Lord Keynes held forth (his wife, the prima donna ballerina Lydia Lopolava was the rage at Bretton Woods). He had not wanted to invite the rest of the world, as it were. They, he wrote acidly, “clearly have nothing to contribute and will merely encumber the ground.” If they were allowed, the Bretton Woods conference would be “the most monstrous monkey-house assembled for years.” There was only one woman at the table, Mabel Newcomer (a Vassar Professor of Economics). The delegates from the darker nations could not help set the agenda, for the few that came where were there at the sufferance of their colonial masters (such as the Indians and the Filipinos) , while the free people (such as some Latin Americans and the Chinese) were shown the door when the real deliberations began. The Chinese delegate, to be fair, was Dr. H. H. Kung, a descendant of Confucius and husband of Ailing (“Pleasant”) Soong (whose sisters had married Dr. Sun Yat Sen and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek). The richest man in China at that time, Kung didn’t seem to do much to pave the way for the reconstruction of a devastated Chinese mainland.
(...) The delegates from afar had to be there in the Gold Room to put their impressions on the final communiqué. No surprise then that the two major institutions that came out of Bretton Woods, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB), had to be run by an European or an American respectively. No-one else would have a turn. Keynes’ disdain for those not like himself was shared by others, and it was this that moved them to disenfranchise the world from the governance of the IMF and the WB (the main votes on their Boards of Executive Directors are held by the U. S. and Europe). The silence of the colonized and semi-colonized meant that the new monetary policies favored those who had already seized the world’s wealth, and the trade policies that followed set inequality in stone. Chastened by the economic warfare of the 1920s and 1930s that not only brought on the hostilities of World War II, but also contributed to the prolongation of the Depression, the major powers now created a currency regime that would be less volatile. The WB was created to help manage the reconstruction of war ravaged Europe (not Asia, nor Africa, both also burnt to the crisp by European ambitions). The IMF emerged as an institution to tide over countries that had a balance of payments or short-term liquidity problem. There is no mandate to poverty reduction or to the elimination of the vast global inequalities that marked the end of the colonial era. The IMF and the WB were institutions for the maintenance of colonial domination by other means.
Showing posts with label neo-colonialism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label neo-colonialism. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Friday, May 30, 2008
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
breaking the chains:
For every $1 that developing countries receive from rich countries in aid, they return $5 in debt repayments.
(...) [a nice, simple, succinct explanation] The genesis of the crisis lies in a world economy saturated by dollars in the 1960s and ’70s, as the dollar replaced gold as the currency of exchange, and the world paid for a growing US budget deficit.When oil-exporting countries in OPEC reduced oil supply in 1973 and oil prices soared, much of this profit was again deposited in dollars in Western banks. Banks, eager to reduce the supply of dollars, to prevent a collapse in the dollar price and to make profit, lent out more money to developing countries, many of which were newly liberated from colonialism. Little thought was given to how useful these loans were or to whom they were being lent. Then, Ronald Reagan came to power in the US. Interest rates soared and the price of commodities, on which many poor countries depended, slumped. Poor countries earned less for their exports and paid more interest on their loans. They had to borrow more simply to repay the interest. The debt crisis was born.
(...) Haiti still owes $1.3bn to international creditors like the World Bank. Some 40 per cent of this was run up by Papa Doc and Baby Doc, who stole parts of these loans for themselves and used the rest to repress the population. When the US flew Baby Doc out of Haiti in 1986, he is estimated to have taken $90m with him.
(...) In 1995, the IMF forced Haiti to slash its rice tariff from 35 per cent to 3 per cent, enriching US business through soaring imports. A country that was self-sufficient in rice is now dependent on foreign imports at the mercy of global market prices.
(...) The Suharto regime in Indonesia was reputed to be one of the most corrupt and brutal governments in modern times. Suharto stole up to $35bn from his country and killed up to 1 million people in political witch-hunts, yet the World Bank still lent it $30bn. Today, the Indonesian people continue to pay $2m every hour for their former dictator’s debt, while 100 million Indonesians live in poverty.
For every $1 that developing countries receive from rich countries in aid, they return $5 in debt repayments.
(...) [a nice, simple, succinct explanation] The genesis of the crisis lies in a world economy saturated by dollars in the 1960s and ’70s, as the dollar replaced gold as the currency of exchange, and the world paid for a growing US budget deficit.When oil-exporting countries in OPEC reduced oil supply in 1973 and oil prices soared, much of this profit was again deposited in dollars in Western banks. Banks, eager to reduce the supply of dollars, to prevent a collapse in the dollar price and to make profit, lent out more money to developing countries, many of which were newly liberated from colonialism. Little thought was given to how useful these loans were or to whom they were being lent. Then, Ronald Reagan came to power in the US. Interest rates soared and the price of commodities, on which many poor countries depended, slumped. Poor countries earned less for their exports and paid more interest on their loans. They had to borrow more simply to repay the interest. The debt crisis was born.
(...) Haiti still owes $1.3bn to international creditors like the World Bank. Some 40 per cent of this was run up by Papa Doc and Baby Doc, who stole parts of these loans for themselves and used the rest to repress the population. When the US flew Baby Doc out of Haiti in 1986, he is estimated to have taken $90m with him.
(...) In 1995, the IMF forced Haiti to slash its rice tariff from 35 per cent to 3 per cent, enriching US business through soaring imports. A country that was self-sufficient in rice is now dependent on foreign imports at the mercy of global market prices.
(...) The Suharto regime in Indonesia was reputed to be one of the most corrupt and brutal governments in modern times. Suharto stole up to $35bn from his country and killed up to 1 million people in political witch-hunts, yet the World Bank still lent it $30bn. Today, the Indonesian people continue to pay $2m every hour for their former dictator’s debt, while 100 million Indonesians live in poverty.
Monday, July 16, 2007
stop trying to 'save' africa:"Don't you want to help us save Africa?" she yelled.
(...) Such campaigns, however well intentioned, promote the stereotype of Africa as a black hole of disease and death. News reports constantly focus on the continent's corrupt leaders, warlords, "tribal" conflicts, child laborers, and women disfigured by abuse and genital mutilation. These descriptions run under headlines like "Can Bono Save Africa?" or "Will Brangelina Save Africa?" The relationship between the West and Africa is no longer based on openly racist beliefs, but such articles are reminiscent of reports from the heyday of European colonialism, when missionaries were sent to Africa to introduce us to education, Jesus Christ and "civilization."
(...) Why do the media frequently refer to African countries as having been "granted independence from their colonial masters," as opposed to having fought and shed blood for their freedom? Why do Angelina Jolie and Bono receive overwhelming attention for their work in Africa while Nwankwo Kanu or Dikembe Mutombo, Africans both, are hardly ever mentioned? How is it that a former mid-level U.S. diplomat receives more attention for his cowboy antics in Sudan than do the numerous African Union countries that have sent food and troops and spent countless hours trying to negotiate a settlement among all parties in that crisis?
(...) Last month the Group of Eight industrialized nations and a host of celebrities met in Germany to discuss, among other things, how to save Africa. Before the next such summit, I hope people will realize Africa doesn't want to be saved. Africa wants the world to acknowledge that through fair partnerships with other members of the global community, we ourselves are capable of unprecedented growth.
(...) Such campaigns, however well intentioned, promote the stereotype of Africa as a black hole of disease and death. News reports constantly focus on the continent's corrupt leaders, warlords, "tribal" conflicts, child laborers, and women disfigured by abuse and genital mutilation. These descriptions run under headlines like "Can Bono Save Africa?" or "Will Brangelina Save Africa?" The relationship between the West and Africa is no longer based on openly racist beliefs, but such articles are reminiscent of reports from the heyday of European colonialism, when missionaries were sent to Africa to introduce us to education, Jesus Christ and "civilization."
(...) Why do the media frequently refer to African countries as having been "granted independence from their colonial masters," as opposed to having fought and shed blood for their freedom? Why do Angelina Jolie and Bono receive overwhelming attention for their work in Africa while Nwankwo Kanu or Dikembe Mutombo, Africans both, are hardly ever mentioned? How is it that a former mid-level U.S. diplomat receives more attention for his cowboy antics in Sudan than do the numerous African Union countries that have sent food and troops and spent countless hours trying to negotiate a settlement among all parties in that crisis?
(...) Last month the Group of Eight industrialized nations and a host of celebrities met in Germany to discuss, among other things, how to save Africa. Before the next such summit, I hope people will realize Africa doesn't want to be saved. Africa wants the world to acknowledge that through fair partnerships with other members of the global community, we ourselves are capable of unprecedented growth.
Friday, July 6, 2007
the crisis of imperialism:
Things reached a crisis in the mid 1980s when, to stave off the prospect of a world depression due to the bad debts incurred by Third World countries, the IMF and WB stepped in and took over responsibility for those debts from the big private banks like Barclays, Credit Lyons, Chase Manhattan, etc., which were threatened with collapse. It was a move which put the IMF and WB into an unassailable position of power which they have never relinquished since.
(...) These austerity programs pave the way for transnational corporations, always looking to reduce costs and access cheap sources of raw materials, to come in and set up their manufacturing operations, driving people, including children in many cases, from the land into factories, where they are forced to labour long hours under horrendous conditions for starvation wages. This serves two purposes: it destroys the agro-economies of the Third World, which are now required to import their food from the First World, and ensures the outward flow of wealth to First World transnational corporations and their international investors.
(...) The case of Nigeria is typical. Today, life expectancy in this oil-rich, aid-dependent nation is 47 years for males and 52 years for females. Of a population of 120 million, 89 million people live on less than a dollar a day, this despite the fact that the Niger Delta region contains large deposits of oil. One IMF loan of $12 billion has become a continuous unpaid debt of $27 billion.
(...) Six million children under the age of 5 die each year in the Third World as a whole due to hunger and preventable disease.
Things reached a crisis in the mid 1980s when, to stave off the prospect of a world depression due to the bad debts incurred by Third World countries, the IMF and WB stepped in and took over responsibility for those debts from the big private banks like Barclays, Credit Lyons, Chase Manhattan, etc., which were threatened with collapse. It was a move which put the IMF and WB into an unassailable position of power which they have never relinquished since.
(...) These austerity programs pave the way for transnational corporations, always looking to reduce costs and access cheap sources of raw materials, to come in and set up their manufacturing operations, driving people, including children in many cases, from the land into factories, where they are forced to labour long hours under horrendous conditions for starvation wages. This serves two purposes: it destroys the agro-economies of the Third World, which are now required to import their food from the First World, and ensures the outward flow of wealth to First World transnational corporations and their international investors.
(...) The case of Nigeria is typical. Today, life expectancy in this oil-rich, aid-dependent nation is 47 years for males and 52 years for females. Of a population of 120 million, 89 million people live on less than a dollar a day, this despite the fact that the Niger Delta region contains large deposits of oil. One IMF loan of $12 billion has become a continuous unpaid debt of $27 billion.
(...) Six million children under the age of 5 die each year in the Third World as a whole due to hunger and preventable disease.
Thursday, June 28, 2007
the banality of greed
This week’s evidence of the continuing corruption of Halliburton and its subsidiaries profiteering from contracts costing American taxpayers an unbelievable $22 billion stems from a report by the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction. The report, only one of many about Halliburton’s recently severed subsidiary KBR, focuses on work done in Baghdad’s super-secure Green Zone. While parent company Halliburton insults U.S. taxpayers by relocating its headquarters to the tax shelter of Dubai, subsidiary KBR has been spun off to focus more directly on the American military contracts that form the core of its operations.
(...) It is claimed by American officials that KBR’s accountability issues are being addressed. In one instance cited, the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad—a spiraling enterprise well on its way to becoming a nation-within-a-nation akin to the Vatican in Italy—announced that, as a means of avoiding food theft, its personnel would no longer be allowed to bring large bags into the eating halls. Such sacrifice for the mission of securing Iraqi freedom.
This week’s evidence of the continuing corruption of Halliburton and its subsidiaries profiteering from contracts costing American taxpayers an unbelievable $22 billion stems from a report by the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction. The report, only one of many about Halliburton’s recently severed subsidiary KBR, focuses on work done in Baghdad’s super-secure Green Zone. While parent company Halliburton insults U.S. taxpayers by relocating its headquarters to the tax shelter of Dubai, subsidiary KBR has been spun off to focus more directly on the American military contracts that form the core of its operations.
(...) It is claimed by American officials that KBR’s accountability issues are being addressed. In one instance cited, the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad—a spiraling enterprise well on its way to becoming a nation-within-a-nation akin to the Vatican in Italy—announced that, as a means of avoiding food theft, its personnel would no longer be allowed to bring large bags into the eating halls. Such sacrifice for the mission of securing Iraqi freedom.
Sunday, June 17, 2007
fisk on "palestine":
How troublesome the Muslims of the Middle East are. First, we demand that the Palestinians embrace democracy and then they elect the wrong party - Hamas - and then Hamas wins a mini-civil war and presides over the Gaza Strip. And we Westerners still want to negotiate with the discredited President, Mahmoud Abbas. Today "Palestine" - and let's keep those quotation marks in place - has two prime ministers. Welcome to the Middle East.
