Henry Paulson and conflict within the American economic elite

Henry Paulson shouldn't have any trouble being confirmed as the new Secretary of the Treasury. Frequent critics of the Bush administration were falling all over themselves welcoming his nomation. Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer called him "the best pick that America could have hoped for" and The New York Times sounds like it has a major crush on Paulson, claiming he "will bring much-needed clout, pragmatism and credibility to the job" and holding out hope that he'll support "rigorous economics and sound fiscal practices" in the administration.

So mainstream Democrats can hardly contain themselves in praising a man who is worth $700 million and heads Goldman Sachs, one of the most powerful forces in international financial capitalism. If we needed any more proof, this shows conclusively that the Democrats are a lost cause until something big changes in how much popular pressure the left can bring to bear on them.

Okay, I've made my polemical point. But the choice of Paulson and the Democratic response also points to some interesting things going on within the American elite. In the broad scheme of things, there are four basic economic orientations: radical, social democrat, neoliberal, and fascist. The American elite and most government policy can be placed within the neoliberal category, yet there remain disagreements even among neoliberals. Some prefer expanding markets slowly and working to coopt opposition in order to maintain economic stability, others prefer a naked grab for power, pursuing a rapid increase in inequality and deregulation. There are also differences based on industry: financial capital and multinational corporations have different interests than those producing primarily for the domestic market or companies like military contractors, which thrive on international instability.

Paulson hails from that faction of the elite that prioritizes economic stability and is based in financial capital, which is the same faction that controlled the Clinton administration's economic policy. Clinton's Treasury Secretaries, Robert Rubin (also an ex-chief of Goldman Sachs) and Larry Summers (former chief economist at the World Bank), enthusiastically pursued balanced budgets, slow-moving domestic market reforms, free trade, and free movement for financial capital. The Bush administration, on the other hand, has pursued a program of rapid market reforms to the domestic economy, most obviously huge tax cuts for the richest Americans and a failed bid to privatize Social Security. It has invested little effort in the multilateral negotiations favored by the Clinton administration to help American corporations penetrate foreign markets, preferring instead unilateral trade agreements and war and occupation as market-opening mechanisms. It has given much less attention to the interests of financial capital and instead prioritized the interests of energy and military companies. And it has created an enormous budget deficit as it quickly expands military spending and cuts taxes.

All of these policies rub the more cautious wing of the neoliberal elite the wrong way. They worry that the Bush administration's aggressive approach could give rise to either economic crisis or popular opposition that would undo the gains that have been made. This is why Paulson, a solid member of their faction, is such a welcome pick.

The question is how Paulson will affect policy. He could just be window dressing meant to calm financial markets and mollify other governments, or he could significantly change the direction of policy. Two especially important areas to keep an eye on are China and energy. The cautious neoliberal faction tends to support an "engagement" policy with China, meant to profit American companies while binding China in US-dominated international economic institutions. The Bush administration has rhetorically endorsed such an approach, but led by Cheney and Rumsfeld has worked quietly to contain China with military alliances and economic pressure. In this regard the Bush administration has proved similar to the Clinton administration, which quietly laid the groundwork for China's military encirclement while speaking loudly of trade and cooperation. But the forces within the Bush administration calling for overt confrontation with China have always been stronger than under Clinton and constantly threaten to push the administration into open cold war. Will Paulson, who has worked extensively with China and explicitly endorses the engagement position, prevent a move to more robust containment?

The second issue is energy and global warming. Parts of the American economic elite are increasingly worried about the damage that global warming promises and about the uncertainty of not having a national policy on global warming. A different faction, based in fossil fuel producers and the car companies, is resolutely opposed to greater regulation. Paulson, who is also chairman of the board of the Nature Conservancy, is clearly a member of the former. The Bush administration has clearly been pursuing the demands of the latter. It will be interesting to see how this conflict plays out.

If Paulson can affect policy, should he be considered an improvement? Obviously some regulation on carbon emissions is preferable to none, balanced budgets are better than rapid redistribution from the poor to the rich, and engaging China isn't as bad as containing it. Yet all of these policies, tho less bad than the far-right alternative, are themselves fundamentally flawed. Moreover, we could argue that Clinton's approach to freeing up international trade and investment was more effective than the Bush administration's, which shows that the cautious faction isn't always to be preferred.

Regardless, the choice between two different factions of neoliberal elites is not something we should spend too much time agonizing over. Moving public debate toward social democratic (liberal) and ultimately radical policies is what we should be concentrating on, and that will only happen thru the hard work of organizing.

The New Yorker wants to give up on food politics

The New Yorker has a decent article on the organic food industry, reviewing a couple new books (including Michael Pollan's, the guy who wrote that New York Times Magazine feature I criticized for a remarkably weak argument against vegetarianism. As we discussed in the comments, even tho Pollan is a human supremacist he's also an environmentalist and pro-organic). These books look closely at the organic industry and call into question how promising it is as a force for change when it has openly embraced market logic, pursues an agriculture model of monoculture and long-distance, energy-intensive transport to market, and features a questionable commitment to the principles it loudly proclaims in its marketing. I especially liked this:

[Pollan bought] an "organic" chicken whose "free-range" label was authorized by U.S.D.A. statutes, but which actually shared a shed with twenty thousand other genetically identical birds. Two small doors in the shed opened onto a patch of grass, but they remained shut until the birds were five or six weeks old, and two weeks later Pollan’s "free range" chicken was a $2.99-a-pound package in his local Whole Foods.

Yet after examining all the problems with the organic industry in a spirit sympathetic to sustainable environmentalism, the writer unexpectedly turns on us. He writes:

Pollan seems aware of the contradictions entailed in trying to eat in this rigorously ethical spirit, but he doesn’t give much space to the most urgent moral problem with the organic ideal: how to feed the world’s population. At the beginning of the twentieth century, there was a serious scare about an imminent Malthusian crisis: the world’s rapidly expanding population was coming up against the limits of agricultural productivity. The Haber-Bosch process [manufacturing synthetic fertilizers] averted disaster, and was largely responsible for a fourfold increase in the world’s food supply during the twentieth century. Earl Butz, Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture, was despised by organic farmers, but he might not have been wrong when he said, in 1971, that if America returned to organic methods "someone must decide which fifty million of our people will starve!" According to a more recent estimate, if synthetic fertilizers suddenly disappeared from the face of the earth, about two billion people would perish.

As usual, this argument is made without considering the incredibly inefficient uses of grain caused by meat eating. Depending on the animal and the livestock farming methods, eating animals uses 7-10 times more grain than feeding people directly. 70-80 percent of corn, the biggest grain crop in the USA, is used to feed animals. So ending meat consumption, or even significantly reducing it, would free up a huge amount of cropland that could be used for organic farming, which is less efficient in the short term but far more sustainable in the long term.

Of course in many ways the American agriculture system is unique in the world (tho, disastrously, market penetration and increased meat eating are leading many countries to adopt it). So the contradiction between feeding everyone and the urgent need for sustainable agriculture isn't quite as easily solved globally as it could be in the American case. The author of this article seems to think that we should simply give up, especially in light of the fact that "[t]o insist that we are consuming not just salad but a vision of society isn’t wrong, but it’s biting off more than most people are able and willing to chew."

Yet simply because markets and dysfunctional politics insulate people from the destructive consequences of their eating doesn't mean we should quit trying to change things. Two key reforms in addition to reducing meat consumption are needed. First, prices need to reflect the ecological damage caused by different kinds of consumption so that people can start making choices that are socially and environmentally rational. This would handily fix the problem of people not caring about the consequences of their eating. Of course markets are incapable of delivering such prices, so a new system of taxes and regulations on energy, petrochemicals, monoculture cropping, and meat production is needed as we move towards an economy like parecon that is friendly to this kind of cost accounting.

Second, I think the left needs to start thinking seriously about population control. I have a lot of bad associations with population control, like the coercive policies of China and many other countries or the tendency of advocates from the rich countries to blame the world's problems on population increase in poor countries when high levels of consumption in the rich countries are actually more destructive. Yet I think there's potential in a progressive approach to population control, as shown in the Indian province of Kerala, by emphasizing women's empowerment and economic equality. This is something we need to think about if we want to achieve global equality by increasing the material standard of living of poor people rather than dramatically lowering it for rich people.

Nationalism and competitiveness

To: Brent Staples
Re: "Why American College Students Hate Science"

You write:
"[If we don't prioritize the training of scientists], America is unlikely to preserve its privileged position in an increasingly competitive and science-based global economy."

Since you frequently and insightfully write about race in America, I was surprised and disappointed by this line of argument. Would you accept a white person who called on other whites to train white students in order to outcompete other races? I doubt it - I assume you'd argue that racial competition is harmful and leads to racial supremacy, that the answer is not intensified competition but an end to racism and the establishment of real equality.

Is there a difference between this kind of competitive racial thinking and the nationalism you draw on to make your argument? Is fighting to keep your nation on top really any different from fighting to keep your race on top? Is American supremacy any less objectionable than white supremacy?

Why the US alliance with Israel?

A long-running debate on the left has been revived by the controversial report "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. Why is the US alliance with Israel so strong?

