Socioeconomic Sovereignty
excerpted from the book
Rogue States
The Rule of Force in World Affairs
by Noam Chomsky
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/...ign_RSChom.html
South End Press, 2000, paper
p208

A century ago, during the early stages of the corporatization of the United States, discussion(about these matters)was quite frank. Conservatives a century ago denounced the procedure, describing corporatization as a "return to feudalism" and "a form of communism," which is not an entirely inappropriate analogy. There were similar intellectual origins in neo-Hegelian ideas about the rights of organic entities, along with the belief in the need to have a centralized administration of chaotic systems- like the markets, which were out of control. It's worth bearing in mind that in today's so-called "free-trade economy" a very large component of cross-border transactions (which are misleadingly called trade), probably about 70 percent of them, are actually within centrally managed institutions, within corporations and corporate alliances, if we include outsourcing and other devices of administration. That's quite apart from all kinds of other radical market distortions.

The conservative critique-notice that I am using the term "conservative" in a traditional sense; such conservatives scarcely exist any more-was echoed at the liberal/progressive end of the spectrum early in the 20th century, most notably perhaps by John Dewey, America's leading social philosopher, whose work focused largely on democracy. He argued that democratic forms have little substance when "the life of the country"-production, commerce, media-is ruled by private tyrannies in a system that he called "industrial feudalism," in which working people are subordinated to managerial control, and politics becomes "the shadow cast by big business over society." Notice that he was articulating ideas that were common coin among working people many years earlier. And the same was true of his call for the replacement of industrial feudalism by self-managed industrial democracy.

Interestingly, progressive intellectuals who favored the process of corporatization agreed more or less with this description. Woodrow Wilson, for example, wrote that "most men are servants of corporations," which now account for the "greater part of the business of the country" in a "very different America from the old, .. . no longer a scene of individual enterprise, ... individual opportunity, and individual achievement," but a new America, in which "small groups of men in control of great corporations wield a power and control over the wealth and business opportunities of the country," becoming "rivals of the government itself," and undermining popular sovereignty, exercised through the democratic political system. Notice this was written in support of the process. He described the process as maybe unfortunate, but necessary, agreeing with the business world, particularly after the destructive market failures of the preceding years had convinced the business world and progressive intellectuals that markets simply had to be administered and that financial transactions had to be regulated.

Similar questions are very much alive in the international arena today: talk about reforming financial architecture, and that sort of thing. A century ago, corporations were granted the rights of persons by radical judicial activism, an extreme violation of classical liberal principles. They were also freed from earlier obligations to keep to specific activities for which they were chartered. Furthermore, in an important move, the courts shifted power upward from the stockholders in a partnership to the central management, which was identified with the immortal corporate person. Those of you who are familiar with the history of Communism will recognize that this is very similar to the process that was taking place at the time, very much as predicted, in fact, by left-Marxist and anarchist critics of Bolshevism. People like Rosa Luxemburg warned early on that the centralizing ideology would shift power from working people to the party, to the central committee, and then to the maximal leader, as happened very quickly after the conquest of state power in 1917, which at once destroyed every residue of socialist forms and principles. The propagandists on both sides prefer a different story for self-serving reasons, but I think that's the more accurate one.


In recent years, corporations have been granted rights that go far beyond those of persons. Under the World Trade Organization rules, corporations can demand what's called the right of "national treatment." That means that General Motors, if it's operating in Mexico, can demand to be treated like a Mexican firm. Now that's only a right of immortal persons; it's not a right of flesh-and-blood persons. A Mexican can't come to New York and demand national treatment and do very well, but corporations can.

Other rules require that the rights of investors, lenders, and speculators must prevail over the rights of mere flesh-and-blood people generally, undermining popular sovereignty and diminishing democratic rights. Corporations are able in various ways to bring suits, bring actions, against sovereign states, and there are interesting cases. For example, Guatemala, a couple of years ago, sought to reduce infant mortality by regulating the marketing of infant formula by multinationals. The measures that Guatemala proposed were in conformity with World Health Organization guidelines, and they kept to international codes, but the Gerber Corporation claimed expropriation, and the threat of a World Trade Organization complaint sufficed for Guatemala to withdraw, fearing retaliatory sanctions by the United States.

The first such complaint under the new World Trade Organization rules was brought against the United States by Venezuela and Brazil, who complained that EPA regulations on petroleum violated their rights as petroleum exporters. Washington backed down that time, also allegedly in fear of sanctions, but I'm skeptical about that interpretation. I don't think the US fears trade sanctions from Venezuela and Brazil. More likely the Clinton administration simply saw no compelling reason to defend the environment and protect health.

These issues are arising very dramatically and, in fact, obscenely right now. Tens of millions of people around the world are dying from treatable diseases because of the protectionist elements written into the World Trade Organization rules that grant private megacorporations monopoly pricing rights. So Thailand and South Africa, for example, which have pharmaceutical industries, can produce life-saving drugs at a fraction of the cost of the monopolistic pricing, but they're afraid to do so under threat of trade sanctions. In fact, in 1998 the United States even threatened to withdraw funding if the World Health Organization even monitored the effects of trade conditions on health. i5 These are very real threats today.
All of this is called "trade rights." It has nothing to do with trade. It has to do with monopolistic pricing practices enforced by protectionist measures that are introduced into what are called free trade agreements. The measures are designed to ensure corporate rights. They also have the effect of reducing growth and innovation. And they are only part of the array of regulations introduced into these agreements which prevent development and growth. What is at stake is investor rights, not trade. And trade, of course, has no value in itself. It's a value if it increases human welfare, otherwise not.

In general the principle of the World Trade Organization, the primary principle, and related treaties, is that sovereignty and democratic rights have to be subordinated to the rights of investors. In practice that means the rights of the huge immortal persons, the private tyrannies to which people must be subordinated. These are among the issues that led to the remarkable events in Seattle. But in some ways, a lot of ways, the conflict between popular sovereignty and private power was illuminated more sharply a couple of months after Seattle, in Montreal, where an ambiguous settlement was reached on the so-called "biosafety protocol." There the issue was very clearly drawn. Quoting the New York Times, a compromise was reached "after intense negotiations that often pitted the United States against almost everyone else" over what's called "the precautionary principle." What's that? Well the chief negotiator for the European Union described it this way: "Countries must be able to have the freedom, the sovereign right, to take precautionary measures with regard" to genetically altered seed, microbes, animals, crops that they fear might be harmful. The United States, however, insisted on World Trade Organization rules. Those rules are that an import can be banned only on the basis of scientific evidence.

Notice what's at stake here. The question that's at stake is whether people have the right to refuse to be experimental subjects. So, to personalize it, suppose the biology department at the university were to walk in and tell you, "You folks have to be experimental subjects in an experiment we're carrying out, where we're going to stick electrodes in your brain and see what happens. You can refuse, but only if you provide scientific evidence that it's going to harm you." Usually you can't provide scientific evidence. The question is, do you have a right to refuse? Under World Trade Organization rules, you don't. You have to be experimental subjects. It's a form of what Edward Herman has called "producer sovereignty." The producer reigns; consumers have to somehow defend themselves. That works domestically, too, as he pointed out. It's not the responsibility, say, of chemical and pesticide industries to prove that what they're putting into the environment is safe. It's the responsibility of the public to prove scientifically that it's unsafe, and they have to do this through underfunded public agencies that are susceptible to industry influence through lobbying and other pressures.

That was the issue at Montreal, and a kind of ambiguous settlement was reached. Notice, to be clear, there was no issue of principle. You can see that by just looking at the lineup. The United States was on one side, and it was joined, in fact, by some other countries with a stake in biotechnology and high-tech agro-export, and on the other side was everybody else-those who didn't expect to profit by the experiment. That was the lineup, and that tells you exactly how much principle was involved. For similar reasons, the European Union favors high tariffs on agricultural products, just as the United States did 40 years ago, but no longer-and not because the principles have changed; just because power has changed.

There is an overriding principle. The principle is that the powerful and the privileged have to be able to do what they want (of course, pleading high motives). The corollary is that sovereignty and democratic rights of people must go, in this case-and that's what makes it so dramatic-their reluctance to be experimental subjects when US-based corporations can profit by the experiment. The US appeal to the World Trade Organization rules is very natural, since they codified that principle; that's the point.

These issues, although they're very real and are affecting a huge number of people in the world, are actually secondary to other modalities to reduce sovereignty in favor of private power. Most important, I think, was the dismantling of the Bretton Woods system in the early 1970s by the United States, Britain, and others. That system was designed by the US and Britain in the 1940s. It was a time of overwhelming popular support for social welfare programs and radical democratic measures. In part for those reasons the Bretton Woods system of the mid-'40s regulated exchange rates and allowed controls on capital flow. The idea was to cut down wasteful and harmful speculation, and to restrict capital flight. The reasons were well understood and clearly articulated-free capital flow creates what's sometimes called a "virtual parliament" of global capital, which can exercise veto power over government policies that it considers irrational. That means things like labor rights, or educational programs, or health, or efforts to stimulate the economy or, in fact anything that might help people and not profits (and therefore is irrational in the technical sense).
The Bretton Woods system more or less functioned for about 25 years. That's what many economists call the "golden age" of modern capitalism (modern state capitalism, more accurately). That was a period, roughly up until about 1970, a period of historically unprecedented growth of the economy, of trade, of productivity, of capital investment, extension of welfare state measures, a golden age. That was reversed in the early '70s. The Bretton Woods system was dismantled, with liberalization of financial markets and floating exchange rates.

The period since has often been described as a "leaden age." There was a huge explosion of very short-term, speculative capital, completely overwhelming the productive economy. There was marked deterioration in just about every respect-considerably slower economic growth, slower growth of productivity, of capital investment, much higher interest rates (which slow down growth), greater market volatility, and financial crises. All of these things have very severe human effects, even in the rich countries: stagnating or declining wages, much longer working hours, particularly striking in the United States, cutback of services. Just to give you one example in today's great economy that everyone's talking about, the median income (half above, half below) for families has gotten back now to what it was in 1989, which is below what it was in the 1970s. It also has been a period of the dismantling of social democratic measures that had considerably improved human welfare. And in general, the newly imposed international order provided much greater veto power for the "virtual parliament" of private capital of investors leading to significant decline of democracy and sovereign rights, and a significant deterioration in social health.

While those effects are felt in the rich societies, they're a catastrophe in the poorer societies. These issues cut across societies, so it's not a matter of this society getting richer and that one getting poorer. The more significant measures are sectors of the global population. So, for example, using recent World Bank analyses, if you take the top 5 percent of the world's population and compare their income and wealth to the bottom 5 percent, that ratio was 78 to I in 1988 and 114 to 1 in 1993 (that's the last period for which figures are available), and undoubtedly higher now. The same figures show the top 1 percent of the world's population has the same income as the bottom 57 percent-2.7 billion people.

It's quite natural that dismantling of the post-war economic order should be accompanied by a significant attack on substantive democracy-freedom, popular sovereignty, and human rights-under the slogan TINA (There Is No Alternative). It's kind of a farcical mimicry of vulgar Marxism. The slogan, needless to say, is self-serving fraud. The particular socioeconomic order that's being imposed is the result of human decisions in human institutions. The decisions can be modified; the institutions can be changed. If necessary, they can be dismantled and replaced, just as honest and courageous people have been doing throughout the course of history.

