The Incessant Thinkers- From the Classrooms of Philippa Winkler, PhD

THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF VIOLENCE

2012-01-26T06:18:00.000-08:00

Gerald Lloyd Beeson in my POS 201 Spring 2012 class, describes the research of Lt. Colonel Dave Grossman. Here is an excerpt from Gerald's essay. The prompt asked students to consider whether humans are by nature predominantly aggressive.

" Grossman, in his book “On Killing”, documents various research in military history that shows that men do not want to kill and that it was only by modified training received after World War 2 and Vietnam that they managed to increase military killing rates. Grossman cites the battle of Gettysburg, in which 90 percent of the 27,574 rifles found on the field of battle were found loaded and not fired (location 896 of 5961) which means that the soldiers that threw them down, died or dropped them did not fire them.

It also that neither the soldiers who continued in the battle picked them up and fired them, either. Also backing this statistic was a 1986 laser study by the British Defense Operational of over one-hundred 19th and 20th century battles, which showed that the “killing effectiveness” of these units were much higher than the actual kill rates of these units in battle (location 807 of 5961). Statistics also showed that the hit rate of a 200 man regiment unit firing muskets at 75 yards was about sixty percent (location 861 of 5961) but yet the average regimental hit rate was only 1 or 2 men per minute. A regiment would hit 480 men per minute if it was firing and hitting their targets at sixty percent (location 861 of 5961). These are just three small examples of many in Lt. Col. Grossman’s book that support human nature as predominately non-violent and non-killing.

Lastly, Alexia Eastwood points out that “EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE" from studies of psychology actually suggests that “OUR INCLINATION TO SHARE AND COOPERATE ARE HARDWIRED INTO OUR GENETIC CODE” (Eastwood, Man 1). Eastwood refutes the modern day assumption of economic modeling which is based on Homo Economicus. This theory is all based on the presumption that actions of all men are, essentially, self-serving (Eastwood, Man 1). Eastwood points out that the “ NOTIONS OF POVERTY AND WEALTH” are “SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONS” and are not “UNIVERSAL”. She indicates that other societies demonstrate or represent wealth by redistribution or gift giving (Eastwood, Man 2).

As you can see, there is clearly evidence that refutes the ideology that man is essentially a ego-maniacal, self-centered, violent and nu-controllable personage that needs to be monitored by a complex political structure. Society is the way that it is because of social constructions and the political systems."

Works Cited:

Eastwood, Alexia. “Revisiting Economic Man.” Share the World’s Resources. (2010 April 16): Web. 22 Jan 2012.

Grossman, Lt. Col. Dave. On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. New York. E-rights/E-reads, 2009. Kindle edition.

CLAIMS ABOUT GLOBAL INCOME GAPS SUBJECT TO CONTROVERSY

2012-01-26T04:42:00.000-08:00

Claims about the morality of globalization, tend to revolve around the global income gap. To make your case, students should provide data (see my Guidelines).

Carolyn Cannafax wrote

'For globalization to succeed as an integrative rather than a divisive force, it cannot be formulated as a zero-sum game, or ultimately there will be no winners. Failure to instigate the necessary transformation throughout the international political economy will reformulate its governmental and corporate leaders as victims of their own malfeasance. All are subject to the same environmental degradation, social chaos and economic attrition, regardless of their economic, societal, or political positions.'

Her evidence of the zero sum game is the widening gap between rich and poor.

This 'gap' is subject to controversy. Anti globalists tend to assume there is a widening gap, whereas pro globalists want to believe the gap is narrowing.

It is not controversial that the US is experiencing a widening gap. Bloomberg.com reports the following:

"A widening gap between rich and poor is reshaping the U.S. economy, leaving it more vulnerable to recurring financial crises and less likely to generate enduring expansions.

Left unchecked, the decades-long trend toward increasing inequality may condemn Wall Street to a generation of unimpressive returns and even shake social stability, economists and financial-industry executives say. "

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-13/growing-income-divide-may-increase-u-s-vulnerability-to-financial-crises.html

China, India and other Asian countries, as well as Sub Sahara Africa have seen a widening gap. Whereas, it has been argued that the gap appears to be narrowing in other parts of the world. But as we see in Week 1, INTL 5400, units of measurement of national wealth are controversial.

Here is an interesting article focusing on the debate about income inequality:

http://ucatlas.ucsc.edu/income/debate.html

Key quotes from the article:

"The September 2004 issue of the prestigious American Journal of Sociology carries an article entitled ‘Accounting for the Recent Decline in Global Income Inequality’ (Firebaugh and Goesling 2004) arguing that global income inequality has declined in recent decades as a result of economic globalization. Firebaugh and Goesling’s main arguments revolve around rapid industrialization in the densely populated regions of China and India.

Robert Wade of the London School of Economics, a notable contributor to debates about global inequality (Wade 2004, 2001) shows that Firebaugh and Goesling’s conclusion of falling inequality is sensitive to a series of choices about measures (how incomes are compared, populations weighted, inequality measured) and data (based on national income accounts or household surveys). When alternative choices are made, global income inequality may increase rather than decline."

WAS FACEBOOK RESPONSIBLE FOR THE ARAB SPRING?

2011-12-01T01:26:00.000-08:00

Today (Dec 1, 2011) a student wrote 'I doubt the Arab Spring would’ve succeeded without the Internet and the information age.'
There has been quite a controversy about the alleged impacts of Facebook (FB) and other social media on the Arab Spring.
Before FB, there was simply email and websites. This allowed a massive anti war global protest in 2003 with 11 million organized in a few weeks, to protest the US plans to invade Iraq.
Before email and websites, there was radio and television. In 1986, massive demonstrations )"people power") led to the peaceful overthrow of a US backed dictator in the Philippines. Popular uprisings that followed included those in Thailand, South Korea, Mongolia and Indonesia. Pre-FB resistance led to the overthrow of the S African regime of Apartheid. In Latin America, dictatorships transformed into democracies, thanks to people power type protests.
Going back further in time, before WWII, there was organized resistance to British imperialism throughout the Middle East. In Iraq there were four uprisings alone. Pan Arabism, socialism and other resistance movements (which we covered early on in the class) led to coup d'etats and regime changes in many ME countries.
Social media perhaps hastens the day, ie quickens the rate at which events develop, but that is true for everything today.
But in terms of getting people out into the streets, I don't think social media has that much of an impact,
One could say that organized and mass resistance to oppression has had a history stretching over millenia, PW

INTERNALIZED OPPRESSION

2011-09-20T07:35:00.000-07:00

Lively discussion this week in my graduate Women and Health class, on Radical Feminism theory. From Amber, who critiques the theory of Radical Feminism suggesting that "violence [by women US soldier at Abu Graib) is indicative of sexual domination of the vulnerable, rather than gender warfare between men and women."
Focusing on gender only doesn't include unequal distributions of power. For example, a wealthy upper class woman has more power than a poor working class man. This idea comes under Identity Politics (in the RF lecture), and is echoed by Jeremy who wrote:
“However, what radical feminism does not appropriately take into account is the impact that racial and class identity has in society. For instance, an upper class white woman living in a suburban household in the United States may not easily relate to the gender problems that a poor Nigerian woman faces.”

Jeremy also wrote
“To be honest, I was disappointed that it was only the Abu Ghraib incident that was used to explain the female abuse over men. Not that this was not an appropriate case, but like you mentioned I thought it was a small cross section to examine. I really expected more and I thought that the "decoy" argument was weak. Instead, I would point to Amin Mallouf's book, "In the Name of Identity," for a better suggestion for female violence toward men. Instead of saying that women in power humiliate men by putting them through the same abuse that women are subjected to is not simply an example of "gender decoy," but more so the fact that all individuals hold multiple identities. Maalouf argues that people choose their primary identity as the identity that is most likely under attack. The small sample of women at Abu Ghraib are also educated Americans who saw themselves as superior and more human then the Middle Eastern men that were now under their control. I would argue that these women did not hold gender at the same level of identity as the men did and the women mocked it. Nevertheless, I think there are too many variables in the Abu Ghraib case when attempting to explain behavior.”

Identity politics describes Mallouf’s point. This was from the lecture this week “EACH WOMAN IS SOCIALLY CONSTRUCTED DIFFERENTLY, BECAUSE OF A MULTIPLICITY OF IDENTITIES (GENDER, SEXUALITY, CLASS, ETHNICITY, NATIONALITY)” (Winkler, 2011, p. 1).
RF is an over-arching theory that doesn’t allow for a contextualized analysis. As Brandon wrote ‘I agree with your idea that a total change will not be successful without taking into consideration race, economics, and class.’
By the way, including Abu Graib in the readings wasn't meant to be a sweeping statement about the US military's approach to torture, but an intriguing and unique case which appears to counter the RF philosophy. But, I worry that the small number of soldiers who were imprisoned for Abu Graib torture, were scapegoated unfairly. There was a permissive atmosphere in the era immediately after 9/11, where rules regarding torture were relaxed. The US under the Bush Administration condoned renditions, and the use of certain types of torture. Today, the Obama Administration continues renditions, which is when prisoners are flown to countries that use unlimited forms of torture. See this:
http://articles.latimes.com/2009/feb/01/nation/na-rendition1

The UK sent prisoners to be tortured by Ghaddafi’s security services in Libya…this was revealed after the rebels took over Libya.

Betul also critiques RF, pointing out that violence is committed by women against women, such as FMG. In the UK, there are continuous newspaper reports about Indian fathers and mothers who kill their daughters for falling in love with someone outside their faith. In India, for every 1000 boys, there are at least about 60-70 girls under the age of 6 years who were killed before or within 6 years after birth.
The mothers are often involved in the murders. This is explained through the idea of ‘internalized oppression.” Here is how the concept is explained from a psychological viewpoint:
“WHAT IS INTERNALIZED OPPRESSION?
We know that every hurt or mistreatment, if not discharged (healed), will create a distress pattern (some form of rigid, destructive, or ineffective feeling and behavior) in the victim of this mistreatment. This distress pattern, when restimulated, will tend to push the victim through a re-enactment of the original distress experience either with someone else in the victim role or, when this is not possible, with the original victim being the object of her/his distress pattern.

Source: http://www.rc.org/publications/journals/black_reemergence/br2/br2_5_sl.html

I like the term ‘internalized censorship”. This explains why a mother would kill or mistreat her daughter, by the fact that social messages are internalized such that they bypass all human instincts of compassion, and even, basic mothering instincts.
Or, this phenomena could be explained by the fact that the mothers themselves could be victims if they did not kill their own daughters. In which case, they have chosen their own lives over those of their daughters…somehow, for me, a less likely explanation.
Betul then writes “The main difference is that women as a whole are more compassionate and less likely to commit atrocities such as torture, terrorism, and genocide that patriarchal societies have carried out in previous decades.” Most feminists believe that a kinder society results from a full participation by women at all levels. It is believed that individual women in a male-centric environment would have no choice but to adopt its dominant values.
Finally, Bridgett makes a great point, which is also a critique of RF “Violence against men is also an important topic that must not be overlooked”.
RF theory has not proved to be sustainable, by many students. But most did not comment on the amazing Umoja, the village where men are forbidden, in which a temporary woman-only solution seems to be working.

ELITES AS PSYCHOPATHS

2011-09-03T00:04:00.000-07:00

Readers of my book based on my PhD thesis (SANCTIONS ON IRAQ: FEMINIST ACTIVISM VS.PATRIARCHAL POLICY 1990-2003: A political-psychological analysis, 2010) will recall its principal thesis: that male elites suffer from cognitive dissonance. This is a form of psychosis identified by the organizational management consultant Chris Argyris. Essentially, it says that those in power adhere publicly to a set of morals but in practice, violate them. It's something we all do to an extent. For example, I might say I believe that animals should be not be killed inhumanely, but in practice, I don't change my eating habits.
So it was interesting to read of a study wherein it was found that one in 25 bosses 'is a psychopath' but hides it with charm and business-speak. This is from a Daily Mail article, by Duncan MacPherson, that appeared September 2, 2011.

"New York psychologist Paul Babiak has discovered how many psychopaths had infiltrated major firms.

'We have identified individuals that might be labelled "the successful psychopath".

'Part of the problem is that the very things we're looking for in our leaders, the psychopath can easily mimic.

'Their natural tendency is to be charming. Take that charm and couch it in the right business language and it sounds like charismatic leadership.'

Dr Babiak designed a 111-point questionnaire with the University of British Columbia's Prof Bob Hare - the world's pre-eminent expert in psychopathy and a regular adviser to the FBI - to determine how many industry bosses were psychopaths.

They found that nearly four per cent of bosses fitted the profile, compared with one per cent among the general population.
Workplace bosses, who are four times more likely to be psychopathic than the general population, climb the career ladder by charming their superiors

Workplace bosses, who are four times more likely to be psychopathic than the general population, climb the career ladder by charming their superiors

Dr Babiak said: 'These were all individuals who were at the top of an organisation - vice-presidents, directors, CEOs - so it was actually quite a shock.'

The results revealed that psychopaths were actually poor managerial performers but were adept at climbing the corporate ladder because they could cover up their weaknesses by subtly charming superiors and subordinates.

This, said Dr Babiak, makes it almost impossible to distinguish between a genuinely talented team leader and a psychopath."

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2032912/One-25-bosses-psychopath-hides-charm-business-speak.html#ixzz1Ws5ReWxN

US DEBT AND THE BALANCE OF POWER

2011-08-01T07:45:00.001-07:00

The US military is the most powerful in the world, which gives it a hegemonic position. However, US is the world's largest debtor nation. This won't matter much (despite what the politicians say) if the debts aren't called in. A surprising array of countries could call in their Treasury Bonds, including a number of Less Developed Countries such as the Philippines, Brazil and Mexico. Third largest US Bond holder is a conglomeration of 'oil exporters' ( Oil exporters include Ecuador, Venezuela, Indonesia, Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar,Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Algeria, Gabon, Libya, and Nigeria.)
See this list:
http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/tic/Documents/mfh.txt.

Adrienne Reid (student, INTL 5400, Summer 2011) wondered why Greece's national sovereignty is at risk due to its debt, but not the US'. She writes that Greece has no competitive advantage. But the US has: its vast military expenditure, financed by taxpayers. She writes:

'The other major difference that distinguishes the U.S. from Greece, is that US debt is denominated by its own currency, over which it has sovereign control...The government holds within its ability to create money at will, to cover debt...When Greece replaced it national currency with the euro, the basis of its economic sovereignty was forfeited.'

I suppose the Federal Reserve, which is not a government institution, could deny the US government a request to print money. And, possibly, the US could one day face a fire sale.

In June 2011, Greece put €50bn of national assets on sale in hotel ballroom but private equity firms were not interested. But China, Japan etc will be very interested in any nationally owned US real estate up for sale. US national sovereignty will be also impaired by massive budget cutbacks curtailing military spending.

Feminist International Relations theorists sum up the changing balance of power of states, as a non issue. The King is dead, long live the King. In other words, a new type of hegemony composed of mainly male elites, will emerge. How enlightened it will be, remains to be seen.

