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A rebellion against racism

April 27th, 2012

From: http://socialistworker.org/2012/04/27/rebellion-against-racism

by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

This month marks the 20th anniversary of one of the fiercest urban uprisings in U.S. history–the Los Angeles Rebellion. At the time, politicians and the media focused on the property damage that took place. They did their best to discredit the uprising as “wanton destruction” and “mob brutality” carried out by “criminals” and “gangs.”

But in reality, the LA Rebellion expressed in the most decisive terms the raging, accumulated bitterness caused by racism and class inequality. For everyone interested in social justice, it should be remembered as an inspiring example of working-class people refusing to be treated like animals–an upheaval in which, as left-wing writer Mike Davis put it, “a generation found that it can fight back.”

In this article that originally ran in the April 26, 2001, issue of Socialist Worker, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor looked back at the lesson for LA Rebellion.

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THE LA Rebellion was sparked by the unbelievable acquittal–by an all-white jury–of four white cops who had viciously beaten Rodney King, an unemployed, Black construction worker. There was no question of the cops’ guilt. An onlooker had captured the entire beating on videotape, which was replayed on televisions around the country.

The Rodney King case highlighted a simple fact: There’s no justice for Blacks in the U.S. Outrage swept across the country. No city was too big or too small to have organized protests on campuses and at city halls.

But the center of the upheaval was in South Central Los Angeles. LA had been particularly hard hit by the recession that began strangling the U.S. economy in 1990–a slump that became the longest economic downturn since the Second World War.

Black LA was especially hard hit, with unemployment for young Blacks jumping to 45 percent. Wrenching poverty, combined with corrupt police and an openly racist criminal justice system, created not only desperation, but intense anger.

This explains the most remarkable aspect of the LA Rebellion–that it involved not only Blacks, but also young Latinos, whites and Asians. As LA’s African American Mayor Tom Bradley said, “Most of the people who were engaged in the violence were young whites.”

Of the first 5,000 people arrested by police, 52 percent were Latino, 10 percent were white and 38 percent were African American. Poll after poll showed the simmering discontent of both Blacks and whites in the wake of the King verdict.

A poll taken by USA Today showed that 100 percent of Blacks and 86 percent of whites thought that the verdict was wrong. Another poll found that 90 percent of Blacks and 63 percent of whites said that the King case was evidence of widespread racism in U.S. society.

The multiracial character of the uprising pointed to deepening class inequality. At the time, a record 24.5 million Americans received food stamps–with unemployment reaching 7 percent just before the riots. Studies revealed that family income had fallen 13 percent between 1973 and 1991.

But as conditions for the working class as a whole worsened, a social catastrophe was unfolding in Black America. One-third of Blacks–compared to 10 percent of whites–lived below the poverty line. Latinos faced only slightly lower rates of poverty at 26 percent.

Unemployment for Blacks jumped above 13 percent–and in the inner cities, it ranged from 34 percent to 50 percent.

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UNLIKE THE urban rebellions of the 1960s, which occurred after more than a decade of civil rights mobilizations, the LA riots came after a period of decline for the left. This helps explain the immaturity of the rebellion, illustrated by its spontaneous explosion and just as rapid decline–and its negative aspects, such as attacks on Korean shop owners.

The media portrayed looting that focused on Korean-owned stores as a virtual pogrom. But the reasons behind these attacks were more complicated. For many Blacks living in South Central, the shop owners–who often charged inflated prices and treated Blacks unfairly–became a focus for their bitterness.

Tensions between Blacks and Koreans had come to a head a year before, when a shop owner shot and killed a 15-year-old Black girl in a fight over a bottle of orange juice. He was let off with a $500 fine and community service.

But while this explains the anger behind them, the attacks were still misdirected. Koreans may have been seen as “the middleman community between people in the ghetto–Black and Mexican–and big capital,” as Davis put it. But they weren’t responsible for racism and police brutality. In fact, a segment of the Korean community supported the rebellion.

The targeting of Korean shop owners was a backward aspect of the LA Rebellion–and in sharp contrast to the multiracial, class nature that characterized it.

In many ways, the riots also underscored the deepening class divisions within Black America. The election of a Black mayor had done absolutely nothing to improve the conditions faced by poor African Americans in LA.

The same could be said of Blacks living in every major U.S. city with Black mayors, from New York to Chicago to Atlanta–life didn’t get better, and in most cases, it got worse.

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MORE THAN anything, the LA Rebellion forced the political establishment to admit that racism was a problem in U.S. society. As the Wall Street Journal put it at the time: “Race is returning to the front burner.”

And the rebellion certainly showed just how out of touch President George Bush was. Like Reagan, Bush’s political strategy had rested on denying that racism existed–while at the same time taking political race-baiting to new levels. From the racist stereotype of the “welfare queen” to the “war on drugs,” Reagan and Bush stoked bigotry for 12 long years.

Now Papa Bush, who had been riding high with 90 percent approval ratings after his victory in the 1991 Gulf War, suddenly found himself in a fight for his political life as the economy crumbled.

The Democratic presidential nominee, Bill Clinton, used the rebellion–with the help of local Black politicians like U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters–to attack Bush and shore up his own campaign. Waters personally escorted Clinton through South Central LA as a campaign stop.

There, Clinton capitalized on hatred of Bush–at the same time as he attacked people who looted stores “because they do not share our values and their children are growing up in a culture alien from ours, without family, without neighborhood and without church, without support.” The problem would be solved, Clinton declared, if the poor took more “personal responsibility.”

Black political leaders and the liberal establishment threw their weight behind Clinton–using the LA Rebellion as an example of how desperate things had become under Bush, but accepting Clinton’s rhetoric about “personal responsibility.” This proved disastrous.

Under Clinton, America’s prison population exploded to unthinkable levels. Police scandals were rampant throughout the 1990s, even as Clinton showered police departments with billions of dollars with his 1995 crime bill. And, as promised, “personal responsibility” became the order of the day, with Clinton adopting a Republican plan to dismantle the welfare system.