It's a puzzling question because the level of commitment the USA has given Israel is without comparison. The USA devotes about one-fifth of its total foreign aid budget to Israel and Israel has been the leading recipient of foreign aid every year since 1976, for a total of $140 million since World War II (cited in Mearsheimer and Walt). Mearsheimer and Walt succinctly demolish the idea that the reason for these incredible levels of support has anything to do with the moral superiority of Israel, and they throw into question strategic rationales for the alliance. Their answer is that the incredible influence of the Israel lobby over foreign policy is responsible for the alliance.

Mearsheimer and Walt, two leading academic proponents of foreign policy "realism", argue that American interests are not served by the alliance with Israel, and that the Israel lobby distorts America's rational self-interest. Many people on the left basically agree, and in addition to the moral imperative of ending support for the human rights violations of Israel, argue against the alliance.

But other leftists have a different explanation for the USA-Israel alliance. They argue that it's not the Israel lobby that explains the alliance, but the strategic necessities of American imperialism. Israel is a proxy for the United States in a region that the USA insists on dominating because of its unmatched energy resources. Norman Finkelstein makes this argument on ZNet. Michael Neumann responds to Finkelstein, arguing strongly against the idea of strategic interests driving American Israel policy, on Counterpunch.

The analytical disagreement on the left often falls along radical/liberal lines. Radicals tend to argue that deep structures (capitalism or the state) are driving foreign policy, whereas liberals tend to argue it's more individuals and ideology. The radical demand for revolutionary change follows from their argument, while the liberal prescription of convincing our leaders of their follies follows from theirs.

On Israel, the arguments break down similarly: liberals like Neumann say the alliance is just a result of the Israel lobby and that our leaders should recognize that the alliance is actually detrimental to national interests. Radicals like Finkelstein and Noam Chomsky say the alliance is actually a structural imperative, and if we want to help the Palestinians we have to fundamentally attack American imperialism and the very concept of national interests.

As to the merits of their arguments, Neumann overstates a number of his arguments to the point of disingenuousness. He tries to play down the strength of Israel, the unreliability of other regional American allies, and the precariousness of Gulf state elites. But Israel really is many times militarily stronger than any other state in the region. Popular feeling in Israel really does make it a far more dependable ally than any Arab state will ever be. And the grip on power of Gulf state elites is far more tenuous than Neumann acknowledges. This has been a constant concern of US planners for 60 years. Furthermore, statements like "The US relies on its fleet and can easily launch devastating attacks without any land bases at all" and "Egypt's instability would quickly vanish were it so lucky as Israel with American largesse, and were America to wean itself of its attachment to Israel" - are simply completely wrong.

On the other hand, he makes a good point: the USA really doesn't seem to be getting much out of Israel strategically. So why the alliance?

I don't think it's simply because of the Israel lobby. The China lobby, which supported the Guomindang against the Communists in the Chinese civil war, makes an instructive comparison. It was extremely powerful in Congress and counted many influential and wealthy people in its ranks, yet the USA dropped the Guomindang in an instant as soon as the strategic realities called for it.

Another interesting point is something Finkelstein mentions: before the 1967 war, the USA was pretty much indifferent to Israel, afterward it became one of America's most important allies almost immediately. This points strongly to something other than the Israel lobby at work. Chomsky argues the 1967 war showed Israel to be the preeminent military power in the region, and that's what made it newly attractive as an ally.

I do think the alliance is primarily strategic. Yet I'm not convinced that it's because Israel is useful for projecting American power. Israel probably is seen as a trump card in case anything really catastrophic for American domination of the region happens, but I’m not sure this is adequate to explain the extraordinary levels of support it receives. Despite the destabilizing effects of the alliance on the USA’s other regional client states that Neumann points out, planners may also be acting to actually stabilize the Middle East. By making Israel far stronger than any of its opponents, the Arab countries have been forced to give up the idea of starting another war. Israel has also long provided secret aid to American projects around the world, from training counterinsurgency forces in Central America to aiding covert American operations in the Middle East.

I’m not really satisfied with these answers either, and must admit that I can’t fully explain the alliance with Israel. But I will come down on the side of the radicals in that I don’t think American support for Israel can be separated from the larger question of American domination of the Middle East, and that we should oppose not only the Israel lobby but the idea of national interests itself, which animates the Mearsheimer and Walt critique and is at least exploited by otherwise humanitarian-minded liberals.

Those who criticize American human rights violations are "unpredictable and potentially dangerous"

Irani President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sent a long, polemical letter to George Bush two days ago, the first direct communication between the two governments’ leaders since 1979. Predictably, the Bush administration dismissed the letter because "It isn't addressing the issues that we're dealing with in a concrete way" (Rice) and "it did not answer the main question that the world is asking, and that is, 'When will you get rid of your nuclear program?'" (Bush). The USA isn’t interested in dealing with any communication except one that announces capitulation to American demands.

The media have learned nothing from the Iraq debacle. Reporters immediately adopted the viewpoint of the US government, using polemical language to describe the letter ("screed" was popular, also "rambling", "diatribe"); highlighting those parts of it - condemnations of liberal democracy and Israel - least likely to get a receptive audience in the States; and devoting more space in their articles to American officials dismissing it than to what it had to say. (See The New York Times, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, USA Today).

In typical condescension, to the extent the media took the letter seriously it was to gain insight into "their mentality" (The New York Times quoting a high official). ABC News said the letter "provides a fascinating and disturbing look into the mind of one of the world's most unpredictable and potentially dangerous leaders." USA Today took a look into that mind and found "a naive leader whose beliefs stem from resentment and ignorance of the Western world". Sally Buzbee, the AP's Chief of Middle East News concluded that "the Muslim world" remains fixated on "a long list of grievances" from as long as 50 years ago but that if Ahmadinejad "won't budge on the nuclear issue[,] it's going to be nearly impossible for anybody in the West ever really to talk with [him]."

It's interesting to see how the media impose this feeling of otherness on the US government's enemies. If you actually read the letter, you find some hypocrisy, a lot of problematic political philosophy - and a lot of very progressive stands on key issues that the media ignores because the US government doesn't talk about them.

Using the rhetorically powerful device of asking Bush whether Jesus would agree with the policies that Bush has pursued, Ahmadinejad raises the key issues he sees dividing the US and Iran. They include the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the torture of prisoners, Israel's human rights violations and American support for them, American opposition to the Irani nuclear program (which he casts as pursuit of technology rather than pursuit of nuclear weapons), American opposition to democratically elected governments in Palestine and Latin America, the coverup (he claims) of US government involvement in orchestrating 9/11, and the USA spending money on the military when it could be spent to address poverty. He writes:

If billions of dollars spent on security, military campaigns and troop movement were instead spent on investment and assistance for poor countries, promotion of health, combating different diseases, education and improvement of mental and physical fitness, assistance to the victims of natural disasters, creation of employment opportunities and production, development projects and poverty alleviation, establishment of peace, mediation between disputing states, and extinguishing the flames of racial, ethnic and other conflicts, were would the world be today?

He also lists a number of specific abuses committed by the USA against Iran:

the coup d'etat of 1953 and the subsequent toppling of the legal government of the day, opposition to the Islamic revolution, transformation of an Embassy into a headquarters supporting the activities of those opposing the Islamic Republic (many thousands of pages of documents corroborate this claim), support for Saddam in the war waged against Iran, the shooting down of the Iranian passenger plane, freezing the assets of the Iranian nation, increasing threats, anger and displeasure vis-a-vis the scientific and nuclear progress of the Iranian nation...

In every point here, with the sole exception of his implication that the US government was involved in the 9/11 attacks, Ahmadinejad is raising urgent and justified criticisms of the US government. More than a few Americans might agree with these criticisms, if they were ever made aware that Iran was making them. Instead the media and government write off what Iranis actually say as some sort of psychological problem and return to the matter at hand: preserving the monopoly on nuclear weapons in the Middle East for the USA and Israel.

Of course we shouldn't romanticize Ahmadinejad or the Irani government's resistance against American power - as the rest of the letter makes clear, Ahmadinejad is not approaching these issues from anything close to a progressive standpoint. Yet we should also be clear: it is the right of all states to acquire nuclear weapons if an aggressive, nuclear-armed imperialist power is threatening them. The United States, which is itself responsible for much of what's wrong in the Middle East, has no right to make demands on anyone in the region. Problems in the Middle East will persist as long as the many legitimate demands raised by Ahmadinejad continue to be ignored by the US government, media, and public.

Here's a shock

From The Washington Post, Projected Iraq War Costs Soar:

Even if a gradual troop withdrawal begins this year, war costs in Iraq and Afghanistan are likely to rise by an additional $371 billion during the phaseout, the report said, citing a Congressional Budget Office study. When factoring in costs of the war in Afghanistan, the $811 billion total for both wars would have far exceeded the inflation-adjusted $549 billion cost of the Vietnam War.

The environment under parecon

I've been reading Robin Hahnel's book Economic Justice and Democracy, which came out last year. The book has some interesting things to say about why libertarian socialists have failed in the past, a strong but not very detailed argument against markets, and one of the more complete responses to critics of participatory economics. But what I want to bring up here is his proposal for how parecon would institutionally deal with the environment.

