Latin America’s left at the crossroads
September 15th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Income inequality rose under Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (Gallo/Getty)
William I. Robinson writes at Al Jazeera on the subject of the Pink Tide–”the ambiguous turn to the left in recent years in several Latin American countries”:
The Pink Tide governments have been “leftist” insofar as they have introduced limited wealth redistribution, restored a minimal role for the state in regulating accumulation, and administered government expansion in more inclusionary ways. When we cut through the rhetoric, however, a number of these governments – such as the Socialists in Chile, Kirchner in Argentina, and Lula in Brazil – were able to push forward capitalist globalisation with greater credibility than their orthodox neo-liberal predecessors, and, in doing so, to deradicalise dissent and demobilise social movements. What emerged was an elected progressive bloc in the region committed to mild redistributive programmes respectful of prevailing property relations and unwilling or simply unable to challenge the global capitalist order – a new, post-neo-liberal form of the national state tied to the larger institutional networks of global capitalism.
In many Pink Tide countries there has been no significant change in the unequal distribution of income or wealth, and indeed, inequality may actually be increasing. Nor has there been any shift in basic property and class relations despite changes in political blocs, despite discourse favouring the popular classes, and despite mildly reformist or social welfare measures. In Argentina, for instance, the percentage of national income going to labour (through wages) and to the unemployed and pensioners (through social welfare subsidies and pensions) dropped from 32.5 per cent in 2001, before the crisis exploded, to 26.7 per cent in 2005. In Kirchner’s own words, the aim of his policies was to reconstruct capitalism in the country, “a capitalism in which the state plays an intelligent role, regulating, controlling, and mitigating where necessary problems that the market does not solve”. Despite its social programmes, the Kirchner administration worked to demobilise and divide Argentina’s social movements.
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A Syrian
September 13th, 2011 § 2 Comments
I met a Syrian whose identity will be revealed at the time of revealing. The Syrian, who is a revolutionary and someone who knows, reassured me of the final outcome. There are two options, the Syrian said. Either the regime goes or the people go. The people say: let’s say there’s been an earthquake. Let’s say a million of us have been killed. Now let’s go out and bring down the regime.
The Syrian said the businessmen of Aleppo in recent weeks have sent their capital into Turkey. Aleppo will rise, the Syrian said.
The Syrian has suffered. The Syrian is not a child. Almost enough clues.
While we were talking the Syrian heard that another friend had been detained. A woman. A professional.
White King, Red Rubber, Black Death
September 12th, 2011 § 1 Comment
The story of King Leopold II of Belgium’s brutal colonisation of central Africa, turning it into a vast rubber-harvesting labour camp in which millions died.
What we are Forgetting to Remember: The Social Context of 9/11
September 12th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
by Mike King
September 11, 2001 is a world historic moment, a historical signpost – “9/11” – marking more than a deadly attack, but a moment that truly changed history, one that can help us understand both the past and the present. This week marks the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Of the memorials given, documentaries aired and news stories published this week, few will address the causes and effects of 9/11 in a way that gives a sense of the root causes, social context and contradictions that surround that moment and continue to define our present.
9/11 grew out of everything from Cold War contradictions to longstanding political grievances and anti-imperialism in the Muslim world. 9/11 propelled two unending wars, Afghanistan being the longest in US history, bankrupting both State finances and global moral legitimacy. Despite the killing of Osama bin Laden, and his mysterious burial at sea, and despite the fact that there have been no successful terror attacks in the US since 9/11, the US has lost the “War on Terror” in every other conceivable way. Whether in terms of lost economic hegemony or in terms Federal budget deficits (and their social effects), largely caused by the costs of wars, or in terms of a loss of geopolitical control over much of the Western hemisphere or North Africa, the US leveraged its Empire to fund a new Crusades which has them clutching to their global thrown with one hand, munitions with the other, as the other world powers and financiers wait for the right moment to pull the rug out from under them, as multiple occupations meet persistent resistance.
The Terrorism Issue that Wasn’t Discussed
September 11th, 2011 § 2 Comments
by Gareth Porter
George W. Bush and President Barack Obama visit the 9/11 memorial (Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images
In the commentary on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, the news and infotainment media have predictably framed the discussion by the question of how successful the CIA and the military have been in destroying al Qaeda. Absent from the torrent of opinion and analysis was any mention of how the U.S. military occupation of Muslim lands and wars that continue to kill Muslim civilians fuel jihadist sentiment that will keep the threat of terrorism high for many years to come.
The failure to have that discussion is not an accident. In December 2007, at a conference in Washington, D.C. on al Qaeda, former State Department Coordinator for Counterterrorism Daniel Benjamin offered a laundry list of things the United States could do to reduce the threat from al Qaeda. But he said nothing about the most important thing to be done: pledging to the Islamic world that the United States would pull its military forces out of Afghanistan and Iraq and end its warfare against those in Islamic countries resisting U.S. military presence.
