[PEN-L:12881] IMF victory in Indonesia - at a price
Leftists (including those on this list) who backed Chomsky's call for financial intervention against Indonesia over East Timor, should note the picture painted by this Bloomberg analysis after the Indonesian elections. Agreed, by comparison with Kosovo, it was much to be preferred that the East Timor crisis was not resolved by massive bombing raids on Jakarta and without the intervention of US troops. But as Chomsky demanded we demanded, there was very effective intervention by the IMF. Less violent but undoubtedly imperialist in nature. Although there may now be some softening of its policies in Indonesia and in Timor, it is IMF finance capitalism that has prevailed over a narrower version of ultra-nationalist Indonesian capital that would have retained East Timor in Indonesia by violent force. Intervention took place. And very effectively. Progressives must follow through the logic of the campaign for global reforms, if the people of South East Asia are to benefit from any real shift in the balance of world forces. Chris Burford London from the anti-IMF list [EMAIL PROTECTED] Bloomberg: New Indon govt likely to stick to reform path -Analysts October 22, 1999 RI new govt likely to stick to reform path: Experts Indonesia's new government led by Muslim cleric Abdurrahman Wahid is likely to retain the currency's free float and rely on international help to reform the banking sector, analysts said. Much of the economic program is already in place as part of a US$49 billion bailout agreed with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) after the country's stocks and currency tumbled in 1997. The IMF, which recently froze aid after a scandal involving a local bank, is planning to send a mission to Jakarta next month to discuss the economic policies of the new government and may soon resume the aid, IMF officials said. "I don't expect any significant changes in economic polices," said Lin Che Wei, research director for SG Securities in Indonesia. "As long as (Wahid) is accommodative, IMF's stance is likely to ease: that is, they won't take a hard stance as with (former president B.J.) Habibie." Indonesia, the world's fourth most populous nation, suffered the worst fallout from Asia's financial crisis over the past two years. Its economy contracted almost 14% in 1998 and has been wracked by political and ethnic strife. The economy should contract another 1% this year before returning to a 3.3% expansion in 2000, a Bloomberg economic survey showed. The IMF has been quick to support the new government. "Indonesia has immense economic potential, which the IMF is determined to help the new government fully realize," said Michel Camdessus, IMF's managing director. Investors also showed support. The benchmark Jakarta stock index gained 5.5% while the rupiah rose as much as 8% a dollar. Challenges One challenge for the government may be winning backing from a newly democratic parliament without a dominant party. Many legislators, for instance, may bristle at foreign pressure, especially after international criticism of the country's botched handling of the East Timor independence vote. The United Nations sent peace keepers after pro-Jakarta militia, opposed to East Timor's separation, wrecked widespread death and destruction on the former Portuguese colony. The fractious parliament may mean "decision making may be much slower than before," said Mari Pangestu, a former director at Indonesia's Center for Strategic and International Studies. Wahid will have push through tough policies while seeking broad support, analysts said. "He will go for people with a commitment to market forces forces but not a blunt commitment," said Robert Elson, a professor at Griffith University's School of Asian and International Studies in Brisbane, Australia. "People who can tread the perilous line between taking heed of market forces and making sure those market forces are not destructive to small, defenseless people." His party, National Awakening Party, or PKB, said yesterday it wants the religious affairs, foreign affairs and education portfolios, said Alwi Shihab, a high-ranking party official tipped to be the next foreign minister. Needs The economic challenges are formidable. Some 35 million workers are under-employed, more than a third of the workforce in a population of about 211 million. The country also needs to rebuild a banking industry losing money on every new loan and unable to recover much of its existing credits. The government estimates that bank repair bill will top Rp570 trillion (US$81 billion). Speed will also be important, with the Wahid government having to prepare its new budget by January next year. "The government's fiscal situation is very serious," said Yuwa Hedrick-Wong, managing director of research at Strategic Intelligence, a consultancy. There is a major funding gap even taking into account some of the optimistic forecasts of donor funding," he said. The World Bank estimates
[PEN-L:12885] Re: Women and the Taliban
