Peru Suspends Decree That Fueled Amazon Violence

compiled from reports by Agence France Presse, Indymedia, and Democracy Now!
Peruvian lawmakers suspended one of several controversial laws that eased restrictions on lumber harvesting in the Amazon rain forest, days after it sparked clashes between police and indigenous protesters, killing dozens of people.

The legislature agreed by a 59 to 49 vote to suspend Decree 1090 -- dubbed the "Law of the Jungle" -- that covers forestry and fauna in Peru's northeastern Amazon rain forest, said Javier Velasquez, the head of Peru's single-chamber Congress.

Ten decrees opening indigenous lands to resource extraction are vehemently opposed by the approximately half-million Indians of 65 ethnic groups who live there. They see the development of the jungle as an assault on their way of life and have been holding protests since April across the region. The decrees were issued in 2007 and 2008 by Peruvian president Alan Garcia to bring Peruvian regulations in synch with conditions imposed by the US-Peruvian Free Trade Act.

The Amazon protest peaked Friday and Saturday when some 400 police officers moved in to clear protesters blocking a highway near the northern city of Bagua. Protesters fought back. According to Indymedia, a raid by police to free 38 police hostages taken by protesters resulted in the deaths of nine of the hostages. (AFP reports that the hostages were killed by the protestors). Subsequent reports on Indymedia say that as many as 84 protesters have been killed, with another 150 arrested.

The decrees were originally to be suspended for 90 days, but in the final vote legislators agreed on an indefinite suspension "to negotiate without pressure," said Aurelio Pastor, a legislator with
President Alan Garcia's APRA party.

Angry legislators with the opposition Nationalist Party (PNP) called for the decrees to be overturned, and waved signs as they held a protest in the chamber after the vote.

"No to transnational (corporations) in the Amazon," read one sign. "The land and water are not for sale," read another.

The vote suspending the decree is seen as a compromise allowing the government to resume talks with the protesting indigenous groups who have been blocking key regional highways, said spokesmen for legislators that voted for the measure.

The vote also comes on the eve of a strike called by the country's powerful leftist labor umbrella group, the General Confederation of Workers of Peru (CGTP). Other protest marches, including those held by indigenous protesters in Amazon cities and towns, are planned in Peru's main cities.

Internationally, groups supporting the protesters are calling for solidarity protests at Peruvian consulates and embassies and revocation of the Peru FTA. Amazon Watch asks individuals to send protest emails to key people in the Peruvian government through this link: http://amazonwatch.org/peru-action-alert.php

Meanwhile some 3,000 Indians from 25 ethnic groups continue to block a key Amazon highway linking the cities of Tarapoto and Yurimaguas, some 700 kilometers (435 miles) north of Lima.

"We want an immediate derogation of those laws," said Segundo Pizango, an apu -- indigenous leader -- at a roadblock near Yurimaguas.

The repercussions of the violence have rocked the government, with Women's Affairs Minister Carmen Vildoso resigning Monday in protest over the government's crackdown, and Prime Minister Yehude Simon planning to resign at a future date when protests ease.

The crisis even extended its reach to foreign affairs after Nicaragua granted political asylum to Alberto Pizango, the main indigenous protest leader, who earlier took refuge in Managua's
embassy in Lima. The Garcia administration has issued an arrest warrant for Pizango on charges of sedition, conspiracy and rebellion.

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'Globalization From Below' Tackles the 'Great Recession'

The economic crisis makes it possible to put proposals on the table that have long been ruled inadmissible.

Can globalization from below really provide an alternative solution to the great recession?

by Jeremy Brecher, Brendan Smith, and Tim Costello, posted on Commondreams.org on January 26, 2009

[As tens of thousands of activists from around the world gather in Belem, Brazil for the World Social Forum, social movements everywhere are debating how to respond to the ever-deepening economic crisis. This article is excerpted from the longer Discussion Paper "GLOBALIZATION FROM BELOW" TACKLES THE "GREAT RECESSION" prepared by Global Labor Strategies.]

At the pit of the Great Depression in 1930, an American country music group named the Carter Family recorded a song called The Worried Man Blues. It began:

"I went down to the river and I lay down to sleep
When I woke up there were shackles on my feet."

Though many subsequent verses describe the horrific outcome, there is no explanation of what had happened or why – just an awakening to a seemingly endless catastrophe. The song immediately became an unprecedented national hit. It's hard to imagine that its success didn't have something to do with capturing the sense of being the helpless victim of incomprehensible disaster that so many felt in the face of the Great Depression.

The seemingly sudden collapse of the global economy in 2008 has similarly left millions, indeed billions of people all over the world a victims of a catastrophe that appears both inexplicable and unending.

But what's now being dubbed the "Great Recession" is neither incomprehensible nor irremediable. On the contrary, it can be understood as an expectable result of a capitalism that has been globalized and at the same time "freed" by neoliberalism of control in the public interest.

The economic globalization that transformed the world at the turn of the century promised, according to its advocates, a glorious vista of prosperity that would provide unprecedented economic growth and raise billions of people out of poverty. In practice it generated personal and national insecurity, growing inequality, and a race to the bottom in which every community, nation, and workgroup had to reduce its social, environmental, and labor conditions to that of its most impoverished competitor.

