Illustration: Anything but Iraq -- thanks Hugh
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The last week:
We started off with more talk of the Scooter. Most think he was a scapegoat for Karl Rove or Dick Cheney. In fact, when it started, Absurd Times called it “Rovegate.”
Now we have Gonzales and the firing of 8 or so federal prosecutors. The strange thing about it is that the Decider could have fired them all when he was elected and there would have been no problem at all. They are political appointments, after all. The problem is firing them for not serving political ends as they come up, such as for not stopping investigations of Republicans and not prosecuting Democrats fast enough. Many think that Karl is behind this as well. Gonzales will be subpoenaed and under oath soon.
The 21,500 extra troops to Iraq has now become over 31,000 and more to come. After all, how can we put an end to violence without troops and weapons? Just be patient. After Iraq passes a bill privatizing (giving to American Corporations) Iraq’s oil, then we will think about it.
Halliburton, the billion dollar no-bid contract firm of which Cheney used to be CEO has moved its headquarters to the UAE. See, they like Moslems. Either that, or Michael Jackson.
On Tuesday, 3/20/07, the news mentioned that Bush called Gonzales to say that he had his full support. This was after Tony Snow said “We hope so” in response to the question of whether Gonzales would stay. The support call came the day after revelations about the FBI’s abuse of the Patriot Act (it is difficult to imagine how it could be abused). Janet Reno was held responsible for Waco as the FBI reports to the Attorney General. The removal of Gonzales will make no difference, but it is worthwhile to point out that many Bush supporters thought he was too liberal for the position.
Recent reports about Blackwater indicate that there are about 50,000 mercenaries in Iraq in addition to the official troops. (It was Blackwater agents who were hanged in Fallujah.)
It turns out that all 93 federal prosecutors were fired and replaced by the ones in office, and some of them were fired – poor performance was the reason give. So Gonzales will testify.
The Senate threw out a part of the Patriot Act by a vote of 96 to 2. This was called “Partisan Politics,” indicating that arithmetic is not a strong suit of the administration, even though Karl Rove, I believe, said he knew the “real math” once.
The decider offered a compromise. Rather than have Rove and Cheney testify under oath, some senators can talk to them off the record in some room somewhere, no tape, no transcript, no notes.
A great deal of this is actually considered good news by the administration because it keeps attention away from Iraq.
Therefore, our single article this week is an interview with Noam Chomsky on Iraq:
*ZNet | Foreign Policy*
*War, Neoliberalism and Empire in the 21st Century
Noam Chomsky Connects the Dots*
*by Noam Chomsky and Sameer Dossani; CounterPunch
<http://www.counterpunch.org/dossani03092007.html>; March 14, 2007*
*Sameer Dossani: Let's talk about the recently passed Iraqi oil
law. It's well known that the law was drafted in the U.S. and
then consulted on by very few Iraqis all loyal to Prime Minister
Noori al-Maliki, then finally pushed through the Iraqi
parliament. This law paves the way for regionalization and
privatization of Iraqi oil. What's the U.S. economic agenda in
Iraq and will it be able to carry that agenda out, given the
disastrous nature of the occupation so far?*
Noam Chomsky: It's not very clear. What you said is correct. The
law was not even seen by the Iraqi Parliament until it was
finished, so it's an inside job. Exactly what this entails is
still kind of open. It allows for Production Sharing Agreements
(PSAs) which have traditionally been a way of gouging the
producer and ensuring that foreign corporations have control and
make huge profits. It's quite different from other contractual
arrangements in the region--it's what they used to have but
they've since nationalized their oil production and countries
set terms more in their own interest with the corporations that
are moving in. This law is vague on that so it leaves it open.
As far as the U.S. economic interests I think we have to make a
distinction. The primary interest, and that's true throughout
the Middle East, even in Saudi Arabia, the major energy
producer, has always been control, not access, and not profit.
Profit is a secondary interest and access is a tertiary interest.