(...) No one asked - on our side - which particular Israel Hamas was supposed to recognise. The Israel of 1948? The Israel of the post-1967 borders? The Israel which builds - and goes on building - vast settlements for Jews and Jews only on Arab land, gobbling up even more of the 22 per cent of "Palestine" still left to negotiate over?
(...) And so today, we are supposed to talk to our faithful policeman, Mr Abbas, the "moderate" (as the BBC, CNN and Fox News refer to him) Palestinian leader, a man who wrote a 600-page book about Oslo without once mentioning the word "occupation", who always referred to Israeli "redeployment" rather than "withdrawal", a "leader" we can trust because he wears a tie and goes to the White House and says all the right things. The Palestinians didn't vote for Hamas because they wanted an Islamic republic - which is how Hamas's bloody victory will be represented - but because they were tired of the corruption of Mr Abbas's Fatah and the rotten nature of the "Palestinian Authority".
(...) Palestinians wanted an end to corruption - the cancer of the Arab world - and so they voted for Hamas and thus we, the all-wise, all-good West, decided to sanction them and starve them and bully them for exercising their free vote. Maybe we should offer "Palestine" EU membership if it would be gracious enough to vote for the right people
(...) All over the Middle East, it is the same. We support Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, even though he keeps warlords and drug barons in his government (and, by the way, we really are sorry about all those innocent Afghan civilians we are killing in our "war on terror" in the wastelands of Helmand province). We love Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, whose torturers have not yet finished with the Muslim Brotherhood politicians recently arrested outside Cairo, whose presidency received the warm support of Mrs - yes Mrs - George W Bush - and whose succession will almost certainly pass to his son, Gamal. We adore Muammar Gaddafi, the crazed dictator of Libya whose werewolves have murdered his opponents abroad, whose plot to murder King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia preceded Tony Blair's recent visit to Tripoli - Colonel Gaddafi, it should be remembered, was called a "statesman" by Jack Straw for abandoning his non-existent nuclear ambitions - and whose "democracy" is perfectly acceptable to us because he is on our side in the "war on terror". Yes, and we love King Abdullah's unconstitutional monarchy in Jordan, and all the princes and emirs of the Gulf, especially those who are paid such vast bribes by our arms companies that even Scotland Yard has to close down its investigations on the orders of our prime minister - and yes, I can indeed see why he doesn't like our coverage of what he quaintly calls "the Middle East". If only the Arabs - and the Iranians - would support our kings and shahs and princes whose sons and daughters are educated at Oxford and Harvard, how much easier the "Middle East" would be to control.
(...) If only Lebanon was a home-grown democracy like our own little back-lawn countries - Belgium, for example, or Luxembourg. But no, those pesky Middle Easterners vote for the wrong people, support the wrong people, love the wrong people, don't behave like us civilised Westerners.
(...) So what will we do? Support the reoccupation of Gaza perhaps? Certainly we will not criticise Israel. And we shall go on giving our affection to the kings and princes and unlovely presidents of the Middle East until the whole place blows up in our faces and then we shall say - as we are already saying of the Iraqis - that they don't deserve our sacrifice and our love.
How troublesome the Muslims of the Middle East are. First, we demand that the Palestinians embrace democracy and then they elect the wrong party - Hamas - and then Hamas wins a mini-civil war and presides over the Gaza Strip. And we Westerners still want to negotiate with the discredited President, Mahmoud Abbas. Today "Palestine" - and let's keep those quotation marks in place - has two prime ministers. Welcome to the Middle East.
(...) No one asked - on our side - which particular Israel Hamas was supposed to recognise. The Israel of 1948? The Israel of the post-1967 borders? The Israel which builds - and goes on building - vast settlements for Jews and Jews only on Arab land, gobbling up even more of the 22 per cent of "Palestine" still left to negotiate over?
(...) And so today, we are supposed to talk to our faithful policeman, Mr Abbas, the "moderate" (as the BBC, CNN and Fox News refer to him) Palestinian leader, a man who wrote a 600-page book about Oslo without once mentioning the word "occupation", who always referred to Israeli "redeployment" rather than "withdrawal", a "leader" we can trust because he wears a tie and goes to the White House and says all the right things. The Palestinians didn't vote for Hamas because they wanted an Islamic republic - which is how Hamas's bloody victory will be represented - but because they were tired of the corruption of Mr Abbas's Fatah and the rotten nature of the "Palestinian Authority".
(...) Palestinians wanted an end to corruption - the cancer of the Arab world - and so they voted for Hamas and thus we, the all-wise, all-good West, decided to sanction them and starve them and bully them for exercising their free vote. Maybe we should offer "Palestine" EU membership if it would be gracious enough to vote for the right people
(...) All over the Middle East, it is the same. We support Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, even though he keeps warlords and drug barons in his government (and, by the way, we really are sorry about all those innocent Afghan civilians we are killing in our "war on terror" in the wastelands of Helmand province). We love Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, whose torturers have not yet finished with the Muslim Brotherhood politicians recently arrested outside Cairo, whose presidency received the warm support of Mrs - yes Mrs - George W Bush - and whose succession will almost certainly pass to his son, Gamal. We adore Muammar Gaddafi, the crazed dictator of Libya whose werewolves have murdered his opponents abroad, whose plot to murder King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia preceded Tony Blair's recent visit to Tripoli - Colonel Gaddafi, it should be remembered, was called a "statesman" by Jack Straw for abandoning his non-existent nuclear ambitions - and whose "democracy" is perfectly acceptable to us because he is on our side in the "war on terror". Yes, and we love King Abdullah's unconstitutional monarchy in Jordan, and all the princes and emirs of the Gulf, especially those who are paid such vast bribes by our arms companies that even Scotland Yard has to close down its investigations on the orders of our prime minister - and yes, I can indeed see why he doesn't like our coverage of what he quaintly calls "the Middle East". If only the Arabs - and the Iranians - would support our kings and shahs and princes whose sons and daughters are educated at Oxford and Harvard, how much easier the "Middle East" would be to control.
(...) If only Lebanon was a home-grown democracy like our own little back-lawn countries - Belgium, for example, or Luxembourg. But no, those pesky Middle Easterners vote for the wrong people, support the wrong people, love the wrong people, don't behave like us civilised Westerners.
(...) So what will we do? Support the reoccupation of Gaza perhaps? Certainly we will not criticise Israel. And we shall go on giving our affection to the kings and princes and unlovely presidents of the Middle East until the whole place blows up in our faces and then we shall say - as we are already saying of the Iraqis - that they don't deserve our sacrifice and our love.
Thursday, June 7, 2007
george monbiot on the g8:
It is time once again for that touching annual ritual, in which the world’s most powerful people move themselves to tears. At Heiligendamm they will emote with the wretched of the earth. They will beat their breasts and say many worthy and necessary things – about climate change, Africa, poverty, trade – but one word will not leave their lips. Power. Amid the patrician goodwill, there will be no acknowledgement that the power they wield over other nations destroys everything they claim to stand for.
(...) They refuse to acknowledge that what the rich nations give with one finger they take with both hands.
(...) Look at what is happening, right now, in the Philippines. This country has many problems, but one stands out: just 16% of children between 4 and 5 months old are exclusively breastfed(1). This is one of the lowest documented rates on earth, and it has fallen by a third since 1998(2). As 70% of Filipinos have inadequate access to clean water, the result is a public health disaster. Every year, according to the World Health Organisation, some 16,000 Filipino children die as a result of “inappropriate feeding practices”(3).
(...) A summary of peer-reviewed studies compiled by the campaigning groups Infact and Ibfan suggests that breastfeeding also reduces the incidence of asthma, allergies, childhood cancers, diabetes, coeliac disease, Crohn’s, colitis, obesity, cardiovascular disease, poor cognitive development, ear infections and poor dentition(4). Switching from bottle to breast could prevent 13% of all childhood deaths(5): a greater impact than any other measure. Panaceas are rare in medicine, but the mammary gland is one.
(...) Both the government of the Philippines and the UN blame the manufacturers of baby formula for much of the decline in breastfeeding. These companies spend over $100m a year on advertising breastmilk substitutes in the Philippines, which equates to over half the department of health’s annual budget(6). Those who appear most susceptible to this advertising are the poor, who are also the most likely to be using contaminated water to make up the feed. Some spend as much as one third of their household income on formula. Powdered milk now accounts for more sales than any other consumer product in the Philippines(7). Almost all of it is produced by companies based in the rich nations.
(...) Last year, in the hope of arresting this public health disaster, the Philippines Department of Health drew up a new set of rules. It prohibited all advertising and promotion of infant formula for children of up to two years old. It forbade the formula companies from giving away gifts or samples or from providing assistance to health workers or classes to mothers(13). The new rules seem stiff, but they all come straight from the WHO’s code. PHAP, whose members include most of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies(14), went to the supreme court to try to obtain a restraining order. When it failed the big guns arrived.
(...) The US embassy and the US regional trade representative started lobbying the Philippines government. Then the chief executive of the US Chamber of Commerce in Washington – which represents three million businesses – wrote a letter to the president of the Philippines, Gloria Arroyo. The new rules, he claimed, would have “unintended negative consequences for investors’ confidence”. The country’s reputation “as a stable and viable destination for investment is at risk.”(15) Four days later, the Supreme Court reversed its decision and imposed the restraining order PHAP had requested. It remains in force today. The government is currently unable to prevent companies from breaking the international code.
(...) The pressure to which the US government and the US Chamber of Commerce have subjected the government of the Philippines is at odds with almost everything the G8 now claims to stand for: the millennium health and education goals, the eradication of poverty, fair terms of trade. But the G8 nations will pursue their stated objectives only to the point at which they collide with their own interests. Away from their sentimental summits, they pull down everything they claim to be building.
(...) The question is no longer whether the undemocratic power the G8 nations exert over the rest of the world can be used for good or ill. The question is whether it will cease to be used.
It is time once again for that touching annual ritual, in which the world’s most powerful people move themselves to tears. At Heiligendamm they will emote with the wretched of the earth. They will beat their breasts and say many worthy and necessary things – about climate change, Africa, poverty, trade – but one word will not leave their lips. Power. Amid the patrician goodwill, there will be no acknowledgement that the power they wield over other nations destroys everything they claim to stand for.
(...) They refuse to acknowledge that what the rich nations give with one finger they take with both hands.
(...) Look at what is happening, right now, in the Philippines. This country has many problems, but one stands out: just 16% of children between 4 and 5 months old are exclusively breastfed(1). This is one of the lowest documented rates on earth, and it has fallen by a third since 1998(2). As 70% of Filipinos have inadequate access to clean water, the result is a public health disaster. Every year, according to the World Health Organisation, some 16,000 Filipino children die as a result of “inappropriate feeding practices”(3).
(...) A summary of peer-reviewed studies compiled by the campaigning groups Infact and Ibfan suggests that breastfeeding also reduces the incidence of asthma, allergies, childhood cancers, diabetes, coeliac disease, Crohn’s, colitis, obesity, cardiovascular disease, poor cognitive development, ear infections and poor dentition(4). Switching from bottle to breast could prevent 13% of all childhood deaths(5): a greater impact than any other measure. Panaceas are rare in medicine, but the mammary gland is one.
(...) Both the government of the Philippines and the UN blame the manufacturers of baby formula for much of the decline in breastfeeding. These companies spend over $100m a year on advertising breastmilk substitutes in the Philippines, which equates to over half the department of health’s annual budget(6). Those who appear most susceptible to this advertising are the poor, who are also the most likely to be using contaminated water to make up the feed. Some spend as much as one third of their household income on formula. Powdered milk now accounts for more sales than any other consumer product in the Philippines(7). Almost all of it is produced by companies based in the rich nations.
(...) Last year, in the hope of arresting this public health disaster, the Philippines Department of Health drew up a new set of rules. It prohibited all advertising and promotion of infant formula for children of up to two years old. It forbade the formula companies from giving away gifts or samples or from providing assistance to health workers or classes to mothers(13). The new rules seem stiff, but they all come straight from the WHO’s code. PHAP, whose members include most of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies(14), went to the supreme court to try to obtain a restraining order. When it failed the big guns arrived.
(...) The US embassy and the US regional trade representative started lobbying the Philippines government. Then the chief executive of the US Chamber of Commerce in Washington – which represents three million businesses – wrote a letter to the president of the Philippines, Gloria Arroyo. The new rules, he claimed, would have “unintended negative consequences for investors’ confidence”. The country’s reputation “as a stable and viable destination for investment is at risk.”(15) Four days later, the Supreme Court reversed its decision and imposed the restraining order PHAP had requested. It remains in force today. The government is currently unable to prevent companies from breaking the international code.
(...) The pressure to which the US government and the US Chamber of Commerce have subjected the government of the Philippines is at odds with almost everything the G8 now claims to stand for: the millennium health and education goals, the eradication of poverty, fair terms of trade. But the G8 nations will pursue their stated objectives only to the point at which they collide with their own interests. Away from their sentimental summits, they pull down everything they claim to be building.
(...) The question is no longer whether the undemocratic power the G8 nations exert over the rest of the world can be used for good or ill. The question is whether it will cease to be used.
