Posts
Illustration: Seems awhile ago the Decider gave a speech promising his devotion to making things better for our veterans. As he walked away, his pants seemed to catch on fire. Moral: Remember your childhood.
This week, Wolfowitz agreed to resign from the World bank on the condition that the World Bank state that he has been doing a good job and doesn’t have to resign. Jimmie Carter was interviewed on the BBC and said that Bush’s foreign has been the worst in history and that Blair was subservient to Bush. The White House indicated that the “proved” that Carter was irrelevant. Over the weekend, 15 to 20 American soldiers were killed in Iraq. A spokesman for the “insurgents” so far has offered support for the surge and asked that even more American Soldiers be sent because they were “hungry for American blood.” Well, Bush needs support wherever he can get it, I suppose. I think the Republican Candidates debated again (or did they?) but no one has been masochistic enough to watch it and send me a review. I’ve heard that the party would like an actor from LAW AND ORDER to run. Bush has vetoed spending for the troops. It looks as if he will be given another opportunity to do so soon. It was revealed that Gonzo and Cheney tried to pressure Ashcroft to sign something while he was barely conscious in the hospital, making Ashcroft sound liberal, and giving more attention to Gonzo who will testify as long as he can command media attention.
Our articles include a graduation speech that should be given at every graduation ceremony, not that it would do any good. Then, there have been more questions on the World Bank and the now departing Wolfowitz. Chomsky (2) provides a moderate view of the subject and (3) comments on the possible pitfalls with an alternative to it, which is in progress now. In short, at least one group of nations have had enough and done something about it. The discussion is what I would call a leftist one.
1)Welcome to Reality, Class of '07
2) Chomsky Takes on the World (Bank)
Noam Chomsky interviewed by Michael Shank
3) *BancoSur should be a bank to finance a socialist economy*
*by Plinio Soares de Arruda and Dick Emanuelsson
TomDispatch.com a project of the Nation Institute
<http://www.nationinstitute.org>
compiled and edited by *Tom Engelhardt
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tomgram: Welcome to Reality, Class of '07
This post can be found at http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=195552
[*Note to Tomdispatch readers:* /I'm off for a few days to attend a
graduation ceremony. I admit to a weakness for graduation speeches, most
of which, as glazed, bored graduates can tell you, are worthless.
(Typically, I can't remember who spoke at my graduation 41 years ago.)
In recent years, however, I've posted some splendid graduation speeches
-- last year by Rebecca Solnit
Mark Danner
gems. This year I thought I'd try my hand at the form and write the
speech I'll never be asked to give. Tom/]
Close Your Eyes
*The Graduation Speech I'll Never Give*
By Tom Engelhardt
Graduates of the class of 2007, close your eyes.
No kidding. That's my advice in a nutshell.
Okay, take a last look around if you want, you who entered college in
September 2003, when it still wasn't apparent to most Americans that our
President had crash-landed on the deck of the aircraft carrier, the /USS
Abraham Lincoln/, to give his famed May Day speech declaring "major
combat operations in Iraq" at an end.
Look at your world just a little longer. As on that sunny September day
when you arrived here almost four years ago, it's another lovely day as
you prepare to depart and, at a glance, the world -- the American world
anyway -- doesn't seem that much the worse for wear. Okay, the price of
a barrel of oil essentially doubled in those four years, as did the
price of a gallon of gas at the pump; the Democrats retook Congress;
Iraq descended into the charnel house of history, into what was already
being termed back then, in a bow to the Vietnam War, the "q-word" (for
quagmire); newspapers began losing young readers to the Internet as if
into a black hole; and the Bush administration, touted in 2003 as the
"most disciplined" in anyone's memory, has fallen into belligerent
disarray; but, hey, the stock market is at a high-water mark, the Boston
Red Sox are leading the American League East by 8 games, lawyers are
suing, doctors are medicating, and brokers are brokering away more or
less as usual.
And here you are in your serried ranks, your parents nearby, your
school's president and various deans, as well as distinguished faculty,
arrayed before you on this stage in impressive gowns and tasseled caps.
Today is a much-awaited moment for you, the culmination of years of
work, just as graduation days like this have been for those who preceded
you.
The campus, this balmy afternoon, seems hardly changed from four years
ago. The same gentle carpet of grass, green with spring, dotted on its
distant edges with beds of tulips, surrounded the graduating class of
'03 -- and probably the class of '66, the year I sat through one of
these ceremonies. The dorms you slept in are behind us; the dining hall
you ate so many unmemorable meals in is just over that hill, which I
have no doubt you climbed grudgingly on many wind-chilled winter
mornings. At least some of the classrooms you did your learning in,
housed in solemn gray stone (as monuments to timeless knowledge should
be), flank us. The Greek-style columns of your library with its
million-plus volumes can just be glimpsed through the distant trees.
Yes, look around. All is as it should be. Everything we can see and
everything we know is here -- all of it normal, all of it fit for a
graduation speech. Fit for you.
