rights of the executive, attacking a string of constitutional protections of individual rights as well as the rights of legislatures and courts. This is not a case of blowback from the disregard of international law abroad; instead, the enhanced disregard abroad goes hand-in-hand with the shrinking adherence to law at home. But the United States remains committed to the rule of law—when protesters at home violate local statutes or black ghetto residents are caught using marijuana or Iran does not abide by some intrusive ruling of the Security Council caving in to the U.S. program setting Iran up for a fresh U.S. aggression.  China’s Flexing Its Muscles  I n the nuthouse, any action by the United States in the way of enhancing its military superiority is treated by the mainstream media with great objectivity. There might be a hint that it may cost a lot of money and doubts may be raised about its urgency and even whether it will work (if it is a new weapon). But it will not be treated as a possible serious threat to other countries, destabilizing and promising a renewed arms race, making war more likely, unaffordable in a world with much poverty and major problems that call for large resources—in short, insane. No. The media are objective, which means deeply irresponsible and contributing to lunacy. (Years ago the New York Times had an almost regular annual column by Seymour Melman in which he would list the foregone civil functions that were sacrificed by a comparable list of weapons, with price tags noted. This apparently was too painful—and enlightening—for the establishment to bear, and was terminated some years back.)  Even when the Bush administration announced its intent to make nuclear weapons part of the regular war arsenal and improve them, and its intent to prevent any challenges to U.S. military superiority by the possible use of force, even naming countries, including China, as potential threats to U.S. dominance, the media barely reported these lunatic plans. They certainly never portray them as they should—in a class with Mein Kampf and suffering from comparable lunacy.  On the other hand, as China has substantially increased its military budget in recent years, although from a very low initial level, this has aroused concern in the U.S. military and political establishment. China’s military budget has risen to one-seventh of that of the United States (in 2006, $66 versus $441 billion), so obviously this is a worrisome matter given that, as Donald Rumsfeld pointed out in June 2005, “Since no nation threatens China, one must wonder: ‘Why this growing investment…these continuing robust deployments?’” Rumsfeld also mentioned that China seemed to be preparing to “project power” in its neighborhood.  Of course, China has no bases in North America, no fleets of warships around the North American coasts, and no military alliances with any country in North or South America. The United States has bases all around China, fleets of warships off the Chinese coast, has regular military exercises in that area, and has military alliances with many countries in Asia. In February 2005 it formalized new security ties with Japan that even announced a joint U.S.-Japanese call for a solution to issues in the Taiwan straits.  We are reaching here the limits of hypocrisy and the double standard. China is a threat because it is getting armed to the point where it might project power in its neighborhood and maybe even defend itself sufficiently from some Global Godfather projecting power everywhere, allowing it to constrain the Godfather a bit. China is a threat to the Godfather only because of those possibilities—it cannot threaten the Godfather directly. On the other hand, the Godfather openly threatens China, has even listed it as a potential challenger who will not be permitted to rise to an effective challenging level, by implication through the use of force. The Godfather also threatens China by its military deployments and alliances. This is only a non-threat on the ludicrous ultra-chauvinist assumption that the Godfather is good, generous, peace-loving and without any seriously conflicting interests that might cause it to exercise force against China.  It is well-known to even casual observers that the rapid growth of China has forced it to look aggressively for independent oil supplies to meet its escalating needs and it is clear that it will be competing with the United States in obtaining such supplies. In that competition the possession of overwhelming force on one side and serious weakness on the other could be costly to the weak. And in that competition, the use of force might be helpful in obtaining privileged access to limited oil resources.  The China threat is an on-and-off-again phenomenon that has been on the upswing in recent years, clearly not based on any real security threat, but consistent with the imperial project of absolute domination. It is also a windfall for the military-industrial complex and may be cultivated in substantial measure to provide it with growing and profitable markets and a raison-d’etre for its continued massive absorption of budget resources. Actual violence is constrained by the huge mutual dependence of the two economies, but who knows what the future holds if China keeps growing and arming itself, and if the rulers of the nuthouse need a diversion to mobilize the population and give them continued power to rule and loot?  Of course this all depends on whether the New York Times , its media associates, the intellectual class, and the Democrats, will go along with this Kafkasque pretence that the Chinese threaten us rather than that we threaten them, and allow the Military Industrial Complex and the Pentagon to continue to absorb vast resources to kill on false pretenses—that is, to continue to make the United States a genuine global menace and nuthouse. It also depends on whether the U.S. public can finally arouse itself to fight for its own and global interests—and sanity. Given the ready mobilization against a not very dire Iran threat that we see moving forward today it is not easy to be optimistic. Edward S. Herman is an economist, media critic, and author of numerous articles and books. 

  Edward Herman ZSpace page
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• Friday, Nov 10, 2006
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  Trigona: Workers in Control

  

  

  Blog Post

  Interview with FRETECO representative By: Marie Trigona - Venezuelanalysis.com Latin America's occupied factories and enterprises represent the development of one of the most advanced strategies in defense of the working class and resistance against ca

  Marie Trigona ZSpace page
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• Wednesday, Mar 01, 2006
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  Barsamian: Interview

  

  

