The Fanonite

‘Obama could set an earthquake under the established electoral map’, writes Gary Younge. ‘He has roused black and young voters as never before, but he has to maintain the rest of the Democratic base’.

The Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has a compelling personal and political biography. One of eight children, he could not read until he was 10, left school soon after and by the age of 12 was working as a shoeshine boy. Lula was instrumental in setting up his own leftwing political party, the Workers party, risked jail as a trade union organiser during the dictatorship and ran for president three times before he was finally successful in 2002, capturing the imagination and hopes of many Brazilians - albeit with a vastly watered-down programme.

Having finally won the presidency, a moment many of his supporters thought would never happen, he was then cruelly mugged. The invisible hand of the market grabbed him on his way to the inauguration and shook what was left of the socialism out of him. In the three months between his winning the vote and being sworn in, the nation’s currency plummeted by 30%, $6bn in hot money had left the country, and some agencies had given Brazil the highest debt-risk ratings in the world.

“We are in government but not in power,” said Lula’s close aide, Dominican friar Frei Betto. “Power today is global power, the power of the big companies, the power of financial capital.”

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We Feed the World is a film about globalisation and scarcity amid plenty.

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Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrineis a groundbreaking book. The sheer scope of the evidence she marshals to illustrate corporate predation around the world is overwhelming. However, the book is also deeply flawed to the extent that it rarely breaks from its economic determenism. Some examples just don’t work. Iraq, for example. But she weaves it into her narrative nevertheless, by ascribing solely economic motives to its architects. The architects, however, were the neocons, and in order to make place for them in her thesis, she writes that ‘neocon’ is a name given to ‘neoliberal’s in the US. While in the following review Stephen Holmes does a good job of illustrating its failings, he does not delve much into which interests were actually behind the war. (Also see Alexander Cockburn’s critique of the book)

The anti-globalisation movement suffered a dizzying setback on 9/11. Symbolic gatecrashing into the well-guarded meeting places of the super-rich suddenly seemed a much more sinister activity than before. Busting up branches of Starbucks and other Seattle-style antics became anathema in an atmosphere of injured and vindictive patriotism. But Naomi Klein, the combative theorist and publicist of anti-globalisation, was not about to accept such guilt by association. Her reply, The Shock Doctrine, deals with the corporate acquisitiveness that she sees as ravaging the planet and reformulates the ideas of the anti-globalisation and anti-corporate movements for a post-9/11 world. Klein believes she has found the answer to a question that has perplexed many on the left: if every modern American government has been a tool of powerful business interests, what, if anything, makes the Bush administration uniquely odious?

Her answer is that the Bush administration draws its political support not from America’s corporate class generally, but rather from a particular part of it: ‘the sprawling disaster capitalism complex’. She has in mind the companies that reap huge profits from catastrophes, both man-made and natural. They include defence contractors, arms dealers, high-tech security firms, the oil and gas sectors, construction companies, private healthcare firms and so on. Not exactly ambulance-chasers, they are driving the ambulances themselves – for a profit. For the most part, they capitalise on emergencies rather than deliberately bringing them about. But the distinction is not always so clear: the stock price of Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest defence contractor, almost tripled between 2003 and 2007 after a former vice president at the firm chaired a committee agitating for war with Iraq. The Iraq war was also ‘the single most profitable event’ in the history of Halliburton, whose former CEO, who still retains stock options, is Dick Cheney.

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‘Simplistic and crude: it’s time central bankers recognised inflation targeting for the misguided fashion it really is,’ writes Joseph Stiglitz.

The world’s central bankers are a close-knit club, given to fads and fashions. In the early 1980s, they fell under the spell of monetarism, a simplistic economic theory promoted by Milton Friedman. After monetarism was discredited — at great cost to those countries that succumbed to it — the quest began for a new mantra.

The answer came in the form of “inflation targeting“, which says that whenever price growth exceeds a target level, interest rates should be raised. This crude recipe is based on little economic theory or empirical evidence; there is no reason to expect that regardless of the source of inflation, the best response is to increase interest rates.

One hopes that most countries will have the good sense not to implement inflation targeting. My sympathies go to the unfortunate citizens of those that do. (Among the list of those who have officially adopted inflation targeting in one form or another are Israel, the Czech Republic, Poland, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, South Africa, Thailand, Korea, Mexico, Hungary, Peru, the Philippines, Slovakia, Indonesia, Romania, New Zealand, Canada, the UK, Sweden, Australia, Iceland, and Norway.)

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Nneka, singing Heartbeat. So beautiful and impassioned, it leaves you speechless. This is the kind of authenticity that MTV and the like spend billions trying to imitate; they never succeed, but inevitably dilute the art in the process. This is heartfelt; a call for justice, recognition of our shared humanity and solidarity on a personal level.

In her own words:

“I get inspired when I take a severe look at the things going on in our world today; especially in my country. How people live, suffer and endure pain, politics and religion, when I see all that man has evoked and created out of self-centeredness and devotion to material things”.

Nneka’s voice strikes an eerie balance between rage and pain which mirror’s the abrasion of two continents, Europe and Africa, within Nneka’s life so far. Nneka reiterates her humility in the face of her musical talents.

