UPDATE 2: So why are they making it seem like Uganda is one big hellhole because of Kony, because it's not.

UPDATE 1: This is the same narrative about Africa that we have seen for centuries.

Hat tip to Jews sans frontieres.

INITIAL POST: Blissfully, I live outside the universe of viral videos, so I only heard about the Invisible Children one about Joseph Kony and the Lords Resistance Army indirectly. I admit that I am late to the story, but I will share my responses: First, if Americans really care that much about gruesome, militaristic violence, they should confront the brutalities inflicted upon others around the world by their own government, instead of supporting a call for more US military assistance for a Uganda military known for its own human rights abuses.

Second, I thought, the more things change, the more they remain the same. Over the course of my life, Americans have flocked to claims that leaders of color are one of the primary sources of global violence. Mao, Castro, Arafat, Gaddafi, Noriega, Aidid, Hussein, Bin Laden, Ahmajinedad . . and, now, Kony. With the passage of time, succeeding figures have been described in more and more lurid terms that highlights their foreign, uniquely perverse character, paradoxically in contradictory ways, contrast, for example, the hedonism of Gaddafi, Noriega and Hussein with the puritanical extremism of Bin Laden and Ahmajinedad. If we could just get rid of these evil demons, the world would be such a wonderful place. The root of this phenonmenon go all the way back to the extermination of Native Americans by, first, the Spanish, and then, the US, with the whites of the time condemning the indigenous population for the interwoven existence of these seemingly oppositional attributes within their non-Christian cultures. As then, anyone who suggests that we should understand the circumstances that give rise to them and seek to address these conditions, instead of putting them on wanted posters, is frequently maligned as an apologist. Callum McCormick has aptly observed that any effort to comprehend the current situation in Uganda as anything more than a binary moral opposition is rejected as an unnecessary complication.

Predictably, one rarely encounters powerful white political figures presented in this way, consider, for example, Donald Rumsfeld, who, as Secretary of Defense, approved the use of harsh interrogation techniques against Guantanamo detainees, personally monitoring the torture of Mohammed al-Qahtani. People like Rumsfeld are able to escape such condemnation because their violence is displaced by modern communications technology and allegedly objective processes for developing information and making administrative decisions, much in the same way that CIA officers evaded responsibility for the mass killings and torture associated with the Phoenix Program and Operation Condor. In the end, the outward appearance of rationality associated with the modernist effort to transform societies still afflicted by the residue of primitivism exonerates them. If Kony had come from an elite Uganda family and attended Harvard or Oxford prior to returning to Uganda to impose austerity with the assistance of a repressive security apparatus, he would be praised in the US media as an exemplary example, regardless of the number of child victims.

Curiously, the Israelis, perceived in a Eurocentric way, also avoid such a characterization, despite a documented history of calculated state violence in Lebanon and the occupied territories. Of course, it is not the fault of Invisible Children that many Americans reflexively respond in this way, but it is, whether consciously or not, exploiting a fundamentally neoconservative, racist discourse that privileges the state sanctioned violence of the US and its allies over others. If the objective is to truly help the people of Uganda, then an approach different from the failed, purportedly humanitarian interventions of the last 25 years should be considered. Otherwise, the arrest and trial of Kony, as sought by Invisible Children, is likely to be noteworthy for giving someone an opportunity to take his place. It would also be conveniently consistent with the rules of the game, whereby violent political figures in opposition to US interests risk finding themselves being prosecuted in The Hague for crimes against humanity, while similarly situated US allies have received billions in assistance.

Hat tip to Lenin's Tomb.

Labels: "War on Terror", Africa, Alternative Media, NGOs, Political Violence, YouTube

Sometimes, I read As'ad Abukhalil's blog, and wonder, what's the point of this one? Here are a couple of examples of important articles linked there over the weekend. First, this one by Christine Ahn and Kavita Ramdas:

The IMF has earned its villainous reputation in the Global South because in exchange for loans, governments must accept a range of austerity measures known as structural adjustment programs (SAPs). A typical IMF package encourages export promotion over local production for local consumption. It also pushes for lower tariffs and cuts in government programs such as welfare and education. Instead of reducing poverty, the trillion dollars of loans issued by the IMF have deepened poverty, especially for women who make up 70 percent of the world’s poor.

IMF-mandated government cutbacks in social welfare spending have often been achieved by cutting public sector jobs, which disproportionately impact women. Women hold most of the lower-skilled public sector jobs, and they are often the first to be cut. Also, as social programs like caregiving are slashed, women are expected to take on additional domestic responsibilities that further limit their access to education or other jobs.

In exchange for borrowing $5.8 billion from the IMF and World Bank, Tanzania agreed to impose fees for health services, which led to fewer women seeking hospital deliveries or post-natal care and naturally, higher rates of maternal death. In Zambia, the imposition of SAPs led to a significant drop in girls’ enrollment in schools and a spike in survival or subsistence sex as a way for young women to continue their educations.

But IMF’s austerity measures don’t just apply to poor African countries. In 1997, South Korea received $57 billion in loans in exchange for IMF conditionalities that forced the government to introduce labor market flexibility, which outlined steps for the government to compress wages, fire surplus workers, and cut government spending on programs and infrastructure. When the financial crisis hit, seven Korean women were laid off for every one Korean man. In a sick twist, the Korean government launched a get your husband energized campaign encouraging women to support depressed male partners while they cooked, cleaned, and cared for everyone.

Nearly 15 years later, the scenario is grim for South Korean workers, especially women. Of all OECD countries, Koreans work the longest hours: 90% of men and 77% of women work over 40 hours a week. According to economist Martin Hart-Landsberg, in 2000, 40 percent of Korean workers were irregular workers; by 2008, 60 percent worked in the informal economy. The Korean Women Working Academy reports that today 70 percent of Korean women workers are temporary laborers.

Please help, can someone tell me when, if ever, the National Organization for Women, the Feminist Majority Foundation or NARAL Pro-Choice America, among others, have drawn attention to the misogyny inherent in neoliberal policy? Oh, I forgot, the Feminist Majority Foundation has been too busy supporting the war in Afghanistan.

And, then, there's this one, an opinion piece by Joseph Massad:

The problem with US policy in the Arab world is not only its insistence on broadcasting credulous US propaganda - easily fed to Americans, yet with few takers elsewhere in the world - but also that it continues to show a complete lack of familiarity with Arab political culture and insists on insulting the intelligence of most Arabs, whom it claims to address directly with speeches such as Mr Obama's.

