The Rag Blog

05/04/07 – – – BAGHDAD, May 2 (UPI) — As calls in the U.S. Congress grow for a scheduled troop withdrawal from Iraq, similar demands are escalating in Iraq’s National Assembly.

Some 133 Iraqi lawmakers from different political blocs, calling themselves the “free deputies,” signed a document demanding a scheduled withdrawal of the U.S.-led multinational troops from their country, according to the Sadrist bloc in Parliament.

A legislator from the Sadrist bloc, Saleh al-Okaili, told reporters Wednesday that his group initiated the document ahead of a U.N. Security Council review on Iraq slated for next month. The Sadrist bloc, whose Cabinet ministers had resigned, represents members of a group led by Shiite maverick leader Moqtada Sadr, who has been calling for setting a timetable to end the U.S.-British occupation of Iraq.

Okaili said the memo signed by the lawmakers in the 275-seat Parliament would be handed over to the U.N. Security Council and its secretary-general, the Organization of Islamic Conference and the Iraqi government.

05/04/07 “ICH” — – And, like every other one since last you can remember, it’s gonna be an ugly morning.

One day you’re gonna wake up and go to your lousy job with its lousy salary and non-existent benefits. You might even remember the good job you once had. Or that the government you once supported gave tax breaks to companies like the one that exported that good job of yours to the Third World (which is what they’re now starting to call your country). Or that that same government undermined the labor unions which fought to get you your good wages and benefits.

One day you’re gonna wake up and be furious at the monstrous tax burden you are carrying, a tab which accounts for fifty of the seventy hours you must work each week just to eke by. You might even figure out why your tax bill is so high. You might remember that the government you once supported shifted the tax burden from the rich onto people like you, and from the taxpayers of the time onto those of today. And that they borrowed money in astonishing quantities to fund their sleight-of-hand, so that you work thirty hours a week just to pay the interest on a mountain of money borrowed decades ago.

One day you’re gonna wake up in anger at the absurdly poor education your children are receiving. You’re gonna remember that it wasn’t always that way, that even after the military’s voracious appetite was temporarily sated, your country still managed to find a few bucks to at least educate a workforce. No more. And you’re gonna remember how you applauded when your educational system was twisted in to a test taking industry that is careful, above all, not to teach children how to think.

One day you’re gonna wake up literally sick and tired. You’re gonna want treatment for your maladies but you won’t be able to touch the cost. You’re gonna wonder what you were thinking when believed your country had the best healthcare system in the world, even though it was the only advanced democracy in the world that didn’t provide universal care, even though it devoted fifty percent more of its economy than those other countries to pay for a system that left fifty million people uninsured, and even though there were massive layers of unnecessary and harmful private sector bureaucracy skimming hundreds of billions of dollars of profits out of the system in the name of free enterprise.

One day you’re gonna wake up too tired to go to work anymore. You’re gonna want to retire in dignity but will be left instead to laugh bitterly at the cruelty of that joke. And you’re gonna wonder what in the world you had been thinking voting for a president who’s primary goal was to allow Wall Street to raid Social Security, destroying what had once been considered the most successful domestic program in human history.

One day you’re gonna wake up and wish that it wasn’t so bloody hot, and that there weren’t so many diseases and species eradications and violent storms lashing the planet. And maybe you’ll even remember that you once supported a government that lied about the very existence of global warming – back when it might have been curtailed – a government that scuttled the barest remedy for the problem in order to protect oil company profits.

Venezuela’s decision this week to pull out of the IMF and the World Bank will be seen in the United States as just another example of the ongoing feud between Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and the Bush Administration. But it is likely to be viewed differently in the rest of the world, and could have an impact on both institutions, whose power and legitimacy in developing countries has been waning steadily in recent years.

Other countries may follow. President Rafael Correa of Ecuador announced last week that it was kicking the World Bank’s representative out of the country. It was an unprecedented action, which President Correa punctuated by stating that “we will not stand for extortion by this international bureaucracy.” In 2005, the World Bank withheld a previously approved $100 million loan to Ecuador to try to force the government to use windfall oil revenues for debt repayment, rather than the government’s choice of social spending.

