By Ignacio Ramonet
VALENCIA, Spain, Aug 11 2014 (Columnist Service)

I had been told he was in Havana but that, because he was sick, he didn’t want to see anyone. I knew where he usually stayed: in a magnificent country house far from the city centre. I called on the phone and Mercedes, his wife, eased my doubts. She said, warmly: “Not at all, that’s to keep the pests away. Come over, ‘Gabo’ will be happy to see you.”

The next morning, in the humid heat, I climbed a palm tree-lined drive and knocked on the door of the tropical villa.

I knew he was suffering from lymphatic cancer and that he was undergoing exhausting chemotherapy. They said his health was delicate, and there was even talk of a heart-wrenching “farewell letter” to his friends and to life…I was afraid I would encounter a dying man.

Mercedes came to open the door, and to my surprise she said with a smile: “Come in. Gabo’s coming…He’s just finishing his tennis match.”

A little while later, sitting on a white sofa in the dim living room, I watched him come in, certainly looking fit, with his curly hair still wet from the shower, and his thick moustache. He was wearing a yellow guayabera shirt, wide white pants and canvas shoes. A character right out of a Visconti film.

Drinking a glass of ice coffee, he said he felt “like a wild bird that has escaped from its cage. In any case, much younger than I look.” And he added that “with age, I find that the body isn’t made to last as long as we would like to live.”

He then suggested that we “do like the English, who never talk about health problems. It’s impolite.”

A stiff breeze lifted the curtains on the huge windows up high and the living room started to feel like a flying ship. I told him how much I liked the first volume of his autobiography, ’Living to Tell the Tale’. “It’s your best novel,” I said.

García Márquez in 1984. Credit: F3rn4nd0, edited by Mangostar C BY-SA 3.

He smiled and adjusted his thick-framed glasses. “Without a little imagination it’s impossible to reconstruct my parents’ incredible love story. Or my memories as a baby…Don’t forget that only the imagination is clairvoyant. Sometimes it is truer than the truth. Just think of Kafka or Faulkner, or simply Cervantes.”

In the background the notes of Antonin Dvorak’s New World Symphony flooded the room, creating an atmosphere at once joyous and dramatic.

I had met Gabriel García Márquez some 40 years earlier, in 1979, in Paris, with my friend Ramón Chao. Gabo, as he was affectionately known, had been invited by UNESCO, and along with Hubert Beuve-Méry, the founder of Le Monde Diplomatique, formed part of a panel chaired by Nobel Peace Prize-winner Sean MacBride, which was charged with producing a report on the north-south imbalance in the global media.

Back then, he had stopped writing novels, as part of a self-imposed ban that was supposed to last as long as General Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) was in power in Chile. He had not yet received the Nobel Literature Prize, but he was already immensely famous. The success of One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) had made him the most widely read Spanish-language author since Cervantes.

I remember being surprised at his short stature and struck by his gravity and his serious demeanor. He lived like a recluse, only leaving his room, which had become a kind of cell where he did his work, only to go to UNESCO.

With respect to journalism, his other great passion, he had just published an account of the seizure by a Sandinista commando of the National Palace in Managua, Nicaragua, which had triggered the downfall of dictator Anastasio Somoza. He furnished a wealth of details that gave the impression that he himself took part in the event. I wanted to know how he had managed to do that.

He told me: “I was in Bogotá at the time of the assault. I called General Omar Torrijos, the president of Panama. The commando had just been given refuge in his country and still hadn’t talked to the media. I asked him to tell the guys to be wary of the press, because their words could be distorted. He responded: ‘Come. They’ll only talk to you.” I went and the leaders of the commando – Edén Pastora, Dora María and Hugo Torres – and I shut ourselves in a room in an army garrison.

“We reconstructed the event minute by minute, from the planning stage to the final outcome. We spent the night there. Exhausted, Pastora and Torres fell asleep. Dora María and I continued till dawn. I returned to the hotel to write up the report. Later, I went back to read it to them. They corrected a few technical terms, the names of weapons, the structure of the groups, etc. The report was published less than a week after the assault. It drew the world’s attention to the Sandinista cause.”

I saw Gabo many times after that – in Paris, Havana, Mexico. We had an ongoing disagreement over Hugo Chávez. He didn’t believe in Venezuela’s comandante. I, on the other hand, thought he was the man who was going to usher Latin America into a new historical period. Apart from that, our conversations were always very (too?) serious: the future of the world, the future of Latin America, Cuba…

However, I remember that once I laughed till I cried. I was coming back from Cartagena de Indias, a sumptuous colonial city in Colombia; I had glimpsed his house behind its high walls, and I mentioned it to him. He asked me: “You know how I got that house?” No idea. “Since I was very young, I wanted to live in Cartagena,” he said. “And when I had money, I started looking for a house there. But it was always too expensive. A lawyer friend explained to me: ‘They think you’re a millionaire and they jack up the price. Let me look for one for you.’ A few months later, he finds this house, which at the time was an old print shop, nearly in ruins. He talks to the owner, who was blind, and they agree on a price.

“But the old man sets a condition: he wants to meet the buyer. My friend comes and tells me: ‘We have to go see him, but you mustn’t talk. Otherwise, as soon as he recognises your voice, he’ll triple the price…He’s blind, you’ll be mute.’ The day of the meeting arrives. The blind guy starts asking me questions. I answer in indecipherable grunts….But at one point, I make the mistake of saying ‘yes’ loud and clear. ‘Ah!’ says the old man, ‘I know that voice! You’re Gabriel García Márquez!’ He had figured out who I was.

“He immediately adds ‘We’re going to have to reconsider the price. Everything’s different now.’ My friend tries to negotiate. But the blind guy says again ‘No. It can’t be the same price. No way.’ ‘Ok, how much then?’ we ask him, resigned. The old man thinks for a minute and says ‘Half.’ We didn’t understand a thing…So he explains: ‘You know I have a print shop. What do you think I made a living from up to now? Printing pirate editions of García Márquez’s novels!’”

That fit of laughter still resonated in my memory when, in the house in Havana, I continued my conversation with a Gabo who was much older, although intellectually as quick as ever. I talked about my book of interviews with Fidel Castro. ‘I’m really jealous,’ he said, laughing, ‘you had the luck of spending over 100 hours with him.’

“‘I’m the one who is impatient to read the second part of your memoir,’ I responded. ‘At last you’re going to talk about your meetings with Fidel, who you’ve known much longer. You and he are like two giants in the Hispanic world. If you compare it to France, it would be like Victor Hugo meeting Napoleon…’ He roared with laughter, while smoothing back his bushy eyebrows. ‘You have too much imagination…But I’m going to disappoint you: there will be no second part…I know that many people, friends and adversaries are waiting for ‘my historic verdict’ on Fidel. It’s absurd. I’ve already written what I had to write about him. Fidel is my friend and he always will be. To the grave.”

The sky had gone dark, and the living room, even though it was the middle of the day, was very dim. The conversation was slowing down, and had become less lively. Gabo was gazing out into space, and I wondered: “Could it be possible that he won’t leave any written testimony of so many confidential things shared in friendly complicity with Fidel? Will he have left it for a posthumous publication, when neither of them are in this world anymore?”

Outside, torrential rain was pouring down from the sky with the force of a tropical storm. The music had gone silent. A heavy fragrance of orchids invaded the room. I glanced over at Gabo. He had the tired look of an old Colombian leopard. He was sitting there, silent and meditative, staring at the endless rain, the constant companion through all his solitudes. I slipped out quietly. Without knowing I was seeing him for the last time.

Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Excerpt:

By Ignacio Ramonet
PARIS, Jul 7 2014 (IPS)

In ‘Hard Choices’, her new book about her experiences as Secretary of State during U.S. President Barack Obama’s first term (2008-2012), Hillary Clinton writes something of prime importance about Cuba – she says that late in her term in office she urged Obama to reconsider the U.S. embargo against Cuba.
“It wasn’t achieving its goals, and it was holding back our broader agenda across Latin America.”

Ignacio Ramonet

For the first time a U.S. presidential hopeful has publicly stated that the blockade imposed by Washington on the Caribbean island – for over fifty years! – is “not achieving its goals”.

In other words, the embargo has not subdued this small country in spite of the amount of unjust suffering it has caused for its population.

The essence of Hillary Clinton’s declaration is two-fold: first, it breaks the taboo on saying out loud what everyone in Washington has known for some time: that the blockade is useless.

And second, and more importantly, her statement comes at the moment when her campaign is being launched for the Democratic Party nomination to the White House; that is, she is not afraid that her affirmation – in opposition to all of Washington policies towards Cuba over the past half century – could be a handicap in the electoral battle she faces up until the elections of November 8, 2016.

If Hillary Clinton takes such an unorthodox position, it is because she is aware that public opinion on this topic in the United States has changed, and that the majority today is in favour of ending the blockade.

Indeed, a nationwide poll in February 2014 by the Atlantic Council research institute, found that 56 percent of U.S. respondents favour changing Washington’s policy towards Cuba.

Contrary to hopes that arose after U.S. President Barack Obama was elected in November 2008, Washington’s relations with Cuba have remained on ice. Just after taking office in April 2009, Obama announced at the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago that the United States was seeking a “new beginning” in its relationship with Havana.

“Washington’s attitude towards Cuba is still reactionary, typical of the Cold War era which has been over for a quarter of a century. Its archaic stance is in sharp contrast to the position taken by other governments”
But he made only limited, largely symbolic, gestures, permitting Cuban Americans to visit the island and send small amounts of money to their families. Later, in 2011, he adopted further measures but these were still of limited scope: he allowed religious groups and students to travel to Cuba, authorised U.S. airports to handle charter flights to Cuba, and increased the limit on remittances Cuban Americans could send to their relatives. Not much in comparison with the huge disputes that divide the two countries.

One of their differences – the case of ‘the Cuban Five’ – has caused an international commotion. Five Cuban intelligence agents, engaged in the prevention of anti-Cuban terrorism, were detained in Florida in September 1998. They were convicted in a Cold War style political trial – a real courtroom lynching – and sentenced to long prison terms. The injustice of their treatment is clear from the fact that they had committed no acts of violence, nor spied on U.S. security secrets, but had risked their lives to prevent attacks and save human lives.

Washington is inconsistent when it claims to combat “international terrorism” yet continues to back anti-Cuban terrorist groups on its own soil. For instance, in April 2014 the Cuban authorities arrested another group of four people arriving from Florida with intent to commit attacks.

Washington’s attitude towards Cuba is still reactionary, typical of the Cold War era which has been over for a quarter of a century. Its archaic stance is in sharp contrast to the position taken by other governments.

For example, all Latin American and Caribbean states, whatever their political orientations, have recently improved relations with Cuba and denounced the blockade. This was proved in January at the summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) held in Havana.

Washington was snubbed again in May at the general assembly of the Organisation of American States (OAS) in Cochabamba, Bolivia, when Latin American countries, in a fresh show of solidarity with Havana, threatened to boycott the next Summit of the Americas scheduled for 2015 in Panama if Cuba is not invited.

For its part, the European Union decided in February to abandon its so-called “common position” on relations with Cuba, imposed in 1996 by José María Aznar, the then Spanish prime minister, to “punish” Cuba by rejecting all dialogue with the island’s authorities. But the policy proved fruitless and it failed. Brussels has recognised this and has reinstated negotiations with Havana to reach agreement on political and economic cooperation.

The European Union is Cuba’s biggest foreign investor and its second most important trading partner. Reflecting this new spirit, several European ministers have already visited the island.

In contrast with Washington’s immobility, many European foreign ministries are observing with interest the changes President Raúl Castro is promoting in Cuba in the framework of “updating the economic model” and the line taken at the Sixth Congress of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC) in 2011, which are highly significant transformations of the economy and society. The recent creation of a special development zone around the port of Mariel, and the approval in March of a new foreign investment law, in particular, have excited great international interest.

The Cuban authorities see no contradiction between socialism and private enterprise. According to some estimates, private enterprise, including foreign investment, could expand to take up 40 percent of the country’s economy, while 60 percent would remain in the hands of the state and the public sector.

The goal is for the Cuban economy to be increasingly compatible with those of its major partners in the region (Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador and Bolivia) where public and private sectors, the state and markets coexist.

All these changes highlight by contrast the stubbornness of the U.S. Administration, painted into the corner of an ideological position dating from another era, even if, as we have seen, more voices are raised day by day in Washington to acknowledge the error of this position and the need to abandon international isolation in terms of its Cuban policy. Will President Obama listen to them? (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Excerpt:

By Ignacio Ramonet
PARIS, Jun 7 2014 (IPS)

It is unlikely that Brazilians will listen to the audacious call made by Michel Platini – a great player in his time and now the politicking president of the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) – on Apr. 26: “Brazil, make an effort for a month, calm down!”

The FIFA World Cup opens in Sao Paulo on Jun. 12 and comes to a close on Jul. 13 in Rio de Janeiro. And there is concern that the current protests could escalate during the global sports event.

Opposition to Brazil’s hosting of the World Cup has been expressed in demonstrations and protests since June 2013, when it all began with the 2013 FIFA Confederations Cup.

Why so much opposition to the biggest global celebration of football in the country considered the sport’s Mecca?

For the past year, sociologists and political scientists have been trying to answer that question, especially given the fact that in the last 11 years – in other words, since the Workers’ Party (PT) started to govern the country – the living standards of Brazilians have improved considerably.

Successive minimum wage hikes have managed to significantly boost the incomes of the poor. Thanks to programmes like ‘Bolsa Familia’ (Family Grant) or ‘Brasil Sem Miséria’ (Brazil Without Poverty), the quality of life of the lowest-income segments has improved. Twenty million people have left poverty behind.

The middle classes have also progressed. But Brazil still has a long way to go to become a less unequal country that offers decent material conditions for all, because the inequality remains abysmal.

Since the PT does not have a majority in either house of Congress, its maneuvering room has been very limited. To move towards more equal distribution of income, PT leaders – former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva first and foremost – had no choice but to forge alliances with conservative parties.

This created a vacuum of representation and political paralysis in the sense that the PT, in exchange, had to promise to put a damper on the protests.

That led the demonstrators to question the functioning of Brazil’s democracy. Especially when the government’s social policies began to show their limits. Because at the same time, society was experiencing a “crisis of maturity”.

When they were lifted out of poverty, many Brazilians moved on from “quantitative” demands (more jobs, more schools, more hospitals) to “qualitative” ones (better jobs, better schools, better care in hospitals).

In the 2013 wave of protests, the demonstrators were often young people from lower-income segments of society who had benefited from the social programmes implemented by the administrations of Lula and his successor, President Dilma Rousseff.

Young people in that category number in the millions, and earn low wages. But they have access to the Internet now and are connected enough online to find out about the new global forms of protests. In this new Brazil, they also want to “get on board”.

But then they find out that society is not very willing to change and to accept them. As a result, they feel frustrated, and are expressing their discontent.

The catalyst for that anger was the World Cup. Obviously, the protests aren’t against football, but against some shady practices that have emerged in the organisation of the event.

The World Cup has involved an enormous investment estimated at 8.2 billion euros. Brazilians believe that, with that budget, more and better schools, more and better housing, and more and better hospitals could have been built for the people.

The World Cup has also revealed less than transparent ways of doing business with public funds. For example, in the construction of the stadiums alone, the final cost went 300 percent over budget.

Demonstrators are protesting the cost overruns paid at the detriment to the already poorly functioning public services offered in areas like education, health and public transport.

Protesters are also demonstrating, in several of the 12 cities that will host the World Cup matches, against the eviction of thousands of families from their neighbourhoods to free up the property for the construction and expansion of airports, freeways and stadiums. An estimated 250,000 people have been evicted from their homes in this country of nearly 200 million people.

Others are protesting the commercial exploitation of football, which FIFA fuels.

Several protest movements express five demands (for the five World Cups won by Brazil): housing, public health, public transport, education and justice (an end to state violence in the favelas or shantytowns and a demilitarisation of the military police).

The social movements that are leading the demonstrations are divided into two broad groups. A radical fraction, under the slogan “no rights, no World Cup”, has struck up alliances with the most violent sectors, even the Black Block with its extreme tactics.

The other group, organised in “World Cup people’s committees”, protest the sporting event but do not take part in violent demonstrations.

Nevertheless, the current protests do not seem to be taking on the magnitude of the June 2013 demonstrations. The radical groups have helped fragment the movements, which have no single unified leadership.

The result: according to a recent survey, two-thirds of Brazilians are opposed to protests being held during the World Cup. And they especially disapprove of violent protests.

What will the political cost of all this be for the Rousseff administration? Last year’s protests dealt a major blow to the president, who, in the first three weeks after they broke out, saw her popularity drop more than 25 percent.

Later, she said she was “listening to the voices from the streets” and proposed political reforms in Congress. That vigorous response enabled her to recover some of her lost popularity.

This time, the challenge will be at the polls, because the presidential elections are scheduled for Oct. 5.

Dilma – as she is popularly referred to in Brazil – is the favourite. But she will be facing an opposition grouped in two alliances: the centrist Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB), whose candidate is Aécio Neves, and the much more worrisome social democratic Brazilian Socialist Party (PSB), made up of the union between Eduardo Campos (a former science and technology minister under Lula) and environmental activist Marina Silva (a former environment minister under Lula).

For these elections, which will be decisive not only for Brazil but for all of Latin America, what happens this month during the World Cup could be critical.

Excerpt:

By Ignacio Ramonet
PARIS, Nov 12 2013 (Columnist Service)

Signs of rapprochement between Tehran and Washington are growing. A new era seems about to begin. It is now possible to imagine a political solution that would put an end to the 33-year confrontation between Iran and the United States.

In early September, we were once more on the verge of war in the Middle East. The big global media players published headline after headline on the United States’ “imminent attack” on Syria, a key ally of Iran, accused of committing a “chemical massacre” on the outskirts of Damascus on Aug. 21.

All signs pointed to a new conflict – which, in that danger zone, ran the risk of soon turning into a regional conflagration.

Russia (which has a geostrategic naval base in Tartus, on the Syrian coast, and supplies Damascus with weapons on a large scale) and China (in the name of the principle of national sovereignty) had warned that they would veto any request for United Nations Security Council approval for an attack.Iran seems to have understood that having a nuclear bomb that it would not be able to use, and finding itself in the same situation as North Korea, is not an option.

For its part, Tehran, while it denounced the use of chemical weapons, also opposed a military intervention, because it feared that Israel would take advantage of the occasion to attack Iran and destroy its nuclear installations…

Hence, the powder kegs in the Middle East, including Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan and Turkey, faced a risk of exploding.

But all of a sudden the “imminent attack” was abandoned. Why?

In first place, there was strong rejection on the part of Western public opinion, which was largely hostile to a new conflict whose main beneficiaries, on the ground, could only be Jihadists linked to Al Qaeda – against whom the Western forces are fighting in Libya, Mali, Somalia, Iraq, Yemen and elsewhere.

Later, on Aug. 29, came David Cameron’s humiliating defeat in the British parliament, which left Britain out of the game.

Then on Aug. 31 came the shift by Barack Obama, who decided, to gain time, to ask for a green light from the U.S. Congress.

And last, on Sep. 5, during the G20 summit in St. Petersburg, Vladimir Putin suggested putting Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal under U.N. control, so it could eventually be destroyed.

This solution, an indisputable diplomatic triumph by Moscow, was in the interests of Washington as well as Paris, Damascus and Tehran.

But it also meant, paradoxically, a diplomatic defeat for some of the United States’ allies (and enemies of Iran): namely Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Israel.

There is no doubt that this solution should transform the diplomatic atmosphere and accelerate the rapprochement between Washington and Tehran.

Actually everything had started on Jun. 14, when Hassan Rouhani was elected president of Iran, to succeed the polemic Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. At his Aug. 4 inauguration, the new president said a different era was starting, and that he would, through dialogue, pull his country out of its diplomatic isolation and confrontation with the West over its nuclear programme.

