Shirin and Sameer's blog

Jon Stewart on Obama's inauguration speech

2009-01-22T13:08:00.001-08:00

This one is just too funny.

Honestly Jon, when Obama says this stuff, I don't think he means it. And that gives me hope.

Yes, the speechwriters are pretty similar at least.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Changefest '09 - Obama's Inaugural Speech

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

Woodie Guthrie's Anthem (with good old socialist lyrics

2009-01-21T19:53:00.001-08:00

The extent to which the Obama administration represents a meaningful policy change from Bush is somewhat debatable, but the change in tone is already very clear. Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen helped to set that tone on Sunday with a version of Woody Guthrie's "This land is your land" that included some of the lyrics that are usually edited out.

My favourite line:
There was a big ole sign there
Said "private property"
but on the other side
it didn't say nothing
That side was made for you and me

The performance is below and you can click on the picture above to learn more about Woody Guthrie.

What would MLK say?

2009-01-20T18:54:00.001-08:00

The last few days have been full of conflicting emotions for me. On the one hand, I'm glad and a little inspired that the people of the United States have elected their first leader from a minority community. For a country born of the genocide of native americans, nurtured on slavery and full to this day of contempt for its impoverished peoples, this is a huge step. It means that we're a far more civilized place than we were even when I grew up in the 1980s, and certainly more civilized than we were in the era of Jim Crow apartheid and before.

But on the other hand, the carnage in Gaza has really left me feeling hollow. To think that a country can impose an economic blockade on its own occupied territory, and then when that blockade is resisted go in and kill more than a thousand, wound several thousand, leave as many as 30,000 homeless... It's terrible and makes one wonder if we as a species have really progressed since the time of the crusades, or Genghis Khan or Hitler. The fact that it is all done with U.S. money and U.S. political support means that all of us are ultimately responsible for this carnage.

Two articles caught my attention today. The first, on the BBC website, shows Ban Ki-moon, secretary General of the UN and a man not known for emotional outbursts to say the least, completely losing control while talking to journalists in Gaza about the devastation.

Appearing stern and at times angry, Mr Ban called the attacks on Gaza "outrageous" and demanded guarantees that it would never happen again.

"I have protested many times. I am today protesting again in the strongest terms. I have asked (for a) full investigation and (to) make those responsible people accountable," he said.

"I am just appalled. I am not able to describe how I am feeling. This was an outrageous and totally unacceptable attack against the United Nations."

Israeli shells hit the UN headquarters as well as two UN schools during the recent three-week offensive. The headquarters were badly damaged and nearly 40 people were killed near one of the schools.

The second article, on Al-Jazeera, shows that the main political fallout of the war is that all the various factions in Gaza are uniting behind Hamas.

The al-Aqsa Martyr's Brigade, an armed wing of Fatah, once threatened to kill Khalid Meshaal, the leader of Hamas.

However, from the beginning of the war on Gaza up to the ceasefire called by Palestinian factions on Sunday, it was fighting shoulder to shoulder with its former rival, lobbing rockets into Israel from the beleaguered coastal strip, Fatah representatives in Damascus say.

Israel says it has dealt Hamas a crippling blow, but its 22-day onslaught that killed around 1,300 civilians and injured at least 6,000 more has brought together a slew of Palestinian factions, many of them previously sworn enemies of Hamas.

Many observers are left wondering if the Hamas-allied coalition will be a new front against Israel and whether Hamas will be able to prevent other factions from launching attacks from Gaza, breaking the fragile calm.

"Israel's aggression on Gaza has unified the Palestinian groups in the face of the Zionist aggression," says Mohammed Nazzal, a member of Hamas' political bureau in Damascus.

This was completely predictable, of course. When your people are under attack, political differences matter less. The important thing is to get together and fight to protect your homes and your families, and if Hamas is leading the defense, then you fight with Hamas.

Since there's been so much talk of Dr. Martin Luther King around Obama and the inauguration, it's important to remember what he said about wars of aggression. King is most known for his "I have a Dream" speech, but in my mind, this speech given April 1967 - a year to the day before he died - was even more important. The entire speech is worth reading, but for me the most important line is:

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

And neither can we.

Here's the first part of the speech. For the rest, you can go here.

Chomsky on Colonialism and Gaza

2009-01-17T08:42:00.001-08:00

Photo: AP

A couple days ago I had the opportunity to do an interview with Noam Chomsky. The bulk of the interview was on the economic crisis, but I would have felt guilty not asking him about Gaza given what's going on.

The whole interview is definitely worth reading (like everything Chomsky does) but this line particularly struck me:

I think one of the reasons for popular support for [the Israeli occupation and military offensives] in the United States is that it resonates very well with American history. How did the United States get established? The themes are similar.

Colonialism looks very similar no matter where it occurs. How similar are the ideas of "manifest destiny", which basically said that all land between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans belonged to European settlers, and the zionist notion that the land between the Jordan River and the Red sea belongs to Jews?

And of course the really striking thing is what kind of blinders folks in the U.S., Israel, and mainstream media all over the world have to be wearing to not be able to see that. As a friend of mine commented yesterday, if a thousand trees were cut down in a forest, there would be outrage. If a thousand animals were killed in a zoo there would be disgust. A thousand Palestinians - eh, that's ok, I guess. Very disturbing.

Giving Bush the shoe

2008-12-15T13:53:00.001-08:00

I'm not sure that any image can sum up what has been the most disastrous presidency in history, but this comes pretty close.

Obama's economic team

2008-11-28T16:54:00.001-08:00

The Washington Post says it all:

Understanding Mumbai

2008-11-28T11:07:00.001-08:00

The world has been alight with news of the coordinated attacks against targets in Mumbai for the last two days. What has happened is despicable, and for many of us, inexplicable. This reflection in an online cricket magazine sums up what a lot of us with ties to Mumbai and India are going through:

I have watched a city of a million dreams held hostage by 20 or so men who have purged from their souls every trace of humanity - let's not confer on them the dignity of a religion - and I have felt the blood drain out of me.

I have felt a sense of paralysis and rage. My family and I are safe at home, none of my friends were in the hotels or at the other attack sites; but I am numb, not with fear or personal loss, but something far deeper: a sense of overpowering bleakness.

And of course it's not just Indians who feel this sense; we all share in the outrage and shock simply by virtue of being human.

Certainly these are terrible attacks that must be condemned and the perpetrators - including whoever financed this operation - must be brought to justice.

And a lot of us are also struggling with the question of "why?"

While it's difficult to think about at the moment, we should not be afraid to wrestle with this question, and the answers are not straightforward. One answer is that the so-called war on terror has increased the incidents of violence against civilians in the world and introduced a kind of double standard where "their" lives are not as important as "our lives". The three thousand killed in the World Trade center were the victims of terrorism, but the three thousand killed in the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan immediately thereafter were "collateral damage" in the "war on terror".

As Deepak Chopra says so eloquently in this clip, this kind of attitude leads moderates on all sides to become extremists.

52 years ago, two of the greatest thinkers the world has ever known, Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell put this question to all of us:

Here, then, is the problem which we present to you, stark and dreadful and inescapable: Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war?

So far we have been on course for the first option, the annihilation of us all. Let's hope for all our sakes we can learn the lessons that they sought to teach us and get rid of war once and for all.

If successful, we will come a lot closer to ending the insanity like that going on in Mumbai right now.

Old Solutions to a new crisis

2008-11-25T19:14:00.001-08:00

Sorry for the lack of updates recently. Been busy with the whole fall of global capitalism thingy. For some glimpses at what we've been up to check here and here.

Recent developments are almost too overwhelming to even comment about. A couple of scattered thoughts:

1) The IMF needs to go. A new loan to Pakistan was approved today, and loans to Hungary and Ukraine have already gone through. The IMF is using this crisis to salvage its reputation and its balance sheet, when it is the institution that created the preconditions for the crisis in the first place. Here's a more detailed article that Sameer wrote on this subject.

2) Let's hope Obama's policies are more visionary than his choices for important economic advisors. Democracy Now had a good panel on this this morning. Basically, almost all of Obama's economic team are former Clinton-era officials who are as responsible for the current situation as anyone. Well anyone except Alan Greenspan, who's in a category of his own. The New York Times, which is normally pretty bad on all this, has a great editorial explaining the culpability of Geithner, Summers, Rubin and all the rest. Nate Silver, who proved himself to be a brilliant pollster this election cycle, has an article arguing that we shouldn't be too quick to judge Obama by his cabinet, as most of the decisions will be coming from the top down. Somehow I don't find that thought comforting, though the chart of policies Nate prepared for that article is helpful.

In general we need to push Obama and his team towards a new kind of economic policy, one that will set up institutions that are more transparent, more accountable and more democratic than what we have now. Ultimately the system should be one that prioritizes human need and basic human rights over the "right" to unlimited profit. This crisis presents all of us who would work for change the opportunity to make those changes real. The opportunity won't come again in most of our lifetimes (the last time was in the 1930s and 40s), so we'd better make the most of it for ourselves and for the next generation.

Out of Afghanistan

2008-11-11T19:20:00.001-08:00

While I'm as teary as anybody else about the events of last Tuesday, I'm also pretty uncertain about whether or not President Barack Obama will put an end to U.S. empire.

Doing so would not only be a good thing in and of itself - ending empire is the only way to ensure the safety of U.S. citizens around the world. It's the only path to peace we have.

While I hope that Obama will be a different kind of president, it's up to all of us to help him along the way. As a Muslim who's been fighting Muslim fundamentalism a lot longer than George W. Bush, it's particularly painful for me to see the Taliban legitimized by the ongoing U.S. occupation. This article - which is in part an attempt to ask the question of how someone like Martin Luther King would treat the Afghanistan situation - is also available here.

The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.

- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

I want justice. And there's an old poster out West, I recall, that says, "Wanted: Dead or Alive".

- George W. Bush

In recent history, two concepts of justice have stood out. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., believed in a kind of justice that could only be achieved when systematic oppression had been eliminated from the world. Along the way, people would have to be held accountable for their crimes. Those who had done wrong would have to admit that they had done wrong and pay some appropriate restitution for their crimes, as happened decades later in South Africa's truth and reconciliation commissions. But justice was forever intertwined with a changing of the human spirit for Dr. King. It was the societal uplifting of love over hate, of human dignity over human debasement. It was a coming to terms with our violent history and affirming values of love and compassion over those of hate and retribution.

George W. Bush, on the other hand, believed in the justice of old Western movies and gunfights.

When he inherits the Bush legacy on January 21st, 2009, Barack Obama will have to choose between these two approaches. The decision he makes will reverberate around the world and be one of the first indicators of whether "Change We Can Believe In" was merely good sloganeering.