Thursday, May 17, 2007
new imperial strategy, same imperial imperative:Whereas military invasions and installing dictatorships have traditionally been the way to control foreign populations and keep them out of the way of business, the U.S. government has now developed a new strategy that is not so messy or brutal, and much more sleek; so sleek, in fact, that it’s almost invisible.
(...) It was so invisible in Serbia that no one seemed to notice in 2000 when a regime was toppled, the country was opened to massive privatization, and huge public-sector industries, businesses, and natural resources fell into the hands of U.S. and multinational corporations. Likewise, few have noticed as countries in the former Soviet-bloc have recently been victims of the same strategy, with the exact same results.
(...) Nations that do not give in to the demands of the empire and the expansion of global capitalism are targeted by an undercover, well-designed plan to change the political situation in the country, and open it up to corporate investors. U.S.-supported groups inside the country overthrow the president, making it seem like there is no outside intervention. And now, Washington has turned toward its new biggest threat: Latin America, and more specifically, Venezuela.
(...) The Rise of the New World Order: During the second half of the twentieth century, capitalists in the first world began to saturate domestic opportunities for investment and growth. Big business reached a point where possibilities for expansion within national borders were mostly exhausted, and the only option for growth was to look for new opportunities abroad. Growing corporate conglomerates looked to expand their operations throughout the world, investing, privatizing, and buying up everything they could get their hands on. National capital was looking to go international, and by the end of the century, capitalism had become truly global. "Get big, or get eaten," was their new philosophy, and they decided to get big by eating whole nations. With the help of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, economies everywhere were opened up to privatization. The phone systems, electrical grids, water systems, and natural resources were bought up by wealthy capitalists in countries around the world. Free-market capitalism now ruled the day; a paradise for international capital as the world’s wealth became more and more concentrated in their hands. [1] Some nations, however, were determined to not be eaten. Privatization was an unpopular idea among populations who had developed the crazy idea that their natural resources belonged to them, and not foreign corporations. Resistance developed in several areas of the world, and some nations would not consent to the logic of global capitalism. Washington, however, was determined to open the world up to corporate expansion. They would oblige those countries that didn’t comply, either by force or by cunning.
[yugoslavia as case-study]
(...) And it’s not hard to see why. After the toppling of the Milosevic regime allowed for mass privatization, all that remained of the formerly socialist country, including some of Europe’s largest reserves of natural resources, soon fell into the hands of U.S. and international investors.
(...) [good history, but hardly a new strategy, right?] As implausible as it might sound, it was exactly this strategy that toppled Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia in 2000. After the war in Kosovo and NATO bombing had failed to produce regime change, the United States worked to strengthen Milosevic’s internal opponents by uniting them behind one candidate, Vojislav Kostunica, and pumping about $40 million into his election campaign. [3] U.S.-funded NGO’s and electoral consultants helped create a propaganda campaign surrounding the elections, and worked behind the scenes to help organize mass resistance to the Milosevic regime. [4] U.S.-trained “election helpers” were deployed around the country on election day to monitor results. The U.S. even provided young activists with thousands of cans of spray paint and campaign stickers to cover the country with anti-Milosevic slogans. [5]
(...) According to official results of the first round elections neither candidate had won a majority of the vote, and so it would require a second round run-off. But U.S. consultants published their own “exit polls” giving Kostunica a huge victory and Milosevic refused to recognize them. [6] The opposition claimed fraud and U.S.-backed groups staged acts of non-violent resistance to put pressure on the government. Armed groups stormed the Federal Assembly and the state television headquarters. [7] Massive protests and rebellion forced Milosevic to step down. There would be no second round election, and Washington’s candidate Vojislav Kostunica took power. The strategy had worked.
(...) The US government had worked on dismantling and dividing the socialist Yugoslavia for years, supporting any and all independence movements within the individual provinces, including the 1999 military intervention to help the province of Kosovo break away. What was once a relative economic success under the famous Josip Tito, the socialist economy, based on socially-owned, worker-controlled companies, did not allow for foreign investment or US capital. This was a mortal sin in modern global capitalism. As Michael Parenti put it: “Yugoslavia was the only country in Eastern Europe that would not dismantle its welfare state and public sector economy. It was the only one that did not beg for entry into NATO. It was - and what's left of it, still is - charting an independent course not in keeping with the New World Order.” [9]
(...) The rewards for their work were substantial. Once Milosevic was gone, one of the first actions taken by the new government was the to repeal the 1997 privatization law and allow 70% of a company to be sold to foreign investors. [10] In 2004 the UN Mission in Kosovo announced the privatization of 500 enterprises, and U.S. corporations came out the big winners. Phillip Morris bought up a $580 million tobacco factory, U.S. Steel got a $250 million deal on a steel producer, Coca-Cola grabbed a bottled water producer for $21 million, and the list goes on. [11]
(...) In addition, western investors now had access to what the New York Times called the “war’s glittering prize,” the second largest coal reserves in Europe and large reserves of lead, zinc, gold, silver, and, even petroleum. [12] And the real gem was located in the province of Kosovo; the huge Trepca mine complex, valued at over $5 billion, now open to the highest bidder. [13]
(...) The success of the strategy in Serbia was an important lesson for the Washington policy makers. They would repeat it several more times throughout Eastern Europe in places like Georgia (2003), the Ukraine (2004) Kyrgyzstan (2005), and Belarus (unsuccessfully in 2001). In what became known as the “Color Revolutions,” each U.S.-aided movement would remove a regime in exchange for one more favorable to the “free-market” policies promoted by Washington. [14] The preferred strategy for regime change became this new sort of non-violent resistance, and now the empire turned its gaze on South America, where a new threat to global capitalism had suddenly emerged.
(...) You can be sure that corporate investors would love to get their hands on the PDVSA company, along with other public sector companies in Venezuela. In fact, they were doing just that throughout the 1990’s. By 1998, multinational corporations had already bought up the national phone company, the largest electricity company, and PDVSA was going through what they called an “opening” to international capital; a prettier way of saying privatization. [16]
(...) But that same year, Hugo Chavez was elected president on an anti-imperialist platform, and the auctioning-off of Venezuela came to an abrupt halt. In fact, Hugo Chavez has become a real problem for the corporate imperialists and their servants in Washington. Not only has he stopped privatization, but he is reversing it by re-nationalizing all that was once privatized. The privatization of the state oil company is now prohibited by law, and his government has taken complete control of it, using it to finance the country’s development.
(...) And so, just as they did in Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine and others, Washington has deployed its forces in Venezuela with the intention of getting rid of the Chavez menace. After trying many things over the years including a short-lived coup, electoral manipulation, and mass protests, Washington has not been able to topple the popular leader. But they haven’t given up. To the contrary, they’ve actually just continued to increase their level of involvement.
(...) The new imperial strategy includes something called “American Corners.” These “corners” are small offices set up by Washington throughout the target country that basically serve as mini-embassies. It is not completely clear what exactly these “corners” do, but inside you will find an array of information about the United States, including study abroad opportunities, English classes, and pro-U.S. propaganda. On top of this, the mini-embassies also organize events, trainings, and lectures for young students. Interestingly, they seem to be very abundant in countries that Washington seeks to destabilize.
(...) As reported by Reuters, the Venezuelan opposition is already learning the Serbian tactics to overthrow a regime from a retired U.S. army colonel named Robert Helvey: “Helvey, who has taught young activists in Myanmar and Serbian students who helped topple the former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic in 2000, is giving courses on non-violent opposition tactics this week at an east Caracas university,” said the article. “Neither Helvey nor the organizers of the Caracas seminar would give details of exactly what opposition tactics were being taught. But in his work in Serbia before Milosevic’s fall, Helvey briefed students on ways to organize a strike and on how to undermine the authority of a dictatorial regime,” reported Reuters. [19]
(...) I attended one of Foley’s speeches and, as expected, it was a complete pro-U.S. propaganda campaign imposed upon the university students. The professor gave exactly the message that the U.S. Embassy had paid him to give, speaking wonders about American society and “American democracy.” According to Foley, the United States solves all of its problems by tolerance for others and an all-inclusive “dialogue,” between opposing parties. And sending a clear hint to the Venezuelan students, Foley implied that any government that does not live up to these standards “must be overthrown.” [21]
(...) The same “electoral consultants” that were used in Serbia, the Washington-based Penn, Schoen and Berland, have also been used in Venezuela to publish fake exit polls in an effort to cast doubt on Venezuelan elections. This strategy of electoral manipulation was used during the 2004 recall referendum when the U.S.-funded NGO Sumate and the Penn, Schoen and Berland firm released false exit polls claiming that Chavez had lost the referendum. They did the same thing before the 2006 elections, claiming that Chavez’ opponent “clearly has the momentum.” [23] Both in 2004 and 2006 the fake polls would give credence to the opposition’s claims of fraud with the hope of producing massive protests against the government. The strategy mostly failed, but it did cast doubt on the legitimacy of the Chavez government and weakened its image internationally.
(...) It was exactly this kind of protest in 2002 that led to dozens of deaths, hundreds wounded, and the temporary overthrow of the Chavez government. Private media channels like RCTV manipulated video footage to blame deaths on Chavez supporters, and condemned the government for human rights abuses. So this time government officials have called on pro-government activists to monitor the opposition protests with photos and video on May 27th and May 28th in order to avoid a situation similar to the 2002 coup.
(...) What most protesters probably do not know is that they are simply pawns in a larger strategy to open up the world to “free-market” global capitalism and corporate-dominated privatizations. While huge multinational corporations carve up the world among themselves, small nations like Serbia and Venezuela are simply unfortunate obstacles to their objectives. In the worldwide scramble to see who will get bigger, and who will get eaten, the fact that some countries would prefer not to be eaten simply doesn’t matter to the bureaucrats in Washington.
(...) It was so invisible in Serbia that no one seemed to notice in 2000 when a regime was toppled, the country was opened to massive privatization, and huge public-sector industries, businesses, and natural resources fell into the hands of U.S. and multinational corporations. Likewise, few have noticed as countries in the former Soviet-bloc have recently been victims of the same strategy, with the exact same results.
(...) Nations that do not give in to the demands of the empire and the expansion of global capitalism are targeted by an undercover, well-designed plan to change the political situation in the country, and open it up to corporate investors. U.S.-supported groups inside the country overthrow the president, making it seem like there is no outside intervention. And now, Washington has turned toward its new biggest threat: Latin America, and more specifically, Venezuela.
(...) The Rise of the New World Order: During the second half of the twentieth century, capitalists in the first world began to saturate domestic opportunities for investment and growth. Big business reached a point where possibilities for expansion within national borders were mostly exhausted, and the only option for growth was to look for new opportunities abroad. Growing corporate conglomerates looked to expand their operations throughout the world, investing, privatizing, and buying up everything they could get their hands on. National capital was looking to go international, and by the end of the century, capitalism had become truly global. "Get big, or get eaten," was their new philosophy, and they decided to get big by eating whole nations. With the help of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, economies everywhere were opened up to privatization. The phone systems, electrical grids, water systems, and natural resources were bought up by wealthy capitalists in countries around the world. Free-market capitalism now ruled the day; a paradise for international capital as the world’s wealth became more and more concentrated in their hands. [1] Some nations, however, were determined to not be eaten. Privatization was an unpopular idea among populations who had developed the crazy idea that their natural resources belonged to them, and not foreign corporations. Resistance developed in several areas of the world, and some nations would not consent to the logic of global capitalism. Washington, however, was determined to open the world up to corporate expansion. They would oblige those countries that didn’t comply, either by force or by cunning.
[yugoslavia as case-study]
(...) And it’s not hard to see why. After the toppling of the Milosevic regime allowed for mass privatization, all that remained of the formerly socialist country, including some of Europe’s largest reserves of natural resources, soon fell into the hands of U.S. and international investors.
(...) [good history, but hardly a new strategy, right?] As implausible as it might sound, it was exactly this strategy that toppled Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia in 2000. After the war in Kosovo and NATO bombing had failed to produce regime change, the United States worked to strengthen Milosevic’s internal opponents by uniting them behind one candidate, Vojislav Kostunica, and pumping about $40 million into his election campaign. [3] U.S.-funded NGO’s and electoral consultants helped create a propaganda campaign surrounding the elections, and worked behind the scenes to help organize mass resistance to the Milosevic regime. [4] U.S.-trained “election helpers” were deployed around the country on election day to monitor results. The U.S. even provided young activists with thousands of cans of spray paint and campaign stickers to cover the country with anti-Milosevic slogans. [5]
(...) According to official results of the first round elections neither candidate had won a majority of the vote, and so it would require a second round run-off. But U.S. consultants published their own “exit polls” giving Kostunica a huge victory and Milosevic refused to recognize them. [6] The opposition claimed fraud and U.S.-backed groups staged acts of non-violent resistance to put pressure on the government. Armed groups stormed the Federal Assembly and the state television headquarters. [7] Massive protests and rebellion forced Milosevic to step down. There would be no second round election, and Washington’s candidate Vojislav Kostunica took power. The strategy had worked.