  ZMag Article

  T ariq Ali was born in Lahore, then a part of British-ruled India, now in Pakistan. For many years he has been based in London where he is an editor of New Left Review. He’s written more than a dozen books on world history and politics. He is also a filmmaker, playwright, and novelist. He is the author of The Clash of Fundamentalisms and Bush in Babylon . His latest book is Speaking of Empire & Resistance. I talked with him in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on December 16, 2005 during the Perdana Gobal Peace Forum.  BARSAMIAN: Lawrence of Arabia wrote in 1920, “The people of England have been led in Iraq into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. It is a disgrace to our imperial record, and may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure.... Our unfortunate troops, under hard conditions of climate and supply are policing an immense area, paying dearly every day in lives for the willfully wrong policy.” It’s interesting how history moves in cycles.  ALI: I’ve always argued that though history never repeats itself exactly, it constantly echoes. And these echoes of history are with us as long as the structures of the world remain basically the same.  On May 1, 2005, the Sunday Times of London published the Downing Street memo. It became front-page news in Britain, but not in the U.S. Explain what it is.  The Downing Street memo is the record of a set of secret conversations, which took place at the highest levels of the British government and intelligence and civil services. What the memorandum reveals is that from the beginning they were determined to lie their way to war.  The date of the memo is July 23, 2002, months before the invasion of Iraq.  Essentially these rogues were devising a plan to go to war, setting traps for the Iraqi government. The staggering thing is that despite the publication of the Downing Street memorandum, Blair is still prime minister of Britain, Jack Straw is still foreign secretary, and George Bush and Dick Cheney are still running the United States. The public is so cynical it doesn’t much care.  Another stunning revelation that appeared in the British press, the Daily Mirror , was that President Bush proposed bombing Al-Jazeera, the Qatar-based Arab satellite network.  Al-Jazeera posed a big problem—from the beginning it provided alternative images. These images could be seen in Europe. The number of European citizens, especially in France, Germany, and Britain, buying Al-Jazeera cable sets so that they could access the station went up by two million at the start of the war. Even though people couldn’t speak a word of Arabic, they did not trust Western images and they wanted to see alternatives.  And it was in order to destroy any possibility of alternative images that the U.S. bombed Al-Jazeera in Afghanistan at the start of the war there. They bombed Al-Jazeera positions even though Al-Jazeera’s directors had told them, “This is where our offices are. Please make sure they don’t bomb us.” Besides the murder of  Tariq Ayoub, we have seen a senior Al-Jazeera correspondent arrested in Spain and charged with terrorism on the basis of information received from the U.S. We have an Al-Jazeera correspondent arrested and tortured in Abu Ghraib prison and we have an Al-Jazeera correspondent at Guantanamo Bay. On July 7, 2005 the London underground and a bus were bombed, resulting in scores of deaths and casualties. What has happened to civil liberties in Britain since the bombings?  The London bombings were a tragedy because innocents died and these young kids who carried them out took their own lives. Senseless carnage on the streets of a city which, by and large, had opposed the war. Nonetheless, one had to ask, “Why did they do it?” And here you saw for one whole week the British establishment and the entire British media system closing ranks. I think, without blowing my own trumpet, that I was the only person who wrote in the Guardian the following day an article on the bombings, saying that this was a direct outcome of Blair’s decision to go to war in Iraq. The Guardian , to its credit, published this. But the letters columns published attacks on me for days on end, without anyone being allowed to respond. Normally after I make a public intervention, I get about 100 emails, sometimes a bit more, 80 percent usually in favor, 20 percent against. After this article, I got over 800 emails and over 90 percent of them were in favor.  Within two weeks it became clear that what I had said was right. The first opinion poll, published in the Guardian, showed that 66 percent of the British public said that the attacks on London were a direct outcome of the war on Iraq. Then we had the leak of a letter written by the head of the British Foreign Office to the prime minister’s office a year prior to the bombings saying, “I am deeply concerned that our foreign policy and intervention in Iraq are creating havoc inside the Muslim communities in Britain.” Then we had a special report, commissioned by the Royal Institute of International Affairs, a semi-Foreign Office think tank. They said, “The war in Iraq has created massive problems within Britain itself and has threatened the security of our country.” July 7 brought all that to the fore. Blair’s ratings are now down. He is a much loathed and despised prime minister.  And civil liberties?  Blair, in order to show that he was doing something, has waged a war on civil liberties. He has demanded emergency laws and demanded that the police should be allowed to detain and hold suspects for 90 days. The 90-day law was a law of apartheid South Africa, which used to be criticized by liberals and conservatives alike as something unacceptable within a democratic state.   But there already is a law under existing legislation whereby police can detain someone for 14 days without access to a lawyer. The shoddy compromise was 28 days, not the proposed 90. The parliamentarians who defeated the 90-day law said, “We’ve defeated Blair,” which is true. They humiliated him. But for the police to hold someone for a whole month? Unheard of. Habeas corpus suspended, the right to hold prisoners without trial indefinitely? This is what is going on in Britain today.  Part of the lexicon of the war on terrorism are such phrases as ghost detainees, extraordinary rendition, secret flights, and secret prisons. This has created a brouhaha in Europe and prompted a visit by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to explain the situation.  We know that Condoleezza Rice was subjected to quite tough questioning, especially when she visited Germany, because they had lifted a German citizen when he was vacationing somewhere and had taken him to some prison. According to this unfortunate German citizen, he was sodomized, tortured, and locked up. Finally they realized he wasn’t guilty of anything and had to release him. He’s now trying to sue the U.S. government. He was kidnapped and the German government didn’t lift a finger to do anything. When Condoleezza Rice visited Berlin, the new German chancellor, who supported the Iraq war, Angela Merkel, had to confront Rice on this question because the German press was outraged.  There is outrage all over Europe. The Italians, who have a pro-U.S. government, are nonetheless angry that people are lifted off the streets of Rome and taken on planes to Guantánamo, prisons in Egypt, or wherever. No one quite knows. The European media have been very angry and say it’s a violation of human rights laws. Blair, of course, is the only one who isn’t angry because he’s been fully collaborating with this. Unmarked planes have been seen taking off from British airports with prisoners.  Some of the prisons they have been taken to are in Eastern Europe. You will recall that throughout the Cold War we were told Eastern Europe were satellite states of the Soviet Union, they didn’t have their own freedoms. Exactly the same is happening now. It’s just that they’ve become satellite states of the U.S. In many cases the same people who were working with the Russians are now working with the U.S. I wouldn’t be surprised if many of the prison guards and wardens are the same.  Eastern Europe dissidents who used to scream and shout in order to get U.S. assistance—Václav Havel, Adam Michnik, Lech Walechsa—where are they now? Why don’t they speak up? Michnik and Havel actually supported the war in Iraq and presumably justified this as part of the fight against “barbarism” or whatever. I don’t know. But this is another aspect of the situation in Europe, which very few people actually discuss. Sectors of the U.S. elite are critical of the Iraq war such as Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations and Colin Powell’s deputy, Lawrence Wilkerson. Even the New York Times . The gist of their critique, however, is based not on the immorality or criminality of attacking a country, but on the incompetence and ineptitude of the Bush administration. Their logic is that if they had done it properly, we wouldn’t have any problems.  The people who only talk about ineptitude are people who basically supported the war and now feel compelled to come out against it because it’s gone wrong. It’s the fact that they didn’t expect a resistance. That’s very, very dangerous talk. It is no way to fight this crazed adventurism of the Bush administration. It totally plays into their hands. They can then point to these people and say, “They want us to send more troops.” And we might have a weird situation where many Democrats, like Hillary Clinton and her gang, are attacking Republicans for not sending more troops. Is this what the next political debate within the American political establishment should be? We did send enough troops. No, you didn’t send enough troops. We did, you didn’t, we did, you didn’t. Give us a break.  In an article in the Guardian , you write that “the argument that withdrawal will lead to civil war is slightly absurd.” Why do you say that?  