So in the years when the U.S. was not using Middle East oil at
all, [the U.S.] was the largest producer and the largest
exporter, it still had the same policies. It wanted to control
the sources of oil and the reasons are understood. In the
mid-1940s, the State Department made it clear that the oil
resources of the region, primarily then Saudi Arabia, were a
stupendous source of strategic power which made the Middle East
the most strategically important area of the world. They also
added that its one of the greatest material prizes in world
history. But the basic point is that it's a source of strategic
power, meaning that if you control the energy resources, then
you can control the world, because the world needs the energy
resources.
This was made explicit by George Kennan when he was one of the
Middle East planners [in the U.S. State Department]. [He said
that] control over Middle East oil will give us veto power over
our rivals. He was specifically talking about Japan, in case
Japan industrialized, it was devastated by the war still, we'll
have veto power as long we control the oil. And that's been
understood through the years. So in the early stages of the Iraq
war [former U.S. National Security Advisor] Zbigniew Brzezinski,
who's one of the more astute of the planners--he was not
terribly enthusiastic about the war--said that if the U.S. wins
the war, which means that it succeeds in imposing a client
regime in Iraq, then the U.S. will have critical leverage over
its industrial rivals in Europe and Asia because it will have
its hand on the spigot.
And that is also understood very well at the highest level of
the administration. So a few months ago, Dick Cheney said that
control over [oil] pipelines can be "tools for intimidation and
[blackmail]". He was talking about control over pipelines in the
hands of others, so if our enemies have it, it's a tool of
intimidation and coercion. But of course the same is true if it
is in our hands. We're not supposed to think that because we're
supposed to be noble, but the rest of the world certainly
understands it. Yes, it's a tool of intimidation and coercion,
whether it's the direction of pipelines or whether its control
over the production or over the regimes in question, and control
can take many forms.
So that's the primary concern--control. A secondary concern is
undoubtedly profit for U.S.-based corporations and British based
corporations and several others of course. And yes [in the case
of the Iraqi oil law] that's a possibility. The Production
Sharing Agreements and the other arrangements for long-term
contracts at ridiculous rates, those are expected to be sources
of immense profit as they have been in the past, so for example
a couple of weeks ago Exxon-Mobil posted its profits for 2006
which are the highest for any corporation in U.S. history. That
broke the record of the preceding year, which also happened to
be Exxon-Mobil and the other energy corporations are doing just
great--they have money pouring out of their ears. And the same
with the corporations that link to them, like Haliburton,
Bechtel and so on.
The material prize of oil production is not just from energy.
It's also from many other things. Take Saudi Arabia or the
[United Arab] Emirates. They have huge constriction projects
paid for by petro-dollars which recycle back to Bechtel and
other major construction companies. A lot of it goes right back
to U.S. military industry. So these are huge markets for U.S.
military exports and the military industry in the United States
is very closely linked to the high-tech economy generally. So
it's a sort of a cycle--high prices for oil, the petro-dollars
pour back to the U.S. for major construction projects for
high-tech industry, for development, for purchasing treasury
securities which helps bolster the economy--it's a major part of
the economy and of course it's not just the United States.
Britain, France and others are trying very hard to sell them the
same things and sometimes succeeding. There was a big bribery
scandal in Britain recently because of efforts to bribe Saudi
officials into buying jet aircraft and so on. So the basic idea
of the energy system is that it should be under the control of
loyal clients of the United States, and they're allowed to
enrich themselves, become super rich in fact, but the
petro-dollars are basically to cycle back to the West, primarily
the United States in various forms. So that's a secondary concern.
A tertiary concern is access. That's much less of a concern. One
of the reasons is that the distribution systems are pretty much
in the hands of big energy corporations anyway and once oil is
on the high seas, it can go anywhere. So access is not
considered a major problem. Political scientists, when they make
fun of the idea that the U.S. invaded Iraq to gain its oil, they
point out is that the U.S. can get Middle East oil in other ways
so therefore that can't be the reason. That's true, but it's
irrelevant because the true issues are and always have been
control and secondarily profit and in fact U.S. intelligence
projections for the coming years have emphasized that while the
U.S. should control Middle East energy for the traditional
reasons, it should rely primarily on more stable Atlantic basin
resources, namely West Africa and the Western hemisphere.