(...) The US government had worked on dismantling and dividing the socialist Yugoslavia for years, supporting any and all independence movements within the individual provinces, including the 1999 military intervention to help the province of Kosovo break away. What was once a relative economic success under the famous Josip Tito, the socialist economy, based on socially-owned, worker-controlled companies, did not allow for foreign investment or US capital. This was a mortal sin in modern global capitalism. As Michael Parenti put it: “Yugoslavia was the only country in Eastern Europe that would not dismantle its welfare state and public sector economy. It was the only one that did not beg for entry into NATO. It was - and what's left of it, still is - charting an independent course not in keeping with the New World Order.” [9]
(...) The rewards for their work were substantial. Once Milosevic was gone, one of the first actions taken by the new government was the to repeal the 1997 privatization law and allow 70% of a company to be sold to foreign investors. [10] In 2004 the UN Mission in Kosovo announced the privatization of 500 enterprises, and U.S. corporations came out the big winners. Phillip Morris bought up a $580 million tobacco factory, U.S. Steel got a $250 million deal on a steel producer, Coca-Cola grabbed a bottled water producer for $21 million, and the list goes on. [11]
(...) In addition, western investors now had access to what the New York Times called the “war’s glittering prize,” the second largest coal reserves in Europe and large reserves of lead, zinc, gold, silver, and, even petroleum. [12] And the real gem was located in the province of Kosovo; the huge Trepca mine complex, valued at over $5 billion, now open to the highest bidder. [13]
(...) The success of the strategy in Serbia was an important lesson for the Washington policy makers. They would repeat it several more times throughout Eastern Europe in places like Georgia (2003), the Ukraine (2004) Kyrgyzstan (2005), and Belarus (unsuccessfully in 2001). In what became known as the “Color Revolutions,” each U.S.-aided movement would remove a regime in exchange for one more favorable to the “free-market” policies promoted by Washington. [14] The preferred strategy for regime change became this new sort of non-violent resistance, and now the empire turned its gaze on South America, where a new threat to global capitalism had suddenly emerged.
(...) You can be sure that corporate investors would love to get their hands on the PDVSA company, along with other public sector companies in Venezuela. In fact, they were doing just that throughout the 1990’s. By 1998, multinational corporations had already bought up the national phone company, the largest electricity company, and PDVSA was going through what they called an “opening” to international capital; a prettier way of saying privatization. [16]
(...) But that same year, Hugo Chavez was elected president on an anti-imperialist platform, and the auctioning-off of Venezuela came to an abrupt halt. In fact, Hugo Chavez has become a real problem for the corporate imperialists and their servants in Washington. Not only has he stopped privatization, but he is reversing it by re-nationalizing all that was once privatized. The privatization of the state oil company is now prohibited by law, and his government has taken complete control of it, using it to finance the country’s development.
(...) And so, just as they did in Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine and others, Washington has deployed its forces in Venezuela with the intention of getting rid of the Chavez menace. After trying many things over the years including a short-lived coup, electoral manipulation, and mass protests, Washington has not been able to topple the popular leader. But they haven’t given up. To the contrary, they’ve actually just continued to increase their level of involvement.
(...) The new imperial strategy includes something called “American Corners.” These “corners” are small offices set up by Washington throughout the target country that basically serve as mini-embassies. It is not completely clear what exactly these “corners” do, but inside you will find an array of information about the United States, including study abroad opportunities, English classes, and pro-U.S. propaganda. On top of this, the mini-embassies also organize events, trainings, and lectures for young students. Interestingly, they seem to be very abundant in countries that Washington seeks to destabilize.
(...) As reported by Reuters, the Venezuelan opposition is already learning the Serbian tactics to overthrow a regime from a retired U.S. army colonel named Robert Helvey: “Helvey, who has taught young activists in Myanmar and Serbian students who helped topple the former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic in 2000, is giving courses on non-violent opposition tactics this week at an east Caracas university,” said the article. “Neither Helvey nor the organizers of the Caracas seminar would give details of exactly what opposition tactics were being taught. But in his work in Serbia before Milosevic’s fall, Helvey briefed students on ways to organize a strike and on how to undermine the authority of a dictatorial regime,” reported Reuters. [19]
(...) I attended one of Foley’s speeches and, as expected, it was a complete pro-U.S. propaganda campaign imposed upon the university students. The professor gave exactly the message that the U.S. Embassy had paid him to give, speaking wonders about American society and “American democracy.” According to Foley, the United States solves all of its problems by tolerance for others and an all-inclusive “dialogue,” between opposing parties. And sending a clear hint to the Venezuelan students, Foley implied that any government that does not live up to these standards “must be overthrown.” [21]
(...) The same “electoral consultants” that were used in Serbia, the Washington-based Penn, Schoen and Berland, have also been used in Venezuela to publish fake exit polls in an effort to cast doubt on Venezuelan elections. This strategy of electoral manipulation was used during the 2004 recall referendum when the U.S.-funded NGO Sumate and the Penn, Schoen and Berland firm released false exit polls claiming that Chavez had lost the referendum. They did the same thing before the 2006 elections, claiming that Chavez’ opponent “clearly has the momentum.” [23] Both in 2004 and 2006 the fake polls would give credence to the opposition’s claims of fraud with the hope of producing massive protests against the government. The strategy mostly failed, but it did cast doubt on the legitimacy of the Chavez government and weakened its image internationally.
(...) It was exactly this kind of protest in 2002 that led to dozens of deaths, hundreds wounded, and the temporary overthrow of the Chavez government. Private media channels like RCTV manipulated video footage to blame deaths on Chavez supporters, and condemned the government for human rights abuses. So this time government officials have called on pro-government activists to monitor the opposition protests with photos and video on May 27th and May 28th in order to avoid a situation similar to the 2002 coup.
(...) What most protesters probably do not know is that they are simply pawns in a larger strategy to open up the world to “free-market” global capitalism and corporate-dominated privatizations. While huge multinational corporations carve up the world among themselves, small nations like Serbia and Venezuela are simply unfortunate obstacles to their objectives. In the worldwide scramble to see who will get bigger, and who will get eaten, the fact that some countries would prefer not to be eaten simply doesn’t matter to the bureaucrats in Washington.
Monday, May 7, 2007
oil and america:
One could date it back to 1980 when President Jimmy Carter -- before his Habitat for Humanity days -- declared that Persian Gulf oil was "vital" to American national interests. So vital was it, he announced, that the U.S. would use "any means necessary, including military force" to sustain access to it"
(...) Or we could date it all the way back to World War II, when British officials declared Middle Eastern oil "a vital prize for any power interested in world influence or domination," and U.S. officials seconded the thought, calling it "a stupendous source of strategic power and one of the greatest material prizes in world history."
(...) We know, for example, that, before and after he ascended to the Vice-Presidency, Dick Cheney has had his eye squarely on the prize. In 1999, for example, he told the Institute of Petroleum Engineers that, when it came to satisfying the exploding demand for oil, "the Middle East, with two thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies." The mysterious Energy Task Force he headed on taking office in 2001 eschewed conservation or developing alternative sources as the main response to any impending energy crisis, preferring instead to make the Middle East "a primary focus of U.S. international energy policy." As part of this focus, the Task Force recommended that the administration put its energy, so to speak, into convincing Middle Eastern countries "to open up areas of their energy sectors to foreign investment" -- in other words, into a policy of reversing 25 years of state control over the petroleum industry in the region.
(...) In 2002, just a year after Cheney's Task Force completed its work, and before the U.S. had officially decided to invade Iraq, the State Department "established a working group on oil and energy," as part of its "Future of Iraq" project. It brought together influential Iraqi exiles, U.S. government officials, and international consultants. Later, several Iraqi members of the group became part of the Iraqi government. The result of the project's work was a "draft framework for Iraq's oil policy" that would form the foundation for the energy policy now being considered by the Iraqi Parliament.
(...) Indeed, Iraq could someday become the most important source of petrochemical energy on the planet. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Iraq possesses 115 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, third largest in the world (after Saudi Arabia and Iran). About two-thirds of its known oil reserves are located in Shia southern Iraq, and the final third in Kurdish northern Iraq. However, in energy terms, only about 10% of the country has actually been explored and there is good reason to believe that modern methods -- which have not been applied since the beginning of the Iraq-Iran War in 1980 -- might well uncover magnitudes more oil. Estimates of the possible new finds offered by officials of various interested governments range from 45 billion to 214 billion additional barrels, depending on the source; but some non-governmental experts see the final treasure exceeding 400 billion barrels. If the latter figure is correct, then Iraq would likely become the world's largest source of oil.
(...) Moreover, both its current fields and many of the potential new discoveries would be extremely cheap to access, if security weren't such a problem today in Iraq. James Paul of the international policy monitoring group, the Global Policy Forum, offers this positive view: "According to Oil and Gas Journal, Western oil companies estimate that they can produce a barrel of Iraqi oil for less than $1.50 and possibly as little as $1.... This is similar to production costs in Saudi Arabia and lower than virtually any other country."
(...) Knowledge of this level of underproduction was certainly one factor in Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz's pre-war prediction that the administration's invasion and occupation of Iraq would pay for itself; he hoped for a quick postwar increase in production to 3.5 million barrels per day or, at the $30 per barrel price of oil at that time, close to $40 billion per year in revenues. An expected expansion in production levels (once the oil giants were brought into the mix) to perhaps 6.5 million barrels, through the development of new oil fields or more efficient exploitation of existing fields, had the potential to more than cover the expected American short-term military costs and leave the new Iraqi government flush as well.
(...) Paul Bremer, the new head of the American occupation, promulgated a series of laws designed, among other things, to kick-start the development of Iraqi oil. In addition to attempting to transfer management of existing oil facilities (well heads, refineries, pipelines, and shipping) to multinational corporations, he also set about creating an oil-policy framework, unique in the region, that would allow the major companies to develop the country's proven reserves and even to begin drilling new wells.
(...) [resistance to these plans] All these plans were, however, quickly frustrated, both by the growing Sunni insurgency and by civil resistance. Iraq's oil workers quickly unionized -- even though Bremer extended Saddam's prohibition on unions in state-owned companies -- and effectively resisted the transfer of management duties to foreign companies. In one noteworthy moment, the oil workers actually refused to take orders from Bechtel officials in the oil hub of Basra, thus preserving their own jobs as well as the right of the Iraqi state-owned Southern Oil Company to continue to control the operation in that region. Bechtel's management contract was subsequently voided. At the same time, the growing insurgency, acting on a general Iraqi understanding that a major goal of the occupation was to "steal" Iraqi oil, systematically began to attack the oil pipelines that traveled through the Sunni areas of the country. Within a few months, all oil exports in the northern part of Iraq were interrupted -- and the northern export pipelines have remained generally unusable ever since.
(...) To resistance of various sorts must be added the "contribution" of the major American corporations involved in "reconstructing" Iraq, notably Halliburton and Bechtel. These crony corporations, with close ties to the Bush administration, accepted huge fees to rehabilitate dilapidated or damaged oil facilities. Almost without fail, they chose not to repair existing plants locally or to employ the raft of skilled Iraqi technicians who had used remarkable ingenuity in maintaining these facilities during a dozen years of UN sanctions. Working under cost-plus agreements that guaranteed a fixed profit rate no matter how much an operation ultimately cost, they preferred instead to install expensive new proprietary equipment. Then, in the absence of any outside oversight, they ran up huge expenses and frequently failed to complete their contracts, leaving the oil facilities they were servicing in states of disrepair or partial repair -- and equipped with technology that local technicians could not service.
(...) hen technical sovereignty was finally handed over to an appointed Iraqi government headed by the CIA's favorite Iraqi exile, Iyad Allawi, in June 2004, the new premier embraced Bremer's policy, but to no avail. The international oil companies were no more impressed with his future than they had been with Bremer's. Like Wolfowitz, they knew that Iraq "floats on a sea of oil"; unlike him, they were no dreamers. They weren't willing to risk their capital in the dangerous and legally ambiguous circumstances then prevailing. As a result, the first two years of Bush administration efforts to "access" Iraqi oil failed -- and dismally so at that. Average production never exceeded the bottom-of-the-barrel 2.5 million barrels Saddam's regime managed to extract on its worst days. By 2006, production had slipped below 2 million barrels per day.
(...) The State Department planners had concluded that Production Sharing Agreements -- a method that granted multinational oil companies effective control of oil fields without transferring permanent ownership to them -- would be the basic instrument through which a future "independent" Iraq would develop new oil fields. Wary by now of being seen as the chief advocate of this policy, which it so desperately wanted in place, the Bush administration concocted a strategy that would enlist the international community in pressuring Iraq to adopt its program. This was done by making the International Monetary Fund (IMF) a key player in Iraqi oil policy. Through loans in the 1980s and reparations imposed for his invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Saddam had accumulated $120 billion in external debt, the largest per capita debt in the world and a potentially insurmountable obstacle to economic recovery, even in oil-rich Iraq. One option available to the new government was to declare this debt "odious," a technical term in international law referring to debt accumulated by authoritarian rulers for their own personal or political aggrandizement.
