Los Expatriados (English Version)

Richard D. Wolff: Workers Self-Directed Enterprises

2011-11-22T14:17:00.001-08:00

Anti-Mankiw initiative in the blogsphere

2011-11-08T14:47:00.000-08:00

This initiative, which comes out the collaborative effort of various students at the University of Massachusetts, is focused on criticizing the positions of economist Gregory Mankiw that are put forward in his blog and offering alternative (radical) perspectives and solutions.

Visit the Anti-Mankiw blog here.

I AM NOT MOVING - Short Film - Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-16T17:35:00.000-07:00

The Puerto Rican Diaspora and the Political Status

2011-10-03T08:47:00.000-07:00

Note: The following is Dr. Meléndez's opening presentation for the Sept. 13 forum "Puerto Rico at its Political Crossroads: A forum to discuss the political future of the island." It was originallty published in http://www.latinalista.net/

There is no topic that incites as much passion among Puerto Ricans as the political status of the island. However, very rarely do stateside Puerto Ricans get an opportunity to discuss this topic with Puerto Rican leaders from the island.

Today I will examine the political status of Puerto Rico from a perspective acknowledging the role and rights of the Puerto Rican people in diaspora.

The origins of the Puerto Rican migration to the United States can be traced to the Latin American wars for independence and to the development of trade networks in the Northeast cities of New York, Hartford, and Boston during the early nineteenth century.

Shortly after the Spanish government lost Puerto Rico to the United States, the American government actively promoted migration as a solution to unemployment and poverty on the island.

By the end of the Second World War, advances in air transportation and economic policies induced the first of several significant exoduses from the island. It is estimated that over 400,000 Puerto Ricans migrated to the United States in the late 1940s and 1950s. Even larger waves were estimated for the 1980s and over the last decade.

All in all, today the majority of Puerto Ricans reside in the United States, not on the island of Puerto Rico. According to the 2010 Census, there are 4.6 million Puerto Ricans in the U.S., with only 3.5 million on the island, excluding foreigners. About one-third of those currently residing in the United States were born in Puerto Rico.

Puerto Ricans are dispersed across all states, with concentrations in New York, Florida, and New Jersey. Though the majority of Puerto Ricans still reside in New York, demographic projections suggest that by the end of this decade the number of Puerto Ricans in Florida will surpass those in New York.

The Political Status and the Diaspora

The question for consideration today is what role, if any, stateside Puerto Ricans should or could play in the determination of the future political status of Puerto Rico?

For the first time in history, the question of the future status of Puerto Rico is being discussed when a majority of the Puerto Ricans do not reside in the territory. In other words, I will examine whether 57 percent of the Puerto Rican people will have a voice and vote in the determination of their destiny.

Stateside Puerto Ricans play a critical role in the political process for any congressional action. Excluding the Resident Commissioner, who is elected to that body by the island population, there are currently four members of the United States House of Representatives of Puerto Rican descent.

Besides the direct connection of the congressional delegation to Puerto Ricans in their districts, there is a vast network of elected local officials and other civic leaders who greatly influence Congress and public opinion on this matter.

Stateside Puerto Ricans, whether they are born in Puerto Rico or not, are critical stakeholders because they influence the political process in the United States well beyond the congressional legislative process. Puerto Ricans have been elected to city, county, and state offices and they are active leaders in both the Democratic and Republican parties.

Then there is the potential participation of stateside Puerto Ricans in a referendum. To date, the House of Representatives has undertaken the question of Puerto Rico's status and approved legislation on two occasions; the Senate has considered but never passed legislation on this matter.

The prevailing view as stated in the most recently approved legislation in the House of Representatives supports that all United States citizens born in Puerto Rico but residing in the 50 states would have a vote in the plebiscite, but not those who were not born in Puerto Rico.

Stateside Puerto Ricans also are critical stakeholders because they maintain economic and social ties with the island, which are critical to its economy and social fabric. Using tourism as an indicator of the constant flow of Puerto Ricans to the island, about two-thirds [63.4 percent in 2010] of visitors to the island stay in other places than hotels. [This number excludes visitors to the island who are not simply in a cruise ship stop or transient military personnel].

Even when we do not consider those Puerto Ricans who stay in hotels, it is reasonable to assume that a significant portion of the island's tourism is from stateside Puerto Ricans who are visiting family, on vacation, or conducting business. We go on vacations, we purchase merchandise, and we visit restaurants. We are renting former primary homes, we have second homes or other real estate property, or we invest in businesses.

Some of our children take advantage of the island's educational system. And after retirement, some of us plan to live or spend a significant portion of our time on the island. In short, we are a significant group of consumers and investors in the island economy.

Given recent trends in migration, the economic impact of stateside Puerto Ricans on the island's economy is likely to grow over the next decades. All things considered, it is in the best interest of Puerto Rico's residents to strengthen the ties that bind us to our homeland.

In this context, one can make the argument that the active, broad engagement of stateside Puerto Ricans, whether island born or descendants, is critical for a resolution to the question of the status of Puerto Rico.

Stateside Puerto Ricans should be encouraged to become involved in the decision- making process of the status of Puerto Rico question. Consequently, all U.S. citizens of Puerto Rican descent should also participate in any referendum.

Referendums on the Status Questions

So what is the historical record of stateside Puerto Ricans' participation in Puerto Rico status referendums?

Since the creation of the Commonwealth in 1952, there have been three local referendums on the political status of Puerto Rico [in 1967, 1993, and 1998], and a referendum held in 1991 seeking to amend the Puerto Rican constitution to ensure certain rights or principles when deciding Puerto Rico's political status.

Stateside Puerto Ricans did not participate in any of these local initiatives. However, Congress has examined the status question on several occasions, and these processes have opened the door for the consideration of the role and participation of Puerto Ricans who do not reside in Puerto Rico.

In 1989, Senators Johnston and McClure introduced the Puerto Rico Status Referendum Act (S.712) which called for a referendum to be held in 1991. Though this bill died in congressional committee and never reached a vote, it served as the foundation for subsequent local efforts in 1991 and 1993, and more significantly it ignited the engagement of the stateside Puerto Rican community on the question of the status of Puerto Rico.

In 1998, the United States-Puerto Rico Political Status Act (H.R. 856) passed in the House but not in the Senate. It stated that Puerto Ricans would not be allowed to vote in the election.

Congressman Serrano presented an amendment to allow U.S. citizens of Puerto Rican descent residing in the 50 states to vote in the plebiscite, but it also was defeated, by a vote of 356 to 57.

In 2007, the Puerto Rico Democracy Act of (H.R. 900), a successor of H.R 856, never had enough votes to carry a debate.

In 2009, the Puerto Rico Democracy Act (H.R. 2499, a successor to H.R. 900 from 2007), was passed by the House with bi-partisan support. Under this act, all United States citizens born in Puerto Rico would have been eligible to participate in the plebiscite, but not those of Puerto Rican descent.

An unsuccessful referendum bill that was proposed by Senators Johnston and McClure in 1991 (S.712) provides a case study for the potential role of the stateside Puerto Rican community in future plebiscites on the status of Puerto Rico. With the active endorsement and participation of the Puerto Rican political leadership, the Committee Pro-Puerto Rican Participation (CPPRP hereafter) was created to insure the right of the Puerto Rican people "to vote in the Puerto Rican plebiscite."

In addition to advocating for the participation of all Puerto Rican people born on the island, the committee advocated a key principle in the resolution of Puerto Rico's political status: that the results of the plebiscite would be binding to the U.S Congress. The campaign was nonpartisan with respect to the status options and a broad range of civic and political leaders actively participated in it.

The reasons for advocating the right of the stateside Puerto Rican people to vote in the plebiscite were simple yet powerful. Foremost, the committee advocated for a clear defense of the right to self-determination, as understood by the international community.

The Puerto Rican people are one, whether they reside in the island or elsewhere. The referendum was considered an important event that transcended local elections because it provided a framework for the future of the country, and by implication of all the Puerto Rican people.

The results of the referendum were likely to have a significant impact on the social and cultural conditions of all Puerto Ricans, including those residing in the United States (whether they were born there or in Puerto Rico). The committee issued several reports and was able to score several important political victories, including the holding of congressional hearings in East Harlem, New York.

The political leadership in Puerto Rico was ambivalent, to say the least, about the participation of stateside Puerto Ricans. Early on in the process, Governor Hernandez-Colon declared his support, but a few months later he opposed an agreement reached by the sponsors of the bill in the House of Representatives.

The agreement was crafted by emissaries from Puerto Rico's three political parties (including the Governor's own party), and the CPPRP leadership. Despite opposition from the island politicians, the efforts of the CPPRP were successful in establishing expectations for future negotiations on the status of Puerto Rico in Congress. The most recent bill - the 2009 Puerto Rico Democracy Act recently mentioned, recognizes the right of all Puerto Rico-born citizens to participate.

Latino Diasporas and Transnational Politics

Before providing some concluding thoughts, I would like to address an important element in the new political environment that directly affects transnational politics between Puerto Rico and the United States.

I am referring to the growing Latino population and how the CPPRP efforts opened pathways for other populations in diaspora to engage in local politics in their countries of origin.

The fact that Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens is well known, certainly among the audience in this forum. However, the concept of dual citizenship is relevant to the question under examination.

Immigrants who become naturalized American citizens, for example, have dual citizenship. They can carry two passports and travel freely within their native and naturalized countries. Like Puerto Ricans, they can go back and forth to their country of origin to work or live as they see fit.

Dual citizenship is becoming more popular in many countries, for good reasons. Citizens with dual citizenship strengthen the economy of both countries by promoting trade and investment, transferring technology and knowledge, and facilitating access to a broader pool of human resources.

Countries like India, the Philippines, and Mexico are liberalizing their citizenship laws to take advantage of the benefits of dual citizenship.

Dual citizenship is a common practice among U.S. Latinos. Some examples of countries that encourage and take advantage of dual citizenship include Columbia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, México, and Peru.

An important component of dual citizenship among U.S. Latinos is that it enables them to participate in their country of origin politics. Two recent examples are:

In May of 2004, for the first time in history, Dominicans in the U.S. voted in the presidential elections of the Dominican Republic. Roughly 52,000 throughout the United States registered to vote in the elections.

In 2006, for the first time, Mexicans in the U.S. were allowed to vote by absentee ballot in the Mexican presidential election. About 4 million of the 10 million Mexican residents in the U.S. were eligible to participate.

The importance of these processes to the Puerto Rican case is evident. For one, they dismiss the idea that the logistics of the electoral process are too complicated or costly. Like Puerto Ricans, these Latino communities are dispersed all over the U.S., but they have the political infrastructure and have been able to get the cooperation of stateside governments to implement electoral processes for transnational politics.

But perhaps more important, the growing political presence of Latinos in Congress will add support to initiatives of concern to Puerto Ricans and boost a more powerful coalition to resolve the status of Puerto Rico than in the past.

The Latino leadership in Congress understands perfectly the implications of the rights of the Puerto Rican people to participate in deciding the future political status of the island.

Conclusions

In conclusion, the environment is becoming more conducive for stateside Puerto Ricans to play a larger role in the status question.

The fact that the majority of Puerto Ricans now live in the United States is a game changer: How can the future of the island be decided by a minority of our people? How can the rights of the people be denied when the political influence of the stateside Puerto Rican community is broader, more diverse than ever, and growing?

The fact that Latinos have a growing influence in the political process is a game changer as well. A broad Latino political coalition can finally induce Congress to recognize the rights of all Puerto Rican people and to make a commitment, prior to any plebiscite, to enact a bill which will be binding to the U.S Congress.

Finally, it is very important that stateside Puerto Ricans become part of the dialogue and political process about the future of Puerto Rico.

We are at a historical juncture when more and more of our families are divided, when our extended families have bilingual children and are becoming more culturally diverse, and when we seek greater connections to those living afar.

It is well known to all of us participating in this forum that there is a general lack of understanding of the stateside Puerto Ricans among the Puerto Ricans residing on the island.

I am hopeful that our participation in any referendum on the status of Puerto Rico will help strengthen social and cultural bridges between the two communities: Para los de aqui y para los de allá.

I am also hopeful that today we will engage in a civic dialogue that will mark a turning point towards the goal and aspiration of UN SOLO PUEBLO.

I leave the panelists with this question:

Do you support the right of all Puerto Ricans to vote in a status referendum?

Dr. Edwin Meléndez is director of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College (CUNY), New York. He has authored or edited ten books and has managed over thirty-five research, outreach, or demonstration projects. Dr. Meléndez was the director of the Mauricio Gastón Institute for Latino Community Development and Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts Boston as well as a faculty member in the Economics Department and the Ph.D. Program in Public Policy. He also served on the faculties of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Fordham University.

Racist BBC host attacks Black Veteran over London Riots

2011-08-09T07:59:00.000-07:00

From the Wiki on Howe (taken from

http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/)

Howe was born in Trinidad and Tobago, the son of an Anglican priest. He left Trinidad for London aged 18^[1] to enter the legal profession atMiddle Temple, but he swapped the law for journalism. He returned to Trinidad, where his uncle and mentor, radical intellectual CLR James, inspired Howe to combine writing with political activism. A brief spell as assistant editor on the Trinidad trade union paper The Vanguard was followed by return to Britain as editor of British magazine Race Today.

He became a member of the British Black Panther Movement, and in August 1970, following a protest, Howe was arrested and tried for riot, affray and assault. He was acquitted after a trial at the Old Bailey. Later, he was the editor of the magazine Race Today and was imprisoned for three months for assaulting a police officer. The celebration following his release was recalled in the song Man Free by poetLinton Kwesi Johnson. The central lines of the song describe Howe’s legal fight: “I stand up in the court like a mighty lion, I stand up in the court like man of iron, Darcus out of jail, Shabba!”.

Howe organised the 20,000 strong Black People’s March 1981 claiming official neglect and inefficient policing of the investigation of New Cross Fire in which 13 black teenagers died.

Terry Everton: "The Use of Unemployment"

2011-07-24T01:55:00.000-07:00

Facundo Cabral, Singer of Conscience, Dies at 74

2011-07-11T12:28:00.001-07:00

NY Times July 10, 2011
By LARRY ROHTER

Facundo Cabral, an Argentine singer-songwriter who was one of the most eloquent voices of protest against military dictatorships in Latin America from the 1970s onward, died on Saturday, shot to death while on tour in Guatemala. He was 74 and lived in Buenos Aires.

Mr. Cabral was killed when the car in which he was a passenger, on its way to the airport in Guatemala City, was ambushed by unidentified gunmen in three vehicles. His road manager, Davíd Llanos, and a concert promoter and nightclub owner from Nicaragua, Henry Fariña Fonseca, were seriously wounded in the attack.

The death of Mr. Cabral, who in 1996 was designated a “worldwide messenger of peace” by the United Nations, caused consternation throughout the Spanish-speaking world. President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela sent a message via Twitter: “Oh what pain! They have killed the great troubadour of the Pampas.” René Pérez, leader of the Puerto Rican hip-hop group Calle 13, wrote, “Latin America is in mourning,” and other leading pop-music figures, among them Ricky Martin, Alejandro Sanz and Ricardo Montaner, also sent Twitter messages lamenting his loss.

Guatemalan government officials said that Mr. Fariña, the nightclub owner, was most likely the gunmen’s intended target. But Rigoberta Menchú, the Guatemalan Indian leader who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992, seemed to contradict this view when she said Saturday, “I can’t help but think he was assassinated for his ideals.”

Rodolfo Enrique Facundo Cabral was born on May 22, 1937, the eighth child of a poor family that soon thereafter emigrated from Buenos Aires province to Tierra del Fuego; it was in that remote region that he was first exposed to Argentine folk music. As a child Mr. Cabral was rebellious, running away from home several times and serving time in a juvenile reformatory: as the story was told years later, at age 9 he even sneaked into the presidential palace in Buenos Aires, where he met Eva Perón and persuaded her to find a job for his mother.

At 14, while in the reformatory, Mr. Cabral was taught to read and write by a Jesuit priest and acquired the love of words that would make him famous. In addition to recording more than two dozen albums, Mr. Cabral wrote numerous books, both novels and nonfiction, the best known of which is probably “Borges and I,” an account of his friendship and conversations with the writer Jorge Luis Borges.

After holding a series of menial jobs and learning to play guitar, Mr. Cabral began performing in 1959, under a stage name, El Indio Gasparino, suggesting that he was of Indian extraction, like his idol and inspiration Atahualpa Yupanqui. It was only in 1970 that he had his first major success under his own name, the spiritually infused song “No Soy de Aquí, ni Soy de Allá” (“I’m Not From Here, I’m Not From There”).

That hit, which has been recorded or performed in various languages by artists including Julio Iglesias and Neil Diamond, was followed by others, and by the mid-1970s Mr. Cabral was firmly established in the top echelon of folk-inspired singer-songwriters in Latin America.

Many of Mr. Cabral’s songs mixed expressions of mystical spirituality with a desire for social justice, which gave him a reputation as a protest singer. That proved dangerous after the Argentine military seized power in a coup in March 1976, and he fled to Mexico, where he remained in exile until after the collapse of the Argentine dictatorship in 1982. On his return, in 1984, Mr. Cabral was more popular than ever.

His sold-out concerts were an unusual mixture of music and the spoken word, with songs preceded by long introductions in which he would muse on philosophy and religion and often quote from his favorite poets, including Borges and Walt Whitman, and spiritual masters like Gandhi and Mother Teresa.

It was not immediately clear if any immediate family members survived. Mr. Cabral’s wife and infant daughter died in an airplane crash in 1978, which he regarded as just one of many painful episodes in a life full of hardships: “I was without a voice until I was 9, illiterate until I was 14, became a widower at 40 and only met my father when I was 46,” he often said in interviews.

Still, Mr. Cabral’s work was suffused with optimistic aphorisms that have become common figures of speech. “Never allow yourself to be confused by a handful of killers, because good predominates,” he once said, adding, “A bomb makes more noise than a caress, but for each bomb that destroys, there are millions of caresses that nourish life.”

Puerto Rico: The fiscal experiment (Al Jazeera)

2011-06-28T13:44:00.000-07:00

Dozens of university students are arrested for demonstrating against a tuition hike. But Puerto Rico Gov. Luis Fortuno remains steadfast in charging students more to help close a $3.2 billion budget gap. The students' fight is representativeof a larger debate in Puerto Rico, and in the US, about how to solve a severe budget crisis -- and at what cost. Gov. Fortuno, a hawkish fiscal conservative, laid off 20,000 government workers in 2009, and suspended all labor negotiations, just like governors on the US mainland are doing today.

But two years later Puerto Rico's labor unions are still scrambling to reorganize a largely unemployed population -- nearly 17 percent. Puerto Rico is in its fifth year of recession, and expected to be the world's slowest growing economy if its situation doesn't improve. At question is the degree of economic and social responsibility the US has to its commonwealth state.

Fault Lines travels to Puerto Rico to investigate America's legacy as the Island's ruler, and the harsh economic policies that are being imposed on the people who live there.

This episode of Fault Lines, "Puerto Rico: The Fiscal Experiment" first aired June 27, 2011 on Al Jazeera English.

ACLU: Puerto Rico has pattern of police brutality

2011-05-04T01:59:00.000-07:00

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — A celebrity-enhanced ACLU delegation criticized Puerto Rico's government Tuesday for using police to keep the island's main university system open during a strike over a new fee, with members saying they found clear evidence in which officers abused students during the protests.
The delegation, which included Oscar-nominated actress Rosie Perez and former major league baseball player Carlos Delgado, said the initial findings of a fact-finding mission found a pattern of excessive police force over the past 18 months involving students, union leaders and journalists.

Their final report, which will be presented to the U.S. Justice Department, is expected by September.

Perez said at a news conference that she was overwhelmed by the testimony of students who said they were brutalized or sexually harassed and groped by police during a series of violent clashes over the $800 fee and budget cuts.

"I was really appalled as to how many of the adults treated many of the young people whether the young people were right or wrong," Perez said. "Yes, there were some bad apples, there were many bad apples in the bunch, but even they have certain rights."

Puerto Rico last year appointed an independent monitor for its police department and announced additional training in April for all officers in response to repeated allegations of brutality and misconduct.

Puerto Rico's Secretary of State Kenneth McClintock, who met with the ACLU delegation along with other island officials, faulted the delegates for announcing their preliminary findings so quickly, saying it suggested they had reached their conclusions before they had started. He said he urged them to expand their focus to include the rights of students and teachers who wanted to go to classes despite the months of protests at island campuses.

"The rights of those thousands of students should be equally entitled to ACLU interest and protection as the rights of the hundreds who participated in the demonstrations," he said.

ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero said in response that the group agrees that students have a right to attend classes but that local authorities went too far in using police to keep the university open.

"The university cannot be kept open at any cost," he said.

Struggle for Democracy and Public Education in Puerto Rico

2011-02-14T02:44:00.001-08:00

Author: Victor M. Rodriguez

"The epicenter of the struggle for the public university in Latin America is Puerto Rico." -- José Carlos Luque Brazán, professor and researcher of political science and urban planning at the Autonomous University, Mexico City*

The social conflict taking place at the University of Puerto Rico is polarizing this island to such an extent that this United States' possession, which used to be heralded as the "Showcase of Democracy" during the Cold War ideological struggles, is now sliding into a system of widespread civil and human rights violations. The University of Puerto Rico, for the first time in decades, is occupied by police: political demonstrations are banned; summary expulsions of student leaders are common; and hundreds of students have been arrested, beaten, and at times sexually assaulted or tortured. On February 9, after the riot squad violently intervened with students painting murals, 28 students were arrested, many were hurt and chaos ensued when pepper gas and batons were used to violently arrest students and bystanders. The police violence was of such magnitude that the faculty organization, the Puerto Rican Association of Professors, and the Brotherhood of Non-Faculty Employees called for a 24-hour strike, which was later extended. The university is closed and the president of the system, Jose Ramon de la Torres, after writing a letter requesting the removal of the police from the campus, announced he was resigning as president.

