EcoLogics

Updated on 24 November 2009 (for updates please scroll to the bottom of this post)

In one of Gabriel García Márquez’s novels, the narrator explains that the gringos have even taken the water from one of Colombia’s bays. Last week, the U.S. and Colombia signed an agreement that suggests that the gringos are now also after Colombia’s—and perhaps Venezuela’s—land and skies. The signing of the agreement confirms the news, first reported in this blog on 3 July 2009, that the U.S. military will use, and almost certainly acquire operational control over as many as seven Colombian bases (it seems that the number is going up every other month; first it was three, then it was four, then five, and now it is ‘at least’ seven). The bases in question range from the Palanquero Air Force Base near Bogotá to Colombia’s main naval bases on the Pacific and Caribbean.

Alas, the move has required an intricate constitutional hopscotch on Uribe’s part. According to Colombian laws, Congress needs to approve new treaties and any agreement involving the movement of foreign troops through the country. Aware no doubt that members of Colombia’s legislative branch might not approve of U.S. use of Colombia’s bases, Uribe has come up with a legal fiction that is as complex as it is misleading. His lawyers (or the ones provided by the U.S. embassy in Bogotá) have argued that, far from involving a new treaty, let alone the movement of foreign troops across Colombian territory, the ‘Complementary Agreement for Cooperation and Technical Assistance in Defence and Security’ with the United States is no more than a kind of supplement to three or more existing treaties. Aspects of each of these pre-existing treaties allegedly provide the ‘framework treaties’ (‘tratados marco’) with which to implement the new agreement. Of course, the new U.S. bases are not being described as new bases, let alone as U.S. bases. Given that nothing has really changed, or so Uribe’s argument goes, the president of Colombia is entitled to use his powers as the director of Colombia’s foreign policy to give the U.S. military (and its ominous civilian contractors) what is, in effect, free use of Colombia’s military infrastructure.

We owe it to President Lula of Brazil to have cut through this patently absurd argument in the course of the historic UNASUR meeting that took place in Argentina’s San Carlos de Bariloche on 28 August 2009. After Uribe claimed that the agreement with the U.S. did not constitute a significant change to existing policy, and that the U.S. had had access to Colombian bases for decades, Lula posed the obvious question: if that was the case, why was any agreement whatsoever required with the U.S.?

These and other interventions during the UNASUR gathering revealed the extent to which, less than a year after arriving to power, the Obama-Clinton presidency has managed to do what no other leader has done in the 180 or so years since most South American countries obtained their independence from Spain: to unite South American countries in condemning U.S. policy in the region. It was extraordinary to watch live on television (UNASUR had live TV coverage at the insistence of Uribe himself), how leader after leader stood up either to express doubts about, or even to flatly condemn the U.S. bases in Colombia. Even Perú’s President Alan García, the other major U.S. proxy in the continent, was forced to qualify his support for Uribe during the course of the televised meeting. One has to wonder, in this sense, who advised Uribe to insist on wall-to-wall TV coverage; perhaps Uribe is so used to having the Colombian media submit to his iron will that he never contemplated the possibility that Latin American leaders would be playing for rather different audiences.

As predicted by this blog, even before the agreement was formally signed, it was already providing further incentive for a beefing up of Colombia’s neighbours’ armed forces. In late July Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez went shopping for fighters and helicopters in Russia, and in September Brazil announced an agreement in principle to buy France’s Rafale fighters. For its part, Ecuador has accepted an offer by Venezuela to donate six of its older Mirage fighters to the Ecuadorean Air Force. While not all of the purchases can be attributed directly to the establishment of the U.S. bases in Colombia, there can be little doubt that the bases will fuel the concern of leaders throughout the region. Many will calculate that, at the very least, they must make it as difficult as possible for the U.S. (or its Colombian proxy) to launch the kind of strikes that Reagan launched against Libya in 1986. The hope must be that current or future U.S. leaders will hesitate to launch such attacks if there is a likelihood of U.S. casualties. Venezuela and Ecuador most also be hoping that, if Uribe knows that his neighbours can strike back at him, he may be less eager to follow the instructions of his U.S. masters.

Unfortunately, this means that the U.S. bases are already paying rich political dividends for the Obama-Clinton presidency: whether this was the plan or not, precious resources that Venezuelan and other regional leaders could have poured into improving the lot of the poor are being devoted to the acquisition of advanced weapons systems. It seems likely that, sooner or later, arms traders will succeed in tempting one or more regional leaders with multi-million dollar bribes of the kind that have made Britain’s BAE notorious. If or when this happens, then the right-wing opposition of Chávez and other progressive leaders in the continent will have their work cut out for them.

Asked in a recent BBC World Service interview what he thought of President Obama, Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa politely suggested that Obama was a very nice man, but that he was not in control of the U.S. military ‘machine’ or of the CIA. EcoLogics suggests that Obama is as much in control of these as any other U.S. president has been (which is not to say that he is completely in control); when it comes to the United States, it has always been the case that perorations of democracy on the home front have tended to be flatly contradicted by policies vis-à-vis countries that the U.S. considers to be a part of its ‘sphere of interest’.

Obama confirmed this practice when he effectively reversed his policy vis-à-vis Colombia’s appalling human rights record. In a speech given to the AFL-CIO in Philadelphia on April 2nd, 2008, Obama said that he would ‘oppose the Colombia Free Trade Agreement if President Bush insists on sending it to Congress because the violence against unions in Colombia would make a mockery of the very labor protections that we have insisted be included in these kinds of agreements’. Despite evidence provided by Human Rights Watch that Uribe’s government continues to tolerate, if not itself engage in murderous actions against left-wing activists, Obama now appears to have changed his mind about Colombia: in his remarks after a meeting earlier this year with Uribe, Obama was quoted as saying that

We discussed, most prominently, the interests of both countries in moving forward on a free trade agreement. This is something that has been discussed for quite some time. I have instructed Ambassador Kirk, our United States Trade Representative, to begin working closely with President Uribe’s team on how we can proceed on a free trade agreement. There are obvious difficulties involved in the process and there remains work to do, but I’m confident that ultimately we can strike a deal that is good for the people of Colombia and good for the people of the United States. […] I commended President Uribe on the progress that has been made in human rights in Colombia and dealing with the killings of labor leaders there, and obviously we’ve seen a downward trajectory in the deaths of labor unions and we’ve seen improvements when it comes to prosecution of those who are carrying out these blatant human rights offenses.