Mainstream Black organizations organized virtually no opposition to these attacks on poor and working-class African Americans. In fact, the factors that sparked the LA rebellion 10 years ago–racism and the ever-widening gap between rich and poor–exist today.

The LA Rebellion should serve as a reminder to the parasites at the top of society that ordinary people won’t simply accept racism, police abuse and poverty. And it should be a reminder to our side of the potential for ordinary people to explode into action–behind the slogan: “No justice, no peace!”

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Is our society really democratic?

April 27th, 2012

From: http://socialistworker.org/2012/04/27/is-our-society-really-democratic

by Paul D’Amato

FOR SOCIALISTS, democracy exists only in name unless it consists of genuine popular control from below.

The American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789 were tremendous steps forward because they replaced autocratic rule with forms of representative democracy.

They were propelled by mass popular action from below, under the slogans of freedom and brotherhood. For the masses of people, these slogans reflected the desire to be rid of all economic and social inequality.

But in each case, wealthy merchants, bankers and industrialists repressed the most democratic elements of the popular movements–in order to consolidate their own class’s power.

Formal democracy–the right to vote–was established. But alongside this right went many restrictions.

In 1851, Karl Marx analyzed the French Constitution, which “guarantees liberty,” save for “exceptions mode by law.”

“For each paragraph of the constitution contains its own antithesis, its own Upper and Lower House, namely, liberty in the general phrase, abrogation of liberty in the marginal note,” Marx wrote.

In Britain, the working class had to organize mass protests in order to win complete universal male suffrage without property restrictions–and women didn’t win the right to vote in the U.S. until the 20th century.

Long after slavery was abolished, millions of Blacks in the South–and many poor whites–were denied the right to vote.

To this day, it’s possible–due to an antiquated electoral system designed to give more political weight to the slave owners–to win the presidency in the U.S. without winning the popular vote.

In fact, workers have had to fight for the extension of democracy at every step of the way against ruling classes fearful that complete universal suffrage might threaten their rule.

But universal suffrage, as it turned out, has not constituted such a grave threat to capitalism. Parliamentary democracy gives, in reality, more votes to those who have more wealth.

To use an old but appropriate cliché–money talks.

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IS MY right to free speech equal to that of Rupert Murdoch, who owns a multibillion-dollar media empire? Moreover, a large part of the state apparatus–the military and the state bureaucracy–isn’t subject to elections.

The voting population doesn’t make decisions like whether or not to go to war. Workers have no democratic say-so over the most basic economic decisions that affect their lives.

We can’t fire our boss or vote to change working conditions. Even today, every freedom granted to us is hemmed in by political and economic qualifications. In many states across the country, for example, public workers are denied the right to strike.

That’s why, in spite of our right to vote, we’re forced to engage in demonstrations and strikes that are outside the formal political process.

Parliamentary democracy–in which we choose unaccountable misrepresentatives every two, four or six years–has been fairly successful in providing the illusion of real democracy in a society where a small number of very wealthy people and the bureaucrats who serve them make all the important decisions.

But there are times when even formal democracy becomes too threatening to the powers that be–as the many military coups around the world show. As the German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg pointed out at the turn of the l9th century:

In this society, the representative institutions, democratic in form, are in content the instruments of the interests of the ruling class.

This manifests itself in a tangible fashion in the fact that as soon as democracy shows the tendency to negate its class character and become transformed into an instrument of the real interests of the population, the democratic forms are sacrificed by the bourgeoisie, and by its state representatives.

First published in the November 24, 2000, issue of Socialist Worker.

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Columnist: Paul D’Amato

Paul D’Amato is managing editor of the International Socialist Review [2] and author of The Meaning of Marxism [3], a lively and accessible introduction to the ideas of Karl Marx and the tradition he founded. Paul can be contacted at pdamato@isreview.org [4].

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Nazism, the lessons of history: The Global War on Terror, in the “Original German”

April 27th, 2012

From: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=SWA20120426&articleId=30553

by David Swanson

In 1939, Sebastian Haffner sat down and wrote a pre-history of Nazism.

Nazism had not been inevitable. It had not progressed steadily without setbacks. But it had been growing for many years, even before the name for it existed. It had been coming since the end of the Great War.

By the late 1920s, according to Haffner, “Berlin became quite an international city. Admittedly, the sinister Nazi types already lurked in the wings, as ‘we’ could not fail to notice with deep disgust. They spoke of ‘Eastern vermin’ with murder in their eyes and sneeringly of ‘Americanization.’ Whereas ‘we,’ a segment of the younger generation difficult to define but instantly and mutually recognizable, were not only friendly toward foreigners, but enthusiastic about them.”

The Stresemann Era, 1924-1929, saw Gustav Stresemann serve as Foreign Minister. He made peace with France, joined the League of Nations, won a Nobel Peace Prize, wandered the streets of Berlin unarmed and unguarded, and his signature is first at the bottom of the Kellogg-Briand Pact. Who studies him today? His spirit is far more powerful in Germany now than Hitler’s, so powerful as to go unnoticed.

But Hitler was coming. When Stresemann died in 1929, “we were seized with icy terror. . . . The era of peace was at an end. So long as Stresemann had been there, we had not quite believed it. Now we knew.”

In 1930, Heinrich Bruning became chancellor, ushering in what we would today call “bipartisan austerity” or “fiscal responsibility,” something the United States and its allies helped to impose on Germany, just as the United States and Germany now help to impose it on Greece or Spain. Bruning cut salaries, pensions, social benefits, wages, interest rates, freedom to travel, freedom of the press, and the powers of the parliament. “Yet, paradoxically, his actions were rooted in the conviction that he was defending the republic. Understandably, the republicans began to ask themselves whether there was anything left to defend.”

Haffner makes an interesting observation at this point in his reminiscences: “To my knowledge, the Bruning regime was the first essay and model of a form of government that has since been copied in many European countries: the semi-dictatorship in the name, and in defense, of democracy against fully fledged dictatorship.”