The coverage of this social movement by U.S. mainstream media is scant, and only Al Jazeera has begun to provide some international coverage. In addition, just as in Egypt, youth have created their own media in order to organize and tell the world what is happening in this territory of the United States. Hidden from the eyes of the world, and especially from the U.S. public, this island with 3.9 million inhabitants is experiencing the most intense struggle for democracy and public education since the 1960s. Since early April 2010, students of the most prestigious institution of higher education in the Caribbean, the University of Puerto Rico, have been involved in a struggle to preserve a system of public higher education. This is the system that provides 95% of the research and development in Puerto Rico.

Neo-Liberalism in Puerto Rico

Since his landslide election in 2008, Governor Luis Fortuño, of the pro-statehood New Progressive Party, has implemented a series of neo-liberal measures, which have polarized the island's population and increased economic inequality. Governor Fortuño is the first Puerto Rican governor who is an avowed member of the National Republican Party, despite the fact that the Republican Party as such does not participate in Puerto Rican elections. Despite his electoral promises, he has fired 30,000 public workers and reduced investments in social services and education. The unemployment rate in December 2010 was 14.7%, which is lower than it was at the beginning of the fiscal year (16.9% in July 2010), but the reason behind this decline is not an increase in jobs but the discouraged worker effect, that is, workers who are dropping out of the work force and either working in the informal economy or participating in social welfare programs. Puerto Rico moreover has one of the lowest labor participation rates in the world. The proportion of the able-bodied population who participates in the work force has declined dramatically. In July 1999, 47.8 per cent were in the labor force and in December 2010 it was 41.1 %. In contrast, the labor participation rate in the United States in January was 64.2%.

In addition, efforts to privatize segments of public services including education are being made through what the government call "private-public partnerships." These are ways of providing the private sector with public assets without the risks involved in the private market. Attempts to create these partnerships include the building of a gas pipeline through some of the most environmentally fragile areas of the island which are close to population centers. There is strong citizen opposition to this project, in light of the gas pipeline explosions in California, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, but the government is committed to its construction.

The privatization of higher education has involved another strategy to achieve the same objective. Funds for the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) since 1997 have been cut by $336 million. The university imposed an $800 fee hike on the students in order to solve the financial deficit of the system. What this increase will mean is that close to 10,000 students will not be able to attend the university. What seems to be behind the financial gutting of the university is the neo-liberal ideology supported by Governor Fortuño. From the academic year of 2001-02, to 2006-07, there was a dramatic decline in the proportion of public university students in the total university student population. In 2001-02, only 117,714 attended private universities while 73,838 attended the UPR. In 2006-07, 158,031 went to private universities and only 65,939 the UPR. In an island with a 47% poverty rate and a median family income of $20,425, a third of the United States median family income ($58,526), education is the only avenue toward upward mobility. And yet, the burden of educating the island's youth has been and will be further shifted to private universities, relying more on federal Pell Grants. So, by expanding the role of private universities the neo-liberals are transferring Puerto Rico's economic responsibility on United States' taxpayers.

Poll ratings of Governor Fortuño are extremely low, and yet he is steadfast in implementing draconian measures and supporting the repressive measures used against the university community, even though the Department of Justice sent investigators in response to a request by the local branch of the American Civil Liberties Union as well as other interested parties for an investigation of civil rights violation by the Puerto Rican Police Department. One reason behind his obstinate efforts may be that he is being courted by the National Republican Party as a way of attracting the Latino vote. Governor Fortuño attended a Heritage Foundation briefing in Simi Valley, California and a Koch brothers event in Rancho Mirage, California last month. At such venues he has been boasting of how he has established law and order in Puerto Rico. Most recently, on February 11, he was one of the speakers at the CPAC 2011 meeting in Washington, D.C., where he touted his neo-liberal policies. Toeing the Tea Party line, he spoke about reducing government, emphasizing higher bond ratings, but not about the collapse of the social fabric caused by his measures. Puerto Rico last year had 1,000 murders; this year, already in January, the homicide number in Puerto Rico reached more than one hundred. And yet the police are at the campus of the University of Puerto Rico, repressing freedom of expression. In the meantime, more than 200,000 Puerto Ricans have migrated to the United States, the highest number since the great migration in the aftermath of World War II.

It seems that the only strategy of neo-liberals in Puerto Rico is to shirk the social and public responsibility to provide for the Puerto Rican population by transferring segments of the population to the United States.

* Qtd. in Maritza Stanchich, "More Violence in Puerto Rico as University Student Fee Is Imposed," Huffington Post, January 18, 2011.

Victor M. Rodriguez is Professor and former Chair of the Department of Chicano and Latino Studies at California State University of Long Beach. He is an alumnus of the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras. Among his publications is Latino Politics: Race, Ethnicity, Class and Gender in Mexican American and Puerto Rican Experience (Kendall-Hunt, 2005). Visit his blog.

Video - Police Riot in UPR

2011-02-10T10:54:00.001-08:00

Ben Bernanke's silence speaks volumes

2011-02-10T10:52:00.000-08:00

Note: This article was written by economist Richard D. Wolff and originally published in the Guardian on february 9th, 2011.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's testimony before the House budget committee on Wednesday largely repeated what he has been saying recently. It was interesting only for its likewise repeated silences which, as so often, spoke loudly. The biggest silence concerned taxing corporations and the rich in the US.

Many sentences were devoted to the burdens of the huge deficits being run by the US government, to the need to reduce those deficits. Otherwise, Bernanke warned, lenders might one day stop providing those immense flows into the US Treasury. But not one word about reducing the deficit by taxing large corporations and the rich.

On Tuesday, Britain's chancellor of the exchequer announced a modest tax increase on banks in the UK: a "fair contribution", he said, "to our recovery". No such idea, let alone any action, in the US.

Instead, we hear pronouncements like Bernanke's that seem to believe that cutting outlays in the only way to go. The debate then becomes about which outlays to cut. Bernanke makes clear his preferred cuts lie in healthcare. Note that the US already spends more than other developed nations for poorer healthcare outcomes as measured by national health statistics. Bernanke says nothing about lowering government outlays by reducing the profits of drugmakers and healthcare providers. Nor do the possible impacts of reduced healthcare upon the wellbeing and productivity of the US workforce merit any comment or concern from Bernanke.

It is worth remembering that when the US borrows trillions of dollars to cover deficits, a significant portion of that borrowing comes from the large corporations and richest individuals who lend to the government the money that, apparently, they did not have to pay in taxes to that government. I can see the desirability for them of lending at interest rather than being taxed. The matter looks otherwise from the standpoint of the rest of us.

Silence on taxation of corporations and the rich should be exposed and opposed for the blatant ideological bias it represents.

Another deafening silence concerned the matter of states and cities. Their currently projected cuts in public services and employment will damage education, infrastructure maintenance and countless social services. Their effects will overwhelm the far smaller initiatives that Obama announced in his state of the union message and which will only be realised in part given the split political control of Congress. Like Obama, Bernanke had nothing to say or offer on the dire crisis of state and city budgets.

Last, consider the silence on unemployment. Bernanke did explain that the current rate of job creation, if maintained, would mean many more years of high unemployment. No word was uttered about even the vaguest idea of government job creation – again, a silence, as if that idea or programme did not exist (despite massive evidence to the contrary provided by FDR in the 1930s).

Of course, taxing large corporations and the rich would have its effects on the larger economy, positive and negative. In any rational debate, those effects would have to be weighed and considered against the positive and negative effects of the alternatives, including those used since this crisis began and those now projected. Instead, we have silences from Bernanke and from Obama, silences that close and narrow, rather than open and widen, discussion over the nation's crisis and future.

Colonial Propaganda - 1955 Video

2010-10-30T21:40:00.001-07:00

Teleview Productions Presents: Report on Puerto Rico USA (1955):

Capitalist Crisis, Radical Renewal? An Interview with Leo Panitch, Sam Gindin, and Greg Albo

2010-08-16T11:29:00.000-07:00

by Sasha Lilley
Originally published in The Bullet.
Part 3 of 3

Sasha Lilley: Sam, what have been the impediments to organizing a robust labour movement and left under neoliberalism that are obstacles in renewing the left now?

Sam Gindin: One of the problems is that the argument that 'there is no alternative' is a serious one – that if we don't actually get more radical, it’s hard to imagine alternatives in the middle. One impediment is not wanting to put forth radical demands, thinking that it’s better to be moderate at this time. In other words lowering our expectations. I think that's been a mistake.

The other mistake has been to think that we're going to build a movement by always predicting that capitalism is going to decline or that it will fall apart or break down. We have to be able to articulate the argument that capitalism is bad even when it's working well, that capitalism is now a barrier to human development.

And the third thing I think, which relates very much to what Greg was getting at, is we have to understand that under neoliberalism it wasn't just a question of the working class being under attack, but it was also integrated into neoliberalism in certain ways. Significant sections of the working class actually increased their consumption through working longer hours and through debt. They're very much more individualized. Inequality has fragmented the working class.

When we think about all those kinds of things, what we recognize is that the working class has been shaped and formed and reformed through neoliberalism. And if we're going to overcome that, we're going to need some kind of organization that actually builds the working class. There's nothing inherently radical about the working class. It just has the potential to be radical. There are all kinds of potentials to mobilize around, from the legitimacy questions you raised, to the volatility in finance that Leo emphasized, to everything that Greg talked about. So the potential is there but the question is how do we actually build the working class into a class.

I come back to what Greg said: a critical point is that we recognize that we're fighting capitalism and we recognize how crucial building our own capacities for analysis, for understanding, for acting democratically internally – how crucial that question is.

Sasha Lilley: How do we challenge the integration of the working class into capitalism through credit card and mortgage debt? What kind of politics could address that crucial dimension of the position of the working class over the last several decades?

Sam Gindin: I think the poor are going to have more trouble getting credit, but the answer shouldn't be to make it easier for them to get credit. The answer should actually be to talk about things like public housing. But for the rest of the working class, I think there's going to be revival of dependency on credit, on pension funds, on trying to survive by retiring later, which there will be a lot of pressure for.

Sasha Lilley: Presumably that's already happening. Consumption is up again and presumably that must be consumption based on debt.

Sam Gindin: All of this is going to continue and get stronger. I think the kinds of things we have to talk about is actually thinking about breaking out of this by raising issues that may not be on the agenda tomorrow, but if we don't start talking about them now they'll never be on the agenda.

One of them is to start talking about nationalizing the banks. Another thing is you can actually look at a specific crisis. If you look what's happened in the auto industry, without the left putting things on the table what unions end up doing is demanding we save our company, we become more competitive, which essentially means: let somebody else be laid off. And the kind of things we have to talk about is to say: the issue isn't about saving the company; it's about saving our productive capacity which can actually make useful things. It's saving our communities. The issue isn't to be competitive, it's actually to make useful things and start thinking about making democratic planning.

And if we link that to the environment for example, if we said that the environment means that everything is going to be changed about how we produce things, how infrastructure works, how we communicate, transportation etc., then the question is why can't we mobilize around plants closing in the auto industry that have the equipment, that have these great skilled workers, and start thinking about using that in a socially useful way and converting it? If you had those kinds of structures in place, you would see workers saying, our company isn't investing or our company is starting to disinvest and move some place else – let's take it over. Let's insist it is converted to some useful ends here.

One of the issues we just have to recognize is that there's logic to it. It seems commonsense in a lot of ways. But it isn't going to emerge through unions. Unions are still going to be defensive. They still think in a very sectionalist way – in other words, they represent their members or they represent workers at a particular company. That's why we have to build something that goes beyond the unions. It has to have its feet in the unions as well; unions are still important institutions. But unless we can start thinking about how we build the kind of organization that's really a cultural change and changes expectations and can actually say, this is what we have to talk about and it involves doing something immediately, which will raise contradictions because the other side is going to respond, and then we'll have to think about how we go further. If we can't build those kinds of spaces – which are psychologically crucial, because it makes people feel like they are part of something, that if it isn't going to win tomorrow there's actually a way of fighting back and getting some place – I don't think we can get anywhere. Because people will just return to saying, I have to survive and the way I can survive is by working more hours, going into more debt, hoping the stock market recovers, hoping that they fix this rotten system so that I can benefit from finance, etc.

Sasha Lilley: Why do you think work-time reduction is important not simply for people's wellbeing but politically? And why you think that it is an achievable demand to make at a time when workers often have very little leverage to shorten their hours at pay that they can survive on?

Sam Gindin: That's a terrific question. I think if you look at the formation of the trade union movement, a critical demand was around work-time. I think this is generally true, but I know it's especially true in Canada. The importance of it was that workers actually wanted time to read and to do other things. And I think that's of crucial importance of work-time today. That the workforce has changed. Workers used to be able to be active by exploiting the partner who would take care of the other chores at home. That's to some extent foreclosed right now. If people can't find time to be active and to read and to think and to learn, we can't build a political movement. So politically, reduced work-time I think is one of the most important demands. If the only reason you're getting reduced work-time is so that you can get another job, that of course is a different thing.

The question of why is it possible: it's only possible by building the kind of movement that can win it. It's possible technically, as we're living through this incredible period of productivity growth. Productivity has been phenomenal. Productivity growth in manufacturing is much higher than it was in the golden 1950s and 1960s. So the technical potentials are there. The question is how you organize for it. That's one question.

I think a lot of that means you can't just think about winning this in your own workplace. We don't have that kind of strength. It does mean thinking about how do we actually win these things by building the class in terms of making it a class demand and thinking of the class more broadly. And that we're actually mobilizing the community and making the argument that this is about sharing good jobs. But in terms that this is a general demand – it shouldn't just be for workers who have collective agreements. It should be a general demand.

The other thing we have to think about – and is very difficult, but we really have to address it – is that it also poses the question how much do we want to consume and what kind of consumption and what we think about our living standards. I'm convinced that if we only think of this in terms of, we want to keep consuming more in the sense of more of the present structure of consumption but have reduced work-time, that we won't go anywhere. That won't win. We have to think in terms of wanting a different kind of life, where we can enjoy life in all kinds of different ways in terms of public consumption and different forms of consumption. But it can't just be the assumption that we can all just keep having more as individual consumer and have less work-time and have a different life.

Greg Albo: It should actually be one of the top things in our demands for addressing global climate change as well, because it has a lot to do with changing consumption. It's probably the most equitable way of dealing with climate change issues.

Sasha Lilley: At the start of this crisis, as government stepped into rescue failing banks, you called for the nationalization of the banks, pointing out that such nationalization had partially taken place. At this further phase of the crisis, do you think a renewed left should still champion this demand?

Leo Panitch: Yes and I actually think that the condition of achieving everything that Sam and Greg were talking about is in fact that. It's not the only condition of it, but it is a necessary condition of it – necessary in the sense that the decisions about what is produced and what is invested and how its produced and where its invested need to be democratic ones. They need to be made in a social, planned way. That can’t happen unless the portion of the surplus, if I can use that term, that passes through the financial system and gives us the funds for credit in capitalism is transferred to a public decision-making process and a planned one, whereby we use the little extent to which the state is now democratized to begin a process of democratizing the economy – and in that process also much further democratize what we now know as governments or the state.

What happened with this financial crisis was there was an enormous opportunity to turn banks into public utilities. Instead we did get the nationalization of some banks – although to some extent we just got public funds put into banks without even a degree of repayment or public control. But we didn't get them changed. On the contrary, when money was put in, governments said we want to be paid back in full, we want the tax-payer to be treated as though he or she was an investor, so we want the highest return possible. Which means that you're pushing the banks to be commercially competitive. In that sense, you could say as someone in the next Socialist Register writes, it wasn't so much the Treasury that nationalized the banks, it was the Treasury that got privatized by the banks, insofar as their interest becomes one of getting a high return for the tax-payer – and then of course giving the banks back to private ownership.

That was a tragedy. It was to be totally expected due to the reasons Sam and Greg talked about in that we didn't have the kind of political alignment that would conceivably have led to what I'm describing taking place – banks being turned into public utilities and the whole process of investment being democratized. But that is what is needed.

It's a lot to take on, but the way we need to link the kinds of demands that Sam and Greg were pointing to with that very much larger issue of taking the banking system into the public domain and democratizing it, is to say we can't really have public transit, and free public transit, unless the state can get hold of at the municipal level at the state, at the federal level, can get hold of those funds that pass as credit through the banking system and transform the uses to which that's put. There's absolutely no reason rationally why we need to think of funding this only through taxation, rather than through the savings that we all are part of. Right now, pension funds are invested in all kinds of things related to financing capitalism. Pension funds, workers savings, we could have a universal pension plan which is directed toward funding government deficits beyond simply the tax system.

There are all kinds of ways in which we can make people see how these things are linked. Nationalizing the banking system isn't something out there. But it's something intricately related to the kinds of reconstruction of production, the conversion of production, that Sam was pointing to. That people are going to be able to say, we're not just losing this company, we're losing the enormous resources that these workers have as mechanics, tool and die makers, accountants, teachers, you have it. What we need to be able to do is turn the savings of our society toward the kinds of production that is socially useful, rather than is commercially driven, the way it now is.

Sasha Lilley: Leo, you've stated that we're possibly living through the fourth crisis of capital in a global sense. What were the other crises and how did their resolutions affect the degree to which capitalism extended itself globally?

Leo Panitch: This arguably is the fourth. The first great crisis of capitalism was from 1873-1896, it's often argued. The second was the Great Depression of the 1930s. The third was the crisis of Keynesianism and of profits in the 1970s. And we may be entering the fourth. Each of those crises had different causes and different outcomes. They are not all caused by the same thing and they don't all lead to the same type of outcome.

The first one produced an orientation toward internationalizing capitalism, but within the framework of competing capitalist empires. That eventually led to World War One. The second one actually broke down and stopped capitalism’s internationalizing tendencies and you got the kind of beggar my neighbor protectionism that led to World War Two. Out of World War Two, you got the American state in particular becoming the kind of empire that was determined to get the globalizing tendencies of capitalism back on the agenda. It succeeded in that. But that led to contradictions by the 1970s, which ushered in the profit squeeze of the 1970s, partly having to do with the way which workers were strengthened under the commitment to social welfare and full employment reflecting the power of democracy that had developed within capitalism in the 20th century. That then led to, in a sense, workers being too strong for capitalism. And it led to a profit squeeze and was resolved largely through the defeat of the working class, the defeat of trade unionism, and the further expansion of capitalist competition at a global level.

This crisis certainly no one could say was caused by workers being too strong. If anything it was caused by workers being too weak – too weak in the sense that they were still very much tied into capitalism, as Sam said, they were trying to be consumers by being indebted consumers. They were trying to look to their retirement by engaging in speculation, whether through their pensions or expecting that their homes would increase in value, the main asset that many workers own in a capitalist housing market. So in a sense, the kinds of contradictions in finance that pertain to the workers’ side of the equation reflected the weakness of workers, their individuation, their fragmentation, their incorporation as Sam said into capitalist finance and capitalist competition.

I think that, however, these are very, very contradictory processes and it isn't impossible – and you see in California the evidence of this – for indebted workers and indebted students to rise up and begin to realize what that means for them, what that means for their lives, in terms of having to pay off these debts in a way that keeps them tied in almost as debt slaves to the system. In California, a campaign by students to have their student debt forgiven or to allow there to be no penalties for a default on that student debt would now be a very important element in the kinds of struggles that are taking place in the educational system. But insofar as that were to be viable, it would have to be connected to the much larger issues that I was talking about in terms of economic planning and the taking over of the financial system. And that's a very big political agenda.

Sasha Lilley: You three have been speaking about the ways that neoliberalism has made it difficult for workers to organize in their interests, to have the time to engage in radical politics, or politics at all. Looking at the other side of the equation, what are the vulnerabilities that this system has that radicals should exploit?

Leo Panitch: There are so many that we could go on talking for weeks and months. The vulnerabilities are of the kind that produced the great unionization movements and the social movements and socialist parties that emerged out of the first crisis from 1873-96. They're the types of contradictions that led people to break with the AFL unions in the 1930s and form the industrial unions that brought in everybody that was in a particular plant, whether they were highly skilled tool and die makers or whether they were janitors into the same organization. They're the same type of contradictions that led to the crisis of the 1970s, being also the moment at which the new social movements were at their height. So there are all kinds of opportunities. And to be very specific the kinds of struggles in which students and teachers are engaging in California provide an enormous opportunity to make connections between the cutbacks that are taking place, the way in which the public sector in California is being made to bear the cost of what was a crisis not at all caused by the public sector, that the link should be made between that struggle and what we've been talking about doesn't seem to me to be too far a stretch.