In the years just after I graduated from college, the much praised (and
maligned) 1960s, the young were said to believe in a single aphorism:
"Never trust anyone over thirty." I must admit I never heard such a
thing myself, but then, as now, the media has a way of knowing what we
think better than we do. I read it, /ergo/ it's so.
Now, I want to update the phrase for your moment which, believe me, is
far worse than anything I ever imagined possible in the Sixties. On such
a normally celebratory day, I wouldn't say that if I didn't urgently
believe it -- and if I didn't think that, in your heart of hearts, you
believed it too.
So here goes. Some graduation advice -- three pieces of it, actually --
that probably run against most of what you've been taught at this
distinguished institution in these last four years:
*Don't trust what you see around you.*
That's right. No matter what anyone tells you, don't trust the world
that's most obviously in front of you. Don't trust your own eyes. Not on
a day like this, not in a country like this. Reality is elsewhere.
That's why I say, close your eyes. Go ahead. Listen to me for a while in
the dark and understand that I'm not trying to blind you. I'm only
suggesting that you'll be able see the world more clearly with your eyes
shut tight and so graduate with a more reasonable sense of what your
future job on this planet really is.
That's no easy thing to assess, if you're on this pristine campus, or in
any mall in America, or, for that matter, in most parts of the city on
the outskirts of which this campus stands rather than in Baghdad, or
Kabul, or low-lying Bangladesh, or the melting Arctic, or some exposed
Pacific atoll.
This sunny May day -- the one you are not looking at any more -- is
deceptive indeed. It masks a far darker world that your generation is
about to inherit on a planet two-thirds of whose inhabitants, as a group
of retired admirals and generals interested in climate change recently
noted, live near a coastline (that might in coming decades flood). Put
another way, according to the NGO Christian Aid, one out of every seven
people on the planet -- perhaps a billion in all -- might, over the next
half century (essentially your post-college work lifetimes) be forced
from their homes and into the kinds of desperate migrations that would
make the present American debate over illegal immigration seem like a
global joke.
Over the next 100 years -- the heart of your life and that of your
children -- the Earth could lose its glaciers (major sources of water in
places like South Asia); the Greenland ice sheet could radically melt
down; and up to half this planet's wealth of species could go extinct.
You could also experience the onrush -- evidently already underway -- of
ever more extreme weather patterns (massive hurricanes, typhoons,
monsoons, 100-year droughts, and the like), the spread of lethal
diseases to new locales, and a host of other unnerving phenomena.
In other words -- and even those of you who claim to doubt the reality
of global warming sense that this is so -- fifty years from now, you are
likely to be living on another, poorer kind of planet. It will also be a
far lonelier one. People, who have the urge to frighten, often say that
we are "destroying the planet," but that is probably not accurate. The
planet will undoubtedly spin on. Given a few million, or a few tens of
millions, or even a few hundreds of millions of years -- the sort of
time that, without our consciousness, wouldn't matter a tinker's dam --
Earth is likely to develop a future filled with life, just without us
(and many of our creaturely neighbors).
The planet's future may not be in doubt, but surely ours is. /New
Scientist/ magazine has offered an estimate of 10 million years for the
planet to "repair" the present "dent" made in biodiversity. I like to
use the example of the pronghorn antelope, "the prairie ghost" of our
West, to explain this. It's a speedy creature, capable of running at up
to 60 miles per hour, at least 30 mph faster than any predator in its
environment. That extra mileage might seem hard to explain unless you
understand that, before the last great mammalian megafaunal die-out on
this continent, some 13,000 to 16,000 years ago, there were evidently
creatures (perhaps lions or dire wolves) that could power along at
something close to those speeds. So, for all those thousands of years,
far longer than human history from Ur to the latest disasters in Iraq,
the pronghorn has had a ghostly companion. So much time in human terms
and it still hasn't "registered" the loss; so much time and that niche
in our environment remains empty.
Back in the ancient 1950s, a half-century-plus in the other direction,
only one thing could end our world, the world I grew up in -- nuclear
weapons or The Bomb (which, when that was all there was, often sported
capital letters) via the Cold War superpower confrontation. The thought
of a nuclear war was paralyzing and nightmare-inducing enough. Believe
me, when I heard President John F. Kennedy's famous speech on October
22, 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis (aka "the most dangerous
moment in human history"), I feared my world was toast -- and I wasn't
alone. I always believed that the Sixties held such a powerful sense of
liberation, in part, because world-annihilating possibilities were, for
a few brief years, simply left behind.
Over half a century later, nuclear weapons have multiplied and
proliferated (even without the other superpower in attendance), and yet
they now have to queue up for attention in a jostling line of
potentially world-ending perils, real and fictional; while all of you
live in the peculiar sunshine of a locked-down, locked-up, Patriot-Act,
homeland-security, gated-community country (of a sort no one in the
1950s could have imagined). I stand here looking out at you, your eyes
closed, and I doubt I can really imagine your world, the one I'm trying
to describe, or the almost unnoticed, largely unacknowledged
exterminatory grid that has settled paralyzingly over consciousness in
this country, that has left you able perhaps to imagine a job, a mate,
even a family -- the most immediate of futures, but not a human future
beyond that.