For those unfamiliar with parecon, it's a proposal for a nonmarket, democratically-planned economy with nonhierarchical workplaces and an egalitarian distribution of incomes. Parecon proponents argue that it's also far more environmentally friendly than capitalism.

The reason markets are fundamentally incompatible with environmental sustainability is that prices are determined exclusively by agreement between the buyer and seller. That means that the ways production and consumption affect other people and the environment is structurally ignored. Thus the price of gasoline only takes into account oil companies' costs to extract, refine, and distribute gas - not the costs incurred by the people who breathe the fumes or the damage to poor Bangladeshis when global warming increases flooding.

A secondary problem with markets is that they're biased towards individual consumption and against collective consumption, which makes collective environmental solutions like public transit much harder to implement.

To the extent that the environmental movement has mobilized effectively, or that elites have begun to fear that wholesale environmental damage will endanger their lives or power, governments intervene in markets thru taxes and regulations to undo some of the environmental damage. But another feature of markets - their tendency to concentrate wealth - allows corporations to manipulate governments and inevitably environmental policies fall short.

Parecon structurally removes the power of corporations by decentralizing wealth and balancing the power of enterprises with that of consumers. It removes the obstacles to collective investment in environmental solutions thru democratic planning. But the key innovation Hahnel proposes is in how prices are determined for environmental damage. (Some knowledge of the participatory planning mechanism is needed to understand the following. A short overview is available here.)

In each iteration in the annual planning procedure there is an indicative price for every pollutant in every relevant region representing the current estimate of the damage, or social cost of releasing a unit of that pollutant into the region. What is a pollutant and what is not are decided by federations representing those who live in a region, who are advised by scientists employed in research and development operations run by the resident federation.... If a worker council located in an affected region proposes to emit x units of a particular polluntant they are "charged" the indicative price for that pollutant in that region times x, just like they are charged y times the indicative price of a ton of steel if they propose to use y tons of steel as inputs in their production process... The consumer federation for the relevant region looks at the indicative price for a unit of every pollutant that impacts the region and decides how many units it wishes to allow to be emitted. The federation can decide they do not wish to permit any units of a pollutant to be emitted: in which case no worker council operating in the region will be allowed to emit any units of that pollutant. But, if the federation decides to allow x units of a pollutant to be emitted in the region, then the regional federation is "credited" with x times the indicative price for that pollutant. (p. 198-199, italics in original)

So the process goes like this:

1. In the first round of planning, a regional federation names what it considers pollutants and the upper limit of what it will tolerate in its region.
   
2. Enterprises make requests for the kinds of pollution they plan on producing and are charged the first-round iterative price on those polluntants, just as they are for other inputs.
   
3. If the total request on the amount of some pollutant in that region runs against the limit set by the regional federation, the Iteration Facilitation Board (IFB) adjusts the iterative price upward for the next round to reflect a surplus of demand; if the total is lower than the federation limit, the price is adjusted downward. Regions receive consumption credits according to how much pollution they allow.
   
4. Plans are adjusted in light of the new prices and the process continues thru subsequent rounds of planning.

To make it concrete, let's take some pollutant X as an example. The Kansas consumer federation determines that X's effects are most relevant at that level, and decrees that y tons of X are acceptable for the coming year. All enterprises calculate how much X they can afford to produce in light of the iterative prices supplied by the IFB, which took last year's price and adjusted it in light of projected trends. In the first round of planning we find that Kansas enterprises have proposed to produce twice as much X as what Kansas is willing to allow. Given the excess demand for X, the IFB now revises its price much higher, so that enterprises will look for other production techniques that produce less X and so that consumers will switch to products whose manufacture produces less X. (Consumer adjustments will actually take place in the round after producer adjustments since only in the round after reduced production proposals are submitted will the prices of those products go up to reflect lower supply for steady demand.)

In some ways this is a brilliant fix. It not only forces enterprises to take into account their environmental impact at the point of production and normalizes this as part of the production process rather than an as a form of external government interference. It also produces socially-determined prices for the pollution itself, balancing the benefits of pollution with its damage to people and - if there's an active environmental movement - other life. And it has the additional benefit of compensating those who tolerate greater pollution for their sacrifice.

Some questions I have:

• Could the process be manipulated by federations? E.g., couldn't some federation name an innocuous industrial byproduct to be a pollutant and thereby reap consumption credits for that byproduct's release in its region?
  
• Do higher-level regional federations pre'empt lower ones? If the Sichuan provincial federation says that X is not a pollutant but the Chengdu city federation disagrees, what happens?
  
• Hahnel doesn't specify at what level the pollutant price is adjusted - is it adjusted for the whole economy, or for each different federation, yielding many different prices thruout the economy? Is either one of these problematic?
  
• How does the "polluter pays" principle figure into the pollution caused not by producers but by consumers thru their use of products? The obvious example here is cars - how is car pollution accounted for? Would some surcharge imposed on gasoline be an adequate fix? How does the damage caused by second-hand smoke get factored into prices?

What do yous think about this proposal? Any answers to these questions? Any questions of your own?

Good thing I'm not running for office, because high gas prices make me happy

I'm a bit conflicted about gas prices. Whenever prices go up all the stories on how expensive gas is hurting average people starting showing up - like here and here, or this one on taxi drivers in Beijing.

Yet I also feel a certain sense of satisfaction when I read about how prices are finally forcing people to stop wasting gas and start considering different ways of moving around, or cutting down on frivolous car trips. It's important to see energy consumption in context. The process that makes car use possible - car manufacture and oil extraction, refining, and transportation - as well as the kind of (sprawling) cities that follow widespread car use exact a terrible toll on the environment. That is, the convenience of cars is bought at the price of the destroyed lives of huge numbers of animals and plants.

Car culture also exacts a severe toll on future generations, which will have to adapt to the possibly catastrophic effects of global warming and will have to deal with all the toxins associated with producing and using cars. Finally, keeping gas cheap also involves a long and bloody American foreign policy of propping up reactionary, authoritarian elites willing to sell their oil at US-determined "reasonable" prices and fighting wars to preserve American domination of the global oil industry.

Add to this the fact that many countries impose taxes on gas that raise prices to more than 2 times current American prices and the howls of pain we hear from Americans start to seem a little petty. Only massive sacrifices of the environment, foreign lives, and future generations have allowed Americans to enjoy low gas prices for so long. The sooner these terrible subsidies come to an end, the better.

The embarassing spectacle of Republicans' flailing attempts to buy off angry gas buyers - quickly withdrawn after business tugged on the reigns - has been matched by the Democrats' embarassing demagoguery on the gas price issue. Certainly the best way to deal with this would be for a powerful, radical environmental movement to lead a less painful transition to sustainable public transit as part of a larger shift to a more egalitarian economy and a progressive foreign policy. But since no such movement currently exists, high gas prices are probably the only thing that can force Americans out of their complacency. So I'm keeping my fingers crossed for $4/gallon - and higher - as soon as possible.

China's at it again, messing up all the human rights progress the USA is always making

From China's Leader Signs Oil Deals With Africans:

Unlike the United States, which often demands human rights improvements in exchange for trade deals, China takes the opposite approach.

I don't think I'm just being polemical when I say this - what the hell is he talking about? When has the USA demanded human rights improvements before signing trade deals? That's not just a rhetorical question - if someone can set me straight on this, please do. But I'm pretty sure that America has trade agreements with a good number of countries that boast atrocious human rights records.

It's a bad sign when reporters at the most liberal newspaper have already fallen into line behind the US propaganda line in the approaching cold war with China.

Btw, China's "opposite approach" turns out to be "the principle of noninterference in others' internal affairs", rather than what the phrasing would lead you to expect, that China demands increased human rights abuses before it signs trade deals.

May Day in China

Yesterday was International Workers Day, a public holiday in China. More than that, it's the beginning of one of China's three annual 金黄周/"golden weeks", official public holidays lasting 7 days. The others are 国庆节/National Day (starting October 1), celebrating the founding of 中华人民共和国/the People's Republic, and 春节/Spring Festival (aka Chinese New Year, usually sometime in February), China's most important holiday. The fact that May Day merits inclusion in that illustrious company is a jarring reminder that the country is still nominally Communist.

Tho not much more than that. Even more than the USA's thoroughly domesticated Labor Day, May Day in China represents all those forces exploiting, disempowering, and marginalizing workers. Most of China's new middle classes get a week off work, using the time to pursue the consumerist dreams inculcated in them by the commercial forces that have overwhelmed China. Tourism is the most visible pursuit, as millions upon millions make for the beaches of 大连/Dalian and 青岛/Qingdao, the national monuments and famous parks of 北京/Beijing, the bright lights of 上海/Shanghai, or the natural wonders of Southwest China. Shopping is the next biggest priority, and shopping meccas like 香港/Hongkong or local centers like Beijing's 西单/Xidan and 王府井/Wangfujing are inundated with the winners from 改革开放/reform and opening.

The consumerist excesses of the holiday could hardly be possible without all those workers who serve the needs of the nouveaux riches. In a poignant reversal of May Day's original meaning, the most exploited workers are made to stay on the job in order to answer to the beck and call of moneyed few.

Meanwhile, as May Day becomes a ritual performance of China's class domination in the cities, the majority of the population looks on from the sidelines of the countryside, having gained too little from reform and opening to do anything but yearn for the consumerist visions that have established hegemony in China.