But economic globalization also gave birth to a new convergence of global social forces that opposed this kind of globalization. People all over the world fought back against this "globalization from above" with their own "globalization from below." They used asymmetrical strategies of linking across the borders of nations and constituencies to become a counter power to the advocates of globalization. They created a movement – variously known as the global justice movement, the anti-globalization movement, global civil society, or as we call it, "globalization from below" -- that some in the media even characterized as "the world's other superpower."

The anti-globalization/global justice/globalization-from-below movement developed in response to the expansive phase of globalization and neoliberalism. Now the global economy has entered the most severe financial crisis since the Great Depression. The financial crisis has turned out to be the start of a cascade of other economic crises that are reshaping the global economy as definitively as an earthquake reshapes a city. Current leaders of the world's nations have utterly failed to develop a solution. The likely impact of their failure on ordinary people around the world is incalculable.

The advocates of globalization from above propounded as an article of faith that markets are self-regulating and that all would be for the best in the best of all possible worlds if only governments, labor unions, citizens organizations, and the unruly mob let them alone to do their thing.

The times they are a-changing. US government officials long known as market fundamentalists seize banks, buy mortgage and insurance companies, and commit $7.7 trillion – half of the US annual product -- to government intervention in financial markets.

The Clintonite "moderates" who once gutted the social safety net and sacrificed commitments to jobs programs in order to build up budget surpluses now propose vast public works programs financed by budget deficits. The IMF, scourge of "irresponsible" countries that didn't balance their budgets, advocates a trillion-plus dollars in global government deficits and claims to have replaced "structural adjustment conditionalities" with condition-free loans.

These programs may well fail in halting the downward spiral of the global economy. But they open the door to new forms of more social and public economy. That's one reason conservatives normally oppose them – and one indicator of how serious the present crisis really is. The economic crisis makes it possible to put proposals on the table that have long been ruled inadmissible.

While economists have asserted with great confidence that one after another trillion dollar "solution" would save the global economy, one after another has failed, raising the specter that it cannot be saved in its present form. Peter Boon and Simon Johnson of the website baselinescenario.com recently raised that possibility in the Wall Street Journal. They note that economists generally believe even the Great Depression of the 1930s could have been stopped by proper monetary policy. But, Boon and Johnson argue, governments may simply not be able to prevent such huge deflationary spirals. "Perhaps the events of 1929 produced an unstoppable whirlwind of deleveraging which no set of policy measures would truly be able to prevent." Their implication seems evident: The same could be true today.

The multi-trillion dollar rescues and bail-outs so far just attempt – possibly futilely -- to save the status quo. But what can we do if the status quo can't be saved? Can globalization from below really provide an alternative solution to the great recession?

It has already started to do so. A landmark was the meeting of a group of social movements and NGOs in October, 2008 on the occasion of the Asia-Europe People's Forum in Beijing that developed a sketch for a "transitional program for radical economic transformation." The "Beijing Declaration" laid out alternatives that are "practical and immediately feasible" that put the "well-being of people and the planet at their center." This requires "democratic control over financial and economic institutions." It includes proposals for finance, taxation, public spending and investment, international trade and finance, environment, and agriculture and industry. It provides a brilliant first expression of a globalization-from-below alternative to the failures of globalization from above.

The basic vision of the Declaration is summed up in its title: "The global economic crisis: An historic opportunity for transformation." Its goal, in other words, is not to shore up the status quo and return to the destructive form of globalization that preceded the crisis. Its objective is almost the opposite of the eight-trillion-dollars-and-counting of bail-outs, rescues, and subsidies provided to business in recent months by the world's governments. It aims instead to provide "a transitional program for radical economic transformation" to a "different kind of political and economic order."

"Transitional program" may sound like antiquated socialist rhetoric – a call to take state power and nationalize industry. But both the goals and the methods are very different. Indeed, the Declaration points a path between merely reestablishing the status quo and assuming that actions must be "revolutionary or nothing."

No "maximalism" here. "To capture people's attention and support" the Declaration argues, proposals must be "practical and immediately feasible." That is possible because, even under the domination of globalization from above, people have been developing alternatives within the world's nooks and crannies. The unfolding economic crisis provides the opportunity "to put into the public domain some of the inspiring and feasible alternatives many of us have been working on for decades."

The goal linking these alternatives is "the well-being of people and the planet." And that requires a focus not primarily on restoring the financial system, but first and foremost on the great human and environmental crisis the world is facing in relation to food, climate, and energy.

Such common human interests are not the principal concerns of the people and institutions that now call the shots in national governments or the global economy. The "well-being of people and the planet" will not be achieved by economic jiggering. Instead, "democratic control over financial and economic institutions are required."

The vision of such democratic control, however, is not of either a centralized national or a centralized global economy. It is closer to what Walden Bello elsewhere described as the "co-existence" of a variety of "international organizations, agreements and regional groupings" that would allow "a more fluid, less structured, more pluralistic world with multiple checks and balances" in which nations and communities can "carve out the space to develop based on their values, their rhythms, and the strategies of their choice."