Because a form of civil war exists already. Whenever imperial powers occupy a country, historically speaking, there is one basic policy they follow, which is divide and rule. Usually they go for a minority ethnic community, give them all sorts of privileges, and hope that will do the trick. In Iraq the British did that with the Sunnis. It kept the Shia at bay. It relied on the Sunni elite to do the trick for them, which worked for a short time. The U.S. is relying largely on the Kurds and collaborationist element within the Shia religious leadership to do the business for them. I’m not sure it’s going to work with the rest of Iraq. But the notion that if they leave, there will be a civil war is utterly ludicrous because it’s their presence that has created a civil war situation inside Iraq.  Harold Pinter won the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature. His acceptance speech, “Art, Truth, and Politics,” was a critique of U.S. power around the world. He says, “The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them.” What kind of coverage did Pinter, who is British, get?  Harold Pinter is probably the greatest living playwright in the English-speaking world today. He is highly respected in Britain, including by people who don’t agree with his political opinions. His speech was shown on Channel 4 television, extracts were shown on the BBC. It was a very moving speech because he was ill in bed. It was given massive coverage in the British media and in Europe. I think it’s been translated into almost every European language. It was certainly publicized widely all over Asia, Africa, and a big extract of Pinter’s speech was shown on Telesur, the Latin American TV channel. And I’m sure Al-Jazeera broadcast it as well. The only country where this speech was not broadcast or covered was in the U.S.  U.S. military power is unchallenged and supreme. However, on the economic level, the U.S. is plagued by a number of serious problems. Other than weapons and cultural products, such as music, Hollywood films, and video games, there are very few things made in the U.S. that people around the world want. So there seems to be a paradox, perhaps echoing previous empires, of great military power, on one hand, and an eroding economic base.  This is true and it certainly applies to the British and the European empires of the 20th century. Though in the case of the Germans, they were defeated not economically, but militarily. But, by and large, empires extend themselves too far, their economies begin to suffer, and there are rebellions within. It’s the conjunction of all these events which usually helps to bring about the fall of empires.  The U.S. can’t do this indefinitely, granted, but it can do it easily for another 25 years. I think the alarm bells are beginning to ring inside the U.S. because they are threatened now not by this spurious threat of terror or tiny groups of religious extremists, but by economic developments  in East Asia.  The emergence of China as a very major player does potentially threaten the U.S., though even here I would advise caution. I have many colleagues and friends in the American academy who sometimes get carried away by the development of China. They sort of ascribe to the Chinese leadership motives that are remote from Chinese thinking. The Chinese, after all, are dependent on the U.S. market so this notion that they can punish the U.S. just by withdrawing from the dollar reserves and going to the Euro would punish themselves. If the U.S. imposed tariffs on Chinese exports to the U.S., then the Chinese could do something. But as long as they don’t impose tariff barriers and there is free trade taking place between both countries, then the Chinese are not going to do anything, because the Chinese economy is booming. The most dynamic capitalism you see today is in China, not in the U.S., Europe, or South Korea even.  Hurricane Katrina exposed enormous fissures. in the U.S. Months after the hurricane, large sections of New Orleans still do not have clean water, sanitation, electricity. How was this seen in the British press?  The European press, not just Britain, are pretty obsessed with the U.S. because this is the empire before which they scrape and bow. Anything that happens there is of enormous concern. The coverage of the New Orleans events in the European media was as if it was happening to their own countries. But they were also shocked, just as for the first two weeks the U.S. media was in a state of complete shock. Even journalists on Fox television were reporting with real anger because they couldn’t believe what they were seeing and, like many Americans, had no idea that so many black people lived in New Orleans. So this was a part of the U.S., which they said was almost like the Third World. It isn’t almost. It is.  In this situation, what you see is a state that cannot provide the basic amenities of life either to countries it’s occupying or to its own country. We know all this and there has been endless stuff written about it. The thing is, as long as no political, social, or economic alternative exists, they will carry on getting away with it. Wouldn’t it be great if in New Orleans they stood independent candidates against the two-party system and won. Just a small thing, but it would reverberate throughout the U.S., saying, “You let us down and we’re going to let you down.”  How is fighting power today different from the 1960s?  It’s very different in the sense that in the 1960s and 1970s, and even the early 1980s, there was still a lot of hope that you could get rid of this system and transform it through a series of democratic revolutions or insurrections or whatever. That no longer exists in large parts of the world. So there is a general feeling that really we’re stuck, there is no real alternative to the system. That is the feeling in North America, Europe, and large chunks of Asia and Africa.  Not in Latin America. Here you have the beginnings of an alternative. This is why the propaganda war against Chavez and the attempts to overthrow him make sense from the U.S. point of view. Chavez is totally challenging the neoliberal economic order. He quotes Simon Bolivar and numerous other leaders of Latin American nationalism to say what needs to be done. And it’s a very clever, intelligent operation. He is using money from the oil wealth of Venezuela, which has benefited the Venezuelan poor enormously because they’re lucky to have a government that doesn’t accept neoliberal jargon and neoliberal prescriptions. So you have had in Venezuela a massive social expenditure on health, education, creating shelter for the poor, land reform, giving land to the peasant farmers, slum dwellers getting the right to the houses they have built and the land on which they have built them. All this is happening.  Gradually, news of this experience is traveling through Latin America because ideas cross borders very easily, they don’t need passports. So Chavez and the Bolivarians in Venezuela have become a pole of attraction for social movements throughout Latin America. These, I would say, are social movements which are movements in the genuine sense of the word. Every single deprived layer is active in some way or the other.  Latin America, from that point of view, is extremely important today in terms of offering some social alternatives. One of the things they told me in Cuba, they said, “We get fed up with these stupid articles in the American press saying, ‘After Fidel, Who? Miami? Raul Castro?’” They said, “No, the answer is very simple. After Fidel, Hugo Chavez, because,” they said, “this is Latin America.” This continent has a habit of throwing up popular leaders who express the aspirations of the poor.  Telesur TV, which you’ve been involved in, went on the air in 2005. It broadcasts from Caracas and is supported by the governments of Venezuela, Argentina, Cuba, and Uruguay.  This is an idea that grew over the years. I remember going to Caracas in 2003 to celebrate the defeat of the coup attempt against Chavez. I said to them at a big public rally where Chavez and others were present that one has to fight on many fronts and one of the fronts one has to fight on is the media front. And I said, “We have in the Arab world Al-Jazeera and what we need in the Latin American world is Al Bolivar.” Afterwards, Chavez pointed out to me, “We can’t call it Al Bolivar because the Brazilians have no memory of Bolivar. He didn’t go there.” So they called it Telesur instead. And together with Eduardo Galeano, Fernando Solanas, many other intellectuals, I’m on the advisory board. So when they ask us, we play an advisory role.  It’s early yet to judge whether it will be a success or not. They have not reached the level of Al-Jazeera. Also, their project is slightly different from Al-Jazeera’s. Telesur’s project is to unify Latin America, so it’s critical of what’s going on, but at the same time it has a very constructive side to it.  The theme of the World Social Forum is “another world is possible.” What signs do you see that another world is possible?  The signs are there, largely in Latin America. I have to say that in Africa and Asia there are not many signs. There are some. You have the discontent of the Chinese peasants now, who are demanding more and more social rights. You have some social movements in India which have scored some victories. But in terms of an overall alternative to the existing neoliberal order, the big struggles that are taking place in Latin America. So there are these possibilities. I don’t exaggerate them. The nice thing about the World Social Forum is that it’s a gathering of like-minded people who meet once a year or once every two years and say, “Hi, guys, we’re still around.” Which is nice, but it’s not sufficient.  What does the title of your book Rough Music mean?  “Rough music” is a phrase that was popularized by the English historian E. P. Thompson who said, “Rough music is the term which has been generally used in England since the end of the 17th century to denote a rude cacophony, with or without more elaborate ritual, which usually directed mockery or hostility against individuals who offended against certain community norms.”  My book Rough Music is a rude cacophony against Tony Blair and all the wielders of power and his embedded journalists in the media who tell endless lies. David Barsamian is the founder and current director of Alternative Radio in Boulder, Colorado (www.alternative radio.org) and the author of numerous books. His latest is Speaking of Empire & Resistanc e, with Tariq Ali.