They're more secure, presumably and therefore we can use those,
but we should control the Middle East oil because it is a
stupendous source of strategic power.
*SD: The difficulties surround the occupation Iraq has deflected
the U.S.'s attention away from other parts of the world,
including Latin America. Recently, Venezuelan President Hugo
Chavez and others such as Rafael Correa of Ecuador, Evo Morales
of Bolivia, have been talking about regional trade agreements
such as ALBA and, in the case of Venezuela, aid packages that
are supposedly designed to actually benefit local populations as
opposed to transnational companies. Critics claim that these
policies are a) unsustainable, because they depend on revenues
from Venezuela's oil wealth, and b) self serving for the
government of Hugo Chavez. What is your response to these
criticisms?*
NC: It's very odd criticism in the first place. Are U.S. aid
programs sustainable? No, not if there's a depression or even a
recession. Furthermore, U.S. aid happens to be about the lowest
relative to the economy of any advanced society so there isn't
much of it in the first place and it also can be withdrawn at
any time and often is.
As for doing it for self interest, what do you think other
countries provide aid for? They're perfectly open about it.
Sometimes, there's something done for altruistic reasons maybe
by Norway, but overwhelmingly, aid is openly presented as "in
our interest", not just by the U.S. but by Britain and France
and others. It is part of general strategic policies of
controlling whatever part of the world you can. So, if in fact
Venezuela's doing it for that reason, that just says, "yeah,
they're just like us". So whatever that is, it's not a criticism.
What are the reasons? Well, they're complicated. First of all,
there's a background. For the first time in 500 years since the
Spanish conquest Latin America--especially South America--is
beginning to move towards some sort of integration. Actually
it's a dual type of integration. Part of it is
international
integration meaning the countries are becoming more integrated
with one another. The traditional structure in LA has been that
each of the countries is primarily oriented towards Western
imperial powers. So [economies are oriented toward trade with]
Spain, and in recent years mostly the United States, not with
one another. That's even true of the transportation systems.
They're designed for export of resources abroad and import of
luxury goods for the rich within.
There's a very clear contrast with East Asia. East Asia is
resource poor, Latin America is resource rich. You would have
expected Latin America to have rapid growth, not East Asia, but
it didn't. One of the reasons is that Latin America adhered very
rigorously to the neo-liberal policies of the last 25 years, the
IMF World Bank policies, and those are basically offshoots of
the U.S. Treasury department. They adhered to the rules and they
suffered severely--most of the population that is. The rich
sectors did ok. East Asia just disregarded the rules and
followed the same kinds of programs that the rich countries
themselves, including the U.S., had followed to gain their
wealth and power. So East Asia grew, but in addition to that, if
you look at say imports and exports, Latin America exported raw
materials, which is low income basically, and imported luxury
goods for the wealthy. East Asia imported capital goods and
moved up the ladder of industrial progress and ended up
exporting high technology goods.
*SD: What do you mean by "capital goods"?*
NC: Machine tools, things that you can use for producing
commodities, electronics, bio-technology and so on. I mean those
are the high-value exports, not rice. I mean for the U.S., rice
is such a low value export that agribusiness has to get about
40% of its profit from U.S. government subsidies, provided
primarily since the Reagan administration, as part of their
efforts to undermine markets--they love rhetoric about markets,
but they greatly dislike the concept applied to us. And the
terms of trade tend to decline for commodities, you know there's
variation, but they tend to decline for primary commodities as
compared with high value goods like industrial exports. So
[economists like to talk about] this notion called "comparative
advantage", you should produce what you're good at, but the way
countries develop is by rejecting that principle and acting in
order to shift their comparative advantage.