This is the way these two institutions have operated for decades. With the IMF as leader, and the U.S. Treasury department holding veto power, they have run a “creditors’ cartel” that has been able to exert enormous pressure on governments over a wide variety of economic issues. This pressure has not only generated widespread resentment, but has also often led to economic failure in the countries and regions where the IMF and World Bank have had the most influence. Over the last 25 years Latin America has had its worst long-term economic growth performance in more than a century.

Venezuela also has specific grievances against the IMF, which are likely to generate sympathy in other developing countries with democratic, left-of-center governments. On April 12, 2002, just hours after Venezuela’s democratically elected government was overthrown in a military coup, the IMF stated publicly that it was “ready to assist the new administration [of Pedro Carmona] in whatever manner they find suitable.”

This instantaneous show of financial support for a newly installed dictatorship – one which immediately dissolved the country’s constitution, general assembly, and Supreme Court – was unprecedented in the IMF’s history. Typically the IMF does not react so quickly, even to an elected government. It is no wonder that this move was seen in Venezuela and elsewhere as an attempt by the IMF to support the coup itself. Washington, which dominates the Fund, had advance knowledge of the coup, supported it, and funded some of its leaders – according to U.S. government documents.

In additions, Venezuela has not been happy with the IMF’s consistently under-projecting its economic growth in recent years, as the Fund has also done with Argentina. The IMF’s forecasts are widely used and can therefore influence investors.

But the resentment against the IMF and World Bank, and demands for change, are worldwide. The scandal over Paul Wolfowitz’s leadership at the World Bank, which is about to topple the Bank’s most unwanted president ever, is just the tip of the iceberg. Last month the IMF’s Independent Evaluation Office stated that since 1999, nearly three-quarters of aid to the poor countries of Sub-Saharan Africa are not being spent. Rather, at the IMF’s request, it is being used to pay off debt and accumulate reserves. This is a terrible thing to do to some of the poorest countries in the world, who desperately need to spend this money on such pressing needs as the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

Venezuela’s decision is likely to strengthen the hand of developing nations within the IMF and World Bank who are demanding serious reforms. Right now the United States, with less than 5 percent of the world’s population, has more votes in the IMF than countries representing the majority of the planet. The world’s developing countries, which bear the brunt of these institutions’ mistakes, have little or no voice in their decision-making. Venezuela’s move – and any other countries that follow – will show the IMF and World Bank that the option of quitting these institutions altogether is a real one.

Putting their personal lives on hold, women in the Mexican state of Oaxaca helped shut down the government, took over a TV station, and stood up to police violence.

“Everything is the movement,” says Patricia Jimenez Alvarado, looking at me across her kitchen table. “You don’t have a personal life anymore.” She leans her face into her open palms, and weeps.

Jimenez, in her mid-forties, is a thesis advisor at Oaxaca State University by profession. But the government of Oaxaca accuses her of being an “urban guerrilla.” Her house and car have just been broken into and searched. She regularly receives text-message death threats on her cellular phone. A warrant has been issued for her arrest. And for the first time in her children’s lives, she has missed their birthdays—several months ago she sent her children to live with her sister-in-law to keep them safe.

Sitting down with me for this interview is the first moment of calm she’s had since mid-June, Jimenez says. That’s when she and thousands of other women—many of whom had never participated in a march or rally before—orchestrated the takeover of the state television and radio stations and broadcast live their opposition to state violence. Their actions earned these women a place among Oaxaca’s most wanted activists, sought by the para-police gangs that serve the state government.

Roots of the protests

In the beginning, the civil disobedience in Oaxaca was not organized primarily by women. It began on May 22 as a teachers’ strike to demand higher federal and state education budgets. The striking teachers set up a protest camp in Oaxaca City, a tent city that filled the touristy town square and stretched out for blocks, housing tens of thousands of teachers from across the state.

In 2004, Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, had been sworn in as governor under serious allegations of electoral fraud. But instead of mending bridges, he announced a policy of no tolerance for protests, even moving the state government offices into guarded compounds miles outside the city center.