During the coffee break, I asked him whether that item should have been on his list. “You’re right,” he answered. And then he added, “But we can’t do that.”
“Why not,” I asked.
“Because,” he said, “we would have to tell the families of the soldiers who have died in those wars that their loved ones died in vain.”
His explanation was obviously bogus. But in agreeing that America’s continuing wars actually increase the risk of terrorism against the United States, Benjamin was merely reflecting the conclusions that the intelligence and counter-terrorism communities had already reached.
September 11
September 11th, 2011 § 1 Comment
The following is Ken Loach’s contribution to 11’09″01 September 11 a film in which French director Alain Brigand invited leading film makers from 11 different nations to provide their own impression of the September 11 attacks in 11 minutes, 9 seconds and one frame. Loach’s contribution won the the International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI) Prize for Best Short Film.
Blowback and U.S. Policy in Somalia
September 11th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Al Shabab fighters. Farah Abdi Warsameh/AP
Somalia is hell on earth, ravaged by war, famine and lack of infrastructure — but do you know why? News coverage of its famine and ongoing violence has been devoid of context, placing blame on the brutal Islamist forces fighting for control of the country without explaining where they came from or why they’ve risen to power.
Fortunately, one of the world’s best investigative journalists, Jeremy Scahill of The Nation, has produced an exemplary report detailing how U.S. proxy wars and support of warlords has proliferated militant Islam resistance movements in Somalia.
“Blowback in Somalia” exposes the covert role of the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command in a decade worth of operations, ranging from supporting warlord-run death squads to the 2006 US-sponsored Ethiopian invasion of Somalia to scores of targeted killing operations. It also reveals how U.S. policy was central to creating and strengthening the very forces it claimed to be fighting in Somalia and elsewhere, namely al Shabab and al Qaeda. According to Scahill: “The chaos and violence of the past decade in Somalia is blowback that was utterly predictable.”
The story is long and well worth every minute it takes to read it. Find a clipping after the break and be sure to check out photojournalist Rick Rowley’s slideshow.
9/11: When truth became a casualty of war
September 11th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Al Jazeera’s Listening Post takes a look at the role of the complicit media in the post-9/11 world:
Guatemala’s September 11
September 10th, 2011 § 2 Comments
Poised to win Guatemala’s presidential elections tomorrow is right-wing former army general Otto Pérez Molina, who is accused of genocide and torture during the epoch of state terrorism in the 1980s and is unsurprisingly an alumnus of the U.S.-run School of the Americas—alma mater of various Latin American dictators, death squad leaders, and other talented persons.
Al Jazeera’s Lucia Newman recently managed to interview Pérez Molina about narcotrafficking in Guatemala without supplying any of these contextual details. In the interview, the former general surmised that 35-40 percent of Guatemalan territory is currently controlled by drug traffickers but failed to mention the drug ties of his own party.
The U.S. war on communism legitimated the elimination of over 200,000 Guatemalans via “internal conflict”. The full extent to which the new narco menace and increasing militarization of Central America will facilitate the eradication of large swaths of the area’s unnecessary human population remains to be seen, as does whether Guatemala will join the list of countries with memorable 9/11s.
Tightening the Siege
September 9th, 2011 § 1 Comment
by Amal Amireh
“We Travel Like Other People”
“Mamnou3,”* she said from behind the window. The harshness of the word was neither softened by its familiarity nor by the lazy gesture that accompanied it when she threw my application back to me.
It was eleven on a cloudless June day. I have been standing in line since 5 o’clock that morning. I was twenty-four. She looked eighteen. I ventured, “Why?”
Her laziness immediately turned into impatience. “Mamnou3!” She repeated, already looking at the next heavily stamped travel application in front of her. Then as if to end any possibility of a conversation, and my future with it, she uttered the dreaded words: “Roukh baitak!”**
There she was in my city, actually few blocks from my home, shooing me away in an Arabic accented with contempt, and deciding my life for me. Her military uniform, her gun which is never far from her, and the bureaucratic authority of an illegal occupation gave her words a finality designed to crush. Just like bulldozers.
These words were the final stamp that sealed my application—an application that I had submitted a month earlier requiring permission to travel from El Bireh in the West Bank to Boston in the United States after receiving a Fulbright scholarship via AMIDEAST. I had graduated from the English Department at Birzeit University two years earlier, despite checkpoints and closures that in my senior year alone totaled seven months. This scholarship was my only chance for graduate education.
But the gods of military occupation had decreed that summer that no one between the ages of eighteen and thirty is allowed to leave the West Bank until further notice. Of course there was no official announcement of such a decree. That would spoil the arbitrariness of it all and give the occupied the dangerous notion that they are owed any explanation at all. You just learn of it when you compare notes with other crushed souls who were told to go home.