So let's take the United States. 200 years ago the comparative
advantage of the United States was exporting fish and fur, and
maybe cotton, thanks to slavery. If the U.S. had followed the
principles that are dictated to the poor countries, we'd be a
sparsely populated, pretty poor country, exporting primary
resources. Instead, the United States violated all of the
rules--the rules of the economists and the neo-liberal
principles. It imposed extremely high tariffs on imports from
Britain, textiles at first, later steel and others, and it had
the highest tariffs in the world, the highest protection in the
world in the 19th century. As a result, it was able to shift its
comparative advantage from primary resource exports to
manufacturing, finally high-tech technology and so on, and that
goes on right until today. Only the poor countries are supposed
to follow the principles that economists dictate. In the United
States there's a state sector of the economy, which is the core
of high-technology advanced production. That's where computers
come from, and the Internet, and lasers, and containers for
trade; civilian aircraft are mostly an offshoot of the military
industry, right now moving on to genetic engineering,
bio-technology, pharmaceuticals, and so on. Research and
development--which are the risky, costly parts of
development--those costs are imposed on the public by funding
through the state sector and development in the state sector.
When there are profits to be made it's handed over to private
corporations and that's the basic structure of the advanced economy.
That's one reason why the U.S. simply can't enter into the free
trade agreement--it just doesn't accept market systems
internally. So going back to East Asia and Latin America, Latin
America followed the rules and became impoverished; East Asia
ignored the rules, and was able to grow and develop pretty much
the way the rich countries had themselves. So one form of
integration in Latin America is integration of the societies
with one another, although the alternative is the more
far-reaching version of this, but there are others. And the
second form of integration is internal. Latin America at last is
beginning to do something, not much, but something about the
internal fracturing of the societies, which is extreme. Each of
those societies is characterized by a very wealthy small elite,
and a huge impoverished mass. There's also a pretty close
correlation to race. The wealthy elite tends to be the white,
Europeanized part of the society; the huge impoverished mass
tends to be the Mestizo, Indian, Black part of the society. Not
a perfect correlation, but it's very noticeable. And that's
beginning to be addressed, in large part as a result of the
pressure of mass popular movements, which are very significant
in Latin America now more than any other part of the world.
It's in this context that the Venezuelan phenomenon surfaces.
Venezuela is indeed now, under Chavez, using its oil wealth to
accelerate these processes--both the international integration
and the internal integration. It's helped countries of the
region free themselves from U.S. controls, exercised in part
through the traditional threat of violence, which has been much
weakened, and in part through economic controls. That's why
country after country is kicking out the IMF, restructuring
their debts, or refusing to pay them, often with the specific
help of Venezuela. In Argentina particularly, Venezuela bought
about a third of the debt and enabled Argentina to "rid herself
of the IMF" as the President [Nestor Kirchner] put it. The
international integration is also proceeding, not just through
Venezuela. It doesn't get reported here because it's sort of not
the right story, but a lot of things are happening. So in early
December for example, there was a meeting of all South American
leaders in Cochabamba, Bolivia--which is right at the heart of
Morales territory, Indian territory--and they proposed, they had
constructive ideas and suggestions which could lead towards sort
of a European Union type structure for South America.
The more extreme version of this, advanced version of it is
ALBA, which you mentioned, the Venezuelan initiative, but there
are others. MERCOSUR, which is a regional trade alliance is
stumbling, but it exists. There are great barriers to
integration, it's not an easy matter to dismantle 500 years of
history, either internally or regionally, but there are steps
towards it, and Venezuela is playing a significant role in them.
In the U.S. there's kind of a new party line on this matter. The
party line is that, OK, we admit the subcontinent is drifting to
the Left, but there are good Leftists and bad Leftists, and we
have to distinguish between them. The bad Leftists are Chavez,
of course, Morales, and probably Correa, not certain yet, and
Kirschner's also one of the bad ones. The good Leftists are Lula
in Brazil, García in Peru, they don't know about Bachelet in
Chile, and so on.