His principal objective, he said, was to ease the pressure of the international sanctions that are strangling the Iranian economy.

The sanctions are among the toughest ever imposed on a country in peace time.

On Sep. 25, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif held, for the first time since relations between the two countries were broken off on Apr. 7, 1980, a bilateral diplomatic meeting, on Iran’s nuclear programme.

The atmosphere, characterised by a conciliatory tone and small steps on the road to reconciliation, was seen more spectacularly during the now-famous Sep. 27 telephone conversation between Obama and Rouhani.

With the exception of Israel’s ultra-conservative government, which is trying to torpedo the rapprochement, other U.S. allies do not want to be the last to jump on the peace bandwagon. And above all, they do not want to let juicy trade deals with a country of 80 million consumers escape.

So everything indicates that the current thaw will intensify. Objectively, Iran and the United States have an interest in making peace.

On the geostrategic front, Obama is trying to free himself up in the Middle East in order to focus more on Asia, which the U.S. sees “as the future in terms of economic growth in the 21st century,” in the words of Simon Kahn, chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in Singapore.

U.S. involvement in the Middle East, which has been steady since the end of World War II, was justified by the existence in the region of most of the world’s oil reserves, essential for the U.S. productive machine.

But that has changed since the discovery of large shale gas and oil deposits in the United States, which could help the country make significant progress towards energy autonomy.

Tehran, for its part, needs this deal to ease the pressure of the sanctions and reduce the difficulties plaguing Iranians in their day-to-day lives – because the country is not safe from a major social uprising.

With respect to the nuclear question, Iran seems to have understood that having a nuclear bomb that it would not be able to use, and finding itself in the same situation as North Korea, is not an option.

At the same time, the status of regional power to which Tehran has always aspired would require an agreement (or even alliance) with the United States, as is the case with Israel and Turkey.

And finally, a far from negligible aspect: time presses. There is a risk that Obama’s successor will turn out to be more intransigent, three years from now.

There will be no shortage of obstacles on either side. The adversaries of an accord are not few, and they have power. To sign any deal, Washington, for example, needs approval from Congress, where Israel has many friends. In Tehran there are also fearsome adversaries of an agreement.

But everything points to the end of a cycle. The logic of history is pushing Iran and the United States, which share a common faith in economic liberalism, towards what we could call “a heroic agreement”.
(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Ignacio Ramonet
PARIS, Jul 12 2013 (IPS)

We were afraid this would happen. We had been warned by books (George Orwell’s “1984”) and films (Steven Spielberg’s “Minority Report”) that with the progress being made in communication technology, we would all end up under surveillance.

Of course, we assumed that this violation of our privacy would be practised by a neo-totalitarian state. There we were wrong, because the unprecedented revelations made by Edward Snowden about the Orwellian surveillance of our communications directly implicate the United States, once regarded as the “country of freedom.”

Apparently this came to an end after the passage of the Patriot Act of 2001. President Barack Obama himself admitted, “You can’t have 100 percent security and then have 100 percent privacy.” Welcome to the era of Big Brother.

What has Snowden revealed? The 29-year-old former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) computer analyst who most recently worked for the private company Booz Allen Hamilton, subcontracted to the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), leaked to The Guardian and to a lesser extent The Washington Post the existence of secret U.S. government programmes to scrutinise the communications of millions of citizens.

The magnitude of this incredible violation of our civil rights and private communications has been described by the press in precise and hair-raising detail. On Jun. 5, for instance, The Guardian published the order issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court instructing the phone company Verizon to hand over to the NSA tens of millions of its clients’ phone records.

The order does not apparently cover the contents of phone communications nor the identity of the users of the phone numbers involved, but it does include the duration of calls and the phone numbers of callers and recipients.

The next day, The Guardian and the Post revealed the existence of a secret surveillance programme, PRISM, that enables the NSA and the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) to access servers of the nine main internet companies (with the notable exception of Twitter): Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple.

By breaching communications privacy, the U.S. government can access users’ files, audio files, videos, e-mails or photographs. PRISM has become the NSA’s number one source of raw intelligence used for the reports it provides President Obama on a daily basis.

Over the last few weeks, both newspapers have been publishing new information on programmes for cyberespionage and surveillance of communications in the rest of the world, based on Snowden’s leaks.

Snowden told The Guardian, “The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested by default. It collects them in its system and it filters them and it analyses them and it measures them and it stores them for periods of time. Everyone is being watched and recorded.”

The NSA, headquartered at Fort Meade, Maryland, is the largest and least-known U.S. intelligence agency.

It is so secret that most U.S. citizens do not even know it exists. It has the lion’s share of the intelligence services’ budget and it produces over 50 tonnes of classified material a day.

The NSA, and not the CIA, possesses and operates most of the U.S. systems of covert gathering of intelligence material: from a global satellite network to dozens of listening posts, thousands of computers and forests of antennae in the mountains of West Virginia.

One of its specialties is spying on the spies, that is, the intelligence services of all world powers, friendly or unfriendly. During the 1982 Falklands/Malvinas War, for example, the NSA deciphered the secret code of the Argentine intelligence services, making it possible to transmit crucial information about the Argentine forces to the British.

The NSA’s interception system can covertly intercept any e-mail, internet search or international telephone call. The complete set of communications intercepted and deciphered by the NSA constitutes the U.S. government’s chief source of clandestine information.

The NSA is in close partnership with the mysterious Echelon system, secretly created after World War II by five English-speaking countries (the “Five Eyes”): the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Echelon is an Orwellian global surveillance system reaching around the world, continuously monitoring most telephone calls, internet communications, e-mail and social networking sites. It can intercept up to two million conversations a minute. Its clandestine mission is to spy on governments, political parties, organisations and businesses.

Within the framework of Echelon, U.S. and British intelligence services have established a longstanding secret collaboration. And now we have learned, thanks to Snowden’s revelations, that British intelligence also clandestinely monitors fibre optic cables, which allowed it to spy on communications from the delegations that attended the G20 summit in London in April 2009.

Washington and London have set up a Big Brother-style plan capable of finding out everything we say and do in our communications. And when President Obama talks of the “legitimacy” of these practices that violate privacy, he is defending the unjustifiable.

Obama is abusing his power and undermining the freedom of all world citizens. “I don’t want to live in a society that does these sorts of things,” Snowden protested when he decided to blow the whistle.

Not by chance, Snowden’s revelations came just as the court martial was beginning of U.S. soldier Bradley Manning, accused of leaking secrets to Wikileaks, the whistle-blowing web site that released millions of confidential documents, and when the head of the site, cyber-activist Julian Assange, has spent one year in asylum at the Ecuadorean embassy in London.

Snowden, Manning and Assange are champions of freedom of expression, and defenders of healthy democracy and of the interests of all citizens on the planet. Now they are being harassed and persecuted by the U.S. Big Brother.

Why did these three heroes of our time take such risks that could even cost them their lives?

Snowden, who has asked a number of countries for political asylum, replied: “If you realise that that’s the world you helped create and it is going to get worse with the next generation and the next generation, and extend the capabilities of this architecture of oppression, you realise that you might be willing to accept any risks and it doesn’t matter what the outcome is.”

Excerpt:

By Ignacio Ramonet
PARIS, France, Jan 9 2013 (IPS)

Having survived the announced end of the world on Dec. 21, we can now try to foretell our immediate future, based on geopolitical principles that will help us understand the overall shifts of global powers and assess the major risks and dangers.

Ignacio Ramonet

Looking at a map of the world, we can immediately see some hotspots lit up in red. Four of them represent high levels of danger: Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and Asia.

In the European Union (EU), 2013 will be the worst year since the beginning of the crisis in 2008. Austerity is the only creed and deep cuts to the welfare state continue because Germany, which for the first time in history dominates Europe and is ruling it with an iron fist, wills it so.

In Spain, political tensions will rise as the Generalitat de Catalunya (Government of Catalonia) decides the terms of a local referendum on independence for this autonomous community (province), a process that will be watched with great interest by the separatists in Euskadi, the Basque Country.

As for the economy, already in dire straits, it all depends on what happens – in the Italian elections in February; and on how the markets react to a possible win by conservative candidate Mario Monti, who has the support of Berlin and the Vatican, or by centre-left candidate Pier Luigi Bersani, who is the frontrunner in the polls.

Social explosions could occur in any of the countries of southern Europe (Greece, Portugal, Italy or Spain), exasperated as their people are with the constant cutbacks. The EU will not emerge from the doldrums in 2013, and everything could get worse if, on top of it all, the response of the markets is brutal (as neoliberals are urging) in France under the very moderate socialist President François Hollande.

In Latin America, 2013 will also be a year of challenges. In the first place, in Venezuela, which since 1999 has been a driver of progressive changes throughout the region, the unforeseen relapse in the health of President Hugo Chávez – re-elected Oct. 7 – is creating uncertainty.

There will also be elections on Feb. 17 in Ecuador. President Rafael Correa, another key Latin American leader, is expected to be re-elected. On Nov. 10 important elections will be held in Honduras, where former president Manuel Zelaya was toppled on Jun. 28, 2009. The Electoral Tribunal has authorised the registration of the Partido Libertad y Refundación (LIBRE – Freedom and Refoundation Party), led by Zelaya.

Chileans are due to go to the polls on Nov. 17. The unpopularity of conservative President Sebastián Piñera opens the way for a possible victory by socialist candidate and former president Michelle Bachelet.

International attention will be focused on Cuba as talks continue in Havana between the Colombian government and the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia (FARC) with the aim of putting an end to Latin America’s last armed conflict.

Meanwhile, there again appears to be a stalemate in the Middle East, the location of the most disturbing events in the world.

The Arab Spring uprisings toppled several dictators in the region: Zine Ben Ali in Tunisia, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya.

But subsequent elections allowed reactionary Islamist parties, like the Muslim Brotherhood, to come to power. Now, as we are seeing in Egypt, they want to hold onto it at all costs, to the consternation of the secular segments of society who had been the first to rise up in protest, and are refusing to accept this new form of authoritarianism. Tunisia faces the same problem.

After following with interest the explosions of freedom in the spring of 2011, European societies have again become apathetic about what is going on in the Middle East.

For example, the inexorably deepening civil war in Syria clearly shows how the big Western powers (the United States, the United Kingdom and France), allies of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, have decided to support – with money, arms and instructors – the Sunni Islamist insurgents. On all fronts, they are gaining ground. How long can the government of President Bashar al-Assad last?

In the face of the “Shiite Front” (Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Syria and Iran), the United States has built a broad regional “Sunni Front” (from Turkey and Saudi Arabia to Morocco, including Egypt, Libya and Tunisia). Its goal: to overthrow Bashar al-Assad and deprive Teheran of its big regional ally by next spring.

Why? Because on Jun. 14 Iran will hold presidential elections, in which incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is not eligible to stand. In other words, for the next six months Iran will be immersed in a violent election campaign between partisans of a hard anti-Washington line and supporters of negotiations.

Given this situation in Iran, Israel will no doubt be preparing for a possible attack on Iran’s nuclear installations. The Jan. 22 elections in Israel will probably result in victory for the ultra-conservative coalition that supports Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is all for bombing Iran as soon as possible.

Meanwhile, U.S. President Barack Obama is looking toward Asia, a priority region for Washington since it decided on a strategic redirection of its foreign policy. The United States is attempting to curb the expansion of China by surrounding that country with military bases and relying on the support of its traditional partners: Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.

China’s seas have become the areas with the greatest potential for armed conflict in the Asia Pacific region. Tensions between Beijing and Tokyo caused by the sovereignty dispute over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands could be heightened following the Dec. 16 electoral victory of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party, led by the new Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, who is a nationalist hawk.

China is moving full speed ahead with the modernisation of its navy. On Sept. 25 it launched its first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, with the intention of intimidating its neighbours. Beijing is increasingly intolerant of the U.S. military presence in Asia. A dangerous “strategic distrust” is building between the two giants, which will doubtless leave its mark on international politics in the 21st century.

(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

People in the streets and squares of the Colombian capital are breathing easier. The air is fresh with hope, in contrast to the former leaden and fearful atmosphere of eternal violence and interminable conflict.

Ignacio Ramonet

The war in Colombia is one of the longest-running armed conflicts in the world. It began (or intensified) when Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, an immensely popular social leader who advocated social justice, including financial system reform and land reform, was murdered by the oligarchy on Apr. 9, 1948.

Since then the number of casualties has reached the hundreds of thousands. Today, in a continent that is overwhelmingly at peace, this conflict – Latin America’s last guerrilla war – is like a vestige of another era.

Travelling around the country and talking with diplomats, intellectuals, social workers, journalists, academics or local residents in low-income neighbourhoods, the conclusion that can be drawn is that this time, intentions are serious.

Things have apparently been on the move since President Juan Manuel Santos, in office since August 2010, publicly announced in early September that the government and the insurgents would be starting peace talks, first in Oslo and then in Havana, with the governments of Norway and Cuba as guarantors and of Venezuela and Chile as observers.

Colombians have confidence in the peace process; they feel that internal and external circumstances allow them – prudently – to dream. What if peace were, at last, possible? During the last 65 years of war, it is not the first time that the authorities and the rebels have sat down to negotiate.

Why has President Santos, who was an implacable opponent of the guerrillas as defence minister under former president Álvaro Uribe, chosen the path of negotiation? Because this time, he says, “the stars are aligned to end the conflict.” In other words, the national and international situations could not be more propitious.

In the first place, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) are no longer what they used to be. They remain the most formidable guerrilla force in Latin America, with 20,000 combatants. And the FARC is the only guerrilla army that has not been defeated by force of arms in Latin America. But satellite tracking and massive use of drones (unmanned spy planes) now allow their communications and movements to be tracked.

Secondly, the killings of the FARC’s top commanders (by means of the Israeli technique of selective killings) have made it more difficult for the guerrillas to regroup. In addition, some odious combat methods used by the FARC, such as kidnapping, summary execution of prisoners and indiscriminate attacks on civilians, have provoked rejection by a significant part of civil society.

The FARC are far from defeated, and could probably continue the conflict for years. But they are certainly not able to win it; the opportunity for a military victory has vanished. Peace talks, if they lead to a dignified agreement, would let them leave the field walking tall, to join political life.

But when Santos decided, to widespread surprise, to embark on peace negotiations with the insurgents, it was not only because the FARC were weakened militarily. It was also because the landowning oligarchy opposed to land reform (Colombia is practically the only country in Latin America that, because of the landowners’ blinkered attitude, has not redistributed land) were no longer the dominant power.

In the last few decades, a new urban oligarchy has become established, with far more power than the rural elites.

During the worst years of the war, the large cities were cut off from the countryside. It was impossible to travel overland from one place to another, and the portion of Colombia that was usable was limited to a sort of archipelago of cities. To these large cities came the millions of people fleeing the conflict, and dynamic, growing local economies were developed, based on industry, services, finance, import-export and other sectors.

Today, this is the economy that predominates in the country, and is to a certain extent represented by Santos, just as Uribe represents the large landowners who are opposed to the peace process.

The urban oligarchy wants peace for economic reasons. First, the cost of peace – probably a modest land reform – will be borne by the big landowners. The urban elites are not interested in the soil, but in the subsoil: pacification would allow exploitation of Colombia’s immense mineral resources, for which China is an insatiable market.

The urban business community also perceives that, if peace is achieved, the present excessive military expenditure could be devoted to reducing inequality, which continues to be enormous in the country. The entrepreneurs know that Colombia is heading towards a population of 50 million, a significant critical mass in terms of consumption, if average purchasing power rises.

They are aware of the redistribution policies taking place in several Latin American countries (Venezuela, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina and others) that have reactivated domestic production and promoted the growth of local businesses.

Meanwhile, Latin America is experiencing a high point in terms of integration, with the recent creation of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), in which Colombia plays an important role.

Given these dynamics, the war is an anachronism, as Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has often claimed. The FARC know that this is the case. The time has come for both sides to lay down their arms.

Current events in Latin America show that, in spite of the hurdles, gaining power by peaceful, political means is possible for a progressive organisation. This has been proved in Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Uruguay and Brazil, among other countries.

Many perils must still be faced. Opponents of peace (Pentagon hawks, ultra-rightwing members of the military, landowners and paramilitaries) will try to sabotage the process. But everything seems to indicate, while negotiations continue in Havana, that the end of the conflict is approaching. At last.(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Ignacio Ramonet is the editor of Le Monde Diplomatique in Spanish.

For anyone who might not have realised it yet, the current crisis is demonstrating beyond a shadow of a doubt that the financial markets are the lead players in the current economic situation in Europe. Power has passed from the politicians to speculators and crooked bankers. This is a fundamental change.

Ignacio Ramonet

Every single day a staggering quantity of money floods through the markets – for example, seven billion euros worth of eurozone governments’ debt alone, according to the European Central Bank. The daily collective decisions of these markets can now topple governments, dictate policies, and subjugate entire populations.

Moreover, these new “lords of the earth” have no concern whatsoever for the common good. Solidarity is not their problem, much less the preservation of the welfare state. Greed is the only motive for their actions. Speculators and bankers, driven by a hunger for profits, behave with total impunity, diving like birds of prey on target after target.

Since the crisis broke in 2008 no serious reform has been imposed to either regulate the markets or rein in the bankers. It is apparent that banks play a clear role in the economic system and that their traditional activities ­ encouraging savings, providing families with credit, financing businesses, spurring commerce ­ are constructive.

However, since the dawn in the 1980s of the “universal bank”, which added speculation and investment to the above mix of functions, risks to customers’ savings shot up dramatically along with deceit, scandals, and fraud.

One of the most shameless acts was carried out by Goldman Sachs, which now dominates the financial universe. In 2001 it helped Greece to cook its books so that Athens would meet the conditions to join the euro.

In under seven years, this scam was discovered and the reality exploded like a bomb. The consequence: a debt crisis engulfed almost an entire continent; Greece was sacked and forced onto its knees; recession struck, with massive unemployment and plummeting buying power of workers; restructuring and drastic cuts in social services followed, with widespread misery and the imposition of structural adjustment programmes.

How were the perpetrators of this devastating swindle punished? Mario Draghi, the ex-vice president of Goldman Sachs for Europe who was aware of most of the fraud, was named president of the European Central Bank. Meanwhile, for its crooked window-dressing for Greece, Goldman charged 600 million euros. The story has a clear moral: when it comes to major rip-offs by the banks, impunity is the rule.

For confirmation look no further than the thousands of Spanish depositors who bought stocks in Bankia the day it was listed on the stock market. It was known that the bank had no credibility and that according to the ratings agencies its stock was just a step above junk.

But the depositors trusted Rodrigo Rato, then president of Bankia and ex-managing director of the International Monetary Fund, who proclaimed on May 2, 2012 (five days before resigning in response to market pressure and just before the Spanish government had to inject 23.5 billion euros to keep it out of bankruptcy): “In terms of both liquidity and solvency, we are in a very robust position.”

It is known that a year earlier, in July 2011, Bankia apparently passed the “stress test” imposed by the European Banking Authority (EBA) on the 91 largest financial businesses in Europe. This should give an idea of the incompetence and ineptitude of the EBA, the European agency charged with guaranteeing the health of our banks.

But that wasn’t the end of the scandals. Indeed, new bank frauds have come to light in recent months. HSBC was accused of money laundering for Mexican narco-traffickers. J.P. Morgan engaged in massive speculation and unprecedented risk-taking that led to losses of 7.5 billion euros and ruined dozens of clients. The same happened at Knight Capital, which lost over 323 million euros in a single night because of a mistake by its automatic trading programme.

But the scandal that is most infuriating on a global scale is the Libor. The Association of British Bankers issues each day what is called the “London Interbank Offered Rate”, an average calculated by Reuters financial news agency of the interest rates obtained by the 16 largest banks for borrowing.