>As Hitler allegedly asked (or was it Stalin?), how >many battalions does the Pope have? > >Fight the power, not the people's faith. > >Jim Devine It is hoped that, in the process of fighting the power, people will also drop any religious faith. * On February 11, 1929, at the Lateran Palace in Rome, Pietro Gasparri, Cardinal Secretary of State to Pope Pius XI, and Benito Mussolini, Il Duce of the Italian State, signed a series of documents known as the Lateran Accords ...In sanctioning the Italian State and declaring Mussolini a "man of providence", the Papacy allowed Catholics across the peninsula to do the same. As the Duce grew in power and stature, the line between Church and State often blurred. This coalescence can been seen in a prayer developed for school children after the Lateran Accords. Taking its cue from the Nicene Creed of the Church, it read, I believe in the high Duce, maker of the Black Shirts, And in Jesus Christ his only protector. Our Savior was conceived by a good teacher and an industrious blacksmith. He was a valiant soldier; he had some enemies. He came down to Rome. On the third day, he reestablished the state. He ascended into the high office. He is seated at the right hand of our Sovereign. >From there, he has come to judge Bolshevism. I believe in the wise laws, the Communion of Citizens, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of Italy and the eternal force. Amen. http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Troy/1344/lateran.html> * Yoshie
[PEN-L:12892] Re: Re: Women and the Taliban
I wrote: As Hitler allegedly asked (or was it Stalin?), how many battalions does the Pope have? Fight the power, not the people's faith. Yoshie writes: It is hoped that, in the process of fighting the power, people will also drop any religious faith. I agree that the abolition of religious faith -- including atheism -- would be a good thing, but it's more of a symptom than a cause. (Some of the worst folk have been secular or nonreligious. For example, Jabotinsky, a leader of "revisionist" Zionism -- i.e., right-wing Zionism -- and quite a terrorist, was secular. A lot of tyrants profess religion but are irreligious in practice.) Some hairy old German guy said that religion was the opiate of the masses (quoting others, including Kant, I believe). But he broke with the hard-core atheism of the Young Hegelians (who seem to have viewed religion as a basic cause of the world's manifest imperfection) to point to the societal basis of religious faith. He then argued the need to change that society rather than to try to convert the world to atheism. I guess that all this fits with what Yoshie says, but it's good to clarify the Left's attitude toward religion. After all, much of the Left has religion of one sort or another. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/JDevine.html
[PEN-L:12889] Re: WTO North vs South strategies
From: Chris Burford [EMAIL PROTECTED] What are the openings in the North therefore for reform of the international systems even if Patrick and his allies would denounce them as timid and reformist? Of the top of my head I can think of two: the consumer movement in the North, and the interests of capital. 3: The coming crash? The kind of dramatic power shift between state and financial capital that seventy years ago led to the semi-dissolution of JP Morgan's empire? ... Therefore all the demands for boycotting the institutions of global governance rather than reforming them, will merely add to the balance of forces by which they are reformed. Chris, in your world-view, is there anything that doesn't, dialectically to be sure, lead to ever-concentrating "finance capital," and thus a world state, and thus gradualist socialism? Is there a counterfactual to be found here? Rather than regretting the different perspective of progressives in the North and the South it would therefore be better to argue, including fiercely at times, about what the likely development of the reform agenda will be, and how different consituencies can be brought it to shape it in different ways. Ok, you've seen my JWSR paper on these various agenda options. What's the next level of debate then? The SA left is going ahead in concrete ways on debt repudiation, defunding the IMF/WB, no new WTO round, capital controls, and a new "Africa Consensus" on people-centred development. Your team? Incidentally for the sake of some of the overconfident SA students who like Chris believe the embryonic world-state can be reformed, I've been putting together a list of primary sources dealing especially with the financial prospects. My three categories are very porous, so not to worry about that. But if anyone wants to add or subtract anything important, I'll be grateful: Further reading on the debate over world economic and financial reform 1. Washington Consensus statements about world economy/finance: Robert Rubin, `Strengthening the Architecture of the International Financial System,' Remarks to the Brookings Institution, Washington, DC, 14 April 1998. Laurence Summers, `The Global Economic Situation and What it Means for the United States,' Remarks to the National Governors' Association, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 4 August 1998. Stanley Fischer, `IMF--The Right Stuff,' Financial Times, 17 December 1997, `In Defence of the IMF: Specialized Tools for a Specialized Task,' Foreign Affairs, July-August 1998, and `On the Need for an International Lender of Last Resort,' IMF Mimeo, Washington, DC, 3 January 1999. Michel Camdessus, `The IMF and its Programs in Asia,' Remarks to the Council on Foreign Relations, New York, 6 February 1998. Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, Report of the Working Group on International Financial Crises, Paris, 1998. 