The current economic crisis creates opportunity for transformation, the Declaration argues, because it severely weakens the power of the US, the EU, and the IMF, World Bank, and WTO. It undermines the legitimacy of the neo-liberal paradigm. And, where global pseudo-consensus once asserted that "there is no alternative" to liberal capitalism, the future of capitalism is now becoming an open question.

Of course, this moment can also be seized by "fascist, right wing populist, xenophobic groups" who will try to "take advantage of people's fear and anger for reactionary ends."

What is the agency for pursuing constructive alternatives and resisting destructive ones? It starts with the "powerful movements against neo-liberalism" that have been built over past decades. These will grow along with public anger at the abuse of public funds for private subsidy, the crises of food, energy, and the environment, and the deepening recession.

As social movements from around the world converge in Belem, Brazil at the end of January for the World Social Forum, they will be in a position to take the next step toward realizing their potential as the world's "other superpower." Indeed, it is the convergence of the already existing networks and understandings of globalization from below with the new outrage at what neo-liberalism has done to the world that provides the opportunity to show that another world is indeed possible.

Tim Costello, Jeremy Brecher and Brendan Smith are the co-founders of Global Labor Strategies, a resource center providing research and analysis on globalization, trade and labor issues. GLS staff have published many previous reports on a variety of labor-related issues, including Outsource This! American Workers, the Jobs Deficit, and the Fair Globalization Solution, Contingent Workers Fight For Fairness, and Fight Where You Stand!: Why Globalization Matters in Your Community and Workplace. They have also written and produced the Emmy-nominated PBS documentary Global Village or Global Pillage? GLS has offices in New York, Boston, and Montevideo, Uruguay. For more on GLS visit: www.laborstrategies.blogs.com or email smithb28@gmail.com.

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Thomas Frank: Why Misgovernment Was No Accident in George W. Bush’s Washington

Published on Tuesday, August 5, 2008 by TomDispatch.com

Washington is the city where the scandals happen. Every American knows this, but we also believe, if only vaguely, that the really monumental scandals are a thing of the past, that the golden age of misgovernment-for-profit ended with the cavalry charge and the robber barons, at about the same time presidents stopped wearing beards.

I moved to Washington in 2003, just in time for the comeback, for the hundred-year flood. At first it was only a trickle in the basement, a little stream released accidentally by the president’s friends at Enron. Before long, though, the levees were failing all over town, and the city was inundated with a muddy torrent of graft.

How are we to dissect a deluge like this one? We might begin by categorizing the earmarks handed out by Congress, sorting the foolish earmarks from the costly earmarks from the earmarks made strictly on a cash basis. We could try a similar approach to government contracting: the no-bid contracts, the no-oversight contracts, the no-experience contracts, the contracts handed out to friends of the vice president. We might consider the shoplifting career of one of the president’s former domestic policy advisers or the habitual plagiarism of the president’s liaison to the Christian right. And we would certainly have to find some way to parse the extraordinary incompetence of the executive branch, incompetence so fulsome and steady and reliable that at some point Americans stopped being surprised and began simply to count on it, to think of incompetence as the way government works.
But the onrushing flow swamps all taxonomies. Mass firing of federal prosecutors; bribing of newspaper columnists; pallets of shrink-wrapped cash “misplaced” in Iraq; inexperienced kids running the Baghdad stock exchange; the discovery that many of Alaska’s leading politicians are apparently on the take — our heads swim. We climb to the rooftop, but we cannot find the heights of irony from which we might laugh off the blend of thug and Pharisee that was Tom DeLay — or dispel the nauseating suspicion, quickly becoming a certainty, that the government of our nation deliberately fibbed us into a pointless, catastrophic war.

Bad Apples All Around
So let us begin on the solid ground of these simple facts: this spectacular episode of misrule has coincided with both the political triumph of conservatism and with the rise of the Washington area to the richest rank of American metropolises. In the period I am describing, gentlemen of the right rolled through the capital like lords of creation. Every spigot was open, and every indulgence slopped out for their gleeful wallowing. All the clichés roared at full, unembarrassed volume: the wines gurgled, the T-bones roasted, the golf courses beckoned, the Learjets zoomed, the contractors’ glass buildings sprouted from the earth, and the lobbyists’ mansions grew like brick-colonial mushrooms on the hills of northern Virginia.

Democrats, for their part, have tried to explain the flood of misgovernment as part of a “culture of corruption,” a phrase at once obviously true and yet so amorphous as to be quite worthless. Republicans have an even simpler answer: government failed, they tell us, because it is the nature of government enterprises to fail. As for the great corruption cases of recent years, they cluck, each is merely a one-of-a-kind moral lapse unconnected to any particular ideology — an individual bad apple with no effect on the larger barrel.

Which leaves us to marvel helplessly at what appears to be a spectacular run of lousy luck. My, what a lot of bad apples they are growing these days!

Corruption is uniquely reprehensible in a democracy because it violates the system’s first principle, which we all learned back in the sunshiny days of elementary school: that the government exists to serve the public, not particular companies or individuals or even elected officials. We Are the Government, insisted the title of a civics primer published in the earnest year of 1945. “The White House belongs to you,” its dust jacket told us. “So do all the other splendid buildings in Washington, D.C. For you are a citizen of the United States.” For you, young citizen, does the Post Office carry letters to every hamlet in the nation. For you does the Department of Agriculture research better plowing methods and the Bureau of Labor Statistics add up long columns of numbers.