It doesn't at all seem to me impossible that we should be talking today about taking the example of the 1930s and the creation of a new type a trade unionism and, to pick up what Sam was saying, the need for the type of labour organization now, which isn't confined to a given industry but sees itself as a much broader class organization and sees the struggle for free public transit as important to the retention of their jobs – but in the way that would involve the conversion of their workplaces in a massive way. One could look at the suicides in China that recently led to a wage increase being given by Honda in their plant there as part of a much broader set of struggles for a working class that has grown in numbers enormously in this period of neoliberalism.

There has been massive proletarianization around the world. One could look forward, it seems to me, to enormously heightened level of class struggle of the kind that would be immitated and encouraged by looking at what's going on in one place and what's going on in another. It's not impossible that the strikes that are taking place in Greece that Greg was referring to can have an exemplary effect. We need to do all we can to make them have an exemplary effect. So, yes, I think there are enormous opportunities. What we need much more of, as Sam was saying, are the kind of organized political forces which can intervene in a productive way to encourage that, to sustain it, to give it a broader focus. As Greg was saying, the old parties, the social democratic parties, the left of the democratic party, etc, and also those old Marxist formations that either were powerful or looked like they might be in the 20th century and have now passed into history – we need to find substitutes and alternatives to them.

The anti-globalization movement was a very, very exciting development from Seattle on and hopefully people in it will begin to see that we need more than protests at IMF meetings and more than annual World Social Forums. Those are useful, but we need to organize out of them. They shouldn't be a substitute for building permanent organizations that can contest for power. There's been too much of a tendency in the movements of the last decade to be afraid to do that and to believe that it’s enough to simply protest.

Sasha Lilley: There was a very interesting editorial in the Financial Times by the historian of the French revolution, Simon Schama, worrying that this year may be the moment where people go to the streets. He made a parallel with the French revolution and the lag that often occurs between when people are hit by a crisis and when they respond. Just looking around us during this summer, perhaps, of our discontent, there is a crisis unfolding in Europe, which of course looms over the United States and North America, and in the Gulf of Mexico there is an absolutely horrendous oil spill, which is hard to fathom except through the lens of the profit motive and private capital’s relation to the state. Sam, do you think that there are opportunities now, despite the weakness of institutions of the left and labour, which we might be hopeful about?

Sam Gindin: Yes and not just in terms of what’s happening now. This is going to continue. There's going to be more volatility. There's going to be more pressure on people to pay for the exit to this crisis. Insecurity isn't going away. Inequality isn't going away. People see what's happening in the Gulf, they see the kind of resources the state can mobilize when it's trying to save the banks and they can contrast it to the state's intervention in other ways. They're cynical. They're skeptical. I don't think you have to convince people that capitalism is wonderful. You just have to convince them that there is something they can do about it.

My sense is that these things explode in unpredictable ways. But then the question is always how do you sustain it. So the opportunities are there and it's encouraging whenever you see a struggle someplace that you can learn from or be inspired by. And then there are local things that are going on. In Toronto we've all been involved in the creation of something called the Greater Toronto Workers' Assembly. It was really an attempt to say: let's just not have another protest against the crisis; let's actually talk about the fact that none of the things we do right now in the movements, or in the unions, or on the left actually match what we're up against. And we need to get together on a class-based way that actually speaks to capitalism, that's actually rooted in the community, in a sense of organizing here. We're focusing on free transit as a class issue. We're focusing on how does the public sector respond in a time of austerity. And we're arguing it can't just respond by trying to get higher wages and isolating itself. It has to actually say: we have to put the level and quality of administration of public services on the agenda and lead in the transformation of public services or we're going to be killed. These things evolve and they're hard to do, but they've got people speaking and finding spaces to address these things. So I'm optimistic, but not in a sense of being ready to predict that it's about to happen. But the opportunities are there definitely.

Sasha Lilley: I want to end by asking Greg that same question – what do you see as the opportunities in this moment despite the obstacles that you have laid out?

Greg Albo: I think there are four. One is that the American and NATO single war across the Middle East is fracturing in many ways, from Palestine to Afghanistan, through some of the problems in Iraq. So I think some defeats and some even positive movement, particularly in Palestine, will be very positive for the global social justice movement.

Secondly, I think the continuing momentum and the breakthrough in the Andean countries as challenges to neoliberalism – not that either Bolivia or Venezuela have managed to break-through neoliberalism, but they have been combining, developing new political forces with anti-neoliberal and anti-capitalist political agendas – is helping to reform the left across the continent of Latin America and it’s a very positive development globally. I would put alongside those the developments that have occurred in both Nepal and Thailand. Obviously the Thai case is very ambiguous in some senses, with the leadership of the Red Shirts, but on the other hand it was an incredibly moving display by peasants and workers in the city demanding democracy.

As Leo pointed out, the developments in Europe are still unpredictable. They can still open up from Greece to Portugal with a more radical left putting demands on what is quite clearly an unworkable solution that has so far been put forward in dealing with the Greek crisis. The political momentum developing in Europe is quite unpredictable and could start making some linkages with the fights in France and Britain and Germany as the austerity packages start moving through those countries. So I think that's very positive.

I would identify, like Sam, a lot of the developments that are occurring largely in urban cities in North America, both in Canada and the U.S., which are finding new ways to connect organizing between unions and migrant rights struggles, and with community fightback initiatives, which I think are forming a different kind of left than we've had for a long time. It's forming a left that is more open for new political initiatives, is more open to longer term organization-building, and I think is breaking from the lock that has been on the left both in Canada and in the U.S. of trying to fight our politics either through the Democratic Party or similar combination of the Liberal Party and New Democratic Party in Canada. I think that's very positive for us being able to build a new left in North America over the next couple or years.

Capitalist Crisis, Radical Renewal? An Interview with Leo Panitch, Sam Gindin, and Greg Albo

2010-08-14T14:05:00.000-07:00

by Sasha Lilley
Originally published in The Bullet.
Part 2 of 3

Sasha Lilley: Various Marxist critics have argued that the financialization of the economy is capital’s means of addressing the underlying stagnation of the “real economy,” of industry in decline. The argument goes that the current crisis is part of a long downturn starting in the 1970s and capitalism’s ill-health has been masked by a shift into profit-making through all sorts of incomprehensible derivatives and forms of speculation. You three see things quite differently. How so?

Sam Gindin: To elaborate a little more on what Leo was saying: part of the role of finance – once you see it in terms of capitalism – is to discipline and restructure the so-called real economy. It's been fundamental to that, imposing discipline on every factory to be more competitive or finance will go somewhere else, to reallocate capital across several sectors, venture capital, but much more generally. So finance has been fundamental to that.

The other way that finance has been absolutely crucial too, is to understanding capitalism in terms of its imperial dimension. It's been fundamental to capitalism actually penetrating other countries, imposing certain conditions if they want the finance, putting the United States in a position where the American state is responsible for managing capitalism more generally; and for integrating the working class – in addition to them using credit in the macro sense that it keeps the economy going – the involvement of workers in the circuits of capitalism in terms of housing and pensions and their assets rising. It’s also been a socialization of workers.

Now in terms of specifically the question of decline, if you leave aside looking at specific numbers for a second and just think about what's happened over the last quarter of a century, it actually looks like one of the most dynamic periods from a capitalist perspective – not from a worker perspective, but from a capitalist perspective. It's a period in which you've penetrated China. You've penetrated the former Soviet Union. You're now penetrating the enormous potential of the Indian market. You've seen a powerful commodification of things that used to be seen as part of the Commons. Part of what government provides has been privatized as sources of accumulation. You've seen very radical breakthroughs in technology over this period in terms of that kind of dynamism.

And when you actually look at the numbers, what you do see is that profits have actually recovered from the lows that they were. They're not at the peak they were at in the 1960s, but that was a unique period. And the restructuring of the economy has been very dramatic across sectors. If you're looking at the American economy, it has restructured geographically. It has restructured in terms of what sectors are dominant right now. The importance of business services has become a very fundamental part of the economy, especially in terms of the American global role. High tech in the U.S. has grown dramatically. The U.S. has been importing a lot but it has also been exporting a lot.

So I don't think there's been a lot of credibility to the argument of the American economy having declined. The real problem we have is that all this restructuring has gone on and workers have basically been pretty passive victims. They've accepted this. They haven't in any way been acting as a barrier in terms of putting other social goals or social values on the agenda. And that's allowed capitalism – American capitalism in particular – to restructure at will. And it's done really well in terms of accumulation.

Sasha Lilley: You mentioned that finance has allowed the U.S. to play a particularly imperial role. How does the U.S. exercise its imperial hegemony, as you see it?

Sam Gindin: The way we've been trying to think about it is, yes, there's direct involvement in terms of occupation, there's direct involvement in terms of transforming so-called failed states when there's no other mechanism of doing this. But the crucial point about the American empire is that unlike national empires of the past, which actually carved up the world, this empire is trying to create a global capitalism and is acting on behalf of global capital and penetrating through capitalist institutions. That's the important element of this empire's penetration.

If more American investment is going abroad and less is in the U.S., if the U.S. share of global production is going down, that's often interpreted as a symbol of decline. But in fact what it is signifying is the spread of capitalism, its penetration into other societies, transforming social relations in those societies, transforming the states in those societies so those states actually take on responsibility for supporting global accumulation, including American accumulation within their own borders. You're creating a global capitalism within which the American state and American capital have a structural power. The structural power comes from the fact that the U.S. is still the dominant country in terms of technology. It's increasingly playing a crucial role in terms of what I raised before – business services, accounting, legal consulting, engineering, and of course finance. There's more concentration of American power in finance then there is in other sectors. So it's very important not to see imperialism as being only about territorial intervention. And it’s very important to understand that this kind of empire grows through actually spreading production, in a sense sharing production globally in a particular way.

Sasha Lilley: Clearly, the type of economic regime of the last quarter century is now in crisis. Is the neoliberal model, in which the U.S. was in some ways the lead player, now dead?

Greg Albo: I think it's very hard to claim, given the way that the crisis unfolded, that neoliberalism is over or dead. Certainly we're entering another phase of it where many of the contradictions that have been internal to neoliberalism from the beginning have compounded and are now taking on a different form. One could begin, of course, with financialization and the role of financialization in neoliberalism from the beginning and financial crises being one of the elements of the developmental model of neoliberalism. And clearly the way that some of those characteristics of finance had developed in the last decade, some of the unregulated forms of collateralized debt obligations are mutating into something quite different and we're likely to see some new regulatory forms in and around many of those markets. But we're unlikely to see those markets abandoned. We can see the way that the regulatory reform issue in Congress is going forward that these aren't radical interventions in overturning the forms of financialization that have been central to neoliberalism. I think that's one contradiction or problem that has been present that is still there.

We see the same thing with inequalities. Wage inequalities, income inequalities, the lowering of transfers to people on welfare, and so on have been another aspect of the developmental model of neoliberalism. In many ways, that's at a crisis with the rates of unemployment higher, the rates of people on welfare are higher, and the income inequalities keep on expanding. There are some pressures from below to address those. But as a whole, without a larger political movement we can see also the way that the crisis is unfolding that that is also not fully on the agenda – it's not on the political agenda to start overturning the income distribution dynamic of neoliberalism. In fact, the way the austerity packages are moving through the various capitalist states of the world, the workers and the poor are the key people who are paying for the crisis.

Similarly, we can see some of the tensions in and around the balance of payment issues and current account differences. There are some tensions that have been always internal to neoliberalism between the current account surpluses of certain zones of the world and the current account deficits of other parts of the world, particularly the U.S., and there's some tension in and around that. There has also been no real route out of it as of yet, with Europe in problems and not being able to move into a major importing zone and the countries of East Asia not wanting to reverse themselves either. It's likely the situation of the current account deficit of the U.S. will be continuing and some of the asymmetries in the world payment system, those are likely to continue. So in many ways, we're definitely in another phase of neoliberalism as a result of this crisis. Certainly, its clear that the political forces in no part of the world have been able to break out of the neoliberal political policies or the balance of power that has backed neoliberalism, that is, the way that finance and industry have supported neoliberal policies at the level of the state.

Sasha Lilley: So is this, then, an impasse based on a crisis of ideas on the part of elites? Or has neoliberalism still not yet run its course as a viable engine of accumulation?

Greg Albo: Neoliberalism is linked to a particular policy framework within capitalism toward a certain balance between the state and market, but as Leo was pointing out, not necessarily a withdrawal of the state, but the market playing the leading role in the determination of where investment is allocated and how incomes are formed. And within that general framework the ideas of neoliberalism can adapt to a new moment, particularly if there are no other political forces on the agenda, the ideas will be generated and something will come up and this model of capitalism will continue.

I think there's a real bankruptcy of ideas among liberals and social democrats. I think that's where the key flaw is – in the hopes that somehow state power can simply be reasserted over and finance constrained as a key way that an alternative of reform could come forward and, alongside that, an expansion of various regulatory structures. I think modern social democracy has failed not only at the political level, but also fails to understand many of the dynamics of contemporary capitalism.

I think the problem on the left actually is not a question of ideas as many people often put forward. I think there are many ideas on the left on how to address the crisis – from work-time reduction to various ideas about green conversion, the traditional ideas on the left on expansion of the social sector. There are many, many interesting new ideas about restructuring the state and planning. The problem really on the left is one of political and organizational capacities right now. That it is just not present, so the left really isn't on the political stage as a political force, both at the level of unions and social movements. Certainly in North America, we're nowhere near having an adequate political force that is capable of offering an alternative vision, an alternative agenda, especially being inventive about how new social forces might be organized.

Sasha Lilley: As you are suggesting, there’s clearly more than one route out of the crisis. How would you envisage a route that would benefit the working class? I was going to ask what route would not benefit them, but presumably that’s what we're seeing right now.

Greg Albo: Why don't I start with the route that is not benefiting them? Clearly, the route that is being put forward right now is that of the capitalist class and the existing states have had a complete sway in setting the agenda. The initial responses that had emerged with some strike responses, some housing occupations, have largely fallen to the side, although I'll come back to the Greek case in a second. They've had a quite wide swath to cut in setting a new agenda and they're doing this with minor reforms around regulatory structure. Particularly, what they're managing to do is paying for the financial crisis and offloading so much of the bad debt into the state sector and the state sector's emergency response in terms of expansion are now focused on what the International Monetary Fund has called for as a decade of austerity. Meaning that transfers to the poor are to be cut back. Public sector wages are being cut back in the order of 5-10 per cent. Income transfers are being cut back. Other forms of social programs are being cut back. And this is being backed around the world by both conservative governments and social democratic governments. They've had complete opening to set that agenda.

There has been little response. The only response that has occurred has been in the Greek case so far, which has generated a large number of walkouts and general strikes, days of action, and in some of the other Mediterranean countries as well. But they haven't been able to push aside the move by those governments to implement these really draconian austerity packages. Right now the route out of the crisis is particularly being set by the capitalist class, in our view within the framework of neoliberalism – although neoliberalism has taken many forms, maybe we'll want to call it something different – but it was within that agenda.

It is very difficult to see any social democratic response at the moment emerging, that is, some alternative reflationary strategy that would have the tax burden shift more onto the capitalist class through various kinds of crises taxes or taxes on financial speculation of a major kind; not the small transaction taxes being discussed as basically a backstop for future financial crises.

So what you're left with is largely the question of whether you can begin engaging the union movement, the social movements, and radical political parties in a new project of organization and challenging capitalism. In an initial sense, I think that's a big question more along the lines of organizing, than per se a reform response to the crisis. It has a lot to do with new forms of attempting to organize unions and allowing much participation of workers in unions. A whole range of issues is involved there.

There are policies of reform that could be put forward now; there's all kinds of things that could be for it in the context of building such a counter movement: one could be arguing for campaign around free public transit, as a way to respond to the crisis in terms of a green alternative that would have the popular resonance among both ecologists and workers and poor people. Work time reduction should be on the agenda as another response. It would be relatively easy to begin campaigns for a crisis tax – that is, a special levy on high-income groups and on the financial sector – and so on. It's easy enough to come up with a range of programs or reforms that we could struggle for. Many of our movements are putting forward some of those across North America, particularly in the major cities where there are a lot of struggles around urban reform and the whole range of housing issues as a consequence of the crisis. The question really is building a renewed left with a much different political capacity.

Capitalist Crisis, Radical Renewal? An Interview with Leo Panitch, Sam Gindin, and Greg Albo

2010-08-12T08:54:00.000-07:00

by Sasha Lilley
Originally published in The Bullet.
Part 1 of 3

Sasha Lilley: Liberals and leftists alike argue that the economic crisis was caused by a lack of state regulation over the banks and financial markets. Consequently, they conclude that we just need new regulation to keep the financial sector in line. Why don't you think that's the case?

Leo Panitch: Well, the cause of the crisis was certainly related to competition in the financial sector. But that competition was to some extent the product of state regulation. The American financial system is certainly the most regulated financial system in the world, and probably in history, if you measure it in terms of the number of pieces of legislation, the number of regulatory agencies, and the massive amounts of regulation to which finance is subject.

So, yes, there were changes that allowed for more competition in finance, although those changes were only a matter of closing the barn door after the horse had bolted. It was already the development of finance that made the old New Deal regulations impossible. The state then removed those limits and encouraged further competition in finance. So it's just a misunderstanding of what's really going on. There's a sense that the state didn't do its job in constraining markets. And there's a confusion about what a capitalist state is. A capitalist state responds to and sponsors and facilitates markets. The notion that it's there to restrain markets, to restrain capitalism, that if only it would do that it would remove the contradictions of competition in capitalism, is simply a cockamamie way of seeing the world. Although unfortunately it's the way in which it's ideologically presented to us.

Sasha Lilley: Much of this may appear counter-intuitive since the dominant narrative on the left is that over the last quarter century the state has retreated and let markets run unfettered. Could you give us some concrete examples of the ways the state actually facilitates markets?

Leo Panitch: At the most basic level, you couldn't have contracts. You couldn't have property without all of the things that the state does in the form of law, in order to guarantee to one side of a contract, or to one capitalist to another, that their deals can be validated. So at the most basic level the state is in there.

But more than that, states are oriented to facilitating accumulation on their own terrain. And some of them, the imperial states like the American, are oriented to facilitating capital accumulation and the spread of markets to do that around the world. They do that in a myriad of different ways. People think the New Deal regulations were brought in to constrain finance. Yet in many ways the Glass-Steagall Act that separated commercial from investment banking, for instance, was adopted in order to stabilize finance and to nurture it back to health. Through the whole of the post-war period there was a very close corporatist relationship between the banking sector and the regulators. The regulators were oriented to nurturing finance, not only back to health, but to a new stage of development. And that's what began to happen by the 1960s.

Some of the old constraints that were put on the separation between commercial and investment banking then began to make less and less sense as finance was now very powerful and expansive and spreading around the world. And you got some removal of those. The big example was the 1975 New York Big Bang where New Deal price-ceilings on what brokers were allowed to charge for buying and selling stocks for people broke down. They were mainly broken down because pension funds and other institutional investors were buying very large blocks of them and they wanted discounts.

Another example is the removal of the Glass-Steagall Act, the separation of commercial and investment banking, which allowed commercial banks to be involved with derivatives and acting as brokers and selling insurance and so on. But that had already broken down. It was never applied internationally and it had broken down domestically in the United States since the early 1980s. So it was really changing the legislation after finance had already expanded in the way it had.

Sasha Lilley: Coupled with the notion that deregulation is the cause of our current economic woes is a belief that finance is simply a parasite on the real economy. What you argue, however, is that although part of finance is obviously speculative, finance actually plays a crucial role for accumulation in general. Can you explain why?

Leo Panitch: Finance is speculative and, yes, it is very much about trying to make money by trading on money. There isn't the kind of Marxist connection between money commodities – money in the classic sense of producing a thing, a good. I think that's where the misconception comes from.

But no production takes place with out the provision of credit. And increasingly no production takes place with out the provision of credit to consumers. And finance has been crucial to the dynamics of expanded production. Especially in terms of globalization and financing the means of integrated production right around the world.

So when people for instance speak of derivatives as simply speculation, there certainly is speculation involved, but you couldn't have somebody, say Wal-Mart, contracting with a supplier in China to produce something that will be on Wal-Mart shelves in the United States next winter, unless both parties were able to find financial intermediaries that would allow them to hedge the difference in the exchange rate between what the dollar and the renminbi is now and what it will be next winter. Or do the same with what transportation costs will be at that time. Or do the same with what interest rates will be at that time. So these derivatives are means of buying insurance in relation to fulfilling a contract for the delivery of things that are produced.

You simply couldn’t have global production with out the role that finance plays just in this respect, and I'm not even getting into the role that finance plays in terms of venture capital, which was very important in terms of the development of information and technology revolution we just lived through; and for the role it plays in facilitating investment. You could do the same for the kind of role that finance plays in terms of making indebted consumers into viable consumers. And you see that through credit cards and many, many other aspects of the role that finance plays. And that even has to do with the role that finance played in housing, which led to subprime crisis. People were taking out second mortgages in order to sustain their consumption in part. Now you can go even further to look at the role that finance plays via channeling workers savings into pension funds and the role those pension funds play in investing in stock markets, investing in derivatives, and so on, which has to be traced through how that links to production.

It's an illusion to imagine that finance is out there in some greedy Gordon Gecko world and that is “bad capitalism,” rather than what GM does which is somehow “good capitalism” and why GM was in the tank was because of the Geckos of this world. Not at all. This is capitalism and both productive capital, in the sense of industrial corporations or retail firms like Wal-Mart, and the big banks are part of the totality and we need to understand them in terms of the way they link with one another.