An image comes to mind. You know how bits of semi-knowledge from who
knows where stick in your brain? Here's one from mine that's useful for
this speech, whatever its historical accuracy. Around 1000 AD, there was
a millenarian movement of peasants who, believing they saw the end days
coming, built their own coffins, and, at the predicted moment, climbed
into them to await their foreordained fate. To tell you the truth, I
don't know what happened next. Assumedly, sooner or later they climbed
out again.
But here's the point I want to make: As long as you're looking at our
world through your usual lenses, I suspect you're already in our version
of those coffins, even if they pass for normal daily life. Only in the
dark can you begin to imagine the possible Pompeii-scapes to come, the
potential for the extreme unraveling of normalcy. And only after you
imagine that, can you do what those peasants undoubtedly did when they
realized that the last days had not come -- not /yet/ anyway: climb out.
If all of you were to clamber out of the coffins we've built for you,
there would still be trouble ahead, but the end of times would be just
that much less likely to arrive.
"Abandon hope, all ye who enter here." As you English majors already
know, Dante claimed this inscription was over the entrance to Hell.
Today, as you form your processional, walking like every class before
you through the arch that fronts this campus, I think you should imagine
that inscription over your heads, because that's the futureless world
you're entering with your eyes open. My definition of hell is, in fact,
futurelessness, a world in which no one can imagine their grandchildren
or great-grandchildren -- and so, no one can work to build a country, a
planet for them.
Now, for a second piece of advice -- probably not best given at a
world-renown center of learning -- but here goes.
*Believe the Hollywood previews. Believe your video games. Believe "24."
Believe /The Day After Tomorrow/.*
It's true that, despite what the screen showed in the global-warming
film, /The Day After Tomorrow/, the Northern Hemisphere is not going to
turn into an ice sheet in approximately 30 seconds; wolves, freed from
the local zoo, are unlikely to roam the streets of New York City any
time soon or movie stars burn books for warmth in the fireplace of the
frigid New York Public Library; spy Arnold Schwarzenegger or his
equivalent will not, despite /True Lies/, kiss Jamie Lee Curtis while an
atomic bomb, handled by Arab terrorists, goes off behind them in the
Florida Keys; you won't save us or the planet the way you do in
first-person shooter video games; and, no, torturing à la "24" is
neither good, nor even effective as an information extractor. Meanwhile,
all these blimps, trains, buses, cable cars, and who knows what else
hijacked by terrorists and heading toward everything we hold dear will
not all arrive as the stadium blows up, the airport goes down, the White
House is zapped, or the city, country, planet disappears.
Nonetheless, since my childhood, Hollywood, not religion, has been the
greatest deliverer of end-time scenarios. This has been true at least
since the atomic war-film-that-couldn't-be-made -- the one that would
have ended not in American victory but in a planet-shaking set of
explosions -- mutated into the horror and science fiction genres. Those
films moved under the mushroom cloud in various futuristic settings
where all sorts of monstrous, irradiated beings and alien creatures
possessing strange rays did to our cities and towns what we had done to
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, while crowds of onscreen Americans, screaming
and fleeing, were crushed or mangled, burned or consumed.
And then, of course, we all left the movie theaters or drive-ins a
little shaken, a little thrilled, and life began again. However weird or
warped or fantastic these films may have been, however happy the endings
when the giant ants went down for the count in the sewers of Los
Angeles, or the aliens were themselves zapped, or the terrorists foiled,
or the monsters destroyed, these were, in essence, Hollywood's previews
of our world to come.
The movie-makers knew, but only because we knew. They wanted our eyes
(and our popcorn money) and so they made a beeline for the stories, the
fears, that resonated most deeply in us, the ones that could be returned
to profitability over and over again. Perhaps, from the beginning, what
we humans had was an ability to view possible ends. Perhaps what made us
human wasn't that opposable thumb, but the fact that we arrived in the
world capable of imagining its termination.
Explain it as you will, Hollywood has been sending us a single riveting
message over the last half-century-plus as the mushroom clouds rose, the
aliens descended, the post-apocalyptic zombies feasted, the swarthy
terrorists arrived, the pandemics spread, and Los Angeles or New York
(the nation's pre-9/11 Sodom and Gomorrah) became a dystopian prison, or
an ice palace, or a place to be zapped, or stomped by monsters, or?
Well, you of all people know the story. You've seen it again and again,
your eyes open in another kind of darkness -- or you've experienced it
in your own living room, while you desperately manipulated hand-held
controls to save us from the mutants, zombies, terrorists, bad guys who
wanted to end it all. You've watched the previews, just as al-Qaeda did,
just as people all over this planet have.
And then, as most of us have for over fifty years, you left the
multiplex pretending that what you just saw was simply fun, or plain-old
entertainment, or plain crud, or eye-candy, the sort of thing that only
puritan wackos (or academics) could wax ridiculously serious over.
Whatever it was, it wasn't life, not this life anyway.