As the rate at which the major banks lend money to each other, Libor constitutes a fundamental benchmark for the entire world financial system. In particular, it is used to calculate mortgage rates for homeowners. Worldwide, Libor influences some 350 trillion euros in credit and any variation in it can have a colossal effect.

How did this scam work? Some of the 91 Libor banks colluded in lying about the rates they were obtaining, thus manipulating not only Libor but all derivative contracts and the credit rates for businesses and families alike. This went on for years.

Investigations have shown that about ten major international banks ­ Barclays, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Credit Suisse, UBS, Societe Generale, Credit Agricole and the Royal Bank of Scotland ­ participated in the racket.

What we see from the Libor disaster is that criminal behaviour has infected the very heart of the financial industry, and that probably millions of families were issued mortgages at incorrect rates. Many had to leave their homes. Others were evicted because they couldn’t pay artificially-manipulated interest rates. And once again the authorities charged with overseeing the operation of the markets turned a blind eye to this crime. No one has been punished beyond four schemers.

How long can democracies continue to allow such impunity? In 1932 in the United States, Ferdinand Pecora, son of Italian immigrants who became a prosecutor in New York, was named by president Herbert Hoover to investigate the responsibility of the banks for the crash of 1929. His report was overwhelming. It was he who coined the term “banksters” (out of “bankers'” and “gangsters”).

On the basis of this report, president Franklin D. Roosevelt acted to protect the American people from the risks of speculation. He passed the “Glass-Stegall Act” which (until it was repealed in 1999) required the separation of commercial banking from investment banking. What government of the eurozone would dare pass similar legislation today? (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

* Ignacio Ramonet is editor of Le Monde diplomatique en español.

As if the summer holiday were a veil of forgetfulness, the media have tried to distract us the brutality of the crisis with massive doses of collective stupefaction: the European Football Championship, the Olympics, the summer adventures of celebrities, etc. Do they want us to forget that a new wave of cuts is on the way and that the second bailout of Spain will be even more painful? But they haven’t succeeded. This fall will be a hot one.

In a public conversation I had last August in Benicassim, Spain, with philosopher Zygmunt Bauman, we agreed on the necessity of breaking with the reigning pessimism of our society, which is disappointed by traditional politics. We must stop being isolated individuals and become agents of change, interconnected social activists.

“We have a duty to take control of our own lives,” Bauman argued. “We are living in a period of profound uncertainty in which citizens do not really know who is in charge, and because of this we have lost confidence in our politicians and traditional institutions. This creates a condition of constant fear and insecurity in the people.

“The politicians encourage this fear as a way of controlling them, abridging their rights, and limiting their individual liberties. This is a very dangerous time because all of this affects our daily lives: we are told repeatedly that we must hold onto our jobs despite the harsh work conditions and precariousness because in this way we will earn enough money to spend…Fear is a very powerful form of social control.”

If the people do not know who is in control, it is because power and politics have broken away from one another. Until not long ago, it was hard to tell them apart. In a democracy, the candidate who won the presidency through elections was the only figure who could legitimately perform that function. Today in neoliberal Europe this is no longer the case. Winning at the polls does not guarantee a president real power because two unelected supreme powers (in addition to Berlin and Angela Merkel) trump the presidential mandate and control the president’s actions: the technocrats of the European Union (EU) and the financial markets.

The latter entities impose their own agendas. The Eurocrats demand blind obedience to treaties and EU mechanisms that are quintessentially neoliberal, while the markets then punish any deviation from the ultraliberal orthodoxy. Thus imprisoned between these twin embankments, the river of politics flows in a single direction with no manoeuvring room whatsoever – or, to put it another way, without power.

“The traditional political institutions are less and less credible,” said Bauman, “because they do nothing to help solve the problems the people find themselves suddenly trapped by. Democracy (what the people voted for) has suffered a collapse as the dictates imposed by the markets are shredding people’s fundamental social rights.”

We are witnessing an epic battle between the Market and the State in which the market, with its totalitarian ambitions, wants to control everything: the economy, politics, culture, society, and individuals. And now, allied with the media, which serve as its ideological apparatus, the market wants to dismantle the edifice of social advances and what we call the “Welfare State”.

What is at stake is fundamental: equality of opportunity. Consider, for example, the effects of the fact that education is quietly being privatised, transferred to the private sector. Funding cuts will give rise to a level of public education in which working conditions are onerous for both teachers and students. Public schools will have a harder time preparing children from humble backgrounds, though for the children in economically comfortable families, private education will play an increasingly significant role and become the midwife of a new privileged class and a stepping stone for national leadership positions. Those in the bottom tier, in contrast, will have access only to grunt jobs as opposed to leadership roles. This is intolerable.

In this regard, the crisis will probably serve as a shock in the sense used by sociologist Naomi Klein in her book ‘The Shock Doctrine’: the economic disaster will be exploited as an opportunity to impose the neoliberal agenda. Mechanisms have been created to monitor and control national democracies so that (as we now see in Spain and have seen in Ireland, Portugal, and Greece) savage structural adjustment programmes can be imposed and overseen by a new authority: the “troika” comprised of the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission, and the European Central Bank, all non-democratic institutions whose members are not elected and do not represent the citizens.

These institutions – with the backing of the media, which obey the economic, financial, and industrial lobbies – are charged with creating the systems of control to reduce democracy to mere theatre – with the complicity of the major governing parties.

What is the difference between the budget slashing of current Spanish president Mariano Rajoy and that of his predecessor Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero? Very little. Both caved in to financial speculators and blindly did the bidding of the Eurocrats. Both liquidated national sovereignty. And neither did anything to rein in the irrational behaviour of the markets. Both had the same response to the dictates of Berlin and the attacks of speculators: like some cruel ancient ritual, the only solution was to sacrifice the population as if the torments inflicted on society might mitigate the greed of the markets.

In conditions like these, do the people have any chance of rebuilding politics and reviving democracy? Yes. Social protests continue to spread. And movements for social justice continue to proliferate. For now Spanish society still believes that this crisis is just an accident and that things will soon return to the way they were. This is an error, a mirage. When the people realise that this is not the case and that the adjustments imposed are not “crisis measures” but structural changes intended to be permanent, social protests will probably reach a critical level.

But what will the protesters demand? Our friend Bauman is clear about that: “We must build a new political system that allows for the emergence of a new model of life and a new and true democracy of the people.” What are we waiting for? (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

* Ignacio Ramonet is editor of Le Monde Diplomatique en Espanol.

Sadism? Yes, sadism. What other word is there for this complacency at the infliction of pain and humiliation on so many people?

We have seen, in these recent years of crisis, how the merciless imposition of a ceremony of punishment by Germany (freezing pensions, raising the retirement age, cutting public spending and services of the welfare state, shrinking funds for combating poverty and social exclusion, labour reform, etc.) ­in Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and other countries of the European Union (EU)­ has provoked a dizzying spike in unemployment and evictions. Mendacity is proliferating, as the suicide rate climbs higher and higher.

Despite the fact that people’s suffering has reached intolerable levels, German chancellor Angela Merkel and her followers (which include Spanish president Mariano Rajoy) continue to assert that suffering is good and that this should be seen not as a period of torture but an occasion for celebration. According to them, every new day of punishment purifies and regenerates us as we draw closer to the hour of the final torment. This philosophy of torture was derived not from the writings of the Marquis de Sade but rather the theories of economist Joseph Schumpeter, one of the fathers of neoliberalism who believed that all suffering of the people contributes in some way to the fulfillment of a necessary economic objective and that it would therefore be a mistake to mitigate it even slightly.

In Spain, where the Rajoy government is imposing savage austerity programmes that come extremely close to constituting “sadism” [i], expressions of social discontent are multiplying. At the same time various essential pillars of the state are collapsing: the Crown (with the grim story of the king elephant hunting in Botswana), the judiciary (with the scandal involving judge Divar), the Church (which pays no real estate taxes), the banking system (which we were assured was the “most solid” in Europe and which we now see in free fall), the Bank of Spain (incapable of foreseeing the collapse of Bankia and other spectacular bankruptcies), the Autonomous Communities (a number of which are mired in abysmal corruption scandals), and the major media (far too dependent on advertising, they obscured the disasters gathering on the horizon).

All of this gives the lamentable impression of a country that is on the verge of shipwreck, whose citizens are discovering rapidly that behind the facade of Spain’s much-proclaimed “economic success” lay a model ­ the “real estate bubble” ­ that was eaten through with incompetence and greed.

To a certain degree we now understand ­and at a high cost to ourselves­ one of the great enigmas of Spanish history: how was it possible that despite the mountains of gold and silver stripped from the Americas by the colonial Empire, the country found itself transformed in the 17th century into a sort of court of miracles filled with beggars, wanderers, and freeloaders? What became of its astounding wealth? We now have the answer right before our eyes: the incompetence and myopia of government leaders and the infinite greed of the bankers.

The current phase of punishment is not over yet. After Moody’s lowered Spain’s credit rating last June by three notches, from A3 to Baa3 (one notch above “junk bonds”), the country’s risk premium became unbearable. Spanish solvency headed inexorably towards a bailout. And whether it is a bank bailout or a bailout of public debt, the social costs will be horrific. In its annual report on Spain, the International Monetary Fund is already demanding that the government raise its Value Added Tax (VAT) and approve as quickly as possible a new cut in salaries of government workers to reduce the deficit.

Similarly the European Commission is recommending pushing the VAT higher and adopting new austerity measures: raising the retirement age, checking spending by the Communities, tightening unemployment benefits, eliminating housing subsidies, and shrinking the public administration ­ all before 2013. Given that it is impossible to devalue the euro, the entire country will have to be devalued, reducing its living standard by between 20-25 percent.

Though Angela Merkel promised at the European Summit (Jun. 28-29) to allow the European Stability Mechanism (MEDE) to lend directly to banks, she is still demanding that Spain continue its profound economic and fiscal reforms. Despite Rajoy’s almost canine loyalty to her, Merkel fiercely opposes any move of the Spanish government that would allow the country to step off the path of austerity and structural reform.

Berlin wants to take advantage of the “shock” created by the crisis and Germany’s dominant position to achieve an old objective: the political integration of Europe along lines dictated by Germany. “Our task today,” Merkal stated before the German parliament, ” is to compensate for what was not done (when the euro was created) and put an end to the vicious circle of eternal debt and non-compliance with rules.” Certain pundits are already speaking about a fourth Reich.

If the EU makes the “federal leap” and moves towards a political union, each member state of the EU will have to renounce considerable parts of its national sovereignty. Afterwards, a central federal body would be able to intervene directly in the budgets and taxes of every state in order to force compliance with the accords. How many countries would be willing to abandon this much of their national sovereignty? While giving up elements of sovereignty is inevitable in a project of political integration like the EU, there is a major difference between federalism and neocolonialism [ii].

In countries that have been subjected to bailouts ­Spain, among others­ this loss of sovereignty is already tangible [v]. Contradicting Rajoy, German finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble asserted that the troika (the ECB, European Commission, and IMF) would oversee the restructuring of the Bank of Spain [iii]. The troika will govern its fiscal and macroeconomic policy in order to insure the continued imposition of reforms and cuts and to make it a priority that Spanish banks make their payments to the European (though mostly German) Central Bank [iv]. It is undeniable that since last June, Spain has had less freedom, less sovereignty over its financial system, and less fiscal sovereignty.

And all of this without any guarantee that the crisis will end.

But if these sadistic “austerity to the death” policies don’t work, why prolong them? Because capitalism is on the march again and has launched an offensive with a clear goal: to eradicate the social programmes of the welfare state that have been implemented since the end of World War II and for which Europe today is the final sanctuary.

But this offensive had better proceed with caution, because the “masses” are grumbling and upset. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

* Ignacio Ramonet is editor of Le Monde Diplomatique en Espanol.

[i] See Conn Hallinan, “Spanish Austerity Savage to the Point of Sadism”, Foreign Policy in Focus, Washington, June 15, 2012.

[ii] One proof of the mentality of the neocolonisers is the grotesque EuroVegas project that the autonomous communities of Madrid and Catalonia are competing for. It is based on urbanistic and financial speculation and linked with the rise in money laundering, prostitution, gambling, and mafias. See the platform at http://aturemeurovegas.wordpress.com/http://aturemeurovegas.wordpress.com

[iii] El Pais, June 14, 2012.

[iv] Vicent Navarro, Juan Torres, “El rescate traera mas recortes y no sirve para salir de la crisis”, Rebelion, June 15, 2012.

The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development will be held in Rio de Janiero, Brazil, from Jun. 20- 22, twenty years after the first great Earth Summit in 1992. Dubbed Rio+20, the conference will draw more than 80 heads of state. Discussion will focus on two main themes: the “green economy” in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication, and the institutional context of sustainable development. The People’s Summit will be held parallel to the conference, bringing together social and ecological movements from around the world.

Environmental issues and the challenges of climate change remain the most urgent part of the international agenda[i], though in Europe they are being overshadowed by the gravity of the economic and financial crisis.

The eurozone is experiencing one of the most trying periods in its history as a result of the obvious failure of the “extreme austerity” policy. The recession has struck numerous economies, creating high unemployment and sharp financial tensions. Spain in particular is in its worst condition since 2008 – worse even than when Lehman Brothers collapsed.

Given these major concerns, European citizens are following the European electoral agenda with rapt attention: legislative elections in France on Jun. 10-17 and fresh Greek elections on Jun. 17. The Brussels summit on Jun. 28-29 will finally determine whether the EU will follow the German path of austerity to the bitter end, or whether it will adopt the French path of growth and recovery. It is a fundamental dilemma.

However, this situation must not make us forget that on a planetary scale there are other equally urgent issues. The most important of these is the climate crisis, which will be a central theme in Rio de Janeiro. We must remember that in 2010 climate change was the cause of 90 percent of a series of natural disasters that took the lives of some 300,000 people and caused economic damage estimated at more than 100 billion euros.

There is another contradiction: in Europe, citizens are demanding, and with reason, more growth to lift them out of the crisis. However, in Rio, ecologists warn that growth, if it is not sustainable, will increase environmental devastation and the danger that the planet’s limited resources will be exhausted.

World leaders, together with thousands of representatives of governments, private enterprise, non-governmental organisations, social movements, and other civil society groups, are coming together in Rio to work out a precise global agenda to guarantee environmental sustainability, reduce poverty, and promote social equality. The central debate will be between the concept of a “green economy” pushed by the champions of neoliberalism, and a “solidarity economy” advanced by movements that believe that unless we overcome the current model of “predatory development”, based on the accumulation of private wealth, there can be no environmental preservation.

The “green economy” is the central proposal of the rich countries coming to Rio. This should be recognised as a trap, an attempt to “greenwash” what in the majority of cases is simply business as usual. The rich countries want the United Nations to grant them a mandate at Rio+20 to define for the entire world the standards and yardsticks for determining the economical value of the various functions of nature and on this basis create a world market for environmental services.

This “green economy” would result in the commodification not only of the material components of nature but even natural processes and functions. The central objective of this “green economy” is to create for private investment a market for water, for the environment, the oceans, biodiversity, and other elements of nature. In assigning a price to each element of the environment, their goal is to guarantee profits for private investors. In this way the “green economy”, rather than create real products, will organise a new virtual market for bonds and financial instruments to be bought through banks. The same financial system that is responsible for the 2008 financial crisis and received billions of euros from governments, would thus be granted the use of nature at its whim to continue speculating and raking in massive profits.

In opposition to this effort, and parallel to the conference, is the Peoples’ Summit organised by civil society to generate alternatives in defense of the “common goods of humanity”. Produced by nature or human groups at the local, national, or global level, these goods must be owned collectively by humanity as a whole. Among these are air and the atmosphere, water, aquifers –rivers, oceans, lakes– communal and ancestral lands, language, countryside, memory, knowledge, the Internet, open source products, genetic information, etc. Fresh water is now being recognised as a common good par excellence, and fights against privatisation in a number of countries have been successful.

Another idea supported by the People’s Summit is a gradual transition from an anthropocentric civilisation to one that is biocentric and places life at its centre, which implies recognition of the rights of nature and a redefinition of living well and prosperity that does not depend on infinite economic growth. Food sovereignty would be another element of this form of civilisation. Every community must be able to control the foods it produces and consumes, bringing producers and consumers closer together, defending peasant agriculture and prohibiting financial speculation on food.

Finally the People’s Conference calls for a vast programme of “responsible consumption” which includes a new ethic of caring and sharing; a critique of the system of planned obsolescence of products; a preference for goods produced by a social and solidary economy based on work and not on capital; and a rejection of the consumption of products of slave labour[ii].

Rio+20 thus offers a chance for social movements on an international scale to reaffirm their struggle for environmental justice as opposed to the speculative model of development. It rejects the effort to “greenify” capitalism. The groups present at the conference reject the idea that the “green economy” constitutes a solution to the environmental and food crisis. To the contrary, it is a false solution that aggravates the problem of the commodification of life. In short, it is nothing but window dressing, which –along with the current system– the people are growing increasingly fed up with. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

* Ignacio Ramonet is editor of Le Monde diplomatique en espanol.

[i] See Ignacio Ramonet, “Urgencias climaticas”, Le Monde diplomatique en espanol, January 2012.

[ii] http://rio20.net/en-camino-a-rio

“The greatest strength of tyrants is the inaction of the people.”
Machiavelli

After so many budget cuts, belt-tightening, and structural adjustment programmes, a feeling of asphyxiation is gripping large numbers of citizens in many countries of the European Union (EU). This feeling is sharpened by the recognition that the alternation of elected political figures does nothing to change leaders’ appetite for austerity.

In Spain for example, the candidate of the conservative Popular Party, Mariano Rajoy, promised a society battered by brutal social adjustment programmes imposed since May 2010 by socialist president Jose Rodriguez Zapatero, “change” [i] and “a return of happiness” during the campaign for general elections last November 20. He won with an absolute majority. However, as soon as he took office he began the most aggressive programme of social cuts in recent Spanish history.

It was the same in countries like Greece, for example, or Portugal, where in June 2011 socialist Jose Socrates lost the election after imposing four unpopular programmes of “fiscal discipline” and accepting an equally loathed rescue plan of the Troika [ii]. The victor, current conservative president Pedro Passos Coelho, who was previously very critical of the socialists’ cuts, wasted no time in arguing once in office that in order to meet the needs of the EU, his goal was “to administer another dose of austerity [iii].”

What then is the use of elections when, in terms of social and economic policy, the new administration does essentially the same as its predecessor ­sometimes even with greater zeal? To ask this question can only raise doubts about democracy. In the EU citizens have lost control over a wide range of matters that affect their lives. In reality the primary exigencies of the markets are gravely impinging on the operation of democracy. Many leaders on both the right and the left are convinced that the markets are always right and that the problem is democracy itself, and public debate. They prefer competent investors to “uninformed voters”.

The people, on the other hand, have the feeling that in Europe today there is a single hidden agenda which has two concrete objectives: reducing state sovereignty as much as possible and completely dismantling the welfare state. Anyone who doubts this need only read the recent statements of Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank (ECB): “The European social model is dead, and whoever takes a step backwards in making budget cuts will trigger the immediate punishment of the markets… As for the European Fiscal Pact [iv], it is in reality a major political advance because thanks to this treaty states lose a part of their national sovereignty [v].”

What could be clearer?

In reality, we are living through a sort of enlightened despotism in which democracy is defined less by voting or the possibility of choosing than by respect for rules and treaties (Maastricht, Lisbon, the Fiscal Pact) adopted in the past; it is also defined by a process of ratification in a climate of general indifference, which imposes a juridical straightjacket from which it is impossible to break free.

Which brings us to the question being asked by so many defrauded citizens: “What is voting good for if we are condemned to elect governments whose only function consists of enforcing rules and treaties that are already decided one and for all [vi]?”

