I'm not that informed about this, but, in light of this appeal for support, I thought that it would be a good idea to post some excerpts from some articles about what is currently transpiring in Chile:

Protesters have clashed violently with police in Chile's capital to decry President Sebastián Pinera's policies, as a poll showed him to be the least popular leader in the two decades since the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship.

Demonstrators led by students demanding cheaper and better state education blocked roads and lit fires as police used water cannons and tear gas to quell the latest outcry against the conservative billionaire.

Some protesters in Santiago and as far afield as Copiapo in the far north started banging pots and pans in a "cacerolazo", a popular form of protest in Latin America reminiscent of Chile's 1973-1990 dictatorship. The term cacerolazo was the world's top trending topic on Twitter on Thursday night.

Over 552 people have been detained across the country. According to wikipedia, students are protesting proposed neoliberal education reforms that run contrary to their demands for a more egalitarian educational system. Such protests appear to be an extension of protests centered around almost identical issues in 2008.

Here is another account of yesterday's protests:

Riot police in the Chilean capital, Santiago, have used tear gas and water cannon to break up demonstrations by students demanding educational reform.

Dozens were detained as they tried to march to the city centre despite a warning that the protest was illegal.

Chile has seen weeks of rallies by students and teachers demanding reform and more investment in education.

President Sebastian Pinera has pledged extra funding, but student leaders say his offer is not enough.

Protesters are calling for the government to take control of the country's public education system, saying the current system is underfunded and unequal.

Riot police moved to clear the demonstrators as they tried to rally in Santiago's Plaza Italia in the city centre. At least 130 students were arrested, while two police officers were reportedly injured in the scuffles.

Students and teachers apparently want the end of the privatized educational system imposed by the Pinochet dictatorship:

Students demand the end of the school voucher system in pre-school, primary and secondary levels and the end of the current public university financing policy, that mixes deliberate underfinancing, a shadow toll called Indirect State Payment (Aporte Fiscal Indirecto, in Spanish), high parents' payments even in public universities (tuition fees in private and state universities are about the same), and a state-guaranteed loan scheme that allow private banks to finance already high tuition fees. The Chilean system, although defended by researchers linked to the Heritage Foundation, is criticized by researchers like Martin Carnoy, blaming on it the tremendous inequalities across all the Chilean educational system, measured by OECD's standards. Chile only spends 4.4% of GDP on education, compared to the 7% of GDP recommended by the UN for developed nations.

The students want those systems replaced by a true publicly financed and managed education system, covering from pre-school to tertiary education. Some segments of the student movement have called for other changes, such as a new constitution or the renationalization of Chile's copper resources in order to fund public education.

Given that the current educational system is an essential component of the neoliberal social order in Chile, and an obvious profit center for lenders, it is hard to imagine how it can be dismantled in the absence of a broader, more ambitious protest movement.

Labels: Activism, Chile, Neoliberalism, South America, YouTube

UPDATE 2: From Issandr El Amrani at The Arabist:

The radical-theological option that Bin Laden represented as a solution to the state of the Arab world has long been discredited. It was discredited before it even began, in that it was a result of the failure of the violent Islamist movements of the 1970s-1990s era. Also discredited, or at least on the ropes, are the pro-US reformist option of the moderate Arab regimes. Moderate, in the way Saudi Arabia or Mubarak's Egypt was, and reformist, because they are interested in changing to survive, not making a radical break. But the people spoke and they don't want reform, they want rupture.

UPDATE 1: From the Angry Arab, As'ad Abukhalil:

But what is not yet acknowledged here in the US is that Bin Laden is a product of horrific US policies in the Cold War: of their alliance with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. The people in Pakistan and Afghanistan would be relieved today: not because they hated Bin Laden (many do sympathize with him only to spite the US), but because scores of Afghans and Pakistanis have been killed over the years during the campaign to get and kill Bin Laden. Remember that time in late 2001 when the US incinerated a convoy there because a tall dark man was seen getting into one of the cars. The US intelligence analyst on the scene assumed that there were no tall people other Bin Laden. But the factors that produced Bin Laden and Al-Qa`idah are still there: the US is still very tempted to arm and fund fanatical groups if they think it is politically convenient for US national security interests. Look at that lousy Libyan Transitional Council: there are fanatics in the ranks and I assume that we will hear from some of them, especially once they declare the victory of their holy cause.