Pedophilia and the Repression of the Press in Mexico
The Power of Corruption and the Corruption of Power
By LAURA CARLSEN
Counterpunch

Last year, a journalist in Cancun--a Mayan word for "nest of serpents"--uncovered and wrote about an international ring of pedophilia. The leader, Jean Succar, was subsequently arrested and is in jail in the state of Arizona, awaiting extradition.

In her book, The Demons of Eden, the courageous journalist, Lydia Cacho, mentions a close friend of Succar's--Kamel Nacif--the owner of a string of textile plants in the central Mexican state of Puebla.

Nacif is a wealthy and powerful man; his connections with political figures from Mexico's former ruling party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, go way back and have served him well. Known as the "King of Denim," his mistreatment of textile factory workers and abuse of power in the region have been denounced repeatedly but without affecting either his influence or his fortune.

A series of taped phone conversations delivered to the Mexican daily La Jornada reveal that Nacif, who is actively supporting Succar's defense, plotted to get revenge on the journalist who cracked the child sex and pornography ring.

By pulling strings with friends that included the governor and attorney general of the state of Puebla, the judge, and the owner of business concessions within the state prison, Nacif had Cacho arrested in Cancun for defamation of character and sent to prison in Puebla. According to Cacho and other testimonies, her arrest and transport violated basic human rights. The tapes indicate that to further punish the audacity of the journalist, arrangements had been made to have her raped in jail-a fate she narrowly escaped.

Mexican newspapers and citizen forums have expressed outrage at the apparent cynicism over the complicity between the government and the businessmen to make Cacho a cautionary tale for others whose work touches the central nodes of power, money, and influence.

Cacho's book carefully documents the ring led by Succar on the basis of research and the testimonies of five children. Although careful not to make specific accusations beyond the public case against Succar, in the investigations the names of several major figures of Mexico's governing and business elite surface. The U.S. government has been involved in the investigations that, in addition to connections in the United States, have opened leads in Brazil, Spain, and Hong Kong.

What emerges, and is undoubtedly just a tiny portion of the horrifying reality, are global circuits that prey upon society's most defenseless members-the children. Globalization and new communications technology have served to expand the arena and reach of international crime. Mexico has no corner on these new forms of violence and corruption that thrive on leaping borders.

Nor is it a coincidence that the victims are women and children. The global system has learned to adapt patriarchy in new and perverse ways. The classic authoritarian family where the father rules with impunity, controlling the lives and labor of his wife and children, has extended into the public and global sphere. Sadly, modern society instead of evolving beyond these fundamental inequities has merely developed new forms.

Mexico's new globalized industries-hailed as our hope for the future-use intensive female and child labor. The production of fruits and vegetables for export has come under scrutiny for multiple human rights and labor violations. In many of these fields of the future, most of the labor force is made up of women and children. Why? Because they're cheaper and they can't fight back effectively.

The textile and clothing plants that generated Succar and Nacif's wealth by employing mostly women with little or no protection for labor rights, the rape and sexual abuse of poor children that form part of Cancun's tourist attractions, the vast internet market for child pornography: all provide examples of how the worst aspects of patriarchy have been fortified by the global economic system. Women and children are still, as in the feudal family, on the bottom rung of power.

Because power, not sex, is what the breaking scandal in Mexico is really all about.

As revealed in the groundbreaking feminist work on rape, the driving force behind these crimes and their protective webs is the exercise of power. As the governor of Puebla struggles to save his name-and his job, since he faces Supreme Court and Congressional investigations-and businessmen seek to defend themselves, the close alliance between wealth, power, and victimization of the weak has been exposed. Globalization's tendency in this country and elsewhere to polarize wealth and power can only strengthen that alliance.

That the victims were children has finally mobilized the citizenry and there is a chance for justice in this case. Lydia Cacho is alive and out of jail, which is a major achievement.

But for every case that makes the headlines, thousands more remain in the dark.

Laura Carlsen directs the Americas Program of the International Relations Center. She can be reached at: laura@irc-online.org

The Crumbling Empire
Latin America and Asia are Breaking Free of Washington's Grip
By NOAM CHOMSKY
Counterpuch.org

The prospect that Europe and Asia might move towards greater independence has troubled US planners since the second world war. The concerns have only risen as the "tripolar order"--Europe, North America and Asia--has continued to evolve.

Every day Latin America, too, is becoming more independent. Now Asia and the Americas are strengthening their ties while the reigning superpower, the odd man out, consumes itself in misadventures in the Middle East.

Regional integration in Asia and Latin America is a crucial and increasingly important issue that, from Washington's perspective, betokens a defiant world gone out of control. Energy, of course, remains a defining factor--the object of contention--everywhere.

China, unlike Europe, refuses to be intimidated by Washington, a primary reason for the fear of China by US planners, which presents a dilemma: steps toward confrontation are inhibited by US corporate reliance on China as an export platform and growing market, as well as by China's financial reserves--reported to be approaching Japan's in scale.

In January, Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah visited Beijing, which is expected to lead to a Sino-Saudi memorandum of understanding calling for "increased cooperation and investment between the two countries in oil, natural gas and investment", the Wall Street Journal reports.

Already much of Iran's oil goes to China, and China is providing Iran with weapons that both states presumably regard as deterrent to US designs. India also has options. India may choose to be a US client, or it may prefer to join the more independent Asian bloc that is taking shape, with ever more ties to Middle East oil producers. Siddharth Varadarjan, the deputy editor of the Hindu, observes that "if the 21st century is to be an 'Asian century,' Asia's passivity in the energy sector has to end".

The key is India-China cooperation. In January, an agreement signed in Beijing "cleared the way for India and China to collaborate not only in technology but also in hydrocarbon exploration and production, a partnership that could eventually alter fundamental equations in the world's oil and natural gas sector", Varadarjan points out.

An additional step, already being contemplated, is an Asian oil market trading in euros. The impact on the international financial system and the balance of global power could be significant. It should be no surprise that President Bush paid a recent visit to try to keep India in the fold, offering nuclear cooperation and other inducements as a lure.

Meanwhile, in Latin America left-centre governments prevail from Venezuela to Argentina. The indigenous populations have become much more active and influential, particularly in Bolivia and Ecuador, where they either want oil and gas to be domestically controlled or, in some cases, oppose production altogether.

Many indigenous people apparently do not see any reason why their lives, societies and cultures should be disrupted or destroyed so that New Yorkers can sit in their SUVs in traffic gridlock.

Venezuela, the leading oil exporter in the hemisphere, has forged probably the closest relations with China of any Latin American country, and is planning to sell increasing amounts of oil to China as part of its effort to reduce dependence on the openly hostile US government.

Venezuela has joined Mercosur, the South American customs union--a move described by Nestor Kirchner, the Argentinian president, as "a milestone" in the development of this trading bloc, and welcomed as a "new chapter in our integration" by Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the Brazilian president.

Venezuela, apart from supplying Argentina with fuel oil, bought almost a third of Argentinian debt issued in 2005, one element of a region-wide effort to free the countries from the controls of the IMF after two decades of disastrous conformity to the rules imposed by the US-dominated international financial institutions.

Steps toward Southern Cone [the southern states of South America] integration advanced further in December with the election in Bolivia of Evo Morales, the country's first indigenous president. Morales moved quickly to reach a series of energy accords with Venezuela. The Financial Times reported that these "are expected to underpin forthcoming radical reforms to Bolivia's economy and energy sector" with its huge gas reserves, second only to Venezuela's in South America.

Cuba-Venezuela relations are becoming ever closer, each relying on its comparative advantage. Venezuela is providing low-cost oil, while in return Cuba organises literacy and health programmes, sending thousands of highly skilled professionals, teachers and doctors, who work in the poorest and most neglected areas, as they do elsewhere in the third world.

Cuban medical assistance is also being welcomed elsewhere. One of the most horrendous tragedies of recent years was the earthquake in Pakistan last October. Besides the huge death toll, unknown numbers of survivors have to face brutal winter weather with little shelter, food or medical assistance.

"Cuba has provided the largest contingent of doctors and paramedics to Pakistan," paying all the costs (perhaps with Venezuelan funding), writes John Cherian in India's Frontline magazine, citing Dawn, a leading Pakistan daily.

President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan expressed his "deep gratitude" to Fidel Castro for the "spirit and compassion" of the Cuban medical teams--reported to comprise more than 1,000 trained personnel, 44% of them women, who remained to work in remote mountain villages, "living in tents in freezing weather and in an alien culture", after western aid teams had been withdrawn.

Growing popular movements, primarily in the south but with increasing participation in the rich industrial countries, are serving as the bases for many of these developments towards more independence and concern for the needs of the great majority of the population.

© Noam Chomsky

Looting By Another Name
The Corporate Takeover of Iraq's Economy
By KEVIN ZEESE
Counterpunch.org

The roots of the economic takeover of Iraq are long and deep. They became more aggressive after the strongest U.S. ally in the region, the Shah of Iran, was deposed in the 1979. The roots of the quest of dominance of the oil-rich region are found in both the Democratic and Republican Party, but the most aggressive pursuit has been by George W. Bush.

Former President Jimmy Carter wrote in his memoirs that many Americans "deeply resented that the greatest nation on the earth was being jerked around by a few desert states." And, when he was president he put forward "the Carter Doctrine" in a State of the Union Address in 1980 that acknowledged "the overwhelming dependence of the Western democracies on oil supplies from the Middle East" and promised military force would be used to ensure access to Middle East oil: "Any attempt by an outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America and . . . will be repelled by any means necessary including the use of force."

But, according to a book by Antonia Juhasz, "The Bush Agenda," it was the Reagan, Bush I and Bush II administrations that most aggressively pursued the Iraq oil economy. Her excellent book tells a story that explains the reasons for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. It shows how the Reagan and Bush I administrations began by building a friendly trade relationship that provided money, arms, intelligence, and political protection to Saddam Hussein--despite his brutal record as a despotic dictator. And, how the Clinton years led to 'regime change' in Iraq becoming the policy of the United States and naturally following that was the Bush II's military invasion of the country.

She highlights the web of corporate interests from the oil, oil engineering and military sectors of the U.S. economy that have combined with government to the build-up to the invasion of Iraq. Many of the corporate players--Chevron, Bechtel, Lockheed Martin and Halliburton--have corporate leaders who went into and out of government over the years, influencing the direction of U.S. policy and then ensuring that their corporations profited mightily from the policies they put in place. Juhasz points to Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, L. Paul Bremer, Scooter Libby, Robert Zoellick, Paul Wolfowitz, Zalmay Khalilzad and George Shultz, as key players in the long term quest to takeover of Iraq's economy.

The Root of the Problem: Peak Oil in the U.S. and Corporate Globalization of Trade

The story of the invasion of Iraq and theft of the Iraqi economy is part of a larger story of multi-national corporations and corporate globalization affecting much of the world. Under the guise of "free trade" economic policies that make multinational corporations more powerful than governments. Laws favoring corporations are put in place: less regulation, less commitment to specific locations, and restrictions on government preventing the shift of economic benefit away from small, local business, workers, consumers and the environment. Globalization of trade claims to benefit by trickling down the profit, but in reality it continues to funnel wealth to the top--making the rich richer, the poor poorer and the middle class class smaller.

In 1970, U.S. domestic oil production hit its peak. The United States began to rely on foreign sources of oil, and went deeper into an oil addiction that continues to this day. It was also the decade where Middle East oil producers began to flex their muscles. OPEC used oil as a weapon in response to the 1973 Arab-Israel War, imposing an embargo on the United States. The embargo ended in March 1974, but the threat was heard.