(...) Saddam's expansionist war against Iran, his use of public funds to build ostentatious monuments and palaces, his transfer of billions to his personal accounts, and his failure to maintain the infrastructure of the country all were excellent evidence that the debt was indeed odious; and the U.S. claimed as much for almost $40 billion of it, held by 19 industrialized countries known as the Paris Club. Instead of seeking to cancel this debt (and the remaining $80 billion) entirely, however, the Bush administration sent James Baker, former Secretary of State under George H. W. Bush, to the Paris Club to negotiate conditional forgiveness. The resulting agreement immediately forgave $12 billion, but left $28 billion on the books. A second $12 billion would be abrogated when the Iraqi government signed onto "a standard International Monetary Fund program," and a further $8 billion three years later, after the IMF confirmed Iraqi compliance. Even if "successful," almost $8 billion would still be outstanding to the Paris Club -- together with $80 billion not covered by the agreement.
(...) The "standard International Monetary Fund program," not surprisingly, included the now familiar American policies regarding Iraqi oil, as well as the use of Profit Sharing Agreements and a host of other provisions that would open the Iraqi economy as a whole, and the oil sector in particular, to investment by multinational corporations. Among the most punitive of the provisions was a demand for an end to the economic breadbasket that guaranteed all Iraqi families low prices for fuel and food staples. In a country with, by 2005, somewhere between 30% and 70% unemployment, average wage levels under $100 per month, and escalating inflation, these Saddam-era subsidies meant the difference between basic subsistence and disaster for a large proportion of Iraqis.
(...) Zaid Al-Ali, an international lawyer working on development issues in Iraq, described the agreement as a "perfect illustration of how the industrialized world has used debt as a tool to force developing nations to surrender sovereignty over their economies."
(...) The newly elected Iraqi National Assembly promptly denounced this agreement as "a new crime committed by the creditors who financed Saddam's oppression." This forceful expression reflected the opinions of the Assembly's constituents. After all, 76% of Iraqis believed that the main reason for the Bush administration's invasion was "to control Iraqi oil."
(...) The U.S. then began pressuring the Iraqi government to draft a definitive petrochemical law that would conform to the IMF guidelines. Given the levels of resistance to the very idea, this work was conducted in secret and took until the end of 2006 to complete. As independent journalist Joshua Holland described the process: "Just months after the Iraqis elected their first constitutional government, USAID sent a BearingPoint adviser to provide the Iraqi Oil Ministry 'legal and regulatory advice in drafting the framework of petroleum and other energy-related legislation, including foreign investment'.... The Iraqi Parliament had not yet seen a draft of the oil law as of July [2006], but by that time... it had already been reviewed and commented on by U.S. Energy Secretary Sam Bodman, who also 'arranged for Dr. Al-Shahristani to meet with nine major oil companies -- including Shell, BP, ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco and ConocoPhillips -- for them to comment on the draft.'"
(...) When the "Draft Hydrocarbon Law" was finally delivered to the Iraqi Parliament on February 18, 2007, key provisions had already been leaked and immediately denounced by the full spectrum of the Iraqi opposition. Taking turns registering dismay were the majority of the Parliament, a wide range of government officials, the leadership of major Sunni political parties, the union of oil workers, the Sadrists -- the most powerful Shia grouping -- and the visible leadership of the insurgency. All this led to many changes in the law, including the removal of all mention of either privatization or Production Sharing Contracts, which would have given multinational oil companies 15-25 years of basically unregulated operational control over Iraqi oil facilities. The amended version in no way excluded the use of PSAs, but it removed the explosive designation from the actual wording of the law.
(...) [PSA´s]Production sharing agreements are generally applied in circumstances where there is a strong possibility that oil exploration will be extremely costly or even fail, and/or where extraction is likely to prove prohibitively expensive. To offset huge and risky investments, the contracting company is guaranteed a proportion of the profits, if and when oil is extracted and sold. In the most common of these agreements, the proportion remains very high until all development costs are amortized, allowing the investing company to recoup its investment expenditures (if oil is found), and then to be rewarded with a larger-than-normal profit margin for the remainder of the contract which, in the Iraqi case, could extend for up to 25 years. None of these conditions apply in Iraq: huge reservoirs of easily accessible oil are already proven to exist, with more equally accessible fields likely to be discovered with little expense. This is why none of Iraq's neighbors utilize PSAs. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates all pay the multinationals a fixed rate to explore and develop their fields; and all of the profits become state revenues.
(...)The advocates of PSAs in Iraq justify their use by arguing that $20 billion would be needed to develop the Iraqi fields fully and that favorable PSAs are the only way to attract such heavy doses of finance capital under the current highly dangerous circumstances. This assertion seems, however, to be little more than a smokescreen. No major oil companies are willing to invest in Iraq now, no matter how sweet the deal. If order is restored, on the other hand, Iraq would have no trouble attracting vast amounts of finance capital to develop reserves that could well be worth in excess of $10 trillion and hence would have no need whatsoever for PSAs.
(...) Based on leaked information, journalists reported that the PSAs envisioned by the Iraqi petrochemical law contained extremely favorable provisions for the oil companies, in which they would be entitled to 70% of profits until development expenses were amortized and 20% afterwards. This would have guaranteed them at least twice the typical profit margin over the long run and many times that figure during the initial years.
(...) There are other elements in the law (and the possible PSA contracts) that have also roused resistance inside Iraq. Among the most controversial:
· Insofar as PSAs or their legal equivalent were enacted, Iraq would lose control over what levels of oil the country produced with the potential to substantially weaken the grip of OPEC on the oil market.
· The law would allow the oil companies to fully repatriate all profits from oil sales, almost insuring that the proceeds would not be reinvested in the Iraqi economy.
· The Iraqi government would not have control over oil company operations inside Iraq. Any disputes would be referred instead to pro-industry international arbitration panels.
· Contacting companies would not be obliged to hire Iraqi workers, and could pursue the current policy of employing American technicians and South Asian manual laborers.
· No contracts would be public documents.
(...) Several African countries with vast mineral riches have been subjected to these sorts of conditions, with large multinational companies extracting both minerals and profits while returning only a tiny fraction of the proceeds to the local population. As the resources are taken out of the ground and the country, the local population actually becomes poorer, while the potential for future prosperity is drained.
(...) [prospects for resistance]The Parliament itself may be the first line of defense. It challenged the original IMF agreement and has refused to consider the bill for two months, already missing a March deadline for passage that American politicians of both parties had pronounced an important "benchmark" by which to judge the viability of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government.
(...) Rafiq Latta, a London-based oil analyst, told Nation reporter Christian Parenti, "The whole culture of the ministry opposes [the law].... Those guys ran the industry very well all through the years of sanctions. It was an impressive job, and they take pride in 'their' oil."
(...) Perhaps most formidable of all is the Federation of Oil Unions, with 26,000 members and allies throughout organized labor. The oil workers overturned contracts in 2003 and 2004 that would have placed substantial oil facilities under multinational corporate control; and they initiated a vigorous campaign against the U.S. sponsored oil program as early as June 2005 -- calling a conference to oppose privatization attended by "workers, academics, and international civil-society groups." In January 2006, they convened a convention composed of all major Iraqi union groups in Amman, Jordan, which issued a manifesto opposing the entire neo-liberal U.S. program for Iraq, including any compromise on national control of oil production.
(...) Iraq's trade unions, speaking in a single voice, declared that: "Iraqi public opinion strongly opposes the handing of authority and control over the oil to foreign companies, that aim to make big profits at the expense of the people. They aim to rob Iraq's national wealth by virtue of unfair, long term oil contracts that undermine the sovereignty of the State and the dignity of the Iraqi people."
(...) He [union leader] then called on the government to consult Iraqi oil experts (who had not participated in drafting the law) and "ask their opinion before sinking Iraq into an ocean of dark injustice."
(...) Finally -- and no small matter -- the armed resistance is also against the oil law. The Sunni insurgency underscored its opposition by assassinating Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi, a major advocate of the pending law, on the day the bill was made public. The significance of the opposition of the Sunni insurgency is amplified by the stance of the Sadrists, the most rebellious segment of the Shia majority. Sadr spokesman Sheikh Gahaith Al Temimi warned journalist Christian Parenti that while the Sadrists would "welcome" foreign investment in oil, they would do so only "under certain conditions. We want our oil to be developed, not stolen. If a bad law were to be passed, all people of Iraq would resist it."
(...) Active opposition by the Parliament alone, or by the unions alone, or by the Sunni insurgency alone, or by the Sadrists alone might be sufficient to defeat or disable the law. The possibility that such disparate groups might find unity around this issue, mobilizing both the government bureaucracy and overwhelming public opinion to their cause, holds a much greater threat: the possibility of creating a unified force that might push beyond the oil law to a more general opposition to the American occupation.
(...) he likelihood that any future Iraqi government which takes on a nationalist mantel will consider such an agreement in any way binding is nil. One day in perhaps the not so distant future, that "law," even if briefly the law of the land, is likely to find itself in the dustbin of history, along with Saddam's various oil deals. As a result, the Bush administration's "capture of new and existing oil and gas fields" is likely to end as a predictable fiasco.
One could date it back to 1980 when President Jimmy Carter -- before his Habitat for Humanity days -- declared that Persian Gulf oil was "vital" to American national interests. So vital was it, he announced, that the U.S. would use "any means necessary, including military force" to sustain access to it"
(...) Or we could date it all the way back to World War II, when British officials declared Middle Eastern oil "a vital prize for any power interested in world influence or domination," and U.S. officials seconded the thought, calling it "a stupendous source of strategic power and one of the greatest material prizes in world history."
(...) We know, for example, that, before and after he ascended to the Vice-Presidency, Dick Cheney has had his eye squarely on the prize. In 1999, for example, he told the Institute of Petroleum Engineers that, when it came to satisfying the exploding demand for oil, "the Middle East, with two thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies." The mysterious Energy Task Force he headed on taking office in 2001 eschewed conservation or developing alternative sources as the main response to any impending energy crisis, preferring instead to make the Middle East "a primary focus of U.S. international energy policy." As part of this focus, the Task Force recommended that the administration put its energy, so to speak, into convincing Middle Eastern countries "to open up areas of their energy sectors to foreign investment" -- in other words, into a policy of reversing 25 years of state control over the petroleum industry in the region.
(...) In 2002, just a year after Cheney's Task Force completed its work, and before the U.S. had officially decided to invade Iraq, the State Department "established a working group on oil and energy," as part of its "Future of Iraq" project. It brought together influential Iraqi exiles, U.S. government officials, and international consultants. Later, several Iraqi members of the group became part of the Iraqi government. The result of the project's work was a "draft framework for Iraq's oil policy" that would form the foundation for the energy policy now being considered by the Iraqi Parliament.
(...) Indeed, Iraq could someday become the most important source of petrochemical energy on the planet. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Iraq possesses 115 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, third largest in the world (after Saudi Arabia and Iran). About two-thirds of its known oil reserves are located in Shia southern Iraq, and the final third in Kurdish northern Iraq. However, in energy terms, only about 10% of the country has actually been explored and there is good reason to believe that modern methods -- which have not been applied since the beginning of the Iraq-Iran War in 1980 -- might well uncover magnitudes more oil. Estimates of the possible new finds offered by officials of various interested governments range from 45 billion to 214 billion additional barrels, depending on the source; but some non-governmental experts see the final treasure exceeding 400 billion barrels. If the latter figure is correct, then Iraq would likely become the world's largest source of oil.
(...) Moreover, both its current fields and many of the potential new discoveries would be extremely cheap to access, if security weren't such a problem today in Iraq. James Paul of the international policy monitoring group, the Global Policy Forum, offers this positive view: "According to Oil and Gas Journal, Western oil companies estimate that they can produce a barrel of Iraqi oil for less than $1.50 and possibly as little as $1.... This is similar to production costs in Saudi Arabia and lower than virtually any other country."
(...) Knowledge of this level of underproduction was certainly one factor in Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz's pre-war prediction that the administration's invasion and occupation of Iraq would pay for itself; he hoped for a quick postwar increase in production to 3.5 million barrels per day or, at the $30 per barrel price of oil at that time, close to $40 billion per year in revenues. An expected expansion in production levels (once the oil giants were brought into the mix) to perhaps 6.5 million barrels, through the development of new oil fields or more efficient exploitation of existing fields, had the potential to more than cover the expected American short-term military costs and leave the new Iraqi government flush as well.
(...) Paul Bremer, the new head of the American occupation, promulgated a series of laws designed, among other things, to kick-start the development of Iraqi oil. In addition to attempting to transfer management of existing oil facilities (well heads, refineries, pipelines, and shipping) to multinational corporations, he also set about creating an oil-policy framework, unique in the region, that would allow the major companies to develop the country's proven reserves and even to begin drilling new wells.
(...) [resistance to these plans] All these plans were, however, quickly frustrated, both by the growing Sunni insurgency and by civil resistance. Iraq's oil workers quickly unionized -- even though Bremer extended Saddam's prohibition on unions in state-owned companies -- and effectively resisted the transfer of management duties to foreign companies. In one noteworthy moment, the oil workers actually refused to take orders from Bechtel officials in the oil hub of Basra, thus preserving their own jobs as well as the right of the Iraqi state-owned Southern Oil Company to continue to control the operation in that region. Bechtel's management contract was subsequently voided. At the same time, the growing insurgency, acting on a general Iraqi understanding that a major goal of the occupation was to "steal" Iraqi oil, systematically began to attack the oil pipelines that traveled through the Sunni areas of the country. Within a few months, all oil exports in the northern part of Iraq were interrupted -- and the northern export pipelines have remained generally unusable ever since.