Are vegetarianism/animal rights/animal liberation philosophically incoherent?

From a humanist (human-supremicist) standpoint, there are many strong reasons to reduce meat eating. The key one, I think, is that current livestock practices undermine the environmental sustainability needed for human life to flourish. But we should be clear - this argument doesn't require eliminating animal eating or animal exploitation, only reducing them.

I don't think humanism can stand up to the anti-speciesist argument. Separating humans from other life and calling for the right to life, freedom, and equality for humans is based on the arbitrarily-chosen "special properties" of humans. No argument is made for why protection from torture and murder should follow from the ability to use language or demonstrate self-consciousness. And frequently humanists still want to protect even those humans who don't possess such properties, like the severely retarded or comatose.

The question is whether an anti-humanist perspective is any more viable. Once you recognize that the arbitrarily-drawn categories that protect humans are invalid, I don't see how you can avoid accepting that all life, including plants and insects, is equally deserving of protection. Where does that leave us, living in an industrial society that necessarily kills millions upon millions of plants and insects?

At some point I think we have to accept that to live is to kill, that nothing short of the elimination of all humans (and all predators for that matter) is consistent with anti-humanist rights to life and freedom. It goes without saying that such a solution, which demands massive killing, is itself inconsistent with these commitments.

So where does that leave us? I think harm reduction is really the only appropriate way forward, unless you want to go straight for absolute nihilism. We have to reduce as far as possible the human impact on other living things. Some obvious measures include:

1) Stop eating most animals,
2) Promote sustainable agriculture,
3) Pursue population control,
4) Produce and consume less,
5) Research technologies that keep unwelcome animals out of human habitats without hurting them.

But these guidelines are less absolute than a lot of us are used to. I don't think there's any question we should stop eating mammals and birds, since raising them for food not only involves killing them but also killing all the plant feed they eat. However, it's less clear that eating wild fish and insects is a problem. We should certainly consume less, but what kinds of consumption are indispensable remains an open question. An impact reduction approach also fails to answer questions of how to balance the need to prevent suffering with the need to prevent killing, and where all this leaves the matter of animal exploitation.

Thoughts?

A war of each (plus parents) against all

This is a pretty interesting article about how parents in the USA are increasingly subsidizing their kids well into adulthood.

The Bank of Mom and Dad

There are some pretty surprising numbers here, including these: "Parents pay $2,323 a year to help support children 25 and 26 years old, said Dr. Schoeni, and $1,556 annually for offspring 33 and 34."

Disappointingly, the reporter does a half-assed job exploring what might be causing this trend. She gestures toward unfavorable economic conditions - "paychecks have stalled, housing costs have risen, education costs have skyrocketed and credit has become so available as to be dangerous" - but then settles on a different explanation. Namely, today's youth are more choosy, so "extended education, the exploration of career options and delayed marriage are the causes of the long transition to self-sufficiency".

My own suspicion is that this represents an adaptation to the realignment of capitalism that began 30 years ago. The postwar settlement that created equitable growth and secure if powerless jobs for the nation's workers has been steadily torn down and replaced with steep inequality and fierce competition. Those parents with the means to do so are trying to preserve a middle class life for kids who simply can't do it on their own, and trying to give them a competitive edge in the increasingly bitter struggle for the dwindling number of jobs that can financially support lives considered respectable and comfortable.

This brings up an issue that the reporter was curiously silent on - what happens to all those kids whose parents simply can't afford to give them the financial space they need to explore careers, attend business school, law school, med school, or grad school, or accumulate the low-wage experience on which they can build successful careers? This seems like far the more interesting story, where we can see the naked class struggle going on beneath the generosity of parental love.

Tofu eating revealed to be immoral

The front page article in The New York Times Magazine this week is a long and self-indulgent intellectualization of the killing and eating of animals, "The Modern Hunter-Gatherer". If you cut away all the fat, it comes down to this:

there is a part of me that envies the moral clarity of the vegetarian, the blamelessness of the tofu eater. Yet part of me pities him too. Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris. Ortega suggests that there is an immorality in failing to look clearly at reality, or in believing the force of human will can somehow overcome it.

I have some sympathy for the moral imperative to be honest about reality. Yet I'm at an utter loss as to how a desire to change the systematic brutality of that reality can thereby be dismissed with the wave of a hand. Or as to how the author, after extensive and dramatically rehearsed expressions of disgust and shame at his killing of a wild pig, can resolve all this in a few lines of confused pseudo-philosophy.

Progressive reformers inside a colonial puppet state

This is a political fable from a book I'm reading called Japan's Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism by Louise Young (1998).

I didn't know much about Japanese imperialism in Manchuria before reading this book, so I was pretty surprised to learn that Japanese leftists were very supportive of 满洲国/Manzhouguo (usually rendered in English as Manchukuo - the puppet state created by the Japanese military in today's 东北/Dongbei, northeast China). Not only that, leftist intellectuals in droves actually took up jobs in the Manzhouguo colonial administration and, despite their deep skepticism of imperialism, enthusiastically took part in the Manzhouguo enterprise.

Young cites two main reasons for the bizarre alliance between Japan's most progressive intellectuals and its most right-wing force, the military. First, public intellectual space in Japan was rapidly closing down as the climate of repression and compulsory nationalism forced many leftist intellectuals out of their previous safe haven in the universities. At the same time, ideological space in Manzhouguo was suprisingly open as the military tolerated - until the early 1940s at least - liberal and leftist academics because it needed their cooperation in gathering key information to form policy and suppress opposition. Excluded and facing persecution at home, leftists surged into the many research, administration, and policymaking jobs in Manzhouguo.

Second, leftists genuinely believed that they could make a revolution in Manzhouguo. Disappointed by the failure of their dreams on the home islands, they turned to Japan's newest colony. Yet they came not in desperation or weariness, but with great optimism. The absolute power of the colonial state to crush local opposition to progressive reform - which had been frustrated time and again inside Japan by intransigent landowners and businessmen - made the leftists believe that their dreams could be achieved. This time, working from the inside would succeed.

How valid these hopes actually were is captured in this vignette:

Mantetsu's [the state-controlled enterprise that had a vast research arm responsible for supplying much of the information needed by the military puppet regime] researchers and Sinologists...tried to provide analyses that took account of the force of Chinese nationalism and advised that military aggression would just make the problems worse. The "Investigation of the Resistance Capacity of the Chinese"..., one of the enormous "integrated" research projects undertaken by Mantetsu at the close of the decade, aimed to convince the army of this point as forcefully as possible.... Under the general editorship of Japanese Communist Party operative Nakanishi Kō, the report submitted to the Kwantung Army [hanyu pinyin: Guandong Army, the Japanese military force running Manzhouguo] in 1940...asserted that Japan could not win the war with China militarily. But when Nakanishi presented the research team's findings with the recommendation that Japan end the war politically to general staff headquarters in Tokyo, he was greeted with silence and finally one question from a young staff officer: "So, then, what sites would it be best for us bomb?" (p. 280-281)

There's two lessons we can take away from this. First, the Chomskian analysis that judges all progressive rhetoric surrounding imperialism as nothing more than cynical manipulation is too simple. Many imperialists deeply believe that what they're doing will forge a more just, more equal world. Of course, the Chomskian skepticism of such claims is, at least in this case, borne out.

Second, "working from within" to accomplish change is a questionable proposition. I wouldn't say it's inappropriate under all circumstances. Yet it does take a nearly willful naïveté to think you can turn institutions in which ultimate power is held by fundamentally right-wing or reactionary forces toward progressive ends. A current example that springs immediately to mind is those progressives who championed the invasion of Iraq as an instance of humanitarian intervention despite the overwhelming evidence that the institutions actually planning the invasion had far different purposes in mind.

More broadly, it's worth questioning whether working from within the state or any corporation is more likely to promote reform or merely provide the information that the leaders of these organizations need to execute their assuredly anti-progressive policies. People are remarkably agile in the rationalizations they perform to justify taking secure or lucrative jobs, but I suspect that "working from within" is almost never useful except when those "working from the outside" are particularly strong.

letter to the editor, re: Iran and disarmament

To the editors:
Accepting a nuclear-armed Iran, which is acting primarily because sworn nuclear-armed enemies (the US and Israel) surround it, is certainly preferable to the current course (The New York Times, "Suppose We Just Let Iran Have the Bomb", 2006 March 19). But a better option is to discuss a different "unthinkable" - worldwide nuclear disarmament.

As the world's leading nuclear power, and the national security threat prompting both Iran and North Korea to develop nuclear arsenals, only the United States could lead such a campaign. Yet the US government instead pursues the rank hypocrisy of designating which countries are "responsible" and thus allowed to proliferate.

Iran's violations of the NPT have been the focus of much public discussion. Yet the US is also breaking its word on the NPT - it and the other nuclear-armed powers solemnly agreed to pursue disarmament. When will we Americans feel the same outrage against our own treaty violations as against those of others?

There are poor people in São Paulo?