The government and its vast workforce serve the people: The idea is so deep in the American grain that we can’t bring ourselves to question it, even in this disillusioned age. Republicans and Democrats may fight over how big government should be and exactly what it should do, but almost everyone shares those baseline good intentions, we believe, that devotion to the public interest.

We continue to believe this in even the most improbable circumstances. Take the worst apple of them all, lobbyist Jack Abramoff, whose astonishing career as a corruptionist has been unreeling in newspaper and congressional investigations since I came to Washington. Abramoff started out as a great political success story, a protégé and then a confidant of the leaders of the conservative faction of the Republican Party. But his career disintegrated on news of the inventive ways he ripped off his clients and the luxury meals and lavish trips with which he bribed legislators.

Journalistic coverage of the Abramoff affair has stuck closely to the “bad apple” thesis, always taking pains to separate the conservative movement from its onetime superstar. What Abramoff represented was “greed gone wild,” asserts the most authoritative account on the subject. He “went native,” say others. Above all, he was “sui generis,” a one-of-a-kind con man, “engaged in bizarre antics that your average Zegna-clad Washington lobbyist would never have dreamed of.”

In which case, we can all relax: Jack Abramoff’s in jail. The system worked; the bad apple has been plucked; the wild greed and the undreamed-of antics have ceased.

Misgovernment by Ideology
But the truth is almost exactly the opposite, whether we are discussing Abramoff or the wider tsunami of corruption. The truth is as obvious as a slab of sirloin and yet so obscured by decades of pettifoggery that we find it almost impossible to apprehend clearly. The truth slaps your face in every hotel lobby in town, but we still don’t get the message.

It is just this: Fantastic misgovernment of the kind we have seen is not an accident, nor is it the work of a few bad individuals. It is the consequence of triumph by a particular philosophy of government, by a movement that understands the liberal state as a perversion and considers the market the ideal nexus of human society. This movement is friendly to industry not just by force of campaign contributions but by conviction; it believes in entrepreneurship not merely in commerce but in politics; and the inevitable results of its ascendance are, first, the capture of the state by business and, second, all that follows: incompetence, graft, and all the other wretched flotsam that we’ve come to expect from Washington.

The correct diagnosis is the “bad apple” thesis turned upside down. There are plenty of good conservative individuals, honorable folks who would never participate in the sort of corruption we have watched unfold over the last few years. Hang around with grassroots conservative voters in Kansas, and in the main you will find them to be honest, hardworking people. Even our story’s worst villains can be personally virtuous. Jack Abramoff, for example, is known to his friends as a pious, polite, and generous fellow.

But put conservatism in charge of the state, and it behaves very differently. Now the “values” that rightist politicians eulogize on the stump disappear, and in their place we can discern an entirely different set of priorities — priorities that reveal more about the unchanging historical essence of American conservatism than do its fleeting campaigns against gay marriage or secular humanism. The conservatism that speaks to us through its actions in Washington is institutionally opposed to those baseline good intentions we learned about in elementary school.

Its leaders laugh off the idea of the public interest as airy-fairy nonsense; they caution against bringing top-notch talent into government service; they declare war on public workers. They have made a cult of outsourcing and privatizing, they have wrecked established federal operations because they disagree with them, and they have deliberately piled up an Everest of debt in order to force the government into crisis. The ruination they have wrought has been thorough; it has been a professional job. Repairing it will require years of political action.

Conservatism-in-power is a very different beast from the conservatism we meet on the streets of Wichita or the conservatism we overhear talking to itself on the pages of Free Republic. For one thing, what conservatism has done in its decades at the seat of power is fundamentally unpopular, and a large percentage of its leaders have been men of eccentric ideas. While they believe things that would get them laughed out of the American Sociological Association, that only makes them more typical of the movement. And for all their peculiarity, these people — Grover Norquist, Tom DeLay, Jack Abramoff, Newt Gingrich, and the whole troupe of activists, lobbyists, and corpora-trons who got their start back in the Reagan years — have for the last three decades been among the most powerful individuals in America. This wave of misgovernment has been brought to you by ideology, not incompetence.

Yes, today’s conservatives have disgraced themselves, but they have not strayed from the teaching of their forefathers or the great ideas of their movement. When conservatives appoint the opponents of government agencies to head those government agencies; when they auction their official services to the purveyor of the most lavish “golf weekend”; when they mulct millions from groups with business before Congress; when they dynamite the Treasury and sabotage the regulatory process and force government shutdowns — in short, when they treat government with contempt — they are running true to form. They have not done these awful things because they are bad conservatives; they have done them because they are good conservatives, because these unsavory deeds follow naturally from the core doctrines of the conservative tradition.

And, yes, there has been greed involved in the effort — a great deal of greed. Every tax cut, every cleverly engineered regulatory snafu saves industry millions and perhaps even billions of dollars, and so naturally securing those tax cuts and engineering those snafus has become a booming business here in Washington. Conservative rule has made the capital region rich, a showplace of the new plutocratic order. But this greed cannot be dismissed as some personal failing of lobbyist or congressman, some badness-of-apple that can be easily contained. Conservatism, as we know it, is a movement that is about greed, about the “virtue of selfishness” when it acts in the marketplace. In rightwing Washington, you can be a man of principle and a boodler at the same time.