President Carter fought back, in 1977 his Defense Secretary, Harold Brown, described the insecurity around oil as the most "serious threat to the long-term security of the United States." In 1978 the second oil shock hit with the Iranian oil embargo, reducing supplies by 5 percent, increasing oil prices by 150 percent causing inflation and interest rates to skyrocket in the U.S. and the debt load of developing countries to rapidly rise. Carter threatened military force to protect access to oil and turned to the World Bank to find more oil--by 1981 the World Bank had 28 oil projects underway.

President Reagan took the World Bank to another level--forcing countries to change their laws so that U.S. corporations would have direct access and control of oil. Reagan increased World Bank oil projects from 1982 to 1984 to more than 55. Reagan also aggressively put forward the trickle down theory--at home and abroad--making the wealthy wealthier would, in theory, trickle down resources to all. But the facts were the opposite. Juhasz points out that in the thirteen years before Reagan the income divide was shrinking--from 1967 to 1980 the poorest in the U.S. increased their share of total income by 6.5 percent. Reagan's aggressive redistribution of wealth to the wealthiest reversed that trend and from 1980 to 1990 the Census reports that the poorest Americans lost more than 10 percent of the income pie, while the wealthiest gained almost 20 percent.

Reagan and Bush I also dramatically increased trade with Iraq. They knew of Saddam's human rights atrocities, and that Iraq was on the U.S. terrorism list but they supplied money, arms, and commercial products to Iraq. They even allowed U.S. corporations to provide the ingredients for weapons of mass destruction. See the Arming of Iraq, .

Reagan removed Iraq from the list of terrorist nations in March 1982 to open up more trade. There was virtually no trade with Iraq in 1981 but by 1989 annual trade was up to $3.6 billion and had been expected to double in 1990 before Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. When Saddam refused U.S. efforts to build an oil pipeline, the strategy changed to the removal of Saddam from office. The first effort the Gulf War and the aftermath failed to achieve that goal.


The Blueprint for the Economic Takeover of the Middle East

The initial blueprint for the takeover of Iraq came in 1992 in the final year of the Bush I administration. The 1992 "Defense Planning Guidance" (DPG) describes America's overall military strategy and represents guidance from the president and secretary of defense. The 1992 DPG was written by Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Zalamy Khalizad, Scooter Libby, Eric Edelman and Colin Powell--six men who served Bush I and II, most worked in the Reagan administration as well.

The DPG was written after the success of the 1991 Gulf War, and the failure to remove Saddam Hussein from power--two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the emergence of the U.S. as a sole superpower. The document, built on the Carter Doctrine and remained in effect through the Clinton years, states the goal clearly--the objective of the United States in the Middle East is "to remain the predominant outside power in the region and preserve U.S. and Western access to the region's oil." The document describes an aggressive, unilateral, preemptive military agenda--that includes ad hoc coalitions of countries--rather than working through organizations like the U.N.

Many in this same group reunited in 1997 to establish the Project for the New American Century. PNAC restated support for the DNG and sought U.S. military dominance in the world. They recognize the importance of economic dominance as a compliment to unrivaled military power. They proposed an annual increase in military spending of $15 to $20 billion. Being able to act preemptively in the Middle East gets special attention noting that "the United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security." They describe Saddam Hussein as providing an "immediate justification" for a "substantial American force" in the Middle East. In January 1998 PNAC wrote President Clinton urging the removal of Saddam Hussein from power noting that Hussein was a threat to "a significant portion of the world's supply of oil."

Another key group was the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. The group was founded in 2002 by Robert Jackson, a Lockheed Martin executive who wrote the Republican Party foreign policy platform in 2000. He formed the Committee while at Lockheed and advocated aggressively for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. The Chairman of the Committee was former Secretary of State and Bechtel executive, George Shultz. Shultz wrote a column in The Washington Post in 2002 claiming the US must "ACT NOW. The danger is immediate. Saddam must be removed." The article argued heavily for an immediate attack because of weapons of mass destruction and Saddam's ties to terrorism saying: "If there is a rattlesnake in the yard, you don't wait for it to strike before you take action in self-defense." Shultz fanned the flames of fear saying the risk is "tens or hundreds of thousands killed by chemical, biological or nuclear attack." After the occupation Lockheed Martin received more than an $11 billion increase in sales and contracts including $5.6 million for work with the Air Force in Iraq. Bechtel received nearly $3 billion in Iraq reconstruction contracts.

The pro-military dominance advocates worked in other spheres as well. Paul Wolfowitz left the Clinton administration and went to Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where he began to advocate for a second Gulf War--this time including the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Zalmay Khalilzad, the current U.S. ambassador to Iraq, went to the Rand Corporation and founded the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and also served as a paid adviser to Unocal Oil Corporation (purchased by Chevron in 2005) where he openly advocated for a close relationship with the Taliban in order to build a 890 mile natural gas pipeline. In a Washington Post Oped he urged re-engaging the Taliban as "The Taliban does not practice the anti-U.S. Style of fundamentalism practiced by Iran."

Bush II united military and corporate globalization into what Juhasz calls "one mighty weapon of Empire." She points out that Bush's unilateralism became evident before 9/11 with the withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, opposition to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, rejection of the International Criminal Court and the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention protocols. Instead of a new DPG, Bush issued a National Security Strategy which makes U.S. status as the only superpower a reason to expand U.S. military spending to dissuade others from challenging U.S. dominance. Bush also put forward that America "will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self defense by acting preemptively."


Embedding U.S. Corporations in the Iraq Economy

After George W. Bush became president, those who had planned and advocated an attack on Iraq to remove Saddam took power. Dick Cheney held meetings under his "Energy Task Force" with corporations including Halliburton, Bechtel and Chevron. A draft of the Task Force's recommendations came out to the media in April 2001. The first recommendation under Strengthening Global Alliances included a graph of Iraq oil output to the United States in 2000 and said a goal was to "make energy security a priority of our trade and foreign policy." The second goal was for the U.S. to "support initiatives by [Mid East] suppliers to open up areas of their energy sectors to foreign investment." In 1998 Chevron's CEO said: "Iraq possesses huge reserves of oil and gas--reserves I'd love Chevron to have access to." His dream was about to be realized.

The well-known drum beat for war with Iraq began and after the success of the invasion the economic takeover began. The initial U.S. czar of Iraq, Jay Garner headed the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance. He advocated for putting Iraqis in charge as soon as possible, with elections held quickly. Garner was fired by Rumsfeld on the night he arrived in Iraq--fired, he believes because of these views. He was replaced by neo-con Paul Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority.

Bremer was in charge from May 6, 2003 to June 28, 2004. He had complete legislative, executive and judicial authority over Iraq. Bremer had four decades of corporate and government experience, working with Kissinger as managing director of Kissinger and Associates, as well as working in government with George Shultz and Donald Rumsfeld.

Prior to the invasion, Bearing Point received a $250 million contract from US AID to develop a blueprint for the remaking of Iraq's economy into a 'free-market' economy friendly to U.S. corporate interests. Bremer's job was to implement the Bearing Point plan. Juhasz points out that while there may have been an inadequate military plan, there was in fact a plan for the takeover and remaking of the economy of Iraq.

Bremer had the power to create laws by issuing "binding instructions or directives." Bremer issued 100 Orders, Juhasz in 2005 interview describes some of the key orders:

"Order No. 39 allows for: (1) privatization of Iraq's 200 state-owned enterprises; (2) 100% foreign ownership of Iraqi businesses; (3) "national treatment" - which means no preferences for local over foreign businesses; (4) unrestricted, tax-free remittance of all profits and other funds; and (5) 40-year ownership licenses.

"Thus, it forbids Iraqis from receiving preference in the reconstruction while allowing foreign corporations - Halliburton and Bechtel, for example - to buy up Iraqi businesses, do all of the work and send all of their money home. They cannot be required to hire Iraqis or to reinvest their money in the Iraqi economy. They can take out their investments at any time and in any amount.

"Orders No. 57 and No. 77 ensure the implementation of the orders by placing U.S.-appointed auditors and inspector generals in every government ministry, with five-year terms and with sweeping authority over contracts, programs, employees and regulations.

"Order No. 17 grants foreign contractors, including private security firms, full immunity from Iraq's laws. Even if they, say, kill someone or cause an environmental disaster, the injured party cannot turn to the Iraqi legal system. Rather, the charges must be brought to U.S. courts.

"Order No. 40 allows foreign banks to purchase up to 50% of Iraqi banks.

"Order No. 49 drops the tax rate on corporations from a high of 40% to a flat 15%. The income tax rate is also capped at 15%.

"Order No. 12 (renewed on Feb. 24) suspends "all tariffs, customs duties, import taxes, licensing fees and similar surcharges for goods entering or leaving Iraq." This led to an immediate and dramatic inflow of cheap foreign consumer products - devastating local producers and sellers who were thoroughly unprepared to meet the challenge of their mammoth global competitors."

Full interview at: http://democracyrising.us/content/view/180/164/.

The result of these orders was to create an economic environment more favorable to U.S. corporations than laws in the United States. As a result Iraq corporations, and Iraqi workers have been excluded from the rebuilding of Iraq. And, the Iraq reconstruction has failed to provide adequate electricity, food, sewage treatment and even gasoline--but U.S. corporations have profited handsomely from this failed reconstruction.

Juhasz describes the impact of U.S. policies on the Iraqi economy:

"The new economic laws have fundamentally transformed Iraq's economy, applying some of the most radical, sought-after corporate globalization policies in the world and overturning existing laws on trade, public services, banking, taxes, agriculture, investment, foreign ownership, media, and oil, among others. The new laws lock in sweeping advantages to U.S. corporations including greater U.S. access to, and corporate control of, Iraq's oil. And the benefits have already begun to flow. Between 2003 and 2004 alone, the value of U.S. imports of Iraqi oil increased by 86 percent and then increased again in the first three quarters of 2005."

To further embed a U.S. corporate economy in Iraq, the Iraq Constitution contained provisions that approve the Bremer Orders. The new Iraqi Constitution specifically repealed the Transitional Administrative Law, but did no such thing for Bremer's Orders and therefore they continue to be the law of the land. Thus, U.S. corporations continue their hold on the reconstruction of Iraq, and U.S. contractors continue to have full immunity from prosecution in Iraq. Beyond that, several articles of the Constitution re-enforce the Bremer Orders, e.g. Article 25 requires "modern economic principles that insure the full investment of its resources, diversification of its sources and the encouragement and development of the private sector; Article 26 "guarantees the encouragement of investment in various sectors," Article 27 allows for the privatization of state property. Juhasz points out that modern economic principles means corporate globalization and the market principles of the Bremer Orders, and private investment means foreign investment.

Further, the Iraq Constitution does nothing to end the military occupation. Early drafts of the Constitution included provisions that forbid Iraq "to be used as a base or corridor for foreign troops" and "to have foreign military bases in Iraq." These provisions were deleted in the final draft.

The Future: Oil Takeover, US Economic Dominance of the Middle East and the Battle Lines of World War III

The next stage for Iraq is a national oil law that will allow for oil companies to sign contracts with Iraq that gives them access and control over Iraqi oil. Juhasz points out that U.S. oil companies were brought into to advise the Bush administration on Iraq oil policy six months before the invasion. Further, the State Department's "Future of Iraq Project's Oil and Energy Group," which included Ibrahim Bahr al-Ulou,, a U.S. educated oil industry who served as Iraqi Minister of Oil from September 2003 and again beginning in May 2005, agreed that Iraq "should be opened to international oil companies as quickly as possible after the war."