But you were wrong, I think. To get things straight, you now have to
ignore much that you've been taught and you've got to attend to the
essential wisdom of the most watched, but least respected, teachers on
the planet. Only they can give you the real, inside dope on what's
coming our way -- if, that is, you're going to lead a life that matters,
if you're going to do something.
So here's a final piece of advice, possibly not the best to offer in the
heart of a great university:
*Don't think too much.*
I look out over this audience, remembering that, when I was 21, there
seemed so much that needed to be done. How could it be that, over 40
years later, there seems to be so much more -- starting with somehow
ending not (as in my college days) one, but two mad frontier wars, two
scenes of slaughter and carnage, Iraq and Afghanistan, in a world where
frontiers no longer exist? These are wars guaranteed to kill tens of
thousands more and, in the long run, to endanger us all -- and there's
only you to end them. There's only you, really, to change everything.
It's a terrible burden that my generation of parents should never, never
have loaded on your shoulders, but understand this clearly: It's /not/ a
coffin, not by a long shot.
We failed you. I believe that and I don't even know exactly how.
If you aren't already settled in, awaiting the end times we have
bequeathed you in our short-sightedness, but you think too carefully for
too long about what needs to be done, all will seem hopeless. As with so
many tasks that desperately need to be undertaken, those who undertake
them must be, in a sense, foolhardy just because the burden looks so
heavy, the path so long and twisting, the end so out of sight. It seems
so much easier to lie in those made-in-America coffins and wait.
But that, of course, is the royal route to everything none of us could
possibly want for our world. No one of you can save a planet of people
and, if the future already seems stolen from you and the previews are so
apocalyptic, then the possibility of building movements of any sort must
seem dim indeed. But don't settle back quite yet and don't ponder too
long. Acting is usually better.
The moment you begin to act, I suspect you will discover that there is
much you might still be able to call on for support, including many in
my generation who, if you're willing to trust some over-thirties (but
not too much), might have a little energy and perspective still to
offer. Then, there's an American can-do (even quick-fix) tradition that
has been lost in recent years, in Katrina-level idiocy and incompetence.
How we turned from a can-do into a can't-do (or, as I like to think, a
Republican't) nation is worthy of a history or two, if people are still
writing them somewhere down the line. But the Iraq War, our oil
dependency, even the potentially massive effects of global warming might
all respond to a new surge of can-doism, to a nation still rich enough
to put its money, its best brains, and its efforts where its mealy mouth
and consumer culture (and a President whose idea of sacrifice in "time
of war" is a trip to Disney World) now is.
To my mind, here's your first job: With your eyes closed, try to see our
world honestly for what it is and then perform a magical act: Conjure up
a new set of previews -- fit for a future for which it's worth doing a
great deal. To act in concert and meaningfully, you need to able to
imagine yourself, fifty years from now, standing at a podium like this,
speaking to a group of graduating seniors, or perhaps simply sitting
with all those parents proudly watching your own child in cap and gown
in -- let's hope -- a very different world with fewer coffins in sight.
Now, with those eyes still closed, take a good look at our world, the
one you already know is there, but don't think too much. It's time to
pass through the portals of this school that has held you these last
four years, out the gate, into the streets beyond, into the world
beyond, and get yourself an education. It's time to look up and read the
inscription -- by now, you can surely do so with your eyes closed -- and
then reformulate it. How about, for example: Abandon paralysis all ye
who exit here.
I can't tell you how to act or what to do. I wouldn't even pretend to
know. For that, in the dark, you, all of you, have to look into our
world and then into yourselves. I suspect that, when enough of you close
your eyes and begin to believe your own previews, you'll know. At least
perhaps, you'll know where you want to start and, knowing, you'll act;
or perhaps, not even knowing, you'll act anyway; and, in acting, hope --
because, in bad times, it's always the act that engenders hope -- and,
then, in hoping you'll know.
*From the edge of the campus of life
May 17, 2007*
/Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a
regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the
American Empire Project
most recently, the author of Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch
Interviews with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters
(Nation Books), the first collection of Tomdispatch interviews./
Copyright 2007 Tom Engelhardt
-
Chomsky Takes on the World (Bank)
Noam Chomsky interviewed by Michael Shank
Foreign Policy in Focus <http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4236>, May 16, 2007
Michael Shank: Given that the U.S. Congress is no longer calling for
binding timelines for troop withdrawal, how is this indicative of a
broader struggle between the executive and legislative branches?
Noam Chomsky: There are a number of issues. One is the unitary executive
conception. The Republican Party happens to be right now in the hands of
a very extreme fringe. That goes from the legal system and the
Federalist Society to the executive and so on. What they basically want,
to put it simply, is a kind of an elective dictatorship. The chief
executive should have total control over the executive branch. And the
executive branch should dominate the other branches. That’s an effective
mode of authoritarian control, natural for those whose dislike of
democracy goes beyond the norm.
