how not to win friends:
A recent Congressional Research Service report on international arms sales records that last year the United States delivered nearly $8 billion worth of weapons to Third World countries. This was about 40% of all such arms transfers. The United States signed agreements to sell over $10 billion worth of weapons, one-third of all arms deals with Third World countries. It is easy to put this in perspective: $10 billon a year is the estimated cost of meeting the UN Millennium Development Goal for water and sanitation, which would reduce by half the proportion of people in the world without proper access to drinking water and basic sanitation by 2015. Today, about 1.1 billion people do not have access to a minimal amount of clean water and about 2.6 billion people do not have access to basic sanitation.
(...) The largest third world buyer of weapons in 2006 was Pakistan. It purchased just over $5 billion in arms deals. Almost $3 billion of the purchases by Pakistan were new U.S.-made F-16s fighter jets, up-grades to the F-16s Pakistan bought in the 1980s, and bombs and missiles to arm these planes. A White House Press spokesman explained that the sale of the jet fighters "demonstrates our commitment to a long-term relationship with Pakistan."
(...) Since September 11, 2001, the United States has given over $10 billion to Pakistan to buy or reward General Musharraf's support for its newest war, the "war on terror." Pakistan has spent over $1.5 billion of this amount on buying new weapons. To understand the scale of this aid, consider Pakistan's total military budget in 2006, estimated at about $4.5 billion. The United States is now giving Pakistan aid to pay for the new deal for F-16s, bombs, and missiles. It is likely to win few friends.
(...) Attitudes toward the United States have worsened. A 2007 poll found that only 15% of Pakistanis had a favorable attitude towards the United States. An August 2007 poll found that General Musharraf was less popular even than Osama bin Laden; Musharraf had the support of 38% of Pakistanis, Bin Laden of 46%, and President Bush found favor with only 9%. It is hard to imagine a more damning indictment of a policy that sought to make friends and build support.

favored nation:
It does not follow, however, that blame for Pakistan’s multifarious woes can be laid squarely on the shoulders of the US. Washington’s influence has played a deletrious contributory role in many respects over the decades, but we are essentially the authors of our own misfortunes - not least in terms of offering the US repeated opportunities to establish - and abuse - its clout.

losing in afghanistan:
What is the reason that the number of soldiers killed in Afghanistan is markedly less than in Iraq when in one country the intervention has lasted since 2001 and in the other since 2003? Well, in the first country the occupying force is much smaller and practically confined to urban centres. The presence in rural areas is so scarce that right now the various forces that make up the Afghan resistance control 75% of the country.
(...) It is mistaken to identify the whole spectrum of Afghan anti-occuoation forces as Taliban. It is true that the Taliban have re-organized and that they make up the greater part of the resistance, but apart from them there are other components like the Islamic Party of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (whose fiefdom is the northern province of Kunduz), nationalist resistance led by Jalalladin Hakkani, Al Qaeda militants, opium traffickers and all kinds of local fighters sick of Western arrogance and above all of the civilian casualties the occupiers have caused. Mor and more villages and towns are abandoning Karzai's puppet regime and going over to the insurrection. One should not forget that the collaborators' “star” program is the fight against opium production and that leads them to destroy all kinds of crops without taking into account that the great majority of the lands belong to impoverished rural families with no other means of support. That is just as true in the case of mercenaries belonging to Dyncorp (the US corporation that is supposed to do the same work in Colombia) as it is of occupation forces directed by Great Britain and of collaborationist troops. These last have an impressive record of robbery, rape, extortion, torture and murder, all with impunity. Repressing anti-occupation demonstrations is the order of the day. The collaborationist army is made up mostly of people of Tajik ethnic background, which makes the reaction of the Pathans (or Pashtuns, if one uses Anglo-Saxon etymology) completely normal. The Tajik militias were the main support of the US in its overthrow of the Taliban who are Pathans, the most numerous ethnic group in Afghanistan.