Obama’s comments came hard on the heels of the news of the new ‘complementary’ agreement. We can only deduce that Obama’s increasingly complimentary disposition towards Uribe is a function of a quid-pro-quo involving the U.S. bases in Colombia.

Updates (most recent first)

24 November 2009: Anyone who has watched Uribe’s rise to power will know that he will stop at nothing–he even changed the constitution during his presidency to allow himself to get re-elected not once, but twice. The fruits of this change, which has involved political corruption of the crudest kind, are finally becoming evident to Colombians themselves. Uribe is now trying to put an end to Colombia’s centuries-old system of checks and balances by brow-beating the one institution that has refused to shut up: the Supreme Court. After the court failed to rubber stamp Uribe’s choice for a prosecutor general, Uribe has engaged in a war of words with the leading supreme court judge, accusing him of lying. The equivalent in the United States would be for Obama to accuse the chief justice of lying, an act with the greatest political and constitutional consequences. What next? Will Uribe accuse supreme court president Augusto Ibañez of being a ‘terrorist’ and sick the paramilitaries on him?

This post is concerned with a neat ideological inversion: isn’t it fantastic that bona fide protestors now only face the possibility of permanent damage to their hearing, or perhaps a fatal aneurysm?

If this comment makes no sense, you may want to read about the news that U.S. police used sonic cannons, also known euphemistically as ‘Long Range Acoustic Devices’, to disperse a relatively small group of protesters during the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh.

Four thoughts:

First, we see yet again how a technology ostensibly developed for U.S. military purposes is used against that country’s own civilians.

Second, how appropriate that the Obama administration, which must have sanctioned the use of this politically sensitive technology, chose to literally drown out the protests with noise—sheer, deafening noise. EcoLogics is reminded of Obama’s repeated claims that he is all about ‘listening‘. Nothing like listening with sonic cannons.

Third, U.S. police use of the cannons implies that there is little difference between someone protesting in Pittsburgh, Iraqi insurgents, and someone hijacking a ship near Somalia—the sonic cannons have reportedly been used by the U.S. military in Iraq, and by cruise ships against the Somali ‘pirates’ as well.  Note, though, that this technology-based ‘equalization’ has a rather interesting discursive implication: if protesters can be treated like insurgents or pirates, then insurgents and pirates can be treated like protesters. A government that terrorises dissent does so at its own peril.

The fourth and final thought concerns the representation of what EcoLogics describes as technologies of non-death. Weapons such as the sonic cannon, produced by the blandly named American Technology Corporation, and the more and more widely used TASER, are being represented as being somehow ‘responsible’ weapons—in fact, not weapons at all. The TASER Corporation has developed a discourse that neatly dissimulates the offensive nature of its guns, even as it reveals the economic motivation behind the development of the weapons: the ‘About TASER’ section of its website claims that ‘We are committed to protecting life by providing innovative, high quality products and services that exceed customer expectations every time’. ‘TASER technology protects life’.

As if to prove its earnestness, the company suggests that ‘most employees and all of our senior management have taken voluntary exposures with our various TASER ECD devices. This includes Rick Smith, CEO; his brother Tom Smith, Chairman; Kathy Hanrahan, President; and Dan Behrendt, CFO; as well as all vice presidents of TASER Interational’ (quoted verbatim).

EcoLogics wonders if it wouldn’t be more realistic to perform involuntary exposures of senior management?

Lest there be any claim of facetiousness, ideology is defined in much the way that Cambridge sociologist John B. Thompson proposes: as meaning that serves to develop and sustain relations of domination between, and of course also within, social groups. Here’s a rather easy prediction: as the accountability of governments in Western democracies is eroded more and more by the agents of neo-liberalism, we will see increased deployment of sonic cannons and other weapons of mass silencing.

Some news in the New York Times:

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration will continue the Bush administration’s practice of sending terror suspects to third countries for detention and interrogation, but will monitor their treatment to ensure they are not tortured, administration officials said on Monday.[...] The administration officials, who announced the changes on condition that they not be identified, said that unlike the Bush administration, they would give the State Department a larger role in assuring that transferred detainees would not be abused. [...] “The emphasis will be on insuring that individuals will not face torture if they are sent over overseas,” said one administration official, adding that no detainees will be sent to countries that are known to conduct abusive interrogations.

There is really not much to say beyond what this blogger wrote in a post published on February 6, and which was titled The Day that Obama’s Hope Died. Hillary Clinton, the head of the State Department, supported the Iraq War, and recently refused to describe the coup d’etat in Honduras as that: a coup. Why should we be reassured that people abducted by the CIA (or perhaps by a private contractor like Blackwater, now renamed as a ridiculous ‘Xe Services’) will escape torture, or as the NY Times has so often called it, ‘torment’?

No, this policy exists because it provides the U.S. government with a way of circumventing its own country’s legislation—legislation that was designed to prevent the illegal abduction and torture of people by the U.S. military, and secret services after the Vietnam and Nixon era excesses—excesses that now seem almost timid by comparison to what is happening today. The Obama policy makes a mockery of the notion of due process, and of the recent U.S. protestations over Scotland’s release of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. Then again, perhaps it is the other way: if a country feels it can kidnap and torture at will, then of course the head of its FBI would have opposed the application of due process in the Lockerbie case.