In the past three decades, Arab leaders allied with the United States (and even the few who were not) have been telling their peoples that Iran, Shia, Sunni Islamists, the Palestinian people and their wretched cause, among others, are the reason for the hardship of Arabs. Indeed this conjuring up of enemies started with the US-Saudi-Kuwaiti plan to subcontract an all-out war against revolutionary Iran, as the enemy of Arabs, which was launched by Saddam Hussein in 1981 to defend America's oil wells - and which resulted by 1988 in the death of one million Iranians and 400,000 Iraqis.

In the meantime, and since the late 1960s, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon have engaged in wars with the Palestinian guerrillas and against Palestinian civilians, whom they identified as the enemy. Egypt launched a war against Libya when Sadat was in power, and later, under Mubarak, against its own Islamists and against the Palestinian people. Indeed even Algeria was conjured up as the enemy of Egyptians in Mubarak's last year on the throne.

Saudi Arabia, while repressing all of its population in the name of Wahabism, has not stopped hatching various plans (and plots) since 1982 to bring Israel into the Arab fold. When President Obama peddles the Israeli lie, that his pro-Israel advisors at the White House - and there has been no other kinds of Middle East advisors at the White House since the Clinton administration - feed him, that too many leaders in the region tried to direct their people's grievances elsewhere. The West was blamed as the source of all ills, a half-century after the end of colonialism. Antagonism toward Israel became the only acceptable outlet for political expression, to which leaders is he actually referring? Sadat, Mubarak, Ben Ali, Kings Hussein and Abdullah II of Jordan, Kings Hasan II and Muhammad VI of Morocco, President Bouteflika, any of the Gulf monarchs or the two Hariri prime ministers, Rafiq and Saad?

Not only are such lies not believable to anyone in the wider world, but also, were the US administration to believe them, explain the ongoing foreign policy failures in a region the US insists on dominating - but which it refuses to learn much about.

Empires always construct a world view compatible with the preservation of them. So, there's nothing surprising here, including the eventual outcome, except that so many Americans remain either unaware of it, or derive emotional fulfillment from it. Meanwhile, during his speech before AIPAC, President Obama sounds eerily like a 19th Century southern plantation owner when he expresses concern about the birthrate of Palestinians and its implications for Israel.

Labels: Africa, American Empire, Feminism, IMF, Israel, Korea, Neoliberalism, Palestine, Zionism

UPDATE 1: As contemplated in paragraph 1 of the original post:

A Texas school district says a teacher won't return to work after being accused of mocking an American-born Muslim student by asking if she was grieving because her uncle had died, a reference to Osama bin Laden.

The teacher was put on leave after making the alleged remark May 2, hours after bin Laden was killed in a U.S. military raid.

INITIAL POST: The death of Bin Laden brings an old question to the forefront: why is it that people are willing to accept state violence, no matter how extreme and indiscriminate, while responding angrily to acts of individual or group violence that are minor by comparison? In the United States, it appears that many have a vicarious relationship with the violence of the government, exulting in a sense of collective superiority associated with its use against others, particularly those with whom they have developed a pre-existing bias. Socialists have always struggled to overcome this nationalistic sensibility, partially because of the gratification connected to such violence. Not surprisingly, to the extent that the people of another culture are different from the still predominately European, Christian one of the US, the use of violence against them is frequently considered an unavoidable necessity.

There are many examples: the near extermination of Native Americans, the continued support for the use of nuclear weapons upon the civilian populace of Japan to end World War II, the bombing of North Vietnam during the Vietnam War, and, of course, more recently, the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan as part of a larger war on terror. During the 19th Century, European Americans believed that it was impossible for them to coexist with Native Americans on the North American continent unless Native Americans were violently suppressed and, thereafter, socially controlled, and such a perspective is central to the current approach to the peoples of North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia, an approach that is an extension of prior European imperial practice. The US military made the connection explicit when it selected Geronimo as the code name for Bin Laden prior to the raid on his compound. Both constitute modernization projects based upon the principles of the Enlightenment, one in which the peoples of non-Eurocentric cultures must be forcibly incorporated into a neoliberal, nation state system that had its origins in, first, Western Europe, and then, in North America. Significantly, most people on the left supported this effort in the late 19th Century and early 20th Century, and some still do, with people like Christopher Hitchens and Fred Halliday being prominent examples.

Of course, this is one of those binary oppositions that has little basis in social reality. The peoples of North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia are not monolithic, and they do not live in inferior, debased societies that evolved as a result of a separation from the peoples of other parts of the world, such as Africa, Europe, South Asia and East Asia. In other words, this effort is based upon a mythology of social superiority that has no basis in fact. There were, and remain, less violent, more collaborative alternatives of transformation, ones that the proponents of the purist Eurocentric imperialist vision cannot accept. But, beyond such an academized, abstract discussion, there is a more immediate, direct problem. Why is it that so many people that otherwise have no connection to it so strongly support this violent enterprise? An enterprise, that, if Libya is an indication, is now gaining more and more European participation? If there is any possibility for Osama Bin Laden to be embraced as a martyr, despite his heinous qualities, it resides in his symbolic opposition to American and European imperial domination. To the extent that this domination becomes even more remorseless, the greater the prospect that Bin Laden's perverse failings will become less and less prominent in future representations of him.

Labels: "War on Terror", Africa, American Empire, Eurocentrism, Europe, France, Imperialism, Italy, Libya, Neoliberalism, Osama Bin Laden

Esam Al-Amin summarizes the events that brought down the Ben Ali dictatorship in Tunisia:

On December 17, Mohammed Bouazizi, a 26-year-old unemployed graduate in the central town of Sidi Bouzid, set himself on fire in an attempt to commit suicide. Earlier in the day, police officers took away his stand and confiscated the fruits and vegetables he was selling because he lacked a permit. When he tried to complain to government officials that he was unemployed and that this was his only means of survival, he was mocked, insulted and beaten by the police. He died 19 days later in the midst of the uprising.

Bouazizi's act of desperation set off the public's boiling frustration over living standards, corruption and lack of political freedom and human rights. For the next four weeks, his self-immolation sparked demonstrations in which protesters burned tires and chanted slogans demanding jobs and freedom. Protests soon spread all over the country including its capital, Tunis.

The first reaction by the regime was to clamp down and use brutal force including beatings, tear gas, and live ammunition. The more ruthless tactics the security forces employed, the more people got angry and took to the streets. On Dec. 28 the president gave his first speech claiming that the protests were organized by a minority of extremists and terrorists and that the law would be applied in all firmness to punish protesters.

However, by the start of the New Year tens of thousands of people, joined by labor unions, students, lawyers, professional syndicates, and other opposition groups, were demonstrating in over a dozen cities. By the end of the week, labor unions called for commercial strikes across the country, while 8,000 lawyers went on strike, bringing the entire judiciary system to an immediate halt.