(...) Just as in Iraq, there are no figures for the number of civilians killed by the occupation. Marc W. Herold, an economist in the University of New Hampshire has carried out a study showing 4643 dead civilians from September 2001 to October 2006. As is logical, this figure has increased considerably because since then NATO has increase bombing of civilian areas. The UN talks timidly of 1000 deaths between January 1st and August 1st of this year (6) covering itself by saying “in many cases security considerations limiting the Mission's access to combat zones and the fact that one is dealing with a delicate political situation render difficult the collection of sufficient data to draw up a full report of incidents.” So one should hardly be surprised therefore that the growth of nationalist, anti US and anti-Western sentiment in general is swelling the ranks of the anti-occupation forces. The anti-occupation forces, generically identified as Taliban (so the term interiorizes itself in the collective sub-conscious as a synonym for uncivilized, while foreign troops are bringing progress) are accused of hiding among the civilian population, as if in an asymmetrical guerrilla war the guerrillas might say “Yoo-hoo! Here I am! – Come and bomb me out here in the open....!” But what is happening in Afghanistan is more and more a guerrilla war, perhaps even a most advanced phase. a war of movement.
(...) The UNODC reckoned that 165,000 hectares were dedicated to opium production in 2006, mostly in areas controlled by Karzai's semi-colonial government and in areas with occupied military presence. So the opium is in the hands of the pro-Western elite and forms part of the counterinsurgency campaign. With the territorial expansion of the guerrillas and the control they have in these areas, opium is turning into an almost essential part of the anti-occupation war.

why the 'free trade' agenda is losing steam:
Real wages - adjusted for inflation -- for the more than 100 million people that make up most of our labor force were just ten percent higher in 2006 than they were in 1973. This is a revolutionary upward redistribution of income, vastly different from the prior 25 years, when real wages increased by 74 percent. How much of this redistribution is due to trade, or more broadly, the "globalization" that includes the movement of production to countries with low wages, repressed labor, and weak environmental regulation?

The conventional wisdom is that there are huge gains from trade, but since benefits are not so visible and are dispersed among many consumers, "protectionists" who might lose jobs prevail against the public interest. The reality is the opposite: the losses are dispersed among the majority of workers through lower wages. The gains are concentrated among the big corporations who own our Congress and lobby for "free trade."

it's uphill for the democrats:
Democratic adherents to what might be called the "neoliberal" position are well organized and well positioned. Their credo was enunciated just nine years ago by Madeleine Albright, then President Bill Clinton's secretary of state: "If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further into the future." She was speaking of Bosnia at the time, but her remark had much wider implications.
(...) Make no mistake," write Marshall and Jeremy Rosner in their introduction, "we are committed to preserving America's military preeminence. We recognize that a strong military undergirds U.S. global leadership." Recalling a Democratic "tradition of muscular liberalism," they insist that "Progressives and Democrats must not give up the promotion of democracy and human rights abroad just because President Bush has paid it lip service. Advancing democracy -- in practice, not just in rhetoric -- is fundamentally the Democrats' legacy, the Democrats' cause, and the Democrats' responsibility."
(...) It isn't easy to offer a true alternative. The challenges to world order are many, as are the influential special interests in this country that want an aggressive policy: globalizing corporations, the military-industrial complex, the pro-Israel lobbies, those who covet Middle Eastern oil. The nationalist conviction that we are indeed "the indispensable nation" will continue to tempt our leaders to overplay their hand. The danger lies in believing that our power is beyond challenge, that the righteousness of our goals is beyond question and that the real task is not to reformulate our role in the world so much as to assert more effectively a global American peace.

Pakistan needs scrutiny not charity
In October 2005, upon learning of the devastation that had been caused in Northern Pakistan by a massive earthquake, many of my British friends promptly emailed me with offers of help, ranging from money to filling in my duties at Cambridge while I visited the earthquake stricken region. At the time, I suggested to them that what countries like Pakistan need, even in the face of such calamities, is not charity but scrutiny. Pakistan is a rich country, with abundant natural as well as human resources. What keeps Pakistan from developing is not a lack of resources but the presence of an illegitimate, highly corrupt government, which is sustained not by the people of Pakistan but by powerful developed countries in the vanguard of movements for ‘good governance’, democracy and transparency. 160 million Pakistanis do not need charity from the British public. They need their scrutiny. They need them to deny oppressive governments legitimacy. And they need them to expose the double standards of their own government.