In order to maintain this propaganda line, it's necessary to
suppress quite a lot of facts. For example, the Cochabamba
conference that I mentioned, or the fact that when Lula was
reelected in last October, his first foreign trip and one of his
first acts was to visit Caracas to support Chávez and his
electoral campaign, and to dedicate a joint Venezuelan-Brazilian
project, a major bridge over the Orinoco river, and to discuss
some other projects. Well that doesn't fit the story so, as far
as I can tell, I don't think it was reported anywhere in the
United States--I didn't check everything, but I couldn't find
it--and many other things like that. I mean with any kind of
propaganda, there's at least some thread of truth to it, but
it's much more complex than that. There's a real will towards
integration and popular pressure towards internal integration,
which are very significant. It's worth remembering that these
are steps toward reversing a 500-year-old pattern, and among
other things, it's weakening the traditional measures of U.S.
control over South America. So the kind of governments the U.S.
is supporting now, including Lula, are the kinds of governments
they might well have been overthrowing not many years ago.
*SD: In Latin America, Venezuela is only one part of the general
discontent that is driving governments away from the IMF. But in
other parts of the world, notably Africa, the IMF and its
neoliberal diktaats are as strong as ever, and the predictable
result is that extreme poverty is still on the rise. Other
countries -- for example India -- are not under this pressure
but still are wildly pursuing neoliberal economic policies. What
hope do you see for citizens and movements in these places? Are
there lessons to be learned from the case of Latin America? How
can we in the U.S. be supportive of struggles for economic
justice in these places?*
A lot depends on what we do. After all [the U.S. is] the most
powerful country in the world and the richest country in the
world and has enormous influence. These policies that you
describe are not without reason called the Washington Consensus;
that's where they emanate from.
Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America are the two areas of the
world that most rigorously followed the neo-liberal principles,
the orthodox principles of the Washington Consensus, and those
are the two parts of the world that suffered most severely. And
you're right, in Sub-Saharan Africa it largely continues. They
simply do not have the resources, the capacities, the countries
are torn to shreds as a result of history of imperial conquest
and devastation, and they've not been able to put themselves
back together again. Their hopes for revival after the the
formal end of colonialism were pretty much shattered by Western
intervention. So for example, the murder of [Patrice]Lumumba in
the Congo, which is the richest, and potentially the most
powerful country of the region, and the installation of the
corrupt and brutal murderer Mobuto [Sese Seko] not long after, I
mean that set off a chain of catastrophes which is still
devastating the area and no sign of resolution.
The French in their regions of Africa did the same. One gangster
after another, the French backed state terrorism, and did all
sorts of things. And pretty much the British, too, in their
regions. So [many African countries] have a hideous legacy to
overcome, and it's very difficult, and they're not getting much
support from the outside. But we should be doing what we can to
support authentic liberation struggles within the countries.
It's too complicated to go into the history here, but it's worth
remembering many of the things that happened. So for example,
when the Portuguese empire collapsed in the mid-70's, the former
Portuguese colonies had a chance, Angola, Mozambique, a couple
other Portuguese colonies, might have moved towards some sort of
independent development. But South Africa, with U.S. backing,
would not allow it--remember that's apartheid South Africa. So
for example in Angola, South African troops backed by the United
States just invaded to try to throw out the elected government,
and again, with U.S. support, supported terrorist movements, the
Savimbi movement, to try to undermine the government, and they
would have succeeded had it not been for the fact that Cuba sent
forces to support the government.
That led to hysteria in the United States. You had [the U.S.
Ambassador to the United Nations] Daniel Moynihan saying 'the
Russians are trying to cut our lifeline, our oil supplies to the
Middle East', [Henry] Kissinger raving and so on, and it was
all, believed to be or presented to be a Russian operation. In
fact, we now know from excellent contemporary U.S. scholarship
that it was a Cuban initiative--it was mainly Piero Gleijeses at
Johns Hopkins University who's going through the archival
material and has done outstanding scholarship. What happened is
that Cuba entered on its own initiative and very
selflessly--they never took any credit for what they were doing,
it's still mostly unknown--but Cuban troops beat back the South
African offensive, and not only did that prevent the re-conquest
of Angola, but it also had extraordinary symbolic significance.