WHAT HAPPENS TO PETRODOLLARS?

2011-07-30T16:05:00.001-07:00

I've always found in hard to research petrodollars...they are immured in secrecy. Last week, I received a paper from student Justin Alpert, that cleared up some of the history connected with this elusive albeit crucial form of currency. Here are some excerpts from Justin's paper:

The term “petrodollar” means quite simply a dollar that has been traded for oil. The “petrodollar standard” refers to the US dollar’s historical role as the currency of choice for virtually all oil producing nations around the world... The petrodollar standard served the US well for about 25 years...No official deal to promote the petrodollar standard is known to have ever been formalized with the Organization of Oil Exporting Countries as a whole...The protection of the US military and favored access to US markets were the basic conditions offered by Washington to OPEC in return for their pledge to only accept US dollars in return for oil shipments. Larger OPEC nations like Iran (then ruled by the pro-western Shah of Iran) and Saudi Arabia were happy to oblige and the dollar became the only currency they would accept. Smaller producer states followed the lead of the larger producer states and the value of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency was saved from free fall. The added benefit of locking out the Soviets and their allies to OPEC oil reserves was also considered an important consequence of the agreement. (Gokay 2005)

In 1972, President Nixon sought to quell the possibility of a run on US gold reserves by removing the gold standard from the dollar completely. Shortly after the US floated its currency on the market, other developed nations followed suit leaving “EXCHANGE RATES TO BE GOVERNED BY RULES OF GOOD CONDUCT to STANDARDIZE CURRENCY EXCHANGE” per the IPE glossary. (Gokay 2005) While this prevented a loss to US gold reserves, it angered OPEC oil producers who were unhappy that the so many of their holdings had just been devalued. Already angry about the US rearming of Israel after the six day war, they demanded that oil be priced in relation to gold and implemented an embargo in protest.

While the resulting embargo crippled the world oil supply, the situation also presented both the US and OPEC with an opportunity. (Clark 2005) Rather than risk losing monetary credibility by creating “fiat” currency, a formal agreement was brokered between the US and Saudi Arabia (this was known as the U.S.-Saudi Arabian Joint Economic Commission and reputedly brokered by Henry Kissinger) at the end of the 1973 OPEC Oil Crisis that would give the US dollar a vital new role in the world economy and would prevent its collapse. (Gokay 2005) However, the rise of globalization, the current US deficit crisis, and the loss of the USSR and the bipolar hegemonic system turned what once was a very useful system to the US into an economic albatross. [It should be noted that Iran has opened its own oil bourse, PW, Ed]. As our IPE glossary (obtainable by emailing philippa.winkler@nau.edu) points out, “LIBERALIZATION PROGRAMS HAVE SPREAD WITH GLOBALIZATION.” This principal gave rise to the euro, which is now the chief competitor to the US petrodollar as the world’s favored petro-currency. This has created unfavorable complications for the US as oil producers and consumers no longer need to sustain American debt to procure this vital commodity. However, even oil producing nations not aligned with the cartel tend to follow the petrodollar standard, e.g. Brazil, Mexico, Post-Soviet Russia, and the US of course(Johnson 2008)...

The question at hand is whether the US can sustain the petrodollar standard in a liberalized economic climate and if so, would it be worth it to anyone else? To put it another way, the question in the 1970’s was how many barrels of oil could a dollar buy? Today, the question is rapidly becoming how many dollars can a barrel of oil buy?

Clark, William R. Petrodollar Warfare: Oil, Iraq and the Future of the Dollar. Gabriola Island, B.C.: New Society, 2005

Gokay, Bulent. "The Beginning of the End of the Petrodollar: What Connects Iraq to Iran." Alternatives - Turkish Journal of International Relations Winter 4.4 (2005). Print.

STRUCTURAL ADJUSTMENT LOANS NOW FOR ADVANCED COUNTRIES

2011-06-29T10:25:00.001-07:00

Updated 7/17/2011

Have you heard of the saying...'first they came for the Jews, then the Catholics, then the gays...and finally they came for me?"

No longer are SALs confined to lesser developed countries. Today, after the 2007-8 economic crisis, we are seeing quite advanced countries such as Iceland, Greece and Ireland, in line for the same treatment: loans with conditions.

See this from the IMF:

IMF Approves €30 Bln Loan for Greece on Fast Track

May 9, 2010
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/survey/so/2010/new050910a.htm

IMF and EU loans come with conditions: the cutting of social benefits to Greeks. We are witnessing vast protests in Athens this week due to this type of austerity measure. See this:
http://money.cnn.com/2011/06/28/news/international/greece_debt_crisis/

At this point, you might be interested in this:
http://www.myloansconsolidated.com/2011/06/26/gerald-celente-people-are-never-going-to-be-free-until-we-break-the-banks/

Say you have a mortgage, but you have fallen into financial difficulties. Your house then defaults back to the bank. This is, in a nutshell, how banks acquire physical assets. On the international stage, banks and countries that loan, can acquire physical assets if loans aren't paid back. In the future, I expect to see large chunks of US real estate being acquired by China and other countries which are in a more stable financial situation.

Greece's debt was at 127% of its GNP when it decided to take out more loans. The US' debt is at roughly 90% of its GNP. The so-called solutions are a) to pile on more debt to pay for the interest on the old debt; b) 'austerity' measures for the masses; and c) buying up the debtor country's physical assets.

I liked how Robert explained the blame game, as countries fail to repay their debt:

'It's remarkable that IOs like the IMF and WorldBank continue to champion SAPs as the vehicles for economic growth, given the obvious failures since the 1980s. Ha-Joon Chang's summarized the typical attitude of the IMF/WorldBank in his lecture. He talked about how, when SAPs were producing bad results early on, people kept saying, "we just need more time." Over time, when the programs still failed to produce positive results, they said its because countries did not abide by recommendations. Then, if a country did follow the recipe but the policies were unsuccessful, IMF/WorldBank folks would say the country's government was corrupt, that their culture is incompatible with the programs, or that the country suffered from bad geography. How long does it take before someone can step back and admit that the policies might just be wrong?'
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How did LDCs get into this position in the first place? The causes can be traced back to European colonization of pre capitalist countries from the 15th century to the 19th century. The colonization disrupted and virtually ended, pre-capitalist economies which were largely based on subsistence agriculture. A capitalist economic model was imposed on these militarily weaker societies by the French, British, Germans, Japanese. These countries then became the resource basket for the wealthy. For example, Congo's agricultural crops were decimated to make way for the rubber industry.

Independence came after WWII, but it could be called an imperfect de-colonization. So while LDCs achieved a formal separation from imperialist powers, financial structures were set up to retain their dependency.

That's how the core dependency theory explains the situation. A class analysis does a better job to explain why the working masses will bear the brunt of a state's debt, whether it's a LDC or a powerful state like the US.

Technological Innovation and Capitalism

2011-06-23T14:48:00.001-07:00

This week in INTL 5400, you discussed the differences between comparative and competitive advantage. Briefly, comparative advantage belongs to the liberalism school of thought. It promotes free trade, product specialization and cheap prices. Competitive advantage belongs to the realist school of thought, which promotes protectionism and government intervention that increases national security. As some of you noted, Japan’s economy reflects aspects of both theories. Most countries tend to blend aspects of both theories.

Both theories operate within the paradigm of capitalism, which promotes the private acquisition of capital, mass production and consumption, and intense use of technology. This is the modernist approach.

By now, you’ve understood that ‘political economy’ is the study of the political distribution of power as expressed through the economy. This has raised philosophical issues about who controls what resource, and who benefits from that control. In fact, there is a bachelor’s degree in the UK called Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE).

The question has become, in this day and age of protests against food prices and unemployment, is capitalism the most efficacious way of a) distributing resources, and b) promoting advancements in technology that improve our quality of life?

In Week 7, you will be studying these protests and how they are linked to economies that rely on food imports. In Week 8, we will look at the issue of global water.

Technological innovations are usually believed to be an outcome of capitalism. The idea is to produce advanced machines that lower labor costs, make cheaper widgets which then sell on a massive scale.

Historically we know that other economic models spur innovation. For example:the Romans focused on engineering, the Islamic Renaissance from 900 to 1200 CE, gave us much of our modern medicine and mathematics. The European Middle Ages spurred advancements in building construction.

Technological innovations also arise from:
1) Creativity combined with altruism. For example, the alternative energy industry in the US has been innovating for decades, but with very little promise of profit. It has to contend with the power of the oil lobbies, and lack of US government support. We will learn in Wk 5 that China’s government is financing research and development in this field.
2) Necessity is the Mother of Invention. Here we can look at prehistory: the success of agriculture is largely due to inventions by what have been mis-named ‘primitive’ societies.
3) Military Matters. Here is where you see protectionism at work. Most governments pour money into military research and development, which have benefits for civilian society. For example: the Internet. Marilyn Waring, as you know, critiques the ‘benefits’of weapons.

ARE POPULATION GROWTH RATES TO BLAME FOR GLOBAL POVERTY?

2011-04-27T12:33:00.001-07:00

UPDATED OCTOBER 30, 2011

First of all, what are global population rates? Scary stories abound...usually headlined The Population Bomb. We are overpopulating the planet, apparently. But is that true?

A hidden revolution is going on around the world, and it's down to women being educated and controlling how many children they have. UN statistics say that the average woman today has 2.5 children. In Iran it's about 1.8. In India, it's 2.8. In Brazil it's 2.2. Also, see this: http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110511/full/473125a.html.

The global population could very well go into reverse by the middle of the 21st century. That means, a glut of older people and not enough young people.

The UN Population Division in 2002, predicted a population decline, and many countries are not replacing their populations. See: http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/wpp2002/WPP2002-HIGHLIGHTSrev1.PDF.

It remains to be seen if poverty will be reduced along with the global population, as it is currently believed.

What we do know is that there is over consumption by advanced countries.

“The richest 20 percent of humanity consumes 86% of all goods and services, while the poorest fifth consumes just 1.3 percent.” (Shah, Global Issues, 2011).

“The population of the U.S. tripled during the 20th century, but the U.S. consumption of raw materials increased 17-fold”.1 (Factoids, 2011).

Today we are in a period called ‘neo-colonialism” which refers to the institutional ways that the rich nations impose unequal economic relations on the former colonies. This is done through loans by rich countries that impose conditions that aren’t healthy for poor populations. These conditions (called STRUCTURAL ADJUSTMENT PROGRAMS or SAPs) often include the privatization of state services such as health and education, which puts them out of the reach of the poor. SAPS introduce cheap goods that undercut local production, or insist on cash crops like coffee for Western markets, rather than food stuffs to feed the population.

Western governments fail to offset over-consumption by Western nations.

Let's look at a case study: Niger.

The current population of Niger is 16,468,886 with a population growth rate of 3.643%. (CIA Fact book) The estimated life expectancy for the total population is 53.4 years with 14.11 deaths/1,000.(CIA Fact book)

Here is my question: Is a growth rate of 3.6 percent so terrible that it justifies the very high mortality rate and the extreme poverty of Niger? It's actually very similar (3.28) to the rate of the population growth of United Arab Emirates, which isn't known for its high poverty levels, and people can expect to live to 76 years of age, in the UAE.

See these statistics about population growth rates globally:
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2002rank.html?countryName=Japan&countryCode=ja®ionCode=eas&rank=215#ja

My personal belief is that a woman and her partner, should both make decisions about reproduction. Clearly, there is a reason to restrict multiple and frequent births, given the impact on women’s health, but this needs to be balanced by a study of resource availability on a global scale. Before Malthusian type policies are enacted, it would be best to that advanced countries start consuming at a more sustainable rate.

How would feminist international relations explain the military intervention in Libya, 2011?

2011-04-27T08:38:00.000-07:00

Here are the questions I would ask about the Libyan situation from a feminist IR perspective. Last update: November 6, 2011

EMPIRICISM
Feminist IR would compile as much information as possible about women’s social and economic status in Libya. It would note that its world ranking (53rd out of 190 countries approx on the Human Development Index) for gender equality was quite respectable given its traditional culture. It would note that the higher Libyan women are on the social scale, the more gender equality they have.
Feminists would also note that the women’s organizations must be formally recognized by the Libyan State. The state is often critiqued as promoting interests of patriarchy (rule of male elites over subordinated women and men). Feminists would question why non-state approved NGOs are not permitted to exist in Libya.
Feminists would ask the following questions about
• The ‘underside’ of globalization:
• Migrant women workers- domestic workers-sex trafficking- sex tourism- women garment workers
• Sex discrimination
State inflicted torture of women (and men)
• Foreign and national policymakers: are they mainly elite men; is there political representation of women?
• They would want to know the impacts on women and children of the long UN and US blockades (1992-2005) that Libya has been under. It is known that sanctions impact women and children more than male elites. Half a million Iraqi children died from the UN sanctions imposed 1990 to 2003. They might say that Libyan women are under dual oppression by competing patriarchies: by male elites internationally (the UNSC) AND by national male elites, as well as in the home.

Feminists might note what a former female CIA analyst wrote in July 2011: "Gadhaffi’s got no ties to terrorism. Way back in 1995, Gadhaffi became the first leader in the world to report Osama bin Laden to Interpol. Egypt posted the first arrest warrant for Bin Laden in 1996. But Libya was the very first to warn about Bin Laden’s agenda."Susan Lindauer is a former US asset covering Libya at the United Nations during the Lockerbie negotiations (http://theintelhub.com/2011/07/10/not-so-fast-mr-president-how-obama-got-it-all-wrong-on-libya-and-how-to-fix-it/).

Feminists would check out reports that the 'rebels' are using child soldiers and that in July 2011, "Human Rights Watch condemned rebels for looting shops, homes and medical facilities in towns seized in the western mountains."

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2014236/Libya-Children-young-7-trained-fight-Gaddafi.html#ixzz1Rzp0Q34qp

ANALYTICALLY
The bifurcation of the personal and the political is an analysis that leads to such contradictory concepts as ‘bombing a country into democracy’.
So feminists would ask: is bombing Libya helping citizens or killing them? Have the rebels consulted women or women’s groups when they launched an armed attack on the government? How would women like to see change in their country, do they want peaceful change, and how could they get help from outside? Are the materials being used as explosives harmful to women’s health (for example the use of ‘depleted’ uranium)? Will women be part of peacekeeping efforts, as required by UNSC Resolution 1325? Are there women armed combatants in the government and/or rebel forces?

NORMATIVE
Women’s voices are conspicuously absent in this crisis in Libya. Yet they are end users of national and foreign policy…what are they doing to change the androcentric norm?
Feminist IR would ask the following normative questions:
1. Is the intervention a manifestation of androcentric competitive North-south, left-right politics? Libya has nationalized its oil, a model not adopted by the North. Italy, Spain and France are the principle buyers of Libyan oil; they are the principle military actors in the intervention. Libya enjoyed up until recently, good relations with NATO countries and US, and agreed to give up its nuclear weapons program. Yet it is being attacked. Will other countries not want to give up their WMD programs?
2. Is the intervention by foreign powers approved of by the ‘dictates of public conscience’? Here one would look at global opinion surveys.
3. Are there a normative double standard in operation? Why aren’t protesters in Syria, Bahrain being protected who are not engaged in armed combat as are the Libyan protesters? Why didn't the 'international community' come to the aid of Burmese monks protesting for democracy a few years ago?