The Wrecking Crew in Full Swing
One of the instructive stories We Are the Government brought before generations of schoolkids was the tale of a smiling dime whose wanderings were meant to introduce us to the government and all that it does for us: the miner who digs the ore for the dime has his “health and safety” supervised by one branch of the government; the bank in which the dime is stored enjoys the protection of a different branch, which “sees that [banks] are safe places for people to keep their money”; the dime gets paid in tax on a gasoline sale; it then lands in the pocket of a Coast Guard lieutenant, who takes it overseas and spends it on a parrot, which is “quarantined for ninety days” when the lieutenant brings it home. All of which is related with the blithest innocence, as though taxes on gasoline and quarantines on parrots were so obviously beneficial that they required little further explanation.

Clearly, a more up-to-date version is required. So let us follow the dime as it wends its way through our present-day capital. Its story, we will find, is the reverse of what it was in 1945. That old dime was all about service, about the things government could do for us. But the new dime is about profit — about the superiority of private enterprise, about the huge sums that can be squeezed out of federal operations. Instead of symbolizing good government, the dime now shows us the wrecking crew in full swing.

Our modern dime first comes to Washington as part of some good citizen’s taxes, and it leaves the U.S. Treasury in a payment to a company that has been hired to do work on the nation’s ports. Back in 1945, the government would have done the work itself, but now it uses contractors for such things. This particular contractor knows how to win a bid, but it doesn’t know how to do the work, so it subcontracts the job to another outfit. The dime follows, and it eventually makes up a worker’s salary, who incorporates it into his monthly car payment. From there it travels into the coffers of an auto industry trade association, which happens to be very upset about a rule proposed by a federal agency that would require cars to notify drivers when their tire pressure is low.

So the trade association gives the dime to a Washington consultant who specializes in fighting federal agencies, and this man launches challenge after challenge to the studies that the agency is using in the tire-pressure matter. It takes many years for the agency to make its way through the flak thrown up by this clever fellow. Meanwhile, with his well-earned dime, he buys himself a big house with nice white columns in front.

But this is only the beginning of the story. As we make our rounds of conservative Washington, we glimpse something much greater than single acts of incompetence or obstruction. We see a vast machinery built for our protection reengineered into a device for our exploitation. We behold the majestic workings of the free market itself, boring ever deeper into the tissues of the state. Ultimately, we gaze upon one of the true marvels of history: democracy buried beneath an avalanche of money.

Thomas Frank, the author of What’s the Matter with Kansas?, is the founding editor of The Baffler, a contributing editor at Harper’s, and, most recently, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal. His WSJ columns can be read at his website. He lives, of course, in Washington D.C. and this essay has been adapted from his new book, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule (Metropolitan Books, 2008).

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US Senators question USTR's capacity to conclude a WTO deal

Published by South-North Development Monitor, July 25, 2008
Geneva, 24 July (Kanaga Raja) -- Two top leaders of the United States Senate have cast further doubts over efforts at the WTO to conclude the Doha trade talks at the current mini-Ministerial, and in effect have challenged the capacity of US Trade Representative Susan Schwab to make any binding commitments on behalf of the United States Congress.

In a letter to US President George W Bush, the two top leaders of the US Senate, Democratic Senators Russell D. Feingold and Robert C. Byrd, have asked what US Trade Representative Susan Schwab and other US trade officials, in the absence of Congressional Fast Track Authority, are telling other countries at the WTO mini-ministerial about their ability to make binding commitments, and obtaining Congressional approval for them.
In the letter dated 23 July 2008, Feingold and Byrd have referred to the United States participating in a Ministerial meeting of the WTO this week in Geneva, whose purpose is to finalize an agreement on certain outstanding issues related to the WTO Doha Round.

"The announcement of this WTO Ministerial was surprising to us," said the two senators.

Typically, they said, high-level negotiations only occur when all parties have authority to make a deal. Yet, the US Constitution grants Congress exclusive authority "to regulate commerce with foreign Nations" and to "lay and collect Taxes [and] Duties."

"As you know, for decades, US presidents have obtained delegations of this congressional trade authority under what is commonly known as Fast Track. However, your delegation of Fast Track Trade Promotion Authority terminated on June 30, 2007.

"Congress has refused to provide you with further authority - either more Fast Track or any other form of trade authority - nor is there any prospect of that occurring before the end of your term.

"Indeed, it is likely that in the future, the Fast Track process will be replaced altogether with a trade negotiation and approval mechanism that better reflects Congress's constitutional role regarding trade policy," said the letter to President Bush.

Therefore, said the two Senators, "we are interested in understanding what USTR Schwab or other US trade officials are representing to other countries' officials regarding their capacity to make binding commitments at this Ministerial on behalf of the US Congress."

"We are eager to ensure that if US trade negotiators participate in the current WTO ministerial, they represent US positions that comport with the sort of WTO agreement that could obtain support in the US Congress."