As a U.S. citizen in 2012, of course, there is nothing whatsoever familiar to me in Haffner’s description of Bruning:

“Anyone who takes the trouble to study Bruning’s rule in depth will find all those factors that make this sort of government the inevitable forerunner of the very thing it is supposed to prevent: its discouragement of its own supporters; the way it undermines its own position; its acceptance of a loss of freedom; its lack of ideological weapons against enemy propaganda; the way it surrenders the initiative; and its collapse at the final moment when the issue is reduced to a simple question of power.”

I will admit that Haffner does pull out a phrase I have heard used in our own day: “Bruning had no real following. He was ‘tolerated.’ He was the lesser evil, the strict schoolmaster who accompanied the chastisement of his pupils with the words ‘This will hurt me more than you,’ rather than a sadistic torturer.”

And this logic does strike me as oddly clear, almost like something I might have seen somewhere before without paying sufficient attention: “One supported Bruning because he seemed to be the only bulwark against Hitler. Knowing that he owed his own political life to the threat posed by Hitler, Bruning had to fight against him, but at all costs refrain from destroying him.”

But Hitler was coming. Haffner saw him coming in the face of a policeman newly militarized: “This face seemed to consist entirely of teeth. The man had literally snarled at me, baring both rows of teeth, an unusual grimace for a human being. . . . I shuddered. I had seen the face of the SS.” Two days later the Reichstag burned. The next day everything changed. Civil liberties, the rule of law, the Constitution, civilization: it all oozed away. Soon such changes would be instituted without even bothering with Reichstag-fire-like excuses.

People went along out of fear, or belief in the system, or a desire to change the Nazi Party from within, or from the value they placed in doing their work well, whatever that work might happen to be. People went along as the mythical frogs on whom we impose human behavior in the story of the boiling water. They did not understand. They did not want to understand. They did not want to consider that young people who understood might be right. They slowly began speaking the language of brutal stupidity: Einsatz (strike force), Garant (pledge), fanatisch (fanatical), Volksgenosse (racial comrade), Scholle (soil), artfremd (racially alien), Untermensch (subhuman), Heimat (Homeland).

Now, history does not actually repeat itself. It’s far too complex and unpredictable. But a few facts leap out at us today:

We are at war with the world without end for the sake of war itself.

We have given power over from the Congress to the President.

We have allowed the Supreme Court to give power over the President to financial and weapons interests.

We have developed a central corporatist and militarist communications system.

Our government operates in great secrecy, censoring and prosecuting whistleblowers.

Our military conducts criminal trials that people strain themselves not to laugh at or condemn, thereby training themselves in a new kind of behavior.

Our president claims the power to imprison, torture, or murder.

Our society has labeled a class of people “illegals” and subjected them to a secondary and abusive status.

Our police have been militarized, nationalized, and empowered to strip-search us or assault us with tasers.

A soldier was just dismissed for speaking unacceptably of the President.

Our government and large corporate partners spy on everything we say on a telephone or near a cell phone, and everything we do or type on the internet.

Our government kills people all over the world with drones and is now putting drones in our own skies.

And we’ve advanced from lying about wars to joking about the lies about the wars to not even bothering with the lies or any legal pretense whatsoever.

Have we killed as many people as Hitler did? No, not in the same manner. But by sins of both commission (Iraqis bombed and shot, for example) and omission (children starving and suffering from preventable illness, for example) of course we have. And we have the potential to quite easily kill many more.

I can still write this.

I can still post this on marginal websites unseen by the masses.

I can still say these things openly on the street.

But reporters are being preemptively detained. Peace activists’ homes are being raided. And the number two excuse I get from people for their inaction (after futility, which is always number one) is fear (which is not always high on the list — it had to be put there).

Do you use these phrases? Illegal Alien. Underclass. Stakeholders. Defense Department. Humanitarian Intervention. Homeland. Targeted Strike. Collateral Damage. Evildoers. Islamofascists. Terrorists. Muslim Extremists. Status of Forces Agreement. Iranian Threat.

If you use those phrases, are they your own?

If you hear those phrases, do you object to them? Do you protest them?

Do you ever think that when they destroyed ACORN it didn’t affect you because you weren’t a poor person and you weren’t a community organizer? Is preventing union organization all right as long as you’re not in a union? Is it OK if they lock up Muslims for free speech but legalize political bribery in the name of free speech for corporations, as long as you’re not a Muslim and your food comes from a corporation? Is it OK to profile Latinos because your ancestors got here earlier? Are we safe packing the prisons with blacks because you’re white? Can whistleblowers be put away for life as long as the President says they were secretly helping evil foreigners who want us dead?

Or does that worry you a little?

David Swanson’s books include “War Is A Lie.” He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org and works for the online activist organization http://rootsaction.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio

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Indifference to the plight of others and the cult of the self (Chris Hedges)

April 27th, 2012

The indifference to the plight of others and the cult of the self is what the corporate state seeks to instill in us.

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Warfare (Fidel Castro Ruz)

April 27th, 2012

Warfare is a means and not an end. Warfare is a tool of revolutionaries. The important thing is the revolution! The important thing is the revolutionary cause, revolutionary ideas, revolutionary objectives, revolutionary sentiments, revolutionary virtues!

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Capitalism (Fidel Castro Ruz)

April 27th, 2012

I find capitalism repugnant. It is filthy, it is gross, it is alienating… because it causes war, hypocrisy and competition.

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Socialist and democratic revolution (Fidel Castro Ruz)

April 27th, 2012

Fellow workers and peasants, this is the socialist and democratic revolution of the working people, with the working people, and for the working people. And for this revolution of the working people, by the working people, and for the working people we are prepared to give our lives.

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The New(er) World Order? Neoliberal Dragons, Eurasian Wet Dreams, and Robocop Fantasies

April 26th, 2012

From: https://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/04/26-7

by Pepe Escobar

Goldman Sachs — via economist Jim O’Neill — invented the concept of a rising new bloc on the planet: BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa). Some cynics couldn’t help calling it the “Bloody Ridiculous Investment Concept.”