2. Post-Washington Consensus (and other reformist-reformist) statements about world economy/finance: Yilmaz Akyuz, `Taming International Finance,' in J.Michie and J.G.Smith (Eds), Managing the Global Economy, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995; `The East Asian Financial Crisis: Back to the Future,' in Jomo K.S. (Ed), Tigers in Trouble, London, Zed, 1998. Jagdish Bhagwati, `The Capital Myth: The Difference between Trade in Widgets and Trade in Dollars,' Foreign Affairs, 77m, 3, May/June 1998. Paul Davidson, `Are Grains of Sand in the Wheels of International Finance Sufficient to do the Job when Boulders are often Required?,' The Economic Journal, 107, 1997; `The Case for Regulating International Capital Flows,' Paper presented at the Social Market Foundation Seminar on Regulation of Capital Movements, 17 November 1998. John Eatwell and Lance Taylor, `International Capital Markets and the Future of Economic Policy,' CEPA Working Paper Series III, Working Paper 9, New School for Social Research, New York, September 1998 Paul Krugman, `Saving Asia: It's Time to get RADICAL,' Fortune, 7 September 1998. Oskar Lafontaine and Christa Mueller, Keine Angst vor der Globalisierung: Worhlstand und Arbeit fuer Alle, Bonn, Dietz Verlag, 1998. Mohamad Mahathir, `The Future of Asia in a Globalised and Deregulated World,' Speech to the conference `The Future of Asia,' Tokyo, 4 June 1998. Jeffrey Sachs, `The IMF is a Power unto Itself,' Financial Times, 11 December 1997; `The IMF and the Asian Flu,' The American Prospect, March-April 1998. George Soros, The Crisis of Global Capitalism: The Open Society Endangered, New York, Public Affairs, 1998. Joseph Stiglitz, `More Instruments and Broader Goals: Moving Toward a
[PEN-L:12888] La Ciudad
You can spot Mexican and Central American immigrants everywhere in New York City. Teenagers guard the outdoor flower displays in front of Korean grocery stores, whose goods mostly come from Colombia, where they leave behind a trail of ecological destruction. If you walk around the West Twenties and Thirties you see Mexican women on their way to sweatshop jobs and on the subways the men are headed to or returning from low-wage construction jobs. They are the fastest-growing group of immigrants in the city right now and have almost no political influence, unlike the comparatively well-organized Dominicans. They are also the poorest. Young film-maker David Riker made the audacious decision to construct "La Ciudad" (The City) around this population, using a largely unprofessional cast. It is a New York that is invisible in Woody Allen's movies or television shows like "Seinfeld." Riker ignores the trendy Manhattan neighborhoods with their coffee bars, designer clothing boutiques and hot new restaurants. His New York is the Bronx, where the stores advertise in Spanish and sell beepers or advice on how to get a green card. Filmed in a gritty black-and-white, the movie consists of street scenes filmed on location of neighborhoods where the average New Yorker, including me, never visits. Riker spent five years from 1992 to 1997 working with this community and gaining their trust. The result is an audacious and powerful film that is clearly in the neo-realist tradition of "The Bicycle Thief." "La Ciudad" is constructed around four separate stories that are connected together by intermezzi of immigrants being photographed in a studio, posing for a picture that we might assume is being sent home to a loved one. Their faces, like the faces of Riker's cast, express a mixture of uncertainty and hope. In the first story we follow a group of ten day laborers who are lured into a job that supposedly pays $50 for a day's work, but when they arrive at the site, they discover that instead they will clean individual bricks from a pile of rubble for fifteen cents each. At first they resist, but eventually go about their task. Their anger toward the man who hired them is displaced toward each other. In the next we meet a young man who has just arrived from Puebla, the most economically devastated state in Mexico. He is trying to find an uncle, but with no success. He wanders the streets of the Bronx until he hears the sounds of Latin music coming from a private party in a dance hall. He crashes the party and strikes up a conversation with a young woman, who is not only from Puebla herself, but the very same town. The possibility for love and economic deliverance in the strange new city turn out to be difficult to achieve. Then we meet a father and his young daughter who live in their car near the East River. He runs a one-man puppet show on the vacant lots in the neighborhood. At night he reads to her from an illustrated fairy tale and his only hope is to enroll her in a local school. He is ably played by José Rabelo, a Cuban-American, and one of the few professional actors in the cast. As I left the theatre, Rabelo was on the sidewalk passing out flyers to help publicize the film. I congratulated him on his performance and took a handful that I will leave around Columbia University. He introduced me to David Riker, who was also on the sidewalk nearby. He mentioned that he is very involved with solidarity efforts in Chiapas and will likely be visiting there in the next few months. The final vignette is the most effective. It depicts the plight of a young mother who works on a sewing machine in a sweatshop run by a Chinese husband and wife, which actually describes the class demographics at work in New York City today. The workers have not been paid in weeks, but are assured by the bosses that they will get money as soon as they make final delivery on the clothing to a potential customer. In