INITIAL POST: Osama Bin Laden is dead, and I am not particularly interested in whether it happened yesterday or was merely announced yesterday. After all, there are many who believe that he has been dead for years. Instead, I am more interested in how the public announcement of his death reveals, yet again, an inability by Americans to seize upon opportunities to reflect upon the interrelationship between violence and US policy.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, I expressed the hope, however misguided, that Americans, having experienced such traumatic acts of violence, would now empathize with many others around the world who have suffered similarly. For example, the 9/11 attacks took place on the same day in 1973 that the Chilean military, with the support of the US, forcibly removed President Salvador Allende from power and subsequently killed thousands of Chileans. Shortly thereafter, Chile, along with other US backed dictatorships in the region, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Peru, launched Operation Condor, a covert intelligence operation with the express purpose of exterminating the left in the southern cone of South America. With the support of the CIA, these countries killed, at minimum, 40,000 people and incarcerated 200,000 others. In other words, the destabilization of Chile by Nixon and Kissinger and subsequent military coup by Pinochet were preconditions for a more ambitious effort to erase the left in much of South America. The coincidence that both 9/11 and the Chilean coup occurred on the same date could have served to provoke Americans to reflect upon the horrible consequences of the infliction of such violence for political purposes. Beyond South America, we could have understood the horrible suffering that resulted from US military and covert operations all over the world.

We could have taken responsibility for our actions even as we grieved over those who died on 9/11, and strove to induce other countries to resolve political disputes non-violently. But this would have required Americans to relate to 9/11 as an act of violence, as opposed to an act of nihilistic resistance to American hegemony, and identify with others who have experienced such violence as well, regardless of their nationality, religion and political ideology. Unfortunately, most Americans responded vengefully, villifying those around the world who objected to the militaristic response to the attacks and the exploitation of them to extend the reach of US imperial influence. Invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq followed, and, to this day, despite the lack of any significant al-Qaeda presence in either country, US troops remain, as Bush and Obama have discovered new enemies to justify their presence. Needless to say, the death and destruction associated with these occupations far exceeds that related to 9/11. Sadly, in Iraq, the US has relied upon the same kind of death squad activity that was such a prominent feature of Operation Condor, as well as covert operations in Vietnam, Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua. And, under Obama, the US has expanded its military and covert operations in Pakistan, Yemen and Libya.

In this, Bin Laden succeeded in his one of his primary objectives, to reduce much of the relationship between the US and the countries of the Middle East and Central Asia to one of military violence or the threat of it. But, as Baudrillard predicted, this effort to overcome the vulnerability revealed by the 9/11 attacks merely increased the perception of US weakness. US troops are mired in conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan without any prospects for success by any recognizable standard, other than the perpetuation of conflict indefinitely. To the extent that people are euphoric over Bin Laden's death, this is a measure of the permanence of his achievement. Paradoxically, though, one of the consequences has been an eruption of more secular, more inclusive activism throughout North Africa and the Middle East, an eruption in which al-Qaeda has been conspicuously absent. Hence, Americans are celebrating success in a struggle that has already been rendered largely irrelevant.

Bin Laden often expressed his belief that this objective would lead to the attainment of another, more serious one, the economic decline of the US, a decline so pronounced that it would no longer be capable of imposing its will upon other countries. Here, the record is mixed. Admittedly, countries in Asia and South America have a freedom of maneuver that they did not possess prior to 9/11. About seven months later, in April 2002, Hugo Chavez survived a coup supported by the US, signalling to the rest of South America that the door was now open to the emergence of center-left governments. It is still uncertain, however, as to whether US economic influence is been impaired globally. The US, with the assistance of Germany and the United Kingdom, has successfully imposed a program of extreme austerity upon Europe, marked by the evisceration of historic social welfare programs, as a means of addressing the severe global recession of 2008 and 2009.

Meanwhile, within the US, the ongoing war on terror serves to ring fence spending on the military and the intelligence services, despite substantial budget deficits, thus empowering those who aspire to eliminate the remaining vestiges of social protection initiated during the New Deal and the Great Society. At this time, it would be more accurate to say that Bin Laden indirectly participated in the creation of circumstances that have made it possible to reconfigure the global economy in ways even more amenable to finance capital. It is tempting to say that Bin Laden lacked a sophisticated understanding of the relationship between the US and global capital, but this is doubtful. Rather, it is more likely that he considered the aggressive neoliberalism of recent years as compatible with his social philosophy and beneficial to the future of al-Qaeda. In this, there is a perverse, unacknowledged alliance between al-Qaeda, neoliberals and neoconsevatives, as all three groups are in agreement about the urgency associated with the need to marginalize and impoverish workers even if it is in the service of strikingly different visions of the future.

Labels: "War on Terror", Al Qaeda, American Empire, Barack Obama, Chile, Hugo Chavez, Neoliberalism, Obituaries, Osama Bin Laden, South America, Venezuela

Just before leaving on vacation, I had the opportunity to see Patricio Guzman's epic documentary, The Battle of Chile, at the Pacific Film Archive. In this approximately four and a half hour film, released in 1975, he profiles the intensifying class conflict during the presidency of Salvador Allende that culminated in the 1973 coup. Fortunately, for those of you who are interested, the film is available on DVD.