There’s a real fascist streak there, definitely. And Congress, to some
extent, is trying to recreate more of a balance between the executive
and legislative branch. So that’s part of the struggle. Part of it is
just that neither party is willing to face the consequences of a
withdrawal from Iraq. It’s not a trivial matter. First of all, there’s
almost no public discussion of the issues involved in the war. Why did
we invade? Why don’t we want to get out?
Shank: Right, it is minutiae now; it is troop numbers, timelines, etc.
Chomsky: That’s right. I was listening to the National Public Radio
tribute to David Halberstam the other day, and they had on Neil Sheehan,
David Greenway, and others. They were talking correctly about these
young reporters in Vietnam who with great courage stood up against power
and told truth to power. Which is correct, but what truth did they tell
to power? The truth they told to power was: "you’re not winning the
war." I listened through the hour and there were never any questions
like: should you be fighting the war or should you be invading another
country? The answer to that is not the kind of truth you tell to power.
In fact, it’s rather similar to what critical journalists in the Soviet
Union were saying in the 1980s. They were saying, “Yeah we’re not
winning the war in Afghanistan.” From my point of view, that’s not
telling truth to power. Truth to power would be: why are you invading
Afghanistan, what right do you have to commit crimes against peace and
against humanity? But that question never came up. And the same is true
in the discussion of Iraq. The question of whether it’s legitimate to
have a victory doesn’t even arise. In fact, the current debate about
Iraq reminds me very much of the dove/hawk debate over Vietnam.
Take, for example, Arthur Schlesinger, leading historian, Kennedy
advisor, and so on. He was originally a strong supporter of the war
during the Kennedy years. But by the mid-1960s, there was a mood
spreading in the country generally, but also among the elites, that the
war is not wise, it’s harming us. Then he had a book that came out in
1966 called Bitter Heritage, which is very much like what’s happening
today. He was one of the extreme liberal critics of the war by then. He
said, “We all pray that the hawks will be correct in thinking that
sending more troops will bring us victory. And if they are, we’ll be
praising the wisdom and statesmanship of the American government in
winning a victory in a land that they’ve left in wreck and ruin. But it
doesn’t look like it’s going to work.”
You can translate that almost verbatim into the liberal dove critique of
the war today. There’s no question about whether we are justified in
invading another country. The only question is: is this tactic going to
work, or is some other tactic going to work, or maybe no tactic and it’s
costing us too much. And those are the limits of the presidential
debates, the congressional discussion, and the media discussion.
That’s why you can have debates such as those going on now about whether
Iran is interfering in Iraq. You can only have that debate on the
assumption that the United States owns the world. You couldn’t debate in
1943 whether the Allies were interfering in occupied France. It was
conquered and occupied by a foreign power. Who can interfere in it? In
fact, it’s the right thing to do, interfering. Or, say, Russia’s
Afghanistan: is the United States interfering in Afghanistan while the
Russians conquered it? You’d crack up in laughter if you heard that
question.
Those are the limits of discussion here. That’s part of the reason the
outcomes of the debates are so inconclusive. The issues are not discussable.
First of all there is the issue of legitimacy. Invading Iraq was the
kind of crime for which Nazi war criminals were hanged at Nuremberg.
They were hanged, primarily, for crimes against peace, i.e. aggression,
the supreme international crime. Von Ribbentrop, foreign minister, was
hanged. One of the main charges was that he supported a preemptive war
against Norway. It’s kind of striking that at the end of the Nuremberg
tribunal, the chief counsel for the prosecution Justice Robert Jackson,
an American justice, made some pretty eloquent speeches about the nature
of the tribunal. After the sentencing, he said, “We’re handing the
defendants a poisoned chalice and if we sip from it we must be subject
to the same charges and sentencing or else we’re just showing that the
proceedings are a farce.” So if they mean anything the principles have
to apply to us.
Try to find a discussion of that anywhere, either in the case of Vietnam
or in the case of Iraq, or any other aggression.
Shank: Another schism opened up recently between the two branches with
Cheney’s comment that Pelosi’s trip to Syria was bad behavior. Do you
think Pelosi has a right to speak to Syria?
Chomsky: Of course she does. If you don’t believe in an elective
dictatorship, everyone has that right, even the local congressman, even
you and I. If it’s a free democratic country you don’t have to follow
the orders of the dear leader. The whole discussion is ridiculous. And
the fact that she has to defend herself is ridiculous.
The question is: are we living in an elective dictatorship? Or is it
supposed to be a free country in which people pursue their interests?
Shank: How much will that [unitary executive] foundation shift if/when
the Democrats take over the executive branch in 2008? Will it be more open?
Chomsky: It’ll be more open, but I don’t think there will be fundamental
changes. The basic fundamentals are shared by the parties. But the Bush
administration happens to be on the very extreme end of a pretty narrow
spectrum. So if liberal Republicans were in [the White House] it would
also change. The mainstream Democrats by now are kind of liberal
Republicans. It’s very hard to make a distinction.
So sure, it would soften the edges. The parties have different
constituencies, and you give something to your constituency. The
Democratic constituency is more of the general population, the working
people and so on. So you give something to them and maybe less to the
super rich. But the framework of thinking is almost the same.