Interview with Richard D. Wolff: Part 2

2010-08-09T10:15:00.001-07:00

Ian Seda (IS): What has led to the various austerity measures that have been proposed and implemented in various European countries during the last months?

Rick Wolff (RW):Austerity’s immediate cause was the threat by lenders that they might not renew existing loans or make additional loans to these countries and/or charge them much higher interest rates unless those countries raised significant new money to guarantee the servicing of their debts. Lenders demanded that indebted governments either raise more in taxes or cut expenditures or both: i.e., “austerity”. Because the US borrowed so much more over the last 2 years and because it remains the world’s least risky debtor, lenders can demand more from all other countries. Lenders can lend all they want to the low-risk, heavily borrowing US, so they demand much more from riskier borrowing nations unless those nations impose an austerity that reduces lenders’ risks.

The global crisis suddenly forced the US and many other countries to vastly increase global borrowing to finance crisis management. New borrowings added to the long accumulation of debt by many governments who borrow rather than face (1) the political enmity of the business interests and wealthy who do not want to pay taxes and/or (2) the mass resistance of people who will not pay more in taxes. Borrowing allows such nations’ leaders to support business and the masses without taxing them more. That option for those leaders has now been damaged by the global capitalist crisis.

Not the least irony of the situation is that among the most important lenders to national governments are major global banks whose collapse provoked governments to undertake massive borrowing to rescue those banks (as well as global credit markets). The banks benefited because rising national debts financed their rescue by governments; in return, they now threaten their riskier benefactors and press austerity upon them.

Of course austerity can take different forms. Imposing austerity is a risky move by a desperate governmental apparatus, since it sharpens struggles internally over who will pay more taxes and who will suffer cuts in payments and services from the government.

(IS): Who are the major lenders to the U.S?

Treasury securities – the main form of the US national debt – are owned by both private (60 per cent) and public (40 per cent) creditors. The biggest single creditor is the U.S. Federal Reserve which buys and sometimes sells Treasury securities as a means of manipulating the money supply to influence the economy. The nations whose private and public creditors together have by far the largest holdings of US treasury debt today are the People’s Republic of China and Japan with roughly $ 900 and $ 800 billion respectively out of a total foreign ownership of Treasury debt equal to $ 4 trillion (all data as of April 2010). Private owners of US Treasury debt include banks (on their own accounts and as trust and fund managers and advisers), pension funds, insurance companies, stock brokerages, etc

(IS): You recently had the chance to visit the latest scapegoat of the crisis, Greece. What general thoughts can you share with us about that particular situation?

(RW): Greece is a place now of sharpening struggles. Europe is close behind as the schedule of general strikes into Fall 2010 show. Greece has a militant working class that cannot be squeezed as easily as in many other capitalist countries. At the same time, it has a highly concentrated business structure and the small wealthy strata it sustains. Notorious tax evasion has been coupled with a relatively generous public employment and remuneration system: both financed with borrowing.

The plan for Greece – both its harsh form demanded by private lenders and the EU’s less harsh substitute loan – have one goal: reduce the risk of Greek default. They do not want default hanging dangerously over Europe and spreading from Greece. Imposing austerity on Greece aims to remove the risk of defaults renewing crisis as lenders collapse again.

Greek workers are fighting back against an austerity aimed with mounting general strikes. While initially defensive, such actions might evolve into more basic challenges of capitalism itself.

(IS): What should we expect of the G-20 meetings in Toronto which have, as one of the important topics in agenda. the restructuring of the world financial system? Will we see something similar to the Bretton Woods Agreement in terms of the dominant role of the US in such proceedings?

(RW): In Toronto, capitalism’s leaders rediscovered Marx’s insight that capitalism is caught in a contradiction: capitalists constantly aim to lower the wages only to discover that workers can then not buy what capitalists need to sell. Thus Obama worried that austerity would reduce what workers and governments buy. Would that not hurt rather that help efforts to emerge from recession? Europe’s leaders simply repeated the “need” to impose austerity given what horrors defaults might unleash. Europeans, Americans, Japan, the BRIC – all experience the uneven global capitalist crisis differently. Each seeks to emerge from it in better shape than the others. The relative decline of the US excites many other capitalist countries even as they fear being destroyed by it.

(IS): What is your take on those that say that China and India will dethrone the US in terms of global hegemony?

(RW): At this point, that is pure speculation provoked by the much more rapid rates of growth of both Asian economies over the last 20 years when compared to that of the US. However, both economies remain much poorer than the US, and more dependent on the US as an export market than the US is dependent on them in any way. The recent economic development of both India and China has been extremely uneven. A relatively small part of those societies has gotten much richer while huge populations - in India even more than in China – remain outside the zones of rapid development. This has been typical for economic development paths of both private capitalism (private shareholders select private corporate boards of directors who employ workers and distribute their surpluses) and state capitalism (state apparatuses select state officials who employ workers and distribute their surpluses). No one can predict how the class struggles inside all three nations will evolve and interact with the complex interdependencies and competitions within and among them. The current global capitalist crisis has impacted them in different ways as each scrambles to minimize the damage and gain advantages vis-à-vis the others.

The long history of capitalism has repeatedly included wars – including world wars of unprecedented savagery – resulting from the internal class and other contradictions and national competitions among nations. Neither China nor India can contest the US hegemony militarily, nor will that change quickly. While US hegemony economically and politically is declining relative to its position in the last half of the 20th century, it is premature to declare whether that decline will continue, what forms that decline would take, how the US might deploy its military and continuing wealth advantages, and how India and China will manage their own internal contradictions and external relations.

Interview with Richard D. Wolff: Part 1

2010-08-03T02:36:00.000-07:00

Note: Article originally published in Claridad (July 29- August 4, 2010)

Ian Seda (IS): Many economists are claiming that the “Great Recession” is finally over given a rebound in GDP growth in the US. What is your take on these types of analyzes?

Rick Wolff (RW): GDP numbers tell us nothing about the distribution of income and wealth, the profitability of enterprises, the prospects for growth, and much else of importance. Politicians often use GDP numbers if and when convenient to applaud policies they support or denounce those they oppose. In the US today, politicians interpret GDP growth since mid-2009 as a sign that capitalism is now “in recovery.” Yet extreme unevenness characterizes US capitalist development since mid-2009. Because of massive injection of money, lowering interest rates to near zero, and guaranteeing private bank obligations by the Federal Reserve (the US central bank), and simultaneous massive deficit spending by the US federal government, banks’ profitability recovered. Low interest rates also fueled a partial “recovery” of stock market prices. Huge government spending likewise slowed (but never reversed) rising unemployment and bankruptcies. Thus, while US GDP rose since mid-2009, unemployment and bankruptcies also rose, the housing crisis deepened (severe excess supply of housing alongside rapidly rising homelessness), and state and local governments slashed services (especially public education, welfare, support for the elderly, etc.).

For the present and the future of the US economy, what matters most since mid-2009 is the severity of rising unemployment and its negative consequences. Current living conditions of most Americans have deteriorated; that plus cutbacks in education seriously compromise the economic future for the US. Multinational corporate capitalists are relocating production, targeting future market growth, and making profits increasingly outside the US. They use their wealth and power to reduce their US taxes and to support US politicians who best manage this long-term decline of the US.

Since the mid-1970s, real wages in the US stagnated. Households maintained rising standards of living only because US workers (especially women) did more hours of paid labor and borrowed huge sums. Today, exhausted from that labor and anxious over unsustainable household debt, US workers confront the historic decline of their standard of living and its future prospects. Only a mass class response can change these historic developments. GDP numbers stressed in public discussions mostly distract attention from the social implications of the crisis and working class decline.

(IS): In what ways is this crisis and the responses to it different from the one of the 1930's?

(RW): President Roosevelt's response to the deepening US depression after 1932 was shaped by three key factors: (1) the severity of unemployment, bankruptcy, profit and output declines, etc. (2) the powerful working class response in an historically unprecedented unionization drive organized by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), and in rising electoral support and social influence of the Socialist and Communist Parties, and (3) the existence of an increasingly influential anti-capitalist alternative in the USSR. Thus Roosevelt's New Deal not only used massive Keynesian monetary and fiscal policies and regulations of businesses and markets; it also undertook massive programs of direct employment (hiring 11 million workers as federal employees between 1933 and 1942) while also established the social security system, unemployment insurance, etc.

In contrast, the Bush and Obama administrations faced only the first of the three key factors listed above: a massive collapse of the capitalist economy. The AFL-CIO has been declining without interruption for 50 years and now represents under 8 per cent of privaste employees. The socialist and communist parties have all but disappeared and nothing comparable has yet replaced them. Thus we have, quite predictably, Keynesianism without any major, direct, or massive social welfare system. Without political pressure from below, the US will continue to be ruled by a right-wing Keynesianism.

(IS): People like Noam Chomsky are worried that the current situation in the US has brought back the ghost of fascism given the lack of an organized labor movement and the role that nationalism acquires as a discourse of unity under situations of crisis. What are your thoughts on this?

(RW): Capitalism always provokes angers and resentments, especially among workers who get jobs in cyclical upswings and then get fired when crises hit. In sustained capitalist crises, the numbers of such workers rise. Their demands for relief, for jobs, etc. can quickly mature into criticisms of the capitalist system itself for so regularly revisiting crises and mass suffering on people. Then socialist and/or communist movements can become more socially powerful. Capitalism’s survival may require something that distracts angry workers and the unemployed away from socialist and communist movements. Fascism is often the solution for capitalism if and when its organizers use nationalism, religion, racism, anti-immigration sentiments or other such means to generate mass movements that do NOT attack capitalism and do attack socialism and/or communism. The ghost of fascism – like economic crisis - always haunts capitalism. The current crisis in the US only brings that ghost closer. As in the past, extended crises can produce a kind of state capitalism (e.g. Nazism) to ward off socialism and communism.

(IS): How do you view the announcement of the USW-Mondragón alliance and its proposal to develop manufacturing jobs around the green economy initiative in light of the intense debates within leftist groupsa bout the role of cooperatives within capitalism?

(RW): Cooperative productive enterprises have long been another way for workers to vote with their lives and work against the capitalist organization of production. Instead of a tiny minority of shareholders selecting boards of directors to decide what, where, and how to produce and what to do with the profits, producer coops take all such powers into the hands of the workers themselves. The USW-Mondragon alliance is an important step of recognition by a major US trade union that its basic strategy of organizing capitalist employees to bargain collectively with capitalist employers needs to be broadened to include an alliance with workers interested in producer coops. The alliance of the USW and Mondragon can transform a still-largely implicit critique of capitalism that they share into a powerful new twenty-first century movement toward the goal of realizing much more democratic, post-capitalist forms of organizing production.

(IS): What is your impression of the dynamics that are taking place in Latin America regarding the 21st Century Socialism alternative to the neo-liberalism?

(RW): What is most impressive about Latin America’s leadership in challenging global neoliberalism is the broad political support for that challenge, the leadership’s sophisticated respect for and attention to mass organization of that support, and its refusal to date to sell out to or knuckle under to US counter-pressures. These dimensions of 21st century Latin American socialism are inspiring for much of the rest of the world. At the same time, what is important to stress is that the problem for socialists is not neo-liberalism – one form of capitalism – but rather capitalism per se in all its forms. Even on those rare occasions when capitalism can be given a human face, that face is never secure. The underlying contradictions of capitalism can – and usually do – quickly reverse the human face and impose again the ugly dictatorship of capital. Thus we see today, across so much of the industrialized capitalist world, the destruction of welfare states in favor of new “austerity” regimes. Capitalism demands them as the necessary response to its crisis. What we all need from the Latin American movements for socialism is (1) a strong, clear refusal not only of austerities but also the capitalism that demands them to repair the crises it creates, and (2) a program for an alternative, non-capitalist organization of production.

Cops Assault Students and Workers

2010-05-22T15:37:00.000-07:00

Puerto Rico: Second National Strike in Less than a Year

2010-05-20T15:49:00.001-07:00

By Firuzeh Shokooh Valle (MRZINE)

The student movement and the strike it has sustained for almost a month at the main campus of the state-run University of Puerto Rico (UPR), which has spread to 10 of the 11 UPR campuses, catalyzed a massive social movement convening a national strike today, May 18, 2010.

As recent as October 15, 2009, a national strike paralyzed the island after Governor Luis Fortuño laid off about 17,000 government employees.

Workers and members of trade unions, women, students, environmentalists, and professors have joined in support of the national strike today, convened by the coalition Todo Puerto Rico por Puerto Rico. The goal is to paralyze all 78 municipalities of the island.

In the past days, tension has risen in the Río Piedras (main) campus of the UPR. A special police unit has surrounded the campus. Parents have been legally denied the possibility of delivering water, food, and other basic supplies to their kids: students who are participating in the strike. There have been violent police encounters with parents, students, and other people who have supported the strike.

Activists, members of trade unions, politicians, artists, professors, the LGBT community, and students from all over the island, with different ideologies, have supported the students by disseminating their message and joining them in their protest at the Río Piedras campus. Students have paralyzed the academic operations in order to protest against a $100 million budget cut and the proposed elimination of certain registration and fee waivers.

Bloggers have also reacted to the student strike and the difficult economic, social, and political moment Puerto Rico is confronting. Marta Aponte Alsina's blog Angélica furiosa published a post written by the novelist Juan Carlos Quiñones (UPR alumnus, #801-90-5414) titled "The University Has No Outside."

Yo digo que cada pulgada del territorio, de éste, sea la universidad. Es difícil acordonar el país entero. No imposible, pero difícil. Que la universidad sea todo Puerto Rico, y su matrícula sea la población entera. Así, le regalamos la torre a quien quiera que sea interino, para que disfrute o sufra con el eco que produzcan sus alaridos. Así, en la parada de la guagua, en la barbería, en Plaza las Américas, yo estoy en la Universidad. Que se haga una Universidad permanente, constante, como la escuela invisible de los rosacruces, que nadie, repito nadie, le pueda quitar a nadie, porque no dependería de nadie dependiendo de todos. Digo, todos a los que les interese. En último caso, que la universidad sea, como en la novela de Orwell, un lugar en la mente de cada uno de nosotros. Así, imposible aniquilarla. Imposible. O que lo intenten.

What I want is for all the land, this island, to be the University. It is difficult to cordon off a whole country. Not impossible, but difficult. What I want is for Puerto Rico to be the University and for its entire population to be the student body. Then, give away the bell tower to whoever wants to be the interim chancellor, so he or she can enjoy or suffer the echoes of its screams. Then, at the bus stop, at the barbershop, at the mall, I am at the University. What I want is to make a permanent University, constant, like the invisible school of the Rosicrucians, which no one, and I mean no one, can take away from anyone because it would not depend on anyone, depending on all. I mean, on all who are interested in the University. Ultimately, what I want is for the University to be, like in Orwell's novel, a place in each of our minds. And then, impossible to kill it. Impossible. Or let them try.

In Erendiro, Alejandro Carpio locates the island's situation in a global context:

Es importante recordar que la lucha civil y social es el impulsor de los cambios políticos y, a fin de cuentas, los procesos históricos. Los estudiantes, profesores, padres, y ciudadanos responsables que se han unido en una protesta en contra de los abusos de nuestra reinante administración deben entender que aunque sus esfuerzos tienen metas delimitadas en el espacio y el tiempo, también conforman un movimiento que abarca el mundo entero y que sacude oligarquías, ya sea la tailandesa, la ecuatoriana, la estadounidense o la puertorriqueña.

It's important to remember that civil and social struggle is the motor of political changes, and, in the end, of historical processes. The responsible students, professors, parents, and citizens who have joined this protest against the abuse of the current administration have to understand that, even though their efforts have goals limited in space and time, they are part of a global movement that is also shaking oligarchies in Thailand, Ecuador, the United States, and Puerto Rico.

Poet and blogger Mara Pastor remembers her beloved years as a student at the Río Piedras campus of the UPR:

La universidad en la que me formé, crecí como ser humano y animal político, leí todo lo que me hizo amar, llorar, discrepar, valorar, entender, filosofar, escribir, está en huelga. Sus motivos, los más legítimos. Los de todos. Denunciar la injusticia. Sus formas, configuraciones nuevas, barricadas, payasos, interupciones, radios y rizomas. Estamos frente a un acontecimiento. Toda mi solidaridad, mi orgullo, mi apoyo a los estudiantes.

The university in which I was formed, grew as a human being and political animal, read everything that made me love, cry, dissent, evaluate, understand, philosophize, write, is on strike. The motives of the strike -- the most legitimate of all. They are the motives of all of us: to denounce injustice. The forms of the strike are new configurations: barricades, clowns, interruptions, radios, and rhizomes. We are witnessing an event. All of my solidarity, my pride, my support to the students.

Online citizen media have been a vital source of information during the student strike. Professor and blogger Mario Nuñez Molina (@digizen) has prepared a list of citizen media in Puerto Rico covering the student strike. Some of them are: the Río Piedras students blog Desde adentro and live radio and streaming of students reporting from Río Piedras through Radio Huelga. UPR es un país is aggregating the digital citizen and alternative media resources. Blogger and graduate student Miguel Ríos created another excellent list of resources that includes Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr.

The hashtags #paroUPR, #huelgaUPR, and #radiohuelga are being used to discuss and follow the student protests on Twitter. Students of the Mayagüez campus (on the west coast of the island) are using @luchasrum and the blog Luchas en el RUM to inform people about their events. UPR Río Piedras Law professor Erika Fontánez is blogging about the situation. The members of the Association of Professors also have their blog: Cátedra en acción. Anonymous bloggers have been writing critical posts about the students, the UPR authorities, and the government in Agenda de la nación puertorriqueña. The UPR's monthly newspaper Diálogo is also covering the strike. The alternative weekly Claridad is live-streaming the strike (you have to register first in order to have access). Mainstream media, such as Primera Hora and El Nuevo Día, are publishing minute-by-minute accounts of the events.

Student strike reignites a fire

2010-05-12T17:53:00.000-07:00

Note: Héctor Tarrido-Picart explains the background to the struggle that is gripping the campuses of the University of Puerto Rico--and how it is affecting the wider struggle. (Taken from http://socialistworker.org/2010/05/11/student-strike-reignites-a-fire)

Mass march of UPR student strikers to the university president's office to draw attention to their struggle (Puerto Rico Indymedia)

WHAT STARTED as a 48-hour student takeover of the University of Puerto Rico's (UPR) Río Piedras campus last month has turned into an ongoing occupation and strike--one that has captured the attention and imagination of not only unions and politicians, but the country as a whole.

The striking students are fighting a series of initiatives by which the university administration intends to balance a budget gap of $100 million on the backs of the majority working-class students at UPR. Many of the administrators' measures are contained in Certification 98--under which tuition waivers would be eliminated or limited, and guarantees against tuition increases and privatization of services would be overturned.

The students are also fighting for UPR's Brotherhood of Non-Teaching and Exempt Personnel (HEENDA, by its Spanish initials) and the Puerto Rican Association of University Professors (APPU, by its Spanish initials), which face the threat of layoffs, cuts in health care coverage and pensions, and a freeze and possible cuts in wages. In return, the unions have expressed solidarity with students by showing up to the university gates and picket lines to show support and providing food as the occupation progresses.

On April 23, the action at the university, originally planned for two days, escalated after UPR President José Ramón de la Torre, Río Piedras' campus rector Ana Guadalupe Quiñones and the UPR Board of Trustees refused to meet with the strike negotiation committee that was democratically elected by the student body in Río Piedras. The indefinite strike that began on the 23rd was an escalation of tactics by the students.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

Students at UPR are asking for solidarity at an international level. The Student Organizing Committee has set up a PayPal account where donations can be made to help the occupiers. E-mail c.ortega.1989@gmail.com for more details.

The university administration claims there is no other way to resolve the massive budget gap except with cuts. The students, along with the APPU and HEEND, on the other hand, refuse to accept that the austerity measures proposed by the administration are the only solutions to the problem.

For one thing, students point out tens of millions of dollars have been set aside in the budget to fund expensive dinner parties, special galas and other non-academic events--showing not only the level of opulence that administrators are used to, but also their detachment from the reality for the majority of working-class students.

The students are also demanding that the board of trustees open the account books so that a transparent assessment of the budget can be made. This reflects students' mistrust of the administration and the government--and for good reason: last year, a significant number of public-sector workers were wrongfully laid off due to "accounting errors." Further grounds for suspicion include the rumors that the government is seeking to sell portions of its public higher education institution to the private Ana G. Mendez University.

The students have put forward a proposal to address how the budget crisis could be solved, but the Board of Trustees, after sitting down for an initial meeting, made no comments on the proposals.

Giovanni Roberto Caez, a spokesperson for the students' negotiating committee, said that Puerto Rico's Gov. Luis Fortuño "and the government should tax the pharmaceutical companies and the rich to provide the funds to cover the budget cut."

The pressure on government officials has been growing, which led Fortuño to denounce the striking students in a televised address to the Puerto Rican Congress.

Calling the students a minority that was asking for too much, the governor then embarked on a discussion of finances which, according to students, revealed that the government has cut funding for UPR to a level below what is stipulated by the colonial commonwealth constitution. Students rightly identify the cut as connected to Law 7, the so-called Fiscal Emergency Law, which prompted massive layoffs of public-sector workers and proposes to privatize a sizable section of the publicly owned state industries.

Fortuño's intention with his speech was to intimidate the students into backing off from their demands. But the students responded with a strong statement, confirming their militancy and their determination.