SEX TRAFFICKING

2011-04-07T09:05:00.001-07:00

This week, I’ve come across a report that makes these basic points about the global sex trafficking trade: “The culture, particular mass media, is playing a large role in normalizing prostitution by portraying prostitution as glamorous or a way to quickly make a lot of money" (Hughes, Donna M, "The Demand: Where Sex Trafficking Begins",2004.)

My comment: Films like PRETTY WOMAN come to mind. Many US-made films propagate the myth of the ‘happy prostitute’. The Western media in general objectifies women’s sexuality to sell commodities to men, such as cars. Therefore we should not just blame the culture in ‘backward’ countries but also the mass media in Western countries.

Hughes' report focuses on ‘destination countries’: ‘In destination countries, strategies are devised to protect the sex industries that generate hundreds of millions of dollars per year for the state where prostitution is legal, or for organized crime groups and corrupt officials where the sex industry is illegal.” “I believe that only by going to the root causes, which are corruption and the demand in destination countries, will we end the trafficking of women and children.”

The full report is accessed at http://www.uri.edu/artsci/wms/hughes/demand_rome_june04.pdf.

SO, WHICH ARE THE ‘DESTINATION’ COUNTRIES?

The most common destinations for victims of human trafficking are Thailand, Japan, Israel, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Turkey and the US (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, “UNODC launches Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking”, 2007).

Note that the majority of these countries are supposedly the ‘advanced’ nations. What does that say about their culture? From WIKIPEDIA (see source): “Of the 45,000 to 50,000 that are brought to the U.S., 30,000 come from Asia, 10,000 from Latin America and 5,000 from other regions e.g., the former Soviet Union. The primary Asian source countries to the U.S. are China, Thailand and Vietnam. Although trafficking into the U.S. and Europe has gained a lot of attention in recent years, anti-trafficking advocates in Asia have been addressing these issues on the continent for decades (FIROZA CHIC DABBY, TRAFFICKING: CONSIDERATIONS & RECOMMENDATIONS FOR BATTERED WOMEN’S ADVOCATES, Revised September 2008, apiahf.org.)

The major sources of trafficked persons include Thailand, China, Nigeria, Albania, Bulgaria, Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine ("The Emancipation Network". Tenstudents.com. http://tenstudents.com/Source_Destination.html. Retrieved 2011-03-22.)

My solutions?

1. ERADICATE POVERTY WORLDWIDE. Only the fair distribution of wealth globally, will fund education, health and other social services for women. I know you've heard this before, but it bears repeating.

2. INCREASE RESOURCES TO COMBAT SEX TRAFFICKING. THE US SPENDS $20 PER HUMAN TRAFFICKING VICTIM BUT 350 TIMES THIS AMOUNT TO COMBAT DRUG TRAFFICKING (http://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/node/896).

3. CHANGE THE PATRIARCHAL VALUE SYSTEM WORLD-WIDE.

MY THEORIES? SOCIALIST FEMINISM explains the underside of poverty, and how women are particularly affected. RADICAL FEMINISM explains the global nature of patriarchy, the rule of male elites over women and subordinated men. COMMENTS WELCOMED.

WHAT IS NATIONAL SECURITY? NATIONAL DEFENSE AND/OR NATIONAL HEALTH?

2011-04-02T08:50:00.001-07:00

I better declare my bias. I am a naturalized American, and was raised in the world’s first national health care system, in the United Kingdom. My father was a pioneering doctor in this system which was established right after World War II. Rather than practice as a private doctor, and make pots of money, my father cared for four generations of poor families in one of London’s working class districts, and was paid as a civil servant. Here in the US, I call myself part of the ‘intellectual working class’ because I don’t have job security, employee health insurance or retirement benefits. Recently I broke my arm which meant an out of pocket cost of $5000 because I could only afford the least expensive insurance rate. I can’t afford to replace two missing ‘smile’ teeth (not a good look!) So, this is a topic dear to my heart.
Carolyn wrote “Across the United States, women are forced to forego both preventative and urgent medical and dental care due to economic considerations. “Uninsured women account for 20% of the population of women ages 18 to 64”,(Women's Health2, 2010)
It was good to hear from our military colleagues that they are receiving comprehensive health care.
Sometimes I wonder if we as Americans are being asked to choose between the world’s largest military or universal health care and education.
A student wrote
‘It is more difficult to sustain healthcare coverage in a federal system where states legislation can differ and difference of level of states’ income is so wide
Military taxes are raised federally. It makes sense when you consider that a nation has to pay for its defense, as one entity within physical borders. But, as Carolyn wrote ‘A nation's health underpins its ability to remain competitive in the global sociopolitical arena.’ So, shouldn’t health costs be raised federally too? Medicare is a federal expense.
This raises the issue of how one defines ‘national security’. Should it be about war- preparedness and fighting, or should it also be about ensuring that the population is relatively healthy?

THE US: HOME OF ELITES OR BEACON TO THE WORLD?

2011-04-01T12:39:00.000-07:00

A student wrote “The United States has been a beacon to the world on how economic freedom brings more wealth, prosperity, and opportunity to its people. “
Supporting that contention, the UN Human Index Development report for 2010 indicates that the US is rated fourth highest in development among approx. 190 countries in the ratings when averages are taken. See: http://hdr.undp.org/en/reports/.
However, when categories are broken down, another picture appears. For example:
U.S. is ranked 30th (out of approx. 190 countries) in global infant mortality (deaths of children under age 5). Infant mortality rates are used to ascertain wellbeing and prosperity of a population. Source:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/11/04/us-usa-infants-mortality-idUSTRE5A30PM20091104
Given that the US’ GNP is one of the highest in the world, this indicates a pyramid structure of wealth which flattens out when you take averages.
In terms of poverty levels by race, the US Census Bureau in 2008 came up with the following:
http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2011/tables/11s0714.pdf
Table 714 shows that Hispanics and African Americans have higher poverty levels than Whites, with such estimates staying steady over the last 30 years.
Approximately 43.6 (14.3%) million Americans were living in poverty in 2009, up from 39.8 million (13.2%) in 2008 ( "Poverty rate hits 15-year high",Reuters. September 17, 2010).
In terms of the distribution of income, the US ranks one of the lowest in the advanced industrialized countries. The CIA reports that the US ranks 45th in 2008 (dropping from 40th in 1997). Source: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2172.html. For comparison, income distribution in Rwanda was 46.8 in 2000. Indonesia was 37th in 2009. Denmark was ranked 29th in 2007.
Today, according to one 2007 estimate, the richest 1 percent in the US account for 24 percent of the nation's income (http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/saez-UStopincomes-2007.pdf).
This indicates an elite in operation. I think you see this best in Congress. There are no less than 261 millionaires in Congress, that’s about half. See this: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20023147-503544.html.

Ratings, data compilation and statistics can be tricky. Sometimes, sources contradict one another. According to the CIA Factbook, the US enjoys 99 percent literacy:
United States
definition: age 15 and over can read and write
total population: 99%
male: 99%
female: 99% (2003 est.)

But contradicting this, the NAAL (National Assessment of Adult Literacy) administered tests which revealed in 2008 that an estimated 14% of US residents would have extreme difficulty with reading and written comprehension (http://www.caliteracy.org/rates/). It’s not clear whether which of those tested were born in a country other than the US.

To overcome this type of discrepancy, students, academics and statisticians look for a range of estimates.

LETTTER FROM HAITI

2011-02-22T06:45:00.000-08:00

by Katie Curran

Ms Curran is in Haiti to train young film-makers.

I wanted to say hi and also let you know more about the situation here in Haiti, at least from my perspective. It’s pretty bad. Actually, it’s horrific, in many ways. I am very grateful to be able to focus on working with the kids here (I call them kids but most are in their 20s) five days a week – they’re fun, smart, very talented, and I hope they can really push for independent media here, which I think is of utmost importance, for Haitians and the world.

The conditions are probably worse than you can imagine, for the majority of Haitians. It was ranked as the most impoverished country in the Western Hemisphere before the earthquake, and conditions have only worsened. 1,300,000 people were left “homeless” after the earthquake (I put that in quotes, because the shacks so many were living in qualified as homes) and there are still 1,050,000 homeless. They are in camps all over Port-au-Prince and the surrounding areas (many neighborhoods have more tents than other buildings). There are a few that are bearable (like the one that is across the street from me), but a recent human rights survey I read described the conditions as close to unlivable (and from what I’ve seen, I agree).

The sanitation is one of the worst problems – though many organizations (over 10,000 NGOs in Haiti) have tried to implement compost toilets, the efforts only scratch the surface. Toilets are overflowing to the point where people are shitting in plastic bags and with no trash services, the bags are just thrown in ravines. The water situation is obviously so bad that it led to cholera. Sanitation conditions of the entire city are absolutely deplorable. Streets are covered with trash and just flow with the water when it rains. Every single ravine is clogged with trash.

The cost of living here is higher than the U.S. People averaging a dollar a day face tuna fish packages that are $4(maybe $2 in the U.S.), $8 orange juice ($4 in the U.S.), $5 for a box of $2 American cereal. A room for rent in a clean house is about $500 a month. I have NO idea how people are surviving.

The political situation is tenuous, to say the least. Protests are a regular occurrence, but they haven’t been very big lately. As you probably know, the president responsible for mass murders and torture has returned, and I didn’t find out until today that I was actually at the same event as him last night (more on that later). The state hasn’t filed any charges against him, though a few individuals have. Though Duvalier/Baby Doc was a relentless dictator, poverty is actually worse now then when he was in office, and many people are supporting him because anything seems better than what they have now – especially the younger ones that didn’t live through his reign. Aristide is supposed to come back, but I’ve heard various rumors as to whether he will, all surrounding stupid bureaucracy about his passport. Lavalas (his party) has been holding press conferences (I live in the same house as the other Haiti Reporter teachers and with other independent journalists who have been reporting on the press conferences). I’ve received very different opinions on Aristide (from rational people that have lived here a long time). The kids, except for a few, are not super interested in politics and I don’t blame them – people say that the country was just broken when Aristide came back(the second time) and spoke nothing of the economic justice he promised, as he had before the US supported coup that ousted him (as the first democratically elected president of Haiti). The kids, in general, like reporting on Haitian culture, the people who have stayed strong against the odds, and the good parts of Haiti, which I totally understand and support. (By the way, I’m writing mostly about the negative stuff because it is so overpowering, but I don’t mean to leave out the amazing things – like the incredible artistic talent, the inner strength and courage and the kindness of so many Haitians – this is, after all, the first slave rebellion that overthrew slavery and colonization). But the kids typically don’t lean towards overtly political stories (their stories, by the way, have been great so far – I’ve been blown away by what they’ve accomplished in 2 months). I think many of them see “politics” not as something that can be of regular people coming together to take control of their own lives, but as the rich, consistently corrupt men that stay at fancy hotels and take power through illegitimate elections (of which they recently had and is still being disputed) and are supported by various members of the military, state police, UN and “paramilitaries” (sometimes referred to as street gangs). Everyone, for the most part, hates the UN and police – the UN is constantly rolling around in their tanks and trucks with machine guns, often pointed directly at people, and the state police are also everywhere. The country is pretty much occupied by the UN soldiers who seem free from any state or international oversight (constantly using live ammunition at protests, etc.).

I have had some interesting insights as a foreigner, ones that I didn’t have last time I came (late spring of 2009).One of the journalists staying here has a lot of connections in the NGO and journalist world, most of which I’ve found to be pretty disgusting. A few of us went to a party at a big house of an NGO in the richest neighborhood of Port au Prince. The (terrifying) motor ride we took to get there drove us by thousands of tents, and once inside the gate EVERYONE was white (except for security) and all dressed up like they were in New York and EVERYONE worked for an NGO or media conglomerate. Then, last night, a few of us went to a“jazz festival”. I was told today that Duvalier was among the guests that included, again, all the NGO people (they all know each other), journalists and ambassadors of all the first-world countries – US, Canada, Spain, etc. It was a group of people that under any other circumstance I would be protesting their political and economic castrations, rather than mingling with them. It was disgusting. When I say NGO, I include not only people from all the different aide organizations (many of whom are paid outrageous salaries to be here) but the World Bank and Organization of American States. I met a guy last night that worked for the OAS in finance, and I said something like, “you all have got to change your economic approach -- capitalism has obviously not worked and its starving people and making everything worse”. And he said, “I totally agree. If you want to see capitalism at it’s best, come to Haiti”. I was quite amazed that he admitted that.

I have never been in a place of such economic disparity. (There are mansions here bigger than the ones on Long Island.)

One of the problems with Haiti is that organizations have either purposefully sidestepped the Haitian state with the good intentions (as obviously the state has not been trustworthy with its funds) or bypassed it out of their own interest. The results are completely disorganized and in-cohesive attempts to improve Haitian living conditions by organizations of every type working independently of each other (resembling hundreds of people trying to stop a gigantic surge of water with small and misshapen plugs) and with no coordination, and economic interests run wild (often
under the auspice of an NGO title). Some of the organizations have done a lot of good, and maybe the situation would be much worse without them, but the lack of coordination and community is a lot of wasted resources at best and contributing to the problems at worst.

The bottom line is that the underlying, root causes are not being addressed and a lack of political structure holds nothing together – I would label the biggest problems as neo-liberal capitalism/globalization, international political destabilization (to support capitalism run riot)and a lack of democracy. I’m pretty convinced that the best use of money/donations is investing in community, grassroots organizations working for political empowerment,education and economic justice, even though it’s tempting to just give money to anybody, anywhere, as that might buy them a meal. Until the political system changes, not much of anything else will change.

Freedom and Capitalism

2011-02-17T09:17:00.000-08:00

How free is the worker in capitalism? A student wrote “ The corporate domain is not the only area in which a laborer lives; the laborer leaves the workplace and may do as he or she pleases.”

True, although as some other students point out, in times of recession the worker is reluctant to walk out on a job. Karl Marx, in Das Capital,(1867) makes the point that capitalism is predicated, among other factors, on the freedom of the worker to sell his labor power. Marx says this is why capitalism could not exist in antiquity (slavery) or the Middle Ages (feudalism).

Why does he say that? In Chapter Six, he makes the following points:

1. Labor power is a commodity because it has use value and exchange value.

2. The worker must sell his labor power which he owns as a free person, to the capitalist. The worker’s labor power is the worker’s private property

. 3. The worker sells his labor power because he does not own the means of production and therefore cannot go into business himself.

4. The worker is not however free to sell the commodities that his labor power has produced

In Chapter 7, Marx makes the following points:

1. All value comes from the laboring process. In other words, trees are value-less until they are handled by laborers to have use-value (for example, a table) and exchange value (the selling price of the table in the market place).

2. The capitalist pays the laborer enough for him to subsist or survive (enough for food, clothing, shelter etc). Marx gives the example of a worker paid 3 shillings for six hours work.