The confirmation that renditions will continue means that the slightly ridiculous Reagan era appellation ‘evil empire’ now actually applies to the U.S.. This regardless of the party in power, and the individual who sits in the Oval Office. Doubtless many good people in the U.S. are despairing in much the same way that many of us beyond the U.S. are; the fact nevertheless remains that the Obama administration has effectively sanctioned, and now almost certainly made permanent, the Bush-era authoritarianism. No wonder Obama does not want the U.S. equivalent of a Truth Commission.

How paradoxical—and how tragic—that Obama now inhabits almost exactly the same political place that Bush did: despite his far greater intelligence and worldliness, he too, is but a pawn of the forces that are desperately trying to maintain U.S. ascendancy by recourse to kidnapping and torture.

When this blog published a brief post, ‘In praise of Obama’, several fellow wordpress.com users sent comments almost before I’d dotted the last i and crossed last t. The comments were all quite polite, but conveyed more or less the same message: EcoLogics had got its facts wrong, there was nothing racist about the Cambridge policeman’s actions in Professor Henry Louis Gates’ home.

Yesterday another event made headlines which poses much the same issues raised by the Gates affair. EcoLogics will be posting a detailed analysis of this matter soon, but in the meantime, here is a very brief summary of what happened.

1. On August 10, Niall Ferguson published an op-ed piece in the Financial Times that began as follows: ‘President Barack Obama reminds me of Felix the Cat. One of the best-loved cartoon characters of the 1920s, Felix was not only black. He was also very, very lucky. And that pretty much sums up the 44th president of the US as he takes a well-earned summer break after just over six months in the world’s biggest and toughest job.’

2. It seems that a number of people wrote to the FT.com website denouncing the comparison, and one or two supported it. But the matter became an ‘affair célèbre’ when at least two well-known columnists took up the issue: Paul Krugman, in his nytimes.com blog, and James Fallows, in his Atlantic column. If readers follow the links, they will be able to see each writer’s argument for themselves.

3. Ferguson was evidently enraged by the criticism, and wrote to Krugman and Fallows enjoining them to publish what he represented as a refutation by none other than Henry Louis Gates himself:

‘As you both took exception to my comparison of the President with Felix the Cat, my favorite cartoon character, implying it was racist and recommending I consult Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., I have now done so [note: in fact, only Fallows suggested that Ferguson should ‘have a beer’ with Gates]. He has taken the trouble to consult others in the field of African-American Studies, including our colleague Lawrence D. Bobo, the W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences, and has written to me as follows:

“None of us thought of Felix as black, unlike some of the racially-questionable caricatures Disney used. Felix’s blackness, like Mickey’s and Minnie’s, was like a suit of clothes, not a skin color. … You are safe on this one.”’

You can read Krugman’s rejoinder here, and Fallows’ here. To see Ferguson’s defence, you may wish to read his account in the Huffington Post.

EcoLogics is interested in various aspects of this debate.

The first point, which was raised by Krugman in his first post, is how the Financial Times allowed the piece to be published in the first place. Despite the best efforts of some right wing professors and commentators, we still live in a society that has social codes that are meant to suppress sexist, racist, and other ideological forms of expression. In the wake of Ferguson’s piece, it would appear that the editors of the Financial Times have effectively thrown down the gauntlet. If the FT has allowed this one to pass, then in principle nothing should prevent columnists from beginning articles with comments such as the one offered as a counter-example by Fallows: ‘”Jackie Chan reminds me of Pluto. One of the best-loved characters from the Disney studio, Pluto was not only yellow. He was also very, very likable.”‘

Perhaps the reason why Fallows offered this example is because most people don’t have a vocabulary with which to explain why or how Ferguson’s article might be, indeed should be regarded as being racist—or as this blogger would put it, as being a text that may well provoke racism. And indeed the second point to be made is that, in the absence of a critical vocabulary, those who denounce racism may be quite easily browbeaten into silence (which is what Ferguson unwisely and ineffectually attempted to do to Krugman and to Fallows) or provoked into statements which leave them looking like the proverbial bull in a china shop (Krugman avoided this too when he neatly returned the ball to Ferguson by noting that it had never occurred to him that Felix the Cat was Afro-American).

The third point is to express surprise that Gates is reportedly backing Ferguson up. We probably haven’t heard the end of this story. On the one hand, Fallows’ account of the differendum notes that Ferguson initially back-tracked on his claim that Gates had ‘rubbished’ any suggestion that the article was racist—an accusation that was not actually made by either Krugman or Fallows. On the other hand, this blogger would be very interested to read what if anything has been left out of the Gates’ quote: note the ‘…’ between ‘not a skin color’ and ‘You are safe on this one.’

Gates’ supposed ‘all clear’ is nonetheless surprising because there can be little doubt that the comparison was indeed racist, in the sense that it focused attention on Obama’s ‘race’. However, it did so in a manner that, in the present ideological climate, can apparently be plausibly denied. In the same way that the policeman tried to argue that Gates’ arrest was grounded in Gates’ own behaviour, Ferguson could, and did suggest that all he was saying is that both Felix the Cat and Obama are black: ‘As for the word “black”, it’s the same one used by the Congressional Black Caucus and the Harvard Black Alumni Society, among others.’

This raises the question: how does one describe and evaluate statements such as Ferguson’s, in a way that refutes what might be described, in honour of eponymous professor, as the ‘Ferguson Defence’? Stay tuned for an analysis

We don’t know—though as noted by critical commentators throughout Latin America, the initial silence of the Obama administration spoke louder than words, and now Hillary Clinton isn’t exactly busting a gut to pressure Micheletti and his cronies to reinstate Zelaya.