Victor Rodriguez, spokesperson for the Union of Socialist Youth in the UPR, said: "Fortuño is wrong if he thinks that he is successfully intimidating and threatening us. They are not going to remove us."

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THE STUDENTS have framed the conflict as an attack on a public institution and the right to affordable education. This has tilted public sentiment in their favor and explains why the strike has been received with a high degree of solidarity on other UPR campuses and beyond. As sociology student Fernando Nieves said to Primera Hora: "This struggle is not only ours, it's also for each and every worker that has been laid-off by the government."

Thus, the call put forward by the Río Piedras students for other campuses to join the strike has spread like wildfire to the other 11 branches of UPR. As of this article's writing, the UPRs in Ponce, Humacao, Carolina, Cayey, Bayamón, Mayagüez, Utuado and Arecibo joined the Río Piedras students on an indefinite strike, and the other three of the 11 campuses held a two-day solidarity strike.

There are also reports that students at private universities, including Ana G. Mendez University, are also taking action in solidarity. Some are joining the UPR students in the occupation, in a recognition that their universities may end up with high levels of debt.

The strike has also been welcomed internationally. In the U.S., a statement by CUNY students in New York City pointed out that they were facing the same austerity measures, while Wall Street and the big banks get a bailout. Students from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and the University of Bern in Switzerland have sent letters of solidarity--the students in Bern staged a two-day solidarity strike in support of UPR students.

This strike has had the highest level of participation and support in many years--not even the 2005 strike at UPR against tuition hikes can match it. The students have even organized two new low-frequency AM radio stations to communicate and entertain the students and supporters, with Río Piedras leading with their own Radio Huelga.

Solidarity beyond the university has snowballed with each day of the occupation. On April 23, the Federación de Maestros de Puerto Rico (Teachers' Federation of Puerto Rico) staged a sit-in to protest the loss of their pensions and then marched to the UPR Río Piedras campus to show their solidarity with the striking students.

In Ponce, a picket line to protest Fortuño's layoffs included participation from two unions, the Central Puertorriqueña de Trabajadores and the Sindicato Puertorriqueño de Trabajadores. Workers went to the UPR campus in Ponce and provided students with food and water to get started with their indefinite strike.

In Rio Píedras, the community, which is facing attack from a gentrification project pushed by the mayor of San Juan and also puts up with a heavy police presence and harassment, mobilized in solidarity with students. Future students have shown their support--contingents of elementary school children have marched to the UPR gates.

The largest show of support so far came on April 28, with students organizing a concert under the title "¡Qué vivan los estudiantes!"--named after a verse from Violeta Parra's famous song "Me gustan los estudiantes."

The event was inspired by support for students from people like reggaeton artist Tego Calderon, Latin rock star Robi "Draco" Rosas and former political prisoner Rafael Cancel Miranda. Jose García, a spokesperson for the Committee Against Discrimination and Homophobia and the Student Negotiating Committee, also invited singer Ricky Martin to join in.

The event, which served as a fundraiser and a show of public support for the strike, featured a number of artists. The highlight of the night was a video created by Réne Pérez, of the reggaeton phenomenon Calle 13, which featured Alejandro Sanz, Rubén Blades and Ricky Martin expressing their solidarity with the students' fight for education as a right.

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THE CONCERT also marked a victory in the strike. UPR Rector Ana Guadalupe had requested an injunction to allow security to move in on the occupying students and take control of the campus. But Judge José Negrón Fernández ruled in favor of a student counter-suit and ordered the police mobilized to the UPR gates to be removed by May 3.

Students celebrated this victory and insisted--against claims from the media and a minority of students and professors who oppose the strike--that students and faculty have been allowed onto campus by the occupiers. In fact, it is the police and the riot squad that is blocking access to campus.

But Negrón is under pressure to overturn his decision and grant the UPR administration's request for an injuction requiring the students to call off the strike and demobilize students occupying the entrances. In particular, Río Piedras' Student Council President Gabriel Laborde is targeted by the injunction--but he has stated on multiple occasions that he alone doesn't have the power to call off the strike, since a student assembly empowered a Student Negotiating Committee to make that decision.

Throughout these legal maneuvers, administrators have kept a strong presence of law enforcement on hand.

At the start of the strike, the administration relied on a private security company to try to prevent students from taking over key buildings and the university gates. When it became clear that the private company couldn't deal with the large numbers of students, Guadalupe declared an academic recess and requested that police take control of the gates. This prompted clashes leading to the police mobilizing its riot squad, which is known historically for its brutality.

After Judge Negrón issued the ruling calling for the university to be opened on May 3, Guadalupe and Río Piedras administrators tried further acts of intimidation--Guadalupe even drove her SUV to break the picket lines, with the support of a heavy police presence.

The police escalation of violence and harassment is a reaction to the growing solidarity of students at Río Piedras and other UPR campuses. But students aren't backing down. The growing support for the strike, not only among students, but among unions and across the working population, shows that the occupation is a force to contend with.

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THE IMPORTANCE of the UPR strike and occupation comes at a critical moment in Puerto Rico. Last October, a one-day general strike supported by the unions closed most schools and government offices, and drew more than 200,000 people to a march in San Juan. But the spirit and energy of the strike was followed by months of confusion. The major unions and organizations that led the one-day walkout made multiple calls for a national general strike, but didn't mobilize for one.

But the UPR students' strike has set an example that struck a chord with much larger numbers of Puerto Ricans. Though they have not yet won their demands, there is a sense that what the students are doing can lead to something bigger.

The students are well aware that their struggle is one of many against an international onslaught on public education. Their sense of momentum and growing confidence comes from a year's worth of activity that preceded the strike.

Over last summer, students in UPR organized forums to discuss the nature of the neoliberal university and how other students fought against privatization internationally. They organized two committees in the wake of the October 2009 general strike--the Committee Against Homophobia and Discrimination and the Committee in Defense of Public Education (CEDEP). During the general strike, UPR students were the most militant demonstrators, staging a sit-in on a street that goes through the heart of San Juan.

All this organizing laid the groundwork for the current strike. In fact, one of the earliest fights this year, prior to the strike, was a CEDEP surprise meeting with the new UPR president, de la Torre, in which students forced him to sign a document that rejected any initiatives to privatize the public university.

Now students are asking for unions, other organizations in Puerto Rico and the international community to support them and join them in a fight for higher education as a fundamental right.

The Manufacture of Consent

2010-04-27T14:59:00.000-07:00

In a previous post we recommended the documentary "Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Politics" based on the work of political scientist and economist, Tom Ferguson. In the film the relationship of banks, financial firms and multinationals to the policies implemented by U.S. governments is examined via the contributions these institutions make to political campaigns. This particlar approach helps in understanding why President Obama is far off from being the agent of "change" that his campaign announced.

The Ferguson analysis in some ways is an updated version of Adam Smith's observation that in the England of his time, merchants and manufacturers guided policy making in their own interests irrespective of the "grievous" effect such policies might have on the general population.

A more general and related work is Noam Chomsky's and Edward Herman's "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media" (1988) which was also adapted to documentary form (2002). In it, the role of corporations as "agenda setters" via their ownership and control of the media takes center stage in a story in which the drive for profits is connected to hegemony, struggle and democracy. Various case studies are used to drive home the general point that knowledge is always mediated, and the specific conclusion that in lots of occasions it is shaped in such a way as to give the impression that capitalism and democracy are two sides of the coin that celebrates individual liberty. This is highly recommended!

The Investment Theory of Politics

2010-03-14T20:56:00.000-07:00

During the current historical conjuncture many are asking themselves what has happened with the much celebrated and anticipated "change" that the Barrack Obama administration was supposed to bring, especially in relation to the previous administration of George W. Bush. Some, like Nobel prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, are surprised at the amount of money that the government has given to banks and corporations, entities that are largely responsible for the current crisis, instead to those whose mortgages have defaulted. Others are not so surprised at the economic policies implemented.

For years Tom Ferguson, a political scientist and economist at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, has analyzed the connection between the individuals and groups that make donations to political campaigns and the policies implemented by the elected government. This topic, which informs his book "Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Politics", has now been adapted in documentary form which we provide below:

http://goldenruledocumentary.blogspot.com/

Rethinking Jeffrey Sachs and the "Big Five": New Proposals for the End of Poverty

2010-02-14T08:52:00.000-08:00

Note: Originally published in Monthly Review Online Magazine (http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/)

Jeffrey Sachs has become something of a force in international development circles over the past decade. As special advisor to the UN's Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, former director of the UN's Millennium Development Project, and a decorated economist at Columbia University, Sachs certainly has much to brag about. The publication of his runaway bestseller, The End of Poverty, even bagged him his second showing on Time's list of the world's top 100 most influential people.

In 2005 Sachs also published a synopsis of his core ideas in a Time Magazine article titled as boldly as his book: "The End of Poverty." Beautifully written, this piece still stands as one of the best distillations of his policy proposals to date. But behind the compelling rhetoric -- much of which is spot on -- some of his basic assumptions about Africa's poverty warrant serious interrogation.

But first, the good. Sachs opens by offering a tragic run-down of African poverty statistics, a litany of emergencies that can't but prick our consciences. He does well to sound the alarm, for there is indeed an emergency. Moreover, Sachs dismisses outright the all too common claim that we should blame Africa's problems on laziness and corruption. He also recognizes the troubling legacies of colonial rule and the Cold War and notes that debts imposed by Western "development" agencies continue to shackle African economies by draining government coffers.

Strangely enough, though, Sachs doesn't let these insights about ongoing political and economic plunder inform the solutions that he proposes for Africa's poverty. Instead, he calls on Western governments to assume the role of savior by marshalling sufficient aid to help Africans up the "ladder of development." This strikes me as ironic. How strange that Westerners so easily embrace the role of savior when so much of the twentieth century has seen the West in the role of plunderer! The problem here is that Sachs calls on us to think within a paradigm of aid when we should be thinking within a paradigm of justice.

Sachs' proposals for the end of poverty focus on beefing up and streamlining aid by encouraging Western governments to keep their promises of charity. He claims that Africa needs just a paltry 0.7% of US GDP in aid to eliminate extreme poverty in Africa. This money would go to what Sachs calls the "Big Five" of African development interventions:

Boosting agriculture with new technologies, fertilizers, and pesticides.

Improving basic health through antimalarial bednets and essential medicines.

Investing in education through free school meals and expanded vocational training.

Bringing power to villages for water pumps, grain mills, and school computers.

Providing clean water and sanitation to prevent disease.

Sachs holds that these interventions would provide the necessary conditions that Africa requires to overcome structural poverty and get onto the first rung of the "development ladder." But while no one would disagree that his proposals are important and well-intentioned, they obscure far more than they reveal about the reasons for Africa's poverty. Working within his charity paradigm, Sachs self-consciously avoids discussing politics today (notwithstanding his recognition of colonial history), let alone the idea that the global political economy, the root cause, must be structurally transformed. This perspective allows him to present Africa's poverty as a consequence of its "unlucky" inheritance of an unkind climate conducive to the spread of tropical diseases. But the poverty of Africa is no more "natural" than is the wealth of the West; the two are intimately interconnected. The problem is not that Africans cannot reach the first rung of the development ladder themselves; the problem is that they are actively prevented from doing so. For more than a century Africa has been and continues to be purposefully underdeveloped.

As part of his work with the Millennium Development Project, Sachs sought to discover the reasons for Africa's poverty by visiting rural villages where he personally witnessed the ravages of hunger, AIDS, and malaria up close in the lives of everyday people. His experience with poor farmers and undernourished children led him to think up his "Big Five" solutions. However, his choice of fieldsites confined him to only one side of the cause-effect equation: the villagers taught him much about the effects of structural poverty but little about its causes. Instead of visiting villages, he should have dropped in on the boardrooms of in-country multinational corporations, where he could have channeled his charitable energies into exposing the loopholes in their mineral contracts and demanding that they restructure their wage standards. Take the oil-rich Niger Delta, for example. 70% of Nigerians in the region live in extreme poverty, subsisting on less than a dollar a day. By contrast, the starting salary for a Chevron engineer in the area tops $175,000, and the company has walked away with millions in revenue already. In the context of such vicious plunder, Sachs' plan to save dying Africans by handing out bednets and fertilizers amounts to a slap in the face.

Instances like this can be multiplied ad nauseum. Take the Democratic Republic of Congo. Canadian negotiators recently convinced the DRC government to barter away mineral concessions worth some $120 billion to China in exchange for a paltry $6 billion of infrastructural development. Why are the Congolese people so desperately poor when they're literally sitting on a goldmine? Because -- as in the days of old European colonialism -- their mineral profits are being siphoned by first-world corporations that can get away without paying them the real price of the commodities they extract or the labor that digs them up. Africans don't need aid, they need fairer trade arrangements.

But back to Sachs. Let's just imagine for a moment that his dream came true, and the US did in fact commit to giving 0.7% of its GDP in aid for education, healthcare, agriculture, and so on. That would be wonderful indeed. But it wouldn't stop the US, Europe, and China from plundering many times more than that amount in artificially cheap African labor and resources each year. In effect, then, Sachs' plan means dispensing bandaids with one hand and vicious beatings with the other. This strategy will almost inevitably leave Africans shackled to their poverty for centuries to come, bednets or no bednets.

According to Sachs, the international donor community should be thinking "round-the-clock" about how to roll out his "Big Five" interventions all across Africa. But with the broader context of Africa's plight in mind, perhaps they should instead be thinking round-the-clock about how to halt the plunder of Africa's resources by Western corporations and government actors. And that's something they can do without ever leaving their shores. In terms of concrete strategies, here are five alternative proposals for ending poverty in Africa.

1) Forgive debt without conditions. The history of African indebtedness to Western banks is deeply troubling. After having been ravaged by colonial mis-development for nearly a century, newly independent African nations desperate for funds sought aid from the World Bank and the IMF under neoliberal conditionalities that suffocated their economies. Today, most African countries spend vastly more of their budgets on servicing the interest on their debts than they do on healthcare and education, for example. In a context of relentless debt, aid simply makes no sense.

2) Protect the resource commons. The rich natural resources and minerals of each African country should be considered the common property of its citizens. Multinational corporations that exploit these resources should be made to give back a fair share of revenues according to publicly transparent and democratically ratified contracts and concessions. Models of this exist already: the US state of Alaska, for example, owns all its natural resources and distributes extraction revenues through rural development initiatives and annual checks to each citizen. The yield from fairer revenue sharing would be many times more than the aid that Africa gets today.

3.) Install an international minimum wage law. Multinational corporations that seek cheap and abundant African labor should be made to pay wages pegged to the cost of local basic living standards. This should be recognized as a matter of fundamental human rights. The US and Europe expect companies to pay their citizens minimum wages; why should they not insist on the same treatment for Africans? If such a law were extended internationally, this would eliminate the "race to the bottom" effect that comes from seeking competitive advantage in countries that allow for easy labor exploitation.

4.) Democratize international institutions. The World Trade Organization is controlled almost entirely by first-world economies whose representatives hold all the bargaining power in the negotiation of trade agreements, most of which are concluded in closed rooms from which representatives from developing nations are barred. If my conversations with Africans have yielded one refrain, it's that they would prefer a fair voice at the WTO over any amount of Western aid. The West casts itself as the messiah of democracy to the rest of the world; it's time to put the rhetoric into action. The same goes for the United Nations, where powerful countries hold disproportionate decision-making power and exercise veto rights over the wishes of the General Assembly. Africans deserve the right to participate meaningfully in the decisions made by international institutions.

5.) Reduce greenhouse gas emissions. While first-world economies such as the United States and China pump the overwhelming majority of the world's carbon emissions into the atmosphere, it is underdeveloped countries that bear the brunt of the burden of climate change. Rising tides, drought, and desertification are responsible for much of Africa's poverty today. First-world economies should have to bear the real costs of their industrialization through compensation to those who suffer its effects. This is not a matter of aid, but of justice, and an important first step in creating disincentives for pollution. There is nothing "natural" about the hostile climates that many Africans have been faced with recently; desertification and drought can be stopped.

Implementing these changes would require enormous political will and moral courage. After all, the sort of solutions I've proposed would run up against Western economic interests and would most likely cut into the profits of those who presently pride themselves on their philanthropy.

I have argued here for a shift from a paradigm of aid to a paradigm of justice. No one has captured this sentiment better than Frantz Fanon, one of Africa's greatest intellectuals. On the question of aid, he offers the following very pointed words:

Colonialism and imperialism have not settled their debt to us once they have withdrawn their flag and their police force from our territories. . . . The wealth of the imperialist nations is also our wealth. . . . Europe is literally the creation of the Third World. The riches which are choking it are those plundered from the underdeveloped peoples. . . . So we will not accept aid for the underdeveloped countries as "charity". Such aid must be considered the final stage of a dual consciousness -- the consciousness of the colonized that it is their due, and the consciousness of the capitalist powers that effectively they must pay up.

Jason Hickel is an instructor as well as a doctoral candidate at the Department of Anthropology of University of Virginia.

Howard Zinn: Socialism without Jails

2010-01-29T06:53:00.000-08:00

Socialism without Jails
by Howard Zinn

Q. What is your philosophy?

I believe, I suppose, in the one that could be called democratic socialism because I believe that we need a society where the motive for the economic system is not corporate profit but the motive is the welfare of people -- healthcare, jobs, childcare, and so on -- where that is dominant, where there is greater equalization of wealth; and a society which is peaceful and which devotes its resources to helping people in the country and elsewhere. And I believe in a world where war is no longer the recourse for the settling of grievances and problems. I believe in the wiping out of national boundaries. I don't believe in visas and passports and immigration quotas. I think we need to move towards a global society. They use the word globalization, but they use it in a very narrow sense to me -- the freedom of corporations to move across boundaries -- but what we need is the freedom of people and things to move across boundaries. When I talk about socialism without jails, I mean, yes, a greater societal intervention into the economy but without deprivation of civil liberties. Don't trouble the Hollywood writer. Put it very simply: yes, he said "socialism without jails."

Q. How do you blend anarchism, socialism, and communism?

I'd like to think of taking the best elements of all of them. Communism -- if you separate communism from the Soviet Union and from those bureaucratic and totalitarian countries that call themselves Marxist and communist and just treat communism as envisioned by Marx and Engels -- ultimately a society where there would be freedom of the individual and rational use of the world's resources. That's something to take from communism. From socialism I would take what I just described, and that is the use of the government, the democratically elected government, to equalize resources and help people. I would take from anarchism the suspicion of authority, the suspicion of all governments, the readiness to criticize and rebel against any government. They may have started out in a humanitarian way but they can easily become ossified and dictatorial. Anarchism has as its goal the idea of a kind of decentralized society where individuals are free from the oppression of government and corporate power and the church. So, I think there are elements in all three that are useful.

Q. Is that a practical way of thinking?

Well, certainly not practical in the sense of something that is immediately achievable, but I think it's very important to hold it as a goal. Philosophical but not in a utopian sense that makes it simply theoretical and unworkable. Philosophical only in the sense that it's long-term. So, although it's not an immediate possibility or probability, I think it's very important to have an idea of what a good society would be like, so you can measure what is happening today, what policies are today, against that goal.

Q. What do you want to be remembered for?

If I want to be remembered for anything, it's for introducing a different way of thinking about the world, about war, about human rights, about equality, for getting more and more people to think that way, and also for getting more people to realize that power, which rests so far in the hands of people with wealth and guns, ultimately rests on people themselves, and they can use it, and at certain points in history they have used it: Black people in the South used it; people in the women's movement used it; people in the anti-war movement used it; people in other countries who have overthrown tyrannies have used it. What I want to be remembered as is somebody who gave people a feeling of hope and power that they didn't have before.

Howard Zinn, 1922-2010. Video by Big Think. The text above is an edited transcript of the videos.

Solidarity and Cooperation: Alternative Premises for an Economic National Plan, Part II

2009-10-20T06:34:00.000-07:00

The market competition is unjust and unfair. The economic structures protect the interests of the capital owner. Their goal is personal gain, an aim for higher profits. Individualism governs their conduct. By that logic it is intended to address collective problems. The economic and social costs of such behavior are ignored. For this reason, the economic program adopted by the New Progressive Party can not be considered a master plan for the nation’s future. It is simply the agenda of the private business sector, a social group that does not represent the majority of the Puerto Rican people and the diversity of interests prevailing in it.

Take for example the Caribbean Riviera, one of the pillars of the economic program of this administration. The proposed development for the east region of the country is conceived as a unique tourist destination and a world-class paradise for gambling. For the government, the project will compete with gaming sites such as Monte Carlo (Monaco), Sun City (South Africa) and Atlantis (Bahamas). It will also have luxury homes and shops. [See Caribbean Business, 25 June 2009 and July 2, 2009]

The objective of this proposal is to attract visitors to the island with a high purchasing power. Residents in the east region and the rest of Puerto Rico are excluded from the enjoyment of such site. They are supposed to be "grateful" for the low paid jobs to be created and be "happy" watching the cruise ships come and the tourists buying expensive merchandise in the shops. “Such is life”?

In the absence of an economic program that meets the needs of the majority of Puerto Ricans, public administrators encourage us to play Loto and Revancha. The fate becomes the only proposal to address the precarious economic condition of workers. A situation for which there is not an encouraging scenario in the future.