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  Sargent: The Social Forum of the …

  

  

  ZMag Article

  T he planning committee of the World Social Forum (WSF) 2005 decided that 2006 would be a year of “polycentric” (decentralized) meetings around the world. Gatherings were to be held in Africa, South America, Pakistan, and Thailand. Michael Albert and I, representing Z, attended the Social Forum of the Americas in Caracas from January 24-29, 2006—he was there to speak at a few of the sessions, I was there to film several events.  The World Social Forum—with the theme “another world is possible”—was first held in January 2001 as an alternative to the World Economic Forum, which is sponsored by such global capitalist institutions as the World Bank and the IMF. Since 2001, the WSF has been attended each year by close to 100,000 progressives who come to participate in “an open meeting place where social movements, networks, NGOs, and other civil society organizations opposed to neoliberalism and a world dominated by capital or by any form of imperialism come together to pursue their thinking, to debate ideas democratically, to formulate proposals, share their experiences freely, and network for effective action” (from the WSF Charter).  Approximately 80,000 were registered for the event in Caracas— with the largest delegations coming from Venezuela, Brazil, and Colombia. The six day event began with a wild ride from the airport over roads through mist-covered mountains surrounding Caracas. A key bridge was out on the main road so what was usually a thirty minute trip took anywhere from an hour and a half to five hours. We made it to the downtown Hilton Hotel where we were staying in just over two hair-raising hours. At the hotel, the lobby was filled with arrivals checking in and reuniting with old friends. We ran into friends from prior Social Forums, many of whom now write for Z, as well as a few graduates from Z Media Institute.  The first day began with a 4:00 PM march of tens of thousands through the streets of Caracas. The march is an especially important event because the sessions are held in many different venues, often spread across the host city, so the march is almost the only chance to get a sense of the size and mood of the participants. The Caracas march was lively and noisy. It was also anti-Bush (as were most of the sessions). The banners were mainly from organizations, unions, and left parties and reflected those groups’ particular issues and cultural clothing and colors, lending diversity to the event. However, it would be nice one day to see some unifying positive slogans, beyond  “another world is possible.”  The next five days were filled with a total of 2,000 sessions that began at 8:30 AM and continued until 9:00 PM. Activities by topic were:  Power, politics, and struggles for social emancipation: 493  Imperial strategies and peoples’ resistance: 314  Alternatives to the predatory model of civilization: 272  Diversities, identities, and worldviews in movement: 132  Work, exploitation, and reproduction of life: 183  Communication, culture, and education: 389  A quick survey of the 20 or so panels being held at the Hilton indicated that attendance was generally fewer than 100 people per session. We figured that number was pretty much the case at the 20 or so other venues. We did hear of sessions with a few thousand, but they were rare. While the numbers seemed small to us, relative to some of the sessions at the World Social Forums in Porto Alegre, Brazil and Mumbai, India, we observed a great deal of enthusiasm among the majority of attendees.  Meanwhile hundreds of participants were wandering halls and streets, enjoying just being there and talking with like-minded people. Interestingly, this distribution between sessions, private meetings, and just hanging out is reflected in a survey taken at the WSF 2005, which showed that 49.8 percent of participants in the Social Forum movement were there to exchange experiences with other participants; 47.8 percent wanted to contribute to a better society; 42.4 percent came for democratic debate; and 20.6 percent came to formulate proposals for alternatives to the neoliberal model.  On the morning of the fourth day, word of mouth indicated that Hugo Chavez was going to speak that evening, even though the program listed him as apearing two days later. We were hustled onto a bus of “important guests” for a 30-minute ride to an indoor stadium. There we were split into more “important guests” who were taken to a room to wait for a quick meeting with Chavez and the “less important guests” (us) who were taken to a special section on the stadium floor.  For the next three hours, we filmed the crowd in the stadium as they cheered, drummed, chanted, and danced. Finally, there was some entertainment, followed by the arrival on stage of the “more important guests” (including Che Guevara’s daughter and Cindy Sheehan). After some additional security checks, Chavez arrived.  While the hierarchical “important guest” business was annoying, Hugo Chavez was impressive. He spoke to the crowd as if chatting with old friends. He boldly urged solidarity with Cuba, which, until Chavez, had been isolated—even condemned—by Latin Americans, right and left.  He quoted and/or referred to Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, and Noam Chomsky, among others (we’re told he’s a avid reader). It was amusing to compare his reading material with what we imagined our president’s was. He made a hopeful and inspiring case for a unified Latin America—a Bolivarian Revolution—that could serve as a progressive model throughout the world, as well as a challenge to U.S. domination.  He revealed that he had met with a few of the WSF organizers behind the scenes (some of whom were onstage). In that meeting he had told them that it was fine to have discussions, but if the Forum didn’t result in conclusions and actions, then it was a waste of time.  The debate between those who want to keep the WSF a forum and those who want it to move toward a global movement organization with common goals and strategies has been going on since 2003. Answers to the aforementioned questionnaire are revealing in this respect. When asked where they considered themselves on the political map, 60.1 percent thought of themselves as left, 19.8 percent were center-left, 4.5 percent were center, 0.6 percent center right, and 1.6 percent was right (13.4 percent had no opinion).   When asked what process should be used for building “the other possible world,” 90.4 percent said the road should include “strengthening the mobilization of civil society on a global, continental, national, and local level”; 72.3 percent said the path should include “the democratization of governments”; 59.3 percent said it should include direct action; 59.2 percent said it should include “the democratization of multilateral organizations (UN, WTO, World Bank, IMF)”; and 13.5 percent believed it should include “direct action with the use of force.”  The direction the WSF should take is a difficult issue, but it’s not clear why organizing a movement and continuing a forum structure can’t both be done. We’ve suggested in these pages that a portion of the WSF could be dedicated to discussion and decision-making leading to the founding of a movement organization or network that could aggressively promote common visions and values for “another world.”  Regardless of what happens, it is extremely important for activists from the U.S. to become part of this growing global left. It would show the rest of the world that there is a left in the U.S. that is resisting the empire from within. It would remind those of us who feel isolated, and often discouraged, that there are other people in the world who want a revolution in values and institutions.   Lydia Sargent is a co-founder of South End Press and Z. She has been on the staff of Z since its founding in 1988. 