Ending Bush's imperial misadventures in Iraq will certainly be a top priority for the incoming administration, but Obama will also be tested in Afghanistan. His words so far — calling Afghanistan the "central front" in the "War on Terror" and demanding more military action against insurgents allied with the Taliban — don't inspire confidence that he would chose the King doctrine over the Bush doctrine.

Reckless Interventions

In 1996, the Taliban, a faction of the anti-Soviet Mujahideen with fundamentalist Wahabi Muslim beliefs, took control of Kabul and most of Afghanistan. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor, supported the Mujahideen (who from the very beginning had fundamentalist tendencies) as part of the "Afghan trap" which succeeded in fatally wounding the Soviet empire. While many Afghans greeted the Taliban's rise to power with delight, their theocratic government soon began to grate on the people of Afghanistan, for whom fundamentalist Islam was almost as foreign as Mormonism.

After the events of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration portrayed the Taliban as deeply connected with al-Qaeda, the terrorist network that claimed responsibility for the attacks, and therefore argued for going to war against Afghanistan. When the Taliban countered that they were happy to give up Osama bin Laden, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, if the U.S. could produce any evidence for the allegation, the U.S. scoffed. Then the U.S. invaded.

The invasion succeeded in two things: First, it brought down a terrible fundamentalist regime while taking an inordinately heavy toll in civilian causalities. The Taliban had instituted a brutal form of shariah law and forced minorities to wear identification tags. They had even destroyed ancient Buddhist carvings claiming that the depiction of the human form is "unislamic." Many Afghans — particularly the half of the population who happen to be women — were excited to see the Taliban ousted. While this is an accomplishment, it's worth remembering that expectations for improvement in women's lives were largely unmet.

The second and even more dangerous accomplishment of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was to elevate the Taliban, al-Qaeda and anyone willing to resist U.S. aggression to the status of heroes or freedom fighters.

Perhaps the easiest way to understand what most Afghans and many South Asians, Muslims, and others around the world felt after the invasion is to remember how Americans felt after the September 11 attacks. George W. Bush was a deeply unpopular president. The election that brought him to power had split the population, with shady dealings in Florida and an activist Supreme Court ultimately deciding the race in favor of Bush. Many of my liberal compatriots despised the president, who was already acquiring a reputation for spending his presidency on vacation.

But after the 9/11 attacks, those same liberals were rallying around Bush. The logic was simple: in a time of crisis, with your country under attack, you support those who are going to defend you. You may not like George W. Bush, but his policies his armed forces stand between you and whoever caused significant damage to New York and Washington, DC.

By the same logic, who stood between Afghan civilians and the NATO aerial bombardments that killed about 3,000 people? The Taliban. Every bomb that detonated on a wedding party led to tens, perhaps hundreds of young people — mostly young boys and many of them orphans — joining the resistance movement under the flag of the Taliban.

And it's not just that the Afghan population believes that the Taliban resistance is legitimate; that resistance is legitimate under international law. No less important a document than the United Nations charter gives the Taliban and other Afghans the right to legitimate self-defense against U.S. aggression.

The Real War against Fundamentalism

So if aerial bombardments and occupations give legitimacy to those very fundamentalists who Afghans would remove from power, what does the real war on fundamentalism look like?

In 1999 I was the first staff person of the International Network for the Rights of Female Victims of Violence in Pakistan, a group that was combating "honor crimes" along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. These were incidences of domestic violence, often against a wife, a sister, a daughter or even a mother who was accused of having some kind of illicit sexual relationship. We understood that these crimes were on the rise because of the spread of Taliban-style Wahabi Islam into tribal areas that already had an extremely patriarchal view of women's bodies.

What was our weapon of choice in fighting against the Talibanization of what has traditionally been a tolerant, ecumenical form of Islam? Education. We taught women their rights under Pakistani and Afghani law, we taught about the passages in the Quran that mentioned women's rights, and we also tried to educate people about other traditions — whether they be secular humanist traditions or the Hindu and Christian traditions of neighboring countries and tribes. In other words we tried to undermine the hatred, the xenophobia, the fear upon which fundamentalism is built.

Such efforts may take generations, and they almost always require the state to play a role in education, development and ensuring employment for all. But ultimately education is the only way to combat religious fundamentalism, just as negotiation is ultimately the only way to end war.

Buying into a Failed Solution

While Obama's election may indicate a shift in U.S. foreign policy (and hopefully a rejection of the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war), Obama has prescribed more military operations in Afghanistan.

For more than a year, Obama has argued for redeploying U.S. troops from Iraq to Afghanistan. He has called Afghanistan the "central front in the War on Terror" and has even threatened to bomb Pakistan should there be evidence that Afghan warlords are hiding there and the Pakistani government isn't "doing enough" about it. (On this last point, Bush has already bombed Pakistan several times over the last few months, prompting the Pakistani government to publicly rebuke the U.S. for violating its sovereignty.)

While Obama's rhetoric in arguing for increased involvement in Afghanistan makes some sense — he claims that Bush has been so involved with Iraq that the al-Qaeda leaders who allegedly orchestrated the September 11 attacks are still at large — his proposed methodology doesn't.

Instead of scaling up an already disastrous war, the United States could change course in a way that would ultimately do a lot more to ensure the world's safety. Such measures should include:

Withdrawing troops. International law is clear on this subject. No country may occupy another indefinitely and certainly not without the will of the people being occupied. If an Obama administration truly thinks that withdrawing U.S. and NATO troops would be a bad thing for Afghans, hold a referendum to see who would like the troops to remain.

Working with the various Afghan factions to begin negotiations. Wars are rarely stopped on the battlefield, and those that are have a tendency to break out again after a few years. The recent history of Afghanistan illustrates this point. It's better by far for enemies and friends, Pashtun, Tajik, and others to settle differences through negotiation based on mutual respect and the rule of law.

Once stability and security are guaranteed in Afghanistan, beginning the attack on fundamentalism in earnest. Working to incorporate Afghanistan into the international human rights framework through enforcing UN measures which Afghanistan has already ratified, such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women is one step that can be taken in this regard. Another is major investment in social infrastructure and particularly health and education measures which will ultimately help Afghanistan recover from being bombed "into the stone age."

If the idea of immediately stopping all military operations in Afghanistan sounds radical, it shouldn't. No less than President Hamid Karzai pleaded for an end to the bombings immediately after the U.S. election, as yet another wedding party fell victim to bombs from the sky.

For the sake of all us, Afghan and American, let's hope President Barack Obama heeds his call.

Speechless

2008-11-08T07:24:00.001-08:00

Although all the math had been pointing to an overwhelming Obama victory for months, we were speechless Tuesday night when it actually happened. With this election, the U.S. public has rejected the descent into fascism orchestrated by George W. Bush and Karl Rove.

Does this mean that all the evils of racism, classism, and sexism are solved? Of course not.

But Obama's message of making democracy more participatory, his acceptance speech and the establishment of the change.gov website where ordinary folks can provide input into policy decisions are all promising signs. And the fact that we have a half-Kenyan, half white American man in the oval office exactly 40 years after the assassination of Martin Luther King should be cause for joy and celebration.

The Jed report has put together this montage which captures the spirit of that evening for those who want to relive it. My favorite are the Fox news clips...

Christians Worship Golden Calf

2008-10-30T12:50:00.001-07:00

Geez, I don't know how to satirize this. Evangelicals really don't read the Bible, do they?

Courtesy wonkette:

Did you know that some Christian dingbat has dubbed today the “Day of Prayer for the World’s Economies?” Well here they are, at the Wall Street bull statue thing, praying to Jesus for money. The dingbat has explained, “We are going to intercede at the site of the statue of the bull on Wall Street to ask God to begin a shift from the bull and bear markets to what we feel will be the ‘Lion’s Market,’ or God’s control over the economic systems.”

McCain rallies getting uglier

2008-10-29T13:46:00.001-07:00

As if we needed more evidence that the McCain-Palin ticket's last ditch efforts to win this election involve pandering to the racists and bigots that make up much of the republican base, 538.com has this report:

[After a McCain rally in Miami, Fl] we witnessed a near-street riot involving the exiting McCain crowd and two Cuban-American Obama supporters. Tony Garcia, 63, and Raul Sorando, 31, were suddenly surrounded by an angry mob. There is a moment in a crowd when something goes from mere yelling to a feeling of danger, and that's what we witnessed. As photographers and police raced to the scene, the crowd elevated from stable to fast-moving scrum, and the two men were surrounded on all sides as we raced to the circle.

"People were screaming 'Terrorist!' 'Communist!' 'Socialist!'" Sorando said when we caught up with him. "I had a guy tell me he was gonna kill me."

Asked what had precipitated the event, "We were just chanting 'Obama!' and holding our signs. That was it. And the crowd suddenly got crazy."

Charming. I still believe that this election and the economic downturn really mark the beginning of the end of the Republican party, but that could just be wishful thinking on my part. I can only hope that the vast majority of U.S. citizens run away from a party that encourages (or at least does not publicly denounce) racism.

Here's Keith Olbermann on McCain's failure to denounce the race baiting incident that went on in Pennsylvania over the weekend:

Eric Mann on turning out for Obama

2008-10-23T17:28:00.001-07:00

Eric Mann at the Los Angeles Strategy Center has this brilliant, but somewhat lengthy article on why progressives should support Obama. For someone who traditionally sees the Democratic party as the lesser of two evils, this has been a question I've been wrestling with (and obviously Mann has given this a lot of thought).

I won't post all ten reasons to support Obama here (but I do suggest you check out the whole article) but here's an excerpt of what I think is the most compelling reason to vote for Obama, especially if you're in a Swing state. (If you're not in a swing state, or even if you are, you could also check out vote pacts, a guilt-free way to support third party candidates.)

6) Because the McCain campaign is an attack on the Left.

The McCain campaign wants to kill the Left in the U.S. and internationally, kill social security, the social safety net, and anything “social” including even the hope of social-ism. Obama is being attacked as an enemy because he is Black and because he is a moderate liberal. The attack on the Left broadly defined must be met by a counter-attack against McCain and for Obama in the last two weeks of this campaign.

Look at McCain’s targets:

* William Ayers, billed a “terrorist” by the McCain camp, worked against the war in Vietnam in which four million people were killed. Ayers is a symbol of the anti-war movement and its most militant wing.

* Reverend Wright. Reverend Wright is a respected theologian whose “crime” was saying that racism is “endemic” to the United States and that the U.S. sees the world through the eyes of an empire.

* ACORN is being attacked by the McCain campaign for registering Democratic-leaning voters. ACORN may have gotten some bad names in the voter registration process but none of those people could vote or be counted. By contrast, the Republicans prevent people from voting who are registered to vote, deny valid signatures and voters, and close down polling places in Black and heavily Democratic districts. They defy the electoral process and have stolen state and national elections.