Meanwhile, the regime started cracking down on bloggers, journalists, artists and political activists. It restricted all means of dissent, including social media. But following nearly 80 deaths by the security forces, the regime started to back down.

On Jan. 13, Ben Ali gave his third televised address, dismissing his interior minister and announcing unprecedented concessions while vowing not to seek re-election in 2014. He also pledged to introduce more freedoms into society, and to investigate the killings of protesters during the demonstrations. When this move only emboldened the protestors, he then addressed his people in desperation, promising fresh legislative elections within six months in an attempt to quell mass dissent.

When this ploy also did not work, he imposed a state of emergency, dismissing the entire cabinet and promising to deploy the army on a shoot to kill order. However, as the head of the army Gen. Rachid Ben Ammar refused to order his troops to kill the demonstrators in the streets, Ben Ali found no alternative but to flee the country and the rage of his people.

On Jan. 14 his entourage flew in four choppers to the Mediterranean island of Malta. When Malta refused to accept them, he boarded a plane heading to France. While in mid air he was told by the French that he would be denied entry. The plane then turned back to the gulf region until he was finally admitted and welcomed by Saudi Arabia. The Saudi regime has a long history of accepting despots including Idi Amin of Uganda and Parvez Musharraf of Pakistan.

Al-Amin also exhaustively documents the complicity of the US and European governments, so it is worth reading his article in its entirety. The French were so supportive of Ben Ali that the foreign minister of the Sarkozy government, Michele Alliot-Marie, offered the assistance of French security forces to put down the rebellion. Meanwhile, President Obama avoided any substantive comment on the situation until the outcome was decided. Or, as As'ad Abukhalil ascerbically said:

The funny announcement by Obama yesterday has clear conclusions: the US administration is thus officially in support of its dictators around the world until the time when they are overthrown. So Obama continued to support the Tunisian dictator until the time when he left the country.

Apparently, the US wasn't that concerned with the fact that the Ben Ali regime had killed between 150 to 200 people since the uprising began on December 17th. Perhaps, it was because the US considered the Ben Ali regime an important ally in the war on terror:

The Tunisian Government is an important ally for the U.S. in its resource-driven colonial wars with Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. A United Nations report on secret detention practices lists Tunisia as having secret detention facilities where prisoners are held without International Red Cross access. Intelligence services in Tunisia cooperated with the U.S. efforts in the War on Terror and have participated in interrogating prisoners at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan and in Tunisia.

And, then, there is the disappointment that the US may lose the ability to continue to persuade future Tunisian governments to impose policies of austerity as Ben Ali did:

. . . Tunisia -- more than almost any country in the region -- has followed the dictates of Washington and the International Monetary Fund in instituting structural adjustment programs in privatizing much of its economy and allowing for an unprecedented level of free trade. These policies have increased rather than decreased unemployment while enriching relatives and cronies of the country's top ruling families. This has been privately acknowledged by the U.S. embassy in a recently-released wikileaks cable, which labeled the U.S.-backed regime as a kleptocracy. The U.S. has also been backing IMF efforts to get the Tunisian government to eliminate the remaining subsidies on fuel and basic food stuffs and fuel and further deregulate its financial sector.

Predictably, the meticulous lenin provides us with the factual and analytical details of this embrace of neoliberalism by Ben Ali:

Globally, the dictatorship aligned itself with neoliberal institutions, acceding to GATT, then joining the WTO. Throughout the 2000s, it forged a closer relationship with the EU, under an agreement removing all tariffs and restrictions on goods between the two. France and Italy have been its main export and import partners in this period. Given his zeal in prosecuting the war against terrorism throughout the 1990s, which mission he took to the UN and the EU, Ben Ali was an obvious candidate to be a regional ally in the Bush administration's programme for reconfiguring the Middle East in America's (further) interests in the context of the war on terror. Ben Ali thus joined Team America, alongside other lifelong democrats such as Hosni Mubarak and King Abdullah.

The results of Ben Ali's authoritarian neoliberalism for capital were impressive in their way: GDP on a par with the European periphery, low public-sector deficit, controlled inflation and renewed credit-worthiness. The financial sector was reformed and initially experienced a mini-boom. Significant sections of the public sector were turned over for profitable investment. A total of 160 state owned enterprises have been privatised. The stock market capitalisation of the 50 largest companies listed on the Bourse de Tunis was worth $5.7bn by 2007. Ben Ali's famously, corruptly wealthy family also made a mint from the boom. He himself became a darling of the EU and the US, conferring global prestige on his regime. The cost of all this to the working class, though concealed in some of the official figures, was just as significant. High unemployment, growing inequality, the removal of subsidies for the poor, rising housing costs and weaker welfare protections are among the added burdens of the Tunisian working class in the neoliberal era.

This does not mean that the average working class person has experienced an absolute decline in income throughout this period. In fact, the development of the cities has meant more people moving from the poorer rural areas to cities and towns where absolute poverty is less common. What it means is that wage growth has been suppressed by the government, and made conditional upon productivity rises. In the private sector, liberalisation means that the discipline of the market has been used to extract higher productivity from the workforce. The total effect is that more of the wealth that has been generated has gone into the pockets of the very rich. In simple terms, it means that the rate of exploitation has been increased. For as long as the political opposition was effectively suppressed, and for as long as the trade union movement was effectively subjugated, the old order could continue. But that in turn depended on the regime's ability to boast that it was creating a wealthier economy that would eventually benefit everyone. That is, the viability of the regime rested on the viability of neoliberal institutions, both domestically and globally - and that is exactly what has taken a knock.

lenin's exposition is enlightening because of his recognition that the so-called war on terror and the imposition of neoliberal economic policies are interrelated aspects of the same social process. It is difficult for one to exist in the absence of the other, as the invasion and occupation of Iraq demonstrated. Without the invasion, there would have been no subsequent attempt to incorporate the Iraqi economy into the neoliberal order. Meanwhile, elite support for the invasion was dependent upon this opportunity to privatize a heavily socialized economy.

Hence, the Ben Ali regime comes across as one that recalls Pinochet's Chile, one that actively participated in the repression of people considered enemies of the US, while serving as an economic laboratory for policies that the US would like to see imposed globally. Much as Pinochet proselytized against the leftist peril that he reduced to communism, prefiguring the rise of Reagan and Thatcher, Ben Ali was an anti-terrorism missionary, preaching his gospel prior to the creation of the Project for a New American Century and 9/11.