The method being used for U.S. control of Iraq's oil is Production Sharing Agreements. PSA's favor private companies at the expense of exporting governments as the entire exploration, drilling and infrastructure-building process are turned over to private companies in contracts that last twenty-five to forty years. These contracts lock in the laws at the time the contract is signed. Thus contracts signed now would have the Bremer Orders as their law no matter what a future Iraqi government did.

Interim Prime Minister Allawi submitted guidelines for Iraq's new petroleum law in September 2004. The guidelines put "an end to the centrally planned and state-dominated Iraq economy" and urged the "Iraqi government to disengage from running the oil sector." Further, he recommended privatization stating the industry "should be exclusively based in the private sector, that domestic wholesale and retail marketing of petroleum products should be gradually transferred to the private sector, and that major refinery expansions or grassroots refineries should be built by the local and foreign private sectors." Finally, Allawi called for all undeveloped oil and gas fields to be turned over to private international oil companies. This, at a time when only seventeen of Iraq's eighty known oil fields have been developed. Article 109 of the Iraq Constitution re-enforces this goal stating that the federal government only administers existing oil and gas fields. The plans for a new Iraq petroleum law were made public at a press conference in Washington, DC by Adel Abdul Mahdi, formerly the Finance Minister, and now a Deputy President of Iraq.

Thus, the goal is about to be realized, control of Iraq's oil and the Iraqi economy. Iraq will be dominated by U.S. corporations, supported by the U.S. military. Ending the economic occupation of Iraq may be more difficult than ending the military occupation. The embedding of laws favoring foreign investment through the Bremer Orders and the Iraq Constitution will make it difficult to give Iraq back to the Iraqis.

The U.S. is already moving to gain control of the broader Middle East economy. The U.S. is aggressively pushing the U.S.-Middle East Free Trade Area. MEFTA is modeled after NAFTA and seeks to economically tie the region--where 54 percent of the world's oil reserves exist--to the United States. MEFTA seeks to cover 20 countries in the Middle East and North Africa. MEFTA is being developed through bi-lateral negotiations with each country, leading to a region-wide agreement. The U.S. is using the "us against them" strategy--those that oppose us will be viewed as against us. Part of the negotiation includes Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) which provide for duty free import into the United States. Unique in the Middle East is the trilateral nature of these agreements--the U.S. and another country plus Israel. To get duty free entry to U.S. markets a certain percentage of goods must go through Israel allowing Israel to take a piece of the profit.

Iraq is the first economy to fall. The massive U.S. Embassy in Baghdad shows it will be the base of U.S. operations in the region. Juhasz subtitles her book "Invading the World, One Economy at a Time." This is consistent with the views of PNAC, the 1992 DPG, and the 'access of evil' speech. As John Gibson, the founder of Committee for the Liberation of Iraq and a Lockheed Martin executive, said in 2003 "We hope Iraq will be the first domino and that Libya and Iran will follow. We don't like being kept out of markets because it gives our competitors an unfair advantage." PNAC labeled the countries of greatest concern 2000 as Iraq, Iran and North Korea--the future 'axis of evil' of George W. Bush. They placed Iran as the second target saying "Over the long-term, Iran may well prove as large a threat to U.S. interests in the Gulf as Iraq has."

President Bush has declared that we are now in World War III. While this World War is framed in terms of good vs. evil--terrorism against the United States--what it may really be about is U.S.-corporate and military dominance of the world. As Juhasz says--the U.S. taking over one economy at a time.

The Four Fundamentalisms and the Threat to Sustainable Democracy
[A version of this talk was delivered to the Brisbane Social Forum, Australia, May 21, 2006.]
by Robert Jensen
http://www.opednews.com

The most important words anyone said to me in the weeks immediately after September 11, 2001, came from my friend James Koplin. While acknowledging the significance of that day, he said, simply: “I was in a profound state of grief about the world before 9/11, and nothing that happened on that day has significantly changed what the world looks like to me.”

Because Jim is a bit older and considerably smarter than I, it took me some time to catch up to him, but eventually I recognized his insight. He was warning me that even we lefties -- trained to keep an eye on systems and structures of power rather than obsessing about individual politicians and single events -- were missing the point if we accepted the conventional wisdom that 9/11 “changed everything,” as the saying went then. He was right, and today I want to talk about four fundamentalisms loose in the world and the long-term crisis to which they point.

Before we head there, a note on the short-term crisis: I have been involved in U.S. organizing against the so-called “war on terror,” which has provided cover for the attempts to expand and deepen U.S. control over the strategically crucial resources of Central Asia and the Middle East, part of a global strategy that the Bush administration openly acknowledges is aimed at unchallengeable U.S domination of the world. For U.S. planners, that “world” includes not only the land and seas -- and, of course, the resources beneath them -- but space above as well. It is our world to arrange and dispose of as they see fit, in support of our “blessed lifestyle.” Other nations can have a place in that world as long as they are willing to assume the role that the United States determines appropriate. The vision of U.S. policymakers is of a world very ordered, by them.

This description of U.S. policy is no caricature. Anyone who doubts my summary can simply read the National Security Strategy document released in 2002 http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss/2002/ and the 2006 update http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss/2006/, and review post-World War II U.S. history http://www.zmag.org/crisescurevts/interventions.htm. Read and review, but only if you don’t mind waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat of fear. But as scary as these paranoid, power-mad policymakers’ delusions may be, Jim was talking about a feeling beyond that fear -- a grief that is much broader and goes much deeper.

Opposing the war-of-the-moment -- and going beyond that to challenge the whole imperial project -- is important. But also important is the work of thinking through the nature of the larger forces that leave us in this grief-stricken position. We need to go beyond Bush. We should recognize the seriousness of the threat that this particular gang of thieves and thugs poses and resist their policies, but not mistake them for the core of the problem.


FUNDAMENTALISMS

One way to come to terms with these forces is to understand the United States as a society in the grip of four fundamentalisms. In ascending order of threat, I identify these fundamentalisms as religious, national, economic, and technological. All share some similar characteristics, while each poses a particular threat to sustainable democracy and sustainable life on the planet. Each needs separate analysis and strategies for resistance.

Let’s start by defining fundamentalism. The term has a specific meaning in Protestant history (an early 20th century movement to promote “The Fundamentals”), but I want to use it in a more general fashion to describe any intellectual/political/theological position that asserts an absolute certainty in the truth and/or righteousness of a belief system. Such fundamentalism leads to an inclination to want to marginalize, or in some cases eliminate, alternative ways to understand and organize the world. After all, what’s the point of engaging in honest dialogue with those who believe in heretical systems that are so clearly wrong or even evil? In this sense, fundamentalism is an extreme form of hubris, a delusional overconfidence not only in one’s beliefs but in the ability of humans to know much of anything definitively. In the way I use the term, fundamentalism isn’t unique to religious people but is instead a feature of a certain approach to the world, rooted in the mistaking of very limited knowledge for wisdom.

The antidote to fundamentalism is humility, that recognition of just how contingent our knowledge about the world is. We need to adopt what sustainable agriculture researcher Wes Jackson calls “an ignorance-based worldview,” http://www.landinstitute.org/vnews/display...3/42c0db19e37f4 an approach to world that acknowledges that what we don’t know dwarfs what we do know about a complex world. Acknowledging our basic ignorance does not mean we should revel in stupidity, but rather should spur us to recognize that we have an obligation to act intelligently on the basis not only of what we know but what we don’t know. When properly understood, I think such humility is implicit in traditional/indigenous systems and also ­the key lesson to be taken from the Enlightenment and modern science (a contentious claim, perhaps, given the way in which modern science tends to overreach). The Enlightenment insight, however, is not that human reason can know everything, but that we can give up attempts to know everything and be satisfied with knowing what we can know. That is, we can be content in making it up as we go along, cautiously. One of the tragedies of the modern world is that too few have learned that lesson.

Fundamentalists, no matter what the specific belief system, believe in their ability to know a lot. That is why it can be so easy for fundamentalists to move from one totalizing belief system to another. For example, I have a faculty colleague who shifted from being a dogmatic communist to a dogmatic right-wing evangelical Christian. When people hear of his conversion they often express amazement, though to me it always seemed easy to understand -- he went from one fundamentalism to another. What matters is not so much the content but the shape of the belief system. Such systems should worry us.

That said, not all fundamentalisms pose the same danger to democracy and sustainability. So, let’s go through the four I have identified: religious, national, economic, and technological.


RELIGION AND NATION

The fundamentalism that attracts the most attention is religious. In the United States, the predominant form is Christian. Elsewhere in the world, Islamic, Jewish, and Hindu fundamentalisms are attractive to some significant portion of populations, either spread across a diaspora or concentrated in one region, or both. Given all the attention focused on religious fundamentalism, I’ll assume everyone has at least a passing acquaintance with the phenomenon and is aware of its threats.

But religious fundamentalism is not necessarily the most serious fundamentalist threat loose in the world today. Certainly much evil has been done in the world in the name of religion, especially the fundamentalist varieties, and we can expect more in the future. But, moving up the list, we also can see clearly the problems posed by national fundamentalism.

Nationalism poses a threat everywhere but should especially concern us in the United States, where the capacity for destruction in the hands of the most powerful state in the history of the world is exacerbated by a pathological hyper-patriotism that tends to suppress internal criticism and leave many unable to hear critique from outside. In other writing (Chapter 3 of Citizens of the Empire http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/asin/087...3901788-0263217 ) I have outlined in some detail an argument that patriotism is intellectually and morally bankrupt. Here, let me simply point out that because a nation-state is an abstraction (lines on a map, not a naturally occurring object), assertions of patriotism (defined as love of or loyalty to a nation-state) raise a simple question: To what we are pledging our love and loyalty? How is that abstraction made real? I conclude that all the possible answers are indefensible and that instead of pledging allegiance to a nation, we should acknowledge and celebrate our connections to real people in our lives while also declaring a commitment to universal principles, but reject offering commitment to arbitrary political units that in the modern era have been the vehicle for such barbarism and brutality.

That critique applies across the board, but because of our power and peculiar history, a rejection of national fundamentalism is most crucial in the United States. The dominant conception of that history is captured in the phrase “the city upon a hill,” the notion that the United States came into the world as the first democracy, a beacon to the world. In addition to setting the example, as soon as it had the capacity to project its power around the world, the United States claimed to be the vehicle for bringing democracy to that world. These are particularly odd claims for a nation that owes its very existence to one of the most successful genocides in recorded history, the near-complete extermination of indigenous peoples to secure the land and resource base for the United States. Odder still when one looks at the U.S. practice of African slavery that propelled the United States into the industrial world, and considers the enduring apartheid system -- once formal and now informal -- that arose from it. And odd-to-the-point-of-bizarre in the context of imperial America’s behavior in the world since it emerged as the lone superpower and made central to its foreign policy in the post-WWII era attacks on any challenge in the Third World to U.S. dominance.