Ruiz refused to meet with the teachers union or answer their demands. Then, at dawn on June 14, 2006, he sent state riot police using tear gas and helicopters to violently dismantle the striking teachers’ camp, leaving scores of men, women, and children injured.

The city exploded. Thousands, including Jimenez, took to the streets to help the teachers, tend the injured, and offer food and water. But to everyone’s surprise, these citizens went one step further—they counterattacked, retook the town square, and drove the police out of town.

This spontaneous rejection of police violence, along with the outpouring of support for the teachers, ignited a five-month civil disobedience uprising. It would put a half million people on the streets in marches and tens of thousands in protest camps across Oaxaca City, paralyze the state government, and send the governor into hiding.

To encourage people’s participation in developing strategies for long-term organizing, the teachers’ union called indigenous organizations, human rights groups, and local unions into an assembly. Together these groups formed the Oaxaca People’s Popular Assembly (APPO), which they opened to all who signed on to demand the ouster or resignation of Ruiz for ordering the police raid. The provisional leadership of the APPO was almost entirely male, with women relegated to lesser roles.

Meanwhile, back at the treasury

Undaunted, women formed neighborhood groups in order to join the APPO and participated in the marathon discussions that guided the protesters’ actions. When the APPO decided to launch a civil disobedience offensive on July 26—setting up camps around the state legislature, courts, and the governor’s offices to shut down all three branches of government—many women volunteered to set up camp outside the state treasury, a building low on the APPO’s priority list. There, during the first nights at their protest camp, they cooked up the idea of a women-only march on August 1.

The march drew some 5,000 women, all banging on pots and pans with meat tenderizers, ladles, and soup spoons. The raucous cacophony had the women so jazzed that when they reached their destination (the protester-occupied town square), they decided to keep going, to the state-owned television station, Channel 9. The only statewide local station, Channel 9 failed to report on the June 14 police violence and later presented the protesters as vandals and hooligans. At first the women demanded only an hour on television to tell their version of the events of June 14 and why they wanted Ruiz out of office. But Mercedes Rojas Saldaña, the station director, refused. The women asked for less time, then even less, but were repeatedly rebuffed. Finally, they walked past the director, with pots and pans in hand, and took over the station.

As Jimenez and the other women rounded up the station’s employees, several of her former students recognized her. One asked, “Teacher, what are you doing here?

“Well, taking over the station,” she said. “No choice.”

Another asked: “Teacher, why are you dragging us into this mess? Aren’t you an academic?

“And so?” Jimenez replied. “I’m also one of the people.”

Employees had taken the station off the air as the women stormed the office. Now the women scrambled to get the station back on the air before the police came to retake the station. Jimenez herself tried to figure out how to work the cameras.

But the police did not come. Instead, thousands of residents from the surrounding neighborhood flooded the streets to guard the station, taking over city buses and parking them across the street to block all approaching traffic.

One technician who knew Jimenez agreed to tell her where the antennas were and how to get the transmission going again if Jimenez would let her go. Jimenez told her, “Here there are no friendships and no privileges. Here we make the decisions in collective.” Then she led the employee off to meet with the other women and negotiated the release of all the employees—none of whom had been harmed in the takeover—in return for their help in getting the station back on the air.

Within three hours, for the first time in Mexican history, a protest movement occupied a state television station and broadcast live. Viewers saw a tight group of women without makeup or designer dresses, pots and pans still in hand, all facing the camera. Their message: if the media insist on airbrushing state violence from the news and distorting social protest into an “urban guerrilla” movement, then the people will take the media in order to tell their own story of suffering, police repression, and organizing social protests.

Moving forward

Meanwhile, from late August through November, the conflict escalated. The government attacked Channel 9, destroying the station’s antennas and knocking the women’s revolutionary media off the air. Plainclothes police officers and PRI party militants regularly opened fire on protestors and, over the course of 3 months, killed at least 16 people, including New York-based journalist Brad Will.

Protesters organized thousands of nighttime barricades across the city to prevent armed attacks. They also took over private radio stations to continue broadcasting their denunciations of state violence and to call for further protests to oust the governor.