Indeed, the parallels between Operation Condor, a sort of Phoenix Program brought to the southern cone of South America by Pinochet and his regional allies in the 1970s, and the current war on terror are striking:

Operation Condor (Spanish: Operación Cóndor, also known as Plan Cóndor, Portuguese: Operação Condor), was a campaign of political repression involving assassination and intelligence operations officially implemented in 1975 by the right-wing dictatorships of the Southern Cone of South America. The program aimed to eradicate alleged socialist and communist influence and ideas and to control active or potential opposition movements against the participating governments. Due to its clandestine nature, the precise number of deaths directly attributable to Operation Condor is highly disputed. It is estimated that a minimum of 60,000 deaths can be attributed to Condor, possibly more. Condor's key members were the governments in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil. The United States participated in a supervisory capacity, with Ecuador and Peru joining later in more peripheral roles.

So, like a mistress attending the funeral of her married lover, US officials present a public appearance of stoicism while privately shedding tears of sorrow for the passing of the Ben Ali regime. We can only hope that the rebellion succeeds in eradicating whatever the residual power of his supporters so that the archives of the military and interior ministry can be opened to scrutiny in order to discover what horrors US and Tunisia intelligence perpetrated. Given the military's astute decision to act against Ben Ali's supporters in the security forces, as described by Al-Amin, it remains doubtful that this will happen.

FOOTNOTE: lenin has also written several other excellent posts about the Tunisian situation, which can be found here and here and here. In the last one, he ponders the peril that the revolution may pose for other US allies in the region:

But if, as seems increasingly possible, the revolt spreads and takes down some other pro-American regimes in Egypt, Jordan or Algeria, then Obama has problems. One can well imagine him, despite his ongoing commitment to aggression in Afghanistan and Pakistan, going down as a Carter-style weakling if a few US embassies in the region start to look vulnerable. Which is why I would expect some sort of panicked intervention by the US and its local proxies to be going on even as you read.

If only someone in one these embassies would get in contact with wikileaks. Just imagine the valuable service that it could provide by releasing sensitive diplomatic cables related to US actions in Tunisia in close to real time.

Labels: "War on Terror", Activism, Africa, American Empire, Chile, IMF, Neoliberalism, Political Violence, Poverty, Sadomasochism, South America, Tunisia

Of course, the Angry Arab is essential if you want an independent perspective on what has happened there that doesn't rely exclusively on American and European sources. As noted here previously, the dictatorship of Ben Ali has been a stalwart ally in the so-called war on terror, which probably explains the belated US response to the turmoil there.

Labels: "War on Terror", Activism, Africa, American Empire, Political Violence, Tunisia

From The Peninsula, a Qatari newspaper:

Top officials in several Arab countries have close links with the CIA, and many officials keep visiting US embassies in their respective countries voluntarily to establish links with this key US intelligence agency, says Julian Assange, founder of the whistle-blowing website, WikiLeaks.

These officials are spies for the US in their countries, Assange told Al Jazeera Arabic channel in an interview yesterday.

The interviewer, Ahmed Mansour, said at the start of the interview which was a continuation of last week’s interface, that Assange had even shown him the files that contained the names of some top Arab officials with alleged links with the CIA.

Assange or Mansour, however, didn’t disclose the names of these officials. The WikiLeaks founder said he feared he could be killed but added that there were 2,000 websites that were ready to publish the remaining files that are in possession of WikiLeaks after he has been done away with.

If I am killed or detained for a long time, there are 2,000 websites ready to publish the remaining files. We have protected these websites through very safe passwords, said Assange.

Currently, his whistle-blowing website is exposing files in a responsible manner, he claimed. But if I am forced we could go to the extreme and expose each and every file that we have access to, thundered the WikiLeaks founder. We must protect our sources at whatever cost. This is our sincere concern.

Some Arab countries even have torture houses where Washington regularly sends suspects for interrogation and torture, he said.

Philip Agee released this sort of information, and lived into his 70s, being fortunate enough to fall in love with a German woman who married him, enabling him to obtain German citizenship. He spent much of his life after the late 1970s in Germany and Cuba. Ecuador has already offered residency to Assange, and other South American countries, such as Venezuela, Bolivia, and Brazil, might do so as well if he requested it. So, there are places where Assange can live outside the reach of the US, or, at least, not any less so than Agee did.

Within this context, it is worth recalling Agee's motivation for releasing confidential information about the activities of the CIA around the world, especially in the Americas:

Agee had left the CIA in 1969 after 12 years working mainly in Latin America, where he gradually became disgusted by the agency's collusion with military dictators in the region and decided to blow the whistle on their activities. The Mexico City massacre of student protesters in 1968 also stiffened his resolve. His 1975 book Inside the Company: CIA Diary spilled the beans on his former employers and enraged the US government, not least because it named CIA operatives.

It was a time in the 70s when the worst imaginable horrors were going on in Latin America, he told the Guardian in an interview published a year ago today. Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Guatemala, El Salvador - they were military dictatorships with death squads, all with the backing of the CIA and the US government. That was what motivated me to name all the names and work with journalists who were interested in knowing just who the CIA were in their countries.

Of course, it is easy for someone like me to suggest that Assange should publicly release the information that he mentioned in his Al Jazeera interview. But there is no question that the worst imaginable horrors are going on in northern Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia today, just as they were in the Americas (and Greece as well) when Agee worked for the CIA. For example, consider what is happening now in Tunisia, a police state unknown to most Americans that is considered an important ally in the global war against terrorism. If Assange is speaking truthfully, wikileaks has documents in its possession that will expose US complicity in the abuse, torture and suppression of peoples throughout the Muslim world in places beyond the usual suspects, such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. Indeed, one should not forget to include Indonesia as one of the possible countries involved, even if, strictly speaking, it is inaccurate to characterize it as Arab.

Hat tip to Marcy Wheeler.

Labels: "War on Terror", Activism, Africa, Alternative Media, American Empire, Central Asia, Indonesia, Muslims, wikileaks

While many responded to the release of the Afghanistan war logs by WikiLeaks with a belief that it would politically damage the Obama administration, as I did, or undermine support for the war, as others did, Chris Floyd was a contrarian:

So in the end, what really is the takeaway from this barrage of high-profile revelations dished up by these bold liberal gadflies speaking truth to power? Let's recap:

Occupation forces kill lots of civilians. But everybody already knew that -- and it's been obvious for years that nobody cares. How does this alter the prevailing conventional wisdom about the war?

Pakistan is pursuing its own strategic interests in the region: interests that don't always mesh with those of the United States. Again, this has been a constantly -- obsessively -- reported aspect of the war since its earliest days. How does this alter the prevailing conventional wisdom about the war?

The Afghan government installed by the occupation is corrupt and dysfunctional. Again, this theme has been sounded at every level of the American government -- including by two presidents -- for years. How does this alter the prevailing conventional wisdom of the war?