Guzman lived in Chile during the events in question, and filmed them, and the public response to them, as they happened. His emphasis is upon the transformation of society by collective, popular action, and the challenges associated with such an endeavor, as most concisely expressed in a famous sentence from Allende's last speech during the coup: History is ours and the people make it. Within the polarized, politically charged climate of Chile in the early 1970s, such a seemingly homogenized statement of political rhetoric constituted a commitment of perpetual resistance. Guzman's effort to smuggle the footage for the film out of Chile to Sweden so that it could be edited and publicly released was one form of such resistance.

For it was within Chile that the neoliberals entered their Garden of Eden, implementing policies of extreme austerity and privatization by means of a destabilization of society orchestrated by the CIA, ITT and the AFL-CIO and the subsequent authoritarian social controls associated with a military regime. It was here that Milton Friedman and the Chicago School, with their purported concern about ensuring that people are free to choose, persuaded General Augusto Pinochet to radically implement capital friendly, market based policies against the will of much of the Chilean populace. In an instance of dialectical irony, the truck drivers, copper workers and middle class people that served in the vanguard of opposition to Allende found themselves among the victims of Pinochet's policies. People around the world have been fighting the export of these neoliberal policies with varying degrees of success ever since. Guzman conveys the ferocity of the initial struggle within Chile as a sort of fatalistic, documentary noir.

Of course, this is a well known history, a tale told many times, most recently by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine. Lesser known is the provocation for the coup, the vision of society that so threatened the middle class, the military and economic elites, including investors thousands of miles away in the United States. In his documentary, Guzman focuses upon the people and social movements that sought to socialize Chilean society and the opposition to them. As Part 1 began, I was overwhelmed by the emotional political participation of people within Chilean society. From the socially alienated, politically disengaged world of 2011, I almost thought that The Battle of Chile was a newly created film genre, the political science fiction period film. One cannot dismiss this by claiming that Guzman was speaking solely with politically engaged people, as he conducted many of his interviews with people from all walks of life, especially those involved in industrial production. He is seemingly everywhere, filming mass rallies, election campaigns, factory occupations, land seizures and organized campaigns to transport people and supply food during the effort to disrupt the Chilean economy and interviewing the participants.

By doing so, Guzman reveals the collective liberatory possibilities embedded within the emergence of popular power, the fusion of political and economic power within communities, administered through increasingly anti-authoritarian forms of social organization, something that, in a different context, Samuel Huntington alarmingly described as a democratic distemper, a situation whereby people demanded more of the government while becoming increasingly resistant to its authority. Within Chile, democratic distemper took the specific form of workers, who had been exploited by their employers and investors for decades while living in terrible conditions, responding to the election of Allende by accelerating the pace of the nationalization of some sectors of the economy by taking over taking over factories themselves. Meanwhile, peasants carried out their own land reform independent of the government by taking land for themselves. Parallel to these efforts, people mobilized to distribute necessities, such as food, during times of scarcity, and provide transportation during CIA financed strikes by transport workers, on a more egalitarian, socially conscious basis. Such actions, combined with the alliance by local economic elites and the United States to make the daily lives of Chileans more and more chaotic and difficult, shattered the effort of Allende to administer a peaceful path to socialism by taking control of the commanding heights of the economy for the benefit of middle and lower class Chileans.

The argument on the left as to the whether such actions facilitated the coup remains, as near as I can tell, unresolved. My impression, after watching the film, is that Guzman sided with those who believe that Allende should have more forcefully embraced the seizure of economic power by workers and peasants within their communities and the creation of local institutions to administer them. Of course, I can't say whether the socialist experiment in Chile would have survived if Allende, and the coalition of left political parties in support of him, had decided to do so, but I can say with more confidence that this democratization of the economy must have been the most frightening form of democratic distemper that imperialists like Huntington could imagine. The coup was, in essence, the Huntington solution to this peril, the reassertion of hierarchical political power and the cultivation of political apathy. In Chile, both were violently enforced. If private property and the hegemony of capital are to be preserved, there are potentially desirable limits to the indefinite extension of political democracy. One suspects that Pinochet was more interested in the social dimension of the policies of the Chicago School, the potential for eliminating possible sources of collective resistance through atomization, than he was in its economic theory, which ultimately, within less than 20 years, resulted in such a severe economic crisis than he was forced from power.