(...) To resistance of various sorts must be added the "contribution" of the major American corporations involved in "reconstructing" Iraq, notably Halliburton and Bechtel. These crony corporations, with close ties to the Bush administration, accepted huge fees to rehabilitate dilapidated or damaged oil facilities. Almost without fail, they chose not to repair existing plants locally or to employ the raft of skilled Iraqi technicians who had used remarkable ingenuity in maintaining these facilities during a dozen years of UN sanctions. Working under cost-plus agreements that guaranteed a fixed profit rate no matter how much an operation ultimately cost, they preferred instead to install expensive new proprietary equipment. Then, in the absence of any outside oversight, they ran up huge expenses and frequently failed to complete their contracts, leaving the oil facilities they were servicing in states of disrepair or partial repair -- and equipped with technology that local technicians could not service.
(...) hen technical sovereignty was finally handed over to an appointed Iraqi government headed by the CIA's favorite Iraqi exile, Iyad Allawi, in June 2004, the new premier embraced Bremer's policy, but to no avail. The international oil companies were no more impressed with his future than they had been with Bremer's. Like Wolfowitz, they knew that Iraq "floats on a sea of oil"; unlike him, they were no dreamers. They weren't willing to risk their capital in the dangerous and legally ambiguous circumstances then prevailing. As a result, the first two years of Bush administration efforts to "access" Iraqi oil failed -- and dismally so at that. Average production never exceeded the bottom-of-the-barrel 2.5 million barrels Saddam's regime managed to extract on its worst days. By 2006, production had slipped below 2 million barrels per day.
(...) The State Department planners had concluded that Production Sharing Agreements -- a method that granted multinational oil companies effective control of oil fields without transferring permanent ownership to them -- would be the basic instrument through which a future "independent" Iraq would develop new oil fields. Wary by now of being seen as the chief advocate of this policy, which it so desperately wanted in place, the Bush administration concocted a strategy that would enlist the international community in pressuring Iraq to adopt its program. This was done by making the International Monetary Fund (IMF) a key player in Iraqi oil policy. Through loans in the 1980s and reparations imposed for his invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Saddam had accumulated $120 billion in external debt, the largest per capita debt in the world and a potentially insurmountable obstacle to economic recovery, even in oil-rich Iraq. One option available to the new government was to declare this debt "odious," a technical term in international law referring to debt accumulated by authoritarian rulers for their own personal or political aggrandizement.
(...) Saddam's expansionist war against Iran, his use of public funds to build ostentatious monuments and palaces, his transfer of billions to his personal accounts, and his failure to maintain the infrastructure of the country all were excellent evidence that the debt was indeed odious; and the U.S. claimed as much for almost $40 billion of it, held by 19 industrialized countries known as the Paris Club. Instead of seeking to cancel this debt (and the remaining $80 billion) entirely, however, the Bush administration sent James Baker, former Secretary of State under George H. W. Bush, to the Paris Club to negotiate conditional forgiveness. The resulting agreement immediately forgave $12 billion, but left $28 billion on the books. A second $12 billion would be abrogated when the Iraqi government signed onto "a standard International Monetary Fund program," and a further $8 billion three years later, after the IMF confirmed Iraqi compliance. Even if "successful," almost $8 billion would still be outstanding to the Paris Club -- together with $80 billion not covered by the agreement.
(...) The "standard International Monetary Fund program," not surprisingly, included the now familiar American policies regarding Iraqi oil, as well as the use of Profit Sharing Agreements and a host of other provisions that would open the Iraqi economy as a whole, and the oil sector in particular, to investment by multinational corporations. Among the most punitive of the provisions was a demand for an end to the economic breadbasket that guaranteed all Iraqi families low prices for fuel and food staples. In a country with, by 2005, somewhere between 30% and 70% unemployment, average wage levels under $100 per month, and escalating inflation, these Saddam-era subsidies meant the difference between basic subsistence and disaster for a large proportion of Iraqis.
(...) Zaid Al-Ali, an international lawyer working on development issues in Iraq, described the agreement as a "perfect illustration of how the industrialized world has used debt as a tool to force developing nations to surrender sovereignty over their economies."
(...) The newly elected Iraqi National Assembly promptly denounced this agreement as "a new crime committed by the creditors who financed Saddam's oppression." This forceful expression reflected the opinions of the Assembly's constituents. After all, 76% of Iraqis believed that the main reason for the Bush administration's invasion was "to control Iraqi oil."
(...) The U.S. then began pressuring the Iraqi government to draft a definitive petrochemical law that would conform to the IMF guidelines. Given the levels of resistance to the very idea, this work was conducted in secret and took until the end of 2006 to complete. As independent journalist Joshua Holland described the process: "Just months after the Iraqis elected their first constitutional government, USAID sent a BearingPoint adviser to provide the Iraqi Oil Ministry 'legal and regulatory advice in drafting the framework of petroleum and other energy-related legislation, including foreign investment'.... The Iraqi Parliament had not yet seen a draft of the oil law as of July [2006], but by that time... it had already been reviewed and commented on by U.S. Energy Secretary Sam Bodman, who also 'arranged for Dr. Al-Shahristani to meet with nine major oil companies -- including Shell, BP, ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco and ConocoPhillips -- for them to comment on the draft.'"
(...) When the "Draft Hydrocarbon Law" was finally delivered to the Iraqi Parliament on February 18, 2007, key provisions had already been leaked and immediately denounced by the full spectrum of the Iraqi opposition. Taking turns registering dismay were the majority of the Parliament, a wide range of government officials, the leadership of major Sunni political parties, the union of oil workers, the Sadrists -- the most powerful Shia grouping -- and the visible leadership of the insurgency. All this led to many changes in the law, including the removal of all mention of either privatization or Production Sharing Contracts, which would have given multinational oil companies 15-25 years of basically unregulated operational control over Iraqi oil facilities. The amended version in no way excluded the use of PSAs, but it removed the explosive designation from the actual wording of the law.
(...) [PSA´s]Production sharing agreements are generally applied in circumstances where there is a strong possibility that oil exploration will be extremely costly or even fail, and/or where extraction is likely to prove prohibitively expensive. To offset huge and risky investments, the contracting company is guaranteed a proportion of the profits, if and when oil is extracted and sold. In the most common of these agreements, the proportion remains very high until all development costs are amortized, allowing the investing company to recoup its investment expenditures (if oil is found), and then to be rewarded with a larger-than-normal profit margin for the remainder of the contract which, in the Iraqi case, could extend for up to 25 years. None of these conditions apply in Iraq: huge reservoirs of easily accessible oil are already proven to exist, with more equally accessible fields likely to be discovered with little expense. This is why none of Iraq's neighbors utilize PSAs. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates all pay the multinationals a fixed rate to explore and develop their fields; and all of the profits become state revenues.
(...)The advocates of PSAs in Iraq justify their use by arguing that $20 billion would be needed to develop the Iraqi fields fully and that favorable PSAs are the only way to attract such heavy doses of finance capital under the current highly dangerous circumstances. This assertion seems, however, to be little more than a smokescreen. No major oil companies are willing to invest in Iraq now, no matter how sweet the deal. If order is restored, on the other hand, Iraq would have no trouble attracting vast amounts of finance capital to develop reserves that could well be worth in excess of $10 trillion and hence would have no need whatsoever for PSAs.
(...) Based on leaked information, journalists reported that the PSAs envisioned by the Iraqi petrochemical law contained extremely favorable provisions for the oil companies, in which they would be entitled to 70% of profits until development expenses were amortized and 20% afterwards. This would have guaranteed them at least twice the typical profit margin over the long run and many times that figure during the initial years.
(...) There are other elements in the law (and the possible PSA contracts) that have also roused resistance inside Iraq. Among the most controversial:
· Insofar as PSAs or their legal equivalent were enacted, Iraq would lose control over what levels of oil the country produced with the potential to substantially weaken the grip of OPEC on the oil market.
· The law would allow the oil companies to fully repatriate all profits from oil sales, almost insuring that the proceeds would not be reinvested in the Iraqi economy.
· The Iraqi government would not have control over oil company operations inside Iraq. Any disputes would be referred instead to pro-industry international arbitration panels.
· Contacting companies would not be obliged to hire Iraqi workers, and could pursue the current policy of employing American technicians and South Asian manual laborers.
· No contracts would be public documents.
(...) Several African countries with vast mineral riches have been subjected to these sorts of conditions, with large multinational companies extracting both minerals and profits while returning only a tiny fraction of the proceeds to the local population. As the resources are taken out of the ground and the country, the local population actually becomes poorer, while the potential for future prosperity is drained.
(...) [prospects for resistance]The Parliament itself may be the first line of defense. It challenged the original IMF agreement and has refused to consider the bill for two months, already missing a March deadline for passage that American politicians of both parties had pronounced an important "benchmark" by which to judge the viability of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government.
(...) Rafiq Latta, a London-based oil analyst, told Nation reporter Christian Parenti, "The whole culture of the ministry opposes [the law].... Those guys ran the industry very well all through the years of sanctions. It was an impressive job, and they take pride in 'their' oil."
(...) Perhaps most formidable of all is the Federation of Oil Unions, with 26,000 members and allies throughout organized labor. The oil workers overturned contracts in 2003 and 2004 that would have placed substantial oil facilities under multinational corporate control; and they initiated a vigorous campaign against the U.S. sponsored oil program as early as June 2005 -- calling a conference to oppose privatization attended by "workers, academics, and international civil-society groups." In January 2006, they convened a convention composed of all major Iraqi union groups in Amman, Jordan, which issued a manifesto opposing the entire neo-liberal U.S. program for Iraq, including any compromise on national control of oil production.
(...) Iraq's trade unions, speaking in a single voice, declared that: "Iraqi public opinion strongly opposes the handing of authority and control over the oil to foreign companies, that aim to make big profits at the expense of the people. They aim to rob Iraq's national wealth by virtue of unfair, long term oil contracts that undermine the sovereignty of the State and the dignity of the Iraqi people."
(...) He [union leader] then called on the government to consult Iraqi oil experts (who had not participated in drafting the law) and "ask their opinion before sinking Iraq into an ocean of dark injustice."
(...) Finally -- and no small matter -- the armed resistance is also against the oil law. The Sunni insurgency underscored its opposition by assassinating Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi, a major advocate of the pending law, on the day the bill was made public. The significance of the opposition of the Sunni insurgency is amplified by the stance of the Sadrists, the most rebellious segment of the Shia majority. Sadr spokesman Sheikh Gahaith Al Temimi warned journalist Christian Parenti that while the Sadrists would "welcome" foreign investment in oil, they would do so only "under certain conditions. We want our oil to be developed, not stolen. If a bad law were to be passed, all people of Iraq would resist it."
(...) Active opposition by the Parliament alone, or by the unions alone, or by the Sunni insurgency alone, or by the Sadrists alone might be sufficient to defeat or disable the law. The possibility that such disparate groups might find unity around this issue, mobilizing both the government bureaucracy and overwhelming public opinion to their cause, holds a much greater threat: the possibility of creating a unified force that might push beyond the oil law to a more general opposition to the American occupation.
(...) he likelihood that any future Iraqi government which takes on a nationalist mantel will consider such an agreement in any way binding is nil. One day in perhaps the not so distant future, that "law," even if briefly the law of the land, is likely to find itself in the dustbin of history, along with Saddam's various oil deals. As a result, the Bush administration's "capture of new and existing oil and gas fields" is likely to end as a predictable fiasco.
Sunday, May 6, 2007
a quote from a general:
When he was asked if he thought the Iraqi insurgents were right to try to force the US-led coalition out, he replied: "Yes I do. As Lord Chatham [the politician William Pitt, the Elder, who, in the second half of the 18th century called for a cessation of hostilities in the colonies and favoured American resistance to the British Stamp Act] said, 'if I was an American - as I am an Englishman - as long as one Englishman remained on American native soil, I would never, never, never lay down my arms'. The Iraqi insurgents feel exactly the same way. I don't excuse them for some of the terrible things they do, but I do understand why they are resisting the Americans."
When he was asked if he thought the Iraqi insurgents were right to try to force the US-led coalition out, he replied: "Yes I do. As Lord Chatham [the politician William Pitt, the Elder, who, in the second half of the 18th century called for a cessation of hostilities in the colonies and favoured American resistance to the British Stamp Act] said, 'if I was an American - as I am an Englishman - as long as one Englishman remained on American native soil, I would never, never, never lay down my arms'. The Iraqi insurgents feel exactly the same way. I don't excuse them for some of the terrible things they do, but I do understand why they are resisting the Americans."
Friday, May 4, 2007
history repeating itself:
The great western power was determined to retain control over oil-rich Iraq, and it used its vastly superior air power to subdue the forces of the Iraqi leader Hussein. Soon after its initial victory, it installed an interim government in the Middle Eastern country. But resistance to the occupation continued to grow. As the determined invader saw its casualty count pass 2000, and as the massive funding required to support the effort had surpassed total spending on social programs back home, public opinion began to turn against the war. The western power sought to reduce its costs while maintaining its rule, in part by offering reconstruction services to Iraq, which had the effect of charging the devastated country for its own subjugation. But as the occupation dragged on, Iraq's resentment grew stronger and the
war became ever more difficult to end. This happened in the early 1920s. The western power was Great Britain. Hussein was Sharif Hussein bin Ali, the self-proclaimed leader of the Islamic nation.