There is often a dichotomy between official statements about the war's progress and the reality of the war on the ground. Again, has there been a month in the last nine years that prominent stories outlining this fact have not appeared in major mainstream publications? Is this not a well-known phenomenon of every single military conflict in human history? How does this alter the prevailing conventional wisdom about the war?

Iran is evil and is helping bad guys kill Americans and should be stopped. It goes without saying that this too has been a relentless drumbeat of the American power structure for many years. The occupation forces in Iraq began blaming Iran for the rise of the insurgency and the political instability almost the moment after George W. Bush proclaimed mission accomplished and all hell broke loose in the conquered land. The Obama administration has continued -- and expanded -- the Bush Regime's demonization of Iran, and its extensive military preparations for an attack on that country. The current administration's diplomatic effort is led by a woman who pledged to obliterate Iran -- that is, to kill tens of millions of innocent people -- if Iran attacked Israel. The American power structure has seized upon every single scrap of Curveball-quality intelligence -- every rumor, every lie, every exaggeration, every fabrication -- to convince the American people that Iran is about to nuke downtown Omaha with burqa-clad atom bombs.

So once again, and for the last time, we ask the question: How does this alter the prevailing conventional wisdom about the war?

It doesn't, of course. These media bombshells will simply bounce off the hardened shell of American exceptionalism -- which easily countenances the slaughter of civilians and targeted killings and indefinite detention and any number of other atrocities anyway.

Floyd is on to something here, even I don't agree with his conclusion, as it strikes me as too reductionist. Admittedly, the logs have a multifaceted quality that tend to confirm the preconceived notions of those who learn about them. Hence, in the US, the emphasis has been, as noted by Floyd, upon the the purported deceit of the Pakistanis and the alleged covert operations of the Iranians. We may well paradoxically remember the release as part of the inexorable momentum in support of an attack upon Iran. But, as I noted on Monday, the primary impact of the disclosures is in Europe, where restive populations of the UK and Germany have been even more disquieted by US mendacity and lack of concern about civilian casualties.

But there is more to it, more to the US intervention in Afghanistan that has been commonly understood, and the WikiLeaks release does little to clarify it. As I remarked here on Tuesday:

Unlike the invasion of Iraq, which has been a tawdry exercise in imperialist competition, the occupations of Afghanistan, both the Russian and the American ones, are about something else. Both have been modernization exercises, attempts to coerce a pre-industrialized society into the circuits of globalization. It is an effort similar to the centuries long effort of sedentary, agricultural societies in China and Southeast Asia to enclose the more migratory hill peoples and reduce them to state subjects, as described by James Scott in his magisterial The Art of Not Being Governed.

As explained by Scott, peoples that remain outside the state system are considered existential threats. Hence, the contemporary designation of regions around the world with limited to non-existent state authority as especially perilous, as rogue states, failed states and terror havens. David Graeber, the anarchist anthropologist, has, much like Scott, a different perspective as expressed in his articles based upon his field work in Madagascar in the late 1980s and early 1990s. For him, the erosion of centralized authority creates an opportunity for people to develop their own informal practices of government and social relations.

Thus, in regard to Afghanistan, the liberal emphasis upon subjects such as the lack of any significant al-Qaeda presence in the country or the need to redirect our effort away from military activities to economic development misses the point. People within much of Afghanistan, as well as the hill regions of Pakistan, object to modernization as imposed from the outside, whether by force or by economic assistance. Given that the state and capital are interwoven forms of social control that must expand to encompass all the space provided, both outwardly (the entirety of the territory of the world) and inwardly (every aspect of daily life, including the extremes of childhood and human sexuality), the war in Afghanistan is a perpetual one, one in Brezhnev, Bush and Obama have all found themselves on the same side.

Afghanistan is therefore a foreshadowing of possible conflicts throughout the most impoverished regions of the lesser developed world, especially Africa, which has become a Pentagon preoccupation.

Labels: Afghanistan, Africa, American Empire, Neoliberalism, War with Iran

July 2005. Gleneagles. It seems so long ago now:

Rockers Bob Geldof and Bono, two of the world's best known Africa fund-raisers, declared victory Friday in their campaign to push leaders at the G-8 summit to double aid to the continent.

We've pulled this off, said U2 frontman Bono.

He and Geldof praised the Group of Eight summit for pledging to double aid to Africa to $50 billion, saying the move will save the lives of hundreds of thousands of people who would have died of poverty, malaria or AIDS.

The world spoke and the politicians listened, Bono said.

In pursuit of this humanitarian agenda, Bono practiced an amnesiac anti-politics of embracing the most ignoble right wing religious and political figures:

On 3 April 2005, Bono paid a personal tribute to John Paul II and called him a street fighter and a wily campaigner on behalf of the world's poor. We would never have gotten the debts of 23 countries completely canceled without him. Bono spoke in advance of President Bush at the 54th Annual National Prayer Breakfast, held at the Hilton Washington Hotel on 2 February 2006. In a speech containing biblical references, Bono encouraged the care of the socially and economically depressed. His comments included a call for an extra one percent tithe of the United States' national budget. He brought his Christian views into harmony with other faiths by noting that Christian, Jewish, and Muslim writings all call for the care of the widow, orphan, and stranger. President Bush received praise from the singer-activist for the United States' increase in aid for the African continent. Bono continued by saying much work is left to be done to be a part of God's ongoing purposes.

Arguably, this was a marginal improvement of Bono's effusive praise for Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in 2004, when he compared them to Lennon and McCartney (the Beatles being more popular than Jesus). He justified his refusal to criticize Bush for the invasion and occupation of Iraq by saying: I work for them. If me not shooting my mouth off about the war in Iraq is the price I pay, then I’m prepared to pay it.

But there has always been Gleneagles and the pledge of the 50 billion with which to bludgeon critics . . . well, not anymore:

The world's richest nations were working on plans to reduce maternal deaths in developing countries as they sought to minimise their embarrassment over breaking aid pledges made at the Gleneagles summit five years ago.

Canada, the host nation at this year's summit, was pushing hard for an agreement that would focus assistance on preventing deaths of mothers and newborn infants, but without any commitment that the proposal would involve new money from cash-strapped western governments.

The initiative came amid signs that the summit communiqué from the G8 would omit all mention of the promises made at Gleneagles in July 2005, which involved a $50bn (£33.4bn) increase in aid by 2010, of which $25bn would go to Africa.

Until this year strong pressure from both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown at the summits that followed Gleneagles prevented countries that were failing to meet their commitments from removing any mention of the 2005 promises. David Cameron arrived in Toronto insisting that the G8 should be more than a talking shop and needed to make good on its promises, but as the final touches were being put to the communique, there was no reference to Gleneagles.