* Socialism. McCain has begun attacking as “socialist” Obama’s efforts to make income taxes more progressive and to use some of the wealth to help the poor. McCain said, “At least in Europe the Socialist leaders who so admire my opponent are upfront about their objectives. They use real numbers and honest language.” McCain proposes cutting capital gains taxes and giving more subsidies to the rich.

Obama’s ties to Ayers were minimal and nothing to apologize for. His ties to Reverend Wright were profound and his disassociation from his mentor deplorable. Obama’s distancing himself from ACORN reflects weakness. But, as Reverend Wright pointed out, Obama is a politician running for office; he makes his tactical moves according to his strategic aim of getting elected. I wish that Obama would defend socialism but he is not a socialist and if he were, he would not be the Democratic nominee for president.

Whether or not Obama chooses to disassociate, denounce, or distance himself from the anti-Vietnam war movement, from the rhetoric and analyses of the Civil Rights and Black Liberation Movements, from grassroots voter registration, and from socialism—those of us on the Left have our own interests in this election that include but also go beyond Obama’s objectives.

Whether Obama chooses to identify with or to renounce these connections, we on the Left need to grasp that these attacks from McCain are against us, not just Obama. If McCain is elected, what do we think he will do to those of us who fought against the war in Vietnam and are fighting to end the U.S. occupation of Iraq ? What will he do to those who will continue to speak and act against the endemic racism of the United States , or to those of us who would study and advocate socialist alternatives to capitalism? I fear for those on the Left who do not see the writing on the wall.

Let’s turn out the vote for Barack Obama, Now.

And a little reminder of what those more militant days looked like:

There was dancing at the revolution...

A Little Inspiration

2008-10-20T19:37:00.001-07:00

As artists, we really like the combination of good art and a solid political message. Andres Useche has done a great job with this video. Good song, good footage and a good message.

And for the mandatory grain of salt, here's Chomsky on why Barack is the lesser of two evils.

Friedman v. Keynes Part I: "How Dare They Expect Us Not to be Greedy - I mean that's the point right?"

2008-10-20T11:32:00.001-07:00

Today's news that Ben Bernanke is now advocating serious government spending in order to help stay the huge downturn in the markets should not surprise anyone. Those who have studied economic history will know that "pure" capitalism has really only been tried once or twice - often with disastrous results.

When I heard that Lehman and AIG were going under (or being nationalized in the case of AIG) I knew that the era of Milton Friedman was at an end. Unregulated markets designed to maximize short-term profit above all else always collapse under their own weight. As a friend at one of the last remaining investment banks so eloquently put it, "It's the government's own damn fault anyway for not expecting the free market to be greedy - I mean, that's the point, right?"

But unchecked greed will get even the greedy into trouble. As this graph shows, it wasn't in the interest of these bankers to effectively lose as much money as they've gained since 2004.

(We should all be outraged that a few CEOs and managers have been rewarded to the tune of millions of dollars for losing as much money as they made. Bailout using tax payer dollars while not going after these ill-gotten gains is effectively a subsidy from the poor to the rich. But I digress.)

After the demise of the current system, we're back where we were circa 1960, i.e. Keynesian economics. John Maynard Keynes was a well-regarded economist who developed much of what we now know as the discipline of economics, including the entire discipline of macroeconomics. Keynesian economics argues that the state can play a role - sometimes a major role - in building up the private sector and in stimulating economic growth.

After the depression, World War II and the Bretton Woods Conference (for more on that check out this brilliant essay) Keynesian economics ruled the day, heralding a period of relative growth and prosperity in the United States and around the world. (The success of anti-colonial movements in Africa and Asia no doubt had something to do with these growth rates as well.) As the world switched (with the help of organizations like the International Monetary Fund) to Friedmanism in the 1980s, the effects were disastrous even in terms of economic indicators like growth rates and wages - let alone poverty indicators such as deaths by hunger and preventable disease.

But the system did work well for a few. While worries about inflation were effectively used to undermine wage growth, CEO salaries were allowed to skyrocket. Cutting taxes on capital gains and other kinds of income gave us one of the most regressive tax systems in the world, meaning you tax poor people at higher rates than you tax rich people. A government survey that came out in August showed that most corporations - including very large and profitable corporations - effectively pay no taxes at all.

What brought the system down was not public anger at the injustice of it all, it was that the system could not self regulate even in its own interest. The shock has been so bad that it's there's no chance of reestablishing that regulation - rather we must go back to an explicitly state-driven (as opposed to merely a state-regulated) form of capitalism.

Today's news confirms that Friedmanism is dead both in the U.S. and around the world, and that there's no going back. The obvious question remains: Is that a good thing for those of us who care about ending the violence of poverty and establishing a more just and democratic economic system where human need is prioritized over corporate greed?

This election is over

2008-10-16T09:18:00.000-07:00

Need I say more?

Well maybe I don't need to but I will. In addition to dramatically defeating McCain, we residents of the USA need to abolish two of his (and Bush's) failed ideologies - neoconservativism (or just plain colonialism for those of us in the reality based community) and neoliberalism (or market fundamentalism). Sameer's article at FPIF has all the details.

Conservatives Running Away from McCain

2008-10-14T20:05:00.000-07:00

Looks like getting a model as a running mate and running the most negative campaign in recent U.S. history isn't working out too well for John McCain, POW.

Christopher Buckley is the latest republican to run away from McCain and write a column endorsing Barack Obama (albeit a rather half-hearted endorsement).

His common sense arguments? McCain's

once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget “by the end of my first term.” Who, really, believes that? Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis. His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?

Now I don't know much about Christopher Buckley, but I know a bit about his father, William F. Buckley Jr. Watching video of Buckley debate Noam Chomsky made me a lifelong fan of Chomsky and a lifelong critic of war apologists of all stripes. Whatever his faults, William Buckley represented a certain brand of Republicanism with an intellectual coherence. Well, a hypocritical kind of coherence. Anyone was entitled to run the world as long as they were American. Or something. And believed in "free markets" (but never actually implemented them).

John McCain deserves some kind of award for sinking so far below this standard as to cause someone like Christopher Buckley (who like his father wrote for the National Review) to run away. The readers of the National Review sunk even lower in demanding his resignation.

The Republican party is dead. It's become the party of racists and religious whackos. After this election, we all need to put every effort into building up the Green Party so that the two-party system doesn't die with it.

Here's the legendary Chomsky/Buckley debate. For those who haven't seen it, it's a real treat.

sorry for the short lapse in posting

2008-10-10T13:07:00.000-07:00

things have been pretty crazy with the whole fall of global capitalism and all. In the next few days look for thoughts on whether or not capitalism should rise again, or whether we should start looking for alternatives (no points for guessing which of those we prefer). One "middle road" that I've heard tossed around a lot would be a return to Keynesian economics and the Bretton Woods system. Well, it would certainly be better than what we've got at the moment.

But in the meanwhile, I'm just in awe of John McCain. The entire economic system is crashing around us and all he can do is throw stones at his opponent. Well, pebbles. Or those bits of bark that sort of look like rocks, but then you pick them up and they're not really.

I can't think of anything remotely serious to say in the face of McCain/Palin pandering to their racist base while trying to divert attention from the economic meltdown. So I'll let Betty White tell some jokes.

Keating and McCain

2008-10-06T14:08:00.000-07:00

Ok, not that we need more evidence that politicians are corrupt, but I don't think many people remember the S&L scandals of the 1980s and John McCain's personal involvement with them. To their credit, the Obama campaign has put together a documentary explaining the background and McCain's involvment.

The sad thing is that the S&L crisis is in the process of repeating itself right now (on a much larger scale) with the housing bubble boom and bust. More on that later. For now, here's the video... It's definitely worth a peek.

Palin for President

2008-09-29T19:02:00.000-07:00

Mark Twain once made the following remark about a certain General Fulston (who was then leading the U.S. charge to invade the Philippines, an incident which would ultimately kill as many as a million Filippinos) - "No satire of Funston could reach perfection,” Twain lamented, “because Funston occupies that summit himself... [he is] satire incarnated.”

Mark Twain had obviously never heard of Sarah Palin, but if he had, he might have had to come up with a new equation of satire incarnate. Aside from actually being quoted almost word-for-word in the latest Saturday Night Live sketch (a first for a parody as far as I know) Palin has been so ludicrous that it's actually hard to make fun of her. She makes fun of herself just by talking to anyone. Anyway, here are a couple of good attempts at Palin humor. One of them relies heavily on Monty Python, but that's never a bad thing...

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Last night's debate and ending the empire

2008-09-27T11:22:00.000-07:00

Rome never looks where she treads.
Always her heavy hooves fall
On our stomachs, our hearts or our heads;
And Rome never heeds when we bawl.
Her sentries pass on -- that is all,
And we gather behind them in hordes,
And plot to reconquer the Wall,
With only our tongues for our swords. - Rudyard Kipling

While listening to Barack Obama trying to out-McCain McCain on being tough on national security, I couldn't help but listen to the discussion through the ears of an Afghani child. Would such a child agree that the U.S. has neglected Afghanistan? Would such a child believe that her life could be made better by U.S. troops?

As Katrina vanden Heuvel points out, Obama has at times risen above the mentality that indiscriminate violence (war) can stop indiscriminate violence (terror). He has

spoken forcefully as the first 21st century candidate---addressing the limits of military force in a world whose central challenges are pandemics, nuclear proliferation, global inequality,and climate change.

But alas, not last night. vanden Heuvel continues:

Instead of playing to the future, forcefully, with toughness and passion, Obama was the young hawk trying to out-hawk the old uber-hawk.

Tragic.

Johan Galtung, the founder of the discipline of Peace Studies, introduced me to a new slogan a few years ago: "Down with the U.S. Empire, Up with the U.S. Republic". If the Democrats were really smart, they would be finding some way to play on this meme.

Here's a great video of Galtung on the greatest threats to humanity (number one is what he calls "hyper capitalism"). Also, this essay that was written shortly after the invasion of Iraq offers some more insights into Galtung's call for an end to empire.

Until some kind of principled opposition to empire in all its forms can be articulated, a vote for the Democratic party will always be a vote for the lesser of two evils. Last night proved that again for me.

On today's further unraveling of the mortgage bubble

2008-09-15T10:06:00.001-07:00

I share with you a quote and a cartoon. First the cartoon:

I really don't get how the Republican party can claim to be the party of fiscal responsibility and no one calls them on it. Especially with a $7.7 trillion war going on.