3. For the capitalist to make a profit, the worker must work 12 hours at 3 shillings - six hours of which are free to the capitalist. This is why workers’ struggles revolve around hours in a working day.

Paula wrote" However, it is the right of workers, as human beings to enjoy certain alienable privileges that are also protected in collectively such as those explained by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights "ARTICLE 4. NO ONE SHALL BE HELD IN SLAVERY OR SERVITUDE; SLAVERY AND THE SLAVE TRADE SHALL BE PROHIBITED IN ALL THEIR FORMS. "

My comment: There is no doubt that capitalism arose at the same time as human rights ideologies, around the 17th century in Europe. Marx believed it’s important to distinguish workers in capitalism from slaves, although the expression ‘wage slaves’ exists. There are other articles in the UDHR and the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (which the US has ratified) that declare the right to bargain collectively.

Slaves don’t receive wages, therefore they cannot be consumers.

Consumerism is a critical function of capitalism. You need people to buy items so they can be sold at a profit. One of the causes of the US Civil War in the 19th Century was that industrialists in the North needed free labor power for industrialization profit making.

Marx makes a critical point. He says that since value comes ONLY from human labor, it must be manipulated in such as way as to create profit. Some might say, isn’t profit created by setting prices? This is my comment: If prices are raised beyond the value that labor has created, the price of the workers’ subsistence will also have to be raised. The only way to realize profit is to add hours to the working day, beyond how much it cost for the workers to subsist and return to work every day. This, again, explains the fight over the working day. The capitalist wants to add more unpaid workers’ hours beyond what it cost to keep the workers ‘alive.

While unions “FOUGHT ONE HUNDRED BLOODY YEARS TO WIN THE RIGHT TO A FORTY-HOUR WEEK,” such rights have been rolled back. “IN THE LAST TWENTY YEARS, THE PROPORTION OF EMPLOYEES WORKING FIFTY HOURS OR MORE EACH WEEK HAS JUMPED BY 50 PERCENT” (Kelly, p. 37, 2001).

What is Global Governance?

2011-02-07T13:36:00.000-08:00

There was an explosion of all kinds of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) after the end of the Cold War. Academically during the 1990s, this explosion was understood from the perspective of a new concept: global governance. Let’s unpack what that discussion has been about:

Global Governance and NGOs: Opposing viewpoints

1) Global governance is a mainstream notion developed during the 1990s. It was a response to globalization, which became truly global after the end of the Cold War. The idea is that transnational actors such as international institutions and NGOs, are called on to provide solutions to transnational problems that are global: refugees, the environment, immigration, wars. Global governance implied that the ‘free market’ solution wasn’t working, and another authority had to supply coordination, cooperation, management and altruistic projects that the ‘free market’ couldn’t offer. Academics also believed that terrorism was and popular uprisings were the result of poorly managed economies and poverty. NGOs, it was believed, would step in and start up employment and reduce poverty. I participated in many academic debates on ‘global governance’ during the mid-1990s. This debate has died down somewhat in academia, because high hopes for GG and NGO participation globally, have not been realized.

2) Conservative investigative sites were the first the sound the alarm re: the new concept of global governance. Reporters like Alex Jones said it was nice-sounding term for a behemoth, un-elected, dictatorial ‘one world government’ under the auspices of the United Nations. In this view, NGOs are the well meaning puppets of this ‘one world government’. The puppet masters are considered to be the most elite bankers and multinational corporate leaders, who want stability to ensure good conditions for profit making. I think this view has a lot of validity if we look at it from the point of view of ‘elite theory’ (that a small elite is managing our lives and want to centralize power in fewer and fewer hands). MY CRITIQUE. Conservatives like Alex Jones want to eliminate as much government intervention as possible. I believe that the only a shift of wealth from the rich to the poor, under the management of the state, can effectively make change for the better.

3) On the other hand, left wing thinkers called the proliferation of NGOs ‘the rise of civic society’. The idea was that NGOS, whether under the auspices of the UN or a state, were the spokespeople for the masses, whose voices were going unheard at the state international level. NGOs provided the framework at the UN and other interstate institutions to voice popular concerns and to raise human rights issues. This view also has some validity. I have been a NGO delegate at the UN Commission on Human Rights in 1994,1996 and 1999. I myself have initiated resolutions and surfaced human rights issues that otherwise would have gone ignored (the humanitarian impacts of UN sanctions, for example). My book in 2004, describes my experiences. I saw firsthand the hard ‘human rights’ football that states play. It goes like this: I won’t raise your human rights issues, if you don’t raise mine. So for example, Russia was afraid that the US would accuse them of human rights violations in Chechnya, so didn’t want to raise US violations of Iraqi human rights during the UN sanctions period in Iraq, 1990-2003. But ultimately, I found human rights NGO efforts were productive. MY CRITIQUE: NGOs aren’t elected, and should not take the place of genuine democratic institutions. If funded by a party to a conflict, they cannot be considered neutral.

ALTERNATIVES TO ECONOMIC GLOBALIZATION

2011-02-02T07:44:00.001-08:00

BOOK REVIEW: ALTERNATIVES TO ECONOMIC GLOBALIZATION, A BETTER WORLD IS POSSIBLE
JOHN CAVANAGH AND JERRY MANDER, EDS, 2004

The battle over the spread of global corporate control in the last two decades is ongoing. The 2008 global economic crisis seems to ‘prove’ that the bankers and corporate leaders are headed in the wrong direction: millions of unemployed, widespread pollution, and the sort of protests we saw in early 2011, in Egypt, Yemen and Tunisia.
The authors critique comparative advantage theory. “Under comparative advantage concepts, the viability of economic systems depends entirely upon whether the importing community can pay for its imports with the earned income of its exports…in practice, this neat formula rarely works. Export markets are variable, volatile, and unreliable. More than one nation is now facing a hunger crisis caused by the failure of comparative advantage theories, as export prices crash” (p 162).
What are some alternatives? Cavanagh and Mander suggest that natural resources belong to all us and to future generations, and should go under the heading of the ‘commons’.
The commons, the authors say, include earthly resources, the oceans, outer space, the moon, asteroids, as well as cultural resources, electronic broadcast waves, the internet, and the genes of human beings, animals and plants. All of this is being placed into private hands (unelected, for the most part).
These are the authors’ suggestions.
• Recognition of the Commons, as the heritage of everyone on earth
• Strengthen multilateral treaties such as the Kyoto Protocols. By the way, I don’t agree with the authors about global governance of the environment, because I am not sure how democratic this governance would be
• Install more public trust models to ensure ecological integrity. For example, wide swaths of wilderness in the US are kept by the state on behalf of the public.
• Implementing subsidiarity, which means favoring local production whenever a choice exists. Local commons should be the property of the local community. Includes protectionism of local domestic economies. For example, preventing a Walmart from undercutting local merchants, and encouraging small scale local organic agriculture and energy infrastructures.
• Ground capital and investment in the community. Profits made locally should remain local.
• Introduction of new taxes, such as the “Tobin Tax” on speculative financial transactions and ending corporate tax relief.
• Re-introduction of exchange controls, reregulation of banks and finance institutions. Increase capital gains tax and limit tax evasion tactics.

My view: This book is long on proposals for alternatives but these are never presented in great detail. Implicit in many of the proposals is advocacy for a form of political decentralization. But how does that work in real life? I felt that an imagined case study was needed. The authors could have imagined Anytown, USA, adopting the principles of the commons. Questions of how federal, state and local government might interact, could be answered hypothetically. The best part of the book describes successful alternative policies and systems already in use in communities around the world today.

THE HUMAN DEVELOPMENT REPORT 2010 and THE LEGATUM PROSPERITY INDEX - IMPROVEMENT OR NOT?

2011-01-27T08:00:00.000-08:00

A 2010 Human Development Report by the UN states that overall, life expectancy around the globe has jumped to 70 years in 2010, up from 58 in 1970.

The Human Development Index (HDI) looks at both political and economic status as indicators of development. For example, it looks at gender equality.

The HD Report shows that , in some African countries, life expectancy decreased because of AIDs and wars. Life expectancy decreased in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine. The report blames alcoholism and the stress of shifting to a market economy in the former Soviet Union. Countries that improved the most since 1970 are: China, Oman, Nepal, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Laos, Tunisia, S Korea, Algeria and Morocco. A study of one or more of these countries would be useful. Is some form of strategic trade theory being applied, I wonder?

Developed nations still rank the highest HDI, although the US has gradually been shifting downwards. For example, the US is ranked 37th in gender equality (measured by number of women in Congress, maternal health, etc). 2010 HDI Report is here: http://hdr.undp.org/en/data/trends/.

The Legatum Institute's Prosperity Index also doesn't measure prosperity by income or GDP alone. It also considers personal freedoms, safety/security,and entrepreneurship. It has ranked Egypt, scene of this month's uprising against a US-backed military dictatorship, as 89th out of 110 nations. Two countries in the Middle East are in the bottom 10: Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Around the world, millions are suffering. This is from the non profit site World Hunger:

* Every 3.6 seconds someone dies of hunger. 75% of them are children.
* There is enough food to feed every person on earth, yet 17% of us are currently malnourished or starving.
* The problem affects people of every race and on every continent.
* 1,386 people died from Hurricane Katrina, yet 24,000 people die EACH DAY from starvation or malnutrition.
* Even in the richest country in the world, the United States, over 10 million people suffer from hunger.
* More people around the world are dying of starvation than any other time in history.
* Malnutrition, as measured by stunting of growth, affects 32.5 percent of children in developing countries

Source: http://dreamer.me/world-hunger

MARX - THE 'SECRET' OF SURPLUS VALUE

2010-12-03T08:03:00.000-08:00

KARL MARX AND CAPITAL VOLUME 1

Good theory is theory that is proven to be correct in its predictions for future phenomena. Karl Marx’ DAS CAPITAL (1867) discovered the long term laws of motion of the capitalist mode of production. Here is what Karl Marx predicted in the 19th century, which has come true in the 20th and 21st century:

• Stepped up technological progress
• Accelerated increase in the productivity and intensity of labor
• Spread of capitalism through every part of the world
• Growing concentration and centralization of capital
• Transformation of the great majority of economically active people into sellers of labor power
• Declining rate of profit
• Increased rate of surplus value
• Periodically recurrent recessions
• Inevitable class struggle between Capital and Labor
• Increasingly revolutionary attempts to overthrow capitalism

(list taken from Ernest Mandel's Introduction to Capital, Vol 1, London: Penguin Classic, 1990).

While many said that Marxism had died an ignominious death after the fall of the USSR in 1992, in fact, there has been a resurgence of socialist ideals in Latin American governments today. Developing countries in most recent years, are rejecting the ideals of privatization and unfettered capitalism, because of resultant high poverty rates. Instead, countries like India are contemplating the need for more welfare state programs. Russia has returned to many of its socialist programs, after a failed experiment in complete privatization. The world may be turning towards a ‘mixed economy’, in which entrepreneurship and socialist policies share the same stage.

DAS CAPITAL Vol 1, AN OUTLINE

Most mainstream economists focus on the circulation of money. Marx starts by examining ‘the commodity’ as an elementary form of capitalist wealth. For Marx, commodity production is the basic and fundamental feature of capitalism. Everything becomes a commodity. Labor power itself is a commodity under capitalism. Capitalism is the pursuit of capital or wealth, using privately owned means of production.

Marx exposes the dual nature of the commodity, its use-value and exchange-value. He tells us that all forms of production hinge on human energy and material obtained from nature. In pre-capitalist societies, items are produced primarily for their use-value. In capitalism, they are produced primarily for their exchange value and ability to yield a profit. Thus an item must be sold at more than it cost. Marx calls this difference - between the cost and sale price of a commodity - ‘surplus value’. This surplus value is derived from labor power, i.e. the more a worker can produce, the more a capitalist can sell. The capitalist must maximize the amount of surplus value from the labor power of the worker. Volume 1 of Capital centers around this ‘secret’ of surplus value. Labor power produces new exchange value larger than the costs of labor power . This is surplus value. As a result, the capitalist must keep wages at the lowest possible minimum. Today, in the US , if the minimum wage had kept up with inflation, it would be set at $20 per hour, not $7.00 approx.

WHAT IS THE 'MIDDLE EAST'?

2010-11-02T12:05:00.001-07:00

WHAT COUNTRIES ARE SAID TO BELONG TO THE ‘MIDDLE EAST’?

There is some disagreement about which countries belong to the Middle East. Naming countries and regions is a political act, subject to controversy and dispute. So for example, the Scottish people don’t in general, adhere to the concept of the “United Kingdom”, because that infers the non-independence of Scotland. Persia is deemed to be a colonial term, and therefore this country was named Iran after the 1979 Iranian revolution. Most of the Middle East was carved into countries in the European style, after the World War I conquest of the Ottoman Empire by England, France and Russia.
For the purposes of my classes, the Middle East is composed of the following countries:
• Bahrain
• Iraq
• Iran (named as such since the Islamic revolution of 1979. It used to be called Persia)
• Israel
• Jordan
• Kuwait
• Lebanon
• Oman
• Palestinian Territories (there has never been a state called Palestine)
• Qatar
• Saudi Arabia
• Syria
• United Arab Emirates
• Yemen

• Egypt.

• The Arabian Gulf. This stretch of sea used to be called the Persian Gulf, which is deemed now to be a colonial term used by Europeans.

(Of ten, Egypt and Yemen are said to be part of Africa, but it is quite common to refer to Egypt for example, as a country in the Middle East.)

The Middle East is home to numerous ethnic groups, including Arabs, Turks, Persians, Jews, Kurds, Assyrian/Chaldean/Syriacs, Armenians, Azeris, Circassians, Greeks and Georgians.
The two principle Islamic denominations in the Middle East are the Shia and the Sunni. The split arose after Muhammed’s death over the issue of his descendants and therefore, who should properly lead the Islamic faith. The Sunni are more secular, and believe in the split between faith and politics. The Shia (principle country, Iran) believe that the state and religious leadership should be intertwined.

HOW DID THE ‘MIDDLE EAST’ GET NAMED?

It's a relatively modern term, popularized by Alfred Mahan in early 1900s, an American imperialist.

“Writing for London's National Review [in 1902], Mahan used the new term in calling for the British to strengthen their naval power in the Persian Gulf.