Here is an article by Nikolas Kozloff in Counterpunch that sheds light on one possible motivation for direct U.S. involvement in the Honduran coup (beyond the more traditional corporate motivations)

Zelaya, Negroponte and the Controversy at Soto Cano: The Coup and the U.S. Airbase in Honduras

This blog recently praised Obama for his initial intervention in the wrongful arrest of Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates. Alas, in the end Obama felt compelled to engage in what amounted to a tactical retreat over the affair: the denunciation of the offending policeman was transformed into an opportunity to ‘drink a beer’ with him.

Earlier, this blog published a series of articles that chronicled another Obama retreat: in the days that followed the coup d’etat in Honduras, the Obama administration refused to recognise the event for what it was—a vintage coup on the part of Honduran oligarchy, led by a former member of congress turned dictator, Roberto Micheletti. As the leaders of Latin American countries took turns condemning the coup, a hitherto silent Obama was embarrassed into admitting that Zelaya was the rightful president, and that Zelaya should return to the presidency. Even after Obama accepted this, Hillary Clinton refused to call the coup a coup.

As noted in the post about the intervention of Cardinal Óscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga, Zelaya’s return was blocked by Micheletti, his accomplices in the military, and the Honduran Roman Catholic Church. The last few weeks have seen a textbook example of hegemonic diplomacy: the U.S. agreed to let Óscar Arias, the president of Costa Rica, act as a mediator, and stood by as Micheletti refused to compromise on the power that he usurped on June 28. Each attempt by Arias to find a way forward has watered down the requirements for the Micheletti camp, even as it has reneged on the original objective of the full restoration of President Zelaya’s democratic powers. As noted by a number of critical commentators, the end result has been that Micheletti and Co. have had time to consolidate their grip on power, even as Zelaya has been left to fly around the continent, ineffectually trying to persuade the U.S. and other countries to force Micheletti out of power.

The subject of today’s post is the startling ideological inversion that Barak Obama has deployed to deflect criticism over the U.S.’s role in the coup—a role which at the very least has involved ‘looking the other way’, but which may well have involved direct U.S. government backing for the conspirators. The coup was at least a year in the making, and so may well have been planned with the assistance of the Bush administration.

According to news reports reaching EcoLogics, Obama is now saying that

‘”The same critics who say the US has not intervened in Honduras are the same people who say we are always intervening and Yankees need to get out of Latin America,” he said, accusing such opponents of “hypocrisy.”’‘”You can’t have it both ways”’.

EcoLogics wonders if Obama called the good Cardinal Rodríguez to ask him for advice on how to turn political reality on its head. Latin American history is littered with U.S. attempts to impose leaders that have been politically and economically convenient. It is, for example, now factually documented that this is what happened in Chile in 1973.

This being the case, there is no contradiction in suggesting that, as Obama puts it, the ‘Yankees’ should ‘get out of Latin America’ (if and when they meddle with the countries’ internal affairs); and suggesting that, if the U.S. really wanted to, it could either bring down the Micheletti dictatorship, or at the very least, make things so hot for the golpistas that they would have no choice but to negotiate with Zelaya.

The point is not to say that the U.S. should intervene, but rather, that it is disingenuous for the Obama administration to pretend that its hands are tied. This is the point that Obama has neatly dissimulated by accusing his critics of hypocrisy.

By way of a postscript: Obama should be careful about how he bandies about the H word: have a look at what Frank Rich has to say about Obama’s policy on healthcare; like a growing number of Democrats, Rich rightly warns Obama that unless he stops ‘punking’ his followers, he has less than four years left in the presidency.

This blog has been very critical of the Obama administration. The signs are that the administration, if not the man himself, is a Clinton Mk II. As such, it will eventually pave the way for another Bush-like figure; to be sure, it’s already engaging in some rather Bush-like actions itself.

Political realists will no doubt argue that Obama faces a formidable opposition, and that he has to make concessions. This blogger believes that it’s actually a rerun of what happened when New Labour came to power in the UK: the new government was so scared of the Tories (or of their press) that it tried to be more Tory than the Tories. In the end, they succeeded. (Actually, New Labour were Tories from the start, but that’s another story.)

That said, there is at least one thing that Obama has done which does show political courage: he’s come out and condemned the actions of the police that wrongly arrested Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates. Obama could have kept quiet, but he didn’t—three cheers for his willingness to denounce this episode, and not just ‘racism in general’. For anyone who thinks that the election of Obama signals the end of institutional racism, the events in Cambridge, MA are a grim reminder that it remains a reality in the U.S., as in the U.K.

A number of commentators have noted over the past months that Obama’s political practice now flatly contradicts the hopeful rhetoric of his campaign speeches. It seems that the Bush-Cheney skulduggery has been replaced by a rather more astute modus operandi, one that involves a continued use of lofty Obama oratory even as Obama allows his lieutenants to engage in policies that are more and more difficult to distinguish from those of the Bush administration.

So it is, for example, that the Wall Street finance barons are once again getting their way thanks to the intervention of Timothy F. Geithner; that Steven Chu has performed extraordinary u-turns vis-à-vis coal-fired power stations and hydrogen cars; and that there is still no guarantee that the Guantánamo prison will actually be closed down. While political realists will claim that there have been pragmatic reasons for each of the mentioned volte faces, the fact is that the Obama administration has shown a remarkable willingness to accommodate many of the very policies that it denounced during the election.

As if the mentioned policy u-turns were not enough, this week the Obama administration has shown that is it even willing to return to the bad old days of ‘banana republic’ diplomacy in Latin America.  In June, the Honduran oligarchy decided that the democratically elected, and increasingly left-wing President Manuel Zelaya had gone too far in the direction of addressing the country’s age old inequalities. In the manner of a García-Márquez novel, they whisked him out of the country whilst he was still in pyjamas, and instituted one of their own as interim president.

