Patrick Bond wrote: On these points, there is an argument to turn all foreign aid into per-person distribution of the funds rather than channel them through the utterly corrupted system of mutual back-scratchers, venal national elites, home-based corporations and bogus NGOs that get most of the benefits from the present 'phantom aid' structure.
Carrol: This makes sense, and it would resolve _some_ of the generic objections to U.S. aid programs. It woul 'free' the aid from the U.S. bureaucracy providing it as well. There remain, however, the kind of problems canvassed below of imposing _this_ program on the U.S. government, which again brings us back to the question of political power in the u.s. Hans ehrbar wrote: Carrol, do you think the developing countries, if left to their own devices, will embark on green development? They will do the only thing feasible for them to lift their populations out of poverty, and this is development based on fossil fuels. Which will grill the planet. By telling the United States to keep out of the rest of the world you are implicitly promoting a paradigm based on nation states. If we want to survive as a species, we have to overcome this paradigm, we need world-wide co-operation forced on the nation states by a world wide mass movement. Whether this is realistic or not, this is what I think is needed; if someone has better ideas, please speak up. ======= O.K. I'n all for mass movements, and I certainly want various po.icies foreced on the U.S. (as well as on the EU, Japan, Russia, China, etc.), but when you speak of compulsion the argument beomes empty except in the context of power relations. It is easy to _say_, "Mass Movementk"; I do it all the time. And the answer I usually get is some version of the question, "How do we get from here to there?" And the answer I am always tempted to give, and sometimes do give, is "We don't; we can't; starting here we can only stay here." In short, any line we draw from here to there ends, as you say, in our being cooked. Let me quote a passage from Rosa Luxemburge's 1898 speeches at the Stuttgart Congress: "". . .by final goal we must not mean, as Heine has said, this or that image of the future state, but the prerequisite for any future society, namely the conquest of political power." Now we are not talking about the overthrow of the state here, but we are talking about political power in a more limited, the power of a mass movement to compel the state to carry out an extraordinarily complex of operations on a global scale involving trillions of dollars expended in scores of areas with different local conditions and in different stages of political development. We seem to be moving towards the writing of quite complex recipes for what I fear will be an ever-receding future. I simply don't see the U.S. government, under any conditions which might develop linearly from here, carrying out such a complex program. The precondition (probably not the only precondition but certainly a key one for it is the emergence of a powerful andindependent left in the U.S. Do you see any route to that? We might speak of it as an intermediate "final goal," and it is only by positing it that we can begin to think clearly about the present. And a temporary closing point. The paragraph you quoted from my post ends with, "Keep conversation going on such topics within both local organizations and national forums." This has been such a coversation, one I hope goes a bit further. That is one of the purposes of slogans. You write in your first post: "Since the US has historically emitted a huge amount of CO2 into the atmosphere, the US owes the developing nations a lot of aid to compensate them for the cost of climate change and to help them pursue a development path based on renewable energy." All of this is certainly true. The U.S. owes the world a good deal in fact. But that debt just isn't going to be paid without a change in power relations in the U.S. itself, That requires the mass movement you speak of, one of the tasks of which would be to promote debate on this complex of issues in much wider circles of the population. And I submit my slogan, as stated, is more apt, ultimately, to generate the programs you advocate, than would slogans supporting complex schemes of foreign aid. Carrol P.S. I hope to return to Robert Naiman's interesting post. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