the environmental movement in the global south:
Mahathir has been interpreted in the North as speaking for a South that seeks to catch up whatever the cost and where the environmental movement is weak or non-existent. Today, China is seen as the prime exemplar of this Mahathirian obsession with rapid industrialization with minimal regard for the environment. This view of the South’s perspective on the environment is a caricature. In fact, the environmental costs of rapid industrialization are of major concern to significant sectors of the population of developing countries and, in many of them, the environmental movement has been a significant actor. Moreover, there is currently an active discussion in many countries of alternatives to the destabilizing high-growth model.
(...) In both societies (Korea and Taiwan), farmers, workers, and the environment bore the costs of high-speed industrialization. Both societies, it is not surprising, saw the emergence of an environmental movement that was spontaneous, that drew participants from different classes, that saw environmental demands linked with issues of employment, occupational health, and agricultural crisis, and that was quite militant.
(...) Unlike in Korea and Taiwan, environmental movements already existed in a number of the Southeast Asian countries before the period of rapid industrialization, which in their case occurred in the mid-eighties to the mid-nineties. These movements had emerged in the seventies and eighties in struggles against nuclear power, as in the Philippines; against big hydroelectric dams, as in Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines; and against deforestation and marine pollution, as in Thailand and the Philippines. These were epic battles, like the struggle against the Chico River Dam in the northern Philippines and the fight against the Pak Mun Dam in the northeast of Thailand, which forced the World Bank to withdraw its planned support for giant hydroelectric projects, an outcome that, as we shall see later on, also occurred in struggle against the Narmada Dam in India. The fight against industrial associated partly with foreign firms seeking to escape strict environmental regulations at home was a case of a new front being opened up in an ongoing struggle to save the environment.
(...) The environmental movements in Southeast Asia played a vital role not only in scuttling projects like the Bataan nuclear plant but in ousting the dictatorships that reigned there in the seventies and eighties. Indeed, because the environment was not perceived by authoritarian regimes as “political,” organizing around environmental and public health issues was not initially proscribed. Thus environmental struggles became an issue around which the anti-dictatorship movement could organize and reach new people. Environmental destruction became one more graphic example of a regime’s irresponsibility. In Indonesia, for example, the environmental organization WALHI went so far as to file a lawsuit for pollution and environmental destruction against six government bodies, including the Minister of the Environment and Population5. By the time the dictatorships wised up to what was happening, it was often too late: environmentalism and anti-fascism fed on one another.
(...) The environmental crisis in China is very serious. For example, the ground water table of the North China plain is dropping by 1.5 meters (5 feet) per year. This region produces 40 percent of China's grain. As environmentalist Dale Wen remarks, “One cannot help wonder about how China will be fed once the ground aquifer is depleted” 6. Water pollution and water scarcity; soil pollution, soil degradation and desertification; global warming and the coming energy crisis—these are all byproducts of China’s high-speed industrialization and massively expanded consumption.
(...) Most of the environmental destabilization in China is produced by local enterprises and massive state projects such as the Three Gorges Dams, but the contribution of foreign investors is not insignificant. Taking advantage of very lax implementation of environmental laws in China, many western TNCs have relocated their most polluting factories into the country and have exacerbated or even created many environmental problems. Wen notes that the Pearl River Delta and Yangtze River Delta, the two Special Economic Zones where most TNC subsidiaries are located, are the most seriously affected by heavy metal and POPs (persistent organic pollutants) pollution.
(...) Global warming is not a distant threat. The first comprehensive study of the impact of the sea level rise of global warming by Gordon McGranahan, Deborah Balk, and Bridget Anderson puts China as the country in Asia most threatened by the sea level rise of up to 10 meters over the next century 8. 144 million of China’s population live in low-elevation coastal zones, and this figure is likely to increase owing to the export-oriented industrialization strategies pursued by the government, which has involved the creation of numerous special economic zones. “From an environmental perspective,” the study warns, “there is a double disadvantage to excessive (and potentially rapid) coastal development. First, uncontrolled coastal development is likely to damage sensitive and important ecosystems and other resources. Second, coastal settlement, particularly in the lowlands, is likely to expose residents to seaward hazards such as sea level rise and tropical storms, both of which are likely to become more serious with climate change”9. The recent spate of super-typhoons descending on the Asian mainland from the Western Pacific underlines the gravity of this observation.