But Guzman also has a clear eye for the internal problems associated with economic democratization. For example, such a process makes great demands of the populace. In one telling sequence, he films a meeting where a cadre attempts to persuade a group of workers that they need to proceed carefully because they work in a plant owned by a Swiss company. Switzerland, he earnestly explains to them, is a member of the Club of Paris, and the Club makes important decisions related to the Chilean foreign debt. Needless to say, they are not convinced, with one person telling the cadre that the workers in the plant will not understand it, that he needs to address issues of importance to them. Guzman had a great insight here, one that can be misunderstood. It is not so much that the workers were too self-centered or ignorant to engage with what the apparently better educated, more articulate cadre had to say. Instead, he contrasts the self-confidence of the workers, and a perspective based upon experience, with the practical diffidence of the cadre derived from abstract knowledge, all manifestations of the difficulty in communication that they must overcome. In this, Guzman echoes Godard, without losing his optimism. Hidden within this nascent collective discourse is the sinister allure of leisure, one of the most significant creations of capitalism in the last 100 years. Working your shift, participating in the distribution of food during your off days and going to meetings at night is emotionally and physically exhausting. Better to leave the decisions and the provision of services to others and watch television.

Neoliberalism, leisure and their accompanying disassembly of collective forms of social organization, have come at a high cost. This is one of the themes that has been engrafted onto The Battle of Chile with the passage of time. Mass mobilization against the brutalities of global capitalism are no longer possible, and it is absurd to believe that it can peaceably tamed through the electoral process, as was attempted in Chile, with the possible exception of South America. Hence, they have been replaced by what is commonly called terrorism. In Italy, Germany and the United States, the process was surprisingly rapid, with mass protest movements fragmenting into covert, small group violence within about 10 years. None of them sparked resistance sufficient to threaten the established order, and, now, decades later, hostility to capitalist excess in all three places is primarily expressed through xenophobia. Most of the participants ended up isolated from the marginalized people in society that motivated them. Meanwhile, with the developmental aspirations of the lesser developed world aborted, such violence has persisted, but it has not politically inspired the millions of wageless people who live in it. So far, as noted, it is only in South America where the residue of the Chilean experience still resonates, as described by Ben Dangl, but the achievements to date have been of a mild, Keynesian nature. One of the forgotten aspects of the coup against Allende is that it signaled the beginning of a coordinated, attempted extermination of the left throughout the southern cone with assistance of the CIA, a campaign known as Operation Condor. At minimum, it has been estimated that the governments of Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, Bolivia and Uruguay killed 60,000 people and incarcerated 400,000 more.

Labels: Activism, American Empire, Chile, Death Squads, Elections, Film Notes, Marxism, South America

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

Back in July 2007, I reviewed Ben Dangl's The Price of Fire, an excellent book that described how Bolivians collectively organized against the neoliberal globalization process to preserve their access to the resources necessary for their survival. Now, Dangl is back with a new book, Dancing with Dynamite, addressing the problematic relationship that the social movements of several South American countries have with the left leaning governments of the region. Many of these movements are associated with the historic grievances of campesinos and indigenous peoples going back centuries.

It is a timely subject, one that, as with most issues associated with South America, we are tempted to push to the side because of our ongoing, necessary preoccupations with the perpetually expanding war on terror and the sub-proletarianization of the US and Europe. But, given that the people there have resisted the postmodern atomization of social life throughout much of the rest of the world, and insisted upon alternatives to neoliberalism, we should remain engaged with what is happening there. For, it is primarily within South America that we perceive the prospect of either a post-capitalist order or one in which the voraciousness of capital is sharply curtailed. His work provides us with new insights and encourages us to speculate about the social forces that will shape the future.

Generally, Dangl presents a dynamic whereby social movements seek to obtain greater autonomy within the nation state, sometimes in conflict with the electoral left within government and sometimes not, while aligning with leftist political parties when necessary to prevent the reemergence of right wing control as it is universally acknowledged that a return to rightist repression and neoliberal economic policy would be catastrophic. He suggests that social movements retain the most effectiveness in terms of achieving their aspirations and containing the rightist threat, when they preserve an independent stance in relation to the political process. Dangl describes this complex, often contradictory relationship between social movements and leftist political parties as a dance, one that requires cooperation without cooptation.

Both Bolivia and Venezuela are interesting examples of how this dynamic plays out on the ground because of their relative distance from American influence. Not surprisingly, the chapters about the social movements in these countries are the longest ones in the book, and Dangl brings out the similarities and differences in regard to the relationship of their social movements to the state. Both countries are governed by charismatic leaders, who, by virtue of their personal appeal, have the capability of incorporating independent activism into their electoral organizations. But both also require a vibrant, activist culture to remain politically viable.

However, in Bolivia, Dangl relates how Morales, and his political party, the Movement Toward Socialism, the MAS, have, by and large, successfully channeled pre-existing demands for the transformation of society into the decisionmaking processes of representative government. He expresses concern about his discovery that the community organizations of El Alto, once a center of anti-authoritarian resistance to state authority, have become quiescent. Meanwhile, in Venezuela, Chavez remains an inspirational figure for millions of poor Venezuelans, one who encourages them to take charge of their communities through demands for public services, such as water and power, as well as by seeking legal recognition of land seizures, housing developments and cooperative factory takeovers, frequently in the face of institutional resistance. Paradoxically, social movements in Venezuela face the challenge of becoming powerful enough to effectively organize themselves independent of the government, while those in Bolivia struggle to preserve their hard fought independence.