On November 25, federal police cracked down on protesters after a small group began to throw rocks and fire bottle rockets at the police. The police rounded up and beat more than 140 protesters, then carted them off to federal prison in Nayarit, four states away. State and federal police patrolled the streets to grab organizers, and hundreds of people went underground. Jimenez cut her brown hair short, dyed it jet black, and sneaked out of town.

But two weeks later she was back to join a delegation of APPO protesters set to hold talks with the federal government and then to stage marches demanding the release of those taken prisoner on November 25. In December she helped organize another high-energy march and a free outdoor concert where the Oaxaca-born musician Lila Downs joined in singing Christmas carols retooled to denounce state violence.

“We have shown that women’s participation in these movements is fundamental,” Jimenez said.

On January 8, I saw Jimenez again. She was on the way to an APPO assembly meeting. “We have to endure! We can’t give up!” she said, her voice hoarse with a bad cold. “We can only go forward. There is no other way.”

Green homes? Organic food? Nature is good? Time to give the ol’ tie-dyers some respect

Go ahead, name your movement. Name something good and positive and pro-environment and eco-friendly that’s happening right now in the newly “greening” America and don’t say more guns in Texas or fewer reproductive choices for women or endless vile unwinnable BushCo wars in the Middle East lasting until roughly 2075 because that would defeat the whole point of this perky little column and destroy its naive tone of happy rose-colored sardonic optimism. OK?

I’m talking about, say, energy-efficient light bulbs. I’m looking at organic foods going mainstream. I mean chemical-free cleaning products widely available at Target and I’m talking saving the whales and protecting the dolphins and I mean yoga studios flourishing in every small town, giant boxes of organic cereal at Costco and non-phthalates dildos at Good Vibes and the Toyota Prius becoming the nation’s oddest status symbol. You know, good things.

Look around: we have entire industries devoted to recycled paper, a new generation of cheap solar-power technology and an Oscar for “An Inconvenient Truth” and even the soulless corporate monsters over at famously heartless joints like Wal-Mart are now claiming that they really, really care about saving the environment because, well, “it’s the right thing to do” (read: It’s purely economic and all about their bottom line because if they don’t start caring they’ll soon be totally screwed on manufacturing and shipping costs at/from all their brutal Chinese sweatshops).

There is but one conclusion you can draw from the astonishing (albeit fitful, bittersweet) pro-environment sea change now happening in the culture and (reluctantly, nervously) in the halls of power in D.C., one thing we must all acknowledge in our wary, jaded, globally warmed universe: The hippies had it right all along. Oh yes they did.

You know it’s true. All this hot enthusiasm for healing the planet and eating whole foods and avoiding chemicals and working with nature and developing the self? Came from the hippies. Alternative health? Hippies. Green cotton? Hippies. Reclaimed wood? Recycling? Humane treatment of animals? Medical pot? Alternative energy? Natural childbirth? Non-GMO seeds? It came from the granola types (who, of course, absorbed much of it from ancient cultures), from the alternative worldviews, from the underground and the sidelines and from far off the goddamn grid and it’s about time the media, the politicians, the culture as a whole sent out a big, wet, hemp-covered apology.

BAGHDAD — Iraq is hemorrhaging doctors as violence racks the nation. To stem the flow, the Iraqi government has recently taken a cue from Saddam Hussein: Medical schools are once again forbidden to issue diplomas and transcripts to new graduates.

Hussein built a fine medical system in part by withholding doctors’ passports and diplomas. Although physicians can work in Iraq with a letter from a medical school verifying their graduation, they say they need certificates and transcripts to work abroad.

It is a common refrain among war-weary Iraqis that things were better before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Electricity in Baghdad was more reliable; sectarian hostility was rare; Iraq was safe — except for the many victims of Hussein’s tyranny. But rarely has the government embraced a policy that so harshly evokes the era of dictatorship. To some students and doctors, the diploma decision, like Iraq’s crumbling medical system, provides clear proof of the government’s helplessness and the nation’s decline.