(...) In terms of public health, the rural health infrastructure has practically collapsed, according to Dale Wen. The system has been privatized with the introduction of a “fee for service” system that is one component of the neoliberal reform program. One result is the resurgence of diseases that had been brought under control, like tuberculosis and schistosomiasis. Cuba, in contrast, has won plaudits for its rural health care system, which is ironic, says Wen, given that the Cuban system was based on the Maoist era’s “barefoot doctor” system.
(...) The combination of the industrialization of food production and the lengthening of the food chain from production to consumption is strongly suspected to be the cause of bird flu, which has migrated from China to other countries. The government has become an unreliable actor in dealing with new diseases such as bird flu and SARS, prone as it is to engage in minimizing the threat if not promoting a cover-up, as it did in the case of SARS.
(...) As in Taiwan and Korea 15 years earlier, we see unrestrained export-oriented industrialization bringing together low-wage migrant labor, farming communities whose lands are being grabbed or ruined environmentally, environmentalists, and the proponents of a major change in political economy called the “New Left.” Environment-related riots, protests and disputes in China increased by 30% in 2005 to more than 50,000, as pollution-related unrest has become “a contagious source of instability in the country,” as one report put it. Indeed, a great many of recorded protests fused environmental, land-loss, income, and political issues. From 8700 in 1995, what the Ministry of Public Security calls "mass group incidents" have grown to 87,000 in 2005, most of them in the countryside. Moreover, the incidents are growing in average size from 10 or fewer persons in the mid-1990s to 52 people per incident in 2004 11. Notable were the April 2005 riots in Huashui, where an estimated 10,000 police officers clashed with desperate villagers who succeeded in repelling strong vested interests polluting their lands.
(...) As in China, the environment and public health have been sites of struggle in India. Over the last 25 years, the movement for the environment and public health has exploded in that country. Indeed, one can say that this movement has become one of the forces that is deepening Indian democracy.
(...) Here Roy expresses an essential truth: that centralized electrification preempted the development of alternative power-systems that could have been more decentralized, more people-oriented, more environmentally benign, and less capital intensive.
(...) While these interests benefited, others paid the costs. Specifically, it was the rural areas and the environment that absorbed the costs of centralized electrification. Tremendous crimes have been committed in the name of power generation and irrigation, says Roy, but these were hidden because governments never recorded these costs. In India, Roy calculates that large dams have displaced about 33 million people in the last 50 years, about 60 per cent of them being either untouchables or indigenous peoples
(...) Equally important was the broader political impact of the Narmada struggle. It proved to be the cutting edge of the social movements that have deepened India’s democracy and transformed the political scene. The state bureaucracy and political parties must now listen to these movements or risk opposition or, in the case of parties, being thrown out of power. Social movements in the rural areas played a key role in stirring up the mass consciousness that led to the defeat in 2004 of the neoliberal coalition led by the Hindu chauvinist BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) that had campaigned on the pro-globalization slogan “India Shining.” While its successor, the Congress Party-led coalition, has turned its back on the rural protest that led to its election and followed the same anti-agriculture and pro-globalization policies of the BJP, it risks provoking an even greater backlash in the near future.
(...) As in China, the challenge lies in building up a mass movement that might be unpopular not only with the elite but also with sections of the urban-based middle class sectors that have been the main beneficiaries of the high-growth economic strategy that has been pursued since the early 1990’s.
(...) The reason for tracing the evolution of a mass-based environmental movement in East Asia and India is to counter the image that the Asian masses are inert elements that uncritically accept the environmentally damaging high-growth export-oriented industrialization models promoted by their governing elites. It is increasingly clear to ordinary people throughout Asia that the model has wrecked agriculture, widened income inequalities, led to increased poverty after the Asian financial crises, and wreaked environmental damage everywhere.
(...) There is no doubt that the burden of adjustment to global warming will fall on the North, and that this adjustment will have to be made in the next 10 to 15 years, and that the adjustment needed might need to be much greater than the 50 per cent reduction from the 1990’s level by 2050 that is being promoted by the G 8. In the eyes of some experts, what might be required is in the order of 100 or 150 per cent reduction from 1990 levels. However, the South will also have to adjust, proportionately less than the North but also rather stringently.