The European Fiscal Pact is a case of “pretend democracy”. Why is there no public debate on this pact now in the process of being adopted, even though it will affect the lives of millions of citizens? Like the European Stability Mechanism on which it depends, this pact constitutes a brutal attack on the rights of citizens. It permanently requires signatory states to reduce social spending, salaries, and pensions, to give priority to EU authority in budget matters of member states, and limit the competence of national parliaments, reducing their sovereignty and converting certain countries into mere European protectorates [vii].

Is there a way out of this situation? The recent presidential elections in France provide an interesting perspective, not so much because millions of desperate and exhausted voters opted for an extremist
anti-Europe, xenophobic right but because the social democratic candidate himself, Francois Hollande, promised to change things in this context.

President Hollande is demanding, in particular, the addition to the Fiscal Pact of a stimulus, solidarity, and growth package. He is also demanding that the ECB lower its interest rates and lend directly to states (and not to private banks) in order to immediately open up a path to recovery.

Although the changes he is demanding are minimal and clearly insufficient, president Hollande is taking a stand against German chancellor

Angela Merkel and the Bundesbank, who are in reality dictating the economic and financial policy of the EU. However, Hollande has stated that if Germany does not approve of these changes, France will not ratify the Fiscal Pact.

What will happen if Hollande sticks to his idea of freeing Europe from the oppression of austerity and recession and pushes structural reforms and stimulates growth? There are two possible outcomes.

In the first scenario, the markets will immediately attack France, as Draghi warned, and force it against the ropes; Hollande will lose his nerve and backtrack, caving in to financial speculation like his social democratic friends Zapatero, Socrates, and Papandreou and ending up the most unpopular leader of the left in French history.

The other possibility is this: knowing that the EU can do nothing without France, the second largest economy of the union (and fifth in the world), Hollande could stick to his position and radicalise it, tap into the mobilisation of populist forces in Europe (starting with the Left Front of Jean-Luc Melenchon) and win the support of the many European governments that share his call for stimulus and growth policies. This would force a change in the ECB-Bundesbank line. Ultimately Hollands would prove that in a democracy, when the popular mandate coincides with a firm political will, there is no objective that cannot be achieved. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

* Ignacio Ramonet is editor of Le Monde diplomatique en espanol.

[i] “Be part of the change” was his campaign slogan, copied from that of right-wing Chilean president Sebastian Pinera in his victorious 2010 campaign.

[ii] Comprised of the European Central Bank, the European Commission, and the International Monetary Fund.

[iii] Jornal de Noticias, Lisbon, 29 February 2012. The austerity policies of Passos Coelho are driving Portugal into a social catastrophe like that in Greece: 15 percent of the active population is unemployed (35 percent of youth); 25 percent of Portuguese live beneath the poverty line, while this year the recession is calculated to be 3.3 percent. In the last six months there have been two general strikes, on November 24, 2011, and March 22, 2012.

[iv] Pushed by Germany, the Fiscal Pact, or Treaty for Stability, Coordination, and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union, was signed March 2, 2012, in Brussels by all EU member states except
Britain and the Czech Republic. It requires each signatory country to include in its constitution a structural deficit cap of 0.5 percent and provides for automatic sanctions for countries whose debt exceeds 3
percent of GDP. It is expected to enter into force January 1, 2013.

[v] The Wall Street Journal, New York, February 23, 2012.

[vi] See: Christophe Deloire, Christophe Dubois, Circus politicus, Albin Michel, Paris, 2012.

[vii] See: Ignacio Ramonet, “Nuevos protectorados”, Le Monde diplomatique en espanol, March 2012.

In France, presidential elections are “the mother of all elections” and the fiery core of political debate. They are held every five years, in two rounds. In principle any French citizen can run in the first round, which will take place on April 22. If no candidate wins an absolute majority (over 50 percent of votes), a runoff election will be held two weeks later.

Since the foundation of the Fifth Republic in 1958, there has always been a runoff election between the two candidates with the largest number of votes in the first round. Thus we will almost certainly have to wait until May 6 to know the result.

For the moment, there is no clear winner, although polls show that the runoff will be between conservative incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy and socialist leader François Hollande. But the campaign is not over yet and one-third of all voters have still not made up their minds which candidate they will vote for.

The political debate is dominated by two major features: the current economic and social crisis, which is the most serious in recent decades[1]; and a growing distrust of the operation of representative democracy.

Sarkozy officially declared he was running for re-election on February 15, after which the giant machinery of his party, the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), lurched into action. But it will not be an easy battle. All polls show Sarkozy losing in the runoff to Hollande.

Sarkozy has become very unpopular. Abroad, many fail to grasp this because they are familiar only with his image as an energetic international leader who, with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, led European Summits and the G-20. Moreover, in 2011, he evolved into a military leader and won two wars, one in Ivory Coast and the other in Libya. And then there is the “glamour” factor that has made him a permanent darling of the gossip magazines: his marriage to ex-model and celebrity Carla Bruni, with whom he had a child.

But it is important to bear in mind, first of all, a near-universal political principle: you don’t win elections because of foreign policy successes.

In addition, there is what appears to be a new political law that has emerged in Europe in the recent years of financial crisis: no government has been re-elected.

Second, there is the rest of Sarkozy’s record, which is execrable. In addition to the numerous scandals he was embroiled in, Sarkozy has been “the president of the rich”, to whom he has given unprecedented tax breaks while sacrificing the middle class and dismantling the welfare state. This approach has generated criticism from all French citizens who, bit by bit, found themselves besieged by difficulties: unemployment, cuts in the number of government employees, the increase of the retirement age, and the rising cost of living. The president simply broke his promises and the delusion of the citizens grew and grew.

Thus far not a single poll shows Sarkozy winning, though the president is a tenacious fighter willing to do whatever it takes to win, at times behaving like an unscrupulous thug or true mercenary. Since he began the campaign, with monumental shamelessness, he ­ the president of the rich ­ has had the nerve to present himself as the “candidate of the people”, wielding near-xenophobic arguments to pander to the far right. And not without effect: he immediately crept up in the polls, surpassing the socialist candidate.

For the moment Hollande is ahead in the polls, all of which show him sweeping the election on May 6. Little known abroad, Hollande is considered by his supporters to be a bureaucrat, having spent more than eleven years (1997-2008) as First Secretary of the Socialist Party[2]. Unlike his ex-partner Segolene Royal, he was never a minister.

Hollande is a centrist social-liberal known for his ability as a negotiator and for his difficulty in making decisions. His economic programme is hard to distinguish from that of the conservatives. After having stated in a campaign speech that the world of finance was “the main enemy”, he was pressured to go to London to calm the waters and remind the markets that no one had privatised and liberalised more than French socialists. As for the euro, sovereign debt, or budget deficits, Hollande ­ who now says he wants to renegotiate the Fiscal Pact[3] ­ is in line with other social-democratic leaders like Yorgos Papandreou of Greece, Jose Socrates of Portugal, and Jose Luis Zapatero of Spain, who, after disavowing their principles and accepting the humiliation by Brussels, were voted out of office.

The political flabbiness of Hollande is all the more striking when compared with the candidate of the Left Front, Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Showing 14 percent in the polls, he is the big discovery of this election. His rallies draw the largest crowds while his speeches, true models of educating the people, are the most rousing of all the candidates. On March 18, on the anniversary of the revolution of the Paris Commune, he managed to mobilise about 120,000 people in the Place de la Bastille, something not seen in the last 50 years. All of this should spark a move to the left by Hollande and the socialists, though their current platforms are abysmal.

The platform of Mélenchon, summed up in a book called “Humans First”, which sold hundreds of thousands of copies, proposes among other measures: the sharing of wealth and the abolition of social insecurity; crushing the power of the banks and the financial markets; ecological planning; the convening of a constituent assembly for a new republic; withdrawal from the Lisbon Treaty and the building of another Europe; and the initiation of a process of deglobalisation.

The enthusiasm for Mélenchon is providing new hope for the working class, veteran militants, and the multitudes of young indignados.

While the far right is wilting and the attempt to revive it with Marine Le Pen is failing, these elections could show that in a Europe disoriented and in crisis, there is still the hope to build a better world. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

*Ignacio Ramonet is editor of Le Monde diplomatique en espanol.

[1] Unemployment: 9.8 percent. Unemployment of people under 25: 24 percent. Total number of unemployed: 4.5 million.
[2] In the polls, two-thirds of voters say they would vote for Hollande “to reject Sarkozy”; only one-third support Hollande’s ideas.
[3] See, Ignacio Ramonet, “Una izquierda descarriada”, Le Monde diplomatique en espanol, June 2011.

Will 2012 be the year the world ends? That is the prediction of a Mayan legend that gives 12/12/12 (December12, 2012) as the date of the apocalypse. In any case, in the context of recession in Europe and its grave financial and social problems, there will be no shortage of risks this year, which will also feature decisive elections in the US, Russia, France, Mexico, and Venezuela.

The main geopolitical threat remains the situation in the Persian Gulf. Will Israel and the US launch the announced attack on Iran’s nuclear installations? Teheran is asserting its right to produce its own civilian nuclear energy. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has repeatedly and adamantly stated that the goal of Iranian research is not military but simply to provide a source of electricity. He also points out that Iran signed and ratified the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), whereas Israel never did.

For their part, the Israeli authorities think they should wait no longer. They believe that the moment the mullahs have the nuclear bomb is fast approaching and that from that point on, it will be too late to do anything: the balance of power in the Middle East will be irreversibly broken and Israel will no longer have uncontestable military supremacy in the region. The government of Benjamin Netanyahu argues that in this situation, the very existence of the Jewish state will be in jeopardy.

According to Israeli strategists, the time to strike is now because Iran is weakened both economically -by the sanctions imposed by the US Security Council (and justified by alarming reports of the International Atomic Energy Agency)- and geopolitically, because its main ally, Syria, shaken by violent domestic unrest, would be unable to provide it with assistance. Damascus’ weakness would effect another Iranian ally, Lebanese Hezbollah, which can no longer depend on supplies from Iran.

For these reasons, Israel wants to attack as soon as possible. In preparation for the bombing, it already has special forces in place in Iran, and it is very possible that they were responsible for the killing of five important Iranian scientists over the last two years.

Although Washington continues to argue that Teheran is still operating a clandestine nuclear programme to produce an atomic bomb, its verdict on attacking the country is different. The US is wrapping up two decades of war in the region, and the outcome is hardly positive. The Iraq War was a disaster and left the country in the hands of the Shi’ite majority sympathetic to Iran. As for the Afghan quagmire, the US forces have demonstrated that they are incapable of defeating the Taliban, with whom American diplomats have resigned themselves to negotiating before they abandon the country to its fate.

These costly conflicts have debilitated the US and revealed to the world the limits of its power and its imminent decline. Now is not the time for new adventures, especially in an election year when President Obama cannot be sure of victory and when the country must focus all of its resources on fighting the economic crisis and reducing unemployment.

Moreover, Washington is trying to improve its image in the Arab-Islamic world, especially in the wake of the uprisings of the “Arab Spring”. Once the accomplice of dictators -in particular Ben Ali of Tunisia and Egypt’s Mubarak- the US now wants to appear as a sponsor of the new Arab democracies. Military aggression against Iran, particularly in collaboration with Israel, would spoil these efforts and set off the anti-Americanism that is latent in many countries -especially those with new governments led by Islamic moderates and brought to power by popular uprisings.

While it would be impossible to rule out the possibility that Iran’s ballistic missiles might reach Israel or US military bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, or Oman, an attack on Iran would also have non-military consequences, economic in particular. The minimum response that could be expected from Iran after an attack on its nuclear sites is a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, through which a third of the world’s oil (17 million barrels) passes each day. This is what Iranian military personnel continue to predict. Such a disruption in the global oil supply would cause oil prices to spike and so choke off a revival of the world economy and recovery from the recession.

The Iranian head of state argues that “nothing is simpler than closing the strait” and he has ramped up naval exercises in the area to demonstrate that he has the capacity to carry out this threat. Washington has responded that blocking the strait would be seen as a casus belli and has reinforced its Fifth Fleet, which patrols the Gulf.

It is very unlikely that Iran will actually take the initiative to block the strait -though it might do so in retaliation for an attack. To begin with, it would be shooting itself in the foot as the oil it exports passes through the strait as well and provides the country with a large proportion of its revenue. Moreover, such a move would hurt Iran’s principle allies, who are backing it in its face-off against the United States -especially China, which imports 15 percent of its oil from Iran. Interruption of supplies would be a significant blow to Chinese industrial production.

Tensions have built to an alarming level. Foreign ministries around the world are watching a dangerous escalation that builds minute by minute and could set off a major regional conflict. This could involve not only Israel, the US, and Iran but also the other regional powers: Turkey, which has serious ambitions in the area; Saudi Arabia, which has dreamed for decades of destroying its major Shi’ite rival; and Iraq, which could break into two parts, one Shi’ite and pro-Iranian and one pro-western and Sunni.

In addition, the bombardment of Iran’s nuclear sites would create a vast and poisonous radioactive cloud that would threaten the health of all populations in the area, including thousands of US military personnel and the inhabitants of Israel. All of the above leads to the conclusion that with the hawks ratcheting up their cry for war, the need for diplomacy is all the more urgent. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Ignacio Ramonet is editor of “Le Monde diplomatique en espanol”.

The grave financial crisis and the economic horrors besieging European societies are causing people to forget that climate change and the destruction of biodiversity remain the greatest threats to humanity, as they were reminded only last December at the climate summit in Durban, South Africa. If we do not radically change the dominant modes of production imposed by economic globalisation, we will soon reach the point of no return, after which human life on the planet will become gradually unviable.

Just a few weeks ago the United Nations announced the birth of the 7 billionth human being. In barely fifty years, the number of inhabitants on the earth increased by a factor of 3.5, and the majority of them live in cities. For the first time ever, urban dwellers outnumber the rural population. Meanwhile, the planet’s resources are not increasing and a new geopolitical concern arises: what will happen when the shortage of certain natural resources grows worse?

We are discovering to our astonishment that our “vast world” is no more. In the course of the last decade, thanks to the population growth of certain emerging countries, the number of people who have risen from poverty passed 150 million. Isn’t this a fact to be celebrated? Yes, but it also brings with it serious responsibilities for all of us, because with the dominant consumerist model of life, the emergence of large numbers of people from poverty is incompatible with the survival of humanity on earth.

Our planet simply does not have enough energy resources for the entire global population to use without restriction. For the world’s 7 billion to consume energy at the rate of the average European, we would need the resources of two earths, while three would be needed to extend the American consumption level worldwide.

Since the beginning of the 20th century, for example, the world’s population has quadrupled. In the same period of time global carbon consumption has risen by a factor of six. Since 1950, global metal consumption has jumped sevenfold, and plastics by a factor of 18. For a while now the UN has warned us that we are using over 30 percent more resources than the planet can replace. The lesson is simple: we have to come up with ways of living that are much more frugal and less wasteful.

While this would seem to be a common sense conclusion, it is clear it does not apply to the more than one billion people who live in a state of chronic hunger, nor to the 3 billion poor. An explosion of misery is a major threat to the world. This is not an abstract assertion. For example, in the time it takes to read this article -about ten minutes- ten women will die in childbirth, 210 children under five will die of easily curable diseases, eleven because they drank unclean water.

These people are not dying because they are sick; they are dying because they are poor. Meanwhile rich country aid to developing countries in the last fifteen years had dropped by a quarter at the same time that 500 billion euros are spent each year on weapons. If in coming decades food production expanded by 70 percent to fill the legitimate needs of the growing population, the ecological impact on the planet would be devastating.

Moreover, this increase in production would not even be sustainable because of the resulting degradation of the soil, increased desertification, greater scarcity of fresh water, and increased destruction of biodiversity, not to mention the greenhouse gasses that would be released as a result.

A mere 13 percent of the energy consumed today is renewable and clean (hydro, wind, solar, etc). The rest is nuclear or from fossil fuels, the worst for the environment. In this context, it is very worrying that the largest emerging countries are adopting the worst and most destructive modes of development used by the industrial world, leading to a grave erosion of biodiversity.

We are experiencing a massive extinction of animal and vegetable species. Each year between 17-100,000 living species disappear. A recent study showed that 30 percent of the marine species are on the verge of extinction because of overfishing and climate change. Similarly one out of eight plant species is threatened with extinction. One fifth of all species on earth could be extinct by the year 2050. And the loss of each species has a domino effect on the chain of life that it is a part of, which changes the course of natural history.

Defending biodiversity is thus a defense of solidarity among all living beings. The human being and his predatory model of production are the primary causes of the destruction of biodiversity. In the last three decades the excesses of neoliberal globalisation have accelerated this process and led to the emergence of a world dominated by economic terror in which the financial markets and giant private corporations have reestablished the law of the jungle, survival of the fittest.

Globalisation also encourages the pillaging of the planet. Many giant companies use massively destructive means to extract natural resources, making enormous profits while polluting with complete impunity the water, air, forests, rivers, soil, and oceans which are the commons of all humanity.

How can this sacking of the earth be stopped? There are solutions:

-replacing the current model of production with a “solidarity economy” that would create social cohesion by distributing benefits not just to a few but to all people. This would be an economic system that would produce wealth without destroying the planet, exploiting workers, discriminating against women, or ignoring social laws;

-restraining globalisation by restoring regulation of damaging and perverse modes of free market activity. There should be an effort to reestablish a form of selective ecological and social protectionism to spur movement towards deglobalisation;

-put the brakes on the fever of financial speculation that is forcing unacceptable sacrifices on entire societies, as we see in Europe where the markets have seized control. A tax on financial transactions is more urgently needed than ever;

-if we want to save the planet, avoid climate change, and defend humanity, it is urgent that we move away from the logic of permanent growth, which in unviable, and adopt a path of reasonable reduction.

These four measures could restore a semblance of hope on the distant horizon as societies start to restore faith in progress. The question is: who would have the political will to impose them? (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Ignacio Ramonet is editor of “Le Monde diplomatique en español”.

It is clear that the European Union cannot summon the political will to stand up to the markets and resolve the crisis. Until now the lamentable behaviour of European leaders has been blamed on their staggering incompetence. However, this (correct) assessment doesn’t go far enough, particularly after the recent ”financial coups d’etat” that in Greece and Italy have dynamited a certain conception of democracy. What has been happening is less a matter of mediocrity and incompetence than active complicity with the markets.

By Ignacio Ramonet and - -
PARIS, Oct 18 2011 (IPS)

Ten years from the attacks of September 11 and three years from the collapse of Lehman Brothers, what are the features of the new “global system”?

The current mode is shocks -climatic, financial, stock market, energy, food, communications, technological, social, and geopolitical (like those underlying the “Arab spring”).

There is a lack of general visibility. Unforseen events erupt with terrific force without anyone, or almost anyone, suspecting they might occur. If governing is seeing ahead, we live in an apparent crisis of governance. The current leaders fail for foresee anything. Politics proves impotent. The state as protector of the people no longer exists. There is a crisis of representative democracy: at uprisings around the world the people are repeating the same charge, “They don’t represent us.” Moreover there is a lack of political leadership at the global level. The current leaders are not up to the challenges.

The rich countries (the US, Europe, and Japan) are undergoing the largest economic-financial crisis since 1929. For the first time the European Union sees its cohesion and even its very existence threatened. The risk of a major economic recession is eroding the international leadership of the US.

In a recent speech the US president announced that he considered “the wars of September 11th” over -meaning the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and against “international terrorism” that have characterised the past decade. If these can be considered victories, they are pyrrhic at best: to a certain degree Al Qaeda has done to Washington what Reagan did to Moscow in the 1980s when it pushed the USSR into an arms race that bled the Soviet Union dry and led to its implosion. The “strategic downgrading” of the US has begun.

The last decade has confirmed the emergence of new poles of power, especially in Asia and Latin America. The world is growing de-westernised and increasingly multipolar. China is growing in importance and has emerged in the beginning of the 21st century as the apparent great power. The stability of the Middle Kingdom is not guaranteed because it embodies both the most savage form of capitalism and the most authoritarian form of communism, for the moment. But while the power of the US declines, that of China is growing.