(...) "We come as administering angels, not as despots," proclaimed one senator. The American soldiers entered the country and a bloody period of fighting began, in which several thousand Americans and tens of thousands of enemy soldiers and civilians were killed over 3-1/2 years. Military leaders censored the press to shelter the public back home from the horrible images. Insurgents continued to strike, and although at one point a general declared that the rebellion was "almost entirely suppressed," intermittent battles persisted and a search for the enemy leaders intensified. It was decided that captured guerrillas would be treated not as soldiers, but as "criminals" who were not entitled to prisoner of war status. This happened 100 years before the War in Iraq. The country was The Philippines. The war was the Philippine-American War, immediately following the Spanish-American War. The President was McKinley. The Senator was Knute Nelson of Minnesota. The General was Arthur MacArthur. Over 4,300 American soldiers were killed. Some estimates put civilian deaths at over 250,000.
The great western power was determined to retain control over oil-rich Iraq, and it used its vastly superior air power to subdue the forces of the Iraqi leader Hussein. Soon after its initial victory, it installed an interim government in the Middle Eastern country. But resistance to the occupation continued to grow. As the determined invader saw its casualty count pass 2000, and as the massive funding required to support the effort had surpassed total spending on social programs back home, public opinion began to turn against the war. The western power sought to reduce its costs while maintaining its rule, in part by offering reconstruction services to Iraq, which had the effect of charging the devastated country for its own subjugation. But as the occupation dragged on, Iraq's resentment grew stronger and the
war became ever more difficult to end. This happened in the early 1920s. The western power was Great Britain. Hussein was Sharif Hussein bin Ali, the self-proclaimed leader of the Islamic nation.
(...) "We come as administering angels, not as despots," proclaimed one senator. The American soldiers entered the country and a bloody period of fighting began, in which several thousand Americans and tens of thousands of enemy soldiers and civilians were killed over 3-1/2 years. Military leaders censored the press to shelter the public back home from the horrible images. Insurgents continued to strike, and although at one point a general declared that the rebellion was "almost entirely suppressed," intermittent battles persisted and a search for the enemy leaders intensified. It was decided that captured guerrillas would be treated not as soldiers, but as "criminals" who were not entitled to prisoner of war status. This happened 100 years before the War in Iraq. The country was The Philippines. The war was the Philippine-American War, immediately following the Spanish-American War. The President was McKinley. The Senator was Knute Nelson of Minnesota. The General was Arthur MacArthur. Over 4,300 American soldiers were killed. Some estimates put civilian deaths at over 250,000.
nyt on israel and palestine:
Moyers’ analysis of the US media failure on Iraq was valuable, yet incomplete. He explained that to launch the attack on Iraq “high officials… needed a compliant press, to pass on their propaganda as news and cheer them on.... our press largely surrendered its independence and skepticism to join with our government in marching to war.” Bob Simon of CBS explained to Moyers that the administration used marketing techniques to sell the war, “Just repeat it and repeat it and repeat it… Keep that drum beat going.” Media critic Norman Solomon told Moyers, “I think these [news] executives were terrified of being called soft on terrorism.” Moyers gave numerous examples of The New York Times passing on bogus intelligence on Iraq to the US public. Michael Massing of the Columbia Journalism Review highlighted the Times central role in marketing the Iraq war, saying: “The New York Times…remainsimmensely influential. People in the TV world read it every morning... People in government-- of course read it, think tanks, and so on.”
(...) Moyers omitted a crucial reason for why the government’s case for war resonated with both the US media and public. It was based in widely held stereotypes about Arabs, Muslims and the Middle East, assumptions which are also essential to understanding US policy in Israel and Palestine. In his classic 1978 book “Orientalism”, Palestinian-American scholar Edward Sa’id asserted that the Western understanding of Arabs, Muslims and the Middle East is a product of colonialism, and that Westerners view the East as inherently inferior and in need of redemption. The US case for war in Iraq rested on orientalist assumptions - that the Middle East was an undifferentiated region of Arabs and Muslims who, lacking any history or valid grievances, are possessed by an irrationally violent nature as well as hatred of the West, Israel, freedom and democracy. The region could be transformed through a combination of US military force and Western enlightenment. Playing on this racist view of Arabs and Muslims which is deeply rooted in the US psyche, the US government managed to convince most Americans, via a complicit media, of fantastic tales about links between Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime and Al Qaeda, stocks of horrific arms, a maniacal desire to use them against the US, and of the beneficial impact of “shock and awe.” This belief that irrational Arab and Muslim violence requires enlightened Western intervention and domination is also used to justify Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, underpins uncritical US support for Israel, and is central to US media coverage of Palestine and Israel.
(...) And in Israel, the other major outpost in “the war on terror,” racist ideology and politically tainted intelligence are also pushed by the government and credulously reported by US media outlets like The New York Times. For example, an April 11, 2007 Times news article by Isabel Kershner headlined unverifiable claims by Israel’s Shin Bet (the equivalent of our FBI) that it had thwarted a massive Hamas suicide bombing planned for Passover.[2] The article largely ignored Palestinian denials reported the same day in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz Daily.[3] The Shin Bet claim seemed to merit skepticism in light of the Palestinian denials, and Hamas’ decision two years ago to halt large-scale attacks.
(...) Indeed, Hamas’ implication in a large-scale bombing plot would have come at a convenient moment for Israel. Following 16 months during which 27 Israelis were killed by Palestinians, the lowest total in more than six years, Israel is struggling to prevent the crumbling of the international boycott of the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority, and to fend off repeated peace overtures from the Palestinian Authority, Syria, Saudi Arabia and the Arab League. The Israeli government has been feeding the media stories saying that the calm is a ruse, that Hamas is using it to arm and plan attacks, and that Israel will therefore be forced to mount a large-scale invasion of Gaza soon. The Times has published at least four other articles echoing these Israeli government assertions since March 2007.[4]
(...) I received an email on April 27, 2007 from The New York Times’ Public Editor Byron Calame acknowledging that: “In the editing of the article late in the evening, the denials Haaretz had obtained from unnamed Palestinian and Hamas officials were deleted. While the vagueness of the sourcing made it less essential that those denials be kept in the story, I think the article would have been better with the denials included.”
(...) Of the 1085 Times news articles since December 1, 2004, 37% mentioned Palestinian “attack(s)”, 36% mentioned “terrorism”, 28% mentioned “terrorist(s)”, 21% mentioned Palestinian “violence”,[6] 18% mentioned “suicide bombing(s)”, 16% mentioned Palestinian “weapon(s)”, and 14% mentioned Palestinian “radicals”. In contrast to this strong Israeli narrative, only two words reflecting a Palestinian narrative appeared in a comparable percentage of Times’ news articles. Israeli “settlement(s)” were noted in 32% of articles,[7] and Israeli “occupation” was mentioned in 16% of articles. This imbalance is even more striking because the emphasis on Palestinian terrorism and violence corresponded with a two year and five month period during which Israelis killed 965 Palestinians, more than half civilians, while Palestinians killed 85 Israelis.[8] Nonetheless, Israeli “attacks(s)” are mentioned in 13% of Times articles, and Israeli “violence” in only 4%.
(...) Only very careful readers of Times news reporting would be able to locate, amidst the barrage on Palestinian terrorism, basic elements of the Palestinian experience - Israeli human rights abuses, Israeli attacks and violations of international law, Palestinian poverty, the Palestinian understanding that they are victims of Israeli discrimination and racism, and Israel’s denial of the right of return to Palestinian refugees. In a startling display of bias, since December, 2004, 70 to 130 times as many Times news article mentioned Palestinian “terrorism” or Palestinian “attack(s)” as mentioned Israeli “discrimination”, “racism” or “apartheid”.[9] Thirty-five times as many articles mentioned Palestinian “terrorism” as mentioned Palestinian “poverty”,[10] though 70% of Palestinians are now living below the poverty line.[11]
(...) The same day, April 22, The Times ran a telling parallel news story by Jennifer Medina, “Settlers' Defiance Reflects Postwar Israeli Changes”, about an Israeli settler takeover of a Palestinian home in the middle of a Palestinian neighborhood in Hebron’s old city. Rather than describing Hebron’s settlers, acknowledged by Israelis as extreme, uzi-toting settlers who frequently attack Palestinians, as “radicals” or “extremists”, the Times politely called them “the most uncompromising of the settlers”. And despite the settler takeover of a home in a Palestinian neighborhood, the Times subtly placed the burden of violence on Palestinians, noting, “there are fears of violence -- there have been some reports of young Palestinians throwing rocks at the settlers. And a white Star of David is spray-painted on the front door of a Palestinian family.” Of 1085 Times articles, 133 mentioned Palestinian “radical(s)”, while only four articles mentioned Israeli “radical(s).” Colonizing settlers are neither radical nor violent, but colonized Palestinians are.
(...) Growing Palestinian radicalization is a dangerous trend, but by minimizing Palestinians’ radicalizing experience of oppression and denial of rights, the Times reader is left to rely on the orientalist assumption that radicalism is a disease that springs naturally from Arab and Muslim minds and spreads.
(...) More broadly, the concepts of Israeli discrimination and racism against Palestinians, which are part of the daily language of many Palestinians including Bishara, were raised in only 0.4% and 0.5% of all Times news articles on Israel and Palestine since December 2004. The concept of Israeli apartheid, also a daily staple of Palestinian discourse, but summarily dismissed by the Times’ Ethan Bronner as “overstatement” and a “false echo of the racist policies of the old South Africa”, was mentioned in only 0.3% of all Times news articles from Israel and Palestine. The Times has essentially refused Palestinians the opportunity to present their view that they are victims of discrimination and racism.
(...) Palestinians’ lived experiences - that they are under attack, being killed, impoverished, having their land taken, denied their rights, and the victims of a discriminatory system - are drowned out by the drumbeat of Palestinian terrorism, even when few Israelis are being killed. As with Iraq, this racist narrative of inherent Arab violence is being exploited to justify domination of one people by another. Lacking this analysis, Bill Moyers’ “Buying the War” represents only a first step towards exposing US media bias in covering the Middle East.
Moyers’ analysis of the US media failure on Iraq was valuable, yet incomplete. He explained that to launch the attack on Iraq “high officials… needed a compliant press, to pass on their propaganda as news and cheer them on.... our press largely surrendered its independence and skepticism to join with our government in marching to war.” Bob Simon of CBS explained to Moyers that the administration used marketing techniques to sell the war, “Just repeat it and repeat it and repeat it… Keep that drum beat going.” Media critic Norman Solomon told Moyers, “I think these [news] executives were terrified of being called soft on terrorism.” Moyers gave numerous examples of The New York Times passing on bogus intelligence on Iraq to the US public. Michael Massing of the Columbia Journalism Review highlighted the Times central role in marketing the Iraq war, saying: “The New York Times…remainsimmensely influential. People in the TV world read it every morning... People in government-- of course read it, think tanks, and so on.”
(...) Moyers omitted a crucial reason for why the government’s case for war resonated with both the US media and public. It was based in widely held stereotypes about Arabs, Muslims and the Middle East, assumptions which are also essential to understanding US policy in Israel and Palestine. In his classic 1978 book “Orientalism”, Palestinian-American scholar Edward Sa’id asserted that the Western understanding of Arabs, Muslims and the Middle East is a product of colonialism, and that Westerners view the East as inherently inferior and in need of redemption. The US case for war in Iraq rested on orientalist assumptions - that the Middle East was an undifferentiated region of Arabs and Muslims who, lacking any history or valid grievances, are possessed by an irrationally violent nature as well as hatred of the West, Israel, freedom and democracy. The region could be transformed through a combination of US military force and Western enlightenment. Playing on this racist view of Arabs and Muslims which is deeply rooted in the US psyche, the US government managed to convince most Americans, via a complicit media, of fantastic tales about links between Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime and Al Qaeda, stocks of horrific arms, a maniacal desire to use them against the US, and of the beneficial impact of “shock and awe.” This belief that irrational Arab and Muslim violence requires enlightened Western intervention and domination is also used to justify Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, underpins uncritical US support for Israel, and is central to US media coverage of Palestine and Israel.
(...) And in Israel, the other major outpost in “the war on terror,” racist ideology and politically tainted intelligence are also pushed by the government and credulously reported by US media outlets like The New York Times. For example, an April 11, 2007 Times news article by Isabel Kershner headlined unverifiable claims by Israel’s Shin Bet (the equivalent of our FBI) that it had thwarted a massive Hamas suicide bombing planned for Passover.[2] The article largely ignored Palestinian denials reported the same day in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz Daily.[3] The Shin Bet claim seemed to merit skepticism in light of the Palestinian denials, and Hamas’ decision two years ago to halt large-scale attacks.