  Lydia Sargent ZSpace page
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• Sunday, Oct 30, 2005
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  Chomsky: The US, Venezuela & Columbia

  

  

  Blog Post

  In Venezuela, the US has tried even more drastic measures, like supporting a military coup that (briefly) overthrew the democratically elected government in 2002. The US had to back down in the face of enormous protest in Latin America, where democracy

  Noam Chomsky ZSpace page
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• Monday, Sep 19, 2005
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  Chomsky: Market Principles?

  

  

  Blog Post

  Take the US. In 1750… it was one of the richest societies on earth, but it was, of course, pre-industrial. If it had pursued its comparative advantage in accordance with market principles, it would now be exporting fish, fur, agricultural products, etc.

  Noam Chomsky ZSpace page
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• Friday, Jul 01, 2005
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  Bacon: Central America

  

  ZMag Article

  O ver one million people filled the streets along the historic route of Mexican social protest on May Day, marching from the Angel of Independence to the Zocalo and then filling the enormous square at the city’s center. This was the largest demonstration in the city’s history, a great peaceful outpouring crying out, not just for formal democracy at the ballot box, but for more. People took to the streets to demand a basic change in their country’s direction.  Mexico has produced a unique political movement, uniting the population of the world’s largest city, estimated at 21.5 million, with the 9.2 million Mexicans now living north of the border. This exile population—so large that every person walking to the Zocalo now has at least one relative in the U.S.—also wants change.  This Spring, the country’s president, Vicente Fox, attempted to impeach Mexico City Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. Fox’s attorney general, Rafael Macedo de la Concha, accused Lopez of using the city’s power of eminent domain to take land for an access road to a new hospital in defiance of a court order. The charge was a pretext, a political move to prevent him from running for president in 2006. The attempt backfired when growing public outcry forced the attorney general to resign three days before the march.  Lopez Obrador is undoubtedly Mexico’s most popular politician. “He runs a boom government,” explains Alejandro Alvarez, an economics professor at the National Autonomous University, “which promotes public works in the midst of economic paralysis. Despite the corruption scandal that ensnared his aides, he is basically honest. He criticizes the voracity of the banking system and Fox’s free trade policies, he has an austere style in a country accustomed to the excesses of imperial presidents, and above all, he shows solidarity with the poor.” Lopez’s most popular acts so far have been to pay a small pension to all the city’s aged residents and provide school supplies to its children.  As president, however, Lopez would hardly be a radical on the order of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, who on May Day declared socialism his country’s goal. This was also Mexico’s official ideal of the 1930s and 1940s, but a socialist direction is not the alternative Lopez Obrador has in mind. Alvarez notes that while he built a second deck on the main freeway circling the city for Mexico City’s horrendous traffic, he capped the budget for the subway system on which most poor residents depend. Lopez’s program for redeveloping the historic city center is oriented towards business promotion, even to the extent of expelling the Mazahua indigenous street vendors there. “He adopted [former New York Mayor] Giuliani’s ‘zero tolerance’ policy to improve personal security, but at the cost of violating individual rights and shelved the investigation into the death of [indigenous rights attorney] Digna Ochoa in the face of grave inconsistencies in police procedure,” Alvarez adds. Compromise or no, in the eyes of millions of Mexicans, Lopez Obrador represents a chance to scrap the present economic policies of Fox’s National Action Party. Despite being lauded as the party that broke the 71-year stranglehold of the former ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the PAN strategy of basing economic development on privatization and foreign investment is indistinguishable from the PRI before it. Both parties’ austerity policies have held wages down and discouraged independent union organization, while opening Mexico to imports from the U.S. The flood of cheap corn—a staple crop of millions of small Mexican farmers—has multiplied by 15 times during the 12 years the North American Free Trade Agreement has been in effect. As a result, income has declined over the last two decades.  The government estimates that 40 of the country’s 104.5 million people live in poverty, 25 million in extreme poverty.  Mexico has become an exporter both of the goods made by low- wage labor in foreign-owned border factories and of labor itself, as millions of people cross that border looking for work in the north.  The march of a million Mexicans is a clear demonstration that movements protesting those policies are growing. According to Alvarez, “The social movements of the last two years have been, in the countryside, openly against NAFTA, and in the city, against privatization and the dismantling of the welfare state.” This is the upsurge in popular sentiment that Lopez Obrador hopes to ride into office and the reason why he represents such a problem, not just for Fox, but for the Bush administration as well. Mexico, under the impetus of this movement, will go in the direction of Brazil, Ecuador, Argentina, Uruguay, and even Venezuela—rejecting the “free trade” model and economic control from Washington.  “What people want is justice,” says Rufino Dominguez, coordinator of the Indigenous Front of Binational Organizations, a group that organizes indigenous people both in their home communities in Mexico, and as the latest and largest wave of migrants coming to the U.S. “To us, democracy means more than elections. It means economic stability—our capacity to make a living in Mexico, without having to migrate. It means a halt to the continued violation of human rights in our communities. It means having a government that attends to the needs of the people. We’re tired of governments which put other interests first.”  No one understands the price of corporate trade policies better than those who have paid them, leaving their homes and traveling thousands of miles in search of work. “We know the reasons we have to leave,” Dominguez asserts. “Over 5,000 of us have died trying to cross the border....”  The Frente’s leader in the southern Mexico state of Oaxaca, Juan Romualdo Gutierrez Cortez, an elementary school teacher, emphasizes that “migration is a necessity, not a choice—there is no work here. Education is linked to development. You can’t tell a child to study to be a doctor if there is no work for doctors in Mexico. It is a very daunting task for a Mexican teacher to convince students to get an education and stay in the country. Children learn by example. If a student sees his older brother migrate to the United States, build a house and buy a car, he will follow.”  Integrating Mexico’s exile population into the country’s political process is a fundamental part of its movement for democracy.  According to Jesus Martinez, a professor at California State University in Fresno, “Mexico has undergone a process of democratic transformation since the 1980s, but it is still incomplete. Mexicans living abroad, who represent 16 percent of the electorate, still have not been granted the right to vote. That’s part of the inclusion that has to take place.”  Mexico’s exile population is excluded from the political process that governs peoples’ lives in the U.S. as well. Undocumented migrants (estimated at over 4 million people) are excluded from all U.S. social benefit programs. The U.S. Congress recently decided to make obtaining a drivers license almost impossible. Even the act of working is a federal crime, despite the fact that big sections of the U.S. economy are totally dependent on migrant labor.  Legal or not, Mexican migrants cannot vote to choose the political representatives who decide basic questions of wages and conditions at work, the education of their children, their healthcare or lack of it, and even whether they can walk the streets without fear of arrest and deportation.  Although excluded from the U.S. electorate, popular pressure to guarantee migrants the right to vote in Mexican elections has been growing for two decades. Last year, Martinez was elected a deputy to the Michoacan state legislature, representing his state’s residents living abroad. He was a candidate of the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), the party of Lopez Obrador. “In Michoacan, we’re trying to carry out reforms that can do justice to the role migrants play in our lives,” Martinez says. “We have the most pro-immigrant governor in the state’s history, who has finally treated migrant concerns as a priority.”  On a national level, however, the PAN and PRI have resisted change, while simultaneously claiming interest in the vote of Mexicans living abroad. Fox and the PAN congratulate migrants for sending home remittances to their families, which last year totaled $17 billion. This money now sustains entire communities, easing pressure on the government to find funding for education, health care, social services, and economic development. Employers in the U.S. likewise find the present system convenient, since they have no obligation to pay the cost of maintaining the communities from which their workers come.  But convenience comes at a price. The Mexico-based political machines that produced the votes that have kept the PRI in power for decades, and which now support the PAN as well, have little influence or control over the votes of people living thousands of miles away in another country entirely. Mexicans living in the U.S. have little reason to be loyal to a political class that created the conditions forcing them to emigrate.  PRI and PAN control the national congress and, while they voted over a decade ago to permit Mexicans in the U.S. to vote, they only set up a system to implement that decision at the end of April.  It is a very limited implementation. Voters will require credentials that can only be obtained in their home communities and will only be able to vote by mail beginning in 2006. Some observers believe that of the 9.2 million Mexicans living in the U.S., fewer than half a million will actually cast ballots.  “It is limited,” concedes Dominguez, “but it is the fruit of many years of fighting by organizations here in the U.S. It’s not all we wanted, but it’s a beginning. And most important, now that they’ve passed the law and started to create a process, there’s no going back.”  Dominguez believes that in a close election, barring fraud, the votes of 500,000 people could determine Mexico’s next president. This prospect is as frightening to both PRI and PAN as the candidacy of Lopez Obrador. Not only might there be a candidate proposing a change in Mexico’s direction, but a sizable number of people with good reasons for voting for him. David Bacon is a freelance writer and photographer. 