As noted by Mark Weisbrot in The Guardian, it is extraordinary that Obama administration’s first statement did no more than call for ‘all political and social actors in Honduras to respect democratic norms, the rule of law and the tenets of the Inter-American Democratic Charter’. When the strength of the response of other nations became clear, Hillary Clinton issued a somewhat stronger statement that stopped short of calling the coup a coup, and didn’t say anything about Zelaya returning to the presidency. It was only on Monday afternoon that Obama finally said ‘We believe that the coup was not legal and that President Zelaya remains the president of Honduras.’ Even so, during a press conference later that day, Clinton herself still refused to confirm that ‘restoring the constitutional order’ in Honduras meant returning Zelaya.

What critical observers on this side of the Atlantic failed to comment on was that Obama made his statement in the course of a press conference with Alvaro Uribe, Colombia’s arch neo-liberal, and far-right wing president. Anyone who wants to find out what Uribe has been up to over the last decade or so should read the letter that Human Rights Watch sent to President Obama on the eve of his meeting with Uribe. In one particularly telling paragraph, the HRW letter says that

In recent years Uribe has said trade unionists are “a bunch of criminals dressed up as trade unionists.”  He has railed against his country’s own Supreme Court, which has spearheaded ground-breaking investigations of paramilitary infiltration in the Colombian government (the “parapolitics” investigations), accusing its members of representing “terrorism.”  He has claimed that opposition politicians are “terrorists in business suits.”  And he has accused assistant Supreme Court justice Ivan Velásquez, who is in charge of coordinating the “parapolitics” investigations, of trying to frame him for murder by offering illegal or inappropriate benefits to an imprisoned paramilitary to testify against Uribe (an investigation by the Attorney General’s office later found that, in fact, Velásquez was the one who the paramilitary and others were framing).  After Velásquez was cleared, last year, Semana magazine revealed that senior Uribe advisors held a meeting in the Presidential Palace with another paramilitary leader to discuss supposed evidence against Velásquez (which also turned out to be false).

In this context, all credit goes to the pre-election Obama for criticizing Colombia’s appalling human rights record. In a speech given to the AFL-CIO in Philadelphia on April 2nd, 2008, Obama said that he would ‘oppose the Colombia Free Trade Agreement if President Bush insists on sending it to Congress because the violence against unions in Colombia would make a mockery of the very labor protections that we have insisted be included in these kinds of agreements’.

Alas, now it appears that this stance is also set for an Obama u-turn thanks to a remarkable new development in the region. This year, the U.S.’s agreement with Ecuador to use the military base in Manta expires. The base is located on the Pacific coast just south of Colombia, and is nominally used by U.S. AWACS E-3 and P3 Orions for the purpose of cocaine trade interdiction. Critics of the growing American military presence in the region suspect that the base has also been used to spy on governments in the area and to help Colombia with its anti-guerilla operations.

The Manta base acquired a new notoriety after March 1, 2008, when Alvaro Uribe launched, some say at the very least with U.S. logistical support, an attack on a FARC guerrilla camp across the border in Ecuador. Some commentators at the time went further and suggested that some or all of the planes were actually flown by U.S. pilots who took off from the Manta base. Whatever the case, Uribe’s attack was such a flagrant violation of international law that it drew condemnation from everyone except the Bush government. Correa called back his ambassador in Bogotá and relations between the two countries reached their lowest point in living memory. The conflict rumbles on; an Ecuadorian judge has just issued an international arrest warrant for the former Colombian Defence Minister, Juan Manuel Santos, one of Uribe’s key lieutenants and political allies, and a member of one of Colombia’s most powerful families.

Unsurprisingly, the Correa government vowed ‘never again to repeat a policy of entreguismo [literally ‘giving-up-ism’], of giving up part of the national territory’. There will be no renewal of the Manta agreement with the U.S., and the U.S. has accepted that its last flight from the base in Manta will be in July. Where, then, will the U.S. spy planes and ships be relocated? No prizes for guessing the answer. The Colombian magazine Cambio has reported that a deal has been hammered out that will allow the U.S. to establish bases in no less than five Colombian sites: most probably the Palanquero airbase near Bogotá, but also the Alberto Pouwels airbase on the Caribbean coast; the Apiay base in the country’s eastern plains near the Venezuelan border; and two naval ports in Bahía Málaga and in Cartagena, on the Pacific and Caribbean coasts respectively. So instead of having one relatively isolated base in Ecuador, the U.S. will now perhaps have five quite sizable bases scattered strategically across all of Colombia. Not bad for a president who got himself elected by promising to bring to an end the Bush-Cheney administration’s war-mongering.

We do not know yet what quid pro quo Uribe has extracted for this deal, which is unlikely to be supported by a majority of Colombians.  There is, however, already evidence that a deal is in the offing: in his remarks after the meeting with Uribe, Obama was quoted as saying

We discussed, most prominently, the interests of both countries in moving forward on a free trade agreement. This is something that has been discussed for quite some time. I have instructed Ambassador Kirk, our United States Trade Representative, to begin working closely with President Uribe’s team on how we can proceed on a free trade agreement. There are obvious difficulties involved in the process and there remains work to do, but I’m confident that ultimately we can strike a deal that is good for the people of Colombia and good for the people of the United States. […] I commended President Uribe on the progress that has been made in human rights in Colombia and dealing with the killings of labor leaders there, and obviously we’ve seen a downward trajectory in the deaths of labor unions and we’ve seen improvements when it comes to prosecution of those who are carrying out these blatant human rights offenses.

The sudden improvement suggested by Obama flies in the face of the letter sent to him by Human Rights Watch. But then again, similar contradictions are now routinely appearing in Obama’s public statements, which conjure one reality even as Obama aides act on another.