Perhaps, Bono might not have been such a useful idiot for capitalists and imperialists if he had spent just a little time talking to Naomi Klein instead of people like Larry Summers and Paul O'Neill:

AMY GOODMAN: Naomi Klein, in your piece in The Globe and Mail, you talk about the history of G20, how it was formed.

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah, you know, the G20 is a little bit of a mysterious institution. Amy, you and I were both at an event in Toronto on Friday night, both speaking at an event organized by the Council of Canadians. It was a terrific event. And Vandana Shiva was one of the other speakers, and she had a great line. She said, Ah, the G20, so young and yet so old, referring to the fact that the ideas of the G20 are so old, so predictable. But it is a young institution. It was conceived in 1999 as a summit of finance ministers. It only became a sort of an extension of the G8 as a leaders’ summit in the past two years, and that we saw in London, and we saw it in Pittsburgh, and we have now seen it in Toronto. So this incarnation of the G20 as a leaders’ summit is very young indeed.

But yeah, ten years ago, Paul Martin, who was then Canada’s finance minister, later Canada’s prime minister, was at a meeting with Larry Summers. This is 1999, so Summers at that time was Bill Clinton’s nominee for Treasury secretary. And the two men were discussing this idea to expand the G7 into a larger grouping to respond to the fact that developing country economies like China and India were growing very quickly, and they wanted to include them into this club, and they were under pressure to do so. So, what Martin and Summers did—and this history we only learned last week. This really wasn’t a history that had been told. So this story came out in The Globe and Mail. And it turns out that the two men didn’t have a piece of paper. They wanted to—I don’t know how this would possibly be the case, but their story is that they wanted to make a list of the countries that they would invite into this club, and they couldn’t find a piece of paper, so they found a manilla envelope and wrote on the back of the manilla envelope a list of countries. And by Paul Martin’s admission, those countries were not simply the twenty top economies of the world, the biggest GDPs. They were also the countries that were most strategic to the United States. So Larry Summers would make a decision that obviously Iran wouldn’t be in, but Saudi Arabia would be. And so, Saudi Arabia is in. Thailand, it made sense to include Thailand, because it had actually been the Thai economy, which, two years earlier, had set off the Asian economic crisis, but Thailand wasn’t as important to the US strategically as Indonesia, so Indonesia was in and not Thailand. So what you see from this story is that the creation of the G20 was an absolutely top-down decision, two powerful men deciding together to do this, making, you know, an invitation-only list.

And what you really see is that this is an attempt to get around the United Nations, where every country in the world has a vote, and to create this expanded G7 or G8, where they invite some developing countries, but not so many that they can overpower or outvote the Western—the traditional Western powers. So, as this happened, we have also seen a weakening and an undermining of the United Nations. And I think that that’s the context in which the G20 needs to be understood. And that’s why a lot of the activists in Toronto this week were arguing that the G20 is an illegitimate institution and the price tag is—that we, as Canadian taxpayers, have had to take on for hosting this summit, you know, $1.2 billion, is particularly unacceptable, given that we have the United Nations, where these countries can meet in a much more democratic, much more legitimate forum, as opposed to this ad hoc invitation-only club from the back of an envelope in Larry Summers’s office.

The countries of the G-8, as well as the more recent lesser developed invitees for the larger G-20, were all too willing to allow Bono to come along for the ride, until they decided that they weren't getting anything out of it anymore, at which point they unceremoniously kicked him to the curb. If he hadn't trumpeted his illusory achievements quite so loudly, I'd feel more sympathy for him.

Labels: Africa, American Empire, Celebrities, G-20, G-8, Neoliberalism

Through recently executed agreements with Colombia, the US has grand ambitions for the military bases it intends to construct there:

With or without nuclear weapons, the bilateral agreement on the seven Colombian bases, signed on 30 October in Bogota, risks a costly new arms race in a region. SIPRI [Stockholm International Peace Research Institute], which is funded by the Swedish government, said it was concerned about rising arms expenditure in Latin America draining resources from social programmes that the poor of the region need.

Much of the new US strategy was clearly set out in May in an enthusiastic US Air Force (USAF) proposal for its military construction programme for the fiscal year 2010. One Colombian air base, Palanquero, was, the proposal said, unique "in a critical sub-region of our hemisphere where security and stability is under constant threat from... anti-US governments".

The proposal sets out a scheme to develop Palanquero which, the USAF says, offers an opportunity for conducting "full-spectrum operations throughout South America.... It also supports mobility missions by providing access to the entire continent, except the Cape Horn region, if fuel is available, and over half the continent if un-refuelled". ("Full-spectrum operations" is the Pentagon's jargon for its long-established goal of securing crushing military superiority with atomic and conventional weapons across the globe and in space.)

Palanquero could also be useful in ferrying arms and personnel to Africa via the British mid-Atlantic island of Ascension, French Guiana and Aruba, the Dutch island off Venezuela. The US has access to them all.

The USAF proposal contradicted the assurances constantly issued by US diplomats that the bases would not be used against third countries. These were repeated by the Colombian military to the Colombian congress on 29 July. That USAF proposal was hastily reissued this month after the signature of the agreement – but without the reference to "anti-US governments". This has led to suggestions of either US government incompetence, or of a battle between a gung-ho USAF and a State Department conscious of the damage done to US relations with Latin America by its leaders' strong objections to the proposal.

Even as the US expands its military operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Pentagon is already contemplating future conflicts in South America and Africa. Apparently, the Pentagon assumes that the US will not be able to obtain resources from these regions through commerce, recourse to the old imperialist methods of violence will be required. By contrast, China is taking a different, investment and trade oriented approach in regard to both continents, as indicated here and here. One can only hope that both South America and Africa find a way to evade the militarism of the US and the mercantilism of China and forge their own path to economic development.

Labels: Africa, American Empire, China, Colombia, South America, US Military

From The Guardian:

The oil giant Shell has agreed to pay $15.5m (£9.7m) in settlement of a legal action in which it was accused of having collaborated in the execution of the writer Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other leaders of the Ogoni tribe of southern Nigeria.

The settlement is one of the largest payouts agreed by a multinational corporation charged with human rights violations. Shell and its Nigerian subsidiary SPDC have not conceded to or admitted any of the allegations, pleading innocent to all the civil charges.

But the scale of the payment is being seen by experts in human rights law as a step towards international businesses being made accountable for their environmental and social actions.

In the past, it has been notoriously difficult to bring and sustain legal actions involving powerful corporations.

The settlement follows three weeks of intensive negotiation between the plaintiffs, who largely consisted of relatives of the executed Ogoni nine, and Shell. "We spent a lot of time trying to put together something that would be acceptable to both sides, and our people are very pleased with the result," said Anthony DiCaprio, the lead lawyer for the Ogoni side working with the New York-based Centre for Constitutional Rights.