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Walden Bello: Doha deal on services poses real perils

From the Bangkok Post

Desperate to clinch a new global trade deal, World Trade Organisation chief Pascal Lamy is planning to convene a "mini-ministerial" meeting in the third week of July.

The aim of the meeting is to come up with agreements to liberalise trade in agriculture, industry, and services which have been the focus of the so-called Doha Round of WTO negotiations that have dragged on since 2001.

Developing country governments have been rightly concerned about agreeing to texts which promise illusory reductions in agricultural subsidies in the European Union and United States and require them to cut their industrial tariffs proportionally more than the developed countries. They should also not allow themselves to be snookered into a bad agreement on services, which include such vital activities as the provision of water, energy, and financial intermediation.

While global attention has focused on the talks on agricultural subsidies and industrial tariffs, the US and EU have made it clear that they will not settle for a trade package that does not include services.

As US Trade Representative Susan Schwab bluntly stated in a recent opinion piece, Washington "will not support a Doha package unless it includes an ambitious outcome on services that delivers commercially meaningful results".

While Ms Schwab portrays the services talks as the poor cousin of the agriculture and industry negotiations, an equally possible outcome is a services agreement unaccompanied by deals in industrial tariffs and agriculture. With the North-South polarisation in agriculture and industry, salvaging Doha with a deal in services, which are said to account for 50-60% of economic activity in most developing countries, might be an attractive option to the EU and US.

The General Agreement on Trade in Services (Gats) requires countries to grant foreign service providers the same treatment as local firms. Developing countries are reluctant to do this, however, because of their current lack of capacity to regulate transnational businesses. Their fears have been fanned by troubles now in the global financial system, which are traceable to the absence of global regulation of developed country financial operators.

While financial services are just one of many services covered by Gats, the US and EU have made a liberalised financial sector their main demand on developing countries. It has been revealed, for instance, that the EU has demanded that some developing countries eliminate regulations that cover the activities of hedge funds, the financial groupings that are said to have triggered the collapse of the baht in 1997.

The EU has also demanded that Mexico open up its market to trade in derivatives, the slippery financial instruments that have played such a key role in the current financial chaos.

Most developing countries welcome foreign capital, but they have learned the hard way that a strong foreign financial presence demands a strong regulatory regime tailored to a particular country's needs and capacities.

It was the indiscriminate elimination of capital controls across the region at the behest of the International Monetary Fund and the US Treasury Department that brought on the devastating Asian financial crisis. With practically all capital controls lifted and investment rules liberalised, some US$100 billion flowed into the key Asian economies between 1993 and 1997, with the money gravitating toward areas of high and quick return, like the stock market and real estate.

With few controls on where the funds went, over-investment soon swamped the stock and housing markets, causing prices to collapse and triggering follow-on dislocations in the exchange rate, the balance of payments, and the balance of trade. Gripped by panic, speculators scampered toward the exit. With both entry and exit rules liberalised, there was no way for governments - except for Malaysia, which defied the IMF and imposed capital controls - to stop the stampede, and the $100 billion that fled the region in a few short weeks in the summer of 1997 brought economic growth to a screeching halt from Korea all the way down to Indonesia.

After the Asian financial crisis, the Argentine financial collapse, and the dot.com crash of 2000-2002, all of which were caused by speculative bubbles that developed owing to lack of financial regulation, one would have thought that developed country authorities would put the emphasis on seriously regulating the activities of global financial actors.

Global finance, however, resisted any move toward effective regulation. While there were calls for controls on proliferating financial instruments such as derivatives, these got nowhere. Assessment and regulation of derivatives were to be left to market players who supposedly had access to sophisticated quantitative "risk assessment" models that were being developed.

Having been burned by the consequences of financial deregulation, many developing country governments were not surprised when "self-regulation" led to the massive housing bubble whose bursting has brought the global financial system to the edge of collapse.

One of the stock scenarios of the old western movies was that of a train picking up speed towards a collision with another train as the lifeless hand of the engineer, already shot dead by outlaws, remained pressed on the accelerator. Current developments in global finance are reminiscent of this scene.

A global consensus is forming around strongly re-regulating the financial sector. But in disregard of this emerging consensus and the financial chaos around them, developed country negotiators at the WTO, much like the dead hand of the engineer, continue to press developing countries for a services agreement that would drastically liberalise their financial sectors!

The developing countries should steer clear of the train wreck that will certainly ensue from the US and EU's determination to pursue global financial liberalisation at any cost. They must not agree to a services deal that would compromise their ability to effectively regulate financial and other services.

Just as they must say no to agricultural and industrial tariff agreements loaded down with inequitable conditions, they must also not be party to a services agreement that would have no other effect but to continually drag them into the terrifying maelstroms of unregulated global finance.

Walden Bello is a professor of sociology at the University of the Philippines, and senior analyst at Focus on the Global South, a research institute at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok.

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Neo-Liberalism, the SPP, and the assault on the Black Nation

by Kali Akuno
Tuesday, May. 20, 2008 at 6:22 PM

The 4th SPP summit demonstrated to transnational capital how successfully a major US city and state can be transformed to realize profits. If transformation can be done in New Orleans, it can done anywhere in the US.

Neo-Liberalism, the Security and Prosperity Partnership Agreement, and the assault on the Black Nation.