While all the empires that have committed great crimes -- the British, French, Belgians, Japanese, Russians and then the Soviets -- have justified their exploitation of others by the alleged benefits it brought to the people being exploited, there is no power so convinced of its own benevolence as the United States. The culture is delusional in its commitment to this mythology, which is why today one can find on the other side of the world peasant farmers with no formal education who understand better the nature of U.S. power than many faculty members at elite U.S. universities. This national fundamentalism rooted in the assumption of the benevolence of U.S. foreign and military policy works to trump critical inquiry. As long as a significant component of the U.S. public -- and virtually the entire elite -- accept this national fundamentalism, the world is at risk.


ECONOMICS

Economic fundamentalism, synonymous these days with market fundamentalism, presents another grave threat. After fall of the Soviet system, the naturalness of capitalism is now taken to be beyond question. The dominant assumption about corporate capitalism in the United States is not simply that it is the best among competing economic systems, but that it is the only sane and rational way to organize an economy in the contemporary world.

In capitalism, (1) property, including capital assets, is owned and controlled by private persons; (2) people sell their labor for money wages, and (3) goods and services are allocated by markets. In contemporary market fundamentalism, also referred to as neoliberalism, it’s assumed that most extensive use of markets possible will unleash maximal competition, resulting in the greatest good -- and all this is inherently just, no matter what the results. The reigning ideology of so-called “free trade” seeks to impose this neoliberalism everywhere on the globe. In this fundamentalism, it is an article of faith that the “invisible hand” of the market always provides the preferred result, no matter how awful the consequences may be for real people.

A corresponding tenet of the market fundamentalist view is that the government should not interfere in any of this; the appropriate role of government, we are told, is to stay out of the economy. This is probably the most ridiculous aspect of the ideology, for the obvious reason that it is the government that establishes the rules for the system (currency, contract law, etc.) and decides whether the wealth accumulated under previous sets of rules should be allowed to remain in the hands of those who accumulated it (typically in ways immoral, illegal, or both; we should recall the quip that behind every great fortune is a great crime) or be redistributed. To argue that government should stay out of the economy merely obscures the obvious fact that without the government -- that is, without rules established through some kind of collective action -- there would be no economy. The government can’t stay out because it’s in from the ground floor, and assertions that government intervention into markets is inherently illegitimate are just silly.

Adding to the absurdity of all this is the hypocrisy of the market fundamentalists, who are quick to call on government to bail them out when things go sour (in recent U.S history, the savings-and-loan and auto industries are the most outrageous examples). And then there's the reality of how some government programs -- most notably the military and space departments -- act as conduits for the transfer of public money to private corporations under the guise of “national defense” and the “exploration of space.” And then there’s the problem of market failure -- the inability of private markets to provide some goods or provide other goods at the most desirable levels -- of which economists are well aware.

In other words, economic fundamentalism -- the worship of markets combined with steadfast denial about how the system actually operates -- leads to a world in which not only are facts irrelevant to the debate, but people learn to ignore their own experience.

On the facts: There is a widening gap between rich and poor, both worldwide and within most nations. According to U.N. statistics, about a quarter of the world’s population lives on less than $1 a day and nearly half live on less than $2. The 2005 U.N. Report on the World Social Situation, aptly titled “The Inequality Predicament,” stresses:

“Ignoring inequality in the pursuit of development is perilous. Focusing exclusively on economic growth and income generation as a development strategy is ineffective, as it leads to the accumulation of wealth by a few and deepens the poverty of many; such an approach does not acknowledge the intergenerational transmission of poverty.” http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/rwss/media%2005/

That’s where the data lead. But I want to highlight the power of this fundamentalism by reminding us of a common acronym: TGIF. Everyone in the United States knows what that means: “Thank God it’s Friday.” The majority of Americans don’t just know what TGIF stands for, they feel it in their bones. That’s a way of saying that a majority of Americans do work they generally do not like and do not believe is really worth doing. That’s a way of saying that we have an economy in which most people spend at least a third of their lives doing things they don’t want to do and don’t believe are valuable. We are told this is a way of organizing an economy that is natural.


TECHNOLOGY

Religious, national, and economic fundamentalisms are dangerous. They are systems of thought -- or, more accurately, systems of non-thought; as Wes Jackson puts it, “fundamentalism takes over where thought leaves off” http://www.oriononline.org/pages/oo/sideba...ca/jackson.html -- that are at the core of much of the organized violence in the world today. They are systems that are deployed to constrain real freedom and justify illegitimate authority. But it may turn out that those fundamentalisms are child’s play compared with U.S. society’s technological fundamentalism.

Most concisely defined, technological fundamentalism is the assumption that the increasing use of increasingly more sophisticated high-energy, advanced technology is always a good thing and that any problems caused by the unintended consequences of such technology eventually can be remedied by more technology. Those who question such declarations are often said to be “anti-technology,” which is a meaningless insult. All human beings use technology of some kind, whether it’s stone tools or computers. An anti-fundamentalist position is not that all technology is bad, but that the introduction of new technology should be evaluated on the basis of its effects -- predictable and unpredictable -- on human communities and the non-human world, with an understanding of the limits of our knowledge.

Our experience with unintended consequences is fairly clear. For example, there’s the case of automobiles and the burning of petroleum in internal-combustion engines, which gave us the interstate highway system and contributes to global warming. We haven’t quite figured out how to cope with these problems, and in retrospect it might have been wise to go slower in the development of a transportation system based on the car and think through the consequences.

Or how about CFCs and the ozone hole? Chlorofluorocarbons have a variety of industrial, commercial, and household applications, including in air conditioning. They were thought to be a miracle chemical when introduced in the 1930s -- non-toxic, non-flammable, and non-reactive with other chemical compounds. But in the 1980s, researchers began to understand that while CFCs are stable in the troposphere, when they move to the stratosphere and are broken down by strong ultraviolet light they release chlorine atoms that deplete the ozone layer. This unintended effect deflated the exuberance a bit. Depletion of the ozone layer means that more UV radiation reaches the Earth’s surface, and overexposure to UV radiation is a cause of skin cancer, cataracts, and immune suppression.

But, the technological fundamentalists might argue, we got a handle on that one and banned CFCs, and now the ozone hole is closing. True enough, but what lessons have been learned? Society didn’t react to the news about CFCs by thinking about ways to step back from a world that has become dependent on air conditioning, but instead looked for replacements to keep the air conditioning running. So, the reasonable question is: When will the unintended effects of the CFC replacements become visible? If not the ozone hole, what’s next? There’s no way to predict, but it seems reasonable to ask the question and sensible to assume the worst.

This technological fundamentalism makes it clear why Jackson’s call for an ignorance-based worldview is so important. If we were to step back and confront honestly the technologies we have unleashed -- out of that hubris, believing our knowledge is adequate to control the consequences of our science and technology -- I doubt any of us would ever get a good night’s sleep. We humans have been overdriving our intellectual headlights for some time, most dramatically in the second half of the 20th century. Most obviously, there are two places we have gone, with reckless abandon, where we had no business going -- into the atom and into the cell.

On the former: The deeper we break into the energy package, the greater the risks we take. Building fires with sticks gathered from around the camp is relatively easy to manage, but breaking into increasingly earlier material of the universe -- such as fossil fuels and, eventually, heavy metal uranium -- is quite a different project, more complex and far beyond our capacity to control. Likewise, manipulating plants through selective breeding is local and manageable, whereas breaking into the workings of the gene -- the foundational material of life -- takes us to places we have no way to understand.

We live now in the uncomfortable position of realizing we have moved too far and too fast, outstripping our capacity to manage safely the world we have created. The answer is not some naive return to a romanticized past, but a recognition of what we have created and a systematic evaluation of how to step back from our most dangerous missteps.


REDEFINING A GOOD LIFE

Central to that project is realizing that we have to learn to live with less, which we can accomplish only when we recognize that living with less is crucial not only to ecological survival but long-term human fulfillment. People in the United States live with an abundance of most everything -- except meaning. The people who have the most in material terms seem to spend the most time in therapy, searching for answers to their own alienation. This “blessed lifestyle” -- a term Bush’s spokesman used in 2000 to describe the president’s view of U.S. affluence -- perhaps is more accurately also seen as a curse.

Let’s return to CFCs and air-conditioning. To someone who lives in Texas, with its miserable heat half the year, it’s reasonable to ask: If not air-conditioning, then what? One possible reasonable response is, of course, to vacate Texas, a strategy I ponder often. More realistic: The “cracker house,” a term from Florida and Georgia to describe houses built before air-conditioning that utilize shade, cross-ventilation, and various building techniques to create a livable space even in the summer in the deep South. Of course, even with all that, there are times when it’s hot in a cracker house -- so hot that one doesn’t want to do much of anything but drink iced tea and sit on the porch. That raises a question: What’s so bad about sitting on the porch drinking iced tea instead of sitting inside in an air-conditioned house?

A world that steps back from high-energy/high-technology answers to all questions will no doubt be a harder world in some ways. But the way people cope without such “solutions” can help create and solidify human bonds. In this sense, the high-energy/high-technology world often contributes to impoverished relationships and the destruction of longstanding cultural practices and the information those practices carry. So, stepping back from this fundamentalism is not simply sacrifice but an exchange of a certain kind of comfort and easy amusement for a different set of rewards.

Articulating this is important in a world in which people have come to believe the good life is synonymous with consumption and the ability to acquire increasingly sophisticated technology. To miss the way in which turning from the high-energy/high-technology can improve our lives, then, supports the techno-fundamentalists, such as this writer in the Wired magazine:

“Green-minded activists failed to move the broader public not because they were wrong about the problems, but because the solutions they offered were unappealing to most people. They called for tightening belts and curbing appetites, turning down the thermostat and living lower on the food chain. They rejected technology, business, and prosperity in favor of returning to a simpler way of life. No wonder the movement got so little traction. Asking people in the world’s wealthiest, most advanced societies to turn their backs on the very forces that drove such abundance is naive at best.”

Naive, perhaps, but not as naive as the belief that unsustainable systems can be sustained indefinitely. With that writer’s limited vision -- which is what passes for vision in this culture -- it’s not surprising that he advocates economic and technological fundamentalist solutions:

“With climate change hard upon us, a new green movement is taking shape, one that embraces environmentalism’s concerns but rejects its worn-out answers. Technology can be a font of endlessly creative solutions. Business can be a vehicle for change. Prosperity can help us build the kind of world we want. Scientific exploration, innovative design, and cultural evolution are the most powerful tools we have. Entrepreneurial zeal and market forces, guided by sustainable policies, can propel the world into a bright green future.” http://wirednews.com/wired/archive/14.05/green.html
In other words: Let’s ignore our experience and throw the dice. Let’s take naivete to new heights. Let’s forget all we should have learned.


WHAT’S NEXT?

So far, it appears my criticism has been of the fundamentalist versions of religion, nation, capitalism, and high-technology. But the problem goes deeper than the most exaggerated versions of these systems. If there is to be a livable future, religion as we know it, the nation-state, capitalism, and what we think of as advanced technology will have to give way to new ways of understanding the world and organizing ourselves. We still have to find ways to struggle with the mystery of the world through ritual and art; organize ourselves politically; produce and distribute goods and services; and create the tools we need to do all these things. But the existing systems have proven inadequate to the task. On each front, we need major conceptual revolutions.

I don’t pretend to have answers, nor should anyone else. We are at the beginning of a long process of redefining what it means to be human in relation to others and to the non-human world. We are still formulating questions. Some find this a depressing situation, but we could just as well see it as a time that opens incredible opportunities for creativity. To live in unsettled times -- especially times in which it’s not difficult to imagine life as we know it becoming increasingly untenable -- is both frightening and exhilarating. In that sense, my friend’s acknowledgement of profound grief need not scare us but instead can be a place from which we see clearly and gather the strength to move forward.