And the quote:

Modern industrial civilization has developed within a certain system of convenient myths. The driving force of our industrial civilization has been individual material gain, which is accepted as legitimate, even praiseworthy on the grounds that private vices yield public benefits, in the classic formulation. Now it's long been understood, very well, that a society that is based on this principle will destroy itself in time. It can only persist with whatever suffering and injustice it entails, as long as it's possible to pretend that the destructive forces that humans create are limited, that the world is an infinite resource, and that the world is an infinite garbage can.

At this stage of history, either one of two things is possible: either the general population will take control of its own destiny and will concern itself with community interests, guided by values of solidarity, and sympathy and concern for others; or alternatively, there will be no destiny for anyone to control.
-Noam Chomsky from Manufacturing Consent

I think the entire financial industry as its been built up over time and especially since about 1990 when we've had these huge speculative bubbles is a way for us to avoid facing the music: if we continue to prioritize private profit over public goods, we will be destroying ourselves as a species.

Understanding McCain-Palin: It's about White Privilege

2008-09-14T22:28:00.001-07:00

I really can't say it any better than Tim Wise has, so here are his words in full.

For those who still can't grasp the concept of white privilege, or who are constantly looking for some easy-to-understand examples of it, perhaps this list will help.

White privilege is when you can get pregnant at seventeen like Bristol Palin and everyone is quick to insist that your life and that of your family is a personal matter, and that no one has a right to judge you or your parents, because "every family has challenges," even as black and Latino families with similar "challenges" are regularly typified as irresponsible, pathological and arbiters of social decay.

White privilege is when you can call yourself a "fuckin' redneck," like Bristol Palin's boyfriend does, and talk about how if anyone messes with you, you'll "kick their fuckin' ass," and talk about how you like to "shoot shit" for fun, and still be viewed as a responsible, all-American boy (and a great son-in-law to be) rather than a thug.

White privilege is when you can attend four different colleges in six years like Sarah Palin did (one of which you basically failed out of, then returned to after making up some coursework at a community college), and no one questions your intelligence or commitment to achievement, whereas a person of color who did this would be viewed as unfit for college, and probably someone who only got in in the first place because of affirmative action.

White privilege is when you can claim that being mayor of a town smaller than most medium-sized colleges, and then Governor of a state with about the same number of people as the lower fifth of the island of Manhattan, makes you ready to potentially be president, and people don't all piss on themselves with laughter, while being a black U.S. Senator, two-term state Senator, and constitutional law scholar, means you're "untested."

White privilege is being able to say that you support the words "under God" in the pledge of allegiance because "if it was good enough for the founding fathers, it's good enough for me," and not be immediately disqualified from holding office--since, after all, the pledge was written in the late 1800s and the "under God" part wasn't added until the 1950s--while believing that reading accused criminals and terrorists their rights (because, ya know, the Constitution, which you used to teach at a prestigious law school requires it), is a dangerous and silly idea only supported by mushy liberals.

White privilege is being able to be a gun enthusiast and not make people immediately scared of you. White privilege is being able to have a husband who was a member of an extremist political party that wants your state to secede from the Union, and whose motto was "Alaska first," and no one questions your patriotism or that of your family, while if you're black and your spouse merely fails to come to a 9/11 memorial so she can be home with her kids on the first day of school, people immediately think she's being disrespectful.

White privilege is being able to make fun of community organizers and the work they do--like, among other things, fight for the right of women to vote, or for civil rights, or the 8-hour workday, or an end to child labor--and people think you're being pithy and tough, but if you merely question the experience of a small town mayor and 18-month governor with no foreign policy expertise beyond a class she took in college--you're somehow being mean, or even sexist.

White privilege is being able to convince white women who don't even agree with you on any substantive issue to vote for you and your running mate anyway, because all of a sudden your presence on the ticket has inspired confidence in these same white women, and made them give your party a "second look."

White privilege is being able to fire people who didn't support your political campaigns and not be accused of abusing your power or being a typical politician who engages in favoritism, while being black and merely knowing some folks from the old-line political machines in Chicago means you must be corrupt.

White privilege is being able to attend churches over the years whose pastors say that people who voted for John Kerry or merely criticize George W. Bush are going to hell, and that the U.S. is an explicitly Christian nation and the job of Christians is to bring Christian theological principles into government, and who bring in speakers who say the conflict in the Middle East is God's punishment on Jews for rejecting Jesus, and everyone can still think you're just a good church-going Christian, but if you're black and friends with a black pastor who has noted (as have Colin Powell and the U.S. Department of Defense) that terrorist attacks are often the result of U.S. foreign policy and who talks about the history of racism and its effect on black people, you're an extremist who probably hates America.

White privilege is not knowing what the Bush Doctrine is when asked by a reporter, and then people get angry at the reporter for asking you such a "trick question," while being black and merely refusing to give one-word answers to the queries of Bill O'Reilly means you're dodging the question, or trying to seem overly intellectual and nuanced.

White privilege is being able to claim your experience as a POW has anything at all to do with your fitness for president, while being black and experiencing racism is, as Sarah Palin has referred to it a "light" burden.

And finally, white privilege is the only thing that could possibly allow someone to become president when he has voted with George W. Bush 90 percent of the time, even as unemployment is skyrocketing, people are losing their homes, inflation is rising, and the U.S. is increasingly isolated from world opinion, just because white voters aren't sure about that whole "change" thing. Ya know, it's just too vague and ill-defined, unlike, say, four more years of the same, which is very concrete and certain.

White privilege is, in short, the problem.

Tim Wise is the author of White Like Me (Soft Skull, 2005, revised 2008), and of Speaking Treason Fluently, publishing this month, also by Soft Skull. For review copies or interview requests, please reply to publicity@softskull.com

Be afraid, be very afraid

2008-09-09T11:24:00.001-07:00

The thing that I love most about this video is the playing on the far right theme of fear. From 2001-2004, all that any politician was doing was playing on the theme of fear in order to do what they wanted to do (no bid contracts for Haliburton, invade Iraq, playing god in Guantanamo). But what the public should really have been afraid of were the policies that the government was proposing. This video hits that theme hard and bring John McCain into the mix for good measure...

Comic Relief

2008-09-04T11:23:00.001-07:00

OK, we don't do this much, but this is such a funny take on this incredibly boring Republican convention, that we thought many of you could use the laughs.

The first clip is about all these Republican pundits crying "sexism" over the vetting of VP candidate Palin while they were criticizing anyone who cried "sexism" while Hillary was running for office. The second is on Bush, Laura, Thompson and Lieberman.

Enjoy...

Update: Here's something else I came across. H/t whoever did the photoshopping...

Thoughts on the potential demise of the Republican Party

2008-09-01T14:42:00.001-07:00

So Arianna Huffington and Robert Borosage are doing some hand wringing over on Hufington Post about the potential end of the Republican party.

The blog posts - especially Borosage's - are definitely worth a read and I agree with a lot of the substance there. The failure of the Republican brand is something that all of humanity should be celebrating - if it turns out to be true.

Borosage's set up for engaging with the question of how to reinvent the Republican party is the following:

Democracy requires at least two parties to thrive. If the Republican Party disintegrates, it will only have to be reinvented.

Jeez, I hope not...

On the one hand I can see where Borosage is coming from with this. In Canada, the right-wing party (Coservatives or Tories) was so mired in corruption and general institutional atrophy a decade ago that the Liberal party of Jean Chrétien basically enjoyed a free reign - and many of its policies were a disaster. They needed questioning and there was no functioning opposition ask the questions. It wasn't until the Liberal party had a few corruption scandals of its own a few years ago that the Tories were able to gain some popular support again (they are now back in power).

But to me what the Canadian example shows is that it's actually necessary for progressives and visionaries to be building up power in places other than the two mainstream parties. Canada has its own left party, the New Democratic Party (NDP), a party which among its other achievements authored Canada's single payer healthcare of which we Yankees are so jealous. Unfortunately the NDP was unable to build its base, in part because center-left Canadians were so afraid of the Tories that they did not want to risk putting them into power by supporting a better party.

So getting back to the southern side of the Great Lakes... Perhaps it's the fact that I grew up in the age of Reagan, but I cannot remember a single Republican policy that's worth supporting. Their economic populism ("shrink the government!") has been exposed as the farce that it is ("let my corporations profit while your income goes down"). When that refrain failed in the late 1990s, they had no positive agenda at all, so chose to build their election strategies on attacking Bill Clinton's sexual morality.

Then along came 9-11 and it was pure Islamophobic hate-mongering right up until the next election. When that threatened to be a failure, they reached out to the "social conservatives" a group that should be taken off the electricity grid and denied use of the combustion engine, IMHO. I mean if you're not going to accept 19th century science, I see no reason why you should benefit from 21st century science... And then there's the outright racism in the Republican party, some of which stems from recently diseased Trent Lott and other "Dixiecrats" - those members of the Democratic party who did not want to get rid of Jim Crow Apartheid.

In fact it's difficult to think of any coherent principle - let alone an ideology - to which all Republicans adhere. Their agenda has been a purely self-serving one of "how do we get into power?" when they're not in power and "which of my friends shall I give the money to?" when they are in power. The fact that the U.S. public is finally beginning to see that should be a cause for celebration, not hand-wringing. Political parties do die every once in a while - the Federalists haven't been seen for over 150 years.

On the other hand, it is important to have a multi-party system which is why we should be looking into ways to support parties to the left of the Democratic party - which after all is the party that brought us workfare, bombings of sudan and afghanistan (for no apparent reason), a murderous regime of sanctions against the Iraqi people (from which the UN estimates that half a million children died) and is in general a party of the corporate special interests.

In order to prevent the position of institutional atrophy and corruption which could come if the Democrats control both houses of Congress and the Presidency, we need to be building up third parties such as the greens and the labor party now.

And as for the Republican party, it's far too early to be celebrating its demise, but when it happens, I hope we all have the dignity to let it rest in peace.

Here's Green Party VP Candidate Rosa Clemente... The task of all of us who would like to make this world a better place, who care about basic principles of equality and justice and who would like to ensure that future generations can enjoy all that this planet has to offer is to make her voice a mainstream voice. In ten years, if a "mainstream" politician looks and talks like this, we will have done something right.

Understanding Musharraf: the U.S. and Pakistan

2008-08-29T15:20:00.001-07:00

Here's a short piece that I had intended to try to publish in the mainstream. I think the coverage of the democratic convention kind of squashed it... H/t to Emily at Foreign Policy in Focus for doing an edit on this.

Understanding Musharraf
What the U.S. needs to know about Pakistan's recent past and immediate future
Sameer Dossani

In September 2001, Pervez Musharraf had a choice. He could either fulfill his promises made to the Pakistani people (to hold an election in early 2002 and resign as president) or he could bow to U.S. pressure to cancel those plans entirely and allow Pakistan to serve as a lynchpin for an upcoming U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. If any democratic principles were to be invoked, there’s no doubt what the Pakistani people would have chosen. They had no interest in getting involved in a U.S. war against their neighbor. Instead of following the will of the Pakistani people and following through on his commitments, Musharraf chose to embrace the U.S. agenda.