(...) Indeed, Hamas’ implication in a large-scale bombing plot would have come at a convenient moment for Israel. Following 16 months during which 27 Israelis were killed by Palestinians, the lowest total in more than six years, Israel is struggling to prevent the crumbling of the international boycott of the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority, and to fend off repeated peace overtures from the Palestinian Authority, Syria, Saudi Arabia and the Arab League. The Israeli government has been feeding the media stories saying that the calm is a ruse, that Hamas is using it to arm and plan attacks, and that Israel will therefore be forced to mount a large-scale invasion of Gaza soon. The Times has published at least four other articles echoing these Israeli government assertions since March 2007.[4]
(...) I received an email on April 27, 2007 from The New York Times’ Public Editor Byron Calame acknowledging that: “In the editing of the article late in the evening, the denials Haaretz had obtained from unnamed Palestinian and Hamas officials were deleted. While the vagueness of the sourcing made it less essential that those denials be kept in the story, I think the article would have been better with the denials included.”
(...) Of the 1085 Times news articles since December 1, 2004, 37% mentioned Palestinian “attack(s)”, 36% mentioned “terrorism”, 28% mentioned “terrorist(s)”, 21% mentioned Palestinian “violence”,[6] 18% mentioned “suicide bombing(s)”, 16% mentioned Palestinian “weapon(s)”, and 14% mentioned Palestinian “radicals”. In contrast to this strong Israeli narrative, only two words reflecting a Palestinian narrative appeared in a comparable percentage of Times’ news articles. Israeli “settlement(s)” were noted in 32% of articles,[7] and Israeli “occupation” was mentioned in 16% of articles. This imbalance is even more striking because the emphasis on Palestinian terrorism and violence corresponded with a two year and five month period during which Israelis killed 965 Palestinians, more than half civilians, while Palestinians killed 85 Israelis.[8] Nonetheless, Israeli “attacks(s)” are mentioned in 13% of Times articles, and Israeli “violence” in only 4%.
(...) Only very careful readers of Times news reporting would be able to locate, amidst the barrage on Palestinian terrorism, basic elements of the Palestinian experience - Israeli human rights abuses, Israeli attacks and violations of international law, Palestinian poverty, the Palestinian understanding that they are victims of Israeli discrimination and racism, and Israel’s denial of the right of return to Palestinian refugees. In a startling display of bias, since December, 2004, 70 to 130 times as many Times news article mentioned Palestinian “terrorism” or Palestinian “attack(s)” as mentioned Israeli “discrimination”, “racism” or “apartheid”.[9] Thirty-five times as many articles mentioned Palestinian “terrorism” as mentioned Palestinian “poverty”,[10] though 70% of Palestinians are now living below the poverty line.[11]
(...) The same day, April 22, The Times ran a telling parallel news story by Jennifer Medina, “Settlers' Defiance Reflects Postwar Israeli Changes”, about an Israeli settler takeover of a Palestinian home in the middle of a Palestinian neighborhood in Hebron’s old city. Rather than describing Hebron’s settlers, acknowledged by Israelis as extreme, uzi-toting settlers who frequently attack Palestinians, as “radicals” or “extremists”, the Times politely called them “the most uncompromising of the settlers”. And despite the settler takeover of a home in a Palestinian neighborhood, the Times subtly placed the burden of violence on Palestinians, noting, “there are fears of violence -- there have been some reports of young Palestinians throwing rocks at the settlers. And a white Star of David is spray-painted on the front door of a Palestinian family.” Of 1085 Times articles, 133 mentioned Palestinian “radical(s)”, while only four articles mentioned Israeli “radical(s).” Colonizing settlers are neither radical nor violent, but colonized Palestinians are.
(...) Growing Palestinian radicalization is a dangerous trend, but by minimizing Palestinians’ radicalizing experience of oppression and denial of rights, the Times reader is left to rely on the orientalist assumption that radicalism is a disease that springs naturally from Arab and Muslim minds and spreads.
(...) More broadly, the concepts of Israeli discrimination and racism against Palestinians, which are part of the daily language of many Palestinians including Bishara, were raised in only 0.4% and 0.5% of all Times news articles on Israel and Palestine since December 2004. The concept of Israeli apartheid, also a daily staple of Palestinian discourse, but summarily dismissed by the Times’ Ethan Bronner as “overstatement” and a “false echo of the racist policies of the old South Africa”, was mentioned in only 0.3% of all Times news articles from Israel and Palestine. The Times has essentially refused Palestinians the opportunity to present their view that they are victims of discrimination and racism.
(...) Palestinians’ lived experiences - that they are under attack, being killed, impoverished, having their land taken, denied their rights, and the victims of a discriminatory system - are drowned out by the drumbeat of Palestinian terrorism, even when few Israelis are being killed. As with Iraq, this racist narrative of inherent Arab violence is being exploited to justify domination of one people by another. Lacking this analysis, Bill Moyers’ “Buying the War” represents only a first step towards exposing US media bias in covering the Middle East.
the democratic option:
The Democrats did not send Bush an antiwar bill. They sent him tepid dead-in-the-water petro-imperial legislation that that would have funded Cheney and Bush’s oil occupation at more than $100 billion and set non-binding timelines for the partial withdrawal and imperial re-deployment of U.S. forces in Iraq. As the Fourth International’s Bill Van Auken rightly observed last week (Van Auken 2007):
(...) The way out of this significantly self-made dilemma, Brecher and Smith observe, is to acknowledge, expose, and denounce the occupation as wrong and to drop the imperial assumption that Iraq was “ours” to “lose.” As long as the Democrats believe or claim to believe that the criminal oil invasion was initiated with “the best of intentions” (see Obama 2006, pp. 290-309, 317; Street 2007) and worth winning (even if its launching was a “strategic blunder”), they will be (somewhat deserving) targets for the “defeatism” charge.
(...) As Tuft's University political scientist Tony Smith noted recently in the Washington Post, there's no real foreign policy difference between the Republicans and the Democrats when it comes to "doctrinal questions." The leaders of both parties are equally committed to U.S. world supremacy. Both wings of the narrow-spectrum U.S. party system strongly embrace U.S. interventionism, militarism and (when "necessary") unilaterialism in the name of spreading "democracy" and "free markets."
(...) If anything, the "neoliberal" Democrats' main foreign policy claim is that they can do a better job of conducting this imperialist foreign policy than the "neoconservative" Republicans. "We are the better, more effective and competent Men and Women of Empire" is the basic claim. Such was the essence of the John F. Kerry "Reporting to Duty" campaign.
(...) Democratic administrations invaded and imposed neo-slavery on Haiti (Wilson), intervened against the Russian Revolution (Wilson), needlessly atom-bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Truman), and lied about Soviet intentions and the nature of post-WWII conflicts to “scare the Hell of the American people” in order to garner their support for a permanent war economy and set off the Cold War (Truman). Democratic administrations killed hundreds of thousands in Korea (Truman again), initiated and escalated the vicious imperial U.S assault on Vietnam (JFK and LBJ),invaded the Dominican Republic (LBJ), imposed the lion’s share of the U.S.-led economic sanctions that killed at least a half million Iraqi children (Clinton), killed thousands in a missile attack of Sudan (Clinton), bombed Serbia in the false name of humanitarianism (Clinton) and signed legislation ending poor peoples’ entitlement to public family cash assistance in the U.S. (Clinton).
The Democrats did not send Bush an antiwar bill. They sent him tepid dead-in-the-water petro-imperial legislation that that would have funded Cheney and Bush’s oil occupation at more than $100 billion and set non-binding timelines for the partial withdrawal and imperial re-deployment of U.S. forces in Iraq. As the Fourth International’s Bill Van Auken rightly observed last week (Van Auken 2007):
“While media reports on the Congressional legislation routinely refer to it as a plan for the withdrawal of US troops from occupied Iraq and ending the war, the language of the bill makes clear that what is involved is a tactical ‘redeployment’ that would leave tens of thousands of US soldiers and marines in Iraq for years to come. The bill incorporates ‘benchmarks’ to be achieved by the Iraqi government that were spelled out by Bush himself as part of the escalation of the war initiated early this year. Included among them is the passage of new oil legislation that would open up Iraq’s vast reserves to exploitation by US energy conglomerates. The legislation proposes that ‘redeployment’ begin by next October—while giving no indication of what number of troops it proposes be withdrawn at that time—and be completed by March of 2008. This timetable is not binding, but merely a goal suggested by the legislation. The bill...would essentially allow the occupation and war to continue indefinitely, with US troops deployed to protect a massive new embassy being constructed in Baghdad to house a virtual colonial government and to guard ‘American citizens’ sent by the oil companies to reap massive profits off of Iraq’s oil fields. At the same time, under the cover of a struggle against ‘al-Qaeda,’...US troops would remain embroiled in a dirty counterinsurgency campaign aimed at crushing the resistance of the Iraqi people...The differences separating the Democrats and Congress and the Bush White House are not between an anti-war faction and a pro-war one, but rather between two pro-war parties, vying over the best tactical means of pursuing the US campaign of neo-colonial aggression in Iraq.”
(...) The way out of this significantly self-made dilemma, Brecher and Smith observe, is to acknowledge, expose, and denounce the occupation as wrong and to drop the imperial assumption that Iraq was “ours” to “lose.” As long as the Democrats believe or claim to believe that the criminal oil invasion was initiated with “the best of intentions” (see Obama 2006, pp. 290-309, 317; Street 2007) and worth winning (even if its launching was a “strategic blunder”), they will be (somewhat deserving) targets for the “defeatism” charge.
(...) As Tuft's University political scientist Tony Smith noted recently in the Washington Post, there's no real foreign policy difference between the Republicans and the Democrats when it comes to "doctrinal questions." The leaders of both parties are equally committed to U.S. world supremacy. Both wings of the narrow-spectrum U.S. party system strongly embrace U.S. interventionism, militarism and (when "necessary") unilaterialism in the name of spreading "democracy" and "free markets."
(...) If anything, the "neoliberal" Democrats' main foreign policy claim is that they can do a better job of conducting this imperialist foreign policy than the "neoconservative" Republicans. "We are the better, more effective and competent Men and Women of Empire" is the basic claim. Such was the essence of the John F. Kerry "Reporting to Duty" campaign.
(...) Democratic administrations invaded and imposed neo-slavery on Haiti (Wilson), intervened against the Russian Revolution (Wilson), needlessly atom-bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Truman), and lied about Soviet intentions and the nature of post-WWII conflicts to “scare the Hell of the American people” in order to garner their support for a permanent war economy and set off the Cold War (Truman). Democratic administrations killed hundreds of thousands in Korea (Truman again), initiated and escalated the vicious imperial U.S assault on Vietnam (JFK and LBJ),invaded the Dominican Republic (LBJ), imposed the lion’s share of the U.S.-led economic sanctions that killed at least a half million Iraqi children (Clinton), killed thousands in a missile attack of Sudan (Clinton), bombed Serbia in the false name of humanitarianism (Clinton) and signed legislation ending poor peoples’ entitlement to public family cash assistance in the U.S. (Clinton).
Thursday, April 26, 2007
the track record of the world bank:
The World Bank is thus seen in much of the world as a neo-colonial institution, and all its preaching about "governance" seems little more than a way for the Bank to cover for the failure of its own economic policy prescriptions. The Bank has little to show for its tens of billions of dollars of development lending. The vast majority of the countries that have followed its policies have suffered a sharp slowdown in economic growth over the last 25 years, and a resulting decline in progress on social indicators such as life expectancy and infant and child mortality.
(...) [corruption as cause?] While corruption is bad and "good governance" is by definition good, failed economic policies - the abandonment of development strategies, anti-growth monetary and fiscal policies, indiscriminate opening to trade and investment flows, the pressuring of governments to prioritize the needs of foreign corporations - are much more likely causes of this long-term economic development failure. After all, countries like South Korea managed to achieve some of the most rapid and successful economic growth and development in world history without cleaning up corruption. South Korea went from a per capita income level of Ghana in 1960 to that of Europe today, while two of its presidents during this successful development trajectory went to jail for corruption involving hundreds of millions of dollars. And the United States didn't exactly have good governance while the robber barons held sway during the latter part of the nineteenth century, when we were the fastest-growing developing country in the world.
The World Bank is thus seen in much of the world as a neo-colonial institution, and all its preaching about "governance" seems little more than a way for the Bank to cover for the failure of its own economic policy prescriptions. The Bank has little to show for its tens of billions of dollars of development lending. The vast majority of the countries that have followed its policies have suffered a sharp slowdown in economic growth over the last 25 years, and a resulting decline in progress on social indicators such as life expectancy and infant and child mortality.
(...) [corruption as cause?] While corruption is bad and "good governance" is by definition good, failed economic policies - the abandonment of development strategies, anti-growth monetary and fiscal policies, indiscriminate opening to trade and investment flows, the pressuring of governments to prioritize the needs of foreign corporations - are much more likely causes of this long-term economic development failure. After all, countries like South Korea managed to achieve some of the most rapid and successful economic growth and development in world history without cleaning up corruption. South Korea went from a per capita income level of Ghana in 1960 to that of Europe today, while two of its presidents during this successful development trajectory went to jail for corruption involving hundreds of millions of dollars. And the United States didn't exactly have good governance while the robber barons held sway during the latter part of the nineteenth century, when we were the fastest-growing developing country in the world.
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