Not really. Goldman now expects the BRICS countries to account for almost 40% of global gross domestic product (GDP) by 2050, and to include four of the world’s top five economies.

Soon, in fact, that acronym may have to expand to include Turkey, Indonesia, South Korea and, yes, nuclear Iran: BRIIICTSS?  Despite its well-known problems as a nation under economic siege, Iran is also motoring along as part of the N-11, yet another distilled concept.  (It stands for the next 11 emerging economies.)

“The American mantra is always the same: “American security,” whose definition is: whatever happens on the planet.  Whether in the oil-rich Persian Gulf where Washington “helps” allies Israel and Saudi Arabia because they feel threatened by Iran, or Asia where similar help is offered to a growing corps of countries that are said to feel threatened by China, it’s always in the name of U.S. security. In either case, in just about any case, that’s what trumps all else.”

The multitrillion-dollar global question remains: Is the emergence of BRICS a signal that we have truly entered a new multipolar world?

Yale’s canny historian Paul Kennedy (of “imperial overstretch” fame) is convinced that we either are about to cross or have already crossed a “historical watershed” taking us far beyond the post-Cold War unipolar world of “the sole superpower.” There are, argues Kennedy, four main reasons for that: the slow erosion of the U.S. dollar (formerly 85% of global reserves, now less than 60%), the “paralysis of the European project,” Asia rising (the end of 500 years of Western hegemony), and the decrepitude of the United Nations.

The Group of Eight (G-8) is already increasingly irrelevant. The G-20, which includes the BRICS, might, however, prove to be the real thing. But there’s much to be done to cross that watershed rather than simply be swept over it willy-nilly: the reform of the U.N. Security Council, and above all, the reform of the Bretton Woods system, especially those two crucial institutions, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.

On the other hand, willy-nilly may prove the way of the world.  After all, as emerging superstars, the BRICS have a ton of problems.  True, in only the last seven years Brazil has added 40 million people as middle-class consumers; by 2016, it will have invested another $900 billion — more than a third of its GDP — in energy and infrastructure; and it’s not as exposed as some BRICS members to the imponderables of world trade, since its exports are only 11% of GDP, even less than the U.S.

Still, the key problem remains the same: lack of good management, not to mention a swamp of corruption. Brazil’s brazen new monied class is turning out to be no less corrupt than the old, arrogant, comprador elites that used to run the country.

In India, the choice seems to be between manageable and unmanageable chaos. The corruption of the country’s political elite would make Shiva proud. Abuse of state power, nepotistic control of contracts related to infrastructure, the looting of mineral resources, real estate property scandals — they’ve got it all, even if India is not a Hindu Pakistan. Not yet anyway.

Since 1991, “reform” in India has meant only one thing: unbridled commerce and getting the state out of the economy. Not surprisingly then, nothing is being done to reform public institutions, which are a scandal in themselves. Efficient public administration? Don’t even think about it. In a nutshell, India is a chaotic economic dynamo and yet, in some sense, not even an emerging power, not to speak of a superpower.

Russia, too, is still trying to find the magic mix, including a competent state policy to exploit the country’s bounteous natural resources, extraordinary space, and impressive social talent.  It must modernize fast as, apart from Moscow and St. Petersburg, relative social backwardness prevails. Its leaders remain uneasy about neighboring China (aware that any Sino-Russian alliance would leave Russia as a distinctly junior partner).  They are distrustful of Washington, anxious over the depopulation of their eastern territories, and worried about the cultural and religious alienation of their Muslim population.

Then again the Putinator is back as president with his magic formula for modernization: a strategic German-Russian partnership that will benefit the power elite/business oligarchy, but not necessarily the majority of Russians.

Dead in the Woods

The post-World War II Bretton Woods system is now officially dead, totally illegitimate, but what are the BRICS planning to do about it?

At their summit in New Delhi in late March, they pushed for the creation of a BRICS development bank that could invest in infrastructure and provide them with back-up credit for whatever financial crises lie down the road. The BRICS know perfectly well that Washington and the European Union (EU) will never relinquish control of the IMF and the World Bank. Nonetheless, trade among these countries will reach an impressive $500 billion by 2015, mostly in their own currencies.

However, BRICS cohesion, to the extent it exists, centers mostly around shared frustration with the Masters of the Universe-style financial speculation that nearly sent the global economy off a cliff in 2008. True, the BRICS crew also has a notable convergence of policy and opinion when it comes to embattled Iran, an Arab Sprung Middle East, and Northern Africa. Still, for the moment the key problem they face is this: they don’t have an ideological or institutional alternative to neo-liberalism and the lordship of global finance.

As Vijay Prashad has noted, the Global North has done everything to prevent any serious discussion of how to reform the global financial casino. No wonder the head of the G-77 group of developing nations (now G-132, in fact), Thai ambassador Pisnau Chanvitan, has warned of “behavior that seems to indicate a desire for the dawn of a new neocolonialism.”

Meanwhile, things happen anyway, helter-skelter.  China, for instance, continues to informally advance the yuan as a globalizing, if not global, currency. It’s already trading in yuan with Russia and Australia, not to mention across Latin America and in the Middle East. Increasingly, the BRICS are betting on the yuan as their monetary alternative to a devalued U.S. dollar.

Japan is using both yen and yuan in its bilateral trade with its huge Asian neighbor. The fact is that there’s already an unacknowledged Asian free-trade zone in the making, with China, Japan, and South Korea on board.

What’s ahead, even if it includes a BRICS-bright future, will undoubtedly be very messy.  Just about anything is possible (verging on likely), from another Great Recession in the U.S. to European stagnation or even the collapse of the eurozone, to a BRICS-wide slowdown, a tempest in the currency markets, the collapse of financial institutions, and a global crash.

And talk about messy, who could forget what Dick Cheney said, while still Halliburton’s CEO, at the Institute of Petroleum in London in 1999: “The Middle East, with two-thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies.” No wonder when, as vice president, he came to power in 2001, his first order of business was to “liberate” Iraq’s oil. Of course, who doesn’t remember how that ended?

