Archive for March, 2006

East Asian economies must prepare for possible sharp US dollar slide

Wednesday, March 29th, 2006

TOKYO (AFX) – With the US trade deficit at a record high and global interest rates rising, East Asian economies need to be prepared for a possible sharp slump in the value of the dollar, the Asian Development Bank warned here.

‘Any shock hitting the US economy or the global market may change investors’ perceptions given the existing global current account imbalance,’ Masahiro Kawai, the ADB’s head of regional economic integration, told reporters on a trip here. The ADB’s headquarters are in Manila.

‘Our suggestion to Asian countries is: don’t take this continuous financing of the US current account deficit as given. If something happens then East Asian economies have to be prepared,’ he said.
forbes.com

Last days of Yukos as bankruptcy court says investors have no role

Wednesday, March 29th, 2006

A Russian court yesterday barred major shareholders in the beleaguered oil company Yukos from taking part in its bankruptcy proceedings, the first step in what analysts said was a slow state campaign to renationalise the remains of the company.
guardian.co.uk

India: country of stark contrasts, fascinating people and holy cows

Tuesday, March 28th, 2006

Rai Merchant, the narrator and a major character in Salman Rushdie’s novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet says about India: “The non-stop sensory assault of that country without a middle register, that continuum entirely composed of extremes.”

“How can one define India? There is no one language, there is no one culture. There is no one religion, there is no one way of life. There is absolutely no way one could draw a line around it and say, ‘This is India’ or, ‘This is what it means to be Indian.'” (Arundhati Roy)

It couldn’t be said better. At first you are hit by a whirlwind of India’s charm, its people so full of life and friendliness, the beauty of the bright-eyed children and young people, the dignity of the women dressed in colorful saris, the impeccably dressed men in Kurta and Pajama, or more western style jackets and slacks, all the different aspects of the streets that are teeming with rickshaws, bicycles, cars, cows and people: all this takes your breath away when you first arrive in India.

After some time, though, you might feel that seeing the daily and never-ending hardship of a huge part of the Indian population overpowers you with feelings of shame and disgust. I am of course mostly referring to the Dalit, also called the untouchables, because of the way the four castes (called Varna in a religious context) consider them unclean. The Dalits make up 20% of the Indian population and together with the lowest caste, the Sudra, they make up about half of the entire population. The Dalits are made to do all the dirty and polluting work there is, burn dead human bodies, deal with the animals, their hides and even their excrements, sweep and clean streets, deal with sewage and do various kinds of menial work. You can see them make patties from cow dung with their bare hands, for decoration and also to make fire when wood is scarce.
axisoflogic.com

Justice and Impunity in Latin America

Tuesday, March 28th, 2006

Guatemala’s Efrain Rios Montt earned the nickname “the General” after taking power in a 1982 coup d’etat. His sixteen-month rule is considered one of Guatemala’s bloodiest periods since the Spanish conquest. Under the General’s command, entire villages were massacred in a bloody counterinsurgency campaign, and some 150,000 mostly indigenous Guatemalans were killed. Despite his gruesome history, Rios Montt remained a powerful political figure and in 2003 ran as a presidential candidate despite a constitutional ban prohibiting former dictators from entering the race. In 1999, Maya activist Rigoberta Menchú submitted an indictment against the former dictator, but over six years later, the trial is still pending.

Rios Montt is not an anomaly in Latin America. F! rom El Salvador to Chile, ex-military leaders guilty of violent crimes perpetrated during the region’s “dirty wars” of the 70’s and 80s roam free. Many, like Rios Montt, wield enough political power to ensure that their macabre pasts remain buried from public scrutiny. Throughout Latin America, human rights groups are seeking to convict these criminals, but most have confronted the greatest obstacle to a functioning justice system–impunity. In Guatemala, the state has made little attempt to investigate or prosecute those responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of war victims–most likely because a large percentage of these criminals still hold high government positions. In the few cases that have ended in conviction, only the material authors, those at the lowest level of the military, have been punished, while the intellectual author! s remain immune to prosecution.
counterpunch.org

Condoleezza Rice Revisits The Scene Of Us Crimes
“Do you know how Chileans first learned about Indonesia?” asks Jorge Insulza, foreign secretary of the Chilean Communist Party. “Long before the coup of Pinochet, right wingers were intimidating members of progressive movements and parties: ‘Watch out, Jakarta is coming!'”