'As scholar Roderic Davison explains, Mahan’s Middle East "was an indeterminate area guarding a part of the sea route from Suez to Singapore.’ The new coinage played off the terms Near East and Far East,"already in use. “

Carolina Center for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Civilizations, http://www.unc.edu/mideast/where/mahan-1902.shtml

Pan Islamic Movements and Self Determination, South Asia

2010-09-27T07:37:00.000-07:00

Would you characterize a pan Islamic, Taliban-like militant group such as the Harakat ul-Mujahidin (HUM)Movement of Holy Warriors in Kashmir. as a movement towards 'self determination' and 'independence' ? Kashmir, northwest of India, has been partitioned between India and Pakistan since 1948. It is 70% Muslim. Chadda (2000) says Kashmir is divided about its allegiance, or even if it wants to govern as an integral territory: “THE KASHMIRIS THEMSELVES ARE DIVIDED ABOUT THE STATUS OF KASHMIR AND THE KIN OF RULE THEY WOULD PREFER” (Chadda, 2000, p 204) yet fundamentalist groups want to take over Kashmir entirely, and place Pakistan and Afghanistan under Sharia law.
In my INTL 5665 Fall 2010 class, I asked student Carolyn to comment. She wrote that “I concur with your contention that it would be both inappropriate and erroneous to characterize HUM as a movement towards 'self-determination' and 'independence'." She then discusses what might be characterized as a political group promoting independence. "The Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JFLK) of the greater Kashmir polity proceeds from a predominantly secular stance purporting to embrace all religions in its quest for self-determination. In contrast, HUM religious ideology strives to disseminate ... political Islam across the Line of Control not only Kashmir's secession from India and accession to Pakistan."

She compared HUM to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam LTTE which "(like the JFLK) represent a legitimate drive for self-determination in response to the pogroms carried out by the Sinhalese government. Karen Parker noted that the Tamils demonstrated all five elements essential for self-determination… [Karen Parker is an international human rights lawyer who represents the LTTE at the UN. The LTTE, defeated in 2009, is often cited as the first modern group to use suicide bombing tactics, PW].

Carolyn wrote that "HUM’s drive is towards Kashmiri unification with Pakistan and the global jihad, rather than the establishment of an autonomous state.

HUM appears to an uncanny ability to strike at the Achilles heel of the Kashmir separatist movement, gaining a foothold from which to propagate its militant Islamic agenda. Pakistan has shown a marked incongruity in its purported efforts against terrorists. Pakistan’s ambidextrous policies are typified by its “clampdown on extremist groups and freezing of terrorist assets” (global security.org) on one hand, and the training of jihadists (by the ISI arm of its military).

I believe there is a growing international consensus that there is indeed a strong element of state sponsorship."

In 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton "chastised Pakistan for not making enough effort to seize senior al-Qaeda leaders who she said were hiding in the lawless tribal region bordering Afghanistan" (Hussein, 2009). The UK Prime Minister David Cameron has accused the Pakistani government of exporting terror (Watt, 2009).

Another student pinpoints the aspirations of the Kashmiri pan- Islamists: “ In a 2000 article for the World Affairs journal, Kashmiri academic Riyaz Punjabi summarized the view of the Indian government with regard to the insurgency. He concluded that ‘Kashmir’s cultural identity is threatened by pan-Islamists seeking to create a modern-day caliphate stretching from Kashmir to Central Asia….Punjabi says the character of Kashmiri militancy has changed over the years from homegrown non-sectarian nationalism to foreign pan-Islamism…’”

It is noted that Kashmiris have a long-standing affiliation with Sufi mysticism, a more esoteric and peaceful branch of Islam.

REFERENCES: • Chadda, Maya, Building Democracy in South Asia, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Boulder, Co: Lynne Rienner Publishers Inc, 2000.

Hussein, Zaid, "Hillary Clinton says Pakistan does not really want to stop al-Qaeda" Sunday Times (UK), October 31, 2009,http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article6896956.ece

Watt, Nicolas. "Pakistan Must Not Be Allowed to Promote Export of Terror, Says David Cameron | World News | Guardian.co.uk." Latest News, Comment and Reviews from the Guardian | Guardian.co.uk. Guardian.co.uk, 28 July 2010. Web. 24 Sept. 2010. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/28/pakistan-promote-terror-david-cameron

2010-07-20T09:49:00.000-07:00

COMMENTS BY INSTRUCTOR.

DARFUR: THE OIL FACTOR

For maps of oil fields and consortia in Sudan, see:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3058/2985425706_dd06589267_o.jpg

http://www.hrw.org/reports/2003/sudan1103/images/image004.jpg

In Not on Our Watch: The Mission to End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond (2007) authors Don Cheadle and John Prendergast note that: “ Barack Obama wrote that there are three reasons why Americans should care about human suffering in Africa and anywhere else: 1) preventing and suppressing genocide is a moral imperative, Americans have made a promise and commitment to “Save Darfur”, and eradicating genocide will make Americans safer. He asks, “What does it take to make the world listen and respond?” “IT TAKES A NUMBER OF IMPORTANT TOOLS, INCLUDING DIPLOMACY, FINANCIAL RESOURCES, AND EFFECTIVE SECURITY FORCES (xiii).”

Note that President Obama didn’t name the United Nations Security Council as the deciding body. But…the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) focuses on the UNSC as the appropriate leader to conduct military humanitarian interventions.

Regarding the countervailing presence of China in the Sudan, what then has been the role of the Great Powers, and how has that affected the wars in Sudan? Tess provides historical context. Recall that the British colonial policy of ruling the north and south of Sudan under separate administrations, had exacerbated a longstanding conflict between Arab Africans in the North and Christian and Animinist Africans in the South. Sudan gained its independence in 1954. The conflict between North and South continued as a civil war until 1972. It was in the 1970s that oil was discovered in great quantities in the Sudan, mainly in the South (see maps).

Here is a brief chronology of Sudan-Great Power relations from 1972:
1974. Chevron’s Sudan Oil discovery project begins.
1979. Jafaar Nimelry, Sudan’s then head of state, breaks ties with USSR.
1979. Chevron discovers big oil reserves in Abu Jabra, south of Sudan.
1983. A second civil war begins between North and South. This time, Chevron is targeted, attacked, suspends its project in 1984, and sells off its oil concessions in 1999. Between 1983 and the peace agreement signed in January 2005, Sudan's civil war took nearly two million lives and left millions more displaced.
1999. China begins to develop oil fields abandoned by Chevron in 1983. Since then, China National Petroleum Company has become Sudan’s largest investor – at least $15 billion overall. CNPC built a pipeline from Sudan to the Red Sea, where oil is imported to China. 8% of China’s oil comes from S Sudan.
2004. A US alliance is made with “President for Life” Idriss Deby, in neighboring Chad. He is a corrupt despot. He joins the “War on Terror” and is supplied with US funds and military training. Deby launches an attack to aid Darfur militants fighting the Sudanese government.
2004. The Save Darfur Coalition was founded at the "Darfur Emergency Summit in New York City" on July 14, 2004. The Coalition began when the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and American Jewish World Service organized this event at the CUNY Graduate Center in Manhattan featuring Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize-winner Elie Wiesel (Wikipedia). The term ‘genocide’ is used to describe the civil war in the Sudan.
2004. A UN mission led by an Italian judge disputes using the term ‘genocide’. He refers to grave human rights abuses, and war crimes. Calls for a war crime trials instead.
2005. Sudan reports that it found oil in Southern Darfur, with a potential of pumping 500,000 barrels a day.
2005. Sudanese government officials say that the US put pressure on Sudan to limit its ties with China.
2005. Counter-terrorism cooperation between the United States and Sudan begins. General Salah Abdallah Gosh, the head of Sudanese intelligence is flown to the United States in 2005 in the course of this cooperation
2005. The BBC Corporation, UK, reports that a leader of the rebel movement against Khartoum, John Garang, has died. An obituary by the BBC notes the following “He studied at Grinnell College, Iowa, and later returned to the US for military training at Fort Benning, Georgia…He varied from Marxism to drawing support from Christian fundamentalists in the US.”
2006. Unhappy with his small share of oil profits, Deby of Chad creates his own oil company (SHT) and demands a 60 % share of Chevron’s profits.
2006. China appears in Chad, offers interest free loans and grants, and becomes a client of Chad’s oil industry.
2007. Chevron (Condoleeza Rice used to be on its Board) enters Chad, on its border with West Sudan (Darfur). With Exxon-Mobil, it completes a $3.7 million pipeline from Chad to the Atlantic Ocean and transits to the US.
2008. Chad continues its military support of militants fighting the Khartoum government.
2008. The International Criminal Court indicts Sudan's president on charges of genocide and war crimes . But the majority of African nations refuse to abide by the judgment, saying that it spoke to Western double standards .
2009. The Council on Foreign Relations notes ‘positive developments’:" CFR Senior Fellow John Campbell, former U.S. ambassador to Nigeria, says the new, more comprehensive approach to Sudan is 'a positive development,' and disagrees with critics of the policy who argue that it offers engagement without requiring that the Sudanese government meet existing benchmarks. '[T]he first law of diplomacy is that you talk to people," Campbell says. "You have to talk to people, and you have to talk to people all the time. And so I think that engagement at this stage is the way to go.'
Campbell also notes the changes in the nature of the violence in Darfur of late. 'It looks much more like low-intensity warfare with a heavy dose of criminal activity," he says. "This is somewhat different from the more blatant state-sponsored terrorism that was going on more than a year ago.' Still, he says, the United States should look for signs that Khartoum is working to extricate itself from the continuing violence there, especially by cooperating with UN and African Union peacekeeping forces.
The new policy offers the Sudanese government, which 'has willy-nilly become a pariah state,' a new opportunity to reform its standing in the world 'by living up to agreements to which it has already been a party,' Campbell says.” The US has accepted the election of Bashar and sent a junior aid to his inauguration in May 2010. This appears to undermine the argument that humanitarian disasters don’t happen under an elected government. The US appears to be supporting independence in the South, with a referendum coming up this January. At least 80 per cent and perhaps as much as 95 per cent of the region's known oil reserves are in the South,where the population is expected to vote for independence. Where would that leave China’s relationship with Khartoum? In 2007 the Chinese government stopped blocking UN Security Council resolutions calling for the deployment of peacekeepers in Darfur. China has said it would support the will of the people in the South. However, a North-South split could produce more bloodshed. The North is expected to resist such a split.
My understanding is that the US was, and maybe still is, sending financial aid to support the implementation of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) signed on January 9, 2005, by the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) and the Government of Sudan (GOS). In my mind, this means that the US is funding the GOS, but I could be wrong and I don’t have hard figures. See a US government report: http://www.usaid.gov/locations/sub-saharan_africa/countries/sudan/docs/sudan_strategy.pdf.
Accusations have appeared on the Internet that the US is funding a covert war against the Sudanese government for example: http://www.allthingspass.com/uploads/pdf-264THE%20WINTER%20OF%20BASHIRS%20DISCONTENT.pdf.

PS to Stephan: I promised you actual figures of US funds going to the Bashir government. Funds have gone to the Peace agreement, as cited above, but I couldn’t find hard figures.
NATION BUILDING AND R2P. WHAT ARE THE DIFFERENCES?
Some students focused on nation building in this course. A distinction needs to be made between the concepts of nation building and R2P type interventions. Conceptually, they are different. This course looks at R2P, with nation building as possible context, but not always.
How does one make a conceptual link between American operations to aid the development of democratic institutions, and humanitarian disasters? If you have chosen this theme in your final paper, cite examples of how the two work together – or not.
Do you believe, for example, that humanitarian disasters don't happen in democracies? This brings up the question of the difference between poverty and a humanitarian disaster. It's a fine line, which we tackle in Week 8. For example, India suffers from widespread poverty, and yet it is a democracy. Rwanda is a democracy now, but still suffers enormously from the 90s humanitarian disaster. Nation building may follow a UN war and sanctions, which in themselves cause humanitarian disasters. Half of million Iraqi children died as a result of UN sanctions, according to UNICEF, from 1990 to 2003.
By the way, I've joined an excellent organization, called Women to Women, and will be helping a woman in Rwanda, to get on her feet. It’s only $30 a month, and I highly recommend it.
Stephen Baran had several comments that introduced new ideas into the course. He wrote
‘The African Union needs to be empowered to act much more efficiently, effectively, and credibly; they do not currently. They require training, resources, and guidance beyond what they currently possess. I don't think the global PR campaign is what it could be either; there is power in information which could be better leveraged.’ It’s true that the ICISS downplays the role of regional organizations in implementing 2P, and emphasizes the leadership role of the UNSC.
Stefan wrote that “Indeed, perversity seems to be the refuge of those who choose not to act but are unwilling to do so in front of a judgmental public for purely self-interested reasons. 'Based on Powers’ case work, however, it seems that where and when the U.S. made clear its intentions to prevent hostility, it succeeded in minimizing damages to the victims. The true perversity is that the legacy of inaction by the United States is often primary in perpetrators’ calculus that they may act with impunity within their own borders and without (Serbia/Bosnia).'
Here he describes the realpolitik of the perpetrators, in terms of how they take on board potential US and international reaction.

THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT INDICTMENT OF al-Bashir

The ICC has recently released a second international warrant for Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir’s arrest, this time adding the crime of genocide to his list of offenses. Bashir already faces previous charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, all of which he has denied.

In fact, only 1 or 2 African countries support the decision of the ICC. The others consider it illegal intervention in another country's domestic affairs The AU will send its troops (if funded) but draws the line when it comes to arresting leaders.

AU forces are underfunded, which is why they 'have failed to materialize'. Personally, I think AU should be funded by the UN. They've done the most to broker an agreement.

The Sudanese media often alleges that international intervention was part of a Zionist conspiracy.
It's interesting to note that the major US organizations promoting R2P in Sudan, have links to Israel. See for example:
http://www.isracast.com/article.aspx?id=546.

2010-06-22T08:43:00.001-07:00

WHO IS DEPENDENT ON WHO? THE CASE STUDY OF THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO AND CELL PHONES

Political economists like Robert Gilpin take into account several theories of US capitalism that he says are ignored by neoclassical economists. For example, he discusses the core-dependency theory.

This ‘core-dependency’ theory was originated by Immanuel Wallerstein, in The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century, New York: Academic Press, 1976.

The core is the advanced industrialized countries, a major source of capital and investment. The periphery is primarily a source of raw materials, food and labor. “Historically, the core has power over the periphery because a rupture of their ties would be more costly to the latter than the former” (Gilpin, 143).

The fact is, as Wallerstein points out, if it weren’t for the rich resources and cheap labor of the pre-capitalist world, Anglo-European capitalism could not have been developed. This remains the case today.

Economists tend to mention the ‘intellectual labor’ of scientists and engineers as necessary to modern technological development. They ignore the manual labor by millions of people involved in the extrication of resources.

Let’s take the case of coltan, which has become indispensable in the functioning of the Western business world. This is a primary resource used in the manufacturing of cell phones, computer chips and other technological devices. Coltan is found in 3 billion-year-old soils, like those in the Rift Valley region of middle Africa, western Australia and central Asia.

“ Columbite-tantalite - coltan for short – is one of the world's most sought-after materials. Refine coltan and you get a highly heat-resistant metal powder called tantalum. It sells for $100 a pound, and it's becoming increasingly vital to modern life. For the high-tech industry, tantalum is magic dust, a key component in everything from mobile phones made by Nokia (NOK) and Ericsson and computer chips from Intel (INTC) to Sony (SNE) stereos and VCRs.”
Essick, Kristi, “Guns, Money and Cell Phones”, The Industry Standard Magazine
June 11 2001, http://www.globalissues.org/article/442/guns-money-and-cell-phones

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is a main source of coltan. It is suffering through a terrible civil war, in which local militia and Western corporations are involved. Approximately 40,000 are dying a month from war-related causes; thousands of women are being raped.