5 million dollars will go towards a trust fund to support educational and community initiatives in the Niger delta. It will be interesting to see how it is implemented, because there is a possibility that the fund will become yet another form of social control.

Let's hope that it doesn't happen. Here is what the Center's press release says about it:

One of the aspects of the settlement is to establish The Kiisi Trust. “Kiisi” means “progress” in the Ogoni languages. The Trust will fund education, health, community development and other benefits for the Ogoni people and their communities, including educational endowments, skills development, women’s programs, agricultural development, small enterprise support, and adult literacy.

The Trust Deed was made by the Estate of Ken Saro-Wiwa, Owens Wiwa, the Estate of John Kpuinen, Karalolo Kogbara, Michael Tema Vizor, the Estate of Saturday Doobee, the Estate of Felix Nuate, the Estate of Daniel Gbokoo, the Children of Barinem and Peace Kiobel, and the Estate of Uebari N-nah. This trust will facilitate community participation in decisions related to the use and enjoyment of the Trust Fund, and emphasizes the importance of transparency in its operations.

According to the Center, the settlement is only the beginning of a process of reconciliation:

The Ogoni people have many outstanding issues with Shell, and it is Shell’s responsibility to resolve those issues with the Ogoni people themselves. The Plaintiffs do not speak for the Ogoni people, nor have they attempted to resolve those issues.

The Center has won a great victory within the constraints of the Anglo American legal system. But the amount of the settlement is, sadly, merely the cost of doing business for a transnational energy company like Shell. For example, would it induce Shell to act differently in the future? There is good reason to doubt it. So, in this respect, the settlement is the beginning of a process, not the end of one, as recognized by the Center.

Labels: Africa, Imperialism, Neoliberalism, Nigeria, Oil Companies, Political Violence

Pope Benedict XVI is traveling through Africa, and, as one might expect, hypocrisy and insensitivity are accompanying him on his journey:

Pope Benedict XVI said condoms are not the answer to the AIDS epidemic in Africa and can make the problem worse, setting off criticism Tuesday as he began a weeklong trip to the continent where some 22 million people are living with HIV.

Benedict's first statement on an issue that has divided even Catholic clergy working with AIDS patients came hours before he arrived in Cameroon's capital -- greeted by thousands of flag-waving faithful who stood shoulder-to-shoulder in red dirt fields and jammed downtown streets for a glimpse of the pontiff's motorcade.

In his four years as pope, Benedict had never directly addressed condom use, although his position is not new. His predecessor, Pope John Paul II, often said that sexual abstinence -- not condoms -- was the best way to prevent the spread of the disease.

Benedict also said the Roman Catholic Church was at the forefront of the battle against AIDS.

''You can't resolve it with the distribution of condoms,'' the pope told reporters aboard the Alitalia plane heading to Yaounde. ''On the contrary, it increases the problem.''

The pope said a responsible and moral attitude toward sex would help fight the disease, as he answered questions submitted in advance by reporters traveling on the plane. His response was presumably also prepared in advance.

As noted elsewhere in the article, three-quarters of all AIDS deaths worldwide in 2007 were in sub-Saharan Africa, where some 22 million people are infected with HIV -- accounting for two-thirds of the world's infections.

I could go on and on about this, but that really says it all. People are dying because of this nonsense, dying in large numbers, and it is an ongoing outrage. There should be protests directed against the Church exponentially larger than those ignited by the sexual molestation scandals.

Labels: Africa, AIDS, Pope Benedict XVI, Religion, Sexuality

Between work, family and writer's block, I haven't posted anything for awhile, but hope to get in the swing of things soon. Meanwhile, some of you may remember my earlier post about the pseudo-scientific imperialism of James Watson.

Turns out that Watson, like those old Southern plantation owners and overseers, has a much closer connection to Africa that he thought:

A Nobel Prize-winning scientist who provoked a public outcry by claiming black Africans were less intelligent than whites has a DNA profile with up to 16 times more genes of black origin than the average white European.

An analysis of the genome of James Watson showed that 16 per cent of his genes were likely to have come from a black ancestor of African descent. By contrast, most people of European descent would have no more than 1 per cent.

"This level is what you would expect in someone who had a great-grandparent who was African," said Kari Stefansson of deCODE Genetics, whose company carried out the analysis. "It was very surprising to get this result for Jim."

The findings were made available after Dr Watson became only the second person to publish his fully sequenced genome online earlier this year. Dr Watson was forced to resign his post as head of a research laboratory in New York shortly after triggering an international furore by questioning the comparative intelligence of Africans. In an interview during his recent British book tour, the American scientist said he was "inherently gloomy about the prospects for Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really".

I never cease to be amazed at the extent to which people are still willing to believe long discredited notions of racial purity. From Isabella to Jackson to Hitler, the notion persists, despite the history of human ingenuity associated with migrating from one place to another. In this instance, Watson has accidentally indicted his own intelligence, with his record of scientific achievement invalidating his odious racial doctrine.

Labels: Africa, African Americans, Imperialism, Racism

From today's Independent:

One of the world's most eminent scientists was embroiled in an extraordinary row last night after he claimed that black people were less intelligent than white people and the idea that "equal powers of reason" were shared across racial groups was a delusion.

James Watson, a Nobel Prize winner for his part in the unravelling of DNA who now runs one of America's leading scientific research institutions, drew widespread condemnation for comments he made ahead of his arrival in Britain today for a speaking tour at venues including the Science Museum in London.

The 79-year-old geneticist reopened the explosive debate about race and science in a newspaper interview in which he said Western policies towards African countries were wrongly based on an assumption that black people were as clever as their white counterparts when "testing" suggested the contrary. He claimed genes responsible for creating differences in human intelligence could be found within a decade.

The newly formed Equality and Human Rights Commission, successor to the Commission for Racial Equality, saidit was studying Dr Watson's remarks "in full". Dr Watson told The Sunday Times that he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really". He said there was a natural desire that all human beings should be equal but "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true".

It is a slick, icy slope. Deny the role of the European powers (and, later, the US) in destabilizing Africa, and you have to start searching for other reasons why the peoples of the continent are in such distress. Doctrines of racial inferiority that go back to Elizabethan times, if not earlier, remain well-suited to justify the continued economic exploitation of the continent by the G-8.

Most political analysts, though, balk at Watson's crude invocation of lesser intelligence for blacks. Instead, they characterize the peoples and governments of Africa as incorrigibly corrupt, a subtle, less offensive variation on the old, purportedly instinctive licentiousness associated with dark skin. It is really quite brazen, given the innovations in the practice of governmental corruption attributable to Bush and Blair.