Now (different administration but same line of work), it’s an oil-embargo-cum-economic-war on Iran. The leadership in Beijing sees Washington’s whole Iran psychodrama as a regime-change plot, pure and simple, having nothing to do with nuclear weapons. Then again, the winner so far in the Iran imbroglio is China. With Iran’s banking system in crisis, and the U.S. embargo playing havoc with that country’s economy, Beijing can essentially dictate its terms for buying Iranian oil.

The Chinese are expanding Iran’s fleet of oil tankers, a deal worth more than $1 billion, and that other BRICS giant, India, is now purchasing even more Iranian oil than China. Yet Washington won’t apply its sanctions to BRICS members because these days, economically speaking, the U.S. needs them more than they need the U.S.

The World Through Chinese Eyes

Which brings us to the dragon in the room: China.

What’s the ultimate Chinese obsession? Stability, stability, stability.

The usual self-description of the system there as “socialism with Chinese characteristics” is, of course, as mythical as a gorgon. In reality, think hardcore neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics led by men who have every intention of saving global capitalism.

At the moment, China is smack in the middle of a tectonic, structural shift from an export/investment model to a services/consumer-led model. In terms of its explosive economic growth, the last decades have been almost unimaginable to most Chinese (and the rest of the world), but according to the Financial Times, they have also left the country’s richest 1% controlling 40%-60% of total household wealth. How to find a way to overcome such staggering collateral damage? How to make a system with tremendous inbuilt problems function for 1.3 billion people?

Enter “stability-mania.” Back in 2007, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao was warning that the Chinese economy could become “unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated, and unsustainable.” These were the famous “Four Uns.”

Today, the collective leadership, including the next Prime Minister, Li Leqiang, has gone a nervous step further, purging “unstable” from the Party’s lexicon.  For all practical purposes, the next phase in the country’s development is already upon us.

It will be quite something to watch in the years to come.

How will the nominally “communist” princelings — the sons and daughters of top revolutionary Party leaders, all immensely wealthy, thanks, in part, to their cozy arrangements with Western corporations, plus the bribes, the alliances with gangsters, all those “concessions” to the highest bidder, and the whole Western-linked crony-capitalist oligarchy — lead China beyond the “Four Modernizations”? Especially with all that fabulous wealth to loot.

The Obama administration, expressing its own anxiety, has responded to the clear emergence of China as a power to be reckoned with via a “strategic pivot” — from its disastrous wars in the Greater Middle East to Asia.  The Pentagon likes to call this “rebalancing” (though things are anything but rebalanced or over for the U.S. in the Middle East).

Before 9/11, the Bush administration had been focused on China as its future global enemy number one.  Then 9/11 redirected it to what the Pentagon called “the arc of instability,” the oil heartlands of the planet extending from the Middle East through Central Asia.  Given Washington’s distraction, Beijing calculated that it might enjoy a window of roughly two decades in which the pressure would be largely off.  In those years, it could focus on a breakneck version of internal development, while the U.S. was squandering mountains of money on its nonsensical “Global War on Terror.”

Twelve years later, that window is being slammed shut as from India, Australia, and the Philippines to South Korea and Japan, the U.S. declares itself back in the hegemony business in Asia. Doubts that this was the new American path were dispelled by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s November 2011 manifesto in Foreign Policy magazine, none too subtly labeled “America’s Pacific Century.” (And she was talking about this century, not the last one!)

The American mantra is always the same: “American security,” whose definition is: whatever happens on the planet.  Whether in the oil-rich Persian Gulf where Washington “helps” allies Israel and Saudi Arabia because they feel threatened by Iran, or Asia where similar help is offered to a growing corps of countries that are said to feel threatened by China, it’s always in the name of U.S. security. In either case, in just about any case, that’s what trumps all else.

Translation; despite being outmaneuvered by a minority Pashtun insurgency for years, neither the Pentagon nor NATO have any intention of rebalancing out of their holdings in the Greater Middle East.

As a result, if there is a 33-year Wall of Mistrust between the U.S. and Iran, there is a new, growing Great Wall of Mistrust between the U.S. and China.  Recently, Wang Jisi, Dean of the School of International Studies at Peking University and a top Chinese strategic analyst, offered the Beijing leadership’s perspective on that “Pacific Century” in an influential paper he coauthored.

China, he and his coauthor write, now expects to be treated as a first-class power.  After all, it “successfully weathered… the 1997-98 global financial crisis,” caused, in Beijing’s eyes, by “deep deficiencies in the U.S. economy and politics. China has surpassed Japan as the world’s second largest economy and seems to be the number two in world politics, as well… Chinese leaders do not credit these successes to the United States or to the U.S.-led world order.”

The U.S., Wang adds, “is seen in China generally as a declining power over the long run… It is now a question of how many years, rather than how many decades, before China replaces the United States as the largest economy in the world… part of an emerging new structure.”  (Think: BRICS.)

In sum, as Wang and his coauthor portray it, influential Chinese see their country’s development model providing “an alternative to Western democracy and experiences for other developing countries to learn from, while many developing countries that have introduced Western values and political systems are experiencing disorder and chaos.”

Put it all in a nutshell and you have a Chinese vision of the world in which a fading U.S. still yearns for global hegemony and remains powerful enough to block emerging powers — China and the other BRICS — from their twenty-first century destiny.

Dr. Zbig’s Eurasian Wet Dream

Now, how does the U.S. political elite see that same world? Virtually no one is better qualified to handle that subject than former national security adviser, BTC pipeline facilitator, and briefly Obama ghost adviser, Dr. Zbigniew (“Zbig”) Brzezinski.  And he doesn’t hesitate to do so in his latest book, Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power.

If the Chinese have their strategic eyes on those other BRICS nations, Dr. Zbig remains stuck on the Old World, newly configured.  He is now arguing that, for the U.S. to maintain some form of global hegemony, it must bet on an “expanded West.”  That would mean strengthening the Europeans (especially in energy terms), while embracing Turkey, which he imagines as a template for new Arab democracies, and engaging Russia, politically and economically, in a “strategically sober and prudent fashion.”