Thus the reference to the 1965 military coup led by General Suharto which was full-heartedly supported by western politicians and companies. In a matter of months, between 1 and 3 million Indonesian Communists, atheists and members of the Chinese minority were mercilessly slaughtered in what can be described as easily the most intensive massacre of the 20th century.

A few days after talking to Insulza I was facing Chilean victims of the 1973 coup who had come to see my documentary film “Terlena–Breaking of a Nation,” about the Indonesian dictatorship, at Universidad Arsis in Santiago. One elderly woman, apparently shaken, came close to me and whispered: “we heard it was bad there, in Indonesia, but we had no idea that it was so bad. Apparently, Chile and Indonesia not only share the same ocean, they also share a horrific past.”

In March, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice decided to embark on a round-the-world journey, visiting Chile, Indonesia and Australia. The symbolism of her trip conveniently escaped the attention of almost all mass media outlets.

In both countries, dictatorship officially collapsed under tremendous popular pressure: in Chile in the late 80’s, in Indonesia almost 10 years later. But both former client states developed in a radically different way: one proudly embarked on a democratic path emphasizing social development, while the other struggled under a feudal system with most people living in outright misery.

The reason for Ms. Rice’s visiting Chile was the inauguration of new Chilean President, Michelle Bachelet – a socialist, single mother of three and an agnostic. Ms. Rice had to sit through and swallow an inaugural speech in which President Bachelet paid homage to her father, Alberto Bachelet, an air-force general kidnapped, tortured and murdered in prison for opposing the 1973 coup against the democratically elected socialist President Salvador Allende.

Michelle Bachelet herself survived imprisonment, torture and exile, by-products of US foreign policy. But now she was proudly taking her oath at the crowded Hall of Honor of Chile’s Congress in the historical and stunning port city of Valparaiso, surrounded by her friends – leaders of left-wing governments from all over South America.

“South America has changed,” declared Hugo Chavez, the President of Venezuela who has managed to survive a US-supported coup. “A worker is president of Brazil – there comes Lula; an Indian is president of Bolivia; a woman is president of Chile, and in Venezuela, a revolutionary soldier, which is what I am.”

Condoleezza Rice described the elections in Chile as a “triumph of democracy,” omitting the fact that the triumph took more than 3 decades to achieve at the cost of more than 4 thousand dead and millions of men, women and children who were tortured, dispossessed or exiled. But a triumph nevertheless!

Debates – BOLIVIA: Has Morales sold out?
Even before the January 22 inauguration of Evo Morales as Bolivia’s first indigenous president, commentators from all sides of the political spectrum, particularly on the left internationally, have begun to speculate about what course Bolivian politics will take under a Morales government.

One of the most prolific contributors to the debate has been US Marxist sociologist James Petras. Given his long history of well-respected research and also of working with some of the most important social movements in South America, Petras’s critical viewpoint has been taken seriously and welcomed by many.

However, his contributions to the left’s discussion of the significance of Morales’s electoral victory seems to be aimed at carving himself out a niche based on denunciations of Morales as a ‘sell-out’ In his article “New Winds from the Left or Hot Air from the Right”, posted on the Canadian Dimension website on March 1, Petras wrote: There are powerful left-wing forces in Latin America and later or sooner they will contest and challenge the power of the neoliberal converts, sooner in the case of Bolivia, where the scale and scope of Morales’s broken promises and embrace of the business elite has already provoked the mobilization of the class-conscious trade unions, the mass urban organizations and the landless peasants.

For Petras, it is the case not just in Bolivia, but in all of South America, that the rebellion against neoliberalism can be explained through the dogmatic schema of (nearly always) reformist leaders who betray and (nearly always) revolutionary masses who are betrayed.

The fact that Morales would go down the path of betrayal was a foregone conclusion for Petras, who writes that his predictions have been proven right because the principal economic and defense ministers and high ranking officials in Morales’s government have been linked to the IMF, World Bank and previous neoliberal regimes. Morales has totally and categorically rejected the expropriation of gas and petroleum, providing explicit long-term, large-scale guarantees that all the facilities of the major energy multinational corporations will be recognized, respected and protected by the state.

While Petras seems almost glad to write that Morales has filled his cabinets with ‘neoliberals’, neither US imperialism nor the right-wing in Bolivia have taken comfort from the new cabinet, expressing particular alarm over Morales’s choice for minister of hydrocarbons, Andres Soliz Rada, a long-time advocate of nationalisation of Bolivia’s gas.