Labels: Africa, African Americans, Imperialism, Racism

Funny what you discover when you read an article out of curiosity. Today, the San Francisco Chronicle published this article with the headline Monterey Soldier Dies in Mali. What was the soldier doing in Mali? Here's the explanation:

A 35-year-old Army soldier from Monterey was killed Saturday while serving a non-combat mission in Kidal, Mali.

Sgt. 1st Class Sean K. Mitchell was serving in a cooperative program between American and African troops which is meant to improve border security and bolster counter-terrorism efforts in the western African nation, said Major John Dorrian, a spokesman for the U.S. European Command.

Mitchell was killed when the tent he was working in was thrown during high winds, said Dorrian. Four other soldiers were injured, and are now being treated at a U.S. military hospital in Germany, he said.

Mitchell was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 10th Special Forces Group in Stuttgart, Germany. He was part of the Special Operations Command Europe's Trans-Sahara Counter Terrorism Partnership, a joint program between the departments of State and Defense.

The program is a cooperative effort that centers on training African troops and "building their capacity and capability," to fight terrorism, Dorrian said.

Apparently, Mitchell was participating in the newly created United States Africa Command as part of the Trans-Saharan Counterterrorism Initiative. According to Marine Corps General James L. Jones, willing partners in the program include Algeria, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Senegal, Nigeria and Tunisia.

Wikipedia blandly informs us that: Discussion over the need for a new continental command has been ongoing since 2003–2004 with the rise of tensions in the oil rich Niger Delta region (see Nigerian Oil Crisis), which supplies a large amount of oil to the United States.

Indeed. Things are not going well in Nigeria these days, especially if you are a foreigner involved in the oil industry. One wonders, how long before the US gets imbroiled in this counflict? After all, the unrest in Nigeria has contributed to recent increases in the price of oil to a near record high. Or, are we involved there already?

As someone with a sociological bent, influenced by postmodernism, and its repudiation of grand historical narratives, I try to be wary of broad, reductionist explanations of events. Even so, I think that we can safely say that, under the Bush Administration especially, the consequences of covert American intervention tends to invariably escalate the level of violence.

Let's hope, against the historical record, that increasing US involvement in Africa will not involve the sort of violent covert operations, such as paramilitary death squad activity, that the US encouraged in Central America and Iraq. As for Sergeant Mitchell, the article rather oddly describes his death as a non-combat one. Possibly, but, given the nature of the mission, openly acknowledged in the article, it seems a little deceptive to describe it this way.

Labels: "War on Terror", Africa, American Empire, Death Squads

An interesting item from the Guardian:

Starbucks, the giant US coffee chain, has used its muscle to block an attempt by Ethiopia's farmers to copyright their most famous coffee bean types, denying them potential earnings of up to £47m a year, said Oxfam.

The development agency said the Ethiopian government last year filed copyright applications to trademark its most famous coffee names - Sidamo, Harar and Yirgacheffe. Securing the rights to these names would enable the impoverished African country to control their use in the market and allow farmers to receive a greater share of the retail price.

The move would have increased its annual export earnings from coffee by 25%.

Apparently, after Starbucks withdrew a earlier application with the United States Patent and Trademark Office for one of these varieties, Sidamo, Ethiopia attempted to obtain copyright protection for all three of them, and Starbucks objected.

It is easy to read this story as a classic instance of attempted transnational expropriation of the brand identification created by the peoples of Ethiopia, and it is certainly an accurate one. But, there is more to the story. For example, the very fact that consumers around the world apparently relate to Ethiopian coffee as a function of its brand names is noteworthy, an indication that the abstraction of the corporate business model into intellectual property, such as brand names, trade secrets and patents, has permeated even the most undeveloped countries. We are far beyond the boundaries of the branded world described by Naomi Klein in No Logo in 1996.

After all, there is something quite striking about an agricultural commodity having a substantially increased value because of the public's identification with its name. To some extent, this has always been true. I grew up in Georgia, and Vidalia onions are nationally praised for their gentle, sweet flavor. In this instance, however, economic value has been split into the components of the physical bean itself and its varietal name.

The consequences of such a subconscious consumer separation of value between commodity and varietal name is alarming, because it compels Ethiopian coffee growers to play by the rules of the neoliberal legal and economic system. As the article states: Securing the rights to these names would enable the impoverished African country to control their use in the market and allow farmers to receive a greater share of the retail price. In other words, Ethiopia could monopolize the marketing of their coffee globally by reference to the same intellectual property rights enforced by the transnationals.

Sadly, it appears that such an approach is necessary to defend against corporate predations into the world of indigenous peoples. As Vandana Shiva has written:

The expansion of "intellectual property rights" into the domain of life forms and biodiversity, and the globalisation of this regime through Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights Agreements of GATT/WTO, has been an attempt to enclose the biological and intellectual commons. This publication is a step towards the recovery of the commons, especially for the two - thirds of India who live outside the livelihoods provided by the state and the market in what is referred to as the biodiversity based economy.

The biodiversity based economy of India represents the poorest communities in the marginalised regions. Their access to biodiversity and their use of their indigenous knowledge and skills is their primary means of livelihood security.

The "piracy" of their indigenous innovation through patents, and the diversion of their biological resources to global markets undermines the livelihoods of the two - thirds of India - women, tribals, peasants, pastoralists and fisherfolk. It also threatens the biodiversity base which they have protected because their survival has depended upon it.

The recovery of the commons for traditional communities is based on their recognition of their own rights and recognition by the state that communities have their own rights, knowledge, and values. This recognition by the formal legal systems would not give the state the right to intrude in local biodiversity utilisation patterns based on community rights, but it would create an obligation on the state to prevent external actors from "pirating" local resources and indigenous knowledge, and from imposing property rights regimes that counter community rights and cultural values.

Shiva emphasizes what she and others have described as biopiracy, the expropriation of indigenous innovation through patents, which grant the recipient the right to charge a fee for its use, but this Ethiopian episode reveals that, even if one successfully resists the seizure of the intangible value of a commodity through a patent, transnationals may now accomplish a similar objective by copyrighting the varietal names by which it is known in the marketplace.

Even worse, as already suggested, indigenous peoples must implicitly accept the terms of the neoliberal system to preserve what little has been left to them, at least as measured financially, by perfecting patents and copyrights before transnationals do so. There is no recovery of the commons, merely a more benign enclosure by Ethiopia to avoid the more pernicious one sought by Starbucks.

Hat tip to the Angry Arab for bringing the Guardian story to my attention.

Labels: Activism, Africa, Neoliberalism, Self-Determination