According to the Puerto Rico Planning Board, in the last fiscal year production decreased 5.5%. During the first seven months of 2009 the number of bankruptcies rose to 6,386 cases, an increase of 28% compared to the same period last year. Last July, the labor participation rate fell to 43%, the lowest figure in twenty years. The unemployment rate is at 16.5%, the highest level since 1994 (excluding the partial shutdown of government agencies in May 2006). The private sector continues to make significant reductions in their payroll. While the Government have laid off about 7,000 public servants and are expected to lay off another 20,000 employees over the end of the fiscal year 2009-10. While the economic activities continue to be articulated in terms of personal gain and there is no social commitment of the various institutions and participants in the market it will be extremely difficult to articulate any plan that can be able to meet our main collective needs. It is necessary to find alternatives to individualism and competition. The Caño Martín Peña Trust, the Piñones se Integra Corporation, Taller Cé, and Iniciativa Comunitaria offer other models by which we can organize and work to meet basic needs such as housing, education, health and entertainment. In all these experiences cooperation and solidarity emerge as alternatives.

National Strike Videos

2009-10-17T09:53:00.000-07:00

Here is a collection of videos from last Thursday's National Strike, prepared by MRZINE. (Click "Read More" to see the rest).

Puerto Rico: Ready for the National Strike

2009-10-14T21:13:00.000-07:00

by Firuzeh Shokooh Valle

Puerto Rico is getting ready for the national strike on Thursday, October 15. Since governor Luis Fortuño layed off about 17,000 government employees the first week of October, there has been tremendous mobilization from different sectors of the civil society: workers and members of trade unions, women, environmentalists, students, and professors, among others. There have been multiple demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience to protest the economic policies that the government has assured are necessary due to the financial crisis. In total this year, the recently elected government has laid off around 25,000 public employees.

In the last months hostility has grown between the government and different civil society groups: eviction orders in socially and economically disadvantaged communities, police brutality, and the dismantlement of community initiatives such as the Fideicomiso del Caño Martín Peña. There have also been a string of comments from government officials considered offensive and insensitive, such as the now sadly famous "such is life," and more recently, when the Governor's designated Chief of Staff Marcos Rodríguez Ema compared demonstrators to terrorists. This is the context of the national strike on Thursday.

Bloggers and twitterers are getting ready for the strike which aims to paralyze the country for one day. In Cargas and descargas, Edwin Vázquez has covened bloggers and citizens to use Twitter and Facebook to circulate information the day of the national strike. Already, the people at @caribnews are asking followers for hashtag suggestions, and the conversation has started under #twittericans.

Firuzeh Shokooh Valle is a Puerto Rican journalist specialized in the coverage of human rights issues, mainly violence against women and children, LGBT community issues, poverty, racism, and immigration. This article was first published by Global Voices Online on 13 October 2009 under a Creative Commons license.

Solidarity and Cooperation: Alternative Premises for an Economic National Plan, Part I

2009-10-13T19:01:00.000-07:00

In 2007, a year before the elections, the Private Sector Coalition was incorporated. This alliance is made up of professional organizations from various industries of the country such as the Chamber of Commerce, the Homebuilders Association, the Association of Insurers, Certified Public Accountants Bar, Products Association and the Association of Industrialists, among others. Their biggest concern has been the decoupling of the island’s economic trends of those observed in United States of America. The aim is to increase their participation in the decision making process in Puerto Rico. With these purposes they suggest a plan for the economy that, from their perspective, would create the necessary conditions to give the country more competitiveness. The reduction in taxes paid by corporations, the review of the permit granting process, the diversification of energy sources and the labor market deregulation are some of their proposals. The result, they say, will be a steady growth in the annual production of goods and services by more than 4%. [See Caribbean Business, June 25, 2009]

This economic proposal, aimed primarily to reduce the public sector presence in the market, is part of the governmental platform of the New Progressive Party and its vision for Puerto Rico. José Ramon Perez - Riera, current Secretary of Economic Development, summarized with clarity the administration’s philosophy in an interview with a business newspaper:

"The government isn’t there to create jobs. The government isn’t there to make investments. The government is there to be a facilitator and provide the tools for the private sector to do its job.” [See Caribbean Business, July 2, 2009]

These statements are consistent with the terms previously expressed by the same public official to the membership of the Puerto Rico Chamber of Commerce. On that occasion, Perez - Riera told to the entrepreneurs that the Government: "We will continue working with you and we trust that the private sector has to feel that owns Puerto Rico and owns the process, […] we respond to you and […] you have to tell us when we do wrong so that we know how we should improve. […] [T]he majority must establish in what direction is that Puerto Rico is going and the majority are you" [See El Vocero, Digital Release, June 19, 2009]

The Private Sector Coalition and the administration of Governor Luis Fortuño base their economic plan for the economy on the premise that through free enterprise and individual effort the society will produce the goods and services required to meet the needs of everyone. They are unable to recognize the main causes of the inequities in the national wealth distribution. For them the poor are in such circumstances because they have not worked enough. Competition is the guiding principle in the economic thought of both. They forget that people have different realities and circumstances. Is not the same to be the son of workers residing in Villa del Sol than the eldest of a family of entrepreneurs living in Garden Hills. The resource wealth of each is different.

For example, in 2006 the median annual income of a Puerto Rican household was $17,621. Approximately 45% of the population lived below the poverty level. However, the 5% of the country's richest families received 25% of the national income. The oligarchy continues appropriating the resources of the island in detriment of workers. [For these economic indicators see www.tendenciaspr.com]

Amending the Puerto Rico-Federal Relations Act

2009-09-09T03:14:00.000-07:00

The new proposal of the Popular Democratic Party: to amend the Puerto Rico-Federal Relations Act in order to exempt the island from U.S. Coastwise Trade Laws and to allow Puerto Rico to enter into international commercial treaties (the amendments can be accessed here and here). It is surprising that these proposals have not been immediately rejected by the island's anti-colonial sector. While the proposals have not been able to capture the attention of the media, and much less of ordinary Puerto Ricans, it is important to understand their meaning and their relationship with the 'sovereigntist rethoric' advanced by a sector of that party.

The Puerto Rico-Federal Relations Act of 1950 is the U.S. law that regulates the relationship between the the U.S. and Puerto Rico (which is nothing but the old Jones Act of 1917, as amended by Public Law 600). As its predecessors, the Foraker Law of 1900 and the Jones Act, of 1917, that statute is the juridical manifestation of Puerto Rico's colonial status. In its Article 9, it establishes that all laws adopted by the U.S. Congress apply in the island (unless they are 'locally inapplicable', an exception with little or no practical effects). So, for instance, the fact that the U.S. Patriot Act and the Federal Death Penalty Act of 1995 apply in Puerto Rico is a direct result of the previously mentioned Article.

Of course, it is not the first time in history that a colony requests an empire the modification of the juridical apparatus that regulates the colonial relationship. Several of the former British colonies, as Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, achieved independence gradually, through the modification of the laws and conventions that sustained the supremacy of the British Parliament over these territories. The first step for the gradual elimination of political colonialism was the British Parliament's agreement to not legislate for its former territories, unless requested by the territory. In the case of Canada, for example, that determination took place in 1867 and culminated with the adoption of the Statute of Westminster in 1931.

However, the new PPD's proposal (presented in the 21st Century!) would leave Article 9 intact, and that would mean that each time the U.S. Congress approves a law and the U.S. President signs it, each Puerto Rican is supposed to obey it. Now, it is true that the mere idea of requesting the U.S. to amend the Puerto Rican-Federal Relations Act in order to give us "more powers", constitutes a legitimation of colonialism that should be rejected. But even if that strategy were considered acceptable, any proposal of that kind that does not push for the elimination of the unilateral application of U.S. laws in the island does not even deserve to be taken seriously.

It is interesting that the 'sovereigntist' wing of the PPD remains silent about this proposal. In a way, that silence is not surprising, since the proposed amendments are entirely consistent with the logic of the Estado Libre Asociado Soberano ('Sovereign Commonwealth') defended by that sector. That is, for Puerto Rico to retain a series of powers (in this case, making international commercial treaties and being exempt from the U.S. Coastwise Trade Laws) and delegates a series of 'competencies' to the U.S. (in this case, the power of the U.S. to adopt laws for Puerto Rico).

An illusion of recovery?, Part 2 of 2

2009-08-28T09:23:00.000-07:00

Note: Article originally published in Spanish for the weekly newspaper Claridad, August 13-19, 2009

As this happens, Wall Street has also been claiming that the recovery is on its way based on the “increase in value” of companies reflected in the stock market. What many of these companies have done is to cut back on costs (such as salaries by firing employees) so that even though they produce less and gain fewer revenues, profits can still be reported. These profits are based, among other things, in an increase in the degree of exploitation of the workers that still remain within the firm.

Other firms that saw an increase in the value of their stock simply made it because the profits made surpassed the forecasts, something that usually causes huge amount of money and investment to flow into those companies. The most notable case was that of Goldman Sachs in mid July. This bank reported a net profit of 3 billion dollars, a number that comfortably surpassed the projections of the analysts. Of course, this gain is in part explained by the disappearance of its competitors given the credit crisis.

Even with all the news that seem to announce the recovery of the system, the victims are still the workers that have lost their jobs, have had a cut in their hours of work, or that have conceded many of their benefits to their employers because of the threat of loosing their jobs. For example, in the case of the United States, we have that the actual average of hours worked per week is 33 hours, the lowest level since the 1970’s, and that is for workers who work a full time job. The problem of the fall in consumption that we mentioned above gets magnified if one takes into account that more than 6 million workers have now been transformed into part time workers since the recession began (Z Magazine, July/August 2009, p. 35).

Its clear from all the above that the possibility of a “jobless recovery” is probably the most vulgar example of how the representations of the health of the economy based on an eventual recuperation in its growth obscures the fact that the necessity of dealing with the precarious situation of most people is subsumed to the survival of a capitalism that constantly moves in an out of the crises that characterize it.

An illusion of recovery?, Part 1 of 2

2009-08-24T07:23:00.000-07:00

On the 31st of July the government of the United States reported that in terms of its gross domestic product (GDP) the economy had contracted at “only” a 1% rate in the second quarter of the present year. This fact, combined with the reported profits of various corporations and the loss of “only” 247,000 jobs for the month of July, has been used to suggest that possibly during the second half of the present year the economy will probably experience the much awaited recovery that would finally put an end to the almost 2 year long recession. Various economists have expressed that such a tendency in the indicators evidences that the stimulus plans of the Obama administration are finally having the desired- even if retarded effect.

One thing that pops up when examining the report of the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) is that the estimate of 1% was based on the change between the 1st and 2nd quarters in terms of a 0.25% decrease between both quarters, a result that then is extrapolated to the whole year. This contrasts with the usual way of reporting, where the present period is compared to the same one of the previous year. If we compare the 2nd quarter of 2009 with the same period for the previous year, what one sees is a 4% contraction in the GDP which might suggest that the light at the end of the tunnel is a bit farther than what the mere contraction of 1% suggests.

In the same report we also observe that all the “positive” signs that the economy is on its way towards recovery are actually decreases in the rates of negative change of the indicators, something that doesn’t necessarily imply that we are “moving from a recession to a recovery” as many analysts have declared (check “US Economic Contraction Slowed in Quarter”, 31st July, NY Times). One alternative way to see this phenomenon, and borrowing language from physics, is as when an object is in a free fall and reaches its terminal velocity. In other words, there is no acceleration and a constant velocity is obtained. In the same way that an object that reaches its terminal velocity keeps falling, the slowing down of the negative rates of change can be interpreted as if the economy were settling in its stagnation. The point of this is that one shouldn’t derive mechanistic conclusions based on percentages, averages and tendencies without seeing the system as a whole. For example, the situation of a country like China and its interdependency with countries that buy its products, like the United States, is very important when one recognizes that the overall levels of consumption of China’s buyers is falling (in the same report of the BEA we see that imports for the US keep falling). We have already seen how mechanistic thinking failed to anticipate the losses of employment for the US during the month of June, something that should have prevented the “experts” from celebrating too early.

Influential Puerto Rican Activist Group the Young Lords Marks 40th Anniversary

2009-08-22T14:24:00.000-07:00

From Democracy Now!

This weekend marks the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the revolutionary community organizing group the Young Lords. The group called for self-determination for all Puerto Ricans, community control of institutions and land, freedom for all political prisoners and the withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam, Puerto Rico and other areas. The Young Lords would also play a pivotal role in spreading awareness of Puerto Rican culture and history, leaving a legacy still felt today. We play excerpts of the documentary Palante, Siempre Palante!: The Young Lords and speak to three of the group’s original members: Luis Garden Acosta, Mickey Melendez, and Democracy Now! co-host Juan Gonzalez.

For more information, videos and audio, click here.

The colonial crisis in Puerto Rico and the Puerto Rican entrepreneurs

2009-07-26T01:12:00.000-07:00

In Puerto Rico, the global crisis intensifies our colonial crisis. Following its internal clock, the latter broke out two years before the former. Given the importance of the government for the Puerto Rican economy, the crisis appears as a fiscal crisis. Now that the crisis has become more obvious than ever with thousands of layoffs of public employees (there will be from 30,000 to 45,000 in total), we cannot simply regret the alternatives that were not implemented nor accuse the Fortuño government of being at the unconditional service of capital by taking neo-liberal policies; nor limit ourselves to seek immediate solutions for the unemployed. The insensibility of the Fortuño government cannot be fought with tantrums or partial solutions that remain just as insensible. It is necessary to understand the reasons for the crisis and thus understand the government’s insensibility and also the capacities we have to confront it. In order to achieve this, one of the things we must consider is the origin of that group of local entrepreneurs who have come to conceive themselves, in their most sophisticated versions, as the ultimate representatives of the Puerto Rican people (see “Coalición aboga por la economía.” El Nuevo Día, 4 de julio de 2009, p. 33 ) or, in their most vulgar versions, as the owners of the country (“Pérez Rivera proclama al sector privado dueño de PR.” El Vocero, 19 de junio de 2009. ).

Puerto Rican businesspeople have always been under the shadow of foreign capitalists, especially during the first half of the 20th century. Thanks to the development of the Commonwealth (Estado Libre Asociado), they managed to develop an unusual power, although always remaining subordinated to US capitalists. It was the local professionals (journalists, lawyers, bureaucrats, etc.) who, facing the crisis of the sugar economy coinciding with the Great Depression, came up with the Commonwealth as a solution. Most local entrepreneurs were in no position to seek a transformation because they had a small and weak function in the sugar cane economy that made them dependent on that system. The larger entrepreneurs, like the plantation owners, had no interest in reforming the system.

The professionals, on the other hand, who were formed in the art of colonial administration, did not share the planters’ need for keeping the rural workers in miserable conditions and were sympathetic with the workers. As an attempt to reconcile the interests of the US entrepreneurs, of whom they depended, with those of the workers, the leaders of the Popular Democratic Party sought to raise the workers’ standards of living by developing capitalism. They were also part of the reformist wave after the Great Depression. Initially, during the late 30’s, they bet on a strategy of diversifying the economy, and soon they adopted the strategy of attracting investments from US firms with greater technology than that of the sugar industry. As these industries arrived, they would demand goods and services and directly and indirectly create more employment, which would in turn lead to the creation of more demand for goods and services. Thus the local market would grow and there would be more space for the local businesspeople to develop, along with the possibility of an autonomous national economy. The Commonwealth as a political status, autonomous within the US state but practically without representation, fit well the objectives of the reformist professional elites. They would have the support of the US state, which would care about developing US capital in Puerto Rico, and at the same time they would achieve greater autonomy to develop the local capital that would benefit our country. At the end, this strategy gave a lot of power to the entrepreneurs and left the workers in a weak position.

Although this type of strategy could improve workers’ conditions, it does nothing to remedy thier subordinate position, thus being paternalistic and antidemocratic. But leaving this aside, in order to develop a competitive capitalism with this strategy, emulated by other countries with varying degrees of success, the serious threat posed by established entrepreneurs with massive capitals must be overcome. They will try to prevent emerging entrepreneurs from expanding their capitals and threatening their advantages or competing with them. Following this rationale, plantation owners, as early as the mid 30’s, opposed vigorously the Chardón Plan, for they wanted to prevent wage increases, which would rise because of the pressures that the workers’ needs in a richer society would put on the value of the labor force. In fact, they undermined the autoridades or government owned firms established by the 40’s. Later, as the market grew because of the investments from textile and subsequently from petrochemical and pharmaceutical capitals, many local entrepreneurs where displaced by US firms, which entered the local market with better organized companies and more capacities and resources.

The possibility of developing a local competitive capitalist following the industrialization by invitation strategy also relied on the elites that lead the process being conscious about the objective: the investments must be used for the local development, not just promoted for their own sake. This is how countries that have used this strategy successfully have done it, since they attract industries that can be linked to local firms, that bring useful technologies, etc., instead of attracting any firm just to create jobs and demand. However, in Puerto Rico, the planters’ offensive against the development strategy appears to have put an end to any vision that the elites had. By the end of the 40’s, with Operation Bootstrap, the development strategy became a matter of attracting any non-agrarian industry without coordinating progress of the local firms, merely giving them all kind of subsidies for their development.

Competition is central to capitalism because one way for the capitalist to get more money from his investment is to outdo his fellow capitalists in productivity, so that his workers are able to produce more with the same salary and materials, thus increasing the value that he appropriates when he sells the product. Given that a more productive capitalist can undersell the others and ruin them while still having profits, every capitalist tries to be more productive. The global effect of this process (whenever it is not breaking up into crisis from the excess of all these commodities in the market), as capitalists race to stay in business while ruining the competition, is more social wealth or, in other words, progress, even for the worker, although in relative terms s/he tends to become poorer.

Without a clear strategy for developing a competitive capitalism, and with a stronger foreign capitalist, who is always threatening to take over, the Puerto Rican entrepreneur tends to avoid foreign competition, seeking cracks to supply the local market without committing his capital—if he has enough to invest—in new ventures or even technologies that might increase his productivity, but that remain unable to guarantee his survival as a capitalist. It is better to use the capital he obtains locally to speculate in financial markets or find unoccupied niches. Among the biggest national companies, very few are manufacturers, while many are financial. Most of the relatively few local firms stick to geographically protected industries, such as construction, distribution, press, food, etc. Even though there have been massive foreign investments, very few large firms have been established. The result of this halfway capitalism is a looting of the national wealth and very little investment to expand substantially our available means, even when investment is in the hands of local capitalists, who would therefore be able to control those means. (For an examination of the disparities between local and foreing capitalists, see (in PDF) Ayala, César J. "La formación del capital local en Puerto Rico: 1947 al presente." Revista de Ciencias Sociales, 18 (2008): 104-149.)

Our businessmen, accustomed since the 40’s to a government that provides general conditions, became even more spoiled with the solutions that the administrative elites sought in face of the first slowdowns. These came along because as soon as the portion of foreign investments benefiting the national economy was stabilized, the local breed of entrepreneurs, unwilling to innovate, are incapable of maintaining the local economy expanding. A vicious cycle thus emerges where there are no buyers for the products that would sway the capitalist to invest in production. The solution that the administrative elites came up with, given their failed strategy, was to invest in construction, the expansion of the debt for public expenses, and the attraction of more multinationals. As early as the 60’s the earnings of nationals minus the earnings of foreigners (GNP) started to be less than all the earnings in the country (GDP). The government responded with great infrastructure works and eventually with the attraction of petrochemical and pharmaceutical companies, as the textile companies started to leave by the 70’s for countries with lower wages.

The infrastructure works, which contractors have managed to label as “development” (desarrollo), have sprawled roads, urbanizaciones and buildings wherever there is a good profit. Recently, there have been talks about attracting high technology or knowledge industries. The politicians have also filled the government with public employees to lessen the unemployment problem that the businesses are unable to solve, and at the same time to tie those workers to the vicious projects of their parties. The short term result has been to provide local businessmen with the demand they need for investing. In the long run, these businessmen end up using the government to directly increase their wealth, instead of using it simply for maintaining the conditions where they can capitalize.

As these entrepreneurs grow, subsidized by the governments of the Comonwealth, they gradually take over government. They mobilize waged workers who depend on their capital, and create groups of professionals, who being formed in this style of business that depends on the government, defend and organize the entrepreneurs' interests. They turn the old political elites and their parties to their service, given that politicians end up depending on businessmen for their campaigns. Thus they even issue national debt and raise taxes in order to canalize the national wealth to their companies and their pockets with government contracts and legal changes to get subsidies; or they pass laws to expand the working day. The more they pillage, the stronger they are to keep pillaging.

The problem with these pampered entrepreneurs is that they need economic growth for the government to keep supporting them, but since the government subsidizes them, they are not willing to invest in economic growth. And so they lead us into a crisis, since there is a point where it is not possible for the government to keep issuing debt, and on top of that employing the people who these businesspeople are unable to employ. The government cannot maintain its functions of canalizing wealth to local capitalists, paying its debt to the US capitalists, and at the same time employing almost 1/3 of the labor force.