Obama may also maintain or even increase the vast amounts of aid that the U.S. already gives to Colombia’s military. All of this officially, of course, in the name of interrupting the flow of drugs from Latin America to the U.S. In fact, the key U.S. priority has been, and under Obama seems likely to continue to be to wage something akin to a post-cold war by proxy. And not just by proxy: the new bases will make it even easier for Obama to wield a new big stick against the U.S.’s most vocal critics in the region: Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, and Ecuador’s Rafael Correa. The location of the bases will mean that U.S. combat aircraft could be minutes away from key civilian and military targets in each of the mentioned countries. Even if the U.S. never sends its bombers, there can be little doubt that the U.S. military will be quite happy to lend a logistical hand in the way that they appear to have done during the attack on the guerrilla base in Ecuador.

The military and political advisers behind any deal with Colombia probably hope that the American military presence in Colombia will counteract the resurgence of left-wing politics in the region. In fact, it is more likely that the policy will revive lingering anti-U.S. sentiment by showing that U.S. policy in the region remains unchanged, despite all the Obama promises. It will also trigger a new regional arms race as the threatened countries scramble to update their air defence systems. Hugo Chávez has already spent vast sums updating Venezuela’s U.S.-made military hardware, and the new bases will be a boon to the Russian and European arms makers that have replaced Boeing and other U.S. merchants of death.

Years after the U.S. finally removed the notorious ‘School of the Americas’ from the Panama Canal, it does not seem unlikely that the bases may yet even serve as training sites for the coups that may be organised by the U.S., or which the U.S. will ‘actively condone’ by way of statements of the kind issued by Hillary Clinton vis-á-vis the coup in Honduras. When it comes to Latin America, the Monroe Doctrine and its Roosevelt Corollary appear to have the full backing of even the most democratic of U.S. presidents.

Given these developments, Obama’s famous slogan  of ‘Yes we can…’ now seems like both a distant, and an extraordinarily ironic memory.

Note: this post originally appeared in another blog. EcoLogics is happy to re-post it here.

Several weeks ago a fellow environmental educator who works in the U.S. sent around an email that celebrated the changes being introduced by the Obama administration. The scientist suggested that things were already looking up, what with real scientists being appointed to high places. As he put it at the beginning of his email, ‘Imagine! National scientific organizations headed by scientists again!!’

The educator was certainly not alone in looking forward to a more hopeful time. Something like a collective sigh of relief could be heard amongst most environmental educators across the globe on the day that Obama beat McCain. Obama’s victory was widely interpreted as the end of the road for what may well go down as the most ideologically-driven presidency since Nixon. Under Bush, big business was given concession after concession at the expense of a variety of local environmental concerns, but also at the expense of the increasingly urgent matter of climate change policy.

The cartoonesque image of an ostrich with a Bush-like head buried in the sand would have been appropriate were it not for the fact that there is ample evidence that the Bush administration engaged in all manner of back-room strategies to undermine the work of scientists with bona fide research—research about climate change, and also about a host of other subjects that Bush and his increasingly hard right-wing advisers regarded as being ‘politically sensitive’. Little wonder that just two years after Bush had taken office, Donald Kennedy was speaking in the Science magazine of ‘an epidemic of politics’ in a variety of science institutions (1).

Over the past few weeks, some have tried to find the silver lining in the Bush administration’s toxic cloud. For example, just this week an article in the International Herald Tribune tried to argue that ‘even those who view [Bush’s] environmental record most harshly acknowledge that he also took significant action. He improved air quality, gave renewable energy a large financial boost, left behind the largest marine sanctuaries ever established and started a dialogue that could help lead to the next international treaty on climate change’(2). This is a sweeping generalisation that is almost certainly false for that very reason. But more to the point, it is a bit like arguing that Bush deserves credit for ‘pacifying’ Iraq; not only is that not true, but it misses the fundamental issues regarding the illegality of the war, the subterfuge that was employed to launch it, and its disastrous consequences for the country’s people, if not for the entire region.

There is, then, good reason to look forward to a significant shift in the new administration’s policies, and certainly there is some evidence that such a shift is already under way: witness, for example, the naming of competent officials such as Jane Lubchenco to head NOAA and Steven Chu as head for the Department of Energy. Witness also the repealing of a raft of Bush administration measures in areas such as drilling in Utah and in the operation of coal-fired plants. At least by mid-February 2009, it also seemed true that Obama was making ‘all the right noises’ in regard to the urgency of taking swift action on specific climate change policy.

After recognising these positive aspects, it is pertinent to make the case for an even greater vigilance, and more environmental activism during the Obama presidency. There are three general reasons for this. The most obvious is the extreme urgency of swift change regarding climate change policies. Dr James Hansen put the time frame starkly into perspective when he said in an interview for the UK’s Observer that ‘We cannot now afford to put off change any longer. We have to get on a new path within this new administration. We have only four years left for Obama to set an example to the rest of the world. America must take the lead’(3). Early today, Prof James McCarthy echoed this idea in the BBC News website (4).

There are, however, two additional, and somewhat less obvious reasons for both goading the Obama administration into action, and scrutinizing its policies more carefully than ever. The first of these has to do with the ideological consequences of what might be described as the ‘post-Bush effect’. Put simply, Bush’s administation was so driven by a right-wing ideology that it may seem that Obama has only to ‘be Obama’ to do a far better job. Such complacency is not only disingenuous, but dangerous. As the time-scale proposed by Hansen and McCarthy makes clear, nothing short of a revolutionary set of policies will address the environmental crisis; in such a context, just ‘being Obama’ is unlikely to be enough.