Shank: Is the foundation on which the current unitary executive stands
beginning to erode? Given the corruption charges facing Paul Wolfowitz
at the World Bank, the scandal surrounding Alberto Gonzales, the Justice
Department’s firing of attorneys, and the indictment of Scooter Libby?
Chomsky: The struggle over the unitary executive and the elective
dictatorship… that’s beginning to erode from internal corruption
primarily, not because what it did was wrong. Yes, of course, some of
things were wrong, like firing a prosecutor, but that is so minor
compared to the array of crimes committed by the administration. It
gains its significance because of the conflict over legislative and
executive powers.
Take Wolfowitz. The charges against Wolfowitz are maybe correct but
pretty minor compared to his record. Forget his involvement in the Iraq
war, let’s put that aside, though it was surely significant. He was the
ambassador to Indonesia under Reagan. He was one of the strongest
supporters of Suharto, who was one of the worst monsters in the modern
period, comparable to Saddam Hussein. When Wolfowitz was appointed to
the World Bank, Indonesian human rights and democracy activists were
bitterly critical because he never lifted his finger to help them when
he was ambassador. In fact, he harmed them and they explained how he did it.
Here’s a man who strongly opposes democracy, who strongly opposes human
rights. That’s not the myth. The myth is his great ideals. But in his
actions, he supported a hideous dictator and in fact he supported
extreme corruption. Transparency International ranked Suharto’s
Indonesia as the world champion in corruption. This is the man he was
defending while at the same time saying that he was going to the World
Bank to do something about corruption.
His record with regard to democracies is also outlandish. You may recall
in Turkey, to everyone’s surprise, the government went along with the
will of 95% of the population and did not let U.S. troops use the
country as a base for the war against Iraq. There was bitter
condemnation of Turkey in the United States, from Colin Powell and
others. But the most extreme was Wolfowitz. He berated the Turkish
military for permitting this to happen. He said, “look, you have power,
you can force the civilian government to do what we want them to do. The
idea that they should listen to 95% of the population is outrageous.”
Then he demanded that Turkey apologize to the United States and in fact
say that it understands its job to help the United States. A couple of
months later he was being hailed as the “idealist-in-chief” leading the
crusade for democracy.
Shank: So why is he going down now for a salary?
Chomsky: He’s very much disliked in the Bank. Apparently he’s very
authoritarian. So they picked an issue on which to expel him: a kind of
corruption issue and a governance issue. And that’s okay. It’s good to
see corrupt people go down. But those are not the issues. It’s just like
in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Shank: Analysts in the media are questioning whether or not the Bank can
redeem itself post-Wolfowitz. Can it redeem itself or is it done?
Chomsky: Redeem itself from what? Through the 1970s, the World Bank and
the International Monetary Fund were pressuring countries to take loans,
borrow, and create huge debt. They argued that it was the right thing to
do. In the early 1980s, with the Volcker regime in Washington, the whole
system collapsed and the countries that had taken the debts were hung
out to dry. Then the World Bank and the IMF pressured them strongly to
introduce structural adjustment programs -- which means that the poor
have to pay off the debts incurred by the rich. And of course there was
economic disaster all over the world.
That’s the World Bank. They’ve done some good things. I’ve seen some
World Bank projects that I think are great. For example, in Colombia the
World Bank has supported very interesting projects run partly by the
church, partly by human rights organizations. They are trying to create
zones of peace, which means communities that separate themselves from
the various warring factions and ask the military, paramilitaries, and
guerillas to leave them alone. The people that are doing that are very
brave, honorable people. It’s very constructive work, and it’s supported
by the World Bank.
So again, I think that’s good. But if you look at the overall range of
the Bank’s policies, it hasn’t been benign by any means. The Bank would
have a long way to go to “redeem itself.”
Shank: So it’s the same problem facing Iraq, the whole conversation is
wrong?
Chomsky: The conversation is too narrow. Within the narrow framework,
yes, it’s a good thing to get rid of corruption and press for good
governance. But there’s a much wider framework…
Shank: …that’s not being talked about.
Chomsky: Right. Take the IMF. The IMF is not the World Bank, but it’s
closely related. The IMF’s former U.S. executive director Karin
Lissakers accurately described the Fund as the credit community’s
enforcer. The IMF is very anti-capitalist. For example, suppose I lend
you money. And I know that you’re a risky borrower, so I insist on a
high-interest rate. Now, suppose that you can’t pay me back. In a
capitalist system, it’s my problem. I made a risky loan. I got a lot of
profit from the interest. You defaulted. It’s my problem.
That’s now what the IMF is about. What the IMF is saying, to put it in
personal terms, is that your friends and neighbors have to pay off the
loan. They didn’t borrow the money, but they have to pay it back. And my
friends and neighbors have to pay me to make sure that I don’t lose any
money. That’s essentially what the IMF is.