I feel like it's a good idea to read articles in The New York Times travel section every now and then so we can renew our disgust against the moneyed classes. This Sunday's article on visiting São Paulo (The New São Paulo) proved especially effective. The author spent three days in São Paulo visiting expensive boutique stores, eating at expensive restaurants, and staying in expensive hotels. To give a taste of this:

My room at the Emiliano was soothing and sybaritic: white Egyptian cotton sheets and six pillows of different firmness; an Eames lounge chair upholstered in an oatmeal fabric; a wall of honey-colored wood that hid closets and two Sub-Zero drawer refrigerators stocked with drinks; and a large bathroom with a view of neighboring penthouses. As the guest services manager tried to teach me how to work all the lighting controls (which I never mastered), she told me she could send a butler to unpack my bags.

And the shopping?

Clube Chocolate is so chic that it has no display windows and is so exclusive that security guards flank the heavy wooden door that hides the glorious, airy interior. How would you know that inside there's a bright, three-story atrium with floor-to-ceiling palm trees and a sandy beach that you reach by descending a polished steel circular staircase?

Not once does the author mention that next door to this opulence lives an enormous slum population nearing 1 million people. The tiny percentage of Paulistas who have access to the city's luxuries, and who use private helicopters to commute between their high-security enclaves and jobs in the business districts, rests atop a working class of some 7 million, not to mention the absolute squalor of the under class. Perhaps the security guards that form a motif unnoticed by the author in his piece might have something to do with all this?

But to mention this would be bad form - it might be upsetting for rich New Yorkers to contemplate that the hotel charges for their weekend in São Paulo amount to far more than the yearly earnings of many hundreds of thousands of residents in the city.

It's taken a long time, but we'll get back to eugenics yet

Remember the good old days when we could rely on genetics to explain the undeniable cultural and psychological differences between nations? The holocaust did a number on that, and then insidious Communist ideas like the influence of the economy over culture and bothersome notions of the fluidity of identity just made things worse.

Fortunately we finally seem to be escaping those dark days. For the last 25 years we've seen the rise of a new Social Darwinism, known as sociobiology or evolutionary psychology. (This corresponds with a broad reorientation of capitalism leading to skyrocketing inequality and the dismantling of the liberal welfare project - but only a Communist would see a link between the two.) Up to now sociobiology has been used in the popular arena primarily to attack feminist theories of how gender is socially constructed, plus a few crude forays into racism.

An article in The New York Times Week in Review signals a new and richer approach: culture is a product of biological evolution. (The Twists and Turns of History, and of DNA) "Humans have continued to evolve throughout prehistory and perhaps to the present day, according to a new analysis of the genome reported last week by Jonathan Pritchard, a population geneticist at the University of Chicago. So human nature may have evolved as well." Therefore, "[e]volutionary changes in the genome could help explain cultural traits that last over many generations as societies adapted to different local pressures."

The reporter, Nicholas Wade, makes a bit of leap from genetic differences in "taste, smell or digestion" to the conclusion that "the concept of national character could turn out to be not entirely baseless". Or from the fact that "Oxytocin [a chemical that in some experiments is associated with a higher degree of trust] levels are known to be under genetic control in other mammals like voles" to the conclusion that trust is a biological trait that can come to characterize a society. But, as the author points out, a biological basis for culture explains why Amerindians are fierce and Jews are smart, so we seem to be on the right path.

(I guess I know why my girlfriend's smart, but it's still unclear how the evolutionary pressures on my farming forebears in Germany, Ireland, Wisconsin, and Iowa caused me to be smart. Further research will clarify this, I'm sure.)

The writer also implies that Jews and East Asians are smart because of genetic similarities - "Dr. Pritchard's team detected strong selection among East Asians in the region of the gene that causes Gaucher's disease, one of the variant genes common among Ashkenazim". And he very quietly hints at why black people and Latinos might be dumb: "a demand for greater cognitive skills...might well have arisen among the first settled societies where people had to deal with the quite novel concepts of surpluses, property, value and quantification."

The "first settled societies" emerged in Iraq, Egypt, northern China, and northern India/Pakistan, but don't be too surprised if people who take up this line of thinking use it to explain why whites and East Asians are the smartest people. Indeed, the process seems to already be under way. In Wade's news article on the story ("Still Evolving, Human Genes Tell New Story"), he writes, "Many of these instances of selection may reflect the pressures that came to bear as people abandoned their hunting and gathering way of life for settlement and agriculture, a transition well under way in Europe and East Asia some 5,000 years ago."

The emergence of Southeast Asia as a Sino-American battleground

In the blinding spotlight of news coverage and commentary on terrorism and Iraq, what the United States is doing in the rest of the world has been mostly ignored. Yet in many ways, how the USA is dealing with the rising power of China will be far more important in the long run than anything that's going on in the Middle East now.

Preserving American power over Southeast Asia is a key component of the American strategy to contain Chinese power and defend US hegemony. Following closely a playbook written in the Cold War, American planners are restoring close patron-client relationships with the region's militaries. The goal is to ensure that, should it come to a showdown with China over control of Southeast Asia, the men with guns will be on the American side.

Yet the situation is very different from Cold War days, when revolutionary China inspired and aided left-wing uprisings against colonialism and national elites. Then, America brutalized Indochina and armed the military dictatorships in Indonesia, the Philippines, South Vietnam, and Thailand, all to keep the region in its grasp. Military aid was used mainly to suppress internal anti-American left-wing movements. Southeast Asia's national elites stood united against against this threat and looked to the USA for protection.

Now the threat is very different. China no longer stands for revolution, but instead for the capitalist status quo. Southeast Asia's national elites exterminated those who challenged them and now face no significant internal opposition. As the internal and external threats to Southeast Asian elites have receded, the fear that drove them into the American embrace has as well.

That leaves them exposed to the blandishments of China. China is no longer the closed country of the past, sponsoring attacks on established power in the region. It has become an economic powerhouse and a cautious participant in regional politics. As China forges more and more trade links with Southeast Asia's business elites, political authorities are less and less fearful of China's rising power.

Since 9/11 the US government has redoubled its efforts to counter China's growing influence. America has little advantage over China in monopolizing the affections of Southeast Asia's business elites, but it has much more to offer the region's other main powerbrokers - military men. Under cover of the war on "terrorism", the USA has rapidly rebuilt extensive links with militaries thruout Southeast Asia (see my analysis of the Indonesian case).

This is a dangerous game - dangerous, at least, for the people of Southeast Asia. Only thru great effort and sacrifice were military dictatorships pushed aside, and despite the winning of bourgois democracy the militaries of the region retain inordinate power. US strengthening of these militaries not only subverts Southeast Asian countries' autonomy in making decisions about their foreign relations, it also threatens to undo what few advances toward democratic societies have been achieved. And should an open confrontation between China and the United States develop, it promises to embroil Southeast Asians in another cold war. The last one cost millions of lives.

With all this in mind, USA-Southeast Asian relations should be a key topic of debate in the United States. Yet the media simply pass on the American government's bland public pronouncements on the situation, typified by this Council on Foreign Relations q-and-a, "New Focus On U.S.-Southeast Asia Military Ties" (also published on The New York Times website here). Like other coverage, this article ascribes American motives to the war on "terrorism" and blithely ignores the containment of China as an explanation for American moves in Southeast Asia. It provides distorted information on Southeast Asia's Islamist groups, casting them as mere Al Qaeda affiliates rather than exploring the much more salient domestic factors that gave rise to them. It misrepresents the Indonesian military (TNI) by playing down its continuing abuses, uncritically accepting the State Department's clearing the TNI of involvement in the killing of several Americans in Papua, and completely suppressing the bloody history of the Cold War relationship between America and the TNI. Worst of all, it fails to raise the key issues of how American military aid could tip the balance of power within Southeast Asian countries toward undemocratic forces, and the potential repercussions of using Southeast Asia as a proxy battleground in the developing contest with China.

New book by Michael Albert

As anyone likely to read this knows, I'm a big proponent of participatory economics as a replacement for capitalism. In my opinion, Michael Albert - one of the two who first proposed the parecon system - is one of the most important theorists of leftist politics now working. Altho I'm less taken by his prose style and interpersonal skills, I strongly recommend Albert's writing for anyone interested in progressive social change.

Albert's new book, Realizing Hope: Life beyond Capitalism is coming out this month. In it he goes beyond his previous work on parecon and movement building to discuss much more broadly what kinds of social arrangements we might work toward for a society of equality and participation. He takes up race, gender, the political system, and the environment; more narrowly focused issues like education, art, and crime; and ideological debates around Marxism and anarchism. He explores how a participatory economy would interact with these systems, and what our strategy could be to pursue radical change.

I haven't kept up with Albert's writing over the last couple years, so I'm interested to see what he has to say (especially on the matter of "other species", since his disdain for animal welfare/liberation movements has been all too evident in the past). Thinking thru the institutional basis for the kind of ethnic/racial, gender, and political relations we should be fighting for has been almost entirely abandoned by the left, and enunciating what kind of society we want is an urgent priority. Our strategy for pursuing radical change is similarly neglected, and sometimes it seems like Albert is the only one out there raising these issues. Hopefully this book makes the kind of vital contributions Albert has made in the past, and even more important, that it helps stimulate the discussions we need to be having on vision and strategy.

book info and table of contents
Introduction to the book
interview with Albert on the book

Doctors, journals, drug companies - teamwork!