Perhaps, this is attributable to the differing socioeconomic terrain in the two countries. Social movements in Bolivia, especially ones involving indigenous peoples, have the express purpose of decentralizing power to the point of achieving the dissolution of the nation state itself. Conversely, decentralization has been a prominent feature of Venezuelan life for decades, with the people there having lived through the rapid urbanization of the country in the absence of a strong administrative presence. Furthermore, indigenous people play a more prominent role in Bolivia because they constitute a substantial part of the population, while, in Venezuela, they are much less so. Hence, the people of Bolivia have a stronger tradition of resistance to the nation state form of organization imposed by Europeans, resulting in a strong anti-authoritarian sensibility, while the Venezuelan left retains the influence of Trotsky and Luxemburg, probably reinforced through various waves of immigration. But, despite such different ideological traditions, Dangl implies that the momemtum in both countries appears to be in the same direction, towards the creation of a highly democratized Keynesian social welfare state.

Unfortunately, there is a more sinister possibility, as revealed by Dangl's exploration of social and political conditions in Paraguay. In 2008, former Catholic bishop Fernando Lugo won the presidential election there, a historic victory for the left in a country dominated by an oligarchy for decades. But, upon visiting there, Dangl discovers that little has changed in the last two years. One political analyst tells Dangl that the powerful interests in the country can be described as follows:

1) the oligarchy, consisting of soy growers and cattle ranchers who rely upon paramilitaries to allow them to expand

2) the narco-traffickers who pay off politicians

3) the lumpen business class, which relies upon international trade and black market goods

4) the transnational corporations who that buy and export soy, cotton and sugar

Accordingly, poor urban and campesino movements remain marginalized, despite Lugo's victory. Campesinos are finding it hard to retain their land against the incursions of the transnational soy business, tragically related to Dangl through the experiences of the victims, much less obtain more through land reform.

Of course, one can imagine similar outcomes in other countries throughout the region, including left bastions like Venezuela and Bolivia, as James Petras has already done. There is nothing irreversible about what has transpired there, particularly given the personality cults centered around Morales and Chavez. Such a propect points toward something that deserves investigation beyond what Dangl has done in Dancing with Dynamite, the role of the industrialized workforce in the social transformation of South America. In his chapter on Brazil, Dangl contrasts the laudable radicalism of the landless workers movement, the MST, with the accommodation of President Lula, and his party, the Worker's Party, the PT, with international capital. The proletariat, and its informalized brethren, are noteworthy for their absence and it is a significant one, given the industrialization of Brazil with the assistance of foreign investment since World War II.

An examination of the relationship between unions, pension funds and foreign investment in Brazil might be revelatory in this regard. Consider, for example, Francisco de Oliveira's evaluation of Lula's record in 2006:

Lula’s reconstruction of the system of power, after the dizzying decomposition that had led to his own election, has been geared around a further, externally oriented shift towards financialization and export-led growth, with new relations of domination powerfully over-determined by globalized capital. Exports have been led by the expanding agribusiness sector. With few exceptions, the other export fronts are in low value-added commodities, with little capacity for establishing strong, inter-industrial relations or self-sustaining growth processes on a national scale. These sectors have limited means for binding together broad social interests and generally tend towards a strong concentration of wealth, as exemplified by agribusiness, founded on an expropriated workforce.

In Brazil’s semi-peripheral economy, capitalization was always closely tied to the state. Financialization, in its latest form, has also been dependent on state-linked capital, via the pension funds of public-sector enterprises; these were developed as a type of private welfare insurance by the military dictatorship, on the model of the Banco do Brasil’s Previ scheme. The 1988 Constitution capped this with establishment of the Workers’ Assistance Fund (fat), now the principal contributor to the National Bank for Economic and Social Development (bndes). There is currently an attempt to attract further foreign investment with new domestic financial instruments, via the pension funds and a banking system that largely depends on transactions involving government bonds. Ultimately, such dependence on external capital flows can only deepen the crisis of peripheral neoliberalism. As Cardoso himself, on whose watch the national debt multiplied tenfold, has put it, It is not the government that controls the debt, but the debt that controls the government. The policy of external financing leads to an exponential increase in the debt burden, hamstringing the accumulation of capital. It also functions as a powerful mechanism for the concentration of income in the financial system. Banks’ profits have risen to staggering new heights under the Workers Party government.

The consequence of such policies are social formations that de Oliveira has described as a duck-billed platypus, a creature that combines external dependency with casualized labour, truncated accumulation with an unremittingly inegalitarian social order. According to de Oliveira, the most conspicuous feature of this order is the creation of a new social class, defined by its access to and control over public funds.