  David Bacon ZSpace page
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• Sunday, May 01, 2005
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  Herman: Nuggets from the Nut House

  

  

  ZMag Article

  N ews reports indicate an official U.S. concern over Venezuelan President Chavez’s purchase of new weapons and the threat that this might set off a local arms race, help him support terrorists, and point to more grandiose and expansionist plans on his part. The worried Rumsfeld asks why Chavez could possibly want to buy 100,000 AK-47s from Russia; Otto Reich speaks of “the emerging axis of subversion between Venezuela and Cuba”; and the Pentagon’s top Latin American official, Rogelio Pardo-Maurer, says, “We need to have a strategy to contain Chavez” (Jim Lobe, “Washington Focuses on Southern ‘Axis of Evil’,” Interpress Service , March 24, 2005; Rowan Scarborough, “Russian arms sale to Chavez irks U.S.,” the Washington Times , February 10, 2005; Juan Forero, “Arms Buying By Venezuela Worries U.S.,” New York Times , February 15, 2005).  The press reports don’t mention the possibility that weapons might be needed by Venezuela for self-defense against a real U.S. threat or to counter-balance the weapons supplied by the United States to its client government in Colombia. The idea that what the United States might really be worried about is the threat of independence and a good example—of possible governmental service to ordinary citizens—and of Chavez’s importance in an emerging left-oriented solidarity bloc in Latin America, is also something the press will never entertain (see Seth R. DeLong, “Venezuela and the Latin American New Left: To Washington’s Chagrin, Chávez’s Influence Continues to Spread Throughout the Continent,” www.coha.org). This is in the great media tradition of the double standard and denial of any right of self-defense on the part of U.S. targets.  The hints that Chavez poses an expansionary threat is also in the great tradition of propaganda deployment of the word “containment.” Containing the Soviet Union was allegedly the heart of U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War from 1945-1991, although an oddity was that except for the Afghanistan invasion—actually deliberately provoked, as Brzezinski has proudly indicated, to exhaust the Soviet Union—the Soviets never moved beyond their borders and the adjacent Eastern European satellites accepted as part of their sphere of influence at Yalta. Meanwhile, since World War II the United States has:  Invaded distant Vietnam, Cambodia, and Lebanon.  Bombed an estimated 26 countries.  Participated in the overthrow of governments in Indonesia, the Philippines, Zaire, Iran, Guatemala, Chile, and Brazil, among 40 or so foreign governments it has attempted to remove.   “Constructively engaged” apartheid and regional aggressor South Africa for many years and has supported apartheid and ethnic-cleansing Israel for half a century.  Established military bases across the globe (which the Soviet Union did not do).  Pushed the arms race, in part to try to impoverish the Soviet Union, in part to give it an edge permitting the ready projection of power.  Trained many thousands of military and security personnel at the School of the Americas, who went home to help establish a string of National Security States in the U.S. backyard,  Used the IMF and World Bank, plus economic and military power, to bring many Third World countries into a state of dependency and subordination.   The United States also claimed to be “containing” virtually all of its small victims: Guatemala, Vietnam, Cuba, Iraq, Nicaragua, and even Grenada. (In most of these cases the small neighbors of the U.S. victim failed to see any urgent threat and had to be coerced into agreeing that the U.S.’s target was a menace and accepting the need for containing action.)  All through this period, although it was quite evident from the “facts on the ground” that it was the United States that needed containing, U.S. power and ideological command were sufficiently great that the Orwellian inversion was an established truth in the West: the Soviet Union was expansionist and needed containing; the United States was responsive, defensive, and not itself expansionist. In short, containment was a superb cover for imperial expansion.  The collapse of the Soviet Union and the aggressive projection of force and expansionism in its wake should have awakened folks captured by the old package of ideology, lies, and myths to the reality of what went on from 1945-1991 and to the even greater present menace of U.S. imperialism in the absence of the Soviet “threat” (of limited de facto containment). To some extent it has, although the ideological institutions and vested interests in the West still allow themselves to be manipulated by evolving party lines that continue to make the pitiful giant merely responding to alleged threats, sometimes a bit inflated by faulty intelligence. The vast majority of the global population knows the score, but the substantial citizens in the West still wear blinders based on ideology, interest, and mass media subservience to imperial strategies. Let us hope that they awaken before the U.S. does us in via bombs, induced social disaster, and counter-revolutionary violence or environmental collapse.  Ending the Bad Occupation  T he ease with which the Western establishment accepts a double standard is often quite humorous. George Bush can state how important it is that we and France are telling Syria, “You get your troops and your secret services out of Lebanon so that good democracy has a chance to flourish,” without drawing hearty laughs. The New York Times editorializes that everybody now agrees “in demanding that Syria stop putting off compliance with the clear order of the United Nations Security Council to withdraw its 14,000 troops” (“Lebanon for the Lebanese,” March 4, 2005). Can you imagine this great newspaper with editorials “Iraq for the Iraqis” or “Palestine for the Palestinians,” suggesting that the United States and Israel should get out of their occupied lands to give democracy a chance to flourish, and giving such credence to UN rulings (or international law—unmentioned by the Times in its numerous editorials on the U.S. invasion-occupation of Iraq)? Can you imagine it saying that the “main point” is that “three occupying countries remain in the Middle East: Syria, Israel, and the United States. The two Western occupiers are now demanding that the Arab occupying state desist from occupying. In its honor, they pushed for the Syria Accountability Act—legislation enabling sanctions to be applied—and UN Security Council Resolution 1559…. The hypocrisy of occupying states is nothing new…[but] always requires semantic juggling?” (Zvi Bar’el, “End the occupation—but only in Lebanon,” Haaretz , March 6, 2005, www.haaretz.com).  In the Western mainstream there are no hoots of laughter despite Bush’s managing an occupation vastly more brutal than Syria’s in Lebanon and far away from the United States, and following a devastating aggression based on Big Lies. There is no suggestion that democracy in Iraq might be impeded by U.S. troops and secret services staying in that country. Nor do the media point out and find it funny that Bush can get uptight about the Syrian occupation while his buddy, the world class terrorist commander Ariel Sharon, is using a brutal occupation to ethnically cleanse an Arab population in favor of his chosen people, an ethnic cleansing operation going on for many years in violation of international law and numerous UN rulings, with full Bush and predecessor approval. (Syria has not been stealing Lebanese land, killing resisters on a daily basis, demolishing thousands of homes and uprooting thousands of Lebanese olive trees, or building security walls that take still more Lebanese land into Syria.) These more vicious occupations are taken as givens in the West and especially in the United States, and new UN demands on Syria to get out are treated in convenient isolation, with the double standard in full and effective play.  Of course, the double standard rests on important considerations: the United States is good and means well—despite the occasional mistakes, tragic errors, and misbehavior by a few rotten apples—and is bringing liberty to the Iraqis, even if by extremely violent force and in straightforward violation of international law. The UN Security Council, including the “Old Europe” contingent, agrees, peremptorily ordering Syria to get out of Lebanon, while sanctioning the U.S. aggressor’s stay in Iraq as head of a multinational force (see the Syria-out-of-Lebanon resolution, UNSC 1559, September 2, 2004; and the U.S.- into-Iraq as the head of the “multinational” force resolution, UNSC 1546, June 8, 2004, www.un.org). The Israelis are also a “good people,” simply responding and trying to contain terrorism as they swallow up the land of those terrorists and violate international law on a daily basis. So it is easy to see that the double standard rests on a sound basis.  Iraq’s Demonstration Elections  A ll U.S.-sponsored elections in Third World countries are treated by the U.S. mainstream media as positive steps on the march to democracy, no matter how blatantly they fail to meet the criteria of a free election and how clearly they serve a strictly public relations function and fail to disturb the power structure fixed by a military occupation. The classics of this character were the Vietnam elections of 1966 and 1967, but the El Salvador election of 1982 was another public relations beauty in which the media helped legitimize brutal military rule by focusing on voter turnout and ignoring the massive negatives incompatible with a free election—the absence of freedom of assembly, speech, and press; sharp limits on the freedom of intermediate groups to exist and organize; no freedom of dissident candidates to run and campaign; and a climate of fear and serious ongoing state terror.   The recent Iraq election falls into this pattern, as did the October 9, 2004 election for the presidency of Afghanistan, won handily by Hamid Karzai, the proconsul installed by the U.S. invading force in late 2001. In the Iraq case, once again the media focused on the turnout and insurgent opposition to the election, as proving its democratic character, exactly as they did in the case of the patently fraudulent elections in the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, and El Salvador—but as they failed to do in Nicaragua in 1984 where this would have legitimated the wrong side.  One major problem with the establishment treatment of the Iraq election is that it ignores the fact that an occupation in itself affects and renders ambiguous the meaning of voting. Are the voters expressing approval of the occupation? Are they adapting pragmatically to choices forced on them by outsiders who they recognize as holding decisive power? Are they possibly voting in the hope of ridding themselves of the occupation? Does the occupying authority exert significant influence by its military actions, threats, control of government, imposed laws and rules, media domination, and strategic use of its—and the occupied country’s—resources?   A well-run propaganda system postulates approval, as the media did for Vietnam and El Salvador, and it fails to discuss the other possibilities, at least for their own government. President Bush clearly suggests that the occupation in Lebanon by Syria contaminates the meaning and results of elections—Syria must leave so that “democracy has a chance to flourish.” The New York Times editorial on “Lebanon for the Lebanese” suggests that Syria exercises influence by “twisting the arms of Lebanese politicians, and the language of Lebanon’s Constitution, to serve its own interests.” But the Times and its media colleagues never speak of Bremer and Negroponte “twisting arms” of Iraq politicians and fixing “the language [Iraq’s] Constitution to serve [U.S.] interests.”  Doesn’t the Bush administration have “interests” it wishes to serve apart from the alleged aim of democracy? Don’t its agents “twist arms?” Don’t they want to keep those four military bases already in operation and others long planned? Don’t they have an oil interest? Don’t they want to avoid a Shiite-dominated state aligned with Iran? Are they prepared to leave empty-handed after having spent $300 billion of taxpayers’ money on this Iraq campaign? The media don’t address the questions that would suggest non-benign motives and a strong interest in particular electoral outcomes. This is deep bias and de facto propaganda service, dramatized by their continued unwillingness to deal consistently with the Syrian occupation of Lebanon and the U.S. occupation of Iraq.  The media doesn’t discuss the documentary evidence that oil and military bases were foremost in the Bush team’s internal explanations of why Iraq should be targeted and they take the alleged shift in objective—to liberation—at face value. If they didn’t evade these points, and were minimally honest, they would analyze how an invader-occupier can maintain control or substantial influence, despite and even by means of, an election. They would examine how the occupation has reshaped the power structure and political alignments of Iraq in ways that necessarily affect an election outcome. Briefly, the working government of Iraq is U.S.-appointed, including both top officials and ministers; the government budget is U.S.-controlled as are the oil revenues and monies allocated by the U.S. congress to the Iraq war and reconstruction; and many locals have benefited from U.S. contracts and sales of state property, so that a structure of vested interests in the occupation has been built up and large-scale political patronage has been dispensed by occupation officials. The dominant media, notably TV, are controlled by the occupiers and their appointees, and Al-Jazeera has been barred from Baghdad. The Bush administration has spent substantial resources advising, training, and giving favorable publicity to their local political favorites, making for a seriously unlevel playing field (see Carl Conetta, “The Iraqi Election ‘Bait and Switch’: Faulty Poll Will Not Bring Peace or US Withdrawal,” January 25, 2005, www.comw.org). Many laws and an interim constitution have been put into effect under the occupation and a new judiciary and legal structure have been put in place. All of these things mean massive political leverage. As to the election, it was organized by the occupation authorities, which fixed its timetable. The election personnel responsible for the final vote count were selected by occupation officials and the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL) under which the election was held was written under occupation auspices and was designed to meet U.S. needs. Important in meeting these needs is the limited power it gives the newly elected assembly, designing it mainly to prepare for a general election a year hence and organize the preparation of a constitution to be submitted for popular approval. In the interim the U.S.-appointed government will run Iraq under U.S.-made laws and the U.S. military will continue to occupy Iraq, build bases, attack, kill, and imprison—all outside of Iraqi control.  TAL is designed to limit Shiite power and make likely stalemate and compromise by requiring super-majorities, as well as unanimous agreement by the presidency council for changes in the U.S.-imposed TAL. TAL gives the Kurds effective veto power over any proposed constitution. If the newly elected assembly cannot agree on a constitution a new election will be held, continuing the U.S.-occupation’s de facto rule for at least another year.  The need for compromise in negotiations over the new transitional government was greatly heightened by the fact that the Shiites allegedly won fewer than 50 percent of the votes and seats in the assembly. This is a great advantage for the occupation, as its interests are more easily served with stalemate and negotiations in which its friends can bargain on its behalf, with stalemate quite acceptable as it simply extends the period of uncontested occupation rule. Scott Ritter claims that “well-placed sources in Iraq who were in a position to know” told him that the Shiites actually won 56 percent of the votes, adjusted downward by the election authorities to 48 percent to serve occupation needs (“Hijacking Democracy in Iraq,” Alternet, March 23, 2005, www.alternet.org). This is plausible given the Shiite majority status and Sistani’s urging them to vote. As we might expect, this claim has not been mentioned and checked out for authenticity by the mainstream media.  The election deepened the split among the ethnic communities in Iraq, with the Shiites agreeing to an election run by an occupying army that was attacking Sunni strongholds with no holds barred, and therefore giving tacit approval to the occupation’s violence (and Sistani offered not a word of criticism of the destruction of Falluja). This has added a civil war to the insurgents’ war against an aggression-occupation (see Thanassis Cambanis, “Fractured Iraq sees a Sunni call to arms,” www.boston.com). This is very useful to the occupation. The U.S. armed forces are now the Shiites’ army, protecting the Shiite leadership against the insurgency, which adds greatly to the occupation’s leverage in bargaining for its future rights to bases and at least some edge in exploiting Iraq’s oil.  So the election has been extremely serviceable to Bush and his policies in Iraq. Its “demonstration” effect has worked well, once again with media cooperation, and has silenced the easily silenced Democrats from criticizing the aggression-occupation, now in the service of Iraqi democracy. An occupation may corrupt democracy in Lebanon, but when we occupy a country, by patriotic assumption the fostering of democracy is the end. But just as in Vietnam and El Salvador, the lies and double standard will serve to provide a breathing space for more killing—and a lot more killing will follow. Giving the invader-occupier this breathing space to kill, and to help assure a continued role for the United States in shaping the politics of a devastated Iraq, was the purpose of the election, surely not liberation. Edward S. Herman is an economist and media critic. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including Demonstration Elections (with Frank Brodhead).

  Edward Herman ZSpace page
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  Street: LOVE ME, I’M A LIBERAL

  

  