As if it wasn't already clear enough, here's some more evidence that the pharameutical system is massively messed up. The Wall Street Journal had an article last week on medical journals publishing drug company-commissioned articles under the names of ostensibly independent researchers:

Many of the articles that appear in scientific journals under the bylines of prominent academics are actually written by ghostwriters in the pay of drug companies. These seemingly objective articles, which doctors around the world use to guide their care of patients, are often part of a marketing campaign by companies to promote a product or play up the condition it treats.....

The practice of letting ghostwriters hired by communications firms draft journal articles -- sometimes with acknowledgment, often without -- has served many parties well. Academic scientists can more easily pile up high-profile publications, the main currency of advancement. Journal editors get clearly written articles that look authoritative because of their well-credentialed authors.

And drug companies get propaganda that looks objective. Well I guess everyone wins, then.

I think it's fairly obvious that producing pharmaceuticals for profit leads to prioritizing research for the treatment of problems that afflict those with money. It provides a strong incentive for rich countries to strong-arm poor countries into respecting their "intellectual property" and thus go without drugs that could be produced cheaply. And as this article once again makes clear, it corrupts everyone involved. There's nothing magical about profit that leads to better R&D - drug companies should be nationalized and run in the public interest.

Aw, India's growing up

The USA is trying to browbeat India into signing on to its anti-Iran policies. American leaders see this as acceptable because over the last 10 years India has moved to ally itself with the USA, and everyone knows that American allies better do exactly what they're told.

In this context, an unnamed senior US official says, "The Indians are emerging from their nonaligned status and becoming a global power, and they have to begin to think about their responsibilities." This rhetoric is fascinating! So once you agree to subordinate yourself to American power, then you're a global power (seems somewhat counterintuitive). And global powers (American lackeys) have a "responsibility" to fall into line behind US diktats. Isn't it amazing how almost any formulation can seem correct and natural once you use the right language?

American ambassadors in Latin America say the damndest things

"Nobody is going to support a situation in which a democratically elected president is removed in a very dubious manner."

-- US Ambassador to Nicaragua Paul Trivelli

I guess that depends on which day of the week it is.

Why do we celebrate Labor Day?

"Labor Day was started in September of 1882, and quickly became an official holiday at the same time May Day spread throughout the world. Labor Day is a time to celebrate the contributions American workers had given their country, unlike May Day events, which focused on the international class struggle. It remains a patriotic holiday, and compared to the first May Day demonstrations, Labor Day is recognized by relatively staid parades and speeches."

May Day: what happened to the radical workers' holiday?

Send forth the respectable protesters!

Todd Gitlin is once again calling for the domestication of the antiwar movement. He wants "the 'Giant Puppet,' 'Bongo circles for peace,' and 'Street Theatre' crowd" to stop running protests so as to avoid alienating mainstream support and allow the "adult" protesters to "increase their leverage and avoid getting painted into a corner."

He's making two substantive points: 1) "weird"/"immature" Americans participating in protests gives war apologists a chance to appeal to mainstream Americans - who might otherwise be skeptical of the war - on grounds of shared cultural identity; 2) the movement's attempt to link the war in Iraq to other issues, such as "the World Bank, Israel, and [a] demand [for] unilateral Nuclear Disarmament", is, well, it isn't good. He doesn't explain why, but we can assume it's because it distracts from the goal of getting American troops out of Iraq, which is easy to unify people behind, and brings in a lot of unrelated issues that might alienate mainstream supporters.

The first point is well-taken, but what's the point in blaming the left for it? Right-wing smear artists (and the media) will always play up elements in the protests that seem strange to mainstream Americans. And really, is street theater that alienating to average people? It's just puppets for godsakes. What Gitlin seems to want is to have serious men in business suits - the antiwar "adults" - negotiating with the serious men in business suits who are killing Iraqis. Those protesters who don't conform to the rules - both political and cultural - laid down by the people who run our society are to be excluded.

The second point? It's true that making connections between the war in Iraq and other aspects of American foreign policy, or global capitalism, or cultural imperialism will to some extent diffuse the power of the movement. But we have to ask ourselves, what is the point of the movement? Is it merely to get the troops out of Iraq? What would that accomplish, other than saving the lives of a small number of Americans? (Iraq is headed for civil war, as it was from the moment Saddam Hussein fell, so the USA leaving probably won't save any Iraqi lives.)

No, the most important goal of the movement is to use an unusually high-profile political issue to educate people on the fundamental source of the Iraq disaster - the global American system of political and economic domination. Drawing connections between that system and its consequences in Iraq and every other country in the world is our task. Pulling the troops out of Iraq will not prevent the next war, and will certainly do nothing to address the countless other human catastrophes currently under way because American global hegemony.

So the first thing the movement must do is radicalize people, ie show them the structural sources of problems that are usually attributed to the individual ineptitude or immorality of particular political leaders. Then it must bring them into the movement, because the only way that such deep-seated structures can be rooted out is thru an overwhelming popular mobilization. If the movement merely sends forth its respectable-looking representatives to negotiate an end to American involvement in Iraq, as Gitlin would have it, the whole thing will have been in vain.

The Times blames the victim, again

Kyle has a good analysis of the shockingly bad New York Times article on the UN killings in the Haitian slum of Cité Soleil. (Shocking? Okay, it's not that shocking.)

The original article is here.

The last time the USA considered nuking China

It's interesting how deeply hypocritical public culture is. Two poor countries constantly threatened by the most powerful country in the world try to develop nuclear weapons in self-defense, and are branded immoral and insane. American leaders talk about actually using nuclear weapons offensively, and it barely registers.

The Bush administration, of course, has talked publicly about using low-yield nukes, but what are they talking about behind closed doors, in records that the public won't have access to for 40 years? We don't know, but we do know what everyone's favorite liberal, JFK, was talking about in 1963:

'63 Tapes Reveal Kennedy and Aides Discussed Using Nuclear Arms in a China-India Clash

That's right, the Kennedy administration was seriously considering nuking China if it got into another war with India.

Defense Secretary Robert McNamara told Kennedy, "Any large Chinese Communist attack on any part of that area would require the use of nuclear weapons by the U.S., and this is to be preferred over the introduction of large numbers of U.S. soldiers." Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Maxwell Taylor says, "I would hate to think that we would fight this on the ground in a non-nuclear way." Kennedy goes along with them.

Jesus Christ! Using nuclear weapons so you don't have to send troops? It's surreal how matter-of-factly they talk about it. Yet another case of the banality of evil.

Yet it really shouldn't be that surprising: American leaders seriously considered using nuclear weapons in the wars in both Korea and Vietnam, and that would have killed far more people than presumably isolated nuclear bombing in the Himalayas - unless the hpyothetical war escalated. Yet it is surprising, because as Americans we're taught to see our leaders sympathetically, not as the demons foreign leaders are frequently made out to be. Yet the cold evidence is there: leaders both American and foreign act, and often think, in exactly the same ruthless ways and with the same blood-drenched results.

The icing on the cake is the quote from über-liberal George Ball (the only high administration official who opposed the Vietnam war): "If there is a general appearance of a shift in strategy to the dependence on a nuclear defense against the Chinese in the Far East, we are going to inject into this whole world opinion the old bugaboo of being willing to use nuclear weapons against Asians."

A classic liberal argument: don't massacre people, because it might make us look bad. It certainly tells you how debased the discourse - or possibly the person - is, when you have to appeal to the national interests in order to argue against that old bugaboo, mass murder.

The Times article, btw, misrepresents the border war between China and India as "an invasion of India by China, which sought to acquire disputed border territories". While border disputes left over from colonialism pretty much never allow for clear apportioning of blame, it's generally acknowledged that Indian provocations started the war, even tho China decisively won.

The delicate task of criticizing Tolerance

When I was in LA a couple weeks ago I went to the Museum of Tolerance. What is the Museum of Tolerance you ask? Well it turns out that it's mainly about learning to tolerate Jews and not kill 6 million of them. But it also comes out against all kinds of intolerance, from ethnic strife to homophobia to class hatred.

Hold on! Class hatred? A significant fraction of the time I spend talking with people is spent subtly encouraging class hatred, thru the insinuated disparagings of "rich people", "fancy shit", "bourgeois taste", "fatcat semi-fascist bastards, blood-suckers of the working class", and the like.

Sure it's nice to have little slogans telling the kids that "hatred is bad". But it's one thing to accept cultural diversity, quite another to tolerate Nazis and slaveowners and bosses - and I'm not uncomfortable grouping the last one in with the other two.

There was a sense of vacuity about the whole the place, of empty moralizing against "hatred" with little to no explanation of what causes hatred or how we can end it. Might intolerance have to do with struggles over control of resources or the state, or with politicians looking for a mass base to support their rise? Might all the different supremacies - based in race, gender, class, culture, or species - be fundamental parts of individuals' identities, structuring how people see the world and allowing them to accept all the many other ways it crushes them underfoot? If so, what structural social changes should we make, what strategies should we pursue, who are our allies and who our enemies?

Who knows? But I did learn this: Hatred is bad.