Those Cuban troops were black, and that broke the kind of
mythology of white conquest; it was the first time that black
soldiers had defeated advanced white armies, South African with
U.S. backing. And that was a very important, had a very
important effect on all of Africa. For the South African whites
it was a sign that their conquest was not permanent. And for
blacks in South Africa and elsewhere in the region, it showed
that you don't have to subordinate yourself to white power.
That breaking of the hold of the mythology of [white] power is
extremely significant, not just in this case. The same is true
with many other cases, slavery, the women's movement, all sorts
of things. Just breaking the idea that you must subject yourself
to overwhelming power, when that's broken, a lot collapses with
it. So that was a very important step towards the liberation of
Africa, and Cuba deserves enormous respect for this, also for
never taking credit for it, because they wanted the credit to be
taken by the African countries themselves. It's only now
beginning to be known, and mostly only known in scholarly
circles because you don't get front page stories in the New York
Times about topics like this. And then Angola fell into total
catastrophe, mainly because of the depredations of the
U.S.-backed terrorist forces, which were horrendous, and now
it's a horror story. Similar things were happening elsewhere.
The United Nations commission on Africa estimated that in the
former Portuguese colonies alone--Mozambique and Angola--about a
million and a half people were killed by South African
aggression backed by the Reagan administration, just during the
Reagan years. That's a pretty serious catastrophe. They also
estimated about 60 billion dollars of damage, and the French and
Algeria and their regions elsewhere were doing pretty much the
same. It's a hideous, ugly story, and sub-Saharan Africa has a
long way to go to extricate itself from these centuries of
destruction still continuing.
India is a complicated story; it has been independent since
1947. Before the British conquest back in the 18th century,
India and China had been the commercial and industrial centers
of the world. British conquest turned India into a poor, peasant
society. [The British] built roads and infrastructure, but they
were mostly for the benefit of the invaders, the export of goods
and so on. There were hideous famines--Mike Davis has a
wonderful book on this Victorian famines, huge famines that
could have easily been prevented, right thru the British rule up
to the very end in the 1940s. Since Indian independence, they
resumed their growth and there were no more famines; it became a
more or less governable society and was beginning to develop. In
the 1980s, there was a significant increase in the rate of
growth. In the 1990s, they instituted the so-called neo-liberal
reforms on their own, I mean, that was not under IMF control, as
you said, and since then there have been changes.
They're very highly praised in the West--you know, the Thomas
Friedman-style adulation of the new India--and in fact growth
has increased, and a sector of the society has become much
better off, has been raised from poverty. But remember that
means a sector of the society; the large majority of the society
is deeply impoverished, maybe even harmed by the neo-liberal
policies, the same policies that are responsible for the
marvelous labs in Hyderabad and Bangalore - which are indeed
marvelous, I've seen them and they're just like MIT - and there
is increase in the wealth of that sector of society. Those same
policies are undermining the large majority of the population,
which is peasant-based. Also the government has withdrawn
support for peasant agriculture, meaning cheap credits,
irrigation, rural aid, assistance programs, and so on, and
they've also kind of pressured the poor farmers to turn from
subsistence crops to export crops--that's the advice of
economists generally.
Mexico, for example, under NAFTA was supposed to turn away from
producing rice for the population and corn, turned away from
that to, say, producing flowers for export to the United States
with "more valued added". In some seminar somewhere that might
look good, but in the real world it happens not to work for very
simple reasons. Commodity prices tend to vary quite a lot, and
if there's like a natural disaster, say a hurricane or whatever,
and you're producing flowers, they might be wiped out that year,
just like the citrus crop has been pretty much wiped out in
California this year because of the cold spell. Well if you're
agribusiness, you can handle that. So wiping out the citrus crop
in California may raise the price of oranges in the United
States, but U.S. agribusiness is going to survive it just fine.