What is that path? Tracking the four fundamentalisms, we can see some turns we need to make.

Technologically: We need to stop talking about progress in terms that reflexively glorify faster and more powerful devices, and instead adopt a standard for judging progress based on the real effects on humans and the wider world of which we are a part.

Economically: We need to stop talking about growth in terms of more production and adopt a standard for economic growth and development based on meeting human needs.

Nationally: We need to stop talking about national security and the national interest -- code words for serving the goals of the powerful -- and focus on people’s interests in being secure in the basics: food, shelter, education, and communal solidarity.

Religiously: We need to stop trying to pin down God. We can understand God as simply the name we give to that which is beyond our ability to understand, and recognize that the attempt to create rules for how to know God is always a failed project.

I want to end by reinforcing the ultimate importance of that recognition: Most of the world is complex beyond our ability to comprehend. It’s not that there’s nothing we can know through our rational faculties, but that it’s essential we recognize the limits of those faculties. We need to reject the fundamentalist streak in all of us, religious or secular, whatever our political affiliation.

We need to stop mistaking cleverness for wisdom. We need to embrace our limits -- our ignorance -- in the hopes that we can stop being so stupid.

When we do that we are coming to terms with the kind of animals we are, in all our glory and all our limitations. That embrace of our limitations is an embrace of a larger world of which we are a part, more glorious than most of us ever experience.

When we do that -- if we can find our way clear to do that -- I think we make possible love in this world. Not an idealized love, but a real love that recognizes the joy that is possible and the grief that is inevitable.

It is my dream to live in that world, to live in that love.

There is much work to be done if we want that world. There is enormous struggle that can’t be avoided. When we allow ourselves to face it, we will realize that ahead of us there is suffering beyond description, as well as potential for transcending that suffering.

There is grief and joy.

And there is nothing to do but face it.

http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/%7Erjensen/index.html

Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a member of the board of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center, http://thirdcoastactivist.org/. He is the author of The Heart of Whiteness: Race, Racism, and White Privilege and Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (both from City Lights Books). He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.

USA – the self-styled CEO of Planet Inc.
By Siv O'Neall
axisoflogic.com
May 26, 2006, 15:44

Neoliberalism is not inevitable

For all those millions and millions of people who have been brainwashed into believing that neoliberalism is the inevitable solution to all our economic and humanitarian problems on the planet, there is news.

The inevitability of the neoliberal economic system is a huge hoax, which has been acted out at the expense of the human race in the sole interest of profit for the few and the total subjugation of the billions of the rest of us. We, the working people, are, so far, obediently bending our backs and making do with the few crumbs the corporate rulers are throwing our way while we accommodate them with out ingrained belief that thats the way the system works, and thats the only way the system can ever work.


Actually, neoliberalism was intended to gradually strangle the economies of the third-world countries and thus seriously degrade the living standards of the people. The World Bank, the IMF and the WTO were set up to make it possible for the rich countries of the world to run the business of the planet, naturally under the judicious leadership and the ultimate profit of the multinational corporations mainly linked to the psychopathic and ruthless mega power that is the U.S. of A. Psychopathic mainly in as much as it is totally impervious to human and geopolitical reality. Europe and Asia were supposed to toe the line or else risk being deprived of their share of the booty.

If we focus in on the last 50 years alone, there was a time when, in the aftermath of World War II, there were hopeful signs that the world-wide scourge of starvation and disease could be dealt with. Third-world countries had hope that the world community would look realistically on this huge problem and there was actually hope that popular consensus would decree that mass starvation was unacceptable in a civilized world.

Bandung or the end of the first colonial era – an aura of hope

At the end of the second World War, the poor countries (then called the underdeveloped countries) got together for a ground-breaking conference in Bandung on Java, Indonesia in April 1955. After the numerous upheavals that have taken place in the geopolitical order of the world since that year, notably the Iranian revolution in 1979, the War in Vietnam ending in 1975, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 with the ensuing implosion of the Soviet empire, it seems of great practical interest to take a step back and look at the way the world was put together at that time.

In Bandung, 29 states and 30 resistance movements in still colonized countries (Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, etc.) were represented at this Asian-African conference which was initiated by India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka (Ceylon at the time), Burma and Indonesia. It was set up to mark the end of the colonial era. (Bandung or the end of the first colonial era - Le Monde Diplomatique, April 2005, reproduced in ‘Maniere de voir of June-July, 2006) The term ‘third world was coined by the French economist Alfred Sauvy in 1952, designating the non-aligned developing countries. The world was strictly divided between the nominally democratic West and the Soviet totalitarian colossus.

The Conference was to symbolize the stand of these ‘underdeveloped countries as being neither for the West nor for the East. Some remarkable leaders were at the head of some of the more prominent third-world countries at the time. There was Jawaharlal Nehru in India, Sukarno in Indonesia, Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt. These were men who did not subscribe to being leashed on to one great power or another. They were all as much as it was possible intent on remaining non-aligned.

Bandung was followed six years later by a similar conference in Belgrade with the independent-minded Marshal Tito as host and Yugoslavia was even for a while a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM).

There was an aura of hope and trust in the future, a vigor and a radiance of newly won freedom clearly visible at this conference of formerly colonized countries and the countries which were still fighting for their independence. There was a common feeling of a sunrise in the third world.

The originally Asian and African Non-Aligned Movement now included Yugoslavia, one of the Eastern European countries that was keeping its independence from the USSR. Numerous other conferences by the NAM followed and the number of countries rose to 115 representing 55% of the people on the planet. Some Latin American countries joined the NAM as well, and all of Africa was represented. NAM focuses on national struggles for independence, the eradication of poverty, economic development and the opposition to colonialism, imperialism, and neocolonialism. India, Egypt and South Africa were some of the most important members.

“The term "Non-Alignment" itself was coined by Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru during his speech in 1954 in Colombo, Sri Lanka. In this speech, Nehru described the five pillars to be used as a guide for Sino-Indian relations, which were first put forth by the contemporary Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai. Called Panchsheel, these principles would later serve as the basis of the Non-Aligned Movement. The five principles were:

1. Mutual respect for each other's territorial integrity and sovereignty

2. Mutual non-aggression

3. Mutual non-interference in domestic affairs

4. Equality and mutual benefit

5. Peaceful co-existence

The world's "non-aligned" nations declared their desire not to become involved in the East-West ideological confrontation of the Cold War.”

Neocolonialism and neoliberalism

What has become of this promise for a more just world? How did we get from this promise of hope and justice to the present system of exploitation that is covered by the concepts of neocolonialism and neoliberalism?

This Non-Aligned Movement was too great a hindrance for the imperial ambitions of the United States. The rise of powers in Africa, in Asia and even in their own backyard, Latin America, was impossible to accept. The United States, the uncontested leader of the ‘civilized world and the lone great power after the implosion of the Soviet empire, could brook no such arrogance on the part of lesser and ‘uncivilized countries which had barely stepped out of colonial dependence.

Ways to achieve super-power goals

It is clear that the U.S. administrations have consistently been focused on not letting anyone stop their ambitions towards sole domination of the planet. They have always done everything possible to stunt any independence movements, any moves towards democratic nationalism, where countries had the audacity to try to stand up on their own and for their leaders to fight to improve the livelihoods of their people. Whenever a country had a strong leader who was a potential threat to the U.S. world domination, the U.S. managed to intervene, either in the wings, plotting against the recalcitrant humanitarian leader, such as was the case with Salvador Allende in Chile (coup detat in 1973, U.S.-friendly General Pinochet taking over) or Sukarno in Indonesia in 1970 (U.S.-friendly Suharto installed in his place).

Or else, they would more openly fight mendacious wars to demonstrate their power. It could be done under the NATO emblem, such as in former Yugoslavia, or quite openly, such as Reagans ridiculous little war on Grenada or Clintons 1998 bombing of a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan.

Reagans horrendous Central American wars in the 1980s were considered too risky to be fought openly, so they had to hide behind the U.S.-supported contra movements always present in the countries considered by the U.S. administrations as rightfully belonging to the U.S. sphere of power.

In each case, there was always a pretext for the aggression that would be propagandized mainly for the benefit of the American people, and which always got the unfailing support of the mass media. War sells, be it in the fight against Communism or against terrorism.

Another effective way of imposing their power was by supplying corrupt African dictators with arms, in which game various European countries entered with the alacrity of winner take all. The tone was set by the Unites States and the former colonial powers were not slow to see the advantages of keeping the newly independent nations from developing internal strength and true independence by backing the opposition movements and so help develop the necessary contingencies for a civil war that might otherwise have been avoided. Even if the countrys leaders were originally all set to play a straight game to advance their country, the unscrupulous men at the helm of the planet solved that problem with promises of financial retribution to the rulers and/or the disappearing of politically undesirable individuals.

The fight against democracy

Patrice Lumumba, African nationalist leader, the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (June-September 1960), was brutally murdered after only a few months in power, since he was considered too far left, too close to the USSR and of course too independent for the Western powers. (Lumumba was replaced in 1965 by the deeply corrupt Mobutu Sese Seko.) His is just one of the most clear-cut cases of Western interference, the same as in the pretty open case of Allendes death in 1973, those two being among the most alarming cases of Western interference to keep emerging democracies from becoming too strong for comfort. If it was not the U.S. who backed the killing of Lumumba, it was certainly in their interest that it be done.

The powerful documentary ‘Darwins Nightmare (by Austrian documentary movie maker, Hubert Sauper) about the Nile perch in Lake Victoria, the alarming lack of concern for the suffering of the native people and the obscene profit of Western industrialists is but one example of what is currently going on all over Africa. The Western and Russian planes carry arms to Africa, to Tanzania in this case, (further delivered to wherever there is a civil war to back up or to instigate) and return with their cargo holds filled to the brim with Nile perch which Westerners love to eat, in this case mostly unaware of the crimes that have preceded the catch of the fish.

Having now dismembered and rendered unrealistic any form of resistance from Africa, trying to keep on superficially good terms with the big Asian economies, for the time being, the U.S. administrations are piqued and surprised to see Latin American countries rise up in disobedience and revolt. The possibility to dominate oil-rich Venezuela and other budding independent and socialist countries have become an absolute priority. For the time being though, the military is tied up in Iraq and there is no telling what the madmen have in store for Latin America when the day comes to take action against Chavez, Evo Morales and other indigenous or mestizo leaders, far too independent to suit U.S. world-dominating ambitions.

The brutality of eternal war and destabilization

However, keeping the world in continuous upheaval is the goal of the U.S. statesmen, and the openly expressed goal of the neocons in particular. Aggressive wars, civil wars, economic destabilization and bankruptcy of countries dependent on WTO and the World Bank for survival, are all means to the end of assuring U.S. world dominance. NATO was supposed to play the U.S. game (and did in the case of the Kosovo tragedy). The UN too was seen by the American administrations as a handy tool for enforcing American interests, thus the horrible ploy of the veto power of five countries, a power that has been used innumerable times by the U.S. and by the USSR/Russia, but far less by the other veto holding powers.

The one thing the U.S. administrations fear more than anything else is democracy – with its accompanying openness. Oh, they will mouth the word, but it doesnt have any real meaning any more. Americans are condescendingly allowed to live happily in the fantasy world that hundreds of years of propaganda have created for them, the belief that theirs is a democratic country. And whats more, it is the greatest democracy in the world, the most moral, the most devout, the most compassionate country in the world.