So this twenty-first century world of ours is shaping up right now largely as a confrontation between the U.S./NATO and the BRICS, warts and all on every side. The danger: that somewhere down the line it turns into a Full Spectrum Confrontation.

Turkey, by the way, is no such template because, despite the Arab Spring, for the foreseeable future, there are no new Arab democracies. Still, Zbig believes that Turkey can help Europe, and so the U.S., in far more practical ways to solve certain global energy problems by facilitating its “unimpeded access across the Caspian Sea to Central Asia’s oil and gas.”

Under the present circumstances, however, this, too, remains something of a fantasy.  After all, Turkey can only become a key transit country in the great energy game on the Eurasian chessboard I’ve long labeled Pipelineistan if the Europeans get their act together.  They would have to convince the energy-rich, autocratic “republic” of Turkmenistan to ignore its powerful Russian neighbor and sell them all the natural gas they need.  And then there’s that other energy matter that looks unlikely at the moment: Washington and Brussels would have to ditch counterproductive sanctions and embargos against Iran (and the war games that go with them) and start doing serious business with that country.

Dr. Zbig nonetheless proposes the notion of a two-speed Europe as the key to future American power on the planet.  Think of it as an upbeat version of a scenario in which the present Eurozone semi-collapses.  He would maintain the leading role of the inept bureaucratic fat cats in Brussels now running the EU, and support another “Europe” (mostly the southern “Club Med” countries) outside the euro, with nominally free movement of people and goods between the two. His bet — and in this he reflects a key strand of Washington thinking — is that a two-speed Europe, a Eurasian Big Mac, still joined at the hip to America, could be a globally critical player for the rest of the twenty-first century.

And then, of course, Dr. Zbig displays all his Cold Warrior colors, extolling an American future “stability in the Far East” inspired by “the role Britain played in the nineteenth century as a stabilizer and balancer of Europe.”  We’re talking, in other words, about this century’s number one gunboat diplomat.  He graciously concedes that a “comprehensive American-Chinese global partnership” would still be possible, but only if Washington retains a significant geopolitical presence in what he still calls the “Far East” — “whether China approves or not.”

The answer will be “not.”

In a way, all of this is familiar stuff, as is much of actual Washington policy today.  In his case, it’s really a remix of his 1997 magnum opus The Grand Chessboard  in which, he once again certifies that “the huge Trans-Eurasian continent is the central arena of world affairs.” Only now reality has taught him that Eurasia can’t be conquered and America’s best shot is to try to bring Turkey and Russia into the fold.

Robocop Rules

Yet Brzezinski looks positively benign when you compare his ideas to Hillary Clinton’s recent pronouncements, including her address to the tongue-twistingly named World Affairs Council 2012 NATO Conference.  There, as the Obama administration regularly does, she highlighted “NATO’s enduring relationship with Afghanistan” and praised negotiations between the U.S. and Kabul over “a long-term strategic partnership between our two nations.”

Translation; despite being outmaneuvered by a minority Pashtun insurgency for years, neither the Pentagon nor NATO have any intention of rebalancing out of their holdings in the Greater Middle East.  Already negotiating with President Hamid Karzai’s government in Kabul for staying rights through 2024, the U.S. has every intention of holding onto three major strategic Afghan bases: Bagram, Shindand (near the Iranian border), and Kandahar (near the Pakistani border). Only the terminally naïve would believe the Pentagon capable of voluntarily abandoning such sterling outposts for the monitoring of Central Asia and strategic competitors Russia and China.

NATO, Clinton added ominously, will “expand its defense capabilities for the twenty-first century,” including the missile defense system the alliance approved at its last meeting in Lisbon in 2010.

It will be fascinating to see what the possible election of socialist François Hollande as French president might mean.  Interested in a deeper strategic partnership with the BRICS, he is committed to the end of the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency.  The question is: Would his victory throw a monkey wrench into NATO’s works, after these years under the Great Liberator of Libya, that neo-Napoleonic image-maker Nicolas Sarkozy (for whom France was just mustard in Washington’s steak tartar).

No matter what either Dr. Zbig or Hillary might think, most European countries, fed up with their black-hole adventures in Afghanistan and Libya, and with the way NATO now serves U.S. global interests, support Hollande on this. But it will still be an uphill battle. The destruction and overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi’s Libyan regime was the highpoint of the recent NATO agenda of regime change in MENA (the Middle East-Northern Africa). And NATO remains Washington’s plan B for the future, if the usual network of think tanks, endowments, funds, foundations, NGOs, and even the U.N. fail to provoke what could be described as YouTube regime change.

In a nutshell: after going to war on three continents (in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Libya), turning the Mediterranean into a virtual NATO lake, and patrolling the Arabian Sea non-stop, NATO will be, according to Hillary, riding on “a bet on America’s leadership and strength, just as we did in the twentieth century, for this century and beyond.” So 21 years after the end of the Soviet Union — NATO’s original raison d’etre — this could be the way the world ends; not with a bang, but with NATO, in whimpering mode, still fulfilling the role of perpetual global Robocop.

We’re back once again with Dr. Zbig and the idea of America as the “promoter and guarantor of unity” in the West, and as “balance and conciliator” in the East (for which it needs bases from the Persian Gulf to Japan, including those Afghan ones). And don’t forget that the Pentagon has never given up the idea of attaining Full Spectrum Dominance.

For all that military strength, however, it’s worth keeping in mind that this is distinctly a New World (and not in North America either).  Against the guns and the gunboats, the missiles and the drones, there is economic power.  Currency wars are now raging. BRICS members China and Russia have cordilleras of cash. South America is uniting fast. The Putinator has offered South Korea an oil pipeline. Iran is planning to sell all its oil and gas in a basket of currencies, none dollars. China is paying to expand its blue-water Navy and its anti-ship missile weaponry. One day, Tokyo may finally realize that, as long as it is occupied by Wall Street and the Pentagon, it will live in eternal recession. Even Australia may eventually refuse to be forced into a counterproductive trade war with China.