We cannot limit our understanding of the policies of the Fortuño government to the neo-liberal framework. The measures taken by his government, particularly the Public-Private Alliances Law and the massive layoffs fit perfectly the logic of our pampered entrepreneurs, spoiled already by the golden time of the Comonwealth in the post-war period (for the other measures recently taken see Quiñones Pérez, Argeo T. “La marcha de la insensatez.” Claridad. y “Afloran las verdaderas consecuencias y contradicciones del plan Fortuño” Claridad. ). As usual, they seek to remain subordinated to the US capitalists, while using the government to plunder the country. The government must have the funds and the mechanisms to keep subsidizing them. Asking them to cut government expenses in contracts and subsidies, is the same as asking them to shoot their own foot, while asking them to raise taxes against the multinational companies or to reduce the public debt is to ask them to betray their accomplices, who would in turn hand them in. The only alternative from their point of view is to fire public employees and make more efficient the way in which government redistributes wealth to their pockets.

The Public-Private Aliances are perfect for this because they create or deliver public entities to private companies for the works that the state used to make or contract out. The private companies keep the profit, with the advantage that they can overlook the old agreements with the workers. Even better, they get a secure space from which to invest their chickenhearted capital, which will be guaranteed by the government, who will assume control of the venture if it becomes unprofitable. (For an explanation of the Public-Private Alliances Law, see: Sosa Pascual, Omaya. “Cheque en blanco que puede salir caro.” Centro de Periodismo Investigativo, 1ro de junio de 2009. See the law in Spanish and pdf format here.)

The development of the local entrepreneurs goes hand in hand with the loss of the concessions that workers got with the advent of the Commonwealth. The lack of competitiveness allow our capitalists to tolerate the lack of efficiency (not only in the government), which would be unheard of in places where capitalism follows the logic of competition. It also compels our capitalists to use force in order to strip the workers of what they have and get the economy back on track. So far we have seen the increase in personal taxes while those of the corporations decrease, changes to the work day, the dissolution of labor agreements, and the appropriation of land occupied by communities. (The raise in the prices of consumer goods also appears to be a tactic used by retailers and distributors.)

The idea of changing the politicians or the alleged neo-liberal ideology of the governing group by pressuring government or other powerful groups to force them back to more sensible politics looses sight of the power relations that imbue our lives. The local, pampered entrepreneurs must expand their wealth by using the government. They end up taking away our small piece of the pie under the supervision of US capitalists. The only way to stop them effectively is to mobilize a powerful opposition with an alternative logic of production to the vicious cycle of bringing any type of investments and using government to support local firms.

Using the given tools that we have in the Commonwealth (parties, unions, organizations, etc., as most of them exist right now) in order to achieve a more sympathetic leadership towards the working people would not go very far because sooner or later it would operate within the conditions and with the means that our businessmen control. Even worse, it would entail being led into roads that we have already traveled and that we do not want to keep using. In the best of cases, it would lead us to new agreements and concessions under the newly developed circumstances without challenging the entrepreneurs’ privileged position. Instead of taking the beaten concession path, we should take the avenue that leaves behind the spoiled leadership that we have fostered.

The Privatization of Academic Journals: "The Dark Side of Online Journals"

2009-07-17T16:49:00.000-07:00

Scholars are not exempt from dealing with materials and conditions that subsume the production of knowledge at the university to particular interest groups. This, obviously, occurs in private universities, where private funds are used to establish departments, purchase materials, employ intellectuals and support staff. Nonetheless, it also occurs in public universities, where high officials that respond to private interests (syndics, presidents, chancellors, etc.), channel public funds and, in general, direct the bureaucracy. Even in the case of the so-called public universities, aside from the control over top level bureaucrats that subsequently gives them control over the organization, private companies colonize the production of knowledge by controlling the materials needed by academics to do their jobs efficiently. Thus we see that students' access to universities more and more often depends on higher tuitions, which force students to take private grants and loans. Similarly, intellectuals access their materials through grants created by private companies for their own purposes.

One of the best examples of de facto privatization in public universities is the case of the academic journals, which are now controlled by big publishing companies. The article “The Dark Side of Online Journals”, by Lisa Richmond, explains how the privatization of journals--which are a very important instrument in the production of knowledge--ultimately directs researchers into considering certain problems while excluding others, consequently, leading them to work to generate a prestigious journal so that it can be sold back to the academy by the publishing companies at extravagant prices, as opposed to working to produce the knowledge we all need to solve our problems.

Constituent Power, Coup in Honduras, and a Brief Comment about Puerto Rico

2009-07-02T17:28:00.000-07:00

By now, the 'official' justification for the coup in Honduras has been that President Manuel Zelaya intended to amend the constitution in order to perpetuate himself as president. In fact, the same day of the coup, a non-binding referendum was scheduled to take place and the coup was the last attempt to stop that electoral event (the referendum had already being declared 'illegal' by the Electoral Court, the Supreme Court of Justice, and even Congress had adopted a law prohibiting the realization of electoral events 180 days before a general election). Why so many efforts in preventing a non-binding referendum to take place?

Those who opposed Zelaya as well as many political analysts from Honduras and the United States, insisted that the June 28 non-binding referendum was about allowing the President's re-election. The Constitution of Honduras, as most Latin American constitutions (unlike the U.S. Constitution and most European constitutions), do not allow anyone to run for President for a second time. There are philosophical reasons for such prohibition (as the importance that is given to the alternation of power in democratic and republican theory), but perhaps the most important historical reason in the Latin American context is that, in countries that have experience numerous dictatorships, the idea of anyone being in power for more than 5 or 6 years (even if democratically elected), is always seen with suspicion.

However, the Constitution of Honduras goes farther than most as it contains clauses that establish that the Presidential term cannot be amended (Articles 374 and 239). This type of clause is usually known in Latin American and European constitutional theory as cláusula pétrea or cláusula de intangibilidad (usually known in Anglo-American constitutional theory as eternity or unamendable clauses, and sometimes simply as 'entrenchment'), as it puts certain provisions or principles outside the scope of the amending power. These clauses are very common through constitutional systems around the world, the most common examples are those that establish that the republican form of government cannot be altered (a cláusula de intangibilidad included in many Latin American and European constitutions, as well as in the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico).

But the re-election issue was not the only and probably not the real reason for the great concern that some groups had with the celebration of the non-binding referendum. In fact, the referendum did not ask electors whether they wanted the constitution to be amended in order to allow for the re-election of Zelaya (see the Official Decree calling for the referendum, see also here and in English, here and here), but whether they wanted to convene a Constituent Assembly in order to adopt a new constitution. This new constitution might or might not allow for re-election, but also opened the possibility for popular organizations and groups of the left to push forward different social and economic reforms (see for example, here, here, here, and here). Of course, these possible constitutional reforms (associated to countries such as Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador), along with the leftist inclinations that Zelaya had been showing particularly at an international level, represented a threat to the interests of different elites (both national and international) (see here, and for an overview of some of the conservative politics of Zelaya, see here).

In fact, the argument that Zelaya intended to perpetuate himself in power is much more weaker than it might appear at first view: if the non-binding referendum had taken place, and if people had supported the convocation of the Constituent Assembly, a binding referendum must have been celebrated in the November general elections in which electors would have been asked again about the adoption of a new constitution (the so-called fourth ballot, that by the way would have required Congress' support). This means that even if the new constitution created allowed for re-election, Zelaya could not have benefited himself from that change because a new President (that could not have been him) would already be in power by the time the new constitution came into effect (nevertheless, Zelaya could have run for President again in the future and subsequently run for re-election).

So, the principal argument of the coup perpetrators is that because the non-binding referendum had the ultimate objective of amending the constitution in order to allow for re-election, and that because the Constitution of Honduras prohibits that kind of change, Zelaya intended to violate the constitutional order and therefore should be immediately removed from office (an argument they claim is supported by Article 374 and 239 of the constitution but that, as we have seen, rests on a false premise). Moreover, they insisted that the constitution could only be amended by Congress, not through a Constituent Assembly (and that is what Article 373 establishes, that is, that the power of constitutional reform rests with the Congress, and Article 5 allows that body to subject amendments to popular ratification). Following this logic they have presented themselves as guardians of the constitution, pretending that there has only been a transition instead of a coup, and issuing an international arrest warrant against Zelaya. By now, popular protests have forced them to suspend the individuals rights guaranteed in the constitution that they were defending so vehemently.

Zelaya's argument for insisting in celebrating a referendum that had been declared illegal by several public institutions can be summarized as follows (for an analysis of these arguments, see here). First, the referendum (which he insisted rested on Article 5 of the constitution, which establishes the right of the people to be consulted about important issues) was non-binding, and that meant that it was equivalent to a public opinion poll and therefore there was simply no legal justification for it being declared illegal. Moreover, citizens were not even asked about re-election, but about the adoption of a new constitution through a Constituent Assembly. Zelaya also rested in the precedents from countries like Colombia and Venezuela, who adopted new constitutions through constituent assemblies even when their old constitutions did not allow for such form of constitutional change. Nevertheless, both the Colombian and Venezuelan Supreme Courts (in 1991 and 1999, respectively) determined that the people always retain the right to exercise their constituent power through a democratically elected Constituent Assembly regardless of what the ordinary amendment process contained in the constitutional text establishes. Finally, it is a generally accepted principle in contemporary constitutional theory that the limits to the power of constitutional reform included in a constitution (the cláusulas de intangibilidad) only operate against the constituted powers (that is, they limit Congress' amending power), but never against the people in the exercise of constituent power, which is considered unlimited. In my view, and regardless of other criticisms that one may have, President Zelaya had, and has, the best arguments.

I would like to end by briefly considering a truly unique cláusula de intangibilidad contained in the Constitution of the Commonwelth of Puerto Rico, one that is directly related to our political status as well as to our possibilities of convening a true Constituent Assembly. The clause is contained in the second sentence of Section 3, Article VII and it reads as follows: “Any amendment or revision of this constitution shall be consistent with the resolution enacted by the applicable provisions of the Constitution of the United States, with the Puerto Rican Federal Relations Act and with Public Law 600, Eighty-first Congress, adopted in the nature of a compact”.

The principal objective of this provision is to ensure that Puerto Rico would not attempt to unilaterally modify its relationship with the United States through constitutional reform. For example, according to the clause, Puerto Rico would not be able to include in its constitution (even after carefully following the amending procedure established in Article VII), a provision that states: “Only those laws adopted by the Puerto Rican Legislative Assembly will apply in Puerto Rico”. Such a provision would be contrary to the Puerto Rican Federal Relations Act, which mandates the application of U.S. laws in the island. It is interesting to note that the original draft of the constitution that was sent to U.S. Congress did not include the cláusula de intangibilidad quoted above, but the U.S. Congress required its inclusion under the threat that otherwise Article VII would lack any legal effects (for a more detailed analysis, see here).

Nevertheless, if we take seriously the Colombian and Venezuelan precedents, as well as the arguments advanced by Zelaya, we begin to understand that the clause quoted above cannot have the power of placing limits on the the people's constituent power. In other words, that if we develop the capacities for convening a true Constituent Assembly, we would be in a position to alter and re-create our constitutional order without being subject to any legal limits and that would include the power to unilaterally modify our relationship with the United States toward independence.

On Popular Sovereignty, Ultimate Powers, and Translation Errors

2009-06-23T05:44:00.000-07:00

Héctor Ferrer's recent speech before the Popular Democratic Party's General Council on June 7th was quickly cheered by the "sovereigntist" wing of that party. The celebration was at least in part a reaction to Ferrer's affirmation that it was necessary to "strengthen the relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States, through a Compact of Association based in a non-colonial and non-territorial Commonwealth [Estado Libre Asociado], based on popular sovereignty emphasis added). The reference to "popular sovereignty" appeals to free association supporters, for whom the mere reference to the word "sovereignty" (regardless of the context) is sufficient evidence of the party's clear movement toward a sovereign Puerto Rico. However, the national press put a damper to their celebration by noting that Ferrer defended "popular sovereignty" and not "national sovereignty".

Does it make sense to talk about popular sovereignty and national sovereignty in the context of the debate about Puerto Rico's status? Yes and no. Let's begin by briefly examining both conceptions of sovereignty. According to the thesis of popular sovereignty (generally associated with Rousseau), the bearer of sovereignty is the people, whose elected representatives, once elected, are required to put into practice the will of the citizenry. In other words, the government must act in conformity with the citizen's mandate, regardless of how wise or convenient that mandate is thought to be. Moreover, the people retains the right to exercise its sovereignty directly, even after regular elections take place. This theory has different strands and in contemporary times is associated with mechanisms such as recall referendums and popular initiatives to amend the constitution, which are present in the constitutional orders of countries such as Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia.

According to the thesis of national sovereignty (generally associated with Sieyes), the bearer of sovereignty is the nation, not the citizens. This means that public officials are supposed to represent the will of the nation and, once elected, are not required to act according to the will of their constituents. Universal suffrage appears here as the means through which the nation elects its representatives (the nation's representatives), not as the expression of a citizen's mandate for the adoption of determinate public policies. Rousseau criticized this view for separating the popular will from that of the nation. As he expressed in a famous passage on the English political system: "The English people believes itself to be free; it is gravely mistaken; it is free only during election of members of parliament; as soon as the members are elected, the people is enslaved; it is nothing. In the brief moment of its freedom, the English people makes such a use of that freedom that it deserves to lose it". The idea that a government is not obliged to act according to the will of the citizens might sound undemocratic (and it certainly is undemocratic), but the fact is that the doctrine of national sovereignty is the one followed by "liberal democracies" (as the United States and most European countries) follow in practice the doctrine of national sovereignty. In the context of Puerto Rico, a good example is the referendum on adopting a unicameral legislature: although a great majority voted in favor of such proposal, the existing legislature decided that it was not a good idea and the Supreme Court of Puerto Rico sanctioned the decision.

In a sense, the distinction between popular and national sovereignty is only relevant for the constitutional orders of individual states. That is to say, when one speaks about sovereignty in the context of the international status of a particular country the distinction becomes unnecessary: from the (juridical) perspective of international relations there is only one kind of sovereignty. Under that view, for example, both under Allende and under Pinochet, Chile was equally sovereign (and this shows, as we have previously argued, that becoming a "sovereign state" is not enough for solving the people's problems). In international relations, the idea of "popular sovereignty" is generally seen as an "internal" issue, because the recognition of a territory as a sovereign state does not depend on how its governmental structures are organized. However, it is also true that to talk about "popular sovereignty" or about "national sovereignty" (as they were defined previously), has important implications with respect to the international status of a country: a basic consequence of both conceptions is that the people or the nation can only be subject to the laws and constitution adopted by themselves (that is to say, they cannot be subject to laws adopted by another people or by another nation, as it happens in colonies). In that sense, in Puerto Rico (as in any colony), to talk about popular or national sovereignty is also to talk about the international status of the country.

But when Ferrer talks about popular sovereignty (interestingly, it has been pointed out that in the original document read by Ferrer, "popular" appeared with a capital "P", as in Popular Democratic Party), he was not referring to popular sovereignty as defined in the previous paragraphs. Instead, he seemed to be interested in doing three things. First, he attempted to settle down the "sovereigntist" wing of the party, which can be done easily by simply uttering words that could be interpreted to point towards free association: that group is characterized for happily clinging to anything that allows them to justify their loyalty to the party. Second, Ferrer made an effort to keep happy the more conservative sector of the party, happy, because the idea of "popular sovereignty" can be understood (as in international relations) merely as an issue of our internal government; that is to say, who "rules" inside the country (as Ferrer stated: "para que quede claro que aquí mandamos los puertorriqueños" or "so it is clear the here Puerto Ricans rule").

Third, Ferrer reproduced the conception of sovereignty adopted by the PPD in the 2008 Assembly: sovereignty as the power to "delegate competences to the United States" or what is the same thing, sovereignty as the power to alienate sovereignty. This is exemplified in a part of his speech that has not received any attention, where Ferrer indicates that it is necessary to develop the Estado Libre Asociado so that "Cabotage Laws don't apply to us" (my translation). We agree that U.S. Cabotage Laws should not apply in Puerto Rico, but Ferrer's silence about the general application of U.S. laws in Puerto Rico betray his position: according to the type of relationship proposed by his party, other laws of the United States (that are not the Cabotage Laws) would continue to apply in the country. Evidently, an arrangement like this constitutes the negation of the very idea of sovereignty because it supposes its alienation: giving someone else the power to decide for oneself in the future.

Incidentally, this contradictory conception of sovereignty is also expressed in a common definition of the concept as "el poder último" (the ultimate power), as in the phrase: "un pueblo es soberano si tiene el poder último para decidir sobre sus asuntos" (a people is sovereign when it has the ultimate power to decide over their issues) (see for example, here). This is the usual definition of sovereignty in English. Our leaders waste no time in rendering English to Spanish. However, último and ultimate are cognates, but they are faux amis, as último in Spanish means "last", whereas ultimate in English has a very strong connotation of goal and fundament. Whereas Spanish recalls a linear logic, English recalls a circular logic. "El poder último " is a bad translation of "the ultimate power" of the people. The idea of unconditional or autonomous power is lost--or rather perverted in translation. In order to present what they want, both to their colonial masters and the people they rule, they use an English term to disguise a logic in Spanish, and a Spanish term to hammer a logic into English. They want the so called poder último (ultimate power) over their people so that they can literally get the poder último (last power) from their masters. After everything is said and done, they want to rule. A more appropriate translation of "ultimate power", such as "poder máximo", is not an appealing term for those who just want the last word on what powers are to be alienated.

Neo-liberalism, the crisis and the catastrophic situation of the worker in the USA

2009-06-18T10:06:00.000-07:00

Note: This is part 3, section 2 of our series on the situation of the worker.

The neo-liberal period that has gone into crisis is not simply characterized by the privatization of public assets. As we have mentioned before, privatization is a normal part of the expansion of capital in its need to penetrate every social relation in order to guarantee that the worker depends intensely on the market and thus remains in a condition to be exploited as much as possible. What defines neo-liberalism is the way in which this privatization occurs.

Transnational companies, the hegemonic US dollar, the international financial system and the worker’s indebtedness play fundamental roles in this privatization (for analyses emphasizing these aspects see here). All of these structures were expanded during the post-war period thanks to the pact between capitalists and workers, sponsored by reformers. While the weapons of the capitalists grew, those of the workers did not develop as to offer significant resistance, for they had unions that, for the most part, negotiated with the capitalists the means to obtain better working conditions and consumer goods without effectively developing alternative structures aimed at liberating themselves from capital's needs. When the pact became an obstacle for the capitalists, workers were in no position to oppose the assault of their adversaries.

One of the most characteristic and important elements of this period is the importance of credit for the appropriation of wealth by the capitalist. Besides the usual mechanism of appropriation of wealth (buying from the worker her capacity to work, which will produce a surplus, for just what she needs to reproduce herself) neo-liberal capitalism, especially in the USA, substitutes wage increases for loans. The worker’s debt has always existed, but this systematic indebtedness has new characteristics. People in the USA can buy more goods, which are produced on other parts of the world, because even though their salaries remain stagnant since the 70’s, they use their credit as a mean to satisfy their growing needs. Meanwhile, the interests paid by the workers finance more loans or production, as much in the USA as in the rest of the world. The capitalists also use the workers’ IOU’s to speculate.

The more the US workers get into debt in order to buy, the more the sweatshops owned by transnational companies on the other side of the world produce. The transnational companies generally employ workers on peripheral countries for standardized processes of manufacturing, and highly skilled workers on the USA and other wealthy countries for sophisticated processes, such as design and research. The workers debt, increasingly tied to complex financial derivatives, is sold to foreign investors who find in them a relatively sure investment. The wealth produced by workers on the other side of the world serves to finance research and development, buy advanced machinery and equipment, and finance the US worker’s debt, whose labor capacity is more expensive given the amount of value concentrated in her country, requiring her to have more expenses, such as costly trainings.

The expansion of capital in this system implies the expansion of the US worker’s credit and the super-exploitation of workers in the peripheral countries. Ensuring the credit increase and the US workers’ buying power becomes a must. This requires the assault on old institutions and organizations, in the USA as well as in the rest of the world, in order to re-privatize them to make them profitable, especially from the point of view of speculative capital. For instance, the structures of the welfare state were funded by the workers through their taxes and the minimal contributions made by companies out of the surplus they extracted from the workers, in order to keep them healthy, well educated, etc. We should note that they were already private in the sense that they only provided healthcare and education in as much as it was necessary for capitalism. Neo-liberal privatization in this case consists of canalizing the funds out of the state into banks or insurance companies, who are always happy to raise their interest or their insurance policies, and buying the services from private providers. The capitalist must provide credit and sell the worker the means to be healthy and trained in order to speculate and finance other entrepreneurships that create the conditions for her to be able to pay the expensive insurance policies and debts. The function of keeping workers healthy and trained continues with a more properly capitalist organization, with the peculiarity of supporting and being supported by the debt system.

The problem, however, is that the capitalist need for taking over old institutions leaves the worker in a precarious situation. This is a serious problem because the worker has to pay her debt so that the system works. The crisis explodes when one of the parties of this delicate financial framework becomes unable to pay.

This is what happened with the real estate system in the USA, the center of global capitalism. Many workers who were already indebted up to their noses, mortgaged their houses with variable interests (interests that raise with time). The lenders who now have been demonized for lending to workers with bad credit (the infamous subprime lending) followed the global logic by which the value of the houses would increase as the interests would be used to finance projects that would increase global wealth, therefore increasing the value of real estate. Their fantasy did not consider, among other things, that the worker’s wages were stagnant. When the higher interests set, with stagnant wages and indebted to their noses, these workers were unable to pay all their debts, even the house mortgage, which is the last thing one stops paying. The complexity of the financial framework, where subprime mortgages were packed with prime mortgages, insured against losses, bought and sold, etc., created a domino effect, which initially affected workers with good credit and then everybody else. The worker does not pay her debts because the financial system collapses and breaks her leverage, and the financial system collapse because the worker cannot pay her debts. Eventually this comes to the industrial sector, which starts taking the usual measures for a crisis (layoffs, reduction of wages, etc.) Not only the value of the houses disappears, but also the salary of the workers, and their possibilities of payment of debt along with it. The main global implication of this process is that commodities produced abroad are not selling in the USA, so that at the global level we see the corresponding processes of crisis at the national level.