This leads us to another reason for being critical vis-à-vis the Obama administration’s policies. If it is true that Obama has made the right noises with respect to the environment, a careful reading of many of his policies in other areas, and the team of advisers that he has assembled suggests a president that will be willing to go a long ways in appeasing the Republicans, or rather, the alliance of lobbies that represent the interests of neoliberal institutions. Beyond the extraordinary nomination of Robert Gates as Defence Secretary, it is highly significant, for example, that Obama named Timothy F. Geithner as his Treasury Secretary. Geithner was the former president and chief executive of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and is reported to have played a leading role in trying to manage the financial crisis. It seems clear, on the one hand, that Geithner was not very effective in that role. But even if he was, it is revealing that, according to the New York Times, Geithner ‘largely prevailed in opposing tougher conditions on financial institutions that were sought by presidential aides, including David Axelrod, a senior adviser to the president’(5). It would appear, in this sense, that in the U.S. as in Britain, politicians are still promoting some of the very people who were most closely associated, by action or inaction, with the neoliberal excesses in the finance sector. This seems not only disingenuous, but manifestly wrong from the point of view of potential conflicts of interest. Some might even argue that it is a recipe for the kind of corruption imputed to the Bush administration, and in Britain, to New Labour.

By way of an aside, it is remarkable to note how consistently most of the media are trying to either downplay, or reconcile the presence of such ancien régime figures with Obama’s signature call for change. To quote just two examples in the New York Times, the paper argued in its background information pages that the new Commerce Secretary, Judd Gregg, was ‘chairman of the budget committee from 2005 to 2007 and is known as a fiscal conservative. He could help President Obama by capitalizing on his relationships with fellow Republicans as well as his contacts in the business community(6). Where Ken Salazar, the new Interior Secretary is concerned, the Times suggested that ‘A few environmental groups may fault him for his pragmatism, and some within the oil and gas industry may disagree with his cautious stance, like favoring a phased approach to opening Colorado’s Roan Plateau to drilling’(7). Again and again, the presence of such figures is represented as a kind of show of strength on the part of Obama, a kind of ‘broad tent’ approach that is able to include, rather than exclude, the opposition. Perhaps it is true that, at least to start with, Obama can simply not afford to ignore the ‘coalition of the right’ in the US and beyond. But the suspicion has to be that the presence of people like Gates, Geithner and of course Gregg may yet be proven to be a sign of Obama’s own conservatism—a conservatism acutely analysed by Gabriel Paquette in the Guardian [8]. More generally, it may also be a sign of the continued hegemony, in the Gramscian sense of this term, of the neoliberal lobby groups that have apparently already ensconced themselves in the new administration.

Far from having consequences for commerce or the economy alone, this ‘broad tent’ approach may mean that Obama will be as prone as the Clinton administration to engaging in the kind of political compromise that arguably led the U.S. to drift further and further to the right, and further and further into the ‘grey’ during the pre-Bush years. The paradox is that, however much Bush was (and remains) a hate figure amongst most if not all environmental activists, there was a terrible clarity about most of his policies, a clarity that more often than not made it possible for environmental activists to smell an environmental rat a mile away (apologies to Muroidea lovers). This did not always make it possible to stop the policies, but it did mean that environmentalists did not often have to spend a lot of political energy trying to unmask dynamics of ideological dissimulation. With Obama, the situation may be reversed; it may be more feasible to stop some policies, or at least to mediate them, but their implications are likely to be far less obvious, and so potentially just as damaging if and when the neoliberals get their way. For this reason, environmental activists and environmental educators will need to fine-tune their critical faculties, and prepare for what is likely to be a four–, or perhaps an eight–year struggle with Obama advisers who are apparently already proving effective at whispering sweet neoliberal nothings into Obama’s ear.

By way of a postscript: If this seems unduly pessimistic to liberal readers on either side of the pond, they might care to reflect on the misguided reception many Britons gave to New Labour, and to Tony Blair during his first years as prime minister.

Update, February 12, 2009, 22:25 GMT: news just in, Judd Gregg has declined the honour of being Obama’s Commerce Secretary. Is the ‘broad tent’ collapsing? Hardly–there are plenty of neoliberals amongst the Democrats. Is this a sign that perhaps Obama is less conservative than this blog has made him out to be? Let us wait and see who is next on Obama’s list of prospective Commerce Secretaries.

References

1) See Science, 31 January 2003, Vol. 299, No. 5607, p. 625. Article available at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/299/5607/625, accessed August 24, 2007.

2) International Herald Tribune, February 7, 2009, ‘Obama sorting Bush’s environment legacy’, at http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/02/07/america/enviro.4-424718.php, accessed February 11, 2009.

3) The Observer, January 18, 2009,‘We have only four years left to act on climate change – America has to lead’, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jan/18/obama-climate-change, accessed February 11, 2009.

4) BBC News online, February 12, 2009, ‘Obama “must act now” on climate’, at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7885036.stm, accessed February 12, 2009.

5) The New York Times, February 9, 2009, ‘Geithner Said to Have Prevailed on the Bailout’, at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/business/economy/10bailout.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=Timothy%20Geithner&st=cse, accessed Febuary 10, 2009.

6) The New York Times, ‘Jud Gregg’, at http://projects.nytimes.com/44th_president/new_team/show/judd-gregg, accessed Febuary 10, 2009.

7) The New York Times, ‘Ken Salazar’, at http://projects.nytimes.com/44th_president/new_team/show/ken-salazar, accessed Febuary 10, 2009.

8] The Guardian, January 26, 2009 ‘Obama the Conservative’, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/jan/26/obama-conservative-progressive-agenda, accessed January 26, 2009.

Tell me who your friends are and I will know who you are.

February 4th was the day when the last nails went into the coffin of the hope that Obama represented to peace-loving, and democractic people.

The coffin was several months in the making. When we thought that he stood for a new world order regarding the Middle East, Obama made a hard-right speech last summer to the Israeli Lobby in which he promised AIPAC an undivided Jerusalem. To anyone familiar with the history of Zionism, that is synonymous with saying that Arab groups will not be allowed to claim as their own—and it is their own—the East Jerusalem occupied by the Israelis since the Six–Day War.

No wonder the delegates of AIPAC were surprised and pleased; at the time, not even Israel itself was daring to make that claim in public. To suggest, as the Obama camp did afterwards, that Obama was misquoted or misinterpreted was disingenuous; indeed, it was almost as disingenuous as pretending, at the height of the Israeli war crimes in Gaza, that Obama could not offer an opinion on the Israeli assassination of hundreds of civilians or the targeting of the UN HQ in Gaza with white phosphorous shells because George W. Bush was still the president.