If Argentina takes out an IMF loan with huge interest rates because it’s
risky and then they default, the IMF comes along and says the workers
and peasants and other people in Argentina have to pay for that. They
may not have borrowed it, it may have been borrowed by a military
dictatorship, but they have to pay it back. That’s what structural
adjustment is. And the IMF will ensure that western taxpayers pay off
the bank. It’s radically anti-capitalist, whether you like that or not.
The whole system has no legitimacy. In fact the whole debt system in the
world, which is crushing much of the world, most of it is fake debt.
If Suharto, one of the biggest debtors in the world, borrows money and
ends up the richest man in Indonesia or maybe the world, why is it the
responsibility of the farmers in Indonesia to pay it off? They didn’t
borrow it; they didn’t get anything from it. They were repressed, but
they have to pay it off. And the IMF makes sure that the lenders don’t
lose money on their risky loan after making a lot of profit from it. Why
should the system even exist?
Shank: The micro version of that in the United States with sub-prime
lending is coming back to bite us pretty quickly.
Chomsky: Exactly.
Shank: Are we going to have that kind of awareness on the global scale?
Because I think people are realizing that sub-prime lending isn’t working.
Chomsky: It’s bad because vulnerable people were exploited. But at least
you can say that the sub-prime borrowers did borrow the money. In the
South the people didn’t borrow the money. It was their leadership that
did. What do the people of Indonesia have to do with Suharto borrowing
money from the Bank?
Take Duvalier in Haiti. He fled with U.S. help, with most of the
treasury. Why do the people of Haiti have to pay off the debt? Most debt
is just illegitimate. In fact, the United States itself has instituted
an international regime that regards these debts as totally
illegitimate. They’re called odious debts. It’s the notion that the
United States introduced when we “liberated” Cuba. The United States
didn’t want to pay off the debts to Spain, so they were dismissed
accurately as illegitimate, later called odious debts. The people of
Cuba had no responsibility for them.
A huge amount of the debt in the global south is odious debt. Why should
anybody pay it?
chomsky.info <../index.htm>
3
*ZNet | Latin America*
*BancoSur should be a bank to finance a socialist economy*
*by Plinio Soares de Arruda and Dick Emanuelsson; Argenpress
<http://www.argenpress.info>; May 18, 2007*
The Bank of the South is already a reality. Enthusiasts say it
is another integrationist project under way in Latin America.
But others are more sceptical and say that the Bank could just
turn into a "tit" to feed Latin America's major capital interests.
Last week's decision in Quito to create the Bank of the South
indisputably signifies another step towards Latin American
integration. Now, not only the countries that make up ALBA are
involved but also countries like Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador and
Paraguay.
But what are the chances that the Bank of the South won't be a
repeat of the International Monetary Fund, the Inter-American
Development Bank, or the World Bank? What guarantees are there
that the regional Latin American multinationals will not take
advantage of capital based on the pensions of the region's
peoples for their own ends?
Many people are concerned about these matters, not just in Latin
America, but everywhere in the world that watches with high
hopes the multiple integration projects launched by Hugo Chavez
and the other members of ALBA.
We spoke about the Bank of the South with Plinio Soares de
Arruda, an economist at the State University of Campinas in
Brazil, one of various leading economists who gave presentations
at an international conference on globalization and integration
in Havana last February.
*Breaking imperialist domination*
D.E. How has the debate gone in Brazil on the Bank of the South
from the point of view of the government and the popular
movement? What are or have been the expectations of that bank?
Can it be a bank to reindustrialize Latin America or will it be
one whose funds local or regional big industrial capital will
exploit for their own advantage?
P.S.dA. Brazil is a very provincial country. The relations of
dependency and domination that characterize the world capitalist
system play no part in Brazilian political debate. For that
reason discussion of the Bank of the South is meagre, as much in
government circles as in the social movement. Until now,
discussion has been limited to conservative economists worried
about the Chavez diplomatic offensive in Latin America. They
fear any initiative that might scratch the Lula government's
excellent relations with the IMF, the World Bank and the Untied
States.
Forming a bank to manage Latin America's dollar surpluses is an
excellent idea. Having a bank able to offer credit in
international currency will dramatically reduce the dependence
of countries in the region on international bodies and the
international financial community. But it is an illusion to
think that a bank is able to solve our problems. Financial
autonomy is a precondition for the articulation of economic
policies focused on the needs of the overall population.
But it is not a sufficient condition to break imperialism's hold
in the region. To interrupt the process of a return to
neocolonialism that affects the region, promoting much deeper
changes is fundamental, such as nationalization of the economy,
renouncing spurious international agreements that hobble the
liberty of our national states, land reform, urban renewal and
so on. Without such measures, on the best hypothesis, the Bank
of the South will turn into an institution for funding the
so-called "national champions" - big companies that operate like
multinationals, with great operational autonomy but with
practically no national responsibility.
*Brazil's real concern*
D.E. El Clarín reported on April 17th on the eve of the
presidential summit on the island of Margarita, "Marco Aurelio
Garcia, Brazilian President Lula da Silva's adviser on
international affairs yesterday squashed any hope of a supposed
disposition by that country to participate as a founding member
in the Bank of the South, an initiative proposed by Argentina
and Venezuela." He commented "We are not going to go along with
the project, we are not going to eat from a plate prepared by
someone else". What is hiding behind this strong rejection of
the Bank of the South project and what has been Lula's position?