Isn't that cute? Bollywood wants to be like grown-ups

Bollywood's Leading Actor Goes Mainstream

This isn't a bad article on Bollywood movie star Aamir Khan, but what drew my attention was the headline.

Khan is making a high profile English-language movie in the hopes of breaking into international markets. Therefore he's going "mainstream".

The presumption here is that the American (British, Australian) market is central or normal, everything else is merely appealing to some niche audience. In this case a niche of 1 billion people.

The cultural arrogance is overwhelming, and it's exactly this sort of thinking that props up American and Western hegemony by casting the West as the lodestone around which the rest of the world rotates. The West works its will upon the rest of the world while everyone else waits with bated breath to see whether it will accept their importuning. Unfortunately, this is sometimes true - but the history and current practice of global inequality which lie at its root are rarely explored. And more often than not the people of other parts of the world are perfectly happy with their own cultural resources and don't see themselves as part of some marginal culture outside the "mainstream" of those (actually a rather small global minority) living in the rich countries.

The rotating door between government and corporations

Remember Michael Powell, Colin Powell's son who - definitely thru his own qualifications and not at all because of nepotism - became chairman of the FCC and did his utmost to end any sort of regulations on the rapidly consolidating media industry? (Is there even more than 1 company left now?)

Well, again exclusively thru his own qualifications and not at all because his political connections will enable him to manipulate the government, he's won a job as senior adviser to Providence Equity Partners, an equity firm whose main job is making deals and buying stakes in media corporations.

This illustrates one of the key processes in American elite formation and reproduction: the rotating door between government agencies that regulate corporations and high-paying consultancies with those same corporations. Someone holding a high position in a regulatory agency or working on regulations in Congress, as soon as he (occasionally she) leaves government, can expect to receive sweet job offers from all the companies he was just overseeing. Unless, of course, he did a good job regulating them, in which case the sweet jobs will not be forthcoming.

Having become "senior consultant" or whatever, he then goes on to use his connections in the bureaucracy or Congress to convince the people who succeeded him (themselves looking forward to sweet corporate jobs), of how closely the interests of his company line up with the public interest. Frequently the corporate consultant cycles right back into a regulatory position a few years down the road. This is a longstanding pattern, certainly not an innovation of the Bush administration.

Might this practice have some influence on the quality of the regulating process?

Adding insult to injury, this important and nearly universal phenomenon goes almost unremarked upon in the media. The Michael Powell story should count as one of the more egregious and high-profile examples of its kind given his crass pursuit of the media companies' interests during his tenure as regulator and his rapid move to working for the same companies. Yet it received only capsule treatment on page 14 in the Chicago Tribune, The New York Times didn't report it at all, and the Reuters article is literally a press release from Providence Equity Partners.

But surely TV news, freed by Michael Powell from the suffocating effect of all those rules and now able to properly do its job as watchdog for our great democracy, will come to our rescue.

I also have a less strident side

I've started a new blog to humor my less political impulses.
http://surpluslabor.blogspot.com

But fear not! I haven't given up on this one. Expect a fascinating new post soon.

Why would China want to control oil when we'll just sell it?

The New York Times has a good article today looking at CNOOC's attempt to buy Unocal from the strategic perspective of China: "China's Costly Quest for Energy Control". Unlike most of the other stuff written on this, reporter Joseph Kahn takes seriously the idea that the Chinese might have their own desires and interests, and that we might want to think about those instead of just the threat China poses to our clearly entirely-deserved global hegemony.

While making a big point of the fact that China is paying a lot of extra money to secure control over oil reserves rather than just buying on the open market, Kahn balances this by explaining exactly how threatened China feels by the USA's tight and expanding grip on world energy supplies. And he doesn't just dismiss these fears as paranoia. A great quote from a Chinese energy consultant explains it all: "A popular saying abroad is that oil is just a commodity that anyone who has money can buy. But this saying is most popular in the countries that already control the supplies."

Uzbekistan teaches how the world works

Sometimes journalists don't cover something that seems obvious because it "has a low news value". Now, I don't agree with this policy but if they wanted to be consistent, an article titled "Uzbek Ministries in Crackdown Received U.S. Aid" would never have been printed in The New York Times.

Because anyone who knows anything about the USA's history of training other countries' militaries and the nature of Uzbekistan's government would simply assume that people who have studied under US direction would participate in atrocities. The very substance of that training, which generally runs under the euphemisms "counterinsurgency" or "counterterrorism", involves disproportionate use of violence and targetting of civilians.

Uzbekistan's "counterterrorism" unit Bars is the latest in a long line of US-trained special forces that have committed atrocities. From the brutal Atlacatl brigade in El Salvador, responsible for massacring whole villages, to Indonesia's elite Kopassus, which has abducted and murdered dissidents for 40 years, to countless others, American training has been put directly to use in committing terrible crimes. And this is in addition to the more general military, diplomatic, and economic aid the USA habitually provides to repressive governments.

The article is useful in documenting the deep ties America has forged with Uzbekistan over the past 15 years and the probable direct involvement of recipients of American training in the massacre of protesters in Andijon on 2005 May 13. But the journalists simply repeat the formulaic explanation for why the USA is working so closely with such a repressive government - Uzbekistan is a key ally in the war on terror. Yet as the article itself goes on to say, the USA-Uzbekistan relationship long predates 9/11 and the American attack on Afghanistan. And it remains unclear why the USA has established permanent military bases in the country even tho their original need - to base warplanes attacking neighboring Afghanistan - is long gone.

In fact, the American alliance with Uzbekistan has little to do with terrorism and much to do with the struggle for big-power control in the key region of Central Asia. By taking the Afghanistan war as an excuse to establish military positions thruout the region, the USA not only pushed back Russia's traditional sphere of influence and made a step toward preventing the possible expansion of China's, it also moved to gain control of the major energy resources of Central Asia. Uzbekistan, tho its energy resources are much smaller than those of its neighbors, has the largest economy, the largest population, and the greatest military potential of any of them. It is an important prize, and the post-9/11 outright alliance with Uzbekistan represents a huge step forward for the American strategy of surrounding both Russia and China with client states and military bases.

It's important to go beyond the easy partisan points to be had from criticizing Bush's hypocrisy in aiding Uzbek autocrat Islam Karimov while earnestly condemning human rights violations committed by less docile rulers. Only by understanding the structural roots of military aid to despots - something that every American president, Democrat and Republican alike, has provided since World War II - can we hope to eliminate it.

The issue is not communism or terrorism, it's not immorality or myopia. The source of these policies is the defense of an international system that places power and wealth in the hands of a few countries, generally the same ones that colonized the world 100 years ago. Those who might challenge this order, whether petty tyrants in تهران/Tehran or 평양/Pyoengyang, or major players in 北京/Beijing or Москва/Moscow, must be contained or destroyed. Any means to that end is justified, including teaching our friends how to kill their innocent enemies.

Getting paranoid

China has always tried to keep control of the internet and regulate the kinds of things Chinese people say online. The New York Times reports that this monitoring has reached a new height, with the government requiring bloggers and owners of websites to register with the Information Ministry. The article also reports that users at Internet bars have to provide identification and are given user numbers, but I've never run into that.

There's definitely a fair number of dissidents active online, and what they're doing is certainly admirable. Unfortunately, I don't think their activities are going to have any more effect than mine are in changing the unjust policies of our respective governments.

I wish my Chinese was good enough to read what they're writing and report on how class-bound it is. Since any internet dissident would be an intellectual or student, I suspect most of the internet writing is about elections, freedom of speech, attacking corruption, &c - it's probably not about liberating workers and peasants. But that's just an assumption, someday maybe I can say for sure.

In any case, I've started getting more worried about the government running across my own blogging and deporting me or denying me a visa or something. So I finally took my name off the site. Lame. Probably they don't care, since Blogger is always blocked (tho you can sometimes get around it with a proxy like anonymouse), and it's not in Chinese, but i guess better safe than sorry.

Internet-brought democracy yet again imminent in China

Nicholas Kristof today writes about how the internet is bringing democracy to China.

This is the latest, and one of the most explicit, in a long line of American fantasies about how "the Internet is hastening China along the same path that South Korea, Chile and especially Taiwan pioneered. In each place, a booming economy nurtured a middle class, rising education, increased international contact and a growing squeamishness about torturing dissidents."

I'm sitting right now in one of those Chinese internet bars that Kristof seems to think are bestowing American-style liberalism directly upon the Chinese. But as I look around and see all the kids playing first-person shooter games and reading about new movies, I have my doubts. And as for chatting - I don't know about Kristof, but every political discussion I've tried to have over AIM or MSN Messenger has died in seconds.

As the rest of Kristof's formulation indicates, the internet is only a part of the dominant understanding in the USA of how "democracy" is won, viz. market reforms create a middle class which then demands elections and freedom of speech, assembly, &c.

This might be very flattering to the middle class, pro-market writers who propogate it, but it doesn't have much relation to the historical reality of the supposed models or to current trends in the supposedly democratizing countries. South Korea's democratization (such as it is) owes a lot to student and worker protest, very little to the commercial and professional classes that mostly disapproved of such disorder until reforms that served their interests were actually won. In China, the middle class is even less interested in major changes since they're intimately linked to the ruling class thru education and personal connections, and share a deep fear of workers and peasants.