“I don’t think anybody would think now to go back like it was in Saddam’s time. It would be a scandal,” said an incredulous Akif al-Alousi, a leader of the Iraqi Medical Association, upon hearing about the measure from a reporter. After verifying it, Alousi said that the association would challenge the rule, which he called a violation of “basic rights.”

Noor Jassem, 24, a fifth-year medical student at Mustansiriyah Medical College in Baghdad, agreed.

WASHINGTON, May 4 (IPS) – With just over 18 months left in office, the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush appears once again to be moving in a more “realist” direction in its dealings with the rest of the world, including the Middle East.

The most obvious sign came during this week’s regional meeting in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, where Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spent a 30-minute tete-a-tete with her Syrian counterpart, Walid al-Moallem, reportedly focused on securing greater cooperation from Damascus on sealing its border with Iraq.

It was the first bilateral cabinet-level encounter between the U.S. and Syria since the February 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, in protest of which Washington recalled its ambassador from Damascus.

While Rice later insisted that her meeting differed from last month’s controversial visit to Damascus by Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi because the discussion was both confined to Iraq and no photographers were present to record the occasion, most analysts here saw it one as the latest — and potentially most significant — in a series of tentative steps toward implementing key recommendations of the Iraq Study Group (ISG), co-chaired by super-realist James Baker.

“Gee, all of a sudden meeting with the Syrian government is not an act of high treason,” wrote Juan Cole, a Middle East specialist at the University of Michigan on his influential blog, who noted that Rice had even sought Pelosi’s advice before setting out on her trip.

“I can only think that Condi’s meeting with Mouallem is a sign that (Vice President) Dick Cheney’s grip on power inside the White House is slipping badly, and that Condi has Bush’s ear on the need to engage.”

Cheney, the leader of the administration’s hawks, had publicly condemned Pelosi’s visit to Damascus as “bad behaviour”, while some of his neo-conservative allies outside the administration even called for her prosecution under a 200-year-old law that makes it a crime for individual citizens to communicate with hostile foreign governments to influence their behaviour.

Cheney, who is still smarting from Bush’s approval — following a personal appeal by Rice — of a controversial nuclear deal with North Korea in February, suffered another setback this week when the White House announced the resignation of Deputy National Security Adviser J.D. Crouch, II, a veteran hard-liner who has overseen the day-to-day management of the National Security Council (NSC) during Bush’s second term.

Crouch, who served first as assistant secretary of defence for international security affairs and then as ambassador to Romania, during Bush’s first term, chaired the inter-agency deliberations that led to the adoption of Bush’s “Surge” strategy to send some 30,000 more troops to Baghdad beginning in February.

He first worked for the vice president when Cheney headed the Pentagon under former President George H.W. Bush. In that capacity, Crouch, long a proponent of developing new nuclear weapons and missile defence systems, helped prepare the 1992 draft Defense Planning Guidance (DPG) overseen by then-Undersecretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz and the vice president’s future chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, both of whom played key roles in Bush’s first term.

The DPG draft, which was leaked to the New York Times and subsequently repudiated by the elder Bush administration, called, among other things, for Washington to pursue military dominance in and around Eurasia, carry out pre-emptive attacks against potential treats, and rely on ad hoc alliances rather than multilateral mechanisms, such as the U.N. or NATO, to promote U.S. interests — ideas which were incorporated 10 years later in the younger Bush’s 2002 National Security Strategy.

The Iraq war and the inquiry into its origins has provoked interest in a number of subjects formerly considered obscure, the discussion of which was once limited to the rarified aeries of academia and specialty journals. Some examples are neoconservatism, just war theory, and, most surprisingly, the theories of Leo Strauss, the philosophical avatar of a cynical Machiavellianism that promotes the idea of the “noble lie.” As the disaster in Iraq unfolded, subjects once considered abstruse were introduced into the pages of the popular press, so that, at one point, we were treated to a long explanation of the doctrines of Strauss in the pages of the New York Times.