effect, the Latinos have no choice except to take a chance whether they will be paid or not. Like the men cleaning bricks in the first story, the only guarantee is that if they don't work they will starve. The young mother needs to be paid because her daughter needs emergency medical care that costs $400. In the final scene she confronts the bosses and discovers that the class ties that bind her to the rest of the workers in the sweatshop prove decisive. "La Cidudad" has received positive reviews in the NY Times and Village Voice, which is encouraging. Both of these newspapers thrive on presenting a view of New York that is totally at odds with the one depicted in Riker's film, one that is geared to successful whites looking for an evening's entertainment. Riker's film has an entirely different agenda. The pleasure you receive is in knowing about the full gamut of human experience in one of the worlds' most powerful and wealthy metropolises. By making the invisible visible, Riker has fulfilled one of the greatest demands that can be
[PEN-L:12887] A Special Forces veteran considers Haiti
October 7, 1999 A BRIEF ACCOUNT OF HAITI By Stan Goff [EMAIL PROTECTED] In the latter decade of the 18th Century, the British attempted to wrest control from the French of the richest colony in the Americas, Hispanola. The French Revolution was considered a window of opportunity by the British. The Revolution and the British incursion combined to destabilize Saint Domingue-the French half of the island. This created the conditions necessary for the only successful slave revolt in modern times, and the only successful slave-led revolution in history, the Haitian Revolution. Haiti was only the second independent nation in the Americas-after the United States-and the first independent modern African state. The Revolution was complex and turbulent, and characterized by a series of shifting alliances. The bourgeoisie in France was wrestling the feudal aristocracy overboard, and that struggle was reflected paradoxically in the colony, with feudal Loyalists supporting slave rebellion. Both the French maritime bourgeoisie and the plantation-based colonial bourgeoisie had powerful vested interests in the institution of slavery-the former in the actual slave trade and the latter in the profit margin they sweat out of free labor. Loyalists of the French monarchy in the colony formed an alliance of convenience first with free blacks and "mulattos", and finally with rebel slaves, for added strength to resist the rebellious bourgeoisie. It should not surprise anyone who understands history that the revolutionaries of France and America fought for their economic emancipation from feudal monarchs at the same time the clung ferociously to the institution of slavery on which they had built the very fortunes and power they needed to overthrow feudalism. The former slaves who fought for their freedom in St. Domingue were not historical materialists, and the question of whether capitalism was progress over feudalism did not enter their thinking. They knew who supported them-even for cynical purposes-and who tried to put them back in chains. Consequently, when Jean-Jacques Dessalines lashed the revolution forward to independence, he declared a kingdom, and a semi-feudal economic system was adopted. This system has been internally responsible for the persistently backward development in Haiti. The terrifying example-from the point of view of slave holders from the United States to Brazil-of a slave revolution, and the dismemberment of slavery's supporting ideology by this dazzling display of African brilliance in the systematic defeat of three powerful white European nations, led slave-dependent Britain, France, and the United States to economically isolate Haiti. This further stifled Haiti's economic development, and rendered Haiti vulnerable to a variety of forms of economic blackmail that continually drained her treasury. This was the first in a series of external factors contributing to backward development in Haiti. Haiti's post-revolutionary economic system placed a vast number of peasants on land owned by gentry. Landowners collected a share of the land's produce in exchange for tenancy-a sharecropping system. In many respects, it was a system like that in the Southern United States. To understand political forces in Haiti today, it will be helpful to draw some further comparisons to the history of the Southern United States. Former slaves in the South who adopted sharecropping were beholden to a land-holding class in a relationship that was feudal in the sense of the tenant proffering "a share". Wage labor was not employed in the production process. The instruments of production were simple, and the rate of accumulation remained slow to stagnant. As industrial production was more rapidly introduced into the South, a conflict developed between the up-and-coming industrial bourgeoisie and the planter class over access to labor. There was a period of rapprochement in which planters were ceded black labor on tenant farms and poor whites were the province of industrial capital. But industrial capital is restless. Like a shark, if it stops it expires, and eventually industrial capital needed to reach into a new pool of black labor. This struggle took on a political character and two "tendencies" developed in Southern politics-what Paul Leubke, in Tar Heel Politics, has called the "modernizers and the traditionalists." The former sought to develop the instruments of production for industry and to modernize agriculture, and the latter sought to protect the traditional privileges of the planter class. The latter tendency has also waged a fierce battle for the social norms that were rooted in the planter economy-especially racism, sexism, and a general cultural conservatism. Those tendencies are still visible in the South, with the struggle only lately asserting itself in two separate political parties instead of one political party with two factions. In that political struggle, the