Now that he has announced his resignation seven years later, Musharraf’s decision to side with U.S. interests against the interests of his own people remains the central moment of his leadership. Defenders of his legacy may say that given the dire events of September 11, 2001 and the strong role that the United States has played in Pakistan since the 1970s Musharraf had little choice. Detractors may retort that regardless of the limited options, it was unconscionable to invest resources in a U.S. war when Pakistan clocks in at 136th place out of 177 countries in the Human Development Index of the United Nations Development Program. The country needs to spend its limited resources instead on basic infrastructure, education services, and healthcare.

These points of view ignore a basic fact – whether Musharraf's actions were right or wrong, they took the country further away from democracy. No one believes that the Pakistani public would have supported the war against the Taliban - an AC Nielsen poll conducted in December 2001 showed only 9% support for the U.S. action in Afghanistan. In order to act in line with U.S. interests, Masharraf was playing the part of the totalitarian dictator. He overrode existing safeguards – by consolidating his power as head of all branches of the armed services, for example – to ensure that his wishes were obeyed. For his heavy-handed actions he was richly praised in the U.S. media and elsewhere. It wasn’t until he repeated that heavy-handedness in 2007, when Musharraf suspended the constitution as well as several senior judges in order to ensure his smooth transition to civilian rule, that anyone in the West began to criticize him.

Musharraf's story gives the lie to the claim that the Bush's agenda in the Muslim world was one of "democratization." If Musharraf had followed the will of his people in 2001, the United States may have taken measures to remove him from office in addition to waging war against the Taliban, so important was Pakistan as the frontline in the “War on Terror”.

As Bush's tenure draws to a close, leaving a legacy that includes a failed foreign policy, this is a good time to evaluate the nation’s relationship with Pakistan and to seek a new course. Pakistan's current leaders have spoken out in favor of negotiating with tribal leaders allied with the Taliban instead of seeking to drop bombs on them - bombs that don’t discriminate between soldier and civilian. If they are sincere in their efforts, they have a chance at ending the cycle of violence that has plagued the region for decades. Since the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, both of Pakistan’s mainstream political parties enjoy mass support in a completely new way. For us in the United States, the best way we can show our support for the struggling Pakistani state and any hope it has at democracy is to get out of the way.

Sameer Dossani is a Pakistani-American, a Foreign Policy In Focus contributor, and director of 50 Years Is Enough: U.S. Network for Global Economic Justice.

F**k Fox News

2008-08-25T13:27:00.001-07:00

Wow! What can one say to this?

The criticism that not speaking to Fox News has anything to do with freedom of speech is particularly laughable.

So good to see Fox told off like this and not even knowing what to do about it. The amazing energy of the crowd is palpable even though I'm sure Fox would have rather ignored it.

Hats off to all you folks doing good work in Denver. I'm not sure that the Democrats will listen to our demands, but now is definitely the time to start making them heard loud and clear.

For those who want to hear a real answer as to why these folks are marching, here's Cynthia McKinney summing it all up...

The Dawning of a New Era

2008-08-11T14:18:00.001-07:00

And it's not a pretty one...

This article by Mike Davis points out that the London Society, one of the world's leading scientific bodies, now believes that the earth has entered a new epoch. The "Anthropocene" era is differentiated from the last not in geological terms but in terms of human intervention.

In a report published by the Geological Society America [pdf]:

The combination of extinctions, global species migrations, and the widespread replacement of natural vegetation with agricultural monocultures is producing a distinctive contemporary biostratigraphic signal. These effects are permanent, as future evolution will take place from surviving (and frequently anthropogenically relocated) stocks.

The implications of this are mind-boggling and Davis does a pretty good job of going over some of the more obvious ones. Some of his best points:

1) The private sector is not the solution (investment in alternative technologies is at the moment largely state driven, despite the propaganda coming in the form of TV ads from Exxon-Mobil, BP, Shell and Chevron).

2) Carbon trading is not the solution (there's every possibility that even if the Kyoto treaty and other Carbon trading mechanisms were actually in place, there would be minimal change to net global carbon emissions, which is what really matters if we're worried about the global ecosystem).

3) Developed countries have collectively done more damage (and should take more responsibility) than developing countries for the damage done. Countries in the global south till date are still much smaller per capita carbon emitters than the U.S. or Europe. Furthermore they have built their development models - especially during the colonial period but even till date - on the extraction of resources from the Global South, and therefore there is an ecological debt that the North owes the South.

Again, definitely worth a read.

Far less educational but on the humorous side of things is this spoof of Bush's climate denial done by Saturday Night Live featuring Will Ferrell as W. Talking about "the global warmings".

The End of the Doha "Development" Round

2008-08-05T08:57:00.001-07:00

Last week saw what we all hope may be the final curtain falling on the drama of the Doha "development" round of World Trade Organization negotiations. I put the word development in quotes because it's been obvious to those of us who have been following this from the start that the Doha round has nothing to do with development.

The shocking thing about last week's developments is not the fact that the U.S. and other developed nations were not able to push through their agenda - with elections in the U.S. and India coming up, that outcome was the odds on favorite. The shocking thing is how few people - including many mainstream economists see this as a bad thing.

In this article, economist Dani Roderik argues that the breakdown in consensus among those who touted free trade as the solution to all things may indicate the end of the globalization project as we know it.

Though all of them are content to see Doha's failure, these economists diverge in their rationale as to why that failure may not be a bad thing.

So we have Paul Samuelson, the author of the postwar era's landmark economics textbook, reminding his fellow economists that China's gains in globalization may well come at the expense of the United States; Paul Krugman, today's foremost international trade theorist, arguing that trade with low-income countries is no longer too small to have an effect on inequality; Alan Blinder, a former U.S. Federal Reserve vice chairman, worrying that international outsourcing will cause unprecedented dislocations for the US labor force; Martin Wolf, the Financial Times columnist and one of the most articulate advocates of globalization, writing of his disappointment with how financial globalization has turned out; and Larry Summers, the U.S. Treasury chief and the Clinton administration's "Mr. Globalization," musing about the dangers of a race to the bottom in national regulations and the need for international labor standards.

For me the striking thing is that most of these arguments - including those about the dangers of outsourcing, the dangers of rampant speculation caused by fiscal liberalization, and the race to the bottom - were articulated by social movements around the world from the moment the WTO came into existence in 1995.

So has history proven us right or have economists suddenly started paying attention to the facts? I think neither. For the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. is feeling threatened in its position of the sole global super power. China, India, and Asia as a whole represent a counter-balance of sorts, and these economies look a lot stronger than that of the U.S. which is plagued by a housing crisis, a weak dollar, and overextension in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. When the U.S. is not always able to dictate the rules in its own favor, protectionism may not be such a bad thing after all...

For more on trade, protectionism and development, be sure to check out Ha-Joon Chang's Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism.

And here's a short video on what's wrong with the current round of failed negotiations from our friends in the Philippines.

Trade Policies and King Leopold's Ghost

2008-07-21T08:30:00.001-07:00

I was in Belgium earlier this year for some meetings at the European Parliament on trade between Africa and Europe. Those meetings were all about the so-called "Global Europe" program, which is code name for the European Commission's international trade strategy. (Global Europe is part of the failed EU constitution attempts and the more recent Lisbon Treaty, which might also be a failure.)

When we met with MEPs (members of the European Parliament), those who supported the Lisbon Treaty and the Global Europe proposals were quite happy to concede that this was all about increased access to the resources and markets of developing countries. They claimed that as the U.S. was already pursuing such a strategy in Africa, and China seemed to be poised to do the same, they had little choice other than to use African resources and consumers for the benefit of European corporations.

What's left unsaid is that this is not a new strategy for Europe; in fact it is a very old strategy.

When I saw some of the monuments in Belgium, one of the most famous of which is the castle at Laeken pictured above, I could not help but think of a book I had read some years ago. As I reread the book - King Leopold's Ghost, by Adam Hochschild - over the past few weeks, I began to understand this castle and much of Europe's splendor would not have been possible without the brutality of European colonialism in Africa.

King Leopld II was the King of Belgium from 1868 until his death in 1909. While turn-of-the-century Europe was moving towards a parliamentary democracy system with Kings as figureheads rather than purveyors of political power, Leopold established a mediaeval kingdom in the heart of the tropical African jungle. Its purpose? To extract African natural resources (in this case wild rubber) for the profit of European corporations and the Belgian King. The Africans "employed" to harvest the wild labor were subject to kidnappings, forced labor, whippings using a deadly hippopotamus hide instrument called the chicote and murder. Soldiers were punished for using bullets for anything other than killing, so for every bullet spent they were encouraged to bring back a human hand to their captain. By most estimates, the toll of murder, disease, famine, and reduced birth rates cost the Congo some 10 million lives during Leopold's rule.

Leopold used the fruits of this system to build buildings in Laeken, Brussels, and elsewhere in Europe, to buy property on the French Riviera, and to keep his young mistress in the fancy silks that she preferred. When court battles after his death divided up his huge fortune between his daughters and the Belgian state, the option of returning the ill-gotten gains to the people of the Congo was not considered.

While the brutality of the Belgian Congo is not worse or better than the brutality of the French, Portugese, Dutch or English colonizers in Southern and Central Africa, there are a couple of things that stand out about this story. The first is that so few people - even in the countries involved - know about it. Stories of the rubber terror do exist in some oral traditions of some of peoples of the Congo, but for the middle and upper classes who receive their education in Kinshasa or in other cities, the Belgians are still portrayed as those who brought civilization to Central Africa. In Belgium, my references to King Leopold's Congo were usually met by completely blank stares.

The second is that by virtue of its other riches and continued European and American exploitation of those riches, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (as the former Belgian Congo is known today) is still a disaster area. At the end of the colonial period, anti-colonial elements galvanized around Patrice Lumumba, a charismatic leader who believed in African economic as well as political independence and was greatly influenced by the All-African Peoples' Conference in Accra, Ghana. CIA operations chief Richard Bissell saw Lumumba as a "mad dog", and paid mercenaries to assassinate him in 1961, about a year after he had taken office as the country's first Prime Minister. The U.S. went on to prop up the military dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko, a man whose habits of giving away lucrative mining contracts to whoever would pay the biggest bribe and treating the country's finances as his own bank account resembled those of Leopold II nearly a century before.

If one really wants to understand the brutality of the global economic system - either the colonial economic system or the system that has replaced it - one need look no further than the Congo. Here's a short video that touches on Leopold's rule but is primarily about Lumumba...

