On the way down: the erosion of America’s—and Britain’s middle class

Back in the days when I was a postgrad student a wise professor noted that he couldn’t understand why public services in the UK were being slashed. He offered a series of compelling statistics that showed how the first wave of Thatcherite politicians (we’re now experiencing the third wave) was lying through its teeth about the need for what the neocons today describe as ‘fiscal austerity’.

Many years later, Britain is once again in the jaws of a neoliberal crocodile that is about to do another death roll. The United States is in more or less the same position, despite the timid flailings of Barack Obama and his coterie of apparently Rambo-esque advisers. This time, many people wonder whether it will be the neoliberal croc’s last hurrah; a country can take only so many ideological drownings before the social air runs out. Alas, the Thatcherite crocs in both countries may soon find that they too, can be devoured by bottom-dwellers.

This post is simply to say that I’ve finally found an article that represents, in all clarity, what this process is really all about. Have a look at the international edition of Der Spiegel, which provides a razor sharp analysis of who stands to lose—and gain—from the neoliberal spell.

On The Way Down: The Erosion of America’s Middle Class

Obama’s ‘Mission Accomplished’ Moment

Few of George W. Bush’s efforts to orchestrate media representations of himself backfired more badly than his famous ‘mission accomplished’ photo-op, in which he got himself photographed in a flight suit on the deck of an aircraft carrier. All this to symbolize America’s victory over Saddam, and the supposed end of the war in Iraq.

Obama may not be so foolish as to get himself photographed in a flight suit, but the widely trailed speech he is to give tonight will be every bit as foolhardy as Bush’s ‘mission accomplished’ moment. If press reports are correct, Obama is going to try to say that he’s fulfilled his campaign promise of bringing America’s Iraq War to an end: ‘Shortly after taking office, I announced our new strategy for Iraq and for a transition to full Iraqi responsibility. And I made it clear that by August 31, 2010, America’s combat mission in Iraq would end. And that is exactly what we are doing — as promised, on schedule’.

Maybe Obama isn’t aware (or wants us to forget) that Iraq continues to be in the midst of a civil war, and that ‘just’ 50.000 U.S. troops will remain there for at least another year, to perform what the New York Times is describing as  ‘ “advise and assist” brigades’ which ‘will officially focus on supporting and training Iraqi security forces, protecting American personnel and facilities and mounting counterterrorism operations.’

Is it just me, or are we experiencing some kind of parallel universe here?

The Copenhagen Disaster: How easy to blame China

EcoLogics breaks a self-imposed hibernation to comment on the disastrous outcome of Copenhagen:

Let’s be very clear: the future that awaits us in the era of the Chinese empire that is fast replacing its American counterpart is grim—very grim. Even if one is critical of the systematic Sinophobia that characterises U.S. and European media representations of most matters Chinese, it seems very clear that the following decades will make the authoritarianism, and the culture of corruption associated with Anglo-American neoliberalism seem meek and mild by comparison to what is coming. Chinese rulers have been, and will in all probability continue to be absolutely ruthless. Many have also been shown to be corrupt.

That said, the current effort on the part of British and U.S. spinmeisters to blame China (‘and a few other countries in Latin America’) for the abject failure of the Copenhagen talks is as foolish as trying to say that New Labour’s Ed Miliband played a key role in ‘saving’ some kind of agreement. Both versions are not only disingenuous, but extraordinarily convenient to the cause of the selfsame neoliberal forces that Miliband represents, and which have worked so hard to scupper any truly meaningful agreement. If you want to get a sense of what really is the outcome of the deal, and how it was achieved, have a read of Joss Garman’s ‘Copenhagen: Historic Failure that will Live in Infamy‘.

EcoLogics’ one proviso is that Garman is wrong—or is playing politics—when his article singles out Ed Miliband for praise. The following excerpt from the Guardian pretty much sums up the attitude and true stance of New Labour, behind all of its quasi-green grandstanding:

Last night Miliband was being credited with helping to rescue the summit from disaster. He had been preparing to go to bed at 4am, after the main accord had been agreed, only to be called by officials and warned that several countries were threatening to veto its signature. Miliband returned to the conference centre in time to hear Sudanese delegate Lumumba Di-Aping comparing the proposed agreement to the Holocaust. He said the deal “asked Africa to sign a suicide pact, an incineration pact, in order to maintain the economic dominance of a few countries”. A furious Miliband intervened and dismissed Di-Aping’s claims as “disgusting”.

Just what is ‘disgusting’? The fact that Lumumba Di-Aping spoke the truth? Or that he spoke the truth ‘out of turn’, and in so doing broke the spell of lies that had already begun to be spun by Britain, the United States, and the small group of signatories of the Judas-like betrayal of Kyoto? We have here the true measure of the cynicism, and hypocrisy of New Labour.

U.S. Military Bases in Colombia: Uribe’s Constitutional Hopscotch

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; although Colombia’s own Cambio magazine reported it could be five, international media said at first it was three, then 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. Apparently the until recently secret agreement also includes a clause that allows the U.S. military free use of all of Colombia’s civilian airports.

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 what looks, to this blogger at least, like a legal fiction that is as complex as it is misleading. His lawyers 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 Defense 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 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 U.S. government 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. ally 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 thought that other leaders might be cowed into silence if they knew that the media spotlight was shining on them. The effect appears to have been exactly the opposite, which says something about the perceived strength of anti-American feeling across the continent.

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 transactions 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’s and Ecuador’s leaders 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 ought to 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 often been 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. Before the elections, and 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: Many of Uribe’s political opponents believe 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 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 be cowed: 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? As noted by Human Rights Watch, it would not be the first time that the ruthless politician accuses his political opponents of being ‘terrorists’.

Weapons of Mass Silencing

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.