  ZMag Article

  T here’s nothing quite as revolting as “left-liberal” Democrats struggling to identify themselves with United States imperialism. Take a look, for example, at the March 2005 issue of the avowedly progressive American Prospect magazine. Along with a poorly conceived cover cartoon portraying the leading left critic of U.S. imperialism and thought control Noam Chomsky and leading imperialist Dick Cheney scowling at each other. The headline of this special “Foreign Policy and National Security Issue” reads “Between Chomsky And Cheney: American power in the service of liberal ideals.” The cover, however, is the last you hear of Chomsky. The special issue focuses on the sins of George W. Bush and his neoconservative cabal.  What is the primary White House misdeed that provokes the American Prospect ’s ire? Dropping the ball of empire. Do Bush’s transgressions include the murder of perhaps more than 100,000 Iraqis in the commission of the Nuremberg Trials’ “supreme crime”—the launching of an unjustified war of aggression on a formerly sovereign state? The imperial occupation of that state (Iraq) in the false name of exporting “freedom” and “democracy,” a belatedly declared U.S. objective that is revealed as coldly disingenuous when we review U.S. support for such dictators as Pakistan’s Pervez Musharrraf, Uzbekistan’s Islam Karimov, and Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, etc? The brazen attempt to establish an Iraqi client state that will host major U.S. military bases and give the U.S. privileged access to Iraqi oil? The simultaneous, interrelated deepening of U.S. empire and U.S. inequality?   Not really. According to Prospect writers Paul Starr, Michael Tomasky, and (journal editor) Robert Kuttner, the real problem is that Bush’s “over-optimistic” and “inadequately planned” invasion of Iraq has “undermined American power and influence in the world.”  “Three and a half years after September 11,” these authors argue, “U.S. military forces are stretched to the limit, anti-Americanism has intensified in Europe and the Middle East, and our traditional allies are increasingly distrustful of U.S. leadership and are setting an independent path in foreign affairs.” To make matters worse, Bush’s “fiscal policies have created a dangerous dependence on foreign borrowing to finance our budget and trade deficits, and its energy policies have increased our dependence on foreign oil.” All in all, “the war and other administration policies are weakening our power” and “undermining our freedom of action.”  The weakening of U.S. global power is the central charge made by two other contributors. According to Prospect correspondent Michael Steinberg, the Bush White House’s obsession with military might has led it to “calamitously” “sacrifice U.S. global economic leadership,” thereby threatening to bring “America’s unipolar [post-Cold War] moment” to “a premature close.” Bush’s crime is that he has blown the chance to turn that “moment” into “a unipolar era.”  “The administration’s indifference to global economics,” Steinberg argues, “has created a void that is being filled by both the European Union, and, more ominously, China.” After pausing to “savor the irony that an administration determined never to surrender an inch of U.S. sovereignty has created a situation in which several Asian central banks control the fate of the dollar,” Steinberg notes that Bush’s acceleration of the decline of the U.S. greenback threatens the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency. This confronts the U.S. with the (classic late-imperial) task of trying to “sustain an empire that is broke.” It’s too bad, Steinberg feels, that the fiscally reckless, hyper-militarist Bush administration lacks “the Clintonites” recognition that “America’s economic strength could be a critical tool in keeping the peace while extending U.S. dominance.”  Steinberg’s concern over lost U.S. economic dominance is shared by Prospect contributor Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Economic Strategy Institute. According to Prestowitz, America’s massive indebtedness to “the world’s biggest dictatorship” (China) is both “symptom and cause of America’s dwindling economic leadership,” which “mocks Bush’s hegemonic grand design. At this rate,” Prestowitz concludes, “we risk becoming the Venice of the 21st century.”   Forgotten Shantytowns of Clintonite Globalism  N ever mind that Clinton’s supposedly progressive and “peaceful” exercise of world-economic “leadership” sustained and deepened gross human suffering and shocking inequality. In a major study that received moderate media attention in the summer of 1999, the United Nations Human Development Program found that “global inequalities in income and living standards have reached grotesque proportions.” The UN reported that the income gap between the richest fifth of the world’s nations and the poorest fifth (measured by average national income per head) increased from 30 to one in 1960 to 74 to one in 1997. The top fifth of nations possessed 86.1 percent of the world’s gross domestic product, 68 percent of direct foreign investment, and 74 percent of the world’s telephone lines.  Taking into account the wide disparities between rich and poor people in all countries (rich and poor alike), it seemed likely that the richest 20 percent of the world’s people received at least 150 times more income than the poorest 20 percent. In the candid words of the Boston Globe , the neoliberal “globalization” overseen by Clinton during the 1990s “resulted in a boom for the wealthiest 20 percent of the world’s population and a bust for just about everyone else.”  Such disparity would have seemed less disturbing if it hadn’t been a leading cause of substantial misery among those at the bottom. While the world’s 200 richest people (overwhelmingly from advanced northern states) doubled their wealth to $1 trillion from 1994 to 1998, the media reported, more than 1.3 billion people in the developing world scraped by on less than one dollar a day—the World Bank’s benchmark for “abject poverty.”  Correspondent R.C. Longworth of the Chicago Tribune marked the millennium’s turn by noting that the world’s “surging economy enriches a few” but “bypasses the rest.” In Longworth’s view, “the 21st century, like the 20th, began as a belle epoque for those lucky enough to enjoy it.” Those fortunate people were a distinct minority for whom the new global era was “a golden age of peace, great wealth, booming markets, easy travel, instant communications, fabulous comfort and, with it, an innocence and confidence that this good fortune is not only deserved but permanent.”  But things were “very different,” Longworth noted, for the world’s “majority [who]...live in shanty towns on the outskirts of the global village.” Longworth referred to “the rest of humanity” beneath the opulent minority: “millions of unemployed nomads in China, street people in Calcutta, European workers without jobs, the 28 percent of Americans whose jobs pay poverty-level wages, semi-educated young men in Morocco begging in four languages, the hopeless poor of Africa, child laborers in Bangladesh, the pensioners of Poland, the Russians wondering what happened to their lives.”  Such disturbing socioeconomic outcomes were the natural result of a particular, corporate-dominated de-regulatory or neoliberal “free-trade/free-capital” global trade and investment system advanced with great enthusiasm by “the Clintonites.” This system turns everything—water, land, air, animals, vegetation, health care, science, knowledge, academia, culture, public space, human labor power, love, law and order, crime, politics—into a commodity and/or private investment opportunity. It also:  Increases inequality both within and between states, “concentrating,” in the words of the UN’s 1999 Human Development Report, “power and wealth in a small and privileged group of people, nations and corporations and marginalizing the others”  “Kicks away the ladder of development” from peripheral nations in the world economic system, preventing them from using the same policy methods (e.g., import restrictions, industrial policy, state-owned industries and extensive controls on foreign capital and exchange rates) that produced “successful” internationally competitive development in core states and “late-industrializing” semi-peripheral states  Pits unfairly over-indebted “developing” nations against each other in an orgy of export competition while denying them (in the curious name of “free markets”) the right to protect their own domestic economies from the heavily subsidized exports of more “advanced” nations and the incursions of heavily state-subsidized multinational corporations  Requires poor nations to sacrifice their own food security and ecological balance and to divert scarce funds away from education, health care, social services and environmental protection and into the hands of wealthy bondholders and corporations as the price of admission to the world economy  Drains tens of billions of dollars out of developing nations through the intellectual-property protectionism of the richest states—the costly, inefficient and often life-threatening patent monopolies enjoyed by corporations based chiefly in Europe and North America  Deregulates global currency and capital flows, leaving nations and governments hostage to rapidly shifting market sentiments and creating financial crises that cause suffering for millions  Saturates the world with a flood of weapons, adding fuel to fires of violence that are fed by the destabilizing consequences of corporate and financial globalization and that provide self-fulfilling pretext for massive state subsidy of high-tech military corporations in the West  Favors authoritarian states over democracies since wages tend be lower and environmental laws and social protections weaker in the former than in the latter, giving businesses in dictatorships an advantage in exploiting human and natural resources and selling exports abroad  On the positive side, the Prospect applauds Bush II for undertaking what Starr, Tomasky, and Kuttner call a “fully justified attack” on Afghanistan. These authors also credit Bush II for setting out (in his second inaugural address) “an attractive vision of the United States as a liberator of oppressed nations”—a vision that “Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt would have recognized.”  At the same time, the Prospect thinks, Bush’s foreign policies “invite liberals to offer a compelling alternative in the spirit of FDR, Harry Truman, George Kennan, Dean Acheson, and John F. Kennedy.” That liberal “alternative” would maintain U.S. “credibility,” reinvigorate U.S. global alliances, respect longstanding principles of international law, and accept the need to work through “multi-lateral institutions.”   As a living example of that supposedly noble liberal vision, the Prospect’s special issue includes a two-page Tomasky interview with former U.S. National Security Adviser (under Democratic President Jimmy Carter) Zbigniew Bzrezinski. Grand imperial strategist Bzrezinski, some may recall, initiated the original massive U.S. payments to fundamentalist Islamic terrorists in Afghanistan as part of his effort to lure the Soviet Union into “its own Vietnam.” He calls for “a more energetic re-engagement with the Europeans and Japanese as the richest parts of mankind in trying to deal with the problem of the politically awakened [global] populace, which is resentful of the global inequalities which it now perceives very sharply because of mass communications.” He wants to “appeal to the good side of the American tradition and exploit the demonstrable preference of the American people for multilateral solutions.” He advocates “an enlightened foreign policy which respects the necessity of American leadership,” but “recognizes that legitimacy and moral support are necessary ingredients” of effective strategy for global dominance.   