If something is going to happen in China, it won't come from the complacent gamers in internet bars, and it won't follow the smug certainties of privileged Americans.

China's reserve army of labor

There's been a call from my loyal readers for some outrages from China, so here's the best one I can think of offhand.

Chinese cities are overrun with private guards. Guards in parking lots, guards at movie theaters, guards at the post office, guards in front of every housing community (unlike in the USA, a lot of Chinese cities' residential areas are all set up sort of like gated communities, so they're gated off and their access roads aren't thru streets). Most of these guards don't really do much of anything, since you can freely walk into most of these areas without them stopping you. Not that you'd be that intimidated in the first place - most of the guards look like they're 16 or 17. China is one of the safest places in the world (as long as you play by the rules), so I'm also not entirely sure why people feel the need for guards.

But the outrage isn't that there are guards, but the work conditions of the guards themselves. My school and the associated dorm/hotel has its own set of guards. All the guards are migrants from the countryside. They work 12 hours every day, 7 days a week (2 days off a month). They get paid 400 yuan a month, roughly $50, ie about 10 cents/hour. For comparison, a foreigner with no teaching skills (eg, me) can make the same amount of money teaching English for 4 hours that they make working 350 hours.

To be fair, the guards are given housing and food by the hotel. It's almost insultingly inadequate food and housing, but still an important benefit since they can save most of their income. But even this is compromised since the hotel uses it to regulate their personal lives. They have to sign out and sign in when they want to go anywhere, and apparently aren't allowed to consort with students off the premises (weird).

They've been promised a lighter workload (8 hours/day, same pay) as soon as more guards can be hired. But last month after a couple new guards were hired, a couple other ones were promptly fired, restoring the old 12 hour days.

So there you go. And that's just the tip of the iceberg, since migrant laborers work in similar conditions in every shit job in the cities, from construction to waiting tables to retail. Migrant workers aren't entitled to any of the social programs that city residents get, like health care or education. And city residents generally look down on them as uncultured and possibly dangerous, just as every migrant group in every other country is treated.

All this is the completely predictable outcome of market reforms, which not only encourage the commodification and exploitation of people but have also supplied them by dismantling the countryside's social insurance and forcing China's extraordinary number of surplus laborers off the land and into the cities.

Yet it's important to acknowledge the positive side of these changes too. Before market reforms it was impossible for people from the countryside to move to the cities because the party decreed that migration wasn't allowed. Because it controlled the entire economy, the party could enforce this by simply cutting off the food supply of anyone who had a different idea. Thus peasants were essentially held in serfdom and exploited for surplus grain that could be invested in industrialization. In important ways, the advent of markets have made China's people much more free. Whether or not trading the party's epic totalitarianism for the petty totalitarianism of one's boss represents a big step in the right direction is more debatable.

A liberal says it straight for once

It's rare that the basics behind ideologies of power are stated explicitly. Generally debates are carried on thru rhetorical strategies that emphasize "the common good", "democracy", "freedom", "prosperity for the nation", &c. A good number of people who have never been exposed to the internal records of governments or corporations - where the rhetorical overlay is more frequently dispensed with - even take these appeals to selfless principles seriously. The media are especially culpable in this, casting George Bush as a fighter for democracy, or Bill Clinton as deeply concerned with the disadvantaged of the world, or closer to my home, the Chinese media casting Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao as doing their utmost to help China's peasants.

So it's worthwhile to note when a writer or politician skips the ritual obeisances and comes right out and says it, as Thomas Friedman recently did:

at its best, the U.N. has been, and still can be, a useful amplifier of American power, helping us to accomplish important global tasks that we deem to be in our own interest.

The U.N. still represents the closest thing we have to a global Good Housekeeping seal of approval for any international action. Whenever the U.S. is able to enlist that U.N. seal on its side, America's actions abroad have more legitimacy, more supporters and more paying partners....

I don't much care how the U.N. works as a bureaucracy; I care about how often it can be enlisted to support, endorse and amplify U.S. power. That is what serves our national interest.

Thomas Friedman is one of the most popular writers on foreign policy in the USA, and he consistently voices the liberal perspective. This is the liberal approach to the UN - use it whenever possible to gain legitimacy for American policy, otherwise dispense with it.

The neoconservative perspective is that the UN is more a hindrance to America's overwhelming power than an amplifier, and it should thus be destroyed at the earliest possible date.

It's an important tactical difference with clear policy implications. But it should not confuse us into thinking that the two sides have different ultimate goals. Rather, they share a single aim, namely to advance US "national interests", ie to expand the power of the American state and businesses.

The radical alternative is to take seriously the idea that humans are equal and that the interests of one nation (or one ruling class) are not the same as the interests of the world. That means acting to restrict the power of the USA, to build institutions that decentralize global power, and to fight for an equal distribution of wealth in the world.

Indonesia's steady return to the US embrace

In the USA's unique style of imperialism-by-proxy, military assistance programs play a major role. The US government creates tacit alliances with the ruling elites of other countries in order to maintain hegemony over the key sources of world power - resources and industry. For the last 60 years, the two social groups that the USA has targeted as potential clients in nearly every country are the economic elites (businessmen and large landowners) and the military.

Thru military assistance programs, the USA channels funds, weapons, and training to the militaries of countries that agree to follow the American foreign policy agenda and to suppress anti-American internal dissidents. Both sides benefit: the client military gets resources and the United States gets a semi-mercenary national armed forces that is both more capable because of American help and more loyal to American priorities because of the indoctrination it receives thru training programs.

The public explanation for these programs, made by officials and conveyed by the press, is that it will strengthen democratic elements in the military. The explanation is rarely questioned in the mainstream, but it's hard to even consider taking it seriously since the graduates of training programs have repeatedly gone on to long careers of massacre, torture, and authoritarianism, and since American weapons have endlessly been used to crush popular social movements thruout Latin America, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere.

Today the USA announced that it would resume International Military Education and Training to Indonesia. IMET is one of the main conduits of patronage to American client militaries. The Bush administration, and before that the Clinton administration, had long pushed to resume IMET funding to the Indonesia military, or TNI.

Various presidents have rarely had trouble sending aid even to death-squad militaries, so the wonder is more that Congress ever managed to cut off IMET funding than that it is now being restored. Indonesia's rather embarrassing tendency to massacre large groups of people thruout the 1990s, when anticommunist pretexts had lost most of their persuasive power, accounts for the temporary (and only partial) restrictions on aid. The murder of several Americans by individuals likely conspiring with the TNI is the only thing that kept 9/11 from overcoming Congress's remaining scruples. (Comprehensive background on this incident and the situation in West Papua, where it happened, is available here. For the incredibly flimsy grounds on which the administration has exculpated the TNI, see here.)

The main ammunition of critics of the TNI is that it has served as the shock-troops of Javanese colonialism since independence. Java, the island at the center of Indonesia political and economic power, has been extending its control over the resource-rich outlying islands of Aceh, West Papua, East Timor, and others since independence. With massive amounts of American aid and after several times over receiving explicit green lights from the USA for particularly heinous crimes (rigging West Papua's self-determination plebiscite in 1969, invading and conquering East Timor in 1975), the TNI committed atrocity after atrocity from the time it took over the country in a 1965 bloodbath. By the 1990s Indonesia had made itself a key American ally in Asia and welcomed Western corporations to exploit its mineral wealth.

But the '90s were rocky for both the military and the patron-client relationship with the USA, as popular uprisings forced the TNI to relinquish control and Congress imposed limits on aid and training. But the TNI still wields extraordinary power in Indonesia and both Clinton and Bush were eager to reestablish close ties in order to contain China and preserve American hegemony over Southeast Asia. Under cover of the war on "terrorism", the USA has now clawed back much of the ground it lost in 1990s in Indonesia and elsewhere in the region.

Indonesia is an extremely important country geostrategically, as well as one of the world's worst human rights abusers. If China's power continues to rise, it will be a key battleground in the Sino-American contest for Southeast Asia. While nationalism is strong and deeply skeptical of the United States, the organized left is nonexistent, having been exterminated in the worst political pogrom history has ever seen when the military took over in 1965. Internal politics, still dominated by the dictatorship-era elite, are extremely complex. Indonesia deserves close watching.

The privations of the upper classes

Chunjie (Spring Festival/Chinese New Year, this year February 9) is the biggest holiday in China, when everyone heads back to their home village to be with their family. Which explains this recent catastrophe:

"Shanghai families hit by exodus of maids"
(The Straits Times)

It seems the rich people of Shanghai faced the terrible situation of having to do their own housework. Sure, everyone sends help when a tsunami hits, but where's that feeling of brotherhood for these victims?

And the crisis isn't limited to Shanghai - the English-language China Daily reports that Beijing rich people, too, had to face the holiday without servants.

Says one victim, "Last year I failed to find a housemaid during the holidays and my husband and I had to do the cleaning for a whole day, which made us really tired." (This is an actual quote from the second article, I did not make it up, click on the link and see for yourself.)

Actually, the Straits Times article has some interesting stuff later in the article, when the deep exploitation of migrant laborers in China's cities is highlighted by the fact that some are forced to give up the all-important chunjie family reunion and stay in the city in order to keep jobs that pay only $2/day.