However, poor farmers cannot, I mean a farmer can't tell his
children 'don't bother eating this year' because cotton prices
went down, or because a storm wiped out our flowers, and 'maybe
you'll be able to eat the next year', you can't do that. So what
you have to do is to try to get credit. Well with the government
having withdrawn support for the vast majority of the
population, you go to usurers, who charge you huge levels of
interest, which you're not going to be able to pay, so then you
have to sell off the little plot of land you have, and pretty
soon you can't support your family at all, so you commit suicide.
And in fact the rate of peasant suicides has been rising [in
India] about as fast as the adulation by Thomas Friedman for the
marvels of the economy. The per capita grain intake for people
in India has declined, the average has declined considerably,
since the onset of the reforms. Manufacturing productivity has
gone way up, manufacturing wages have gone way down. At the
beginning of the so-called reforms, India was ranked around
124th or so in the UN development rankings, which measure infant
mortality and so on. Since the reforms have been undertaken,
it's actually declined--the last time I looked I think it was
127th, it certainly hasn't advanced.
Well, these are parts, I can go on, but these are the several
aspects of the Indian development story. For some it's been very
good, and for others it's been, at best, stagnation, at worst, a
disaster. And remember, for huge parts of India, like say for
women, life is kind of like under the Taliban. Careful studies
of say [the Indian state of] Uttar Pradesh, which maybe has 160
million people, has found that they have about the lowest female
to male ratio in the world and it's not because of female
infanticide, it's because of the way women are treated, which
would make the Taliban look pretty decent. And these are huge
areas, and they're not getting better, many are getting worse.
The same is true in China, it's harder to say about China, it's
a closed society, I don't know the details, but it's probably
quite similar. India's a more open society so there's a lot of
evidence.
Going back to Mexico and producing corn and beans, I mean, why
is there a vast increase in illegal immigration from Mexico in
recent years? It's partly the predicted effects of NAFTA. If you
flood, the worst is yet to happen but even the beginning of it,
if you flood Mexico with U.S. agribusiness exports, which are
highly subsidized--that's how they get their profits--then
Mexican farmers aren't going to be able to compete. Then comes
the economists' theory, you know, turn from producing corn and
beans and rice to producing flowers and [other] export crops,
and you have the mode I described, and people can't survive. So
there's a flight of people from the countryside to the cities
where there are no jobs because Mexican businesses can't compete
with U.S. multinationals, which are given enormous advantages
under the mislabeled trade agreements. And yes, you get a flight
of population [across the border]. The price of tortillas, you
know, the basic food for the poor, it's gone out of sight,
people can't pay for it. If you're growing your own food, you
can manage, or if there's a subsistence agriculture, yeah, you
can kind of manage, but not when you abandon it.
Again, for parts of the population it's been a benefit, so the
number of billionaires has gone way up, just like in India.
India now ranks very high internationally among the number of
billionaires, but also for peasant suicides, and for severe
malnutrition and so on. These countries, which are pretty rich,
[are in some respects doing worse than] the poorest countries.
GDP per capita in India is below Bolivia. That's nothing to rave
about, Bolivia is the poorest country in South America. These
are several sides of the same policies.
Remember that when NAFTA was enacted in 1994, another policy was
enacted. In 1994, Clinton militarized the border in Operation
Gatekeeper. Now previously, that had been a pretty open border.
The border, of course, was established by conquest, like most
borders. And there were similar people on both sides, people who
would cross the border to visit their friends and relatives and
that sort of thing. Now the border was militarized in 1994. OK,
maybe it's a coincidence, more likely I think it's because the
Clinton administration understood that their glowing predictions
[about the benefits of NAFTA] were for propaganda, and that the
likelihood was that there would be effects in Mexico which would
lead to substantial flight, immigration, joined by people
fleeing the wreckage of Central America after Reagan's terrorist
wars there. And yes, now you have what they call an immigration
crisis. These things are connected, you can't look at them in
isolation.
*Sameer Dossani *is the Director of 50 Years Is Enough: U.S.
Network for Global Economic Justice <http://www.50years.org/>.
*Noam Chomsky* is emeritus professor of linguistics and
philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His
most recent books are Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the
Assault on Democracy
and Interventions
, forthcoming from
City Lights.
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