There is therefore an urgency to an effort to move beyond an examination of social movements created by indigenous people, campesinos and the jobless, and their relationship to leftist electoral parties, as so compellingly profiled by Dangl, to others more centrally located in the process of capitalist accumulation in South America. I say more centrally located, because they are workers, whether formal or informal, who directly faciliate the process of truncated capital accumulation referenced by de Oliveira, whereas those emphasized by Dangl constitute its detritus, useful to the current economic order only if they can be reconstituted in a form rendering them subject to the accumulation process.

Similarly, such an examination in Argentina, where Dangl posits the desultory interaction between social movements, such as the jobless piqueteros, the middle class and the government as an explanation for the demobilization of social movements since the economic collapse of late 2001 and early 2002, might provide further insight as well. It might partially explain why Kirchner was able to reconstruct capitalism in Argentina as he has acknowledged.

Beyond clarifying current social conditions in Brazil and Argentina, it could also make a strong contribution to Dangl's effort to show how the practices of South American social movements can be effectively utilized by people in the US, as he has done in relation to the Republic Windows and Doors occupation, successful efforts to reverse the privatization of municipal water systems and the Take Back the Land Movement in south Florida, where homeless people seize empty, foreclosed properties for their homes. In any event, the proletariat, even in its currently disorganized condition, is likely to play a major, possibly decisive role, in deciding the future of the South American left, despite its premature dismissal by Chavez.

Labels: Activism, American Empire, Bolivia, Book Reviews, Neoliberalism, South America, Venezuela

Looks like the State Department came through on this one. It also appears that President Garcia will issue a commutation of her sentence so that she can return to the United States with her family although the timing of such a decision remains uncertain.

Labels: Death Squads, Neoliberalism, Peru, Political Violence, South America

Labels: American Empire, Ecuador, Neoliberalism, South America

Andrey Platonov lived much of his life in the USSR during the Leninist and Stalinist periods, but his novels, short stories, plays and film scripts only became known, in the form that he had written them, after it no longer existed. New English translations of them continue to filter out into the marketplace, such as the New York Review Books release of The Foundation Pit last year. He has been celebrated as a allegorical, spiritual voice of the absurdities and horrors of Stalinism.

Without question, Platonov was a very fine writer, but we should be careful about incorporating his work into an American anti-communist perspective, least we lose sight of his actual accomplishments. In The Foundation Pit, a short, 150 page novella, he relates the brutalities of the collectivization of agriculture in seemingly surreal fashion. But, as two of the translators, Robert Chandler and Olga Meerson, remind us: This impression is, however, misleading; they contain barely an incident or passage of dialogue that does not directly relate to some real event or publication from these years.

Hence, in the broadest possible sense, Platonov appropriates them to create his own deformed language so as to reveal the depraved social relations that accompanied collectivization. Furthermore, according to Chandler and Meerson, he had been heavily influenced by 19th and early 20th Century Russian Orthodox religious philosophers, leading him to conclude that communism should not aspire to eliminate religious faith, but rather, to improve upon it: Many of us think that it is possible to take faith away without giving people anything better. The soul of contemporary man is organized in such a way that if faith is removed from it, it will be completely overturned.

In The Foundation Pit, Platonov examines the catastrophic consequences of the failure of the Bolshevik Revolution to provide what he described as more than religion to substitute for the Christian faith that it sought to subordinate to the state, resulting in what he characterized as the end of the socialist generation. The narrative itself is fairly simple: a thirty year old man, Voshchev, is discharged from his workplace, and wanders off into the countryside, where he comes across a group of workers in another town. They have been assigned to dig out a foundation pit for a new proletarian home envisioned by by Prushevsky, an architect. He joins them, and encounters a number of characters symbolically associated with the first Five Year Plan. In the latter part of the novel, he travels with several of them, and participates in the forced collectivization of a nearby village.

One of the great paradoxes of the novel is that the collectivization of the peasantry is facilitated by their practice of Russian Orthodox religious rituals. A group of peasants designated as kulaks accomodate themselves to their fate by their communal expression of farewell to those who sent them away, while those who remain consecrate their abandonment of their homes and their entry into the collective through behaviour consistent with the rite of Forgiveness Sunday. Of course, it goes without saying that the action of pauperizing one's self for the general good is a profoundly Christian act. More generally, the authors of the directives for the implementation of collectivization insist that enthusiasm is the essential attribute for the undertaking, a religious state as opposed to a material one. Even the activist responsible for the collectivization of the village cannot avoid memorializing it in reports that take on a distinctly religious tone. Platonov recognized that the utopianism responsible for the atrocities of collectivization required a perversion of spiritual as well as material aspirations.