The Strange Case of Canada and Guantanamo Bay

2008-07-16T10:15:00.001-07:00

When British citizen Moazzam Begg was released from the U.S. detention camp in Guantanamo Bay in 2005 after considerable protest by the UK government, I assumed that that would mark the beginning of the end of Guantanamo, or at least of citizens from nations allied with the U.S. being held there.

Nearly all "Western" nations have made some kind of protest about their citizens being held without recourse to due process in Guantanamo Bay, and some of them, including Denmark, Australia, Britain and Belgium have succeeded in efforts to have their citizens repatriated either to stand trial or to be released in their native country.

But Canada is the exception. Of the two Canadian nationals held at Guantanamo, Abdurrahman Khadr agreed to spy for the CIA in exchange for his release, while his brother Omar Khadr, who was just 15 at the time of his capture during a battle where he allegedly fought with Taleban forces against the invading U.S. troops, remains in custody. Khadr apparently took two bullets in that battle and allegedly killed one U.S. soldier.

Even if these charges are proved, Khadr meets the definition of a child soldier and should be a candidate for rehabilitation, not held in indefinite custody without recourse to any judicial system, including basic human rights that have been guaranteed since the time of the magna carta.

The decision by Khadr's lawyers to release a videotape of Khadr being interrogated and begging for help (or death) should be applauded. Hopefully it will shame the Canadian government into doing something. But then it looks like most folks in Canada won't be holding their breath.

My mind can't help but contrast the treatment of Khadr and other Guantanamo detainees, who at the most are accused of killing a handful of people, with the treatment of the real war criminals - Bush, Cheyney, Rumsfeld and companies like Blackwater are punished only by their profits, and (one can hope) guilty consciences.

St. Augustine narrates the story of Alexander the Great asking a pirate in his custody what he means by seizing ships upon the seas. The pirate replies:

What do you mean by seizing the whole earth: but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, whilst you who do it with a great fleet are called emperor.

Food Crises in Africa and Beyond

2008-07-02T13:36:00.001-07:00

There are times when taking an honest look at the world can be about as uplifting as a Dostoevsky novel. My research about the food crisis and its supposed solutions is one example of a clear grasp of the facts leading to near total despair.

The sad thing of course is that this is certainly a preventable - and I would argue a planned - crisis. As I argue in this piece largely about Africa, the IMF and the World Bank have taken dangerous steps to privatize and deregulate the global food industry. While marginalized populations around the world are struggling to make ends meet, Archer Daniels Midland and other agribusiness conglomerates are posting record profits. The deregulation was done in their interest and they are now reaping the benefits, while mostly urban impoverished populations unable to afford increased food prices are the hardest hit.

But the deregulation alone does not explain the crisis. As I argue here, it can hardly be a coincidence that the huge rise in food prices is occurring at almost exactly the same time as the U.S. mortgage market is crashing. It's as if there is too much speculative capital in the world, and wherever it goes it is likely to cause overvaluations of different kinds.

Theoretically speaking, there should be no cause for despair. All of these problems have solutions, some of them fairly intuitive. Farmers have been providing the world with food since the Bronze age. It may be a good idea to trust their instincts, to allow them to grow what makes sense in their national and regional environments, and for governments to worry first about feeding their own citizens and then exporting luxury goods. Speculation can be easily curbed through some kind of taxation, like the tax proposed by economist James Tobin; often a fraction of a per cent tax imposed on every transaction may be enough to dramatically decrease speculator's profit margins.

But these are common sense solutions. Someone let me know when the people who make decisions develop some common sense.

For more background reading and resources check out La Via Campesina and Food First.

Why I'm disillusioned with the Dems (again)

2008-06-29T15:40:00.001-07:00

Ok, so call me gullible. But when Barack Obama was running as someone more progressive than Hillary Clinton, I believed him. Though I had previously thought of him as more or less a centrist, his stance on NAFTA while opposing Hillary in the primary and his relatively clear statements on ending the Iraq war led me to believe that he would at least be staying on the right side of these issues.

But alas, I was wrong. In a flurry of moves to the center, Obama has told us NAFTA's not so bad after all, and that "all politicians", including himself, have tendencies to be "overheated and amplified". Change We Can Believe In, indeed... Obama also supported the least strategic move on behalf of the Democrats this session (and that's saying something), compromising on the FISA telecomm immunity legislation.

The G spot has the best analysis on this I've seen. What Kathy points out over there, that all this was completely predictable and that we should have tried to get our primary candidates to make firmer commitments, is certainly true, but I don't think that it's the whole solution. When the Democratic party - the party that brought us NAFTA in the first place along with other disasters like workfare, the party that is as closely aligned with corporate interests as the Republicans - is the only place for the U.S. left to go, we're in a world of trouble. We need to build up viable third party alternatives that will in the short term scare the Democrats into doing the right thing. In the longer term, maybe we can get rid of the Republicans altogether and ultimately have a two party system with the Greens representing the left and the Democrats representing the center right, which is more or less where they belong in the grander scheme of things.

Thanks to All Who Came to see Mere Bachché

2008-06-25T12:21:00.001-07:00

Thanks to all who came to see Shirin in Mere Bachché [pdf] this weekend. The performances were a huge hit, thanks to loads of hard workers at Natya Bharati.

For those who were unable to make it, there are rumors of more performances to come. We'll keep you posted. In the meanwhile, here are a few more stills from the play taken by Sameer.

The Colonialism of Yesterday and Today

2008-06-23T15:28:00.001-07:00

This BBC review of Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies got me thinking about colonialism and its legacies.

Colonialism has always been about economics. Whether it was Christopher Columbus bragging about slaves and gold for the taking or the brutality of the French sugar production systems in Haiti or even Israel's use of the West Bank's water reserves to promote their agricultural sector, it's all about the money.

The story of the British devastation of Indian agriculture and the story of the Opium wars - British export of Opium to China to fuel addiction and then to make masses of money - are usually thought of as independent stories. The first is thought to have involved a process of de-industrialization [pdf] to force India to produce cheap cotton to be exported and manufactured in British factories and ultimately re-imported as finished goods. The latter, Britain's involvement in the Chinese opium trade, is thought to be one of the most scandalous events in colonial history, with a colonial power doing its best to turn an entire population into opium addicts and then starting a war when the Chinese government began to regulate the trade.

Amitav Ghosh's book argues that there is a strong connection between the two, as cotton was not the only agricultural product that the British forced Indians to grow. Poppy production and the opium trade accounted for well over 20% of the Indian economy in the years prior to the Opium War, and Ghosh claims that it is not a coincidence that the British Raj fell apart about 20 years after the end of the opium trade.

All this has me thinking not about British imperial history but about imperialism in the United States of America. Here as Walter Nugent points out, U.S. imperialism has come in three phases: Expansion within the North American continent, expansion through gains in the Spanish American war (Hawaii, Guam, Puerto Rico, Cuba) and the post World War II phase of unlimited expansion wherever possible (Southeast Asia in the 1960s and 70s, Central America in the 1980s, West Asia and the Middle East today).

All of this expansion has some economic motivation behind it. But in the case of the ongoing Iraq war, I have a feeling that this is such a botched colonial venture that we may see its end soon. Then again, it certainly has made money for some folks...

FISA lessons: The United States Needs an Opposition Party

2008-06-20T08:45:00.001-07:00

So, it's not a good sign when the least popular president in U.S. history is excited about what's going on in the Democratic-led House of Representatives.

“My director of national intelligence and the attorney general tell me that this is a good bill,” Bush said. “It will help our intelligence professionals learn our enemies' plans for new attacks. It ensures that those companies whose assistance is necessary to protect the country will themselves be protected from liability for past or future cooperation with the government.”

In other words, Bush thinks its great that Congress wants to ensure that neither the Bush administration nor its allies in the telecom sector will ever be brought to justice for illegally spying on U.S. citizens for years.

Salon.com has more details:

So all the Attorney General has to do is recite those magic words -- the President requested this eavesdropping and did it in order to save us from the Terrorists -- and the minute he utters those words, the courts are required to dismiss the lawsuits against the telecoms, no matter how illegal their behavior was. That's the "compromise" Steny Hoyer negotiated and which he is now -- according to very credible reports -- pressuring every member of the Democratic caucus to support. It's full-scale, unconditional amnesty with no inquiry into whether anyone broke the law.

The stupidity of the Democrats led by Steny Hoyer is mind boggling. They have no need to pass this law; they don't even know the details of all the laws that may have been broken because the Bush administration has been ultra secretive about this. All they need do is wait a couple of months and there will be a new President, and they can revisit the issue at least with the knowledge of what's going on. Especially if that President is Barack Obama (and if McCain can't even hold a lead in Georgia, I don't know where he can).

That said, why isn't Barack Obama saying anything about this sell out? Give his office a call (202) 224-2854, and contact your Congressional representative to demand that the Bush administration and the telecom companies be held accountable for their actions.

Shirin Acting in Mere Bachché this weekend

2008-06-19T14:38:00.001-07:00

For all those in the DC area and who can understand some Hindi or Urdu, make sure to check out this weekend's production of Arthur Miller's "All My Sons", featuring Shirin as Anu. The play is being produced by Natya Bharati, which we got involved with when we discovered it was the only half decent Desi theater group in the area - at least the only one we could find.

Mere Bachché tells the story of Anu as she returns to the house of her neighbor and fiancé, Sharad, who disappeared three years ago during a major war. Anu's father and Jamna Prasad, Sharad's father, were business partners during the war and were accused of knowingly supplying faulty parts to the army, an act which resulted in the deaths of 21 pilots. As Anu and Sharad's family struggle to make peace with the past, events unfold which make living in the present even more difficult.

The play will be performed on Saturday and Sunday, June 21 and 22 at 4pm at Kreeger Auditorium, Jewish Community Center of Greater Washington, 6125 Montrose Road, Rockville, MD 20852. The dialogues are pretty Bollywood, so don't worry if your Urdu/Hindi isn't that great; you'll definitely understand it. Tickets will be available at the theater, but come early in case it sells out.

Act Collective performs at DC JwJ Awards Ceremony

2008-06-13T13:38:00.001-07:00

Thanks to all who came out yesterday to the DC Jobs with Justice awards ceremony.

The theater group that we're in, the ACT collective, was invited to perform. We did a version of "The Pit" which is based on Nishant Natya Manch's adaptaion of one of Hindi writer Kishanchandar's short stories. That short story itself is based on the biblical story of the good samaritan.