To get an idea of the crisis, the estimate for evictions for this year is 3,000,000 (the media, looking at them from the point of view of capital calls them “foreclosures”) (Reuters, April 16, 2009). There are millions of people who have been forced out of their homes while the effort put to build the houses goes to waste. For March, the unemployment rate in the USA was 8.5%, while Latin Americans in this country had an unemployment rate of 11.4% (the participation rate in the USA for January was 65.5%, Bureau of Labor Statistics).

In other parts of the world, the situation worsens to the point where there has been food shortages. In Puerto Rico, where the Comonwealth (Estado Libre Asociado) has been incapable of creating jobs for the population, the unemployment rate stands currently at 13% with a participation rate of 44% (January, Junta de Planificación). In sum, there are millions of capable workers who remain unemployed, tools, machinery and finished products not being used, while there are immense needs for them.

People from the USA have always thought of themselves as the center of the universe; in the case of the post-war and neo-liberal periods with its crisis they were not far from the truth. Used to solve their problems through the neo-liberal institutions, which promote an extremely individualistic, partial life, in what appears as a wondrous, shifting and expanding world beyond their control, they find themselves ill equipped to phase the global crisis. It would be easy to fall for the reformist rehash of neo-liberalism, but the real challenge is to get rid of the very organization which causes the problem.

The Nomination of Sonia Sotomayor

2009-06-02T18:30:00.000-07:00

The nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court of the United States has already triggered the usual discussions among lawyers about the quality of the past decisions of a nominee for that position (see for example, here). In addition, several of Sotomayor's expressions outside court that tend to indicate her political positions about certain topics have been put into question. For example, the fact that in a conference Sotomayor expressed that appellate judges make "public policy" (see here), something that should be obvious (see here), has caused upheaval among commentators that cling to the idea that judges only interpret (and never make) the law. Similarly, her position in a law review article about the role that the race and gender of a judge plays in judicial decisions (see here, and for a much more interesting analysis of a part of that article that has been seldom commented, see here), or the fact that in her Yale bachelor's thesis she made an expression in favor of Puerto Rico's independence (see here) have become objects of discussion in a mediatic system that depends on its capacity to sell controversies. The fact that a Puerto Rican woman has been nominated to the highest court in the U.S. has also been emphasized and, naturally, that has been the center of the discussion in the island (for an interesting analysis, in Spanish, see here).

It is not our intention to negate Sotomayor's merits or to deny the satisfaction that one might feel when the daughter of two Puerto Ricans that emigrated to the U.S. during the mid 20th century, who grew up in a poor neighborhood in the Bronx, has the possibility of been confirmed to one of the main positions in the government of that country. However, we think it is important to mention the following. The appointments of persons from minorities to high ranking governmental positions are usually presented as substantial victories, as if, from that moment on, these groups had a true representative in a position of power. But one must not forget that being nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court, or to any other position of power (as the Presidency), is to be at the service of a structure that hides and reproduces, through the appeareance of equality of the "liberal rule of law", important relations of power. Relations in which the great parts of the population, in particular those with similar backgrounds to that of Sotomayor, occupy the less privileged position. In that sense, it is not the case that subordinated groups will now have someone in the Supreme Court whose function will be to protect their interests, but that a person that belongs to a historically subordinated group has been called to form part of a juridical apparatus that, at least in part, protects those very relations of subordination.

Sovereignty Beyond the State as an Actor

2009-05-22T09:04:00.000-07:00

Translated by Zinnia Cintrón

Some advocates of independence, define sovereignty in light of international relations as the authority that a state has to govern itself. Therefore, to achieve sovereignty, there can not be an external force subordinating the state as it pleases. A country is independent when it is not subordinated to another authority and a colony when it has to surrender itself to another power.

This mental picture of sovereignty, untangles the foul-ups caused by the “Populares” colonialists in relation to what it means to have sovereignty. We are not sovereign and we will not be as long as the USA submits Puerto Rico to its institutions. We could also argue that we are not and will not be sovereign if we are subordinated to the dictates of the international capitalist market or the transnational companies.

However, to limit ourselves to see the state as an actor that directs itself is dangerous. We can not loose perspective of the fact that the ones that actually act and control themselves (through the state), are human beings. First of all, if we only see the state, we will uncritically assume the privileged position of the powerful groups for whom the concrete problems of the people are unimportant and the priority lies on what they can do with the state for their own benefit. To develop our own strategy (i.e. an anti-colonial strategy) becomes impossible. If we limit ourselves to see the state without the social relations that comprises it, we miss that there are states which – irrespectively of them being submitted to an external power or not – are constituted in such a fashion that, being human creations, ultimately dominate them instead of being at their service. They become authorities internally external. If we reduce the sovereignty problem to the state that governs itself, we consequently facilitate the mental image of an international community with individuals in equal conditions, also hiding the fundamental problem of interdependence based on power relations, not only due to the US hegemony that submits what are supposed to be sovereign countries to its institutions, but also because of the transnational capital that subordinates even the powerful USA to its necessities.

We, the independence advocates, need for our concept of sovereignty to take into account these problems in order to be able to fight for a genuine sovereignty by attacking the multiple dimensions of colonialism. We must conceptualize the state as an actor to be able to understand international relations, but this concept can not hide the way that individuals, using the state's powers as well as those of structures beyond the state to solve their problems, give them life.

The New Status Plebiscites: What is the Problem?

2009-05-18T11:10:00.000-07:00

According to the press, in the next few days the Resident Commissioner in Washington, Pedro Pierluisi, will present to Congress a bill that would allow for the celebration of a new plebiscite on the status of Puerto Rico. In contrast to previous plebiscites, the proposed legislation would require two different electoral processes. In the first one, electors would be asked whether they desire (or not) to continue the current territorial status. However, if the current status is rejected, a second plebiscite in which electors would choose among the alternatives recognized by the United Nations (integration, free association, and independence), would take place.

We are already familiar with the most obvious critiques to this proposal: that Pierluisi does not have the required votes in Congress; that the U.S. would never commit to respect the result of a process in which statehood is one of the alternatives; that plesbicites are not the right mechanism to deal with the status issue; that this plebiscite is an electoral ambush designed to eliminate the commonwealth option from the ballot in order to create an artificial majority in favor of statehood. The fundamental problem with Pierluisi's proposal, however, is that it assumes that colonialism is a legitimate political option.

In other words, the proposal recognizes the right of the people to decide 'freely and democratically' if they want to continue a colonial relationship (to remain as a territory). Such a position contradicts both freedom and democracy: both concepts, in addition to being incompatible with colonialism, find their limit in their own negation. By way of explanation, the concept of 'freedom' does not include the right to decide not to be free, because that right supposes the negation of liberty; to reject self-government through voting does not constitute a democratic exercise because it would result in democracy's abolition. Furthermore, an electoral process in which colonialism appears as a valid alternative, as one of the options that would be 'respected' by the empire, could hardly be characterized as part of an exercise of decolonization.

Is Free Association Superior to Independence?

2009-05-10T12:40:00.000-07:00

Those who are willing to defend free association and the "delegation of competences" to the United States have not explained why free association is superior to independence. It is not enough to say, as many do, that free association represents "a better reflection of the historical aspirations of our people". That response not only cannot be considered an argument in favor of the convenience of free association, but does not take into account that those "historical aspirations' (assuming they are actually consistent with a claim to free association), are not developed in a vacuum, but result from a series of complex relationships that include colonialism itself as well as the positions of political leaders that people have trusted at certain moments. The fact that in electoral terms free association is more viable than independence is merely the enunciation of an empirical fact, of something that appears to be that way, but does not say anything in favor of that political alternative. For instance, if at some point in our history, it becomes obvious that a considerable part of the people aspire to a military dictatorship, that would not be a reason for us to support dictatorship nor to say that dictatorship is superior to democracy. On the contrary, it would be an urgent reason to, via work at a grassroot level, attempt to mobilize the population toward other political positions. And of course, that should be the priority of the independence movement.

Workers and their Situation this 1st of May, Part 2

2009-05-07T08:04:00.000-07:00

The capitalist crisis and the reform; everything changes but the subordination of work

Note: This article consists of three parts. Part 1 can be found below this article.
Translated by Zinnia Cintrón

Crisis arrive when the fashion in which capital organizes the conditions to exploit workers becomes ineffective; the same necessities that workers keep creating, forces the system to handle too many problems as to maintain capitalists' profits This is a typical problem of any imperial system as it tries to superimpose the necessities of one over the necessities of many and this position cannot be kept intact for a long time. The one in the power position becomes careless to the necessities of the majority which, simultaneously, grow and become more complex. Consequently, reforms need to be done periodically. Work (subordinated to the capitalist market as salable labor power), progressively achieves political and technological developments in accordance to capitalism's requirements. However, as time goes by, unavoidable problems arise which have no effective solution within the fashion in which capital organized society originally. At those times, capitalists have to engineer a reorganization of society without altering the foundation of capitalism: for workers to be forced to sell their labor and to buy everything that she needs in such a way that capitalists can employ them, pay them for the cost to reproduce her labor power and keep the total value of what is produced (refer to the last paragraph of Part I).

The wear and tear of the ways in which capitalists organize global production becomes more complex as capitalists find a way to reproduce capital (take the accumulated money, buy tools, materials and labor for production, and sell to have even more money) as fast as possible and, frequently, accumulated capital has no exit, especially if they have managed to impoverish workers to the point that they cannot buy even a negligible part of all the wealth produced. They then find, within financial, risky acrobatics, a way to stay in the reign of money and to avoid dealing with what pertains to this world, to work, specially with workers that sweat, get tired, get sick; that want other things besides merely making money; that refuse to march to the monotonous sound that money plays.

Under the usual rhythm of life within capitalism, given that production is achieved primarily to increase capital, noxious necessities arise and people lead lives full of frustration and dissatisfaction. In their daily lives as waged sworkers, workers cannot be creative in their work, learn almost nothing, and harm themselves. Furthermore, they usually cannot buy what they produced; if they can buy it, it is usually of poor quality, and, if at a certain moment they can get what they could not buy, they produced more wealth that (at this point) they cannot afford. Being that they are not able to control what they are creating, but still have the necessity of creating, they frequently find obsessive distractions. Many of these are packed and sold by capitalism sooner than later. When crisis detonate, capitalists demand more and bigger sacrifices from workers and, in the worst case scenarios, they fire these people and close their factories and shops for the sake of saving their capital until the situation improves. Because workers cannot buy, it is senseless for any capitalist to put their capital “into production”. In the meantime, the things that workers need are not being produced and the ones that are already produced (including the tools and materials to produce) are kept under lock while workers go through extreme misery.

At this point, capitalists do not waste any time to mobilize the rest of society to come to their rescue. This is not too difficult when, indeed, the immense majority needs capital to circulate. It cannot be forgotten that, under this arrangement, the only way to satisfy personal necessities is by satisfying the necessities of capital itself. For this reason, intellectual reformists have almost all the work done since people notice that if capital does not circulate to employ them, their quality of life will worsen.

Reformists that are more empathic towards workers and that are aware of the system's logic, recognize at this point that even when capitalism exploits people and leads us to another crisis, we need to save it because we cannot achieve a dramatically different society if the immediate problems are not solved beforehand. Certainly, but the way to attack the immediate problems cannot rely entirely on capital exploiting us. We need to solve the immediate problems by establishing basic conditions that imply the society that we want: one where work is not subordinated to its creations. The same applies for any project. For example, if one wants to build a round table, one does not collect the tools, materials, techniques, and plans that would be used to build a bench and then say: “at least we can eat on it”. If the conditions available provide only the means to do the usual things, one must modify them to fit the purpose pursued.

The course that the reorganization of the crisis will take or even if it will be successful (or not), will depend on how well organized workers are. As soon as their intellectual leaders limit themselves to use the plan based on capitalism, it will not matter how well organized they are; it will only be an issue of getting concessions – that the leaders generally enjoy more than anybody – and then wait for the empire's time, the cyclic movement, the return of the pendulum or the eternal return that will supposedly bring another advance. This story is told in every crisis and here we are again. If there are pendulums, cyclic movements, and eternal returns, it is mostly because of the implementation of those stories. When, on the contrary, leaders and intellectuals who take very seriously the plan for a new society develop – a plan that having work at its core, is not monolythic as capital is, but dynamic –, not only concessions that solve the immediate problems are granted, but also the structures that announce a new society commence to emerge

Workers and their Situation this May Day, Part I

2009-05-04T20:01:00.000-07:00

Note: This article consists of three parts which will be published during the rest of the week.

The importance of work

For many people, May 1st or the International Worker's Day, represents an angry shout of protest against the brutal inequities and atrocities that come from a system in which benefiting the majority is not important. Instead, priority is given to the accumulation of profits for a minority that has control (directly or indirectly) over the means that we need to satisfy our necessities. Since its original vision in 1886, founded on reducing the working day to eight hours, up until now with the pro-immigrants assertions in the United States or the strike against the privatization projects that Luis Fortuño's Government is planning to implement in Puerto Rico, this day symbolizes a flag for the diverse international groups and organizations that are aware of the exploitation, domination, and oppression that, in one way or another, become present in their lives under the actual socioeconomic regime.

One of these forms of oppression is the fact that the importance of work is not recognized. Some people (the most reactionary supporters of capitalism), disregard that work creates, reproduces, and increases wealth. They also ignore that work also creates the means and conditions necessary for capitalism to exist. The reformists, on the other hand, simply limit the work possibilities: it becomes solely a mental activity within a universe of ideas; an activity that establishes norms, contracts, and institutions in an already institutionalized universe; an activity that creates signs and language in a “textual” world. What they all elude is that human beings must satisfy their natural necessities and that, by working with the means and conditions that they have created, they generate within themselves the strength, intelligence, craftsmanship, technique, and knowledge that exposes them to new necessities. Human nature is not based on being rational, selfish or an absolute “other”; it is founded instead on the fact that, by working, humans create their own nature.

Currently, capitalism is undergoing its most precarious crisis since the thirties but the most conservative versions have kept quiet. Discussions of reformist tendencies have reappeared to discuss the issues of saving, fixing or regulating the system. However, what is really imperative is to analyze profoundly the necessity and desirability of the capitalist system and its logic. To do so, we must position ourselves within the perspective of the workers.

Within capitalism, work unravels fundamentally under the market conditions that were previously established. Once the means and necessity for expropriation were developed, the workers lost their properties (certainly becoming “free” considering that they lacked the support as well as the responsibilities of their previous relations) and had no other alternative but to sell their labor power in the market. Consequently, the one with the work tools and materials, employs workers who produce society's wealth, but instead of receiving the value of their production, they are only compensated with the market value of those things that they need to reproduce their labor power (housing, provisions, education, entertainment, etc.). In other words, workers get paid only to ensure their capability to return to work the next day under the same conditions. Capitalists increase their wealth by employing workers to sell what the workers produced, they pay their debt, and keep the remaining quantity. As a result of the control that they have over the means of production (that in this case consist of merchandise that only capitalists can buy and organize to produce), they dictate to workers what to produce and how to produce it so as to when society's wealth increases, capital increases as well. Moreover, this explains the blindness of the most fanatic defenders of capital as they envision everything from the equal market realm; overlooking the unfairness that exists in work issues. It also explains the reformists' insistence to create jobs and even jobs that pay more or the fair wage, as this does not affect the origin of the problem itself at all.

On Alliances and Pro Independence Congresses

2009-04-28T15:13:00.000-07:00

The idea of convening a Third Pro Independence Congress has been gaining strength among independence supporters. According to Carlos Gallisá, one of its principal proponents (Noel Colón Martínez and Juan Mari Brás are also among those who support the idea), one of the main objectives of the Third Congress should be to “work out alliances with sectors that go beyond the independence movement, like the sovereigntists inside the PPD [Partido Popular Democrático], community, environmental, and other organizations that make possible a joint action plan that serves as a foundation to the so needed opposition in a broad front for decolonization and social justice” (my translation, see here).

Presented as an historical sequel to the 1943 and 1944 Pro Independence Congresses, it is undeniable that this initiative has at least the potential to create a great deal of enthusiasm among independence supporters. We would like to briefly consider here the idea of political alliances, in particular the proposed alliance with the “sovereigntists inside the PPD” (or, what is the same thing, free association supporters), which occupies a privileged position in most proposals in favor of the Third Congress. We should make clear from the beginning that we are not against political alliances. On the contrary, we believe that alliances have always played an important role in the consolidation of left-wing movements, as has been demonstrated in Latin America's recent history. Nevertheless, we understand that in order for a political agreement to be characterized as an alliance, it must have, at the very least, two main characteristics.

First, for all practical effects, an alliance should result in the creation of an entity that is distinct to the political movements that comprise it. In Uruguay, for example, the Broad Front (Frente Amplio) is composed by more than ten political parties and groups. In the election of 1932 in Puerto Rico, the Partido Socialista and the Partido Unión Republicana achieved a legislative majority through an alliance known as The Coalition (which, of course, was not a particularly progressive alliance). More recently, the Nuevo Movimiento Independentista and the Congreso Nacional Hostosiano formed the MINH (Nuevo Movimiento Nacional Hostosiano). But at least until now, all 'negotiations' between independentists and PPD sovereigntists have ended with the former voting in favor of the PPD in the general election. That was the case, for example, of the 2008 electoral process. What took place in 2008, of course, was not an “alliance”, but an example of how a political party can be effective in getting votes from electors not affiliated to it. A genuine alliance between independence supporters and PPD sovereigntists (we will consider below if this would be in fact a good idea), would require the latter to be willing either to abandon the PPD and to create -together with independence supporters- a new political group, or to subordinate the PPD to the decisions of a new entity (that would also be directed by independentists). Both possibilities are extremely improbable: if something is clear about the so called “sovereigntists” of the PPD is their profound loyalty to their party (they have come so far as to imagine that the PPD has been a “sovereigntist” party since the 50s, see here).

The second characteristic that a political agreement should have in order to count as an alliance is that it must advance the interests of each of the organizations that conform it. The main interest of the PPD sovereigntists is that Puerto Rico and the United States sign a treaty of free association, and the main interest of independence supporters is that the island achieves independence (or at least that it moves closer towards it). At first glance, there seems to be an important similarity between the interests of these two groups that would justify every attempt at an alliance: after all, both groups want Puerto Rico to become a sovereign country. However, as we have argued before, the “sovereignty” of free association supporters does not even satisfy the basic criteria of sovereignty in a juridical sense, and much less comes close to the goals of what we have identified as true sovereignty (soberanía plena, see here and here). Moreover, although it appears as if free association would move us closer to independence, there are important indications to the contrary. In particular, sovereignty under free association would legitimize the relation of political subordination of Puerto Rico to the United States. In other words, the exercise of power of the United States in Puerto Rico (the so called “competences” that would be delegated to the United States through a free association treaty) would no longer be considered an imperial practice, but the juridical manifestation of the Puerto Rican people's exercise of self-determination according to international law. When one considers this in light of the economic project shared by free association supporters (that is, that Puerto Rico becomes a 'player' in the international capitalist market through the power of entering into international trade agreements, and as a result creating new employments through the establishment of new multinational corporations in the island) any possibility of true sovereignty vanishes.

While the Third Pro Independence Congress is an interesting initiative, one of its principal objectives should not be to enter into an alliance with the “sovereigntists inside the PPD”. The Third Congress should instead attempt to strenghten community based action, opening new possibilities for independence support to emerge from below. In that sense, promoting alliances with community and environmental organizations is a step in the right direction. As independentists, we cannot have as our goal that the leaders of the PPD (which as a political party has a solid political base) support free association, but to develop the conditions for people to see in independence the real possibility of solving their problems.

Los Expatriados

2009-04-27T07:36:00.000-07:00

This blog is formed by Puerto Ricans in different parts of the world. Our purpose here is to develop explanations about the Puerto Rican colonial reality that allow us to effectively tackle it.

The work we propose must confront the obstacle of our own implication in the colonial relation that we want to criticize. Our tools are not completely ours, andbelong to conditions that we barely control. In this sense, we are not expatriates because, just as most Puerto Ricans, we live abroad our national territory, but because ourcountry is not fully ours.

Since this problem affects all of us, our job requires us to be able to look beyond the particular problems of our immediate groups, to the source of the common problems. We must therefore transform the instruments at our disposal so that we can tackle that source and not the immediate problems for which they were originally developed. In this way we start developing the means and conditions necessary for truly building our own nation.

The patria we desire cannot be achieved without the peoples of other nations. The case of Puerto Rico, even though having the specificity of being a colony in the classical sense, is not the only one: in varying degrees, no people truly owns its nation. Just as we cannot limit ourselves to deal only with our puny groups within our country, we cannot use tools incapable of dealing with the root of the common problems of the peoples of the world.

We know that the work we do here is only part of all the work necessary for our goal, and that we are not alone in this project. That is why we want this space to be useful to everyone who wants to solve the colonial problem.