Meanwhile, the proletariat, as manifest in the menagerie of characters involved in the digging of the pit, is in perpetual movement without making any progress anywhere, except towards death, and, indeed, those who embrace their proletarian identity have a higher mortality rate than those who do not. Here, Platonov hints at the heresy of Cherkazov, among others, namely that the proletariat is a creation of the bourgeoisie. One can therefore construe the collectivization process imposed upon the peasantry by the proletariat in The Foundation Pit as a bourgeois one, which sounds implausible, until one recalls that, according to James Scott, US capitalists took a great interest in Soviet collectivization because of the economies of scale that they thought could be obtained through the application of industrial processes to agriculture.

There is a contemporary resonance to the narrative as well. The proponents of collectivization proceed, with a religious fervor already described, to force the peasantry to sever themselves from all reassuring bonds of their former lives, their small plots, their homes, their livestock, their Christian religion, and, in some instances, even their relatives, if the relatives had been found to be kulaks. Upon doing so, the peasants then adopted a relatively more atomized existence within the collective farm. Platonov leaves it to the reader to speculate as to their survival in such stark conditions.

If this sounds familiar, it should. It is precisely what has happened in much of the lesser developed world in the last 40 years, where indigenous peoples have been compelled, through lesser degrees of coercion and violence, to leave their villages and live as either poorly paid industrial workers or participants in the informal sector. Much like the party members of the early Stalinist period, the contemporary proponents of this social transformation have rationalized it in similarly messianic terms (most obviously, Thatcher and Reagan, but also Friedman's conflation of freedom with market participation.) Ultimately, Platonov cautions us against the extremism inherent in all involuntary modernization projects. It has fallen to those on the anti-authoritarian left in South America and elsewhere to organize a resistance centered around the family, the community and even a religious cosmology, as Raul Zibechi has observed in relation the Aymara people in Bolivia.

Labels: Bolivia, Book Reviews, Communism, Marxism, Neoliberalism, Religion, Russia, South America

UPDATE: Berenson turns herself into the authorities after communicating with US consular officials in Lima. I understand the reasoning behind her decision, contrasting her willingness to cooperate with the intransigence of the Peruvian judiciary, but she has a young son who spent much of his first year of life in a 6 by 10 foot jail cell, and developed significant health issues as a result. They can only hope that the US will negotiate a solution that results in her release.

INITIAL POST: Still, Ms. Berenson could not be found at her apartment in Lima shortly after Peruvian officials said they had revoked her parole.

Hopefully, she, her husband and her young son are making their way to the Bolivian or Venezuelan embassy if they haven't arrived already. As a cursory reading of Simon Romero's article reveals, the court seized upon a pretext to return her to custody: The Peruvian court issuing the parole revocation said it based its ruling on a failure by other legal authorities to verify addresses in Lima that Ms. Berenson had provided them.

Labels: Death Squads, Neoliberalism, Peru, Political Violence, South America

To be released within 24 hours?

Her statement from 2005, on the 10th anniversary of her imprisonment:

My name is Lori Berenson. I am a New York born and raised political prisoner in Perú. I have spent many years in Central and South America, trying to contribute to the efforts of those who seek social justice for all. I continue this work from prison.

On November 30, 1995, I was pulled off of a public bus in Lima. Like thousands of Peruvians, I was detained by the anti-terrorist police, tried for treason by a hooded military tribunal under draconian anti-terrorism laws and condemned to life in prison.

This all occurred in the context of an internal conflict in Perú that began in the early 1980s with the armed insurgence of the Shining Path, and later the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement.

When I was arrested, Peruvian President Fujimori made me a symbol for his anti-terrorist campaign. His ability to use the media for his own publicity purposes led to my case being very high profile.

Because of the tireless efforts of my family, friends and many others, the Fujimori regime was forced to retry me in a civilian court. In 2001, I was sentenced to 20 years for collaboration. In 2004, in light of the international anti-terrorism campaign in our post-9/11 world and under extreme pressure from Perú’s political class, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ratified my sentence.

The details of what happened to me are irrelevant in the broader picture of the thousands of Peruvians who have been killed, disappeared, tortured and detained during this internal conflict. Since history has always been re-written by those who have the upper-hand, the issue of subversion became the scapegoat for all of Perú’s problems.

In all parts of the world, symbolic culprits are used to obscure the root causes of social discontent, to distract attention and distort realities when any group of people question the existing order. The world order, especially in this era of globalized capitalism, is designed to benefit a powerful few at the expense of the majority of our world’s peoples. This system is unjust, immoral, terrifying and just plain insane. We must change it.

People all over the world are imprisoned today and suffering tremendous injustices for challenging this order. I express my solidarity with all of those prisoners, and in particular my admiration for those whose courage we can hear in the voice of Mumia Abu-Jamal, in the writings about Leonard Peltier, in the struggle for the liberation of Puerto Rico, and many others.