It is true that the Morales government will not be nationalising the foreign companies that currently run Bolivia’s gas industry and booting them out of the country. But Morales didn’t promise to do either of these things, so it seems odd to speak of ”breaking promises”. Rather, Morales has promised, not unlike Venezuela, to nationalise the country’s gas reserves, which his government has declared it will carry out by July 12.

Tabatinga, the other triple border – A new Vietnam?
“We are in one of the strategic points of the planet, in the heart of the Americas,” says the mayor of Tabatinga, a small Brazilian city in the middle of the tropical forest, “on the triple border between Brazil, Colombia and Peru.”

This is a highly militarized region, in Amazonia. This zone is almost uninhabited, approximately five million square kilometers in size and the government considers it a national priority. A beautiful treasure, that Brazil is determined to defend.

Brazilian public opinion is convinced that natural resources are for sure a cause for war. Amazonia has enormous oil deposits and possesses the biggest fresh water reserves in the world, not to mention a biodiversity that is well beyond comparison. Are these sufficient reasons for a future war?

So, who do they think they would have to defend this treasure from?

The military high command wearily watch US military bases close to the borders of Brazil, Colombia, Peru and also more recently Paraguay. The Defense Minister has recently sent a high-ranking military delegation to Vietnam to study the guerrilla tactics and strategies used against the US army in the jungle during the war. Soon they will also guard Amazonia’s air space in partnership with the Venezuelan Armed Forces.

THE END OF THE WORLD
“Tabatinga is so important strategically, that we have deployed a Battalion here permanently,” says Brigadier General Joaquin Maia Brandao, and Bishop Alcimar Caldas can feel the imminent danger of a military attack. “We are afraid that one of these days US troops will come here and say to us too: Ok, from now on, the airport belongs to us and you all answer to us because we now control the rivers.”

Recuperated Enterprises in Argentina: Reversing the Logic of Capitalism
Argentina’s worker-run factories are setting an example for workers around the world that employees can run a business even better without a boss or owner. Some 180 recuperated enterprises up and running, providing jobs for more than 10,000 Argentine workers.

The new phenomenon of employees taking over their workplace began in 2000 and heightened as Argentina faced its worst economic crisis ever in 2001. Nationwide, thousands of factories have closed and millions of jobs have been lost in recent years. Despite challenges, Argentina’s recuperated factory movement have created jobs, formed a broad network of mutual support among the worker-run workplaces and generated community projects.

Water Law and Indigenous Rights in the Andes
n Andean countries, widespread protests over violations of traditional rights have resulted in creative reform proposals to secure indigenous water rights and water system management.

“Our irrigation system, we have to defend it because it is our work and it costs us much effort. So many mingas, so many meetings, so many commissions, so many problems we have faced in the Guarguallá irrigation project! They cannot impose on us, not the landowners, not the State; they cannot leave us without this project that has been achieved with the organization’s effort, with the effort of people who have stopped sleeping, of women who have left their duties at home… We have to defend it to death because of how much it hurts, and we can’t let nobody take from us what has cost us so much sacrifice!”1
— Rosa Guamán, Licto, Ecuador

Who Is Killing New Orleans?

Tuesday, March 28th, 2006

A few blocks from the badly flooded and still-closed campus of Dillard University, a wind-bent street sign announces the intersection of Humanity and New Orleans. In the nighttime distance, the downtown skyscrapers on Poydras and Canal Streets are already ablaze with light, but a vast northern and eastern swath of the city, including the Gentilly neighborhood around Dillard, remains shrouded in darkness.

The lights have been out for six months now, and no one seems to know when, if ever, they will be turned back on. In greater New Orleans about 125,000 homes remain damaged and unoccupied, a vast ghost city that rots in darkness while les bon temps return to a guilty strip of unflooded and mostly affluent neighborhoods near the river. Such a large portion of the black population is gone that some radio stations are now switching their formats from funk and rap to soft rock.

Mayor Ray Nagin likes to boast that “New Orleans is back,” pointing to the tourists who again prowl the French Quarter and the Tulane students who crowd Magazine Street bistros; but the current population of New Orleans on the west bank of the Mississippi is about the same as that of Disney World on a normal day. More than 60 percent of Nagin’s constituents–including an estimated 80 percent of the African-Americans–are still scattered in exile with no obvious way home.