"'There is a direct link between human rights abuses and the exploitation of resources in areas in the DRC occupied by Rwanda and Uganda,'" says Suliman Baldo, a senior researcher in the Africa division at Human Rights Watch, a New York-based nongovernmental organization that tracks human-rights abuses worldwide.” (Essick, op cit).

How are multinational corporations involved in this crisis? While not directly engaged in fighting or even mining, a U.N. report states that companies trading minerals are "the engine of the conflict in the DRC" (cited on http://www.thecongocause.org/mining.htm). Companies sell coltan to processing companies, which in turn sell to tantalum capacitor manufacturers - whose clients are high-tech companies such as Ericsson, Intel and Nokia.

These companies deny acquiring coltan from either side in the civil war raging in the DRC. But, like the provenance of diamonds, there is no independent monitoring to prove this. What is clear, is that we in the West and elsewhere around the globe, are dependent on coltan as a resource. Sectors of the DRC have become dependent on the cash provided by coltan sales. This is not, however, a chicken and egg question of what came first. We know that multinational corporation approached countries in Africa for coltan first.

Pre-coltan days, people in the DRC were mainly farmers and peasants. Now many, including children, are mining coltan under horrendous conditions, and unpaid, under conditions of virtual slavery.

In the present day international division of labor (euphemistically called 'globalization'), manual work involved in the extrication of raw resources is done by people in the ‘developing world’ and in dependency regions within the 'developed' world (such as coal mines in Virginia, USA). The intellectual work is done in the ‘advanced, developed world.’ The US’ manufacturing base has been replaced by the service sector (banking, hospitality, tourism etc).

This is because the labor costs of mass manufacturing are much lower in the developing world.

Take a look at the labels in your clothing. Here you will see a smorgasbord of developing countries that have made your clothes, and most of your other ‘stuff’. This is because of low labor costs. We in the developed world are actually dependent on this labor for most everything we own!

How did this come about? Political economists like Robert Gilpin vaguely ascribe the inequality between rich and poor countries to lack of education in poor countries. But this is not an accident. The ‘free trade’ model imposed on poor countries, has resulted in the deterioration of educational systems in those countries. Developing economies have switched from subsistence farming to cash crops subject to the risky environment of the global market. Many poor countries were forced to beg for loans in the 20th century from the IMF. Loans were given with strings attached: all health, education and welfare services had to be privatized.

The result has been a degradation of social life in loan-receiving countries, who are also saddled with huge interest bearing debts. In short, privatization/globalization has increased inequality,

In the last decade, this unfortunate state of affairs has been referred to as 'neocolonialism.' The adverse consequences of the core-dependency relationship is widely recognized by the IMF and other international institutions. See these 1999 remarks which critique 'globalization':
Birdsall, Nancy, “Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: Globalization and the Developing Countries:The Inequality Risk”, 1999.
http://www.econ.yale.edu/alumni/reunion99/birdsall.htm

CAPITALISM , LEX LATA, AND HUMAN NATURE

2010-06-18T09:08:00.000-07:00

In my Summer 2010, "International Political Economy" class, Mable wrote:
"People who express anti-globalization views would ask—how does minimizing economic insecurity change capitalism?"
This question is central to the debate between economic and political human rights. Originally, the UN Declaration of Human Rights was enacted by the UN General Assembly in 1948, and it mentioned both sets of rights. Political rights protect the freedom of assembly, speech and freedom from torture, arbitrary detention and other oppressive actions by the state. Economic rights are states’ obligation to feed, shelter and provide medical care:
Article 25: "Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control."
These entitlements are paid through taxes, which means that the wealthier segments of society shift their wealth to the poorer sections of society. This idea undermines the 'free market' philosophy of capitalism. The US only partially accepts health and welfare obligations. Therefore, the UNDHR was split into 2 Covenants: the Covenant on Political and Civil Rights, and the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Only the US and three other countries have not ratified the latter.
The US arguments for the non-ratification of the Covenant on E, S and C rights are as follows:
• A massive shift of wealth subsidizing one section of the society by another, undermines the principles of a free market.
• If a section of a society is allowed to enrich itself, the wealth will ‘trickle down’ naturally to subordinate sectors, thus enriching everyone.
• The states that have fulfilled, or tried to, economic rights were command economies that were repressive and anti capitalist (ie, the USSR).
• Today, economic rights are considered by the US to be ‘aspirational ‘(lex ferenda -- what the law should be). Political rights are considered by the US as more rooted in the world that actually exists (lex lata: the law that exists). Therefore most states are out of compliance with the Covenant on E,S and C rights, according to the US, and it makes no sense to ratify. Inclusion of economic rights has led the US not to ratify Covenants on the rights of women and the child.

Critics argue that low-taxed inheritances, tax breaks for the wealthy, and other policies that privilege the rich, are subsidies for the rich or ‘corporate welfare’ which also undermine the principle of the free market. The accumulation of wealth in the hands of the few has failed to trickle down to the rest of us.

Travis wrote:
"Capitalism is simply an idea about how certain human endeavors and behaviors should be conducted." This statement points to the social construction of capitalism in a specific historical and geographical context.
What is that idea? How do we define capitalism?
Adding an ‘ism’ to the word ‘capital’, indicates a movement or organization (as in Buddhism).
The definition of capitalism from the Financial Dictionary:

"An economic system based on a free market, open competition, profit motive and private ownership of the means of production. Capitalism encourages private investment and business, compared to a government-controlled economy. Investors in these private companies (i.e. shareholders) also own the firms and are known as capitalists."

In fact, no state has a completely free market. Corruption, no-bid contracts, subsidies for the wealthy, trade protection (e.g, the US protects certain types of textiles, also steel) exist most places. So, we could say that the Financial Dictionary's definition of capitalism is ‘aspirational’…the way capitalism should be.

Personally, I like short definitions. I define capitalism as ‘the pursuit of capital’, i.e. profit. Today, the US is a debtor nation running at a loss ($13 trillion debt, see http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/). Can it be said to be capitalist any more, since INCOME PLUS ASSETS MINUS LIABILITIES=NEGATIVE CAPITAL OR DEBT?

Joseph wrote
'statements assume that human nature is a fixed variable,'
It’s interesting how much political economic theory rests on definitions of human nature in European and N American philosophy. The rise of capitalism happened at the same time that definitions of human nature were being turned on their head. The God-centered, earth-centric and stable universe of feudalism defined humans as each having an immutable, divinely ordered function. You were either a king or a serf, knight or a priest or merchant. Women were subordinated to men. With the collapse of feudalism and the rise of the mercantile class, came the discovery that the universe was a much more chaotic place: the rise of the solar centric view. Essentially, humans began to be viewed from the 17th century on, as a mass of atoms with no spiritual purpose, a state of nature in which each possesses a selfish instinct for survival which engenders competition and conflict. Thomas Hobbes, the 17th century English philosopher, popularized this view by advocating a strong ruler that could bring order to chaos (The Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil, 1651).
The idea that humans are irredeemably and naturally competitive, greedy and aggressive, and that these are overriding factors, is now disputed. Anthropologists for example point out that for millions of years of human existence before the rise of ‘civilization’ 5000 years ago, hunter-gatherer societies led cooperative and peaceful lives. This, anthropologists claim, is the reason why humans have survived as a species. It is thought that the threats to survival today (nuclear, environmental degradation etc) are the result of the competitive view of human nature, which emphasizes hyper-masculine traits, territoriality and resource wars as norms. Authors such as the scientist Fritjof Capra (The Turning Point, 1991), believe that humans are moving towards another evolutionary phase, which is more cooperative, woman-centered and ecologically conscious.

Measuring Wealth: A Philosophical Exercise!

2010-06-10T09:07:00.000-07:00

The Global Pie Chart exercise is fraught with pitfalls. Implied is the question: what is wealth? Dictionary.com defines wealth in economic terms as
'all things that have a monetary or exchange value'. So it's an aggregate term. Water and oil cannot be by themselves 'all things', although definitely should be factors in measuring wealth. Students who noted this, are on the right track.
So, according to Keynes and his GDP, wealth is quantifiable, and you saw that the most popular measure of wealth is Gross National Product or Gross Domestic Product (see my Political Economy glossary for definitions.)
But...there is emerging a new definition of wealth that is NOT quantifiable. Clean air, clean water, good health, happiness, wellbeing...these are qualitative factors. It is now increasingly understood that these qualitative factors are indicators of economic well being. Health IS wealth (as my grandmother used to say!) For example, in the US, the poorer you are, the more likely you are to die earlier than others who are wealthier. It actually is more complicated than that. You see, there are societies that are poor in terms of currency but also long living. This might be because they have clean air, plenty of foraging and agricultural food, etc, most of which does not have exchange value. A friend of mine lives on an obscure Philippino island relatively untouched by civilization. People live off the land, the economy is barely run on money,there are small marketplaces, they are happy and live about as long as we do in the West.
Feminist economists (see my Pol Econ glossary) critique the GDP/GNP. They tend to look at unpaid services, like child caretaking, and argue that they are invisibilized, but should be part of accounting wealth.
In case you think all this talk is far fetched, be aware that tucked inside the 2010 health bill, on p 562 no less, is a provision requiring Congress to help finance and oversee the creation of a 'key national indicators' system, a sort of report card to show improvement, or not, in areas of health, education and the environment. This is called the State of the US, and will be run by the National Academy of Sciences; indicators will also include crime, energy, infrastructure, housing. What is not clear, is which indicators would enhance the GDP. Should they account for happiness or carbon emissions? Accounting wealth is a philosophical exercise. One economist, Amartya Sen, who teaches at Harvard, has created the Human Development Index; you might want to research his indicators.
The criticism of the GDP is as follows: just taking a national average of the GDP per person gives a skewed picture. For example, just a small minority of extremely rich people, can artificially increase the average GDP per person. So this explains why the US has a very high aggregate GDP, but 40 million Americans live under the poverty line. The US' child mortality rate is the same as Cuba's. Yet the US is ranked as high income country, and Cuba is ranked as a middle income country.

MADOFF 101

2010-04-19T10:00:00.000-07:00

For students of the economy, there are many lessons to be learned from the 2009 Bernie Madoff debacle.
We live in a world of cons and Ponzi schemes: your health insurance, Social Security, government bonds, bank accounts, unemployment benefits are Ponzis on a much larger scale than Madoff ‘s empire.
In these ‘legal' Ponzi schemes, younger participants' money is by law donated to older participants. These donations are masqueraded as our ‘taxes', ‘ insurance payments' , and the like. Purportedly adjusted for inflation, instead our returns diminish annually. This is why most of us will receive a pitiful $100 a week social security from the government despite putting in 40 years of taxes into the system. Newer investors face price hikes. It's why health insurance has increased by 20 percent in the last few months in the US.
Investment companies like Goldman Sachs invent financial instruments like ‘ credit default swaps’ to favor certain clients and rip off others. Big finance is big fraud (see this: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/apr/18/goldman-sachs-regulators-civil-charges).
Banks are run on a Ponzi scheme too. By law, they only carry 30% of their assets in cash. That's called fractional banking . If you want to liquify your bank assets, the bank releases cash from newer customers' deposits. But if there is a run on the banks, you're out of luck. Banks' government insurance money , estimated at $8 trillion in December of 2008, does not equal the total amount of money in banks.
What else can we learn from Bernie Madoff? Consider this:
Bernie operated on the ‘power of no.' Initially, if you asked to invest with his company, he'd say no, it's closed to you. You didn't have to be fleeced. But investors reacted as if they'd been refused entry into an exclusive golf club , and insisted on being part of the world of Madoff.
So Madoff didn't force investors to enter into his Ponzi scheme. Yet, the great American public has no such choice : it is forced to pay into a national insurance program and an insecure banking system that yields less and less returns for the middle and working classes. Income tax was never constitutionally amended; in other words, it’s imposed illegally.
Bernie knew who his investors were. The list has been made public, and it includes some big names of the great and good. Whereas, the great American public has not a clue whose toxic assets they are paying off in the big trillion dollar bailout. The world public is vulnerable, as President Obama and UK Prime Minister Brown recently pointed out, to shadow banking systems, where there is no monitoring or regulation or transparency.
Madoff admitted his losses . A shadow banking system doesn't have to. The above ground banking system is equally deceptive. When report time comes, hide losses by shuffling them through offshore accounts and other banks. The US government shuffles off losses by going into extraordinary debt.
Madoff didn't have the power to print new money, which the government does when unsustainable financing crashes. Today, we talk in trillions of dollars, unheard of five years ago. More paper money leads to more inflation.
He didn't do what the Federal Reserve did, take money out of circulation by imposing higher interest rates, and then call that a ‘credit crunch.' The Federal Reserve is not a government institution yet is allowed to release or withdraw money supply at will. The US government pays interest to the Federal Reserve to print the dollar. Greenbacks anyone? (government-printed, interest-free dollars).
Madoff didn't apply for corporate welfare, and ask the taxpaying public to buy off his toxic assets like the big corporate boys .
Madoff “only “ defrauded on a reported $50 billion, whereas Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin is accused of defrauding Citibank shareholders of more than $122 billion, also described as a Ponzi scheme. Top brass of the US military are being investigated for billions of dollars in ‘missing contracts'.
Madoff holds up a mirror to our economy's shortcomings.
He reminds us once again of the Golden Rule: ‘if it's too good to be true, then it is.”
He reminds us that if you gamble on your wealth, the casino always wins hands down.
Madoff helped to create the largest on-screen stock exchange, NASDAQ, reminding us that today, money is just digits typed on a computer keyboard.
He spilled the beans about the greedy, vicious world of trading and its so-called guardian, the Securities and Exchange Commission. See his priceless ‘confession' on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab1NTIlO-FM&NR=1.
Madoff's demise provides us with a cautionary tale of social responsibility: your money is an extension of yourself. Know where it is going, who and what benefits or is destroyed by your investments.
Madoff was an equal opportunity swindler. Like banks and corporations, it didn't matter to him if his investors owned a sweatshop, sold lethal weapons or ran charities. Should you be concerned who your co-investors are?
One of his ‘victims' was actor John Malkovitch. That's karma for ya, John, for threatening to kill journalist Robert Fisk because you didn't like his reporting on the Middle East. (“I'd like to shoot Fisk , ” Malkovitch told the Cambridge Union in 2002).
On a personal note, I like Bernie because his baseball cap makes him look kinda cute for a ‘father knows best' type of guy. A LOJM (little old jewish man) wearing a bulletproof vest and ankle tag – how gangsta cool is that?
Of course, if Bernie looks charming it's because all conmen are charmers, including heads of state, CEOs , the IMF and anyone else who are now promoting the current ‘global, one world solution' to the crisis.
Why would you trust the people that got us into this mess, to get us out of it?
Finally, before his arrest, Bernie took the time to sign over his houses and jewelry to his wife.
Always thinking of his family.
WHAT A MENSCH!

WHAT IS 'CIVILIZATION'?