As Jeet Heer put it in the Boston Globe,

“Odd as this may sound, we live in a world increasingly shaped by Leo Strauss, a controversial philosopher who died in 1973. Although generally unknown to the wider population, Strauss has been one of the two or three most important intellectual influences on the conservative worldview now ascendant in George W. Bush’s Washington. Eager to get the lowdown on White House thinking, editors at the New York Times and Le Monde have had journalists pore over Strauss’s work and trace his disciples’ affiliations. The New Yorker has even found a contingent of Straussians doing intelligence work for the Pentagon.”

This sudden interest was due to the unusual number of Straussians who had found their way into close proximity to the centers of power in Washington – an extraordinary number of Strauss’s students (or students of his leading followers) were employed in and around the Bush administration, particularly at key points in the national security bureaucracy, as William Pfaff pointed out, including then- “Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz; Abram Shulsky of the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, Richard Perle of the Pentagon advisory board, Elliott Abrams of the National Security Council, and the writers Robert Kagan and William Kristol.”

One can easily see how the concept of the “noble lie” fits neatly into the neoconservative scheme of things, and the run-up to the Iraq war is surely a textbook example of the Straussian method in action: an enlightened elite deceives the public into an action that must be taken, after all, for their own good. In this case, we were lied into invading and occupying Iraq, for reasons that had nothing to do with “weapons of mass destruction” and Saddam’s alleged links to al Qaeda and the 9/11 terrorist attacks, both of which the promulgators knew to be lies, and yet reiterated ceaselessly.

Since we are now permanently at war, the ideal atmosphere for a Straussian (or any authoritarian) to theorize in, this is the time for the War Party to come out in the open with its theory of government, which, in normal times, is dressed up as “peace through strength,” and now comes out of the closet as “peace through dictatorship.” Aside from rationalizing a regime based on lies, the Straussian method, and philosophy, is useful in other ways. The prominent Straussian Harvey Mansfield, a professor of government at Harvard, demonstrates his usefulness as a promoter of the regime’s authority, and specifically the supremacy of the executive branch of government in wartime. Mansfield makes “The Case for the Strong Executive” in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, and it is an argument that constitutes a vital part of the intellectual blueprint for the dictatorship I wrote about the other day.

Mansfield starts out with a paean to the incorrect and unfortunately near-universal conception of the Constitution as a “flexible” document, and the resulting reference to “the living Constitution” is one of those cliches that no one ever thinks to challenge – except when it’s too late. When the tanks are already rolling through the streets, that is …

Look: there is nothing “flexible” about the Constitution. It means precisely what it says, and its language is not in any way obscure or complex. Furthermore, I would note that every time someone is about to take away our liberties, or in some way circumvent the plain intent of the Founders, they inevitably preface it with odes to the Constitution’s “flexibility.” Balderdash! The Founders meant what they said, and said what they meant in plain and simple English, language that even a Harvard professor can understand. Yet, examining Mansfield’s case for an executive dictatorship – and that is surely the intent of his piece – we see at work the old Straussian method of “reinterpreting” an author’s clear intent to mean its exact opposite.

Now it would seem that the Founders, being revolutionaries, and even libertarians of a sort (except for Hamilton), were intent on setting up a republic of freemen, that is, a form of government that was constitutionally limited and certainly had nothing to do with the royalism against which they had recently rebelled. Ah, but a Straussian can find “hidden” meanings that the rest of us are blind to, and Mansfield detects a built-in contradiction, a deliberate tension between “one-man rule” and the republican spirit that imbues the Constitution with – yes, an authoritarian streak:

“Now the rule of law has two defects, each of which suggests the need for one-man rule. The first is that law is always imperfect by being universal, thus an average solution even in the best case, that is inferior to the living intelligence of a wise man on the spot, who can judge particular circumstances. This defect is discussed by Aristotle in the well-known passage in his ‘Politics’ where he considers ‘whether it is more advantageous to be ruled by the best man or the best laws.’

“The other defect is that the law does not know how to make itself obeyed. …There must be police, and the rulers over the police must use energy (Alexander Hamilton’s term) in addition to reason. It is a delusion to believe that governments can have energy without ever resorting to the use of force.