In our version, we tell the story of an immigrant woman who falls into a pit while trying to escape from ICE. She appeals to every passersby to help her out but no one does. The common folk are very busy with their lives and have no time to help others. The cop views her as a terrorist on account of her skin color and threatens arrest. The profit-mongering Sprawlmart representative offers to pull the woman out if she agrees to work for him at 4 dollars an hour. The minuteman wants her deported at once as he holds people like her responsible for unemployment and poverty. There's also an economist who tries to explain that the world is just fine the way it is and she should stop whining, and a politician who ignores her completely. In the end, the audience is asked whether they can help

Here's a slideshow of some of the highlights...

Update on Indian Guest Workers' Hunger Strike and Birthday Wishes to Paul Konar

2008-05-31T20:39:00.001-07:00

We never fail to be impressed by the bravery of these workers.

This past Wednesday Paul Konar (pictured above, center), a welder who has worked all over India and in the Middle East since the 1970s, celebrated his 54th birthday.

Today he also celebrated day 18 of his hunger strike. Although he has given up all food for two and a half weeks, Paul has not given up hope. He is confident that his Satyagraha (non-violent civil disobedience) will help these workers achieve victory in their struggle to remain in this country until the Department of Justice hears the charges of human trafficking against Signal International.

His example and that of his fellow workers and organizers is one from which we could all learn a lot. Their bravery has also garnered support in Congress, with Dennis Kucinich sponsoring a letter to the Department of Justice demanding that the workers be granted continued presence.

In the past few days we've been blessed to be able to spend a lot of time with Paul and other workers as Sameer has been helping out the New Orleans Worker Center for Racial Justice with the organizing efforts. He also has a new article on the campaign over at Foreign Policy in Focus.

Shirin singing original song on Indo-Pak unity

2008-05-30T20:24:00.000-07:00

In the interests of diversity, here's a recording we made in August 2005 of Shirin singing an original folky Hindi song. The opening line is "hai tere ambar mein jo chanda mere ambar mein bhi" - "the moon that is in your sky is also in mine".

For the past several years, the Indian and Pakistani communities here in Washington DC have had joint celebrations for their independence days which fall on August 14 and August 15. I'm not a big believer in independence day celebrations, but if you're going to celebrate it, might as well do it with a song that expresses a sense of unity with an "enemy" country...

The King is Gone, Long Live the... Maovadis?

2008-05-30T05:28:00.001-07:00

Regardless of your political inclinations, you've got to be happy about this.

Nepal is set to abolish its once revered monarchy and create a new republic in the Himalayas.

I've had the honor of visiting Nepal on a few occasions, in solidarity with the communities campaigning against the Melamchi Valley Water Supply project. The project was designed to divert water from the Melamchi valley to the neighboring Kathmandu valley to provide drinking water for the inhabitants of Nepal's capital city.

Aside from the dangers for the inhabitants of Melamchi Valley (water scarcity during the dry season, potential overflow and flooding during the rainy season) and potential design flaws (the project included a 25 kilometer tunnel through the earthquake prone Himalayan mountains) the thing that worried me most about this project was its premise: It's ok for Nepal's biggest city to continue to grow at alarming levels, to continue to attract lots of new Nepalis leaving their villages, while those who stay in the villages remain impoverished. The government (at this time the King's government) would be happy to invest in the booming city, but not to provide badly needed infrastructure to those in the rural areas who need it most.

Though Melamchi is close to Kathmandu, in 2004 and 2005 when I visited it was firmly under control of the Maoists (Maovadis). When we arrived in Melamchi and found the guest house where we were to stay completely full, we stayed with a relative of our guide who claimed to be the proud owner of the "poorest" land and house in the village. The family consisted of this man, his wife and two teenage children, a son and a daughter. My conversation was almost entirely with the father, as he was the only one who spoke Hindi (which he learned while driving taxi in India).

Being the blunt American that I am, I immediately questioned him about the two things that I really cared about - the Maoists and the water project. His replies were polite and somewhat curt. "What should we have to do with the Maoists? We are common people and the King has protected us for generations." And "water is needed by all. If we have much and Kathmandu has little, why shouldn't we share?"

Two hours and a plate of daal bhat later, his tune had changed. "Look Sameer, we have lived here for generations and the king has done nothing for us. The road you came up on, that was built by the Maoists. The water pipes that we have, they were built by the Maoists. At least they are doing something. And this project, I don't know what it will do but we are powerless to stop it."

It was a valuable lesson in the importance of trust building.

I can't honestly say whether the current politically disparate forces in Nepal - Maoists, liberal democrats and the remnants of the Royalists - will succeed where others have failed. But I, and 15 million Nepalis, at least have some hope today.

Victory for Immokalee Workers

2008-05-24T21:13:00.001-07:00

Sometimes it seems as though we're always on the defensive. From trying to stop walls being built in Palestine and Texas to trying to ensure that the Bush administration's captives in Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere have access to some dignity and justice, it's a long and hard struggle just to ensure that communities around the world still have the rights that they've already won.

That's why the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and their string of victories is so encouraging. For the uninitiated, the CIW represents farmworkers in Immokalee, Florida. The mostly immigrant workers have been picking tomatoes for years for a pittance - about $10-12,000 per year.

This wage is by and large set by the fast food companies that who hire the pickers. In 2005, the CIW launched a boycott of Taco Bell demanding that they pay one penny per pound more for tomatoes picked, an increase of over 70% in the workers' wages. Eventually, and in order to avoid the bad publicity that the boycott was generating, Taco Bell agreed to the demands. After Taco Bell, the CIW went after McDonalds, and in this case, McDonalds was so afraid of bad press that they acceded to the demands before the boycott was even in full swing. Just yesterday, the CIW was successful in their campaign against a third company, Burger King.

Congratulations to all who were a part of this struggle! And while life's challenges continue for us all, please take a moment to toast this victory (and any others you can think of) with the celebratory beverage of your choice.

Here's more on the struggle of the Immokalee Workers...

Dignity, Human Rights and the Guest Worker programs

2008-05-14T20:08:00.000-07:00

Guest worker programs in the United States have long been a tactic to exploit cheap immigrants labor and undermine working class wages. But sometimes they go a step further and resemble share cropping and even slavery.

In the case of Signal International, a subcontractor for U.S. defense giant Northrop Grumman, it is not difficult to see the connection between guest worker programs and outright slavery. Indian workers were promised good jobs, the ability to bring their families over and even green cards in exchange for $20,000 in cash upfront. After coughing up their life savings, these workers were kept in labor camps in terrible working conditions and told that they'd be sent back when their visas expired. They were under constant threat of deportation, sometimes even being told that if they didn't get a specific job done in time, they would be deported.

Instead of allowing themselves to be intimidated, the workers filed a case with the Department of Justice accusing the company of human trafficking. The DoJ, in its infinite wisdom, has ruled that it can only hear the case after the claimants have been deported!!!

These workers have shown unbelievable courage and strength in their fight for dignity. Today they went on hunger strike to demand that Congress pass legislation to ensure that they are not deported until their case is heard. The kickoff event took place in front of the White House and lots of folks came out to express their solidarity, including civil rights leader Lennox Yearwood.

Please check out the New Orleans Worker Center webpage for more background and updates and sign this petition to express your solidarity. And if you are in DC, try to come by and see the workers to express your solidarity (be sure to check the website first as they will be in different places over the next few weeks).

May Birthdays - Tagore & Israel

2008-05-08T15:03:00.000-07:00

May seventh was the 147th birthday of Rabindranath Tagore, perhaps the most famous Bengali ever.

Tagore's poetry, prose and political writings earned him numerous awards, including the distinction of being Asia's first Nobel laureate, and he was a significant influence on the struggle for Indian independence. His role in the freedom struggle is often underestimated and misunderstood - most people over emphasize the role of Gandhi and underemphasize the role of everyone else, including Tagore.

One of the more interesting aspects of Tagore's contributions to the freedom struggle were his criticisms, especially his criticism of the concept of nationalism. Amartya Sen (another Bengali Nobel prize winner), in his recent book The Argumentative Indian has this to say about Tagore's critique of nationalism:

Rabindranath rebelled against the strongly nationalist form that the independence movement often took... He wanted to assert India's right to be independent without denying the importance of what India could learn - freely and profitably - from abroad. He was afraid that rejection of the West in favour of an indigenous India tradition... could easily turn into hostility to other influences from abroad, including Christianity, which came to parts of India by the fourth century, Judaism, which came through Jewish immigration shortly before the fall of Jerusalem, as did Zoroastrianism through Parsee immigration later on (mainly in the eighth century), and, of course - and most importantly - Islam, which has had a very strong presence in India since the eighth century.

Tagore's views are very prescient in considering the history of India and the rise of religious nationalism (see our post on Shamsul Islam's recent books). But they are perhaps even more prescient in light of another May birthday.

On the 15th of May of 1948, the British occupation of Palestine ended with a handover of power to a branch of European zionists, thereby creating the state of Israel. In the process, tens of thousands of Palestinian families were displaced. While the anti colonial sentiment and resistance to the British is to be applauded, the supposed justification for this situation (the terrible crimes committed by the Nazis against Jews, Roma, homosexuals and others) does not justify the "catastrophe" or "Nakba" as this displacement is known to Palestinians. The real reason for the creation of Israel lies in the continuation of a kind of colonialism, one that is evident whenever we consider the double standards applied to Israel on issues of nuclear proliferation, rule of law, and human rights. All nationalism has its ugly side, but the current celebrations of Israeli independence are perhaps a display of nationalism at its ugliest.

Here's a short youtube clip from Edward Said on apartheid within Israel (more of him here). More info can be found here, and a really good timeline of events can be found here.

May Day, Migration, and Lou Dobbs fans

2008-05-06T11:38:00.000-07:00

As was mentioned in the last post, CNN featured a brief clip of me on the Lou Dobbs show on May 1. The show itself (I didn't watch it but I looked at the transcript) was predictably inane drivel about how "them immigrants" are coming over here to take our jobs. It even had special reference to May 1 as "law day", a term coined during the cold war and then invoked by Ronald Reagan just after he announced that he would not be respecting international law. The show was so silly, I was content to leave it alone, though I made a mental note to think twice before agreeing to be interviewed by CNN again...

Well that was that until I came across this while looking for media hits on the events.

You know what sameer dossani you and your illegal friends and family can go back to whatever country you hail from and demand your rights there! Go back to wherever you came from and see what this kind of behavior will get you.

Not one to shy away from fighting words, I began what I hope was a fairly reasoned debate with folks who should be at least in class solidarity with their working class Latino sisters and brothers. Well, ok I was a bit snarky, but the thought of being confronted by the "minute man" character that I play in our play "The Pit", was equal parts hilarious and nauseating. (And h/t to my brother Zain for joining the fray.)

Some of the realizations I came to from that discussion:

1) Any talk about the root causes of migration is met with bewildered anger. Accusations about being off topic flew when talking about economic and political strife in Global South countries (and the U.S. role in that strife). For my part, I find talk about the root causes of immigration so obvious, that I 've been unable to write much about it since I did this article for FPIF.