2010-03-25T09:05:00.000-07:00

Can one refer to an Islamic civilization or a Western civilization? According to some definitions you can, implying a high level of homogeneity. Societies are often defined as having 'low' or 'high' levels of civilization.
And, how would one define ‘a high level of culture’ or, what would be a ‘low level’ ?Or, would you agree with another definition which equates civilization with modernity?
Who is called 'civilized' ? This introduces value judgments bound by political motivations and ideology. For example, the Romans said that the Gauls were barbaric. In fact, historians have discovered the Gauls had advanced cultures. Why then did the Romans call them barbaric and justified their conquest in order to ‘civilize’ them? Because, archeologists now say, the Gauls had hundreds of gold mines, and the Romans wanted the gold for themselves.

Remember the categories, class/ethnicity/gender. It makes the notion of a homogeneous society problematic . For example, most Americans consider their society ‘civilized’ in the sense that there is democracy (political rights) and running water, electricity and food (economic rights) available to all. I live 100 miles from the Navajo Nation, a huge area that encompasses bits of Arizona and New Mexico, but not a nation by any means. It receives charity from the US government and isn’t allowed to raise taxes. 50% of the ‘rez’ (local word for the reservation) live without electricity, they are still burning coal! The water is often polluted from uranium mines. There are no hospitals. Native Americans have the lowest life expectancy than any US demographic.

Airport Scanners and Passive Resistance

2010-03-04T08:07:00.000-08:00

Mahatma Gandhi wrote this in his famous "Indian Home Rule" (1909):
"If the Government were to ask us to go about without any clothing, should we do so? If I were a passive resister, I would say to them that I would have nothing to do with their law. But we have so forgotten ourselves and become so compliant that we do not mind any degrading law."

There is no question that airport scanners that undress us and our children, are degrading instruments. Scanners are also carcinogenic. I was pleased that two women refused to go through the scanners at a UK airport yesterday, March 2 2010, and forfeited their tickets.

The chances of being hijacked or being blown up by a terrorist in an airplane are something like a million to one. We are much more likely to be killed in a car accident, or by cancers, and other leading causes of death in the West.

I advocate passive resistance by refusing to fly from airports that degrade my humanity and invade my privacy and that of vulnerable children. If this means no airplane travel, so be it. Our bodies belong to us -- this is a fundamental right called 'habeas corpus'.

Why did NATO but not the UN intervene to save Kosovans in 1999?

2010-02-08T10:20:00.000-08:00

The NATO 1999 humanitarian intervention to rescue Muslim Kosovans from Serbian aggression, is controversial in that it did not have the backing of the UN Security Council.

But it can be understood from the perspective of the global balance of power.

Muslim Kosovans were engaged in a battle for independence from socialist Yugoslavia.

According to research done by student Marija Greenlee (Spring 2010), on October 1, 1999, US Congressman Engel made one of the strongest cases linking images of Serbian atrocities on CNN to the need for military action:

“We read about it in the paper today on the front page, that there were several massacres, that bodies were found of innocent civilians, men, women and children, as the Serbian police forces and military units continue their campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo…Mr. Speaker, it is time for action. We need to have immediate NATO air strikes on Serbian positions in Kosovo.” (Bahador 2006).

By why NATO? Why not coordinate with the UN Security Council? This is what the US did in 1990, to remove Saddam Hussein from Kuwait.

Five days after NATO bombed socialist Serbia, accused of atrocities against Muslim Kosovans, the US Congress adopted the SILK ROAD STRATEGY ACT. This was to break Russia’s monopoly over pipeline routes in Central Asia and define American business interests in the region. Bombing and destabilizing Serbia was possibly an undeclared part of a strategy to create a corridor of power for America and her allies between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. This explains why Russia and China were not included in the humanitarian intervention to rescue Muslim Kosovans, and NATO was used instead, bypassing potential trouble at the UN Security Council.
In one of my lectures, I state that , “THE TRANS-BALKAN PIPELINE (AMBO) WILL PASS VERY NEAR KOSOVO, PUMPING CASPIAN OIL FROM THE BULGARIAN PORT OF VLORA, FOR TRANSPORTATION TO EUROPE AND THE US”.

Marija Greenlee wrote in her Spring 2010 paper: “This critical oil pipeline [AMBO], currently under construction and set to operate in 2011 will link up pipeline corridors between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. The Caspian Sea is the hub of the world’s largest unexplored oil reserves. Coincidentally, Camp Bondsteel, America’s largest US military base since Vietnam has been built in Kosovo.” The US took over 1000 acres of farmland in SE Kosovo at Uresevic, near the Macedonian Border, for the construction of Camp Bondsteel, the biggest such project since the war in Vietnam.

Marija also draws our attention to the newly discovered petroleum reserves in neighboring Albania, which is located on the Adriatic Sea.

According to Marija’s research, Kosovo is a place of religious history and national pride for Serbs. In an area that has become known as the Field of Blackbirds, thousands of Serbian “warrior saints” stood their ground in the 1389 Battle of Kosovo Polje, only to be slaughtered by the invading Ottoman Turks. And Kosovo is the historical seat of the Serbian Orthodox Church

Here are some casualty estimates, note (as always in these types of estimates) the discrepancies:
1. Kosovo (1998-99)
o Ethnic cleansing by Yugoslavs, before the war
 29 April 1999 AP: 2,000 (in 1998)
 Ploughshares 2000: 1-2,000 (1998)
o Ethnic cleansing during the war
 18 July 1999 Baltimore Sun (NY Times News Service): 10,000 Albanians killed during 3-month campaign
 5 July 1999 AP: 10,000
 4 July 1999 Toronto Star: 10,000
 9 Nov. 1999 Washington Times: 9,269
 Ploughshares 2000: 2,500-10,000
o NATO Bombing (1999)
 9 Feb. 2000 Slate, civilian deaths [http://slate.msn.com/code/Explainer/Explainer.asp?Show=2/9/2000&idMessage=4570]
 Human Rights Watch: ca. 500; or specifically 488-527 ("confidently")
 Serb propaganda: 1,200-5,000 ("stubbornly")
 HRW: 500 civ. [http://www.hrw.org/press/2000/02/nato207.htm]
 14 June 1999 Time: 5,000 military + 1,200 civilian = 6,200
 4 Dec. 2001 WSJ: 500, citing Wm Arkin [http://wsjclassroomedition.com/tj_120401_casu.htm]
 5 July 1999 AP: 1,200 civilians, citing Yugoslav state-run media
 Ploughshares 2000: 500 civilians
 11 July 1999 Washington Post
 Official Serbian figures: 576 Serb military "casualties" (probably deaths)
 NATO estimates: 5,000 to 10,000 Serb soldiers dead
 Author's estimate: 1,600 civilians and 1,000 military "casualties"
Source: Historical Atlas of the 20th Century, http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/20centry.htm, accessed February 7, 2010.

As usual, pictures are worth a thousand words. See where Kosovo is located in the context of proposed pipeline routes.

For a map of proposed pipelines in the region, by US, China, Russia

See: http://leftwrite.wordpress.com/2008/08/19/lenins-epitaph-lessons-from-the-russia-georgia-war/

Compare to a map of Kosovo and the region:

Source: http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/images/kosoregion.gif

References
Bahador, Babak. "The CNN Effect on Western Policy Before the Kosovo Intervention" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, Le Centre Sheraton Hotel, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, Mar 17, 2004, http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p72684_index.html

THE HAITIAN EARTHQUAKE and GLOBAL POWER RIVALRIES

2010-01-24T12:30:00.000-08:00

By Philippa
Updated August 2, 2011

What are perspectives from international relations theories that we can apply to the devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti?
Haiti is a model of a country which has been impacted by colonialism and postcolonialism. Realist Thomas Weiss writes about Somalia in the 19th century period of colonization: "CONSUMER GOODS WERE INTRODUCED INTO THE LOCAL MARKET, WITH ACCOMPANYING MONETIZATION AND OTHER CHANGES IN THE ECONOMY" (Weiss, 2005, p. 58). This happened to Haiti in the mid 1990s, when the International Monetary Fund loaned money to Haiti with strings: it had to accept low cost food imports, which in turn, led to the collapse of its agricultural economy. Allowing US imports of rice, part of the conditions of Structural Adjustment Loans (SALs) devastated local rice production. As student Robert Pampel (INTL 5400, Summer 2011) points out, an oil embargo imposed by the US and UN on Haiti after the first ouster of President Aristide, caused Haitians to turn to forests for fuel, which eroded the soil and caused flooding. A US-aid program to replace the indigenous Creole pig, considered to be diseased, turned disastrous. Rural farmers fled to the impoverished cities, where housing constructions were not built to be earthquake proof.

As Robert Pampel points out, SAPs do not work in a country that lacks governmental infrastructure: "SAPs were enforced on countries with little consideration for their infrastructure and ability to implement structural adjustments. This is one reason why middle-income developing countries like Brazil and Thailand had success implementing SAPs, while many lower-income developing countries with little to no infrastructure struggled."

NGOs in Haiti are tasked to act as state substitutes, but while some have proved very useful in food distribution, trash goes unpicked up, roads are not repaired, and a disaster response program is not institutionalized.

The liberal view is stated here:" RESCUING OTHERS WILL ALWAYS BE ONEROUS, BUT IF WE DENY THE MORAL DUTY AND LEGAL RIGHT TO DO SO, WE DENY NOT ONLY THE CENTRALITY OF JUSTICE IN POLITICAL AFFAIRS, BUT ALSO THE COMMON HUMANITY THAT BINDS US ALL (Teson in Holzgrefe and Keohane, p. 129). The cry from Haiti has been answered by billions of people around the world, including a massive relief effort led by the US government. There was no forced intervention, no violation of national sovereignty, in the strict legal sense.

But Haiti was already dependent on outside powers, as the realist Weiss points out was the case of Somalia during the 1990s. In the case of Somalia, according to Weiss, "MILITARY, ECONOMIC, AND FOOD AID PERPETUATED A POLITICAL SYSTEM THAT WAS NOT SELF-SUSTAINING, NOR DID IT FULFILL THE BASIC REQUIREMENTS OF A SOVEREIGN GOVERNMENT (Weiss, 2005, p. 59).

The anti-imperialist Bricmont asks us to imagine "A WORLD IN WHICH CONGO, CUBA, VIETNAM, BRAZIL, CHILE, IRAQ, AND MANY OTHER COUNTRIES WOULD HAVE BEEN ABLE TO DEVELOP WITHOUT CONSTANT INTERFERENCE FROM THE WEST" (Bricmont, 2006, p.38). But now, China and Russia are shaping the economies of the poorer countries around the world. Here is a review of how I see Great Power rivalries in the Caribbean:

Before the Haitian earthquake struck, global power tensions in this part of the world had been escalating.

The western hemisphere (slice the earth in half length-ways and Haiti and the Americas are on the western side) is dubbed the US’s backyard. But N American policymakers fear their traditional influence is waning. US foreign policymakers are concerned with drug and terrorist sanctions in the area, as well as strategic resources – such as oil.
US oil imports from the Caribbean account for 15% of total oil imports to the US.
Russia and China have both recently staked a claim in the Caribbean.
In July 2009, Russia and Cuba signed a deal to jointly explore crude oil reserves off the Cuban coast. A meeting in Moscow in January 2009 renewed the pact, which had collapsed after the Cold War. While no mention was made of a military alliance, agreements were signed to cooperate in agriculture, manufacturing, science and tourism. In December 2009, a contingent of Russia’s North Sea Fleet docked in Havana after conducting exercises with Venezuela’s navy.
In September 2009, China sent Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress (NPC) Wu Banggou to the Bahamas with 150 Chinese officials and business leaders. A number of economic deals were signed, including a multimillion dollar loan to help build a highway to Nassau’s international airport. This marked another step in the normalization of diplomatic relations between China and the Bahamas since1997.
Iran is another player. In 2008, St Vincent and the Grenadines established diplomatic relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran and secured a commitment to assist in the construction of the US$200 million international airport. On January 21, 2010, the President of Guyana, Bharrat Jagdeo, arrived in Tehran to renew ties with the Islamic world.
Half a year earlier, on May 1, 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton laid bare US concerns, saying that “the Obama Administration is working to improve deteriorating US relations with a number of Latin American nations to counter growing Iranian, Chinese and Russian influence in the Western Hemisphere” (Associated Press, May 1, 2009). The Obama presidency however has welcomed China's bid to become an observer at the Organization of American States and a donor member of the Inter-American Development Bank. This is in line with a long term US policy of both collaborating with, and remaining wary of , ‘competitor peer’ major powers.
At a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization the following month, Brazil, Russia, India and China - or BRIC as the fast-growing countries are collectively coined - held their first summit. The BRIC leaders called for a ‘multipolar world order’, which in diplomatic language constitutes a challenge to US global dominance.
US’ wariness of BRIC is illustrated by policies on the military front. Washington is building its potential for nuclear and non-nuclear strikes in Latin America and the Caribbean. The US Southern Command’s 4th Fleet was recently reconstituted and patrols up and down the Latin American coastline. Part of its mission is humanitarian – dealing with hurricanes, for example. The other part of the mission has to do with national strategy. Forty percent of US trade and fifty percent of US oil imports come from this area.
Latin America leaders, however, are turning down requests for a US armed presence. For example, President Rafael Correa has asked US troops to leave their base in the port of Manta in Ecuador.
One principal reason for resistance against US military presence is the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America (also known as the Treaty of Tlatelolco) which came into force in 1969. It obligates Latin American parties not to acquire or possess nuclear weapons, nor to permit the storage or deployment of nuclear weapons on their territories by other countries.
Back in Haiti, the people still urgently need help; the death toll was past 300,000.
Let us hope Haiti’s needs inspire global cooperation, not competition.

References:
Bricmont, Jean, Humanitarian Imperialism, Using Human Rights to Sell War, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006.
Teson, Ferdinando in Holzgrefe, JL Ed and Keohane, Robert, Humanitarian Intervention, Ethical, Legal and Political Dilemmas, Cambridge University Press, 2003
Weiss, Thomas G, Military-Civilian Interactions, Humanitarian Crisis and the Responsibility to Protect, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005.

Legitimizing Usury, the Rise of Capitalism and Sharia Banking

2010-01-22T07:36:00.000-08:00

LEGITIMIZING USURY AND THE RISE OF CAPITALISM

In the New Testament, Jesus chased the money lenders out of the temple. Shylock, a money lender in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice was reviled by his fellow citizens. Anti-semitism arose probably as the result of laws that only allowed Jews to be moneylenders in Europe. "Miser", "hoarding wealth" and other terms denoted the negative meaning of capital accumulation.

Today, of course, the accumulation of vast riches is applauded, as can be seen by the 'stardom' of such businessmen as Donald Trump. The legitimizing of usury in Europe by Christian religious leaders helped to develop the economic model of capitalism. How? Without bank loans, there can be no investment. Without interest on debt, there can be no bank loans. Bank loans and debt are crucial to continuing investments. Also, the stocks and shares developed in the 17th Century had one very important component: the forgiveness of debts made by investors. Yes, that’s right. Although we hold poor countries to the fire for debt repayment, if you invest in a company and it fails, you are not liable for debt. This frees capital to invest elsewhere.