In their absence, local business elites, advised by conservative think tanks, “New Urbanists” and neo- Democrats, have usurped almost every function of elected government. With the City Council largely shut out of their deliberations, mayor-appointed commissions and outside experts, mostly white and Republican, propose to radically shrink and reshape a majority- black and Democratic city. Without any mandate from local voters, the public-school system has already been virtually abolished, along with the jobs of unionized teachers and school employees. Thousands of other unionized jobs have been lost with the closure of Charity Hospital, formerly the flagship of public medicine in Louisiana. And a proposed oversight board, dominated by appointees of President Bush and Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, would end local control over city finances.

Meanwhile, Bush’s pledge to “get the work done quickly” and mount “one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen” has proved to be the same fool’s gold as his earlier guarantee to rebuild Iraq’s bombed-out infrastructure. Instead, the Administration has left the residents of neighborhoods like Gentilly in limbo: largely without jobs, emergency housing, flood protection, mortgage relief, small-business loans or a coordinated plan for reconstruction.

With each passing week of neglect–what Representative Barney Frank has labeled “a policy of ethnic cleansing by inaction”–the likelihood increases that most black Orleanians will never be able to return.
zmag.org

We Didn’t Cross the Border, the Border Crossed Us

Tuesday, March 28th, 2006

Don’t believe the hype I was in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday when the historic march to protest the racist anti-immigration bill HR 4437 took place. For those who don’t know, this bill would make illegal immigrants felons as well as anybody, including family members who help them in any sort of way.

This means that if you have a cousin living in Mexico who comes over here and his paper work ain’t right, even if you didn’t know, you could face jail time. This means if you unknowingly hire somebody to haul away trash you could be in trouble. This is not about giving the government the power to build a wall at the border. This is much deeper then that..

As for the march, the mainstream news media claim there were 500 thousand people on who showed up. Keep in mind, this is after they tried to hate on the march and say only a few thousand were going to show up the night before. Trust me more than a million people showed up Anyone who was there could attest to that. All the blocks around the courthouse for as far as the eye could see was a sea of people. It was wall to wall. The rally started at 10 am.. Folks showed up in masse around 6 am and it stayed packed with people until 3 or 4 that afternoon.

Also it was a beautiful thing. The vibe in the air and the overall energy was infectious as you saw everyone from church goers to gang bangers all fighting to keep this oppressive bill from passing. There was an enormous amount of young people. Many came with their families. Its been a while since I been to a rally or march where I saw Grandmas, parents, young adults and little kids all in attendance.

I talked to cats who were all tatted up carrying signs that said ‘Stolen Land Defeat HR 4437’ and college cats carrying signs that read ‘Where was George Washington’s Green card’ carrying signs You could feel the spirit of resistance in the air. People are waking up and ready to hold people accountable for being so mean spirited

Also as you listen to the audio clips just don’t think this immigration thing is only gonna effect Brown folks. I guess the media doesn’t like to show what we all have in common, but bear in mind there’s a whole lot of Black folks like Haitians who this bill is designed to smash on if passed.
counterpunch.org

MI5 ‘helped IRA buy bomb parts in US’

Tuesday, March 28th, 2006

A FORMER British Army mole in the IRA has claimed that MI5 arranged a weapons-buying trip to America in which he obtained detonators, later used by terrorists to murder soldiers and police officers.
In a book to be published next month, the spy, who uses the pseudonym Kevin Fulton, describes in detail how British intelligence co-operated with the FBI to ensure his trip to New York in the 1990s went ahead without incident so that his cover would not be blown.

He claims the technology he obtained has been used in Northern Ireland and copied by terrorists in Iraq in roadside bombs that have killed British troops.

In the book, Unsung Hero, Fulton tells of his double life in which he had to play a convincing IRA man while working for the British. “You cannot pretend to be a terrorist,” said Fulton, who now lives outside Northern Ireland. “I had to be able to do the exact same thing as the IRA man next to me. Otherwise I wouldn’t be there.”

His allegations that the security services helped to obtain weapons that killed their own members follow revelations about British infiltration of terrorist groups and collusion in paramilitary killings.
timesonline.co.uk

Moussaoui Says He and Reid Planned to Attack the White House

Tuesday, March 28th, 2006

March 27 (Bloomberg) — Zacarias Moussaoui testified that he and would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid planned to hijack a jetliner and fly it into the White House on the day of the Sept. 11 attacks.