(...) The South’s adjustment will not take place without the North taking the lead. But it will also not take place unless its leaders junk the export-oriented, high-growth paradigm promoted by the World Bank and most economists to which its elites and many middle strata are addicted.

obama's insults:
(...) During his Brown Chapel address, Obama praised the “Moses [King and Selma] Generation” of Civil Rights leaders for bringing black America “90 percent” of the way to social equality in America. It’s up to Obama and his fellow “Joshua Generation” blacks to get past “that [final] 10 percent in order to cross over to the other side,” Obama said. This formulation was consistent with his 2006 campaign book The Audacity of Hope’s claim that most black Americans have been “pulled into the economic mainstream.”
Never mind that blacks are afflicted with a shocking racial wealth gap that keeps their average net worth at one eleventh that of whites and an income structure starkly and persistently tilted towards poverty (Loewen 2005, p. 130; Shapiro 2005). Or that whites in the United States, considered separately, enjoy the highest quality of life in the world while black Americans, viewed separately, live at the level of a “Third World” nation (Elaine Brown, The Condemnation of Little B [Boston, MA: Beacon, 2002], pp. 78-79).
(...) Too bad Obama’s relatively privileged background has little to do with American Horatio Alger (rags to riches) mythology. And too bad that Obama’s paean to the American Dream was plagued by a different sort of empirical challenge: the relatively stationary and harshly unbalanced structure of American inequality.
(...) Not only does the social class into which you are born matter a very great deal when it comes to where you stand on the American socioeconomic ladder. It matters more in the U.S. than it does in most if not all the rest of the industrialized world. As reporter David Wessel noted on the front page of the Wall Street Journal in the spring of 2005, the best scholarship on the subject simply does not support "the notion that the US is a meritocracy where smarts and ambition matter more than parenthood and class." In reality, the odds that a child born into poverty will climb into the middle or upper class are slighter in the U.S. than they are in "class bound Europe." The U.S. and its junior partner England are "the least mobile societies" among the world's "rich countries." France and Germany "are somewhat more mobile than the U.S.; Canada and the Nordic countries are much more so."
(...) As Obama waxed eloquent about “generous America’s” status as the global beacon of ascendant opportunity, the best current research determined at least 45 to 60 percent of "parents' [class] advantage" is "passed on to their children." Using the 60 percent estimate, Wessel reported that rich Americans’ inherited edge and poor Americans’ inherited disadvantage goes five generations deep in the U.S., extending back to the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. According to Chicago Federal Reserve economist Bhashkar Mazumdor, who matched government survey data with the Social Security records of thousands of men burn during the 1960s, just 14% of American men born to fathers in the bottom tenth of the wage structure have risen to the top 30%. Conversely, just 17% of men born to fathers in the top tenth have fallen into the bottom 30th.
(...) It gets worse, Wessel noted, when you factor in race: fully 42% of blacks born into the bottom tenth of families for income fail to escape the lowest ten percent. By contrast, just 17% of whites born into the bottom tenth stay there as adults.
(...) “The people in this stadium need to know who we're going to fight for,” Obama told labor union members in Chicago’s Soldier Field last August. “The reason that I'm running for president is because of you, not because of folks who are writing big checks, and that's a clear message that has to be sent, I think, by every candidate.” At the same time, “Obama, Inc.” proceeds to set campaign fundraising records with considerable help from gigantic corporations and investment capital behemoths like Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Chase and Co., and Exelon. These and other stupendous concentrations of wealth exercise quiet but powerful control over Obama’s campaign rhetoric and policy proposals. Especially insulting to our intelligence and sensibilities is Obama’s determination to retain close and lucrative funding relationships with leading Washington-based lobbyists and lobbying firms he claims to repudiate. Obama talks a big game of not taking lobbyist money but he works regularly with influential lobbyist players who (as Los Angeles Times reporter Dan Moran noted last August) “skirt disclosure requirements by merely advising clients and associates who do actual lobbying, and avoiding regular contact with policymakers.”