So this twenty-first century world of ours is shaping up right now largely as a confrontation between the U.S./NATO and the BRICS, warts and all on every side. The danger: that somewhere down the line it turns into a Full Spectrum Confrontation. Because make no mistake, unlike Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi, the BRICS will actually be able to shoot back.

© 2012 Pepe Escobar

Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for Asia Times and an analyst for the Real News Network. His latest book is Obama does Globalistan. He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

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Human Trafficking and Telling Stories

April 26th, 2012

From: http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/04/26/human-trafficking-and-telling-stories/

by Tanya Golash-Boza

I recently read Wendi Adelson’s book on human trafficking This is Our Story, and can’t get the stories out of my head. I find myself walking down the street, thinking of Ana, a 14-year old girl raped every day by her 17-year-old captor, and lying in bed thinking of Rosa, a girl forced to be a sex slave. As I think about these girls, and my reaction to the very traumatic experience of multiple, daily rapes, I wonder about the purpose of such provocative, heart-breaking stories.

In this book, Professor Adelson does a fantastic job of weaving together three stories: her story, the story of a 13-year old girl from Argentina, and the story of an 18-year old young woman from Slovakia. The stories of the two young victims of human trafficking are heart-breaking, horrendous, and full of evil men and women. The form she chooses is compelling: each protagonist writes in her diary and the book alternates between the diary entries of each.

I read their stories and wonder, “What’s next?” “What am I supposed to do now?” Am I supposed to be compelled to action to stop human trafficking? If so, who should we go after? International prostitution rings? Individual human traffickers? Should I insist on more police investigations, harsher sentences for traffickers, or more informational pamphlets in immigrant neighborhoods and airports? I am reminded of fliers I have seen in immigrant-rights agencies and in airports in Peru designed to raise awareness of human trafficking. Do we need more of those fliers? What can we do to stop such extreme suffering?

At one point in the book, the neighbors call the police because they see Rosa, a 14-year old girl, outside taking a shower with the hose. (She does this because her captors refuse her access to the shower.) The neighbors call the police as they are suspicious about the girl’s presence in the house and wonder if she ever goes to school. The police come by, but Rosa’s captors convince them that Rosa is their daughter and goes to school each day. Rosa is subsequently beaten horribly. Perhaps it would have been better if the neighbors hadn’t called the police. Or, perhaps the police should have been trained better.

As I am reading the story of Mila, a young woman from Slovakia, I wonder why she doesn’t escape. She is forced to work days in a Chinese restaurant, and then nights as an exotic dancer. In addition, she is emotionally, physically, and sexually abused by her captor. One evening, she decides to flee. She is quickly caught hundreds of miles away. Instead of being taken back to her former captors, she is forced into prostitution as punishment. Running away made her bad situation even worse.

As a social scientist, I want to know how common this sort of extreme human trafficking is. Are most prostitutes and exotic dancers forced into these professions? Are all Chinese restaurants staffed by overworked, exploited slaves?

I am also trying to tease out my own emotional reaction – my personal horror at the gruesome stories versus the social scientist in me who doesn’t want to hear yet another story about how self-sacrificing white lawyers and police officers come to the rescue of poor, helpless sex slaves. On the other hand, who else would save them?

Also, whose fault is it that these young women are trafficked? Is it the government of Argentina, who did not do its diligence to ensure that Rosa did not travel abroad as the supposed daughter of the people who would become her captors? Is it the Slovakian government who did not do its job of informing young Slovakians about the risks of responding to newspaper ads advertising work in the United States? Does the fault belong to the US government, which creates fear by handing out harsh punishments for undocumented immigrants and creating a situation where you need a highly qualified lawyer to save a young girl from trafficking and a deft human trafficker just to get in the country? Does the fault lie with the evil captors, who are just horrible people?

The social scientist in me is not ready to accept the horrible people/helpless victim/heroic savior story. I suppose, however, that this is not the purpose of the book. The purpose of the book is to raise consciousness about human trafficking. In my case, I already knew that human trafficking existed. I have seen cases of human trafficking on television crime series, and I read about child slaves and sex slaves in another book - Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the Global Economy. The stories in This is Our Story haunt me, but they don’t make it clear what the next steps are or should be.

I suppose the book might make me or others more likely to donate money to a shelter for victims of human trafficking, but I know the problem runs deeper than that. So, where does that leave me? I am not sure.

One thing I do know is that the book leaves me pondering one big question: How bad do situations have to be for us to be compelled to do something? I honestly can’t imagine anyone reading this book and thinking that this extreme form of exploitation is unacceptable. However, how bad does it have to be for us to get up in arms? The girls and young women in this book were subjected to repeated physical, emotional, and sexual abuse by various people for over a year. What if the situation were not so severe?

  • What if you knew that it was common practice for restaurants in your town to not pay undocumented workers, and that their only wages were tips?
  • What if you found out that the gardeners for a local company never paid its undocumented workers overtime?
  • What if you learned that people in your neighborhood picked up undocumented day laborers, agreed to pay them $80 a day, and then gave them $40 at the end of the day?

Would those stories compel you to action? I can assure you that the three scenarios above are likely happening on a daily basis not too far from you. The more extreme cases of human trafficking are also happening, although they are less common. What all of these scenarios share in common is that vulnerable people are made more vulnerable by laws that prevent them from realizing their dreams.

In This is Our Story, Rosa and Ana travel to the United States under false pretenses because there was no way for them to do so legally. This minor transgression opened the way for a series of other much more serious transgressions. Similarly, Mila entered on a temporary visa to work in a restaurant, also likely under false pretenses. Once her visa expired, she felt even more bound to her captors. The three scenarios with undocumented workers I explained above are also made more feasible because of laws that render people without authorization to live and work in the United States more vulnerable.

If This is Our Story compels its readers to fight to change these laws, that would be a good thing. If, instead, readers are only successful at further criminalizing human trafficking, we will not be any closer to the goal of ensuring fundamental human rights for all.