Written by Kali Akuno
Monday, May 19th, 2008

The Fourth North American Leadership Summit, held in New Orleans, Louisiana on March 21st and 22nd, 2008 marked a watershed in the Battle for New Orleans and the global peoples' struggle against neo-liberalism and imperialism. The Summit was a continuation of the negotiations on the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) agreement between the Chief Executives of Canada, Mexico, and the United States. But, it was also much, much more.

President Bush's mission for this Summit was to consolidate many of the transformative gains he and the reactionary forces he represents have attained in New Orleans via their neo-liberal reconstruction program. This program is the most ambitious and far reaching application of neo-liberalism within US national boarders to date. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina this neo-liberal program has virtually eliminated the cities labor unions and turned the public education, housing, health care, transportation, and sanitation systems into private profit making enterprises. And it doesn't stop there. Bush also structured this Summit to be a international coming out party for Louisiana Republican Governor Bobby Jindal to showcase how an entire state government can possibly be privatized (Jindal aims to privatize the Louisiana educational system through the introduction of a state-wide voucher program).

In effect, the Fourth Summit was a calculated exhibition for tans-national capital to demonstrate how successfully a major US city and state can be transformed to realize profits. And the larger implications couldn't be clearer. What this says is that the US, which as the center of international capital and imperialism was long thought impervious to a complete neo-liberal transformation, is open ground cause if this transformation can be done in New Orleans, it can done anywhere in the US.

Conversely, the Fourth Summit was also a critical moment for the progressive forces of the Gulf Coast Peoples' Reconstruction Movement (RM). The coming of the summit further illuminated how central New Orleans and the Gulf Coast are to the overall program of imperialist globalization. And how central the task of dissolving the Black working class and the Black nation itself is to this project locally, nationally, and internationally. It also demonstrated the degree to which the Reconstruction Movement, and the Black Liberation Movement (BLM) which is its anchor, must organize, study, plan, and execute to overcome this challenge. To this latter end, the BLM, RP, and Global Justice movements on a whole must engage in a deeper interrogation of imperialisms neo-liberal project to dissolve the Black Nation to gain a more strategic understanding of the project to enable the forces of resistance to launch a potentially decisive counter initiative.

Dispelling Myths

To deeply engage this interrogation some critical myths regarding the neo-liberal project must be dispelled. Chief amongst them is the position and perspective that neo-liberalism and free-trade agreements (FTA's) within themselves are the problem. The problem, meaning what constitutes the central threat to our movements and humanity on a whole, is capitalism and imperialism. Neo-liberalism and Free Trade Agreements like the SPP, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), etc., are mere ideological frameworks and strategic policy initiatives of capital to create the structural controls needed to realize profits.

Neo-Liberalism as an ideological program and FTA's and their regulating instruments like the World Trade Organization (WTO), were strategically developed by capital between the two great inter-imperialist wars of the 20th century to mitigate against the destructiveness of their rivalries and the development of a genuine socialist socio-economic alternative. To this latter end, international capital, under the stewardship of US capital, created the Breton Woods institutions of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the General Agreement on Tariff's and Trade (GATT) / WTO to regulate and gradually integrate the world-capitalist system.

However, there were always tactical differences amongst capital as to how best to regulate this system, how fast to integrate it, and how to relate to the forces opposed to this system (including the colonized and oppressed peoples and nations of the world, the working and exploited social sectors within the imperialist nations themselves, and the revolutionary nationalist and anti-capitalist state projects of the world, particularly the Eastern Soviet block nations). Between 1950 and 1972 roughly, the dominant factions of capital enacted a program of compromise that allowed for a gradual integration and a limited degree of distributed capital accumulation that tolerated workers rights and national self-determination on a limited scale. This compromise was perhaps best described as "consensus capitalism".

This compromise was based on the steady growth of capital markets the world over following the second major inter-imperialist war (i.e. WWII). When this growth began to give way to declining rates of profit, inflation, and inter-imperialist antagonism over the divide of the spoils from the "Third World" in the 1960's, capital, particularly US capital gradually broke with the strategy of consensus capitalism and implemented a new strategy of capitalist accumulation. This new strategy is generally referred to as either neo-liberalism or the "Washington consensus". The Neo-Liberal strategy and program was originally articulated by Freidrich von Hayek in the 1940's, but wasn't unleashed on the world until the mid-1970's with the economic dismemberment of Chile under the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. With the adoption of this new strategy the implementation speed and intensity of the Breton Woods agreements, particularly the utilization of FTA's, rapidly accelerated and created the global dynamics we are now confronting.

The Assault on the Black Nation

As Naomi Klein aptly proves in "Disaster Capitalism", structural crises are fundamental to the success of the neo-liberal strategy and program. Her analysis however has a major blind spot. That blind spot is the strategies correlating dependence on national oppression and racial inequality as mediated by the historical process of uneven development within the capitalist world-system.

The successful implementation of the neo-liberal program in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast is directly contingent on the national oppression of New Afrikan and/or Black people, and the degree to which the regions Black community, particularly its working class sectors, can be assaulted with little or no consequence in this transformative process.