(...) In an interview last year with Time’s Joe Klein, Obama expressed interesting misgivings even about Massachusetts’ (non-single payer)plan for universal health insurance. He insulted American intelligence and moral sensibilities when he told Klein that “voluntary” solutions are “more consonant” with “the American character” than “government mandates.” Never mind that, as Noam Chomsky noted in 2006 (Chomsky Failed States [2006], p. 225): “A large majority of the [U.S.] population supports extensive government intervention [in the health care market], it appears. An NBC-Wall Street Journal poll found that ‘over 2/3 of all Americans thought the government should guarantee “everyone the best and most advanced health care that technology can supply;”’ a Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 80 percent regard universal health care as ‘more important than holding down taxes’; polls reported in Business Week found that 67% of Americans think it is a good idea to guarantee health care for all U.S. citizens, as Canada and Britain do, with just 27 5 dissenting; the Pew Research Center found that 64 percent of Americans favor the ‘U.S. government guaranteeing health insurance for all citizens, even if it means raising taxes’ (30 percent opposed). By the late 1980s, more than 70 percent of Americans ‘thought health care should be a constitutional guarantee,’ while 40 percent ‘thought it already was.’” Obama, it is worth noting, received $708,000 from medical and insurance interests between 2001 and 2006. His wife Michelle, a fellow Harvard Law graduate, was a Vice President for Community and External Affairs at the University of Chicago Hospitals, a position that paid her $273, 618 in 2006.
(...) These were maddeningly meager reflections on the wonders of American democracy. Obama’s ode to the absence of fascist dictatorship in the U.S. deleted the absence or weakness of substantive positive popular governance there. It evaded the unpleasant fact that much of ordinary U.S. citizens’ freedom to “say,” “write,” and “think” whatever they wish generally amounts to the liberty to whisper to one's immediate neighbor in the front row of a crowded movie theater with a blaring sound track since it is generally drowned out by giant, concentrated corporate media and the special megaphones possessed by private and state power. In a similar vein, Joe Six Pack et al.’s votes - when actually counted - are mere political half-pennies compared to the structurally empowered super-citizenship bestowed upon the great monied interests and corporations that exercise such well known disproportionate influence on American “market democracy.”
(...) It gets worse and more insulting and authoritarian with Obama. After referring to Americans as "one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes,” Obama’s Keynote Address praised "a young man" named Seamus who "told me he'd joined the Marines and was heading to Iraq the following week." Seamus' most endearing quality, Obama told the 2004 Convention, was "absolute faith in our country and its leaders, his devotion to duty and service." Reflecting on Seamus’ supposed blind and unquestioning devotion to the American fatherland, Obama "thought this young man was all that any of us might hope for in a child." So much for the venerable democratic tradition of encouraging critical thinking and questioning authority!
(...) "We heard a few reports, in one case corroborated by photographs," Hedges and Al-Arian report, "that some soldiers had so lost their moral compasses that they mocked or desecrated Iraqi civilian corpses." Twenty four veterans "said they had witnessed or heard stories from those in their unit of unarmed civilians being shot or run over by convoys. These incidents were so numerous that many were never reported." The killing of "unarmed Iraqis" is "so common many of the troops said it became an accepted part of the daily landscape." Several interviewees told Hedges and Al-Arian of cases where U.S. soldiers would "plant AK-47s" next to the bodies of unarmed Iraqis they had butchered "to make it seems as if the civilian dead were combatants" (Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian, "The Other War: Iraq Vets Bear Witness," The Nation, July 30, 2007).

nicaragua's sandinista government:
"For a party with a socialist mission like the Sandinista Front, our situation is very complex and contradictory. The party holds the presidency and has the most political sympathizers in Nicaragua. However, it is still a minority in other state powers, and faces an opposition that is trying to unite and jointly oppose it. This party, now in power, has to administer a country where capitalist economy dominates and must govern a society whose hegemonic values are liberal and neo-liberal. Its strategy implies defending revolutionary measures of the government and acting as a party opposed to the capitalist system now in force."
(...) But how can we Sandinistas contest capitalist "hegemonic values"? In Venezuela, repeated popular mobilizations turned back the right-wing assault. Can Nicaragua follow a similar path?