[PEN-L:12886] WTO North vs South strategies
I have no great objection to Patrick's sketch of a diametric opposition between North and South strategies against global state institutions like the WTO, except that I do not think it is regrettable. I think it is inevitable and something to be argued through constantly. It comes from the very different economic situation of North and South. If that means at times Patrick has to challenge me as reformist or labour aristocratic it is more important that we can use the internet as a forum for arguing out the different tactical and strategic choices. It is entirely normal that the development of the "proletariat" proceeds everywhere amidst internal struggles. (This is also an ideological question about whether opportunism is a platonic entity or one that has to be defeated, whether in its left or right forms, in the course of practice.) It may well be that in the South the main thrust and leverage for radical change has to be by relying on poverty of the people of those countries to demand no cooperation with global agencies unless they give some ground to an emerging notion of global democracy. This may be the best way of putting some leverage on the weak comprador bourgeois governments of those countries to strengthen their stance in international forums. Within the North the material class base for radical reform of international organizations is extremely weak. The forces behind the impressive June 18th demonstrations were a heterogeneous group of christians and lumpen intelligentsia living on state welfare, held together only by the robust political coherence of their overall demands for radical change in the world financial system. Ditto for the alliance between Bob Geldorf and the Pope around Jubilee 2000 and Netaid. The North, including its populations who stand in relation to the people of the South as a real labour aristocracy, have so much to gain from the continued uneven distribution of capitalist wealth in the world that it is difficult for even non-opportunist union leaders to articulate a genuinely proletarian internationalist position. What are the openings in the North therefore for reform of the international systems even if Patrick and his allies would denounce them as timid and reformist? Of the top of my head I can think of two: the consumer movement in the North, and the interests of capital. 1) The consumer movement has become more powerful than the workers movement (although it is just that same movement that is using the price of its labour power to sustain itself in the way it wishes). The lightening victories of the movement against GM foods this year globally are a signal that standards of production may be imposable for the production of footballs and other goods by child labour in the South. Although against the short term interest of the national capitalists of the South, it is progressive strategically that similar standards should apply globally to all workers to restrict [I did not say abolish] the scope for exploitation. 2) Few bond traders lose much sleep if Indonesia falls over a precipice again or Africa drops off the map: the volume of circulating capital around the epicentres of the North is incomparably so much greater. But it is a significant cost to capitalists if the relative price of the Euro and the dollar fluctuate by even 10%. They have to spend a lot of time and resources discounting this. Even though it is true that the larger institutions of finance capital are better able to protect themselves and pull ahead in the evolutionary competition of capitalism than smaller nationally based capitals, it is still very expensive to them. Finance capital is by no means against government, and regulation. Stabilisation of the short term financial movements is a reform whose day has come. Indeed finance capital naturally converges towards monopoly the more abstract that capital becomes. Therefore reform of the global institutions of finance capital will take place independently of the will of any one constituency. That is a historical materialist inevitability. That is the incredibly complex process by which world government is being forged. Therefore all the demands for boycotting the institutions of global governance rather than reforming them, will merely add to the balance of forces by which they are reformed. Rather than regretting the different perspective of progressives in the North and the South it would therefore be better to argue, including fiercely at times, about what the likely development of the reform agenda will be, and how different consituencies can be brought it to shape it in different ways. Different progressive forces have different roles to play in different contexts if they are going to work together to produce similar results. That is a sound and dialectical tradition of "proletarian internationalism". But if Patrick or anyone else thinks I am being too bland now or in the future, please will they lay into me