Today, many capitalist countries are in fact debtor nations. I like to say we live in ‘debtism’ not capitalism because capital=profit minus debt.

I recommend the book The Web of Debt.

A student wrote on the topic of Sharia banking for her final paper in a previous semester. Here is an excerpt. Capital letters indicate referenced information (not blogged here.)

Marie-Josee Herard
December 19, 2009

The Qur’an FORBIDS THE CHARGING OF INTEREST IN EXCHANGE FOR A LOAN, OR “RIBA” . The reason for this, according to the Qur’an, is BECAUSE IT HARMS THE HUMANE AIMS OF ISLAM TOWARDS MERCY, SOLIDARITY AND COOPERATION .

This is a founding principle that has shaped Islamic banking. The first ever Islamic savings bank was modeled on “profit sharing” which WAS STARTED IN THE EGYPTIAN TOWN OF MIT GHAMR IN 1963 . The Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna’s goal was TO PENETRATE THE WESTERN FINANCE SYSTEM, CORRUPTING IT FROM WITHIN IN HOPES OF CREATING A PARALLEL SYSTEM TO RE-ESTABLISH A GLOBAL ISLAMIC EMPIRE GOVERNED BY ISLAMIC LAW (SHARIA).

Islamic banking policy states that money should be used productively and investment activities should be dealt with in partnerships so that risks and rewards are shared by creditor and debtor alike. Also, according to sharia, excess capital (i.e. profits) ought to be put back into the community in the form of zakat (alms). This includes stocks, real estate investments, insurances, and currency swaps that are sharia-compliant (called sukuks). There are limits, though; SHARIA LAW PROHIBIT INVESTING IN CERTAIN INDUSTRIES OR PRODUCTS, INCLUDING ALCOHOL, TOBACCO, PORK, AND PORNOGRAPHY. THE QUR’AN ALSO FORBIDS USURY (as aforementioned), SO FINANCIAL TRANSACTIONS ARE STRUCTURED TO RELY ON INCOME IN THE FORM OF RENTS OR PROFITS FROM THE LOAN, TECHNICALLY NOT INTEREST. SUKUKS … ARE A TYPE OF ISLAMIC BOND BACKED BY OWNERSHIP OF A TANGIBLE ASSET THAT PRODUCES A FINANCIAL RESULT. Another popular instrument is the murabaha, ESSENTIALLY COST-PLUS FINANCING, WHICH INVOLVES THE SALE AND REPURCHASE OF A COMMODITY TO FUND A LOAN . Scholars must review banking products and cases to make sure that they adhere to the Qur’an. BUT DEFINITIONS OF WHAT IS ACCEPTABLE CAN VARY GREATLY, NOT ONLY FROM REGION TO REGION BUT FROM BANK TO BANK… AS EACH BANK HAS ITS OWN BOARD OF SCHOLARS .

After initial success in the late 1970s and 1980s, which was largely fueled by oil revenues, Islamic banking suffered serious setbacks. There were failures in Islamic banking integration in such countries as Egypt, Iran, Sudan, and Pakistan, and several banks went bankrupt after having over-leveraged their funds, which coincidentally violated the sharia tenet of avoiding excessive risk-taking. So new products were developed and banks branched out; that’s when sukuks came into the picture, among others. But since then, some have estimated that the SECTOR HAS EXPANDED AT A BRISK PACE OF BETWEEN 15% AND 25% ANNUALLY IN THE PAST DECADE… in fact, THERE ARE CURRENTLY (as of 2006) 250 ISLAMIC MUTUAL FUNDS WITH $300BN WORTH OF ASSETS UNDER MANAGEMENT AND 300 IFIs HOLDING OVER $250BN DEPOSITS…FURTHERMORE, $200BN IN ASSETS ARE MANAGED BY DEDICATED MUSLIM “WINDOWS” OR SUBSIDIARIES OF CONVENTIONAL BANKS .

US-KURDISH RELATIONS IN IRAQ: A CHECKERED HISTORY

2009-11-12T11:22:00.000-08:00

Here is a brief chronology:
US backed the Kurds in 1972, possibly to destabilize the new government of Iraq under Gen Qasim which was nationalizing Iraq’s oil resources.
The US dropped support for the Kurds in 1975, possibly due to the Shatt Al Arab waterway dispute resolution in which Iran dropped its support for dissidents in Iraq.
The US didn’t come to the aid of the Kurds during the Anfal campaign, instead supported Saddam Hussein with money and weapons technology, during the Iran Iraq War 1980-1988.
The US gave verbal support in 1991 to the Kurds , encouraging them to rise against Iraq, but didn’t follow through. Saddam Hussein attacked the Kurdish revolt, millions of Kurdish refugees were left stranded on mountains on the Turkish border. The US did eventually provide an umbrella of protection (UNSC Res 688)
The US supported Kurdish autonomy leading up to and after the invasion in 2003, but in 2007 ‘turned a blind eye’ to the Turkish incursion into Kurdish territory in Turkey's pursuit of Kurdish militants. Turkey is a US ally.

PRESIDENT NASSER OF EGYPT: NEITHER A 'STRONGMAN' OR A WEAK RULER

2009-11-12T11:20:00.000-08:00

WAS NASSER WAS A ‘STRONGMAN’ , OR A ‘WEAK RULER’? THIS IS A MATTER OF INTERPRETATION

President Gamal Abdar Nasser (1918-1970) was overwhelmingly elected as President of Egypt in a national referendum held in 1956, when he instituted a one party system. He was not a dictator a la Saddam Hussein, by any means.
Was he a weak ruler because he lost the 1967 war with Israel? Losing a war doesn’t necessarily indicate ‘weakness’ of a ruler. For example, Presidents in the US were not widely believed to be ‘weak’ because of defeat in the Vietnam War. You could argue that if a ruler can’t defend the country, he or she is ‘weak.’ The reality is more complex. In 1967, Egypt as a post-colonial state struggling to get on its feet after British rule, was not sufficiently financially sound to conduct a war, nor did it have military preparedness. Nasser was under pressure however by other Middle East powers to go to war against Israel, and with good cause, he was worried about an Israeli invasion of Egypt. Israel began hostilities by bombing the entire Egyptian Air Force as it sat on the tarmac. In the ensuing six day war, Israel went on to occupy the Sinai desert and the Gaza Strip. Nasser then went on television in Egypt and said
"I have taken a decision with which I need your help. I have decided to withdraw totally and for good from any official post or political role, and to return to the ranks of the masses, performing my duty in their midst, like any other citizen. This is a time for action, not grief.... My whole heart is with you, and let your hearts be with me. May God be with us—hope, light and guidance in our hearts."
The next day, demonstrations were organized in support of his Presidency, and he retracted his decision. Contrast this to the refusal of Rumsfeld et al to take responsibility for not defending the US when it was attacked on 9/11. To me, Nassar’s stance indicated strength and accountability. I disagree with his stance towards the Egyptian Communist Party, which he outlawed.
In 1970, Nasser at a landmark Arab League meeting, succeeded in ending the war between King Hussein of Jordan and the PLO. In my view, the ability to end hostilities is the mark of a responsible leader. He died a day after the end of the Arab League meeting.

Do Democracy and Development Go Hand in Hand?

2009-10-01T11:21:00.000-07:00

DEVELOPMENT VS DEMOCRACY?
Updated August 1, 2011

Who or what, is to blame for a world in which 40 million people a year die of hunger, disease and poverty, while an elite acquires massive amounts of wealth? Global income disparities are often viewed through the lens of traditional development theory. A developed country is conventionally defined as one with a high per capita income, largely as a result of a privatized, profit-driven market, industrialization, urbanization, and Western-style democracy. A developing country is referred to as one with a low per capita income, with aspirations for development, but hampered by ‘backward’ or ‘indigenous’ economic and political systems and a diversity of cultures. Developed countries helped Less Developed Countries (LDCs) with aid.
However, this model doesn’t hold.
India is an example of a country which has achieved many forms of democracy, yet has failed on the economic front, because of high rates of poverty. Can it therefore be said to be truly democratic? As Martin Luther King said, what is the point of being able to sit a lunch counter, if I can’t afford lunch? Put another way, what is the point of being able to vote if you can’t afford the bus fare to get to the polling booth? Since the 90s, India has followed a free market development policy, under pressure from the IMF and World Bank. But prosperity has not come from India’s combination of democracy and free market. Can one have democracy and not have more prosperity? Interesting conundrum. See this for the 'democracy versus development" argument:
http://www.usyd.edu.au/riap/documents/publications/papers/chua.htm

Aid to develop a country along free market lines, comes at a price that undermines national sovereignty. Student Lauren Precopia in INTL 5400 Summer 2011 writes 'As Ngaire Woods states in “Bretton Woods Institutions”, Elliot Page, a trade negotiator from East Caribbean States discusses what is at stake for developing countries if they fail to comply:
“YOU COULD BE A DEVELOPING COUNTRY, FOR INSTANCE, THAT HAS DECIDED TO BLOCK A POSITION EVERYONE ELSE HAS SUPPORTED…HOWEVER A TELEPHONE CALL WOULD BE CONDUCTED FROM LEADER TO LEADER…AND A PARTICULAR AID PROGRAM IN YOUR COUNTRY COULD BE JEOPARDIZED.”'

Development analysts choose to look at GNP figures, but these don’t tell us anything about disparity of income, child mortality and life expectancy rates.

US ranks 45th, Kryghyzstan ranks 30th, in income gap statistics.

We know that the US itself is not immune to election fraud (do a search on the 2000 US election and ‘fraud’). The US’ family income distribution is 45th in the world (the most equal is Sweden). Kryghyztan does better than the US re: income gaps. Russia does worse than any of the Central Asian countries but better than the US. But, Russia does worse than most in life expectancy rates. For ‘your’ country’s income gap, see this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality

I like Maya Chadda (Building Democracy in South Asia) but…
Chadda contradicts herself. Earlier on in the book, she says that democracy in Europe rolled out quietly. Then later on, she says democracy took hold in conflict with the state. In any case, I would challenge the dichotomy between democracy and economic prosperity. The United Nations have reached consensus that you can’t have one without the other. This is expressed in its consensus that economic and political rights are indivisible. Economic rights=the responsibility of the state to ensure basic needs.

DEMOCRACY AND THE IMF , OIL FACTOR

How do the great powers affect development and democracy in peripheral countries? It was quite shocking to read that Chadda thinks the Benazir Bhutto was ushered out as a result of pressure from the IMF because she couldn’t pay back Pakistan’s loans to the IMF.
Clearly, there is great outside interest in the Central Asian region, because of its oil. But, it may have had an adverse affect on democratization. As another student writes ‘Many ‘western' democracies are weakening their stance on the protection of human rights in the country, in large measure due to Turkmenistan's vast hydrocarbons reserves.’ Another student remarks that ‘The high price of oil has fostered an environment in which the Azerbaijani government does not need to maintain a façade of democracy.”
See this:
-- "Turkmenistan is the country nobody talks about. Its huge reserves of natural gas can only get to market through pipelines. Until 1991, it was part of the Soviet Union and its gas flowed only north through Soviet pipelines. Now the Russians plan a new pipeline north. The Chinese are building a new pipeline east. The U.S. is pushing for "multiple oil and gas export routes." High-level Russian, Chinese and American delegations visit Turkmenistan frequently to discuss energy. The U.S. even has a special envoy for Eurasian energy diplomacy.--John Foster, "Afghanistan and the new great game: Prized pipeline route could explain West's stubborn interest in poor, remote land," Toronto Star, August 12, 2009

No, European Capitalist Democracy Did Not Evolve Peacefully

2009-09-04T07:30:00.000-07:00

No, European Capitalist Democracy Did Not Evolve Peacefully
By Philippa Winkler, PhD

Maya Chadda ‘s thesis is that European countries had ‘time’ to evolve a capitalist democracy over centuries, whereas India, Pakistan etc had to compress nation building, decolonization and the development of democratic institutions into a shorter time period (Chadda, Maya, Building Democracy in South Asia, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers 2000).
She paints a rosy picture describing how European countries had a peaceful transition to capitalist democracy (“democracy flowered subsequently…gradual unfolding of a market economy…”p 2). She contrasts this with the supposedly more violent South Asian sequence of development.
In fact, bloodshed , war and suffering have accompanied the 300 year old evolution of capitalist democracy in Europe.
1) In the UK, civil war between merchant interests and the aristocracy in the middle of the 17th century, ending with the beheading of Charles I.
2) Forcible relocation of masses of peasants to make way for cash crops, all over Europe beginning in the 18th century. In the UK, the Enclosure Acts legislated the relocation. Millions of peasants became internal refugees, escaped to the cities, and became the nucleus for the emerging factory laboring class.
3) Luddism in the UK in the 18th century (when peasants and artisans smashed machines that were depriving them of their livelihood).
4) The 1789 French Revolution, beheading of Louis XVI and family, in France’s transition from a feudal type monarchy to a Republic, followed by the Terror (remember the guillotine?). Other revolutions followed, to establish a democracy, in 1848, and an unsuccessful one to establish a form of socialism, in 1872 (the Paris Commune).
5) In the 19th Century, nationalist revolutions all over Europe for countries like Italy to free themselves from the yoke of Austro Hungary Empire and establish capitalist constitutional monarchies with parliaments.
6) Exploitation of labor, child labor, 12 hour work weeks, demonstrations, protests, met by extensive governmental repression etc., litter the landscape of the European road to industrialization from the 18th century.
7)7) Colonization of Asia was key to the creation of the European market economies. Gold, silver and other vital resources were plundered by the Europeans, resulting in huge losses of life and subsistence lifestyles in non European countries. One could argue that the USSR colonized Central Asia. So the development of European capitalism and Russian communism came at the expense of pre-capitalist countries. Today, many of these countries supply cheap labor forces while building a professional and business middle class.

The State of Cognitive Dissonance

2009-08-31T08:22:00.000-07:00

'The state of cognitive dissonance is so uncomfortable that the subject may deny that she/he is in a moral dilemma (Festinger 1968). Denial is a strategy therefore that expresses psychological moral unconsciousness. At this point, the subject falls into circularity and blind belief (an idea that cannot be explained by another idea). When I confronted the diplomats with the illogic of bargaining lives with someone they considered un-reedemable, the three diplomats essentially offered a circular logic not based on a set of data: ‘children must die when hard choices have to be made because sometimes it’s necessary for children to die when hard choices have to be made’.

When an individual is unconscious to this extent, he/she is acting on behalf of others, whether it is a cult, an organization, a government, or a President, he/she has given over her power of reasoning, indeed the conscious self, to what is viewed as a higher authority and a superior holder of knowledge. It is assumed that the higher power simultaneously collects the facts, makes judgments, metes out either praise or punishment, and gives orders. It is assumed that the higher authority has the right to make those working on behalf of the authority, to feel guilty or ashamed if they are doing something contrary to its wishes, or if they question or even think critically about directives that are leading to genocide." From blogger's PhD thesis,