American ignorance and naivete are unlimited and the leaders very carefully see to it that things remain that way. Even looking back on history, it is doubtful if anyone can honestly refer to the rapacious United States of America as a great democracy. Ruthless killings and brutal grabbing of other peoples territories have always been the rule of the game, ever since the indescribably cruel decimation of the Native Americans.

The big surprise

This insolent and megalomaniac country, which has set out for itself the role of planetary leadership in a world where some resources are finite, even though there is plenty of food resources to feed the billions in the world, this countrys arrogant leaders are coming in for a huge surprise.

The spirit of independence and human dignity are far too powerful, far too deeply ingrained in the human soul, to make it possible in the long run to let one hubristic country take up the reins in a move that will lead to the death and destruction of their own people and of the planet.

People are already rising up, first of all in the many countries in Latin America where the citizens are stirred by a new-found sense of national and individual pride and power, where they finally see the possibility of eradicating extreme poverty and hunger as a goal which has been slow in coming.

They are speaking up, they are crying out, in defense of their national rights and values. Much more is to come the day the USA implodes from its own overreaching and arrogance. The noise of the rattling of American sabers will be drowned out in the general din from the battle cries of the long-suffering people and the voices of the new leaders who are taking over the running of the destinies of their own people.

© Copyright 2006 by AxisofLogic.com
_____________________

Siv ONeall is an Axis of Logic columnist, based in France. She can be reached at siv@axisoflogic.com

Welcome America's new ally in South America.
Colombia's 'Narco-Presidente'
By Jerry Meldon
consortiumnews.com
June 1, 2006

Across South America, voters – fed up with what many see as deep-seated economic inequality and political injustice – have rejected Washington’s preferred candidates and elected populist or center-left alternatives. But Colombia’s reelection of President Alvaro Uribe Velez has bucked that regional trend.

Winning about 60 percent of the vote on May 28, Uribe now stands as South America’s last right-wing head of state, a lonely voice siding with George W. Bush. Diminutive and thin-skinned, the 53-year-old Uribe also remains an anti-communist hard-liner fighting an insurgency dating back to the Cold War.

Uribe’s reelection sets the stage, too, for a new round of confrontation between the Bush administration and the populist government of Hugo Chavez from oil-rich Venezuela, which borders Colombia to the east and which has spearheaded the region’s drive for greater independence from the policies of Washington and the International Monetary Fund.

Tensions between Colombia and Venezuela have threatened to boil over in recent years, with Colombian officials accusing Venezuela of supporting leftist guerillas known as the FARC and Venezuelans suspecting Colombia of aiding U.S. efforts to destabilize and eliminate the Chavez government, which has withstood several coup attempts.

In the past few months, evidence has emerged to support some of those Venezuelan suspicions. Rafael Garcia, a cashiered official of Colombia’s federal police agency (DAS), alleged that the DAS plotted to assassinate Chavez.

Garcia, the former DAS chief of information systems, was accused of taking bribes to erase police files that incriminated right-wing paramilitary leaders. He then went public describing the Colombian plot to kill Chavez, as well as DAS help for narco-traffickers connected to a right-wing “death squad,” the United Self-Defense Forces, known as the AUC.

Garcia also alleged that the AUC murdered union activists and engineered voter fraud four years ago to help Uribe get elected.

Uribe lashed out at the press for printing Garcia’s accusations, but other Colombian officials vowed to clean up DAS corruption. The new DAS director Andres Penate boasted of firing 49 DAS officials suspected of wrongdoing.

But Jose Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch, said Penate faces a tough challenge because “the DAS has been fully penetrated by drug traffickers and paramilitary mafias.” [Reuters, April 20, 2006]

Landslide Victory

In the May 28 election, despite these allegations, Uribe won a landslide victory over left-of-center Democratic Pole candidate Carlos Gaviria. Despite a late surge in popularity at the expense of a centrist candidate, Gaviria came in a distant second with 20 percent. But public enthusiasm for Uribe was less than overwhelming, with 55 percent of eligible voters abstaining from voting.

To many of these Colombians, Uribe has failed to live up to his press clippings, at least those common in the mainstream U.S. news media, hailing him as a popular, Harvard-educated, free-market stalwart and Washington’s No. 1 ally in the “drug war.”

According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and its Colombian counterparts, Colombia remains the dominant source for cocaine and heroin in the U.S. market. Some estimates indicate that Colombia produces 90 percent of the cocaine consumed in the United States and 60 percent of the heroin (much of the rest coming from Afghanistan since Washington ousted the Taliban government after 9/11 and restored power to Afghan warlords.

DEA and other drug authorities also believe that the biggest share of Colombia's multibillion-dollar northbound drug trade is controlled by the paramilitary AUC, the violent right-wing group with which Uribe’s government has allegedly collaborated.

Garcia, the former DAS official, alleged that AUC thugs used intimidation and fraud to give Uribe 300,000 of his 5.3 million votes in the 2002 election. During Uribe’s first term, the AUC also appears to have increased its penetration of key government agencies, including the DAS, roughly the equivalent of Colombia’s FBI.

In its reliance on Washington’s advice and in its continuing counterinsurgency war, Colombia also seems stuck in a Cold War political/economic model. Yet, despite U.S. investment of billions of dollars, most of it through what was known as “Plan Colombia,” the problem with the political violence and the drug trafficking never seems to get much better and arguably gets worse.

As author Peter Dale Scott notes in his 2003 book, Drugs, Oil and War, “U.S. involvement in Colombia has escalated by stages since the original commitment to a counterinsurgency program under the Kennedy administration… At every stage, U.S. programs have aggravated the problem they are attempting to deal with.”

History of Violence

Colombia’s long history of violence – the origins of which Scott lays at the doorstep of a feudalistic oligarchy that dispossessed peasants and subjugated laborers with impunity – predates the first U.S. intervention in the early 1960s. (The 15-year-long “La Violencia” period began with the 1948 assassination of a popular presidential candidate.)

Furthermore, the crystallization of what had previously been a fragmented left-wing underground into an armed revolutionary guerilla movement, occurred in response, not prior, to U.S. intervention.

Washington intervened in Colombia after the Indochinese and Cuban revolutions of the 1950s. Throughout the Cold War, but particularly then and in the Reagan era, the U.S. government viewed political developments through red-tinted glasses, seeing evidence of Soviet expansionism in every revolutionary movement.

Determined to block another revolution in Latin America, Washington applied new CIA counterinsurgency techniques in Colombia.

“In February 1962,” Scott writes, “a U.S. Special Warfare team, headed by General William Yarborough, visited [Colombia] for two weeks.” Following that visit, “the Special Warfare experts at Fort Bragg rushed to instruct the Colombian army in …counterinsurgency techniques…

“[Gen. Yarborough] recommended development of a ‘civil and military structure… to perform counter-agent and counter-propaganda functions and as necessary execution, sabotage, and/or terrorist activities [emphasis added] against known communist proponents. … In the wake of Yarborough’s visit, a series of training teams arrived, contributing to the Colombian Army’s Plan Lazo, a comprehensive counterinsurgency plan implemented between 1962 and 1965.”

As result, according to counterinsurgency historian Michael McClintock, “The banditry of the early 1960s…was transformed into organized revolutionary guerilla warfare after 1965, which has continued to date.”

Worse yet, Plan Lazo also spawned the paramilitary death squads that today control much of the narcotics traffic and about 30 percent of the Colombian legislature.

A key element of Fort Bragg’s concept of counterinsurgency, according to training manuals cited by Scott, was “the organization of ‘self-defense units’ and other paramilitary groups, including ‘hunter-killer teams.’ The thinking and nomenclature of these field manuals were translated and cited in the Colombian army’s counter-guerilla manual, Reglamento de Combate de Contraguerillas.

“It defined the self-defense group (junta de auto-defensa) as ‘an organization of a military nature made up of select civilian personnel from the combat zone who are trained and equipped to carry out actions against groups of guerillas.’ The autodefensas [as the paramilitaries became known] have been a scourge ever since.”

More Fires

In the 1970s, Washington continued to pour fuel onto Colombia’s fires.

The CIA, Scott writes, “offered further training to Colombian and other Latin American police officers at its so-called bomb school in Los Fresnos, Texas. There AID [the Agency for International Development], under the CIA’s so-called Public Safety Program, taught a curriculum including ‘Terrorist Concepts; Terrorist Devices; Fabrication and Functioning of Devices’ Improvised Triggering Devices; Incendiaries,’ and ‘Assassination Weapons: A discussion of various weapons which may be used by the assassin.’ During congressional hearings, AID officials admitted that the so-called bomb school offered lessons not in bomb disposal but in bomb making.

“Trained terrorist counterrevolutionaries thus became assets of the Colombian security apparatus. They were also employed by U.S. corporations anxious to protect their workforces from unionization as well as in anti-union campaigns by Colombian suppliers to large U.S. corporations. Oil companies in particular have been part of the state-coordinated campaign against left-wing guerillas.”

According to more mainstream versions of how the “death squads” were born, rich landowners living in fear of kidnapping by leftist guerillas paid protection money to right-wing militias. By 1981, the right-wing militias had morphed into civilian-murdering squads operating alongside the Colombian army.

Scott notes that the leftist guerillas also kidnapped drug kingpins, who joined with the army and established a training school for a nationwide counterterrorist network, Muerte a Sequestradores (MAS, Death to Kidnappers).

The traffickers put up the money and the generals contracted for Israeli and British mercenaries to come to Colombia to run the school. A leading graduate was Carlos Castano, who later became head of the AUC, which carried out the murders of hundreds of civilian opposition leaders and peace activists.

The Colombian legislature outlawed the autodefensas in 1989. But, according to a 1996 report by Human Rights Watch, the CIA and Colombian authorities cloned new ones.

Writing in the Progressive in 1998, Frank Smyth reported that “In the name of fighting drugs, the CIA financed new military intelligence networks [in Colombia] in 1991. But the new networks did little to stop drug traffickers. Instead, they incorporated illegal paramilitary groups into their ranks and fostered death squads.

“These death squads killed trade unionists, peasant leaders, human-rights workers, journalists and other suspected ‘subversives.’ The evidence, including secret Colombian military documents, suggests that the CIA may be more interested in fighting a leftist resistance movement than in combating drugs.”

Implicated Americans

Some U.S. Army personnel also appear to have been corrupted by the easy drug money. Laurie Hiatt, wife of Col. James Hiatt, the Army’s top counter-narcotics official in Colombia, was arrested for smuggling cocaine to New York City.

Hiatt, who was regularly briefed the U.S. military’s anti-drug spy flights, was himself convicted for helping his wife launder drug profits.

While FARC guerillas have financed their operations by taxing coca farmers in the south, right-wing AUC paramilitaries in the north have controlled actual cocaine production and transportation to the U.S. – in partnership with Colombia’s corrupt armed forces.

In November 1998, a military plane that never left the Colombian air force’s hands landed in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, with 1,600 pounds of cocaine. Just last week Colombian soldiers ambushed and wiped out an elite 10-member police counter-narcotics team and their informer, as they were about to make a major drug seizure.

Other evidence also points to links between drug lords and Uribe’s inner circle.

Between 1997 and 1998, U.S. Custom agents in California seized three Colombia-bound ships carrying 25 tons of potassium permanganate, a key precursor chemical in the production of cocaine, NarcoNews reported in 2002. The 25 tons were enough to produce 500,000 kilos of cocaine with a U.S. street value of $15 billion.