P.S.dA. Lula hasn't the least problem with "eating from a plate
made for someone else". He has eaten from the hand of the IMF
and the international banks since before taking office, in
September 2002, when he underwrote the so called "Letter to
Brazilians" in which he committed himself to following the
neoliberal menu. The Brazilian government is more worried about
sustaining its "credibility" with the international and national
financial community than with trying more or less heterodox
exits from the neoliberal dead-end. For that reason Lula is very
resistant to getting close to the Bolivarian revolution and
seriously mistrusts Evo Morales and Rafael Correa.
D.E. In what sense could the Bank of the South really be an
alternative to the IMF, the Inter-American Development Bank and
the World Bank in the grass-roots sense of integration and
social development for the peoples who might be members of that
bank? Or will it be, as some have put it, simply a lending
institution for infrastructure works?
P.S.dA. The Bank of the South would be an alternative to the
international bodies if its resources were used to finance a
style of development where "the North is the South", or in other
words, to fund a model incorporating technical progress that
categorically prioritizes the overall needs of Latin America's
people - land, employment, housing and national sovereignty.
Otherwise, the bank will only be a tool for the region's big
economic groups to drive their international competitiveness. In
other words, for the Bank of the South to serve the Latin
American peoples, its formation ought to be part of a more
general process of breaking away from imperialism. I don't see
the least possibility of a change on that scale without
superseding capitalism. Thus, the Bank of the South ought to be
a bank to finance a socialist economy.
*Political power in the bank for the weaker economies.*
D.E. How can it be a bank with equal participation for the
member countries based on a proportional representation for the
respective economies, as Guido Mantega the Brazilian Treasury
minister has put it, so that all the countries can be "on an
equal footing".
P.S.dA. The integration of the peoples of Latin America should
be conceived as unity within diversity. Therefore it is
fundamental to root out any kind of chauvinist attitude or
hegemonist tendency. In order for the stronger economies not to
gobble up the weaker ones, for the minority not to be cut to
pieces by the majority, Latin American integration demands a
federal arrangement with very high levels of political power for
the peoples that have the weakest economies. It is in that
spirit that I understand that the decisive process of the Bank
of the South ought to be conceived.
D.E. According to the Venezuelan ABN news agency, Mantega has
also suggested to the government in Brasilia that should this
financial institution come about then it ought to be linked to
the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). What is your opinion of
that position? Why the interest in "tying" it to Mercosur ?
P.S.dA. The Brazilian government has no intention of breaking
with the global order. Mantega's concern is to subordinate the
Bank of the South to the dominating logic of the North, since
Mercosur is a commercial agreement serving the interests of some
multinationals and fits perfectly into the framework of
neoliberal globalization. A bank that might break ranks with
that order does not figure in the plans of Lula's government.
D.E. What path has Brazil chosen? What are the links that unite
Brazil and Venezuela economically and industrially and in what
areas might they grow? Is Brazil really integrated into Latin
America?
P.S.dA. Economic links between Brazil and Venezuela are tenuous.
Brazil is self-sufficent in oil and the Venezuelan market for
Brazilian exports is tiny. Brazil is very interested in
Venezuelan gas so as to lessen dependency on Bolivian gas and is
interested in opening new markets for its industries in Venezuela.
The two objectives are complicated. The first one only
reinforces an outmoded energy model. The second one, if it were
implemented in accordance with the ultra-liberal rules of
Mercosur, would compromise Venezuela's industrialization. I
think Brazil and Venezuela have many fronts for economic
cooperation but they ought to be conceived of within the
framework of ALBA.
Mercosur and the other South American countries are important
commercial partners for Brazil. But this does not mean that the
Brazilian economy is integrated into Latin America. It is the
multinational businesses, welcomed in Brazil, who, the worse for
us, are profoundly integrated into Latin America's economic
space. An economy at risk of disintegration, like Brazil's,
cannot integrate with another and vice versa.
*Lula's double agenda*
D.E. Is Lula playing with two agendas? One with Chavez and
another with Bush? How important might an eventual agreement on
ethanol between the United States and Brazil be in creating
obstacles for Latin American integration?
P.S.dA. Really, Lula only has one agenda : to win the confidence
of imperialism as its most favoured partner in South America.
Beyond the scene-setting game for internal efect, above all with
the popular sectors that sympathise a lot with the Bolivarian
revolution, the "friendship" with Chavez helps increase Brazil's
room for manoeuvre with the United States. Should such a deal
come about the preference for the ethanol option might really
douse the dreams of greater Brazilian participation in an
alternative programme of Latin American integration
Ethanol marries agri-business with the auto industry - the new
great landowners with old international capital - giving a
further push to the pattern of peripheral neoliberal
accumulation that condemns Brazil to deepen the process of
return to neocolonialism that has been on course now for more
than thirty years.
Translation copyleft by tortilla con sal
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