The social repercussions of the economic cataclysm are of an unprecedented brutality: in the European Union, there are more than 23 million unemployed and 80 million poor. The young are the primary victims. This is why from Madrid to Tel Aviv, from Santiago de Chile, to Athens to London, a wave of outrage is sweeping the youth of world. But the middle classes are also frightened because the neoliberal model of growth is leaving them behind.

The financial powers have taken control of political power and this has rattled the people. No one can understand the inertia of the governments in the face of this economic crisis. The people are demanding that politicians step in and do what they are supposed to do: right the wrongs. But it won’t be easy because economics moves at the speed of light while politics creeps along at a snail’s pace.

In reality we are suffering not through a crisis but rather an accumulation of crises so closely interwoven that it is impossible to make out cause and effect. The effects of some are the cause of others and together constitute a real system. In other words, we are facing a systemic crisis of the western world that is affecting technology. economics, trade, politics, democracy, war, geopolitics, the climate, the environment, culture, values, family, education, youth, and more.

We are living through a period of strategic ruptures the importance of which we cannot yet grasp. Today the Internet is the vector of the majority of the changes. Almost all of the recent crises have some relation to the new communications and information technologies. The financial markets, for example. would not be so powerful if the buy and sell orders did not circulate at the speed of light via the Internet. More than a technology, the Internet is an actor in the crisis. It is enough to consider the role of Wikileaks, Facebook, and Twitter in the recent democratic revolutions in the Arab world.

From an anthropological point of view, these crises are producing a rise in fear and bitterness. Massive panic is unleashed by vague threats, like the loss of employment, technological and biotech shocks, natural disasters, and general insecurity. All of these are a threat to democracy because the fear transforms into hatred and rejection. In many European countries, this hatred is directed against foreigners, immigrants, and those who are different. The rejection of all “others” (Muslims, gypsies, subSaharans, “illegal” immigrants, etc) is on the rise as xenophobic parties grow stronger..

Another grave problem for the planet: the climate crisis. The danger that global warming represents has extended its reach. Problems related to the environment are becoming extremely strategic. The next World Climate Summit in Rio de Janiero 2012 will present the fact that the number of natural disasters has risen significantly as has its spectacular nature.

The course of globalisation seems to have stalled. People talk more and more about deglobalisation and negative growth. The pendulum has swung too far in the direction of neoliberalism and now can swing back the other way. It is already not taboo to talk of protectionism to limit the excesses of the free market and to end outsourcing and the deindustrialisation of the developed countries. The hour has come to reinvent politics and reengage the world. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Ignacio Ramonet is editor of “Le Monde diplomatique en espanol”.

Excerpt:

By Ignacio Ramonet and - -
PARIS, Sep 28 2011 (IPS)

“The world will be saved, if it can be, by the unsubmissive.” Andre Gide

First it was the Arabs, then the Greeks, then the Spanish and Portuguese, and after them the Chileans and the Israelis. Last month, full of sound and fury, the English followed. The sequence recalled the explosion that shook the planet decades ago from California to Tokyo, running through Paris, Berlin, Madrid, and Prague, in 1967-68, transforming western societies. In an era of prosperity, youth stood up and demanded their own space.

But today is different. The world has gotten worse. Hope has vanished. For the first time in almost a century, the new generations in Europe will be worse off that their parents. The process of neoliberal globalisation is brutalising entire populations, humiliating citizens, destroying the future of the young. And the financial crisis together with the solutions implemented to end it -austerity forced on the middle class and the least well off- is making the problem worse. Democratic states are reneging on their own values. In circumstances like these, submission and compliance are absurd. What is natural, rather, are indignation and protests, and these will multiply. Meanwhile the level of violence is rising.

But the nature of the uprisings is not the same in Tel Aviv and Santiago de Chile and London. In England, for, example, the level of violence was higher than elsewhere (though there were certainly intense confrontations in Athens, Santiago de Chile, and other capitals).

There was another essential difference: the English protesters were incapable of verbalising their discontent or channelling their rage in a political direction or even denouncing specific outrages. In their rampaging through their cities, there was not even a systematic assault on the banks. They gave the lamentable impression that they were roused to anger only by the upscale merchandise in shop windows. At bottom, though, as with the other outraged people of the world, the English expressed their desperation at being forgotten by a system that is unable to offer them either a place in society or a future.

One particularly irritating feature of neoliberalism in Chile and Israel is the privatisation of public services, which amounts to an overt plundering of the patrimony of the poor. The poorest of society could at least count on public schools, public transportation, and public hospitals, free or very inexpensive because of government subsidies. When these are privatised, not only does this take a benefit away from society, which paid for it with its taxes; it confiscates the only patrimony of the poor. This is a double injustice and one of the roots of the current uprisings.

One witness explained the rage of the protesters of Tottenham in this way: “The system continues to favour the rich and crush the poor. It cuts the budget for public services. People are dying in waiting rooms of hospitals after waiting hours and hours for a doctor…[i]”

In Chile, for almost three months tens of thousands of students, backed by a significant part of society, are calling for the deprivatisation of education, which was privatised under the neoliberal dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990). They are demanding that the right to a free, quality public education be written into the constitution, arguing that at present “education is not a tool for social mobility but the opposite, a system that reproduces social inequalities. [ii]” The result is that without a change, the poor will stay poor for eternity.

In Tel Aviv last August 6, shouting “The people want social justice”, some 300,000 people rallied in support of the movement of “indignant youth” demanding a change in the public policies of the neoliberal administration of Benjamin Netanyahu [iii].” “When working people do not even make enough to be able to feed themselves, the system doesn’t work,” one student declared. “It is not a problem with certain individuals, it is a problem with the government. [iv]”

Since the 1980s and the economic approach of Ronald Reagan, governments in these countries, and especially the European countries weakened by the debt crisis, have behaved the same way: drastic cuts in public spending, especially on social programmes. One of the results was the dramatic jump in youth unemployment, which stands at 21 percent in the European Union and a staggering 42.8 percent in Spain. It amounts to the suicide of a society.

Rather than taking any action to address the situation and terrified by recent drops on the stock exchanges, governments are bending over backwards to coddle the markets when what they should do is disarm them [v] and make them submit to strict regulation. How long can we continue to allow financial speculation to set the terms for political representation? What is democracy for, after all? What is the use of voting when the markets dictate what the government should do?

Ironically realistic alternatives are to be found in the very centre of the capitalist model, backed by internationally- recognised economic experts. Two examples: first, the European Central Bank (ECB) should be transformed into a true central bank that can lend money (under specific conditions) to states in the Eurozone in order to finance their spending. At present the ECB is barred from doing so, which forces countries to turn to the markets which charge astronomical interest rates. This is the way the debt crisis began.

A second solution: to stop promising and finally move to impose a tax on financial transactions. A modest tax (0.1 percent) on all stock and currency trades would bring the EU between 30 and 50 billion euros per year, which would be more than enough to finance public services, restore the welfare state, and offer a bright future for the new generations.

In other words, there are viable solutions to the current problem. The question is, where is the political will to act? (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Ignacio Ramonet, editor of Le Monde diplomatique en espanol.

[i] Liberation, Paris, 15 August 2011.

[ii] Le Monde, Paris, 12 August 2011.

[iii] According to an opinion poll, the demands of the “indignant” Israelis are approved of by 88 percent of the citizens. (Lib?ration, op. cit.)

[iv] Le Monde, Paris, 16 August 2011.

[v] See Ignacio Ramonet, “Desarmar a los mercados (Disarm the Markets)”, Le Monde diplomatique en espanol, December 1997.GENERATION WITHOUT A FUTURE

Excerpt:

Two centuries after the abolition of slavery we are seeing the reintroduction of an abominable practice: human trafficking. The International Labour Organisation (ILO) estimates that 12.3 million people each year are taken captive by networks tied to international crime and used as forced labour in inhuman conditions.

By Ignacio Ramonet and - -
PARIS, Jun 13 2011 (IPS)

One of the most powerful men in the world, director of the largest financial institution of the planet, sexually assaults one of the world’s most vulnerable people, a humble African immigrant. In its raw concision, this image sums up with the expressive force of an editorial cartoon one of the central characteristics of our age: the violence of inequality.

What makes the case of Dominique Strauss-Kahn -ex-managing director of the International Monetary Fund and leader of the right wing of the French Socialist Party- more pathetic is that, if the charges against him prove true, his downfall will also be a metaphor for the current moral unravelling of social democracy. With the aggravating factor that it also reveals, in France, the dangers of complicit media.

The entire situation infuriates many leftist voters in Europe, who are increasingly disposed to three forms of rejection, as we saw in the May 22 municipal and regional elections: radical abstentionism, voting for the extreme right, and animated street protests.

Naturally the ex-head of the IMF and ex-candidate for the French Socialist Party in the 2012 presidential elections, charged with sexual assault and attempted rape of a cleaning woman at a New York hotel on May 14, enjoys the presumption of innocence until his trial is concluded. But what was most shameful was the attitude displayed in France by socialist leaders and many “leftist” intellectuals who are friends of the accused and rushed to make pronouncements and unconditional defences of Strauss-Kahn, portraying him as the real victim, with allusions to “plots” and “machinations”. There was not a word of solidarity or compassion for the alleged victim. Some, like ex-culture minister Jack Lang, in a gesture of machismo, actually discounted the gravity of the situation, because “after all, no one died.[1]” Others, forgetting even the meaning of the word “justice”, went so far as to demand certain privileges and favourable treatment for their powerful friend because, they argued, he wasn’t just “another common criminal [ii]”.

Such brazenness has given the impression that the French political elites simply close rank around any of its members, whatever the accusation, in a move that seems more appropriate for mafia complicity [iii].

In retrospect, now that earlier accusations of sexual assault by Strauss-Kahn are surfacing [iv], many people are asking why the media hid this side of his character [v]. Why did journalists, who did not ignore the charges of other victims of harassment, never launch an investigation into these allegations? Why did the media keep the electorate in the dark and present the IMF chief as “the great hope of the left” when it was clear that his Achilles’ heel could short circuit his ascension at any moment?

For years, in his effort to win the presidency, Strauss-Khan has hired brigades of spin doctors, one of whose missions was to prevent the press from publicising his luxurious life style. The goal was to prevent any inopportune contrast between the way he lives and the lives of the millions of humble citizens thrown into social hell partly because of policies imposed by the institution he headed.

Now the masks are coming off. The cynicism and hypocrisy are appearing in all their crudity. And though the private conduct of one man should not impugn his entire political clan, clearly it has raised serious questions about social democracy. Add to this the innumerable cases of economic corruption that mark the movement, and even its political degeneration, as shown in the ouster of dictators Ben Ali of Tunisia and Mubarak of Egypt, both members of the Socialist International.

The massive conversion to free market economics and neoliberal globalisation, the renunciation of any defence of the welfare state and the public sector, the new alliance with financial capital and banking have all stripped social democracy of the primary features of its identity. Every day people find it harder to tell the difference between “leftist” and “rightist” policies since both do the bidding of the financial bosses of the world. Perhaps it was a brilliant move on the part of the latter to place a “socialist” at the head of the IMF to impose draconian neoliberal structural adjustment programmes on his “socialist” friends in Greece, Portugal, and Spain [vi].

Thus the explosion of popular disgust and outrage, and the rejection of the false choice between the two main platforms, which were in fact merely twins. Then came the “days of rage” in the public squares, and the awakening of society. This spelled the end of inaction and indifference, and a central demand: “The people want an end to the system.” (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Ignacio Ramonet is editor of “Le Monde diplomatique en espanol”.

[i] From the news show on French state TV station France 2, 17 May 2011.

[ii] Bernard-Henri Levy, “Defense de Dominique Strauss-Kahn” ( www.bernard-henri-levy.com/defense-de-dominique-strauss-kahn-1890 9.html ), and Robert Badinter, ex-socialist justice minister, statements to France Inter public radio, May 17, 2011.

[iii] This collective demonstrated is tremendous effectiveness in media control when it managed to mobilise in 2009 French public opinion and government figures to support the cause of Polish- French director Roman Polanski, accused in the US of drugging and sodomising a 13-year-old girl in 1977.

[iv] Especially that formulated by writer and journalist Tristane Banon. See: “Tristane Banon, DSK et AgoraVox : retour sur une omerta mediatique” , AgoraVox, May 18, 2011.(www.agoravox.fr/actualites/medias/article/tristane-banon-dsk-et-agoravox-94196 )

[v] In the IMF itself, Strauss-Kahn had already been involved in 2008 in a scandal caused by his affair with a subordinate, Hungarian economist Piroska Nagy.

[vi] “His “socialist” credentials allowed him to administer bitter pills to many governments on the right and left and explain to the millions of the victims on international finance that all they had to do was tighten their belts and wait for better times.” Pierre Charasse, “No habra revolucion en el FMI (There Will Be No Revolution in the IMF)”, La Jornada, Mexico, 22 May 2011.

Excerpt:

By Ignacio Ramonet and - -
PARIS, May 11 2011 (IPS)

Fukushima marks the end of the era of atomic energy illusions and the beginning of the post-nuclear age. Now classified at level 7 on the international scale of nuclear accidents (INES), the Japanese disaster is comparable to the Chernobyl meltdown in Ukraine 1986 in terms of its “considerable radioactive effects on the human health and on the environment”.

The magnitude 9 earthquake and the giant tsunami that blasted the northeast of Japan on March 11 with unprecedented brutality not only caused the Fukushima disaster but also destroyed all of certainties of proponents of the civil nuclear programmes.

Before Fukushima the nuclear industry found itself in a curiously idyllic period, with the construction of tens of nuclear plants planned in a range of countries.

There were two reasons for this: first, the fear that oil reserves will be exhausted by the end of this century and the exponential growth of demand for energy in the giant emerging countries (China, India, and Brazil) made nuclear power appear like the ultimate substitute energy source.

Second, the soul-searching provoked by climate change caused by global warming led many, paradoxically, to opt for nuclear energy as a “clean” -non-CO2-producing- alternative .

These two arguments were accompanied by other familiar ones: the desire for energy sovereignty and less dependence on imported hydrocarbons; the low cost of nuclear energy; and, though it may seem paradoxical at this period, safety, given that the world’s 441 nuclear plants (half of them in western Europe) have experienced only three major accidents in 50 years.

All of these arguments, none patently absurd, were shattered by the scope of the Fukushima catastrophe. The new panic now spreading around the world is based on certain observations.

In the first place, and in contrast to the disaster at Chernobyl -which was blamed partly, for ideological reasons, on the backwards state of Soviet technology- this catastrophe took place in the world’s hypertechnological centre, where one would suppose that Japan’s authorities and technicians would take every conceivable precaution to avoid a civil nuclear disaster, especially considering that it was the only country to experience an atomic attack and the hell it caused, in 1945.

If the world’s most competent scientific culture was unable to avoid this, does it make sense to allow others to continue playing with atomic fire?

In second place, the temporal and spacial consequences of the Fukushima disaster are terrifying. Because of elevated levels of radioactivity, the area around the plant will be uninhabitable for millennia, and the area around that for centuries. Millions of people will have no choice but to move their home and their work, whether industry, fishing or farming, to less contaminated areas.

Beyond the most contaminated areas, the radioactivity released will effect the health of tens of million of Japanese, as well as large numbers of their Korean, Russian, and Chinese neighbours, and perhaps other inhabitants of the northern hemisphere. There could be no clearer demonstration of the fact that a nuclear accident is never local, but always planetary.

Third, Fukushima has shown that so-called “energy sovereignty” is very relative matter. The production of nuclear energy presupposes a new form of reliance: “technological dependence”. Despite its immense technological advancement, Japan had to draw on the assistance of experts from the US, Russia, and France, as well as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to try and control the situation. Moreover, the planet’s supply of the uranium that powers nuclear plants is very limited and, at the present rate of use, will be exhausted in 80 years -in other words, at about the same time oil gives out.

For these and other reasons, defenders of the nuclear option must admit that Fukushima has radically changed the energy equation. There are now four demands: to stop building new nuclear plants; dismantle those more than thirty years old; greatly increase energy conservation; and shift usage to renewable sources as much as possible. Only in this way can the planet, and humanity, be saved. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Ignacio Ramonet is editor of “Le Monde diplomatique en espanol”.

Excerpt:

By Ignacio Ramonet and - -
Apr 2 2011 (IPS)

The Libyan rebels deserve the help of all democrats. Colonel Gaddafi is indefensible. The international coalition that is attacking him lacks credibility. A democracy is not built with foreign bombs. The contradictions implicit in these four statements give rise to a certain uneasiness about Operation Odyssey Dawn, especially to people on the left, writes Ignacio Ramonet, director of Le Monde diplomatique en espanol

In this analysis, Ramonet writes that a number of observations are in order:

While the recently-liberated peoples of Tunisia and Egypt should have immediately provided support to the besieged Libyans, their governments simply were in no condition to do so. UN Resolution 1973 has the support of the Arab League as well as certain African countries and was proposed by an Arab state: Lebanon. Neither China nor Russia vetoed it. No state, Brazil and India included, voted against it.

One can object to the current structure of the UN or argue that it is dominated by western powers. However, presently the UN is the only source of international law, and unlike the wars of Kosovo and Iraq, which never won UN support, the intervention in Libya is internationally legal and legitimate according to principles of humanitarian solidarity. Muslim countries that were initially resistant, like Turkey, ended up participating. Had Gaddafi made good on his intention to drown the popular uprising in blood, this would have given the green light to the other tyrants in the region to do the same.

The European Union has a particular responsibility in this context, and not only military. It is time to think about the next step in the consolidation of the new democracies across the Mediterranean, and the possibility of programme of massive economic assistance like the “Marshall Plan” after World War Two.

The Arab peoples are no doubt weighing rights and wrongs in the current intervention. The majority of them support the insurgents and thus far there have been no protests against the operation in Arab capitals. Rather, as if stimulated by it, new protests have sprung up in Morocco, Yemen, Bahrain, and in especially in Syria.

Excerpt:

By Ignacio Ramonet and - -
PARIS, Feb 8 2011 (IPS)

He is 93 years old. His name is Stephane Hessel, and the story of his life reads like a fantastical novel. In a way it was even before his birth. Some of you may remember Francois Truffaut’s film “Jules et Jim”. The non-conformist woman played by Jeanne Moreau and one of her two lovers [1], Jules, a German Jewish translator of Proust, were his parents. In the artistic environment of Paris of the 20s and 30s, Stephane Hessel grew up surrounded by the friends that filled his house, including philosopher Walter Benjamin, Dadaist Marcel Duchamp, and sculptor Alexander Calder.

At the outbreak of World War Two, he joined the resistance and became a part of General de Gaulle’s team in London. De Gaulle assigned him a dangerous mission in French territory, where he was captured by the Nazis, tortured, and sent to Buchenwald concentration camp, from which he repeatedly tried to escape. On the verge of being executed, he managed to assume the identity of a dead man and finally succeeded in fleeing. He joined the fight for the liberation of France, inspired by the principles of the National Council for Resistance, which promised a social democracy, the nationalisation of the energy sector, insurance companies, and banks, and the creation of a social security system.

After the victory, de Gaulle sent him -then just 28 years old- to the United Nations in New York, which was putting the finishing touches on its theoretical foundations. In 1948 Hessel participated in the process of drafting and polishing one of the most supremely significant documents of the last 60 years: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. He subsequently returned to Paris where he became a part of the socialist cabinet of Pierre Mendes-France, who began the decolonisation process, ended the war in Indochina, and prepared to grant independence to Tunisia and Morocco.

In recent years, this noble and staunch defender of just causes, a diplomat by profession, has called on all immigrants to protest tirelessly against the treatment of foreigners without papers, gypsies, and all immigrants.