“I do not see myself as a performer but as somebody who shares her heartfelt feelings with others. I have fortunately, by the grace of God, the opportunity to sing my message to you on stage.”

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Today’s guest editorial is another installment in my friend toni solo’s Globalization and terror series.

Corporate globalization and its equally misshapen twin, the fake “war on terror”, look like the Western Bloc’s last crooked chance to sustain a few decades longer its member countries’ habitual global power and privilege. John Pilger has noted that seven months after the attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York, Condoleezza Rice spoke of the “opportunity” that outrage presented. She and her Bush regime cronies subsequently imposed their imperialist agenda abroad and their fascist agenda at home.

Globally, corporate consumer capitalism now cannot even deliver minimal subsistence food security, let alone broader economic stability. The global crisis presents another opportunity for suave barbarian advocates of mass murder like Rice and similar-minded me-too’s like Hilary Clinton to help provoke and exploit conflict around the world in the service of their corporate plutocracy’s narcissistic greed. Accordingly, G7 leaders have recently gamed a streamlined variant of their endless hypocritical sadistic war on the world’s impoverished majority.

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Another documentary by Big Noise Films this time on the Zapatistas of Chiapas Mexico. The Zapatistas (EZLN) are an armed revolutionary group that rose up on New Years day 1994 in opposition to NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement). They are ideologically opposed to corporate globalisation and neoliberalism - which they see as exploitative and destructive to their indigenous culture.

They’re also quite famous as the first resistance movement to garner popular global support through innovitive use of the internet. Their charismatic - and media savvy - spokesperson Marcos with his poetic philosophy and stylish image, I believe, played a large role in their success in this area.

Can I speak? Can I speak about our dead at this celebration? After all, they are the ones who made it possible. Can someone say that we are here because they are not? Is that permitted?

I have a dead brother. Is there someone here who doesn’t have a dead brother? I have a dead brother. He was killed by a bullet to his head. It was the before dawn on the 1st of January, 1994. Way before dawn the bullet that was shot. Way before dawn the death that kissed the forehead of my brother. My brother used to laugh a lot but now he doesn’t laugh any more. I couldn’t keep my brother in my pocket, but I kept the bullet that killed him. On another day before dawn I asked the bullet where it came from. It said: “From the rifle of a soldier of the government of a powerful person who serves another powerful person who serves another powerful person who serves another in the whole world. The bullet that killed my brother has no nationality.

The fight that must be fought to keep our brothers with us, rather than the bullets that have killed them, has no nationality either. For this purpose we zapatistas have many big pockets in our uniforms. Not for keeping bullets. For keeping brothers.

In 1999 opponents of corporate sponsered globalisation succeeded in shutting down the World Trade Organistion (WTO) Seattle summit. This is what democracy looks like is a moving testimony recorded by over 100 of the activists involved, compiled by Big Noise Films.

“If you do not move you will be the subject of pain compliance” Seattle Police Force Fascists

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Walden Bello on the travails of global capital.

Skyrocketing oil prices, a falling dollar, and collapsing financial markets are the key ingredients in an economic brew that could end up in more than just an ordinary recession. The falling dollar and rising oil prices have been rattling the global economy for sometime. But it is the dramatic implosion of financial markets that is driving the financial elite to panic.And panic there is. Even as it characterized Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke’s deep cuts amounting to a 1.25 points off the prime rate in late January as a sign of panic, the Economist admitted that “there is no doubt that this is a frightening moment.” The losses stemming from bad securities tied up with defaulted mortgage loans by “subprime” borrowers are now estimated to be in the range of about $400 billion. But as the Financial Times warned, “the big question is what else is out there” at a time that the global financial system “is wide open to a catastrophic failure.” In the last few weeks, for instance, several Swiss, Japanese, and Korean banks have owned up to billions of dollars in subprime-related losses. The globalization of finance was, from the beginning, the cutting edge of the globalization process, and it was always an illusion to think that the subprime crisis could be confined to U.S. financial institutions, as some analysts had thought.

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Noam Chomsky interviewed by Michael Shank.

Michael Shank: In December 2007, seven South American countries officially launched the Bank of the South in response to growing opposition to the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and other International Financial Institutions. How important is this shift and will it spur other responses in the developing world? Will it at some point completely undermine the reach of the World Bank and the IMF?

Noam Chomsky: I think it’s very important, especially because, contrary to the impression often held here, the biggest country Brazil is supporting it. The U.S. propaganda, western propaganda, is trying to establish a divide between the good left and the bad left. The good left, like Lula in Brazil, are governments they would’ve overthrown by force 40 years ago. But now that’s their hope, one of their saviors. But the divide is pretty artificial. Sure, they’re different. Lula isn’t Chavez. But they get along very well, they cooperate. And they are cooperating on the Bank of the South.

The Bank of the South could turn out to be a viable institution. There are plenty of problems in the region. But one of the striking things that’s been happening in South America for quite a few years now is that they are beginning to overcome for the first time, since the Spanish invasion, the conflicts among the countries and the separation of the countries. It was a very disintegrated continent. If you look at transportation systems they don’t have much to do with each other. They’re mostly oriented toward the imperial power that was dominant. So you send out resources, you send out capital, the rich tiny elite have their chateaus on the Riviera, and that sort of thing. But they have not much to do with each other.

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