All three shipments were headed for GMP Productos Quimicos in Medellin, whose owner according to the DEA was Pedro Juan Moreno, Uribe’s former campaign manager, chief of staff and right-hand man.

While chief of staff to Uribe, Moreno set up armed vigilante groups known as CONVIVIRS (Rural Vigilence Committees). According to Amnesty International, CONVIVIRS was a cover for government-funded training camps and recruiting agencies for paramilitary death squads.

They committed so many bloody massacres that Colombia’s government was forced to ban CONVIVIRS in 1997. But instead of turning in their weapons, they were allowed to join Carlos Castano’s AUC paramilitary organization.

Under Uribe, the Colombian military has focused on subduing FARC, especially in regions where Occidental Petroleum and other U.S. companies are extracting oil. It also helped Uribe’s re-election that, at least partly as result of that focus, kidnappings and other crimes went down sharply.

The Drug Apple Cart

However, six years later, after Washington's investment of $4 billion in Plan Colombia and additional hundreds of millions in its wake, the supply of cocaine to the North American market has hardly been dented. That’s because Uribe has done little to upset the AUC apple cart.

Uribe did push through legislation called the “Justice and Peace Law,” which ostensibly was designed to demobilize the AUC.

In a May 26, 2006, editorial, the New York Times wrote that the law “was supposed to offer paramilitary fighters incentives to put down their guns… [but] instead… let them continue their criminal activities undisturbed…

“Now the Constitutional Court has strengthened the demobilization law … [requiring that AUC members] confess in full to their crimes and provide the authorities with the information necessary to dismantle these criminal gangs. The court also struck down a provision that would have given prosecutors a cripplingly short time to prepare cases.”

Significantly, the editorial continues, “Uribe’s administration has twice written bills that restrict the jurisdiction of the Constitutional Court, which is the most important remaining check on the president’s power. Uribe may try again if he is elected to a second term on Sunday.

“He enjoys the backing of Washington, which considers him a counterweight to Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. The American ambassador, William Wood, has enthusiastically supported Mr. Uribe’s sweetheart deal for the paramilitaries.”

Now Colombians have re-elected Uribe who, like his good friend and fellow Ivy Leaguer, George Bush, models himself after absolute monarchs like Louis XV of France who is said to have declared, “Apres moi le deluge” (after me, the flood; his heir, Louis XVI, was toppled by the French Revolution and ultimately decapitated).

Uribe, before the May 28 vote, simply warned his countrymen, “it’s either me or catastrophe.”

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Jerry Meldon is an associate professor (chemical and biological engineering) at Tufts University in Massachusetts.

"The United States is Terrified" - Noam Chomsky on Latin America's Move Towards "Independence and Integration"
democracynow.org
Tuesday, June 6th, 2006

AMY GOODMAN: As we end today's show, we turn to Noam Chomsky, the renowned linguist and political analyst. He was in New York Monday, where he gave a news conference at the United Nations. Democracy Now! was there to capture some of his two-hour exchange with reporters from around the world.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Now remember, the U.S. is a global power, so you can't just look at one region. You have to look at what's going on everywhere. So if we go back, say, to the last intelligence projection of the Clinton administration, National Intelligence Council, year 2000, their projection for the next 15 years, they -- just keeping to energy, but there's a lot more. They took it as a matter of course that the United States would control Middle East oil. They don't discuss that much. And then they say the United States, though it will control Middle East oil, because that’s a lever of world control, nevertheless it, itself, will rely on what were called more stable Atlantic Basin resources, meaning West African dictatorships and the western hemisphere. That's what the U.S. will rely on.

Well, what's been going on in Latin America since then significantly threatens that. For the first time in its history, first time since the Spanish colonization, Latin America is moving towards a degree of independence and also a degree of integration. The history of Latin America -- Latin America is very sharply split between a tiny rich elite and huge poverty, and the rich elite have been the only active ones politically. They were oriented towards the colonial power. So that's where they ship their capital. That's where they have their second wealthy homes, you know, send their kids to school, this whole business. Very little integration internal to Latin America. I mean, even the transportation system shows that. It's beginning to change. They are moving towards a degree of independence and towards a degree of integration.

And the United States is terrified. Just keeping to oil alone, it means that the energy resources -- I mean, the major energy producer in the hemisphere is Venezuela. The U.S. kicked the British out under Wilson, Woodrow Wilson. It’s known as Wilsonian idealism. They kicked the British out as soon as the oil age began, because they knew that Venezuela had enormous oil resources. That meant supporting a bunch of utterly brutal dictators, while Venezuela became by 1928 the leading oil exporter in the world. It’s remained very high. Venezuela is now going towards independence, and the United States is frantic. That's why you have this hysteria about Chavez. It’s not because he's attacking anyone or anything like. It's hysteria because he's not following orders. It’s kind of like Serbia, but much more serious, because this is a big energy producer.

Furthermore, it influences others. The major energy producer in South America second to Venezuela is Bolivia. Well, you know what just happened there. They're moving towards independence, as well. And, in fact, the whole region from Venezuela down to Argentina is pretty much out of control, not totally, but pretty much.

The U.S. in the past has had two fundamental mechanisms for controlling Latin America: one is violence, the other is economic strangulation. They're both weakening. The last exercise of violence was in the year 2002, when in its dedication to democracy promotion the U.S. supported a military coup to overthrow the elected government of Venezuela. Well, had to back down, for one thing, because there was a popular uprising in Venezuela. But another reason was just the reaction in Latin America, where democracy is taken a lot more seriously than it is in North America and Europe and people don't think it's amusing anymore to have elected governments overthrown by a military coup. So the U.S. had to back down and turn to subversion instead, which is what’s going on now. That's the last major use of violence.

And so, the U.S. is preparing for more use of violence. If you take a look at the number of U.S. military personnel throughout Latin America, the military bases, the training of Latin American officers, that's all going up very sharply. In fact, for the first time ever, there are now more U.S. military personnel in Latin America than personnel for the major federal aid organizations. That never happened during the Cold War. Also military training for Latin American officers, and you know what that means.

Military training is being shifted from the State Department to the Pentagon. That's important. The State Department is under congressional supervision, and there are conditionalities, human rights and democracy conditionalities. They're not imposed very much, but they're there, you know, and they have some effect. You switch it to the Pentagon, there's no controls. Do whatever you want. And the whole region is surrounded by bases, and I suspect there will be secessionist movements coming along in Venezuela and Bolivia and possibly Iran. So the military option has by no means been abandoned, but it’s nothing like what it was before. I mean, in the past, you just overthrew governments, you know, didn't think twice about it.

As for the economic option, that's being lost, too. The most dramatic case, perhaps, was Argentina. Argentina was the poster child for the IMF. And following IMF rules, it led to the worst economic disaster in its history, totally collapsed. Then, violating IMF rules radically, they pulled out of it and have had rapid growth. And the international investing community and the IMF, which is a branch of the Treasury Department, couldn't do anything about it, even the refusal to pay debt. And Argentina -- in fact, the president of Argentina said, ‘Well, we're ridding ourselves of the IMF.’ That means of U.S. economic strangulation. And worse, he was helped in that by Venezuela, which bought a large part of the debt. Bolivia is probably doing the same. Brazil had already done it. Well, you know, you rid yourself of the IMF, meaning the Treasury Department, that's seriously weakening the measures of economic strangulation.

And it's worse. A lot of these policies are gaining significant popular appeal. Just read a scholarly paper by a very anti-Castro Cuban American scholar, who reports -- I don't know where he got it from, but he said about 170,000 Latin Americans have been, in the last couple years, have been treated in Cuban medical facilities, and most of them restoring sight under Cuban-Venezuelan programs, where Venezuela pays for it and people -- blind people, others who need medical care in the U.S. dependencies, where they can't get it, of course -- are sent to Cuba, where they come back seeing. They were blind. You know, okay, that has its effects on countries. Called Operation Miracle.

And within Venezuela, as far as -- you can like it or hate it, but the interesting question is what Venezuelans think about it. Okay, well, a good knowledge of that. There's extensive polls taken, Latin American and North American polls. It turns out that the popularity of the government has shot way up in the last -- since 1998, and it now is the most popular elected government in Latin America; in fact, in the hemisphere, because this government is not popular. So it's the most popular elected government in Latin America, and it keeps going up. Well, reasons not too obscure, but, sure, it's driving the United States berserk. That's why you have the constant hysteria from the government and the media about the terrible things in Venezuela and Bolivia.

AMY GOODMAN: Noam Chomsky speaking at the United Nations yesterday. Noam Chomsky is MIT linguist. His latest book is called Failed States.

Closure demanded for “School of Assassins”
Pablo Long.
lapress.org
May 25, 2006

Four South American countries refuse to send their military personnel to the controversial School of the Americas.

Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina and Uruguay have stopped sending their military officers to the School of the Americas (SOA), the US army-run Spanish-language military academy. Over the last 60 years, 62,000 officials have graduated from the institution, among them some of Latin America’s most ruthless dictators.

The SOA is losing four countries whose citizens lived through some of its bloodiest teachings, and more withdrawals could be on the way.

Brazil, Chile, Peru and Ecuador are stops on a tour by Roy Bourgeois, a Catholic priest who runs the School of the Americas Watch (SOAW), a watchdog group whose mission is to close the institution indefinitely. In a visit to Latin America in March and April Bourgeois helped convince Argentina, Bolivia and Uruguay to leave the SOA, following Venezuela’s January 2005 decision.

In the 60 years since the SOA began training military personnel from 18 countries in the region in low-intensity warfare, counter-insurgency tactics, commando operations, psychological and other interrogation techniques, "all so far from that aim of promoting democracy and educating military personnel in the respect of human rights, the motto with which it was created in 1946," said Bourgeois.

At least 11 Latin American dictators graduated from the SOA, including Argentines Leopoldo Galtieri (1981-82) and Roberto Viola (1981), Bolivians Hugo Banzer Suarez (1971-78 ) and Luis Garcia Meza (1980-81), Guatemalan Efrain Rios Montt (1982-83), Honduran Juan Melgar Castro (1975-79), Panamanian Manuel Noriega (1983-89), Brazilian Humberto Castelo Branco (1964-67), Uruguayan Gregorio alvarez (1981-85), Ecuadorian Guillermo Rodriguez Lara (1972-76), and Chilean Augusto Pinochet (1973-90).

Another of the SOA’s students was now-deceased Salvadoran army major Roberto D’Aubuisson, who graduated in 1972. D’Aubuisson is credited with founding death squads in El Salvador, one of which was responsible for the murder of Bishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero en 1980.

But powerful officials in the shadow of Latin American heads of state also received training from the institution, and put the SOA’s teachings to work in the form of regimented assassinations and torture. Vladimiro Montesinos, the "power behind the throne," security advisor to Peru’s ex-President Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000), was a star student at the SOA, as was Manuel Contreras, head of secret services during the Chilean dictatorship, who was responsible for the murders of former army chief Carlos Prats in 1974 and ex-Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier in 1976.

On March 27, Argentina’s Defense Minister Nilda Garre said: "Not only will Argentina not send officials to the School of the Americas, but it is illegal to send them because this ill-fated institution provides training in areas of interior security and the fight against drug-trafficking, and the military are prohibited by law to do that here."

Uruguay’s Defense Minis