2) The history of May Day is something hardly any folks in the U.S. know, especially working class folks. It's such an important story of solidarity, of demanding better working conditions, of uniting between different segments of the workers, that this is really a shame. If one of the contributions of the immigrants rights movement is to help U.S. workers remember their own holiday, that would be amazing.

3) The right has done an amazing job instilling a culture of isolation and xenophobia on folks who should be worried about the Bush administration's record when it comes to the rule of law. Not sure how we're going to build a movement for meaningful peace and justice as long as people still watch Faux news and Dobbs...

For those who want to see my unpublished responses to the Lou Dobbs thread, I'll post them in the comments section.

May Day pics from Pickets at RNC and DNC

2008-05-03T12:00:00.000-07:00

These are our pics from the May Day events here in DC. Hats off to DC Jobs with Justice and others who did a great job making the cut-outs and organizing the events. Media was out in full force, and we'll be on the lookout for any hits. Sameer did have a short quote on CNN, but we won't post to that here. For those with the stomach, you can look for transcripts of Lou Dobb's show.

More photos are in the feed on the right hand side of this page or on our public picasa site.

May Day, Mandela & We Are All Terrorists

2008-05-01T17:50:00.001-07:00

May first is celebrated all over the world as labor day except in the United States. This may be seem like another aspect of U.S. parochialism (like the fact that we still buy milk in gallons and measure distance in miles) except for one thing: the events behind May Day took place here in the United States. In 1886, immigrant workers all over the country were demanding better working conditions. Their chief demand was that the workday be shortened to eight hours. On May 3, police fired into a crowd of demonstrators in Chicago killing four and wounding many more. The following day, as police were harassing the stragglers at a meeting called to figure out a response to the police violence, an unknown demonstrator threw a bomb at the police line, killing one. The police fired into the crowd (gathered at Haymarket Square) and another worker was killed. Though the police could never determine who threw the bomb, five prominent labor activists were sentenced to death and four of them were hanged for the crime. Soon after, global outrage at the actions of the U.S. government inspired the celebration of May Day, a day of global solidarity with U.S. workers.

This story came into my head today as I read about Nelson Mandela being on a list of terrorists and possibly denied entry to the United States. Mandela, of course was a terrorist according to FW De Klerk and the administrators of apartheid before him, and according to Ronald Reagan who backed the apartheid regime to the hilt. But within a few years of Mandela being branded an un-reformable terrorist, he became the celebrated first Black South African head of state.

Without Mandela and the movement for which he was a spokesperson South Africa would still be an apartheid state. Without the workers who were murdered by the U.S. state in 1886 and their struggle, who knows if we would have eight hour days, weekends, let alone basic education and healthcare? Whatever gains working class and colonized people have made over the centuries have been made by those whom the state brands as terrorists.

Don't Let Your Food Do Drugs

2008-04-30T13:43:00.000-07:00

In an infuriating but completely predictable narrative, many of the world's leading publications have begun advocating the increased use of technology to solve the world's food problems.

AARRGGH!!! At a time when critiques of bad-for-you and unsustainable farming practices seemed to be going mainstream (just look at the popularity of Polan's Omnivore's Dilemma or the recent movie King Corn), it looks like the global food industry has revived the narrative that their big business money making is the only way to feed the world. I've written an article on what's wrong with the Gates-Rockefeller push for a "new green revolution" is a really bad idea; it should be published by Food and Water Watch in the next couple of weeks. Till then, check out this really great backrounder by Food First and this older article over a Grist.

Shirin Acting in Mere Bacche

2008-04-28T17:33:00.000-07:00

For those in the DC area, Shirin will be acting in a Hindi version of Arthur Miller's All My Sons called Mere Bacche. Looks like it's going to be a great production, and the last Desi production we saw in DC got sold out quickly, so get your tix here.

Hunger and History in Haiti

2008-04-25T11:15:00.000-07:00

There is perhaps no case more disturbing in the global economy than that of Haiti. Today's Miami Herald has a story on donors attempting to come to Haiti's aid in the midst of violence (and the threat of much more violence) due to rising food prices.

Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere, but it was the jewel of the French colonial crown. The primary reason for its ongoing poverty is the unending desire on the part of the "civilized" world to extract vengeance for Haiti's defeat of the French in 1804, making it the second oldest republic in the Americas. The best book for understaning this story is Adam Hachschild's Bury the Chains which is a remarkable account of the end of the transatlantic slave trade and one of my all time favorites.

The Miami Herald article also mentions the role of the World Bank and the IMF:

In November 2006, Haiti signed a multi-year program with the IMF that would culminate with a pardon of nearly $1 billion of the $1.6 billion the country owes multilateral institutions like the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the World Bank

That program, HIPC (the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries program), would lock in the liberalization policies that have been such a disaster for Haiti. While debt cancellation is a good thing, tying it to these conditions is ludicrous, especially in a country that has been as colonized as collectively punished as Haiti.

Today that colonization goes on in the form of a UN occupation. For more on economic and political justice and to find out how to get involved, check out the Quixote center's Haiti Reborn project.

Thomas Friedman gets pied

2008-04-24T08:37:00.000-07:00

From ZP Heller blogging at alternet...

Thomas Friedman, the author and NY Times columnist, was all set to deliver an Earth Day speech at Brown University entitled "Green is the new Red, White, and Blue." Friedman's been calling for government-led environmentalism to bring about energy salvation and climate change.
Not everyone agrees with Friedman's ideas, including the Greenwash Guerrillas, who stormed the stage and let their green pies fly. As the Greenwash Guerillas fled, they threw leaflets into the crowd that stated:
Thomas Friedman deserves a pie in the face...
* Because of his sickeningly cheery applaud for free market capitalism's conquest of the planet.
* For telling the world that the free market and techno fixes can save us from climate change. From carbon trading to biofuels, these distractions are dangerous in and of themselves, while encouraging inaction with respect to the true problems at hand.
* For helping turn environmentalism into a fake plastic consumer product for the privileged
* For his long-standing support for the US Occupation of Iraq and the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Such committed support to the US War Machine and its proxy states overseas cannot be masked behind any twisted mask of "green" - the US Military is the largest single emitter of greenhouse gases in the world.
* For his pure arrogance.

On behalf of the earth and all true environmentalists -- we, the Greenwash Guerrillas, declare Thomas Friedman's "Green" as fake and toxic to human and planetary health as the cool-whip covering his face.

I'll try to post a longer critique of Friedman at some point. He's my favourite straw man to bring up in workshops these days because his arguments in favour of globalization vary between the silly and the inane.

Eric Mann - Hillary and McCain: The White Bloc that must be stopped

2008-04-22T08:36:00.000-07:00

Eric Mann has a piece over at Burning Cane on the presidential elections and the racism that is slowly bubbling to the surface therein.

It's a long article but definitely worth a read. I'm not sure I agree with everything Mann says, but I do think that we are already witnessing history. A few months ago, nearly all of the big money corporate donors were in Clinton's camp. A few years ago, that would have meant an automatic nomination. Instead, Obama has mobilized a grassroots base of activists and donors to not only keep him in the game, but to make him the odds-on favorite. The extent to which Obama remains accountable to this base will determine whether or not he serves ordinary people's interests if he wins the presidency.

Policy wise, he's no different than Hillary though.

The video below is the best speech of the race so far, the Obama on racism speech. Crucially, it leaves out an analysis of white supremacy (without which, racism is meaningless) but it's way better than anything that's come before. The U.S. has a long way to go in confronting its history of racism, sexism and colonialism, and having a president who is at least willing to talk about these issues for a change couldn't hurt.

Shamsul Islam's Latest Books Reviewd

2008-04-21T15:49:00.001-07:00

As many of you know, Shirin's father just released a series of seven(!) books on the 1857 first war of Indian liberation (known to the British as the 1857 mutiny. The Sunday Tribune has done a review of all seven.

Shirin singing Mirabai's Barse Badariya

2008-04-20T18:03:00.000-07:00

So as folks seem unhappy with only a taste of Shirin's singing, here's some more! This was recorded at a fundraiser at Sameer's parents house in June of 2007.

Shirin singing Raga from Umrao Jaan

2008-04-20T12:00:00.000-07:00

Last month, we recorded this song on my cousin Zia's computer. Mostly we had fun playing with the various tanpura samplers we found on the web.

Turns out blogger is not the best service for uploading audio. You have to turn it into a movie file (which I did with iphoto's slideshow feature) and then upload that file. The audio here may be choppy. I'll try to find a work around for our next audio post, but if that doesn't work, we may be switching over to wordpress...

Edward Said on Iraq

2008-04-04T16:00:00.001-07:00

Apologies for the lack of activity in this space. We have updates on our recent travels to Thailand and Arizona, as well as work on proscenium and street theater, but before we get to those, this 2001 video of Edward Said taking on Charlie Rose and debunking the status quo on Iraq (and the rest of the Middle East) is definitely worth watching. The second interview is with George Soros, and while he's a bit of a mixed bag (defintely not the kind of champion that Said was) his take on market fundamentalism and the "open society" also deserves some attention.

Enjoy!

Visit to Al-Jazeera

2008-01-27T15:04:00.001-08:00

This week I had the opportunity to do my first interview with Al-Jazeera English. While visiting their DC studio, I also got the opportunity to look around and check out their live feed, a rare luxury for those of us in the U.S., where the government has blocked Al-Jazeera from negotiating a deal with any cable or satellite providers. Amazing stuff. Kind of like the BBC with a Global South focus. In the half hour or so I spent waiting for my interview to start, I saw clips from Kenya, Palestine, Pakistan, a focus group on African development. I thought it was pretty impressive.

Anyway, here are the clips of the show I was on, called inside story. If you have time, you may want to check out Al-Jazeera's youtube channel. You can also get a premium subscription from their website which apparently lets you check out their archives in better quality, but I haven't checked that out as yet.

Blogged with Flock

Welcome to our Blog

2007-12-22T16:14:00.000-08:00

Ok, so we've tried this a few times now, but this one's for real. Shirin and I are starting a blog. Again. This time, it's not about a particular project of ours, it's not about the 50 Years Is Enough Network, it's not about scholarships for girls and women in India, it's not about violence in the name of religion. Instead it's really all about us.

Self centered... um, yes we know ;-)

This way, we can keep all of you folks out there informed about whatever it is we happen to be working on at the moment, whether it's a better way to make dhahi ki kadhi, or the latest on the U.S. War Of Terror in the Middle East and elsewhere, or it's the latest play or piece of music we're working on.

We're looking forward to blogging and we hope that our own disparate interests will keep you interested.