What’s behind this seemingly counter-intuitive phenomenon of a supposedly progressive magazine bemoaning the decline of imperial power and criticizing the Bush administration primarily for damaging U.S. global hegemony and destroying the supposed possibility of long-term “unipolar” U.S. dominance? There were numerous good reasons for hard, anti-imperial leftists to join American Prospect in preferring the more sanely internationalist John F. Kerry over the radical-nationalist Bushcons last fall. Some on the left, most prominently Alexander Cockburn, advanced an irresponsible perspective when they claimed that Bush was actually “the lesser evil” because he would be the less effective and sophisticated imperialist—the one most likely to speed the evil empire’s demise. Such reckless reasoning was far too relaxed in the face of the truly dangerous and bloody record, ambitions, and philosophy of the “messianic militarist” (Ralph Nader’s description) Bush administration’s foreign policy, not to mention Bush’s ongoing assault on what’s left of the U.S. welfare state and social contract. It also ignored the strong likelihood that the climate for left organizing would be better with Democrats in the White House and the fact that it is better for people overseas to focus their resistance to U.S. hegemony on bipartisan institutions and structures of empire (including economic empire), not an evil cabal of over-the-top jingoists.  The American Prospect is right to criticize Bush for “intensify[ing] anti-Americanism…in Europe and the Middle East.” As Stephen Shalom notes, “the American populace is not wrong to care about their security. What’s wrong is to want it at the expense of others. Our (the left’s) solution to the problem of security is that we need a different foreign policy, one that doesn’t drive people to hate us and serve as recruits for terrorism…and Bush’s policies of increasing anti-Americanism in the Middle East are exactly the opposite of what is required to enhance the security of the American people.”  Still, it is curious and revealing to see the American Prospect penning a critique of Bush’s foreign policy that singles out the Administration for doing what some radicals said would make Bush “the lesser evil”: bungling empire. Aren’t people on “the left” opposed to imperialism and single-state world hegemony in all its dimensions—economic, political, and/or military? Isn’t it precisely “the left” that points out the regressive, repressive, and reactionary sorrows of world domination and the toxic, dialectically inseparable relationships between empire, militarism, and domestic and global inequality?  Unlike the hard left, of course, the “liberal-left” pro-imperialists at American Prospect are convinced that the U.S. is at heart an essentially good and liberating force in the world. To sustain this belief, they have to ignore the massive record of imperial arrogance and criminality to which liberals like Roosevelt, Kennan, Acheson, Truman, and Bzrezinski have richly contributed. As Chomsky and other radical writers and historians have noted, the crimes inflicted by the Prospect ’s liberal foreign policy heroes to date include:  The Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration’s decision to support Italian and German fascism as reasonable middle-class bulwarks against European social democracy and Soviet “communism”—a decision that was reversed only by the realization that the fascist Axis threatened U.S. imperial power and related global Open Door investment interests  The Roosevelt administration’s decision to adopt an official position of “neutrality” that translated into support for Spanish fascism and alliance with Stalinist Russia against popular-democratic Spanish forces during the 1930s  The Roosevelt administration’s decision to restore fascists and monarchists to power in Allied-occupied Italy during and after the great “peoples’ war for democracy” (World War II)  Harry Truman’s decision to demonstrate the mass-murderous power of nuclear weapons by dropping atomic bombs on the densely civilian-populated Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after it was already clear that Japan had been defeated and wished to surrender  Truman’s decision to back fascist, landlord, and monarchical forces in the brutal suppression of popular democratic rebellion in post-WWII Greece  Truman’s decision to use the crushing of that rebellion as an opportunity to terrorize the U.S. populace into supporting a massive expansion of the burgeoning U.S. military-industrial complex in the name of countering a mythical Soviet-directed communist conspiracy  The Kennedy administration’s decision to dramatically escalate the international arms race after Kennedy campaigned on the monumentally deceptive claim that the U.S. was on the wrong side of the Soviet-American “missile gap”   The liberal Kennedy administration’s significant escalation of the monumentally illegal and immoral U.S. attack on Vietnam  The Kennedy and Johnson administrations’ support for numerous Latin-American dictatorships in the name of “progress”  The Clinton administration’s decision to enforce mass-murderous “economic sanctions” against the devastated, heavily impoverished nation of Iraq, justifying 500,000 resulting Iraq child deaths as “a price worth paying” (Madeline Albright) and deepening the hold of Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime over the overwhelmed Iraqi populace  The Clinton administration’s decision to kill thousands of innocent African civilians by bombing a pharmaceutical factory in the Sudan in loose “retaliation” for terrorist attacks on U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya  The Clinton administration’s decision to bomb Serbia to discipline a perceived challenger of U.S. global hegemony in the falsely proclaimed name of humanitarian concern for ethnic Albanians  During many of these and other imperial actions, U.S. policymakers of both parties—liberals and conservatives alike—have regularly described U.S. objectives in terms of the advance of “democracy.” But the operative U.S. definition of “democracy” is rather different from the dictionary meaning. The U.S. only recognizes a curious sort of overseas “democracy”—the kind that supports interrelated U.S. global economic and military-strategic objectives. U.S.-acknowledged “democracies” provide U.S. transnational capital with a favorable investment climate. They accept neoliberal prescriptions that forbid poor states from undertaking common-sense economic-nationalist measures required for them to develop rapidly and independently on the model of the richer states. They agree to serve as neocolonial military vassals of Uncle Sam. Since few world peoples and nations are eager to accept such a curious, absurdly restricted definition of “democracy” (contemporary Iraq is another of many examples), there is a chasm between idealistic liberal (“Wilsonian”) rhetoric and authoritarian policy reality in the long and failed history of America’s effort to “make the world safe” for both “democracy” and U.S. empire at one and the same time.  The liberal Kennedy epitomized the conditional nature of U.S. “democracy” as a foreign policy objective when he remarked that while the U.S. would prefer democratic regimes abroad, it will choose “a [pro-American dictator] Trujillo” over “a [“anti-American” dictator] Castro” if those were the only choices. “It is necessary only to add,” Chomsky noted in 1991, that Kennedy’s “concept of ‘a Castro’ was very broad, extending to anyone who raises problems for the ‘rich men dwelling at peace with their habitations,’ who are to rule the world according to [Winston] Churchill’s aphorism, while enjoying the benefits of its human and material resources.”  John F. Kerry seems to have applied such reasoning to Venezuela’s popular, left-populist, and freely elected President, Hugo Chavez. In 2004, Kerry made it clear that he’d like to see the replacement of the proud left nationalist Chavez by a government that was favorably disposed to granting the U.S. privileged access to Venezuela’s oil wealth. Need we once again follow Chomsky in quoting the great liberal Prospect foreign policy hero George Kennan on the actual objectives behind the officially declared democratic and humanitarian purposes of U.S. global policy?  In Policy Planning Study 23, written for the State Department in 1948, Kennan argued, “We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth but only 6.3 percent of its population.... In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy…. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity.” To perform that task effectively, Kennan argued, “we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; we should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization.”  A few years later, the liberal Kennan embraced brutal police-state measures by U.S.-supported Latin American governments to ensure “the protection of our [that is, Latin American] raw materials” from the dangerous notion “that the government has direct responsibility for the welfare of the people.” Such thinking probably informed the Clintonites’ decision to make Columbia, one of the world’s bloodiest states, into the top recipient of U.S. military aid in 1999.  We might also note liberal statesperson Dean Acheson’s comments in 1963 when he told the American Society of International Law that there wereno legal issues that constricted U.S. behavior when U.S. “power, position, and prestige” were at stake. “Contempt for international law and institutions,” Chomsky notes, was hardly invented by the Bushcons, who have been criticized by Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeline Albright for being so recklessly open about U.S. longstanding and (for Albright) legitimate principle of acting “multilaterally” when it “can” and “unilaterally when” it feels it “must.”  Empire, Democracy, and Inequality  I n a recent left critique of liberal imperialist George Packer’s book The Fight is For Democracy (2003), Edward S. Herman notes the ironic curiosity of domestically half-progressive liberals thinking that the arch-plutocratic United States (“the best democracy that money can [and did] buy”) possesses democratic freedom to export in the first place. “Maybe the liberals,” Herman writes, “ought to be working full-time to get a working democracy here before pushing for spreading it elsewhere.” Indeed.  The further irony is that the U.S. empire in all its guises and under the direction of both neoliberals and neoconservatives, undermines democracy at home, making the American Prospect look more than a little self-defeating in bemoaning the decline of U.S. imperial power. But then, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the Prospect ’s real purpose is a little less than consistently progressive. There are reasons to agree with its critique of Bush’s recklessness and the real danger the current White House poses to the security of people in the U.S. At the same time, serious leftists need to think about empire in its full, many-sided complexity, including economic and neoliberal aspects. They must also avoid the trap of seeming to seek little more than the replacement of one wing of the imperial corporate-polyarchic party duopoly (the Democrats) with the other wing (the Republicans) atop the interrelated pyramids of empire and inequality. Paul Street is a writer and researcher in Chicago, Illinois. His most recent book is Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, Colorado: Paradigm Publishers, 2004).

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