Tanya Golash-Boza is the author of: Yo Soy Negro Blackness in Peru, Immigration Nation: Raids, Detentions and Deportations in Post-9/11 America, and Due Process Denied: Detentions and Deportations in the United States.

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The Violence of Poverty

April 26th, 2012

From: http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/04/26/the-violence-of-poverty/

by Alyosha Goldstein

On April 22, 1968, the National Welfare Rights Organization held a vigil on Capitol Hill in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr., who had been murdered eighteen days earlier.  This was to have been the day that King presented the demands of the Poor People’s Campaign to Congress. At the vigil, the NWRO presented its “Proposals for a Living Memorial” to King demanding a national guaranteed annual income, a federal job creation program, and the repeal of the punitive welfare sections of the 1967 Social Security Amendments.  The NWRO framed their proposals as the first steps in establishing “the only fitting memorial to Dr. Martin Luther King — a society with liberty and justice for all.”  Speakers recalled King’s insistence on the connection between poverty in the U.S. and the cost of the U.S. imperial war in Vietnam, highlighting the entwined violence of poverty and empire.

Consistent with the escalating criminalization of the poor that the vigil aimed to underscore, all the participants were arrested.  In court, the presiding judge berated the defendants for what he perceived as their commiseration with those who rioted in DC after the news of King’s assassination.  In response to the assertion that the vigil was in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. the judge dismissively remarked “That’s what… [the rioters] said they were doing when they burned the town down.”  From the perspective of the judge, the vigil could be nothing more than a flagrant disregard for law and order and evidence of the unruly excess of the War on Poverty.

With the multivalent and resurgent (un)Occupy movements today in mind, the preempted NWRO memorial is important to evoke now for its far-reaching challenge to the state-sanctioned violence of poverty.  Welfare rights activists demanded a more substantial government effort to confront social and economic inequality than that provided by Lyndon Johnson’s antipoverty program. In opposition to policymakers and social scientists who derided welfare as shameful dependence and personal failing that rightfully made recipients suspects and legitimized oppressive state surveillance, welfare rights activists insisted on a guaranteed annual income as a fundamental social obligation and central to the purpose of the state itself.  The NRWO’s “living memorial” for King argued that the U.S. state should be compelled to provide the conditions for social well-being and the basic necessities of life — especially for poor women of color and those people rendered most vulnerable to social abandonment and exploitation.

During this same period, liberal government achieved a new synergy between militarism overseas and urban policing on the home front.  Military technologies honed in wars abroad were used to dramatically reconfigure domestic law enforcement.  The continuum of state violence and its corollaries at home and abroad targeted poor people of color to fortify the profits of the wealthy.  National “defense” should be understood less as justifying imperialist wars in Southeast Asia, claimed the NWRO, than as a means of providing guaranteed minimum annual income as a basic national responsibility.

During the twentieth century, U.S. liberal policymaking worked primarily to safeguard the capitalist world market rather than address inequality.  Indeed, poverty as a category apart from the crisis of the Great Depression was not directly the concern of the Roosevelt administration.  The administration shifted through the rubble of economic collapse in an effort to restore and secure the status quo of capitalist accumulation.  In an often-quoted passage from his 1935 State of the Union address, Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared that “The lessons of history… show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fibre.  To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.  It is inimical to the dictates of sound policy.  It is in violation of the traditions of America.”  This same attitude remained predominant nearly thirty years later.  Addressing Congress on March 16, 1964, President Johnson proclaimed that “The war on poverty is not a struggle simply to support people, to make them dependent on the generosity of others….  It is an effort to allow them to develop and use their capacities… so that they can share… in the promise of this Nation.”

Rather than accepting the pejorative terms of dependency and the ostensibly self-evident good of America’s “promise,” the NWRO and the Poor People’s Campaign launched by Martin Luther King, Jr. before his murder demanded an end to the long-standing practice of faulting the poor for the conditions of poverty.  Whereas such invectives as Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s rant against the putative “tangle of pathology” birthed by black matriarchy or Senator Russell Long’s infamous “brood mare” diatribe sought to further vilify and degrade single-motherhood, the NWRO promoted guaranteed annual income as an explicit program for the economic and social autonomy of poor women.

As spelled out in their “living memorial” and subsequent initiatives, the NWRO proposal for a guaranteed annual income was distinct from contemporaneous liberal, neoliberal, and conservative plans put forward under the same name.  John Kenneth Galbraith advocated the idea of a basic income as a necessary complement to the “affluent society.”  Milton Friedman’s scheme for a negative income tax was committed to bolstering consumer-driven market choice.  Richard Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan introduced the first version of workfare in the guise of guaranteed income. Against all these endeavors to shore up market-based commitments, the NWRO called for an end to any and all of the means-tested measures of character and compliance that underwrote Aid to Families with Dependent Children.  The current Temporary Assistance to Needy Families initiatives for “healthy-marriage promotion” and “pathways to responsible fatherhood grants,” themselves only the meager aftermath of the “end of welfare as we know it,” perpetuate and intensify such coercive state paternalism.  The NWRO “living memorial” rejected these normative scripts, instead contending that “Those who truly support the ideals for which Martin Luther King fought and died must face and act upon the underlying problems of poverty and injustice in our society.”

In their efforts to refuse liberal cooptation, reformist calls to “rebuild the American dream,” and the incorporative promise of electoral politics-as-usual (un)Occupy and other social movements today can usefully take up welfare rights activists’ insistence on the federal government’s fundamental responsibility to the poor and their resolute challenge to the state’s active complicity in the globally-interconnected violence of poverty.

Cheri Honkala’s 2011 campaign for Sheriff of Philadelphia on a “no evictions” platform is one example of the persistent legacy of the NWRO.  Honkala established the Kensington Welfare Rights Union in 1990 and helped found the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign in 1998.  Although she didn’t win the election for Sheriff last year, her run for office highlighted the role of “law enforcement” in our current era of foreclosure and homelessness.

Alyosha Goldstein is an associate professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico and author of Poverty in Common: The Politics of Community Action during the American Century.

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