Hessel is in the news again today because he has just published a book, or, more correctly, a 30-page pamphlet that has become a runaway publishing success and social phenomenon in the France of the common people who have risen up against social repression. Thanks to word of mouth and especially to the new social networks, Hessel’s text, overlooked in the beginning by the major media, managed to get past the censors and spark hope in thousands of hearts. In just a few weeks this compendium of the most outrageous cases of injustice has sold (it costs 3 euros) more than 650,000 copies -an unprecedented phenomenon. The title: Get Outraged! [ii]

Balzac said that the pamphlet “is sarcasm converted into a cannon ball”. Stephane Hessel adds that indignation is the charge behind every social explosion. Addressing his readers, he exhorts them to “find a reason to be indignant. This is a priceless act, because when something makes us indignant, we become activists, we feel committed, and our force becomes irresistible.”

There is no shortage of reasons for indignation, Hessel writes: “In this world there are things that are absolutely intolerable.” For a start, there is the nature of the economic system that caused the current devastating crisis. “The international dictatorship of the international markets” constitutes “a threat to peace and democracy”, according to Hessel. Never was the power of money so great, so insolent, and so egotistical, and never have the loyal servants of Lord Money been seated so high up in the most powerful reaches of government.

In second place, Hessel denounces the growing inequality between those who have almost nothing and those who have everything: “The gap between the poorest and the richest has never been so great; and the hunger for money and the zeal to flatten your neighbour have never been so encouraged.” He presents two simple suggestions: “That the general interest be imposed on individual interests; and that a fair sharing of the wealth created by workers should be given priority over the egotism of the power of money.”

In terms of foreign policy, Hessel affirms that his main area of outrage is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He recommends that people read the September 2009 Richard Goldstone report on Gaza [iii] in which this South African judge, a Jew who even describes himself as a Zionist, makes an accusation against the Israeli army. He describes his recent visit to Gaza, “an open-air prison for a million and a half Palestinians”. It was an experience that startled him and roused him to revolt. Though that is not why he renounced non-violence. He argues that “terrorism is unacceptable” not only for ethical reasons but also because it is “an expression of desperation” and is not effective at advancing its cause because “it does not make it possible to obtain the results which hope could eventually guarantee”.

Hessel invokes the memory of Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King who have showed us “the path that we should follow” because, to move forward, there is only one stance: “We must demand our rights, the violation of which, by anyone, should provoke our indignation. We will never compromise on our rights.”

Finally, Hessel states his support for a “peaceful insurrection”, particularly against the mass media owned by major financial interests which “do nothing but induce in people mass consumption, scorn for the poor and even for culture, widespread amnesia, and an all-against-all fight to the end”.

Stephane Hessel was able to put into words that which so many of the people battered by the crisis and regressive social measures are feeling: a sense that their rights are being taken away, a powerful urge to shout themselves hoarse, and the desire to protest without knowing exactly how.

Everyone is awaiting the second instalment. Its title, of course, can only be, “Rise up!” (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Ignacio Ramonet is editor of “Le Monde diplomatique en espanol”.

[i] The other was Pierre-Henri Roche, author of the novel of the same name, which Truffaut adapted for film.

[ii] Stephane Hessel, Indignez-vous!, Indigne Editions, Montpellier, 2010.

[iii] NDLR: “Human Rights In Palestine And Other Occupied Arab Territories. Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict”, United Nations, New York, 15 September 2009.

Excerpt:

By Ignacio Ramonet and - -
PARIS, Jan 3 2011 (IPS)

On November 28, a referendum in Switzerland was approved by 53 percent of voters authorising the expulsion of all foreigners convicted of serious crimes (homicide, burglary, procuring, drug trafficking, armed robbery) after serving their sentences. The measure was organised by the country’s main party, the Democratic Union of the Centre (also known as the Swiss People’s Party), which in 2009 succeeded in banning by referendum the building of minarets in mosques. Elsewhere in Europe there has been a rise in xenophobia as the economic crisis has grown more intense.

This new victory of the far right in Switzerland creates the risk that other similar parties in the rest of Europe will harden their opposition to foreigners, Muslims especially. This will have consequences for the European Union (EU), which Switzerland did not join, though it did sign a 2002 agreement guaranteeing the free passage of EU citizens to and from the country. What will European governments do when Bern expels their citizens, thus subjecting them to double jeopardy?

At bottom, the Swiss referendum is a reflection of a growing concern with immigration, which is blamed for all problems. It is clear that each country has the right to define what it allows or forbids in its public space. The guest country is certainly under no obligation to change its laws to accommodate recent arrivals; rather it is the latter that must adapt to the former. Yet on the basis of the two changes brought, which have widespread support, the new right wing parties are building an Islamophobic platform, extending their circle of influence, and generating acceptance of all of their extremist positions.

It is true that in the name of “modernisation”, abstract and imperious, European societies have been subjected for about twenty years to a series of upsets and traumas of considerable violence. The logic of competition, the expansion of the EU, the creation of the euro, the elimination of borders, the massive influx of immigrants, multiculturalism and the dismantling of the welfare state have all provoked among many Europeans a loss of elements of their identity. Moreover, this has all taken place in the context of a financial, economic, and social crisis that has had massive and unacceptable social repercussions (25 million laid off workers, and 85 million poor in the heart of the EU) that have brought about an increase of violence at every level.

In this context, a new wave of demagogues has surfaced blaming foreigners, Muslims, Jews, and blacks for all recent disorder and forms of insecurity. The immigrants are the easiest scapegoats, symbolising social disturbance and representing to the less well-off Europeans unwanted competition on the labour market.

The far right has always tried to address crises by blaming a single cause: foreigners. It is deplorable that this approach is now being helped along by the contortions of the democratic parties, which have been reduced to asking themselves how much xenophobia is acceptable in their own discourse.

In France, the National Front (FN) of Jean-Marie Le Pen has long proposed the cult of blood and earth, ie, restoration of the nation (in the ethnic sense of the term), establishment of an authoritarian regime to battle insecurity, a return to economic protectionism, to the idea that a woman’s place is in the home, the and the expulsion of three million foreigners, which would -it is claimed- instantly open up that many jobs for “pure blooded” French workers. However malevolent, this idea has long seduced “more than one in four French people”.

President Nicholas Sarkozy, in turn, in order to win over voters, launched in the summer of 2010 a campaign against the Romanian gypsies present in France. Although EU law bars the expulsion of EU citizens, the French government had no qualms about expelling 8601 gypsies between October 1-17, 2010 -7447 “voluntarily” and 1154 by force.

Italy’s Silvo Berlusconi is following suit. Gypsy camps are frequently vacated. In Milan, for example, the Roma population has been reduced from 10,000 to 1200. Other EU countries do the same, only more discreetly. In Denmark, the mayor of Copenhagen, Frank Jensen, a social democrat, bemoaned the number of gypsies “dedicated to stealing”. The result: the government threw out ten gypsies at the beginning of September after expelling twenty in early July.

These xenophobic acts have been roundly denounced by the international organisations. The European Tribunal for Human Rights holds the treatment of gypsies by two EU members -Greece and the Czech Republic- amounts to a violation of human rights. The United Nations Committee charged with implementation of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD) pointed out the existence of similar expulsions in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Greece, Lithuania, and Rumania.

In 2010, throughout the EU there has been a noticeable increase in extremist “decidedly anti-democratic and racist” positions and the acceptance of social Darwinism. At present, the “anti-democratic potential” of a society can be measured by its degree of Islamophobia.

According to a study by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation issued on October 13, 2010, the current economic crisis is “driving the European political climate to the right” and placing extremist positions at the centre of electoral debate. Xenophobia can now show it face without worry. There is every reason to fear that “just as happened with the Tea Party in the US”, the political spectrum in Europe will shift towards the far right, which will place democracy itself in jeopardy. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Ignacio Ramonet is director of “Le Monde diplomatique en español”.

[i] Le Monde, Paris, 27 November, 2010.

Excerpt:

By Ignacio Ramonet and - -
PARIS, Dec 23 2010 (IPS)

November 20 was the hundredth anniversary of the Mexican Revolution, the first major social revolution of the 20th century: a heroic deed carried out by two legendary popular figures, Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa, whose victory was a victory for workers and peasant farmers: rights, agrarian reform, free, non-religious public education, and social security.

One hundred years later, paradoxically, the situation of Mexico “is analogous in many respects to that at the and of 1910: an obscene concentration of wealth accompanied by widespread social backwardness; distortion of the popular will; infringement of workers rights; the negation of basic guarantees by the authorities; ceding of sovereignty to international capital, and a oligarchic, patrimonialist, technocratic political class out of touch with the people.[i]”

Add to this depressing catalogue of problems a war -or, to be more precise, three wars: one waged among the drug traffickers for the control of territory; one of the Zeta groups (criminal groups comprised of ex-military and ex-police) that rob and kidnap the civil population; and one of the military and special forces against their own citizens.

Starting December 1, 2006, under pressure from Washington, recently elected Mexican president Felipe Calderon launched his “offensive against drug trafficking”. The wave of violence that followed left about 30,000 dead in Mexico.

Mexico increasingly resembles a “failed state”, caught in a deadly trap, beset by every type of armed thug: paramilitary and parapolice; bands of “legal” and “liberated” assassins; US agents from the CIA and DEA; and finally the Zetas, who target particularly Central and South American migrants on their way to the United States. They are without a doubt responsible for the atrocious murder of 72 migrants discovered last August 24 in the state of Tamaulipas.

Every year some 500,000 Latin Americans cross through Mexico on their way north. During the passage they undergo a wide range of abuses, from arbitrary arrest, robbery, and plundering to rape. Eight of ten Mexican women experience sexual abuse; many are impressed as servants to criminal gangs or forced into prostitution. Hundreds of children are put to work. Thousands of migrants are kidnapped. The Zetas make the families of their victims (whether in the US or their country of origin) pay ransom.

“For organised crime it is easier to kidnap 50 or so unknown people for a few days and receive payments of between 300-1500 dollars than kidnap an important businessman. [ii]” If the kidnapped person has no way to pay the ransom, he is killed. Each Zeta cell has its own “butcher” to decapitate and dismember the victims, and burn the remains in a steel barrel. [iii] In the last decade some 60,000 undocumented people whose families were unable to pay their ransom were “disappeared”.

Such barbaric violence concentrated in certain cities, like Ciudad Juarez [iv], and in certain states, has spread to the rest of the country (except, it is important to point out, the capital, Mexico City). Washington has designated Mexico a “dangerous country” and ordered its consulate workers in various cities to send their children back to the US.

President Calderon regularly announces successes in the war on drug trafficking and the arrest of important narco leaders. He is content to have mobilised the army. The majority of Mexicans do not agree, because the military, who have no experience in this sort of intervention, increase the “collateral damage”, killing hundreds of civilians by mistake.

By mistake? Abel Barrera Hernandez, who just won the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Prize, awarded in the United States, doesn’t believe it. To the contrary he believes that the drug war is being used to criminalise civil protest: “The victims of this war are the most vulnerable: the indigenous, women, youth. The army is used to intimidate, demobilise, sow terror, mute social protest and fragment and criminalise those who fight. [v]”

The Obama administration believes that the bloodbath Mexico has become is a threat to the security of the US. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated, “The threat of drug trafficking is changing form and in certain cases associating itself with the insurgency.” She added that Mexico today resembles Colombia of the 1980s.”

In reality, the US bears a major share of the responsibility for this war. It is the main opponent of the legalisation of drugs. It is the supplier of (up to 90 percent of [vi]) the weapons used in the violence, whether by the cartels or the Zetas or the army or the police. Moreover, the US is the main drug power: it is a major producer of marijuana and the largest producer of chemical drugs like amphetamines, ecstasy, etc.

The US is, above all, the largest drug market in the world, with 7 million cocaine addicts. And the mafias that operate in its territory make the largest profits off of the sale of drugs: 90 percent, or 45 billion dollars per year. In contrast, the total made by all of the Latin American cartels come to a mere 10 percent.

Yet again, rather than give its neighbours (bad) advice, which has precipitated Mexico into a hellish war, Washington should clean its own house. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Ignacio Ramonet is editor of “Le Monde diplomatique en espanol”.

[i] La Jornada, Mexico, 20 November 2010.

[ii] See the exceptional book by Oscar Martinez, “The Migrants that Don’t Count. On the Road with Undocumented Central Americans in Mexico”, Iracia, Barcelona, 2010.

[iii] Proceso, Mexico, 29 August 2010.

[iv] See the blog of Judith Torrea Ciudad Juarez, in the shadow of drug trafficking

[v] La Jornada, op. cit.

[vi] El Norte, Monterrey, 9 September 2010.

Excerpt:

By Ignacio Ramonet and - -
PARIS, Oct 6 2010 (IPS)

The days of social peace are over. The general strike held on September 29 protesting the labour reforms decided by the government of Prime Minister Zapatero marks the opening of what promises to be a period of social turbulence.

The government has decided to present to congress before the end of the year with a new bill that would raise the legal retirement age from 65 to 67 and extend the computation period from 15 to 20 years of work. Together with the labour reforms and last May’s decree lowering the salaries of civil servants, freezing pensions, and cutting spending on public works, this bill has aroused the anger of labour unions and a significant proportion of salary workers.

Zapatero presented his decisions as irrevocable: “The day after the general strike,” he stated in Tokyo on September 1, “we will move ahead with the same approach.” This incited the unions to plan new protests.

In his intransigence, the Spanish leader is following the lead of other European governments. In France, despite three recent massive protests against pension reform, President Sarkozy repeated that he would not change the law. In Greece, six general strikes in as many months against the austerity measures had no effect on Prime Minister Yorgos Papandreu.

Grounding themselves in the principle that in a democracy policy is decided in parliament and not in the street, these leaders have brushed aside the discontent of wide swaths of society that were obliged to participate in the strikes or street protests -expressions of social democracy- to make known their specific grievances. [i]

But the reaction of these leaders is a mistake. They are assuming that electoral legitimacy trumps other forms of legitimacy and in particular social democracy [ii]. In any case, their inflexible attitude may serve only to fan the discontent and encourage the people to reject a subsequent phase of social dialogue and resort to a frontal conflict.

Since last May and the announcement of a brutal adjustment plan, the disgust of a large sector of Spanish society has not stopped growing [iii]. The nearly 5 million unemployed, precariously employed, jobless youth, women salary workers, low level civil servants, and all of their families are united in the conviction that the government has sacrificed them.

At the same time, through the bank rescue fund, the government transferred to banking and savings institutions (responsible for the real estate bubble) almost 90 billion euros. It is not considering significantly raising taxes on the top income bracket, imposing a tax on the largest fortunes, or cutting defence spending (now 8 billion euros a year), funding to the Catholic church (6 billion euros) or even to the royal family (almost 9 million euros).

What many citizens find distasteful is the certainty that the government adopted these repressive measures against salary workers less out of its own conviction than in response to the dictates of the European Union and the International Monetary Fund and to pressure from the financial markets which, threatening not to invest in Spain, demanded lower salaries and a reduction in the standard of living. Zapatero himself recognised this addressing a group of Japanese investors:

“We are undertaking the reforms that international investors are most concerned with [iv],” he confessed. And he repeated to the top managers of the major US commercial banks and investment funds that the reforms were intended “to make investors and the markets appreciate my firm determination to make the Spanish economy competitive [v].”

Labour reform has no relation to cutting the public deficit or reducing the state budget, which are the primary demands of the financial markets. But because the government cannot devalue the currency to stimulate exports, it decided instead to lower salaries in order boost competitiveness.

What is worst is the fact that these mistaken measures have no guarantee of success. Employment figures from August show that 93.4 percent of new contracts were temporary. In other words, the labour market remains highly precarious. The only difference is that for businesses, it is now cheaper to fire workers.

After the crisis of the 90s, unemployment took three years to drop to the European average -and in a period of strong growth when Spain was receiving massive assistance from the EU. Today with this labour reform and anaemic growth expected for a long while, “employment in Spain, according to US economist Carmen Reinhart, will not reach 2007 levels until 2017.[vi]”

And so, rejected by voters, this government will probably have lost power and hand over guidance of the country to the conservative and populist opposition. In general that is what happens when leftist parties jettison their own values and opt for policies that are shamefully right wing, as we have seen in Germany, the UK, and more recently Sweden. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Ignacio Ramonet is editor of “Le Monde diplomatique en espanol”.

[i] Voting in a democracy, because it is general and universal, does not always allow the expression of particular sensibilities.

[ii] see Pierre Rosenvallon, “Le pouvoir contre l’interet general”, Le Monde, Paris, 21 September 2010.

[iii] According to a recent poll by the Centro de Investigaciones Sociologicas (CIS), the ruling PSOE party has lost 3.1 percent of its support. Only 2.5 percent of those polled said that the economic situation is good or very good, as opposed to 22.6 percent who described it as normal and 74.4 percent who considered it bad or very bad.

[iv] El Pais, Madrid, September 1, 2010.

[v] Ibid, September 21, 2010.

[vi] Ibid, September 12, 2010.

Excerpt:

By Ignacio Ramonet and - -
PARIS, Sep 1 2010 (IPS)

Two decisive contests are fast approaching in the struggle for ideological supremacy in Latin America: the legislative elections in Venezuela on September 26 and the presidential elections in Brazil on October 3. If the democratic left doesn’t win in the latter, the political pendulum would begin to swing continent wide towards the right, which is already in power in Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, and Peru. But this is unlikely to occur: it is inconceivable that Jose Serra, of the Brazilian Social Democratic Party, could defeat Dilma Rousseff of the Workers Party (PT), supported by the very popular current president Lula Ignacio de Silva, who could easily win a third term if the constitution didn’t bar it.

Given this situation in Brazil, international conservative forces are concentrating their attacks on the other front, Venezuela, trying to weaken President Hugo Chavez and his Bolivarian revolution. At stake are the seats of 165 deputies in the National Assembly (there is no senate). Almost all of the outgoing lawmakers are Chavistas because the opposition boycotted the last elections, in 2005. They won’t this time. There is a myriad of parties and disparate organisations [i] all united by their anti-Chavez zeal in the umbrella group the Table of Democratic Unity (MUD) against Chavez’ Unified Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUU[ii]).

The Bolivarian government will inevitably have fewer representatives in the new assembly, which raises many questions: What will the new proportion be? Will the body still be able to push through Chavez’ reforms? Will the opposition be able to put the brakes on the revolution?

Those are the challenges. Sixty percent of the seats will be assigned by direct election, the rest by proportionality. Of this 40 percent, the ticket that receives over 50 percent of the votes will receive 75 percent of the seats. This is important because the constitution stipulates that organic laws need a two-thirds majority to pass while an enabling act, which would give the president the power to legislate by decree, must pass by a three-fifths majority. In other words: the opposition would need just 56 of the total 165 votes to block passage of organic laws and 67 votes to block passage of any enabling act. Up until now, it was the latter that made it possible for the government to pass the major reforms.

Thus the battle in Venezuela in mobilising massive energy while the international defamation campaigns launched against President Chavez are churning with malignancy. Recent months have seen an alternation of attacks. First came the focus on problems with water supplies and electricity cuts (now resolved), blaming the government for both without mentioning the central factor: the drought of the century then afflicting Venezuela. Next came endless repetitions of the unsubstantiated charge made by ex-Colombian president Alvaro Uribe regarding a supposed “Venezuelan sanctuary for terrorists”.

This accusation was dropped by the new president of Colombia Juan Miguel Santos after his August 10 meeting with Chavez, who said again that the guerillas should abandon their armed struggle: “Today’s world is not the world of the 1960s. The conditions of the country are not right for the guerillas to take power. Instead, they have been transformed into the main excuse for the [American] empire to penetrate deep into Colombia and from there to attack Venezuela, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Cuba[iii].”