“Before your arrest, were you scheduled to be a pilot in an operation run on Sept. 11, 2001?” defense lawyer Gerald Zerkin asked Moussaoui at his sentencing trial in Alexandria, Virginia.

“Yes, I was supposed to pilot a plane to hit the White House,” Moussaoui said. He also said, “I knew the towers would be hit,” referring to the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York.

Moussaoui said he knew about the plot when he was arrested a month before the attacks and lied to FBI agents because he wanted the mission to go forward. Moussaoui, 37, pleaded guilty last April to conspiracy charges linked to the Sept. 11 attacks. He is the only person charged in the U.S. in connection with the attacks.
bloomberg.com

This stinks of somethin’.

Martin Jacques: Decline and fall

Tuesday, March 28th, 2006

Bush’s foreign policy has failed ignominiously in Iraq, but where does that leave the liberal imperialists?

Liberal imperialists, 1990-2006, RIP? Hardly, but their tails are down. And so they should be. I am referring, of course, to a school of thought associated with the left that took wind after the end of the cold war and came to believe that the US was a benign power that could intervene around the world for the good of democracy and human values.

In the mood that prevailed after 1989, it was perhaps not entirely surprising: the left felt defeated, and many busily took the road of rejecting everything from their past as mistaken. This, for some, included the warm embrace of the US. The first Gulf war was easy to support, and so was American intervention in the Balkans tragedy. The US was not just the global policeman: it was the friendly bobby down the street, waiting to deliver good sense and virtue to some faraway country.

And so we had the spectacle of left figures rushing to support the US occupation of Iraq. It would bring democracy to Iraq, they proclaimed; human rights as well; peace to the region, and the end of a global threat. Rarely has such a huge undertaking ended in such rapid, ignominious and public failure. Just three short years later, the country is on the verge of civil war and patently ungovernable More than 15,000 US troops have been killed or wounded, and many tens of thousands of Iraqis are dead, with absolutely no end in sight and the prospect of worse to come.

It was always an illusion to believe that the US was essentially a benevolent power whose actions were universalistic and altruistic rather than primarily interest-driven. One could understand, perhaps, in the backwash of 1989, people believing this, or wanting to believe it. And Clinton was in the White House to give such a position an air of plausibility for New Labour and its intellectual outriders. But these guys’ fulsome embrace of the US coincided with Bush, a major lurch to the right and the triumph of the neoconservatives. This was the full-blown imperialism of a power that believed it could now rule the world without constraint – unilateralism, pre-emptive war, an overwhelming emphasis on military force, and a military budget that exceeded that of the rest of the world put together. Far from being the benign force of liberal imperialist fantasy, Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib and the like have told a rather traditional story of how an imperial power behaves when it feels unconstrained. Bizarrely their embrace of the US coincided with its most naked act of imperial aggression and its greatest moment of global isolation.
guardian.co.uk

One racist nation

Tuesday, March 28th, 2006

Contrary to appearances, the elections this week are important, because they will expose the true face of Israeli society and its hidden ambitions. More than 100 elected candidates will be sent to the Knesset on the basis of one ticket – the racism ticket. If we used to think that every two Israelis have three opinions, now it will be evident that nearly every Israeli has one opinion – racism. Elections 2006 will make this much clearer than ever before. An absolute majority of the MKs in the 17th Knesset will hold a position based on a lie: that Israel does not have a partner for peace. An absolute majority of MKs in the next Knesset do not believe in peace, nor do they even want it – just like their voters – and worse than that, don’t regard Palestinians as equal human beings. Racism has never had so many open supporters. It’s the real hit of this election campaign.

One does not have to be Avigdor Lieberman to be a racist. The “peace” proposed by Ehud Olmert is no less racist. Lieberman wants to distance them from our borders, Olmert and his ilk want to distance them from out consciousness. Nobody is speaking about peace with them, nobody really wants it. Only one ambition unites everyone – to get rid of them, one way or another. Transfer or wall, “disengagement” or “convergence” – the point is that they should get out of our sight. The only game in town, the ‘unilateral arrangement,” is not only based on the lie that there is no partner, is not only based exclusively on our “needs” because of a sense of superiority, but also leads to a dangerous pattern of behavior that totally ignores the existence of the other nation.

The problem is that this feeling is based entirely on an illusory assumption. The Palestinians are here, just like us. They will, therefore, be forced to continue to remind us of their existence in the one way they and we both know, through violence and terror.
haaretz.com