When we thought that Obama would take a big broom to the corrupt Washington, and would use it to sweep away the most important symbols of the Bush administration’s war (itself not only an illegal, but a corrupt war), Obama slapped us in the face. He left Gates as Secretary of Defence, and named Hillary Clinton as the Secretary of State. However moderate by Bush standards, Robert Gates played a central role in managing the illegal occupation of Iraq, and that makes him a war criminal. Hillary Clinton supported the war, and so was part of the political order that enabled George W. Bush to get away, quite literally, with murder.

Let there be no misunderstanding: of course politics is a ruthless game, and after the election Obama no doubt felt that he needed to do something to include and appease the republicans who voted for him, and the people who voted for Clinton. That, however, does not really contradict the point being made here. Anyone who thinks that there is no link between the rise of the kind of politics represented by George W. Bush and the Clinton administration needs to think again; even after acknowledging that the religious right made a grotesque scene out of the Monica Lewinski affair, it is clear that the Clintons and their coterie were an integral part of the U.S. drift to an increasingly corrupt and right-wing politics—a drift that, as coupled to the post-9/11 ‘war on terror’, made it possible for Nixon’s neocons to roar back into power, and to begin to dismantle the U.S. system of checks and balances.

If you think this is harsh, and that there is no continuity between the Clinton years and the Bush years, consider how many Democrats have had to be excluded from Obama’s administration, or have had to give up their new posts days if not hours after accepting them. Or look at the rise of Rahm Emanuel, the man whom Obama chose as his chief–of–staff. Emanuel, a former Clinton apparatchik, is not only Zionist—we return to the Israel Lobby—but a hardcore neoliberal and Iraq War apologist, a man with a history of virulent, some might say violent loyalty to those in power (EcoLogics is mindful of the oft-quoted passage, cited in Emanuel’s Wikipedia entry, that in the 1996 election ‘Emanuel was so angry at the president’s enemies that he stood up at a celebratory dinner with colleagues from the campaign, grabbed a steak knife and began rattling off a list of betrayers, shouting ‘Dead! … Dead! … Dead!’ and plunging the knife into the table after every name’.)

Emanuel is just one, albeit a particularly aggressive, example of the kind of Clinton-era operatives that now permeate the Obama administration. This is as much a sign of the Clintons’ lingering power, as it is of Obama’s obvious lack of discomfort with this political caste. It signals not just a return to Democrat business as usual, but a complete contradiction of most of the things that Obama reportedly stood for.

The list of contradictions to Obama’s carefully nurtured image of a peace-loving democrat could go on and on, but EcoLogics will mention just two more events, both of which came to light on February 4th. The first was analysed in yesterday’s blog (Obama, Miliband, and Torture), and involves Obama’s deception vis-a-vis the U.S.’s policy on torture and extraordinary renditions. It now seems likely that where Bush went for out–and–out torture (torture practiced almost publicly, and publicly defended by Dick Cheney), Obama is going back to the older modus operandi of discrete torture, torture practiced subtly but denounced in public, as opposed to torture practiced routinely if not crowed in public. If any political realist is reading this and thinking, ‘get real, it was always thus’, then you’ve just made EcoLogics’ point: Obama does not stand for democratic change, he stands for a change back to what the U.S. stood for before Bush came to power.

The second and last event is the one that involves the crowning insult to anyone who is a political liberal, let alone anyone committed to the political left. The event was announced in an unfortunately titled article in the Guardian yesterday, ‘Barak Obama makes Tony Blair his unofficial “first friend”‘ . The article reported that Obama said that “I want to thank my good friend Tony Blair for coming today [to the annual National Prayer Breakfast], somebody who did it first and perhaps did it better than I will do. He has been an example for so many people around the world of what dedicated leadership can accomplish. And we are very grateful to him.”

‘Somebody who did it first’?! ‘Dedicated leadership’? ‘An example for so many people’?! Is Obama referring to the fact that Blair has condoned Israeli State Terrorism? Or is he referring to the fact that Blair was the man who, along with George W. Bush, deliberately deceived the world about Iraq’s so-called WMDs? Or perhaps he refers to Blair the man who brought to power the likes of Peter Mandelson and David Blunkett, both of whom were forced to quit in corrupt disgrace, but who then weaseled their way back into power? Or perhaps Obama refers to Blair the man whose virulent neoliberalism took the UK where Thatcher herself never dared to go, the man whose political partnership with Gordon Brown led to the current economic collapse—a collapse which, however linked to similar policies in the U.S., is also home–grown. The depression (in Brown’s own words, yesterday) is an economic calamity for which Blair must shoulder a significant portion of the blame: it was in Blair’s years as prime minister that the markets were allowed to run wild, and it is still Blairites that are pushing for even more privatisation, even more radically neoliberal reform. Oh, and let us not forget, while we’re at it, that Blair took up a post as an adviser in none other than J P Morgan.

Viewed from these perspectives, Blair did ‘do it first’, if by this one refers to the British prime minister who did away with some of the UK’s most fundamental civil liberties, and the man who looked the other way when Britain’s biggest–ever protest march took place to repudiate the Bush–Blairite conspiracy vis-a-vis Iraq, and the man who ushered in corporate clientelism on a scale that even the Tories never quite managed.

EcoLogics is emphatically atheist, but the expression ‘God help us all’ is the only one that seems capable of expressing the horror that begins to be felt by true democrats at the prospect of a U.S. president who is increasingly proving to be an ideological replicant of the very people he so persuasively trounced in the primary, and then in the national, elections. Perhaps we should adapt the saying quoted at the outset of this post: tell me who your advisers are and I will know what kind of a president you are.