Against all evidence, the hatemonger media continue to assert that in Venezuela political freedoms would be eliminated and censorship would choke off the freedom of expression. They fail to note that 80 percent of radio and television stations belong to the private sector and only 8 percent are public [iv]. Nor do they mention that since 1989 there have been 15 democratic elections unchallenged by any international oversight organisation. Journalist Jose Vicente Rangel writes, “Every Venezuelan is able to affiliate with any of thousands of political parties, unions, social organisations or associations and then move into the national arena to debate their ideas and points of view without any limitation. [v]”

Since Chavez was elected president, social investment in Venezuela has increased by a factor of five with respect to 1988-1998 levels; this was a crucial move, because of which Venezuela has already achieved almost all of the UN Millennium Development Goals, well before the 2015 target date. [vi]. The percentage of Venezuelans living in poverty has dropped from 49.4 percent in 1999 to 30.2 percent in 2006, and indigence has dropped from 21.7 to 7.2 percent [vii].

Do such encouraging achievements deserve such hatred? (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Ignacio Ramonet is editor of Le Monde Diplomatique in Spanish.

[i] Accion Democratica (social-democrat), Alianza Bravo Pueblo (right-wing), Copei (Christian democrat), Fuerza Liberal (ultraliberal), La Causa R (ex-comunist), MAS (socialist), Movimiento Republicano (neoliberal), PPT (Patria para todos, Fatherland for All), Podemos (social democract), Primero Justicia (ultraliberal) and Un Nuevo Tiempo (social-liberal).

[ii] Created in 2007, it is a grouping of the majority of the political forces that back the Bolivarian revolution (Movimiento Quinta Republica, Movimiento Electoral del Pueblo, Movimiento Independiente Ganamos Todos, Liga Socialista, Unidad Popular Venezolana, etc.) The Venezuelan Communist Party (PCU) did not join the PSUV but supports it and is its ally in these elections.

[iii] Clarin, Buenos Aires, 25 July 2010.

[iv] They also fail to mention that in Honduras, for example, nine journalists were killed in the first six months of this year.

[v] www.abn.info.ve/node/12781

[vi] http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/spanish/specials/2009/chavez_10/newsid_7837000/7837964.stm

[vii] www.radiomundial.com.ve/yvke/noticia.php?45387

Excerpt:

By Ignacio Ramonet and - -
PARIS, Aug 10 2010 (IPS)

The “Bettencourt Case”, which is rattling France with its storm of arrests, family feuds, suspicious checks, secret recordings, fiscal misdemeanours, and illegal donations to the party of French premier Nicolas Sarkozy, is plunging the country into a profound crisis.

Lilliane Bettencourt, one of the richest women on the planet, owner of the L’Oreal perfume and cosmetics empire, with a personal fortune of 17 billion euros, finds herself at the epicentre of a hallucinatory soap opera that has become a government matter.

A few of the conversations recorded in her house reveal that Eric Woerth, then budget minister in change of tax collection and now labour minister, used his influence to arrange for his wife Florence to be hired by Bettencourt to manage her fortune for a yearly salary of 200,000 euros. Subsequently Woerth, who was also the treasurer of Sarkozy’s party, received what were presumably donations of tens of thousands of euros[i] to finance Sarkozy’s election campaign. Then the suspicion arose that the minister had turned a blind eye to a part of Ms. Bettencourt’s hidden fortune, including a number of million-euro accounts in Switzerland and an island in the Seychelles valued at around 500 million euros.

This matter, shameful enough in itself, becomes more alarming when one considers that it was Eric Woerth who was chosen to carry out the tough pension reform that will punish millions of retirees of modest means. In an environment of intense social tension and unrest in the ghettos of France’s cities, the “Bettencourt case” is reigniting the old battle between the elites and the common people. According to philosopher Marcel Gauchet,”The atmosphere of society today is growing saturated with latent revolt and a feeling of radical distance from the rulers [ii].”

France is not the only country sullied by the corruption of a handful of politicians who permanently confuse the duties public office with private benefits. People still clearly remember the UK’s parliament expenses scandal that brought down the Labour Party in the May 6 elections. Or the scandal in the Italy of Silvio Berlusconi where, almost 20 years after the “clean hands” corruption crackdown wiped out major components of the political class, endemic corruption is spreading with massive force as the left looks on, paralysed and without ideas. In its most recent report, Italy’s Corte dei Conti found that corruption by public officials jumped 150 percent in the last year.[iii] Spain has been exhausted by multiple cases of corruption of public officials connected with the construction barons who have made vast sums from the delirious urban planning policies. And then there is the grotesque “Gurtel case” which continues to unfold.

Internationally, in the era of neoliberal globalisation, corruption has become structural. Its practice has become commonplace along with other forms of corrupting criminality: embezzlement, manipulation of public contracts, abuse of social goods, the creation of fictional jobs, tax fraud, and money laundering, among others.

All of the above confirms that corruption is a central pillar of capitalism. Essayist Moises Naim argues that in the next few decades “the activities of the illicit networks of global trafficking and their partners in the ‘legitimate’ world, whether state or private, will have a far greater impact on international relations, strategies for economic development, promotion of democracy, business, finance, migration, global security, and war and peace than could be imagined up until now.”[iv]

According to the World Bank, the annual flow of money from corruption, criminal activities, and tax evasion to tax shelters has reached a staggering 1.6 trillion euros. Of this figure, roughly 250 billion are from tax evasion in the European Union alone. Redirected back into the legal economy, this amount would make it possible to avoid the current austerity plans and adjustments that are wreaking havoc on society.

No leader should ever forget that democracy is above all an ethical project grounded in virtue and a system of social values and morals that give meaning to the exercise of power. In his posthumous and indispensable book, Jose Vidal-Beneyto argues that when “the principal political forces, in complete mafia-style harmony, coordinate among themselves to swindle the citizens” [v], the result is a discrediting of democracy, a rejection of politics, a rise in abstention, and, more dangerous, growth of the far right. He concludes: “Government grows corrupted by corruption, and when there is corruption in democracy, democracy becomes corrupt.” (END. COPYRIGHT IPS)

[i] In France the political party finance law of 11 April 2003 limits individual private donations to 7500 euros per year.

[ii] Le Monde, Paris, 18 July 2010.

[iii] Clarin, Buenos Aires, 17 February 2010.

[iv] Moises Naim, Ilicito, Debate, Madrid, 2006.

[v] Jose Vidal-Beneyto, La corrupcion de la democracia, [The Corruption of Democracy], Catarata, Madrid, 2010.

(*) Ignacio Ramonet is editor of “Le Monde diplomatique en espanol”.

Excerpt:

By Ignacio Ramonet and - -
PARIS, Aug 2 2010 (IPS)

"Lower your head, fierce Sicambrian; love what you have burned, and burn what you have loved." So Bishop Remigius commanded the barbarian Clovis, converting him to Christianity so he could become the king of France, about 1500 years ago. The same command might have been addressed to social democrat Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero by the heads of state of the Europgroup in Brussels last May 7 when they joined the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the financial markets to make the Spanish premier abjure any social whims and swear allegiance to the neoliberal creed.

Just five days later, with the fanaticism of converts (and feigned reluctance) the Spanish prime minister -who stated in 2004, "I will govern for the weakest," and repeated in 2008, "I will govern thinking of those who have nothing"- announced a wildly unpopular programme. Five million pensioners, three million government employees, hundreds of thousands of elderly in need of assistance, and half a million new parents as of 2011 will suffer the consequences of these drastic cuts.

At the same time, other social democratic heads of state, in Greece and Portugal, found themselves forced to make this voyage to Canossa, as it were, to recant and prostrate themselves and comply with the very ultraliberal philosophy that they had previously fought against .

It was a striking change. Just two years earlier, since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in the US, the proponents of neoliberalism were defeated and on the defensive. They were the ones recanting back then. The "crisis of the century" seemed to demonstrate the failure of their ideology of deregulation and the need for the state to reassert itself to save the economy and preserve the cohesion of society.

Governments, including those on the right, were reasserting their elemental role in economics, nationalising financial entities and strategic firms, injecting massive amounts of liquidity into the banking sector, multiplying stimulus plans. Both economists and government officials were pleased by these efforts, which reflected the lessons learned from the crisis of 1929, when it was shown that deflationary policies, the restriction of credit, and austerity led to the great depression.

Thus in fall of 2008 the entire world proclaimed "the return of Keynes". The US launched a 700 billion dollar rescue plan for the banks, soon followed by the infusion of another 800 billion dollars. The 27 members of the European Union reached an agreement on a 400 billion euro stimulus package. And the government of Rodriguez Zapatero, stating in November 2008 that "three consecutive years of budget surpluses now allow us to incur a deficit without jeopardising the credibility of our public finances", announced an ambitious 93 billion euro Stimulus Plan for the Economy and Employment.

Moreover, at various G-20 Summits, the leaders of the most powerful countries decided to abolish tax shelters, rein in hedge funds, and punish the abuses of speculation that caused the crisis. Jose Manuel Durao Barroso, president of European Commission, announced: "The political authorities will never again allow speculators to raise their heads and drag us back into this situation."

And yet here we are in the same situation. Once again the markets and the speculators are in the driver’s seat and the politicians are on their knees. What happened? The weight of the sovereign debt incurred by states to save the banks [i] has been used as the pretext for a spectacular change of situation. Without scruples, the markets and financial speculators, backed by the ratings agencies which had been completely discredited for months, launched a direct attack in the heart of the European Union against the most indebted countries, now accused of living beyond their means. The primary target is the euro. The Wall Street Journal [ii] revealed that a group of prominent hedge fund directors met at a hotel in Manhattan on February 8 and decided to join together in an effort to drive down the euro to parity with the dollar.

The markets want their revenge. And they are demanding more forcefully than ever, in the name of "necessary austerity", the dismantling of social protections and drastic cuts in public services. The more neoliberal governments are taking advantage of this state of affairs to demand greater "European integration", in the name of which they are trying to force the adoption of two instruments that do not exist: an economic government of the European Union, and a common fiscal policy. With the backing of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Germany has imposed structural adjustment programmes on all EU members (Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy, France, the UK, Romania, Hungary, etc) whose governments, blindsided by the cuts in public spending, complied without complaint. Even though this threatens to push Europe into a deep depression.

Along the same lines, Brussels wants to sanction countries that don’t respect the stability pact [iii]. Berlin is trying to go further and add a highly political punishment: the suspension of the right to vote on the European Council. The goal is clear: to prevent all governments from straying from the neoliberal path.

At bottom, this is the political fallout from the current sovereign debt crisis: there seems to be no room in the EU for any form of progress. Will the citizens of the EU allow this leap backwards? Will they accept the elimination of any leftist democratic solution that seeks social advancement? (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

[i] A report by the European Commission indicates that the total of funds committed for the banks has risen to 3.3 trillion euros, or 28 percent of the GNP of the EU. (El Pais, Madrid, 20 June 2010)

[ii] The Wall Street Journal, NY, 26 February 2010. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100014240527487037950045750877418 48074392.html

[iii] Adopted in 1997, limiting the public debt to 3 percent of GDP.

(*) Ignacio Ramonet, director of "Le Monde diplomatique en espanol" ( www.monde-diplomatique.es).

Excerpt:

By Ignacio Ramonet and - -
PARIS, May 10 2010 (IPS)

“For the dead man here abandoned, build him a tomb.” Sophocles, Antigone (442 A.D.)

“Senseless”, “astounding” , “unheard of” … The world press, human rights associations, and the finest international jurists can’t get over it. Why is the Spanish judicial system, which has done so much in recent years to punish and prevent crimes against humanity in many parts of the world, bringing charges against Baltasar Garzon, the judge who best symbolises the contemporary paradigm of applying universal justice?

The international media know well the merits of the “superjudge”: his transcendental role in the arrest of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in London in 1998; his denunciation of the atrocities committed by the military in Argentina, Guatemala, and by other Latin American dictatorships; his efforts to dismantle the GAL (Antiterrorist Liberation Groups, formed by the Spanish government to fight the ETA Basque separatists) and prosecute socialist premier Felipe Gonzalez; his opposition to the invasion of Iraq in 2003; and even his recent trip to Honduras to warn the coup participants that crimes against humanity are imprescriptible.

As a judge of the National Court of Spain, Garzon prosecuted thousands of activists of the terrorist Basque separatist group ETA (the right felt he should be considered for the Nobel Peace Prize). What generated criticism was his 1998 decision to order the closure of the Basque newspaper Egin, or his ordering of terrorism suspects to be held incommunicado. Organisations like the Committee for the Prevention of Torture of the Council of Europe have called for the abolition of this form of detention. Garzon’s immoderate appetite for the front pages and “superstar judge” behaviour are other targets of criticism.

In any case, Garzon has shown himself to be a rebel judge, independent and incorruptible. It is because of this that he has accumulated so many adversaries and now finds himself persecuted by those involved in “Gurtel[i]” matter and the heirs of Francoism. There are in fact three charges pending against him in the Supreme Court, one regarding fees he received for conferences he spoke at in New York sponsored by Banco Santander. Another regards wiretaps ordered for the investigation of the “Gurtel” network. The main accusation involves the investigation of the crimes of Francoism.

Two ultraconservative organisations have accused him of “prevarication[ii]” for having initiated in October 2008 an investigation into the disappearance during the Spanish Civil War of more than 100,000 republicans (whose bodies lie in unmarked ditches, denied a dignified burial) and the destiny of 30,000 children taken from their mothers in prison [iii] and given to families on the side of the victors during the dictatorship (1939-1975).

If found guilty, Garzon will face a suspension of between ten and twenty years. This would be a great shame. Because at bottom this matter involves one central question: symbolically, what is to be done with the Spanish Civil War? The administrative decision taken in 1977 with the Amnesty Law (which in the short term was intended essentially to obtain the release from prison of a few hundred prisoners of the left) was not to do justice and not to impose any kind of policy with regard to memory.

Obviously 71 years from the end of the conflict, with all responsible parties deceased, the administration of justice cannot consist of physically trying those accused of abominable crimes. But this is not just a juridical matter. If it impassions millions of Spanish, it is because they feel that, beyond the Garzon case, what is at issue is the right of victims to moral reparation, the collective rights to memory and the possibility of officially establishing, on the basis of the atrocities committed, that Francoism was an abomination and that allowing it impunity is intolerable. It is essential to be able to say this, to proclaim it, and show it in “museums dedicated to the Civil War”, for example; in history textbooks; and on the solemn days of collective homage, etc. As is the case with all of Europe in solidarity with the victims of Nazism.

Proponents of the “culture of concealment” are accusing Garzon of wanting to open a Pandora’s box and divide the Spanish people again. They are insisting that the other side committed crimes as well. They have not understood the specificity of Francoism. They behave like a journalist who, seeking to organise a “fair debate” on World War Two, gave one minute to Hitler and one minute to the Jews.

Francoism was not just the war (in which General Queipo de Llano asserted, “We must sow terror and eliminate without scruples or wavering all those who don’t think like us.”) ; it was above all, between 1939 and 1975, one of the most implacable authoritarian regimes of the 20th century which used terror in a systematic manner to exterminate its ideological opponents and frighten the entire population. This is not a political assertion; it is a historical fact.

The Amnesty Law led to the imposition, on the Francoist “banality of evil”, of a sort of official amnesia, or a mechanism of “unconscious blindness” (collective, in this case) by which a person makes unpleasant areas of his memory disappear. Until the day they boil back up to the surface in an fever of irrationality.

This what judge Garzon wanted to avoid. He wanted to reveal the malevolent nature of Francoism so that history would never repeat itself. Never. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Ignacio Ramonet is editor of “Le Monde diplomatique in Spanish”.

[i] This involves figures in the rightist Popular Party (PP), particularly the ex-treasurer of the PP, Luis Barcenas.

[ii] Prevarication is the issuance of a resolution by an official who is aware that the resolution is unjust.

[iii] Ricard Vinyes Irredentas, Political Prisoners and their Children in the Prisons under Franco, Planeta, Barcelona, 2002. See the documentary Els nens perduts del franquisme (The Lost Children of Francoism) by Montserrat Armengou and Ricard Belis.

Excerpt:

By Ignacio Ramonet and - -
PARIS, Apr 19 2010 (IPS)

With the motto “Stop the misery”, the European Union (EU) has declared 2010 “The Year for Combating Poverty and Social Exclusion”. In the 27 countries of the EU, there are some 85 million poor [i]. One in six Europeans lives in poverty [ii]. And the situation is getting worse as the effects of the global economic crisis spread. The social question must be put at the centre of the debate.

Popular rage has erupted over the austerity plans in Greece, Portugal, Spain, Ireland, etc. Strikes and violent protests are multiplying. Many citizens are also rejecting the political system (abstaining from voting or casting white ballots) or joining extreme factions (the far right and xenophobes). Poverty and social desperation are creating a crisis in the democratic system itself. Is Europe in for a spring of explosive discontent?

In Spain, 20 percent of the population, or about 10 million people, live below the poverty line [iii]. There are particularly extreme cases, like that of the children of non-EU immigrants (more than half of whom live in poverty) and the homeless, who number 30,000 (about half a million in total EU)[iv]. Hundreds die of cold each winter.

Who are today’s poor? Peasant farmers exploited by major agro-firms, isolated pensioners, single mothers, youth with low paying jobs, couples with children living on a single salary, and of course the giant number of people who just lost their jobs in the crisis. Never have figures like these been seen in the EU: 23 million poor (5 million more than a year ago). The worst part is that the violence of unemployment effects most intensely those under twenty-five. In Spain youth unemployment stands at a catastrophic 44.5 percent, more than double the European average of 20 percent.

If the social question has become such a pressing issue these days it is because it coincides with the crisis of the European welfare state. Since the 1970s, with the peak of economic globalisation, we moved from industrial capitalism to savage capitalism, the fundamental dynamic of which is desocialisation and the shredding of the social contract. This is why there is so little respect for the concepts of solidarity and social justice.

The greatest transformation took place in the organisation of labour. The professional status of salary workers has eroded. In an environment of massive unemployment, looking for a job is no longer just a rough uncertain period; it has become a permanent state. This is what French sociologist Robert Castel labels “precariousness” [v], a new condition now found throughout Europe. In Portugal, for example, one out of every five salary workers has what is called a “green receipt”, or free lance, contract: though one may have worked for years in the same office or plant with fixed hours, his employer is simply a client he invoices for his services and who can, without any penalty, break the contract from one day to the next.

Such degradation of the status of salary workers aggravates inequality by excluding an ever increasing number of people (youth above all) from the protections of the state welfare system, isolating, marginalising, and crippling them. How many workers have committed suicide in their own workplace? Abandoned to themselves, in the fierce competition of all against all, individuals live in a sort of jungle, which is disturbing to many unions, once powerful and now tempted to collaborate with the employers.

Economic efficiency has become the central focus of businesses, which shift their obligations of solidarity to the state. The state, in turn, shifts its obligations to non-governmental organisations (NGOs) or private humanitarian organisations. In this way the economic sphere and the social sphere are drifting further and permanently apart. And the contrast between the two grows more and more scandalous.

In Spain, for example, while the number of unemployed in 2009 reached 4.5 million (up from 3.1 million in 2008), companies listed on the stock market paid out 32.3 billion euros to stockholders (19 percent more than in 2008). Last year, profits at the ten largest European banks topped 50 billion euros. In a continent punished by the worst recession since 1929, how is this possible? From the beginning of the crisis in the fall of 2008, central banks made massive loans at minimum interest rates to private banks, which lent this cheap money at higher interest rates to families, businesses, and even their own governments. This is how they made their billions. Now sovereign debt is reaching shocking levels in numerous countries -Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain- whose governments have had to impose drastic austerity plans on their citizens to be able to meet the needs of the financial actors- which caused the crisis in the first place. It is easy to understand the rage and shock millions and millions of European wage-earners feel about this disgrace.

The rich get richer while the number of the unemployed and in- danger rises, their purchasing power shrinks, work conditions worsen, and physical and symbolic violence spreads through a society that is falling apart as social relations grow increasingly brutal. How far will social disgust and anger grow? The International Monetary Fund warned on March 17 that if the financial system isn’t reformed, “there will be social uprisings”. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Ignacio Ramonet is editor of “Le Monde diplomatique in Spanish”.