For prisoners, the struggle for basic dignity is a daily plight. Prisons are just a smaller version of the general system that operates in this world, and that is what is wrong. The desire to change it is why many of us are here in the first place. It is a worthy cause to be behind bars for.

Let us hope that she is quickly released as ordered.

Labels: Death Squads, Neoliberalism, Peru, Political Violence, South America

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 Associated Press:

Venezuela and Bolivia are supplying Iran with uranium for its nuclear program, according to a secret Israeli government report obtained Monday by The Associated Press.

The two South American countries are known to have close ties with Iran, but this is the first allegation that they are involved in the development of Iran’s nuclear program, considered a strategic threat by Israel.

“There are reports that Venezuela supplies Iran with uranium for its nuclear program,” the Foreign Ministry document states, referring to previous Israeli intelligence conclusions.

It added, “Bolivia also supplies uranium to Iran.”

The report did not say where the uranium was from.

There was no immediate comment from officials in Venezuela or Bolivia about the report.

Perhaps, Israel can launch airstrikes against them, too, expanding any war with Iran to South America as well. All in all, it sounds remarkably similar to the Niger forgeries, documents leaked by Italian intelligence in 2002 that purportedly established that Iraq had been attempting to purchase processed uranium from Niger for nuclear weapons development.

By way of background, there is a strong belief among Venezuela leftists and some in the military that Israel was involved in the 2002 unsuccessful coup attempt against Chavez. I was also told during my trip to Venezuela in 2005 that Chavez, sometime after taking office in 1998, removed a number of Israeli operatives providing unspecified services to the Venezuela military and intelligence services. He did it because he believed that they were using these positions to gather information that could be used against him. Recently, Chavez ordered the removal of the Israeli ambassador in Caracas in protest against the assault upon the civilian populace of Gaza.

One should not dimiss the possibility that the hostility towards Israel within Venezuela is coloured by a residue of anti-semitism directed towards Jews generally. Even so, Chavez apparently had good reason to be concerned. After all, Israel supported Somoza in Nicaragua, and subsequently provided military assistance to the contras. Not surprisingly, Israel also provided provided military assistance to El Salvador and Guatemala in their armed struggles with the left during this same period. In the case of Guatemala, Israel assisted the government's brutal campaign of near extermination against its indigenous populace when the US was legally prohibited from doing so. And, as you might have guessed, Israel had good relations with Pinochet in Chile as well, selling weapons to him, despite his flirtation with a notorious neo-Nazi sect.

Closer to home, at least from a Venezuelan perspective, Israel has supplied weapons to Colombian paramilitaries since the 1980s, and continues to do so. Similarly, Israel participated in the dirty war in Argentina. Chavez, and the left throughout South America, understand what many in the US do not, that Israel has been an implacable enemy of leftist movements in South America, violent or non-violent, for decades. Furthermore, it has provided material assistance in their violent suppression by rightist governments and social movements. Such a history lends credibility to the belief of some Venezuelans that Israel, through the Mossad, was involved in the 2002 coup. No doubt the Bolivians are aware of this history as well, and wary about Israeli involvement in their country.

But are Venezuela and Bolivia supplying Iran with uranium? Hard to say, although the report comes across as embarrassingly propagandistic. The Associated Press article states that Venezuela has undertaken no action to mine its estimated uranium reserves, while Bolivia does so. It is, of course, possible that Venezuela is involved in the delivery of Bolivian uranium to Iran. If so, what is the significance? Is it illegal for them to do so? Of course, it is common for countries to sell uranium to other countries for use in nuclear power generation facilities, as Australian does in relation to China, and Russia now does in relation to the US. If Iran is merely involved in the development of nuclear power, consistent with the most recent National Intelligence Estimate and the findings of the International Atomic Energy Agency, one would assume that such purchases, if they ever happened, transgress no international laws. Oh, by the way, did I forget to mention that the report also claims that Venezuela is also a Hizbullah sanctuary?

Labels: American Empire, Bolivia, Israel, Neoliberalism, South America, Venezuela, War with Iran

From the Financial Times:

Brazil and China will work towards using their own currencies in trade transactions rather than the US dollar, according to Brazil’s central bank and aides to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s president.

The move follows recent Chinese challenges to the status of the dollar as the world’s leading international currency.

Significant, not just because China and Brazil are among the largest emerging market economies, but also because Brazil is the largest economy in South America, formerly a US economic preserve. US preoccupations with the Middle East and Central Asia, combined with the severity of the global recession, continue to drive a decline in US military and economic influence there.

From the Brazilian and Chinese perspectives, it may be a reflection of the urgency that each places upon reducing their dependence upon US markets. As you may recall, James Petras is forecasting a collapse in the South American manufacturing sector over the next few years, while there have already been numerous reports of plant closures in China. Hence, the need to create new links of global economic interdependence to replace the old ones.

Labels: American Empire, China, Global Recession, Neoliberalism, South America