Following the massive press for Black Liberation mounted between the 1950's - 70's, US capital has been aiming to fracture and crush the Black nation and the strategic "internal" threat it posses to US imperialism and its hegemony over the capitalist world-system. Capital has executed a broad scope of strategic means to this end since the 1960's, including targeted repression and assassination, substantive buy-off programs, mass incarceration and warehousing, disinvestment from Black zones of inhabitance, and much, much more. The cumulative effect of these initiatives has been extremely devastating to the Black nation and its social stability and composition.

Despite the thorough nature of all of these initiatives, they were intentionally piecemeal. The political and social power accumulated by Blacks between the 1960's through the 80's, kept US capital from mounting a full on frontal assault against the Black nation. The dissipation of this power, due primarily to the retrenchment of the Black working class over the past 30 years, has shifted the balance of power decisively in favor of capital. The lack of a critical response to the emptying (in part through a forced military evacuation) of New Orleans and the numerous human rights abuses that have been committed against the peoples of the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina, has allowed capital to experiment with the strategic option of ethnic cleansing. Ethnic cleansing (and genocide), barring a few rare exceptions, has not been employed on the US mainland since the 1940's, primarily because the political costs were too high. Now that these costs have been minimalized, the strategic option of ethnic cleansing is being fully reincorporated into imperialisms arsenal (its international reintroduction started in Yugoslavia in the early 1990's).

Although the process is as of yet incomplete, New Orleans has in essence been strategically cleansed of its Black working class. This cleansing is the direct result of the neo-liberal strategy applied to the cities "reconstruction". As of February 2008, more than two and half years after the Hurricane, less than half of the cities Black working class had returned. Their return has barred by a coordinated set of policies and actions dictated by capital and enforced by the US government on all levels (Federal, state and municipal, i.e. parish) to ensure the destruction of the cities service institutions and ensure maximum corporate profits via privatizations (i.e. "public/private partnerships"). These policies and actions include hyper-inflated price gouging in the housing and utilities markets; the restriction of vital service provisions like water and electricity (for as long as two years in some locations in the Ninth Ward); the state seizure and demolition of tens of thousands of partially damaged and "abandoned" homes; the racist distribution of relief funds, like the Road Home Program, and insurance payout's; the barricading and destruction of more than four thousand units of public housing; the directing of the resources allocated to the cities redevelopment towards undamaged, predominantly white sections of the city (see the Ed Blakely's redevelopment plan); the ongoing military occupation of the city; and more. Capital has altered the "facts on the ground" as it relates to infrastructure in New Orleans to such an extent that a "right to return" for the cities historic ethnic majority is in fact not possible. In effect, New Orleans is being subjected to the "Palestinian Option" of displacement as development for its historic Black majority.

Viewed in this strategic light, the ethnic cleansing of New Orleans must not be seen as a limited geographic or tactical engagement. Rather, it must be viewed as an advanced assault against the entire Black Nation. Why? There are three primary reasons: 1) the dislocation of a considerable portion of the Black working class has created a highly volatile social force throughout the U.S. with high material aspirations, a deeply engrained consciousness of resistance to white supremacy and exploitation, and little patience; 2) this dislocated population has been deemed an expendable surplus by capital and society at large because of this volatility, and 3) the option of containment via mass incarceration and warehousing is rapidly approaching its peak limits. Given this, capital must explore other means to control this strategic liability.

Based on developments in New Orleans and a critical analysis of the means used to generate displacement via gentrification over the past thirty years, it can be surmised that this new strategic assault will be conducted via the following means: 1) the forced displacement of Black zones of inhabitance (via combinations of mass incarceration, gentrification, land speculation, predatory lending, and disaster capitalism), 2) the permanent militarization of these zones (including direct military occupations in direct violation of the Posse Comitatus Act), 3) the systematic exclusion of broad segments of the Black working class from the labor market (including from low-wage service employment), 4) the elimination or privatization of all public services and institutions in these zones and, and 5) the institutionalization of these arrangements via special legislative means.

This is directly where the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) agreement and other transnational agreements like it come into play.

The SPP and its Usages

The SPP for all intensive purposes is the consolidation of NAFTA via military means. These means include the development US led special security units that could be deployed in both Mexico and Canada; the centralization of intelligence between the three states; and the creation of super-security ports and highways to secure the transport of goods, services, and security forces. Capital is advancing this strategy to contain the resistance of the peoples and working classes it has dispossessed and discarded with the passage of NAFTA and to defend its gains it has acquired at their expense.

The Black nation is a primary target of the SPP agenda. But, it is not alone. The Indigenous peoples and nations of Mexico and Canada constitute another, as are the dispossessed workers and peasants of Mexico. This is illustrated by the fourteen-year assault against the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) and the Indigenous people of Chiapas and more recently against the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca or APPO inspired by retrenched Teachers. Both of these forces have played a vanguard role in the struggle against neo-liberalism on the North American continent, and have demonstrated from day one (remembering that the Zapatistas stormed to the worlds consciousness on January 1st, 1994 which was the commencement date for NAFTA) that this program would not be met without stiff resistance.
The SPP therefore represents a critical "learning" for capital and imperialism. The question is, will the Black nation and other peoples and workers movements of North America learn in response and act in kind in a united peoples front against imperialism and its neo-liberal globalization programs?

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