[i] A person is classified as poor if he lives on less than half of the average net disposable income of his country. In Spain, the average monthly income is about 1000 euros.

[ii] Cf. The Social Situation in the European Union 2007, Brussels, 2008 (http://ec.europa.eu/employment_social/spsi/reports_social_situat ion_fr.htm ).

[iii] See: “Report on Social Inclusion in Spain”, Fundacio Un sol mon, Caixa Catalunya, Barcelona, 2008.

[iv] See: www.enredpsh.org/

[v] Robert Castel, The Metamorphosis of the Social Question (La Metamorfosis de la cuestion social ), Paidos, Barcelona, 1997.

Excerpt:

By Ignacio Ramonet and - -
PARIS, Mar 8 2010 (IPS)

Ideas die too. The cemetery of political parties overflows with the remains of organisations that at one time ignited passions and roused multitudes but are now relegated to oblivion. Who in Europe today agrees with Radicalism, though it was one of the most important political forces (centre-left) of the second half of the 19th century? Or Anarchism? Or Stalinist Communism? What happened to these formidable mass movements that in their day could mobilise millions of workers and peasant farmers? Were they just passing fashions?

Because of what it has abandoned, retracted, and renounced, European social democracy today finds itself being dragged towards the grave. Its life cycle seems about to end. And yet, this is happening at a time when its arch rival, ultraliberal capitalism, is passing through one of its worst periods ever. How can social democracy be dying just as ultraliberal capitalism finds itself in severe crisis? The answer is clear: because it was incapable of generating popular enthusiasm for its weak response to the urgent social problems of the day.

Without compass or theory, it gropes along, seemingly broken, its leadership sickly, with neither organisation nor ideas, neither doctrine nor direction. And, most important, without identity. This was an organisation that was supposed to have carried out a revolution but backed away from the idea. It was a workers party, but today it is the party of a comfortable urban middle class.

The recent elections demonstrated that European social democracy no longer knows how to appeal to the millions of voters who are victims of the brutal postindustrial world brought about by globalisation -the multitudes of disposable workers, the new poor of the suburbs, the marginalised, the retired though still of working age, at-risk youth, middle class families threatened by destitution, all groups damned by neoliberal shock.

For all of these people, social democracy seems to have neither a message nor solutions. The June 2009 European elections gave a clear indication of its current disastrous state. The majority of the social democratic parties that had been in power were dealt serious setbacks, while those in the opposition also suffered losses, especially in France and Finland.

They couldn’t convince voters they had a response to the economic and social challenges raised by the shipwreck of financial capitalism. If evidence had been lacking of the European social democrats’ failure to devise an approach different from that of the EU leadership, Gordon Brown and Jose Luis Zapatero provided more than enough when they backed the shameful election as president of the European Commission of ultra-liberal Jose Manuel Durao Barroso, the fourth man of the March 2003 Azores Summit -along with George W. Bush, Tony Blair, and Jose Maria Aznar- where the decision was made to launch the illegal invasion of Iraq.

In 2002, the social democrats were in power in fifteen countries of the EU. Today, despite the fact that the financial crisis has proved the social, moral, and ecological bankruptcy of ultraliberalism, the social democrats rule in only five countries (Spain, Greece, Portugal, Hungary, and the UK). They have been simply incapable of taking advantage of this situation. Moreover, the governments of three of these countries -Spain, Greece, and Portugal, each ravaged by the financial markets and the debt crisis- will end up more discredited and unpopular when they begin to rigidly implement the austerity programmes and anti-populist policies demanded by the logic of the EU and its principal gatekeepers.

Indeed, repudiating their very foundations has become a habit: European social democrats decided years ago to ramp up privatisations, demand lower budgets at the expense of the citizens, call for raising the retirement age, dismantle the public sector, while pushing for giant corporate mergers and concentration and pampering the banks. It gradually converted itself, without remorse, to social-liberalism, dropping as priorities certain objectives that were part of its ideological DNA -for example, full employment, the defence of acquired social advantages, the development of public services, and the eradication of hunger and poverty.

From the end of the 19th century until the 1930s, every time capitalism took a step forward, the social democrats, backed by the left and the unions, responded with original and progressive proposals: universal suffrage, free education for all, the right to a job, social security, the social state, the welfare state. The dynamic imagination that gave rise to these ideas now seems to have been exhausted.

European social democracy lacks the vision of a new social utopia. Times have changed. In the minds of many constituents, even the least well off, consumerism has triumphed, along with the desire to get rich, have fun, luxuriate in abundance, and be happy without feeling guilty.

In the face of this dominant hedonism, permanently stamped into people’s minds by relentless advertising and manipulation by the media, the leaders of the social-democrats do not dare go against the current.

They have even managed to convince themselves that it isn’t certain that capitalists get rich by exploiting workers but that, to the contrary, the poor are taking advantage of the taxes paid by the wealthy. They think, in the words of Italian philosopher Raffaele Simone, that “socialism is possible only when misfortune outstrips happiness, when suffering far exceeds pleasure, and chaos triumphs over structure. [i]”

In contrast, however, in certain countries of South America (Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela), we may be seeing a rebirth, with force and creativity, of a new, 21st century socialism, as in Europe the bell tolls for social democracy. Requiem aeternam…. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Ignacio Ramonet is the editor of Le Monde Diplomatique in Spanish.

[i] Raffaele Simone, “Les socialistes proposent toujours le sacrifice”,(Socialists Always Propose Sacrifice), in Philosophie Magazine, number 36, February 2010, Paris.

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By Ignacio Ramonet and - -
PARIS, Feb 8 2010 (IPS)

As “natural” as it may seem, no catastrophe is natural. An earthquake of the same intensity has more victims in a poor country than in a rich industrialised one. For example, the earthquake in Haiti, 7.0 on the Richter scale, caused more than 200,000 deaths, while the one six months ago that struck Honshu, Japan, caused only one death and one injury though it was of the same strength (7.1).

“The poorest countries and those with problems of governance are more exposed to risks than others,” a recent United Nation report concludes[i]. In the same city, the human impact of a calamity can vary widely depending on the characteristics of the various neighbourhoods. In Port-au-Prince, the earthquake ravaged the dilapidated shantytown of the centre, yet the privileged areas where the mulatto merchant middle class lived was barely damaged.

Nor do the poor weather adversity equally. The International Federation of the Red Cross holds that in the event of disasters, “women, the handicapped, the elderly, and ethnic and religious minorities, the habitual victims of discrimination, are the worst hit.”[ii]

On the other hand, a country that is not rich but has an effective disaster prevention plan can save many, many lives. In August 2008, hurricane Gustav, the most violent of the last 50 years, blasted the Caribbean with winds of 340 kilometres per hour. In Haiti 66 people were killed. In Cuba, not a single person died.

Is Haiti a poor country? In reality, there are not poor countries, there are only “impoverished countries”. This is a crucial difference. In the last third of the 18th century, Haiti was the “Pearl of the Antilles” and produced 60 percent of the coffee and 75 percent of the sugar consumed in Europe. However, its great wealth benefitted only 50,000 or so white colonists and not the 500,000 black slaved that produced it.

Invoking the noble ideals of the French Revolution, these slaves rose up in 1791 led by Toussaint Louverture, the “Black Spartacus”. The war lasted thirteen years. Napoleon sent an expedition of 43,000 veterans. The rebels won. It was the first anti-colonial racial war and the only slave rebellion that resulted in a sovereign state.

On January 1, 1804, the new country proclaimed its independence. The event reverberated throughout the American continent. The black slaves had demonstrated that without external assistance, of their own strength, they could win their own freedom. Thus Afro-America appeared on the international political scene.

But the “bad example of Haiti”, as then US president Thomas Jefferson characterised it, terrorised those powers that continued to practice slavery. And they never pardoned Haiti. No one recognised or helped the new black republic, which was the nightmare of white colonialism. The terror has not yet disappeared. It was not by chance that American televangelist Pat Robertson said that thousands of Haitians died in the earthquake because the slaves “swore a pact with the devil” to win their freedom.” [iii]

The new independent state was boycotted for decades in the hope of “sealing off the plague” in the country. Haiti descended into a period of civil wars that razed the land, missing the necessary phase building the institutions of a nation state. Despite the high calibre of its many intellectuals, the country grew stagnant.

Then came the US occupation, from 1915-1934, and the war of resistance. The hero of the rebellion, Charlemagne Peralte, was crucified by the Marines, nailed onto the door of a church. Washington ended up handing Haiti over to new dictators, including “Papa Doc” Duvalier, one of the most despotic.

In 1970, Haiti still enjoyed food sovereignty. Its farmers produced 90 percent of the food the country consumed. But the Reagan-Bush Plan imposed by Washington forced the country to lower tariffs on imported rice, the central crop of local farmers. US rice, cheaper because it was subsidised, flooded the local markets and ruined thousands of peasant farmers, who emigrated en masse to Port-au-Prince, where they would be later trapped in the earthquake.

Haiti’s only experience with a real democratic government was the two terms of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, (1994-1996, 2001-2004), who was driven into exile by both his own errors and pressure from Washington. Since then Haiti has found itself under the protection of the UN and a conglomerate of international NGOs. The government of Rene Preval, the current president, who followed Aristide, was systematically denied any means of action. It is thus absurd to reproach him for a failure to act after the earthquake struck. The public sector had been long dismantled and its particular functions transferred to the private sector if they were profitable and to NGOs if there weren’t. Well before it was converted into the “ground zero” of the planet, Haiti was the first case of “humanitarian colonialism”. The current tragedy will only reinforce its dependency, and so its resistance. The “shock capitalism” described by Naomi Klein will have a new place to demand -in the name of efficiency- the complete privatisation of every economic and trade activity connected with reconstruction.

The US is first in line, with its armed forces deployed in a broad humanitarian offensive. This is without doubt the result of a generous desire to help. However there are also indisputable geopolitical interests. Washington prefers invading Haiti with aid to seeing its shores invaded by tens of thousands of Haitian “boat people”. Ultimately, here too it’s a matter of “sealing off the plague”. (END\COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Ignacio Ramonet is the editor of Le Monde Diplomatique in Spanish.

[i] Risk and poverty in a changing climate. Invest today for a more secure tomorrow. United Nations, New York, May 2009.

[ii] World Disasters Report, 2009, International Red Cross, July 2009.

[iii] Christian Broadcasting Network, January 14, 2010.

(*)Ignacio Ramonet is editor of Le Monde Diplomatique in Spanish.

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By Ignacio Ramonet, Walden Bello, and - -
MANILA, Nov 16 2009 (IPS)

The recent collapse of the global economy, caused by among other things the lack of regulation of financial markets, has further eroded the credibility of neoliberalism. And yet it continues to exercise a strong influence on the majority of economists and economic managers, for whom, despite its obvious shortcomings, it remains the default discourse.

Why the continuing invocation of neoliberal mantras when the promises of this doctrinaire approach have been contradicted at almost every turn by reality?

Neoliberalism is a perspective that champions the market as the prime regulator of economic activity and seeks to limit the intervention of the state in economic life to a minimum.

In recent times neoliberalism has become identified with economics, given its hegemony as a paradigm within the discipline, that is, its exclusion of other perspectives as legitimate ways of doing economics.

Since economics is regarded in many quarters as a hard science, much like physics -being, for instance, the only social science for which there is a Nobel Prize- neoliberalism has had a tremendous and pervasive influence not only in academic circles but in policy circles as well. While the University of Chicago, home to neoliberal economic guru Milton Friedman, became the font of academic wisdom, in technocratic circles the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank were seen as the key institutions that translated this theory into policy with a set of practical prescriptions that were applicable to all economies.

It is surprising to realise how recently neoliberalism became a hegemonic paradigm. As late as the mid-1970s Keynesian economics, which promoted a good dose of state intervention as necessary for stability and steady growth, was the orthodoxy. In what used to be known as the Third World, developmentalism, which prescribed Keynesian economics to economies that were still insufficiently penetrated and transformed by capitalism, was the dominant approach. There was a conservative brand of developmentalism and a progressive one, but both saw the state, rather than the market, as the central mechanism of development.

I believe that are three reasons why neoliberalism, despite its failures, remains dominant.

First, in certain developing countries like the Philippines, corruption continues to be pervasive as an explanation for underdevelopment. Therefore, it is argued, because the state is the source of corruption, increasing the state’s role in the economy, even as a regulator, is viewed with scepticism. Neoliberal discourse ties in very neatly with this corruption theory, with its minimisation of the role of the state in economic life and its assumption that making market relations more dominant in economic transactions at the expense of the state will reduce the opportunities for corruption by both economic and state agents.

For instance, for many Filipinos, and not only in the middle class, it is the corrupt state -and not the relations of inequality spawned by the market and the erosion of national economic interests brought about by the liberalisation of trade and capital markets- that continues to be the main obstacle to the greater good. It is seen as the biggest impediment to development and sustained economic growth. Corruption, of course, must be condemned for moral and political reason, but this supposed correlation between corruption and underdevelopment and poverty has little basis in fact.

Second, despite the deep crisis of neoliberalism, no credible alternative paradigm or discourse has emerged, either locally or internationally. There is nothing like the challenge that Keynesian economics posed to market fundamentalism during the Great Depression in the early 1930s. The challenges posed by star economists like Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, and Dani Rodrik continue to be made within the confines of neoclassical economics, with its equation of social welfare with the reduction of the unit cost of production.

And third, neoliberal economics continues to project a ‘hard science’ image because of the fact that it has been thoroughly mathematised. In the aftermath of the recent financial crisis, this extreme formalisation and mathematisation of the discipline has come under criticism from within the economics profession itself, with some contending that methodology rather than substance has become the end of economic practice, and that as a result the discipline has lost its contact with real-world trends and problems. It is worthwhile to note that John Maynard Keynes, a mathematical mind himself, opposed the mathematisation of the discipline precisely because of false sense of solidity that it gave to economics. As his biographer Robert Skidelsky notes, Keynes was “famously sceptical about econometrics”; numbers for him were “simply clues, triggers for the imagination”, rather than the expressions of certainties or probabilities of past and future events.

Getting over neoliberalism, thus, will involve getting beyond the worship of numbers that often shroud the real and beyond the scientism that masks itself as science. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Walden Bello, member of the House of Representatives of the Republic of the Philippines, is president of the Freedom from Debt Coalition and senior analyst at the Bangkok-based research and advocacy institute Focus on the Global South.

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By Ignacio Ramonet and - -
PARIS, Oct 15 2009 (IPS)

It is a major catastrophe: dozens of daily newspapers are bankrupt. In the United States, at least 120 have already closed. And the tsunami is now striking Europe. Not even institutions once considered the journals of record are safe: Spain’s El Pais, France’s Le Monde, The Times and The Independent of the United Kingdom. and Italy’s Corriere della Sera and La Repubblica are all accumulating major economic losses as a result of the drop in subscriptions and the collapse of advertising[i].

The prestigious New York Times had to seek help from Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim; the Tribune Company, publisher of the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, as well as the Hearst Corporation, owner of the San Francisco Chronicle, are bankrupt; News Corp, Rupert Murdoch’s powerful multi-media group which publishes the Wall Street Journal, reported losses of 2.5 billion euros.

To reduce costs many publications are cutting back on the number of pages: the Washington Post has eliminated its prestigious book review; the Christian Science Monitor has dropped its paper edition and now exists only on the Internet; the Financial Times is asking its editors to consider a three-day weeks and has drastically trimmed its staff.

There have been massive layoffs. Since January 2008, the American newspaper industry has shed 21,000 jobs. In Spain, “between June 2008 and April 2009, 2,221 journalists lost their jobs”[ii].

The for-pay daily paper is on the edge of a cliff and desperately searching for ways to survive. Certain analysts feel that this form of information is simply obsolete. Michael Wolf of Newser predicts that 80 percent of US papers will disappear[iii]. Rupert Murdoch is even more pessimistic: he thinks that in the next decade newspapers will cease to exist entirely.

This situation, already very grim, was seriously aggravated by the global economic crisis, which triggered a plunge in advertising and a restriction of credit. Then, at the worst possible time, the structural problems of the sector grew worse: the problems inherent in the commodification of information, the newspaper industry’s dependence on advertising, a loss of credibility, drop in the number of subscribers, competition from free newspapers, and an aging readership.

In Latin America, there is an additional challenge: the much needed democratic reforms undertaken by certain governments (Argentina, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Venezuela) against the “media barons” -private groups with press monopolies. The effort has set off against these governments and their presidents a series of scurrilous attacks milled by the most spiteful major media and their usual accomplices. Even Spain’s El Pais is critical of Latin American governments, in addition to attacking President Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero[iv].

The daily paper continues to use an economic and industrial model that simply doesn’t work. And the option of building mega international multi-media conglomerates, common between 1980-1990, would make no sense today with the proliferation of new modes of information distribution and of entertainment via the Internet and mobile phones[v].

Paradoxically, newspapers have never enjoyed as massive an audience as they do today. With the Internet, the number of readers has exploded[vi]. However, the use of the cyber world is still poorly thought out and currently features a particular injustice: readers who buy the print edition end up subsidising those who read the free on-line digital edition of the paper, which is both larger and more user-friendly. This is partly because web advertising never really came into its own, being far less expensive that in print[vii]. The losses and gains produced by the advent of the Internet never balanced out.

Groping blindly, the print media has desperately sought ways to adapt to the rapid change and survive. Following the example of iTunes, some tried to impose small fees for reading material on line[viii]. Rupert Murdoch decided that beginning in 2010, all access to the Wall Street Journal with any technology, whether the Blackberry or iPhone or the Kindle electronic reader, will cost. The search engine Google is considering a system that would make it possible to charge for any digital access to daily newspapers and channel the revenue to the publisher.

But can such measures save the dying patient? Few think so. Because there is another, even more worrying factor in the mix: plunging credibility. The newspaper’s current obsession with instantaneous reporting and getting the story first leads to a multiplication of errors. The demagogic request that “reader/journalists” post their blogs, photos, and videos on the newspaper’s website only increases the risk of transmitting mistakes. And adopting the defense of the business strategy as the editorial line (which we see in various dominant papers today) leads to the imposition of a subjective, arbitrary, and partisan slant.

Meanwhile, faced with the new “mortal sins” of journalism, the people feel their rights are being eroded. They know that having reliable, quality information is more important that ever, for them and for democracy, and they are asking where they can turn to find the truth?

Faced with the new ‘mortal sins’ of journalism, the people feel their rights are being eroded. They know that having reliable, quality information is more important that ever, for them and for democracy, and they are asking where they can turn to find the truth. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Ignacio Ramonet is the editor of Le Monde Diplomatique in Spanish.

[i] Ines Hayes, “En quiebra los principales diarios del mundo (The World’s Major Newspapers are Bankrupt)”, America XXI, Caracas, April 2009.

[ii] According to the Federacion de Asociaciones de Periodistas de Espana (Federation of Associations of Journalists of Spain), Madrid, 13 April 2009.

[iii] The Washington Post, 21 April 2009.

[iv] On the attacks in El Pais again Zapatero: Doreen Carvajal, ” El Pais in Rare Break With Socialist Leader”, New York Times, 13 September 2009.

[v] Luis Hernandez Navarro, “La crisis de la prensa escrita (The Crisis of the Print Media)”, La Jornada, Mexico, 3 March 2009.

[vi] “Newspapers in Crisis” (www.emarketer.com/Reports/All/Emarketer_2000552.aspx )

[vii] In 2008, the New York Times readership on the Internet was ten times that of the printed edition, yet the advertising revenue from the latter was ten times higher.

[viii] Gordon Crovitz, “El futuro de los diarios en Internet (The Future of Newspapers on the Internet)”, La Nacion, Buenos Aires, 15 August 2009, and El Pais, Madrid, 11 September 2009.

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