Month: March 2010

by SETH WESSLER

Unable to find jobs, kicked off welfare, women in Connecticut are forced to sell food assistance to buy basic necessities.

Since she was 16, Eva Hernández has worked a string of low-wage jobs. She’s prepared chicken at KFC, run the register at Dunkin Donuts, packed and sealed boxes at a produce company, and held other similar jobs in Hartford, Connecticut, where she was born and raised. These jobs haven’t paid enough for Eva, now 28, to support herself and her two young daughters. So for almost three years in the last decade, she’s relied on welfare to supplement her income. Most of the time, though, she’s simply found another low-wage job, a task that in this economy is proving almost impossible.

In March 2009, in the midst of the worst job crisis in at least a generation, Eva opened the last welfare check she will ever receive. She is one of a growing number of people in the United States who can’t find work in this recession but don’t qualify for government cash assistance, no matter how poor they are or how bad the economy gets.

Without the help of welfare, Eva doesn’t have enough money left at the end of each month to feed her daughters full meals. It is the first time in her life, she said, that she hasn’t had enough money for food.

Now, with no other source of income, Eva breaks the law, selling her food stamps to pay for the rent, phone bill, detergent and tampons.

Color Lines for more

Oil deals and diamond contracts are on the docket for Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in India, where he is scheduled to arrive Thursday.

India’s state-run Oil and Natural Gas Corp may be invited to develop oil and gas fields in Russia, the government said Thursday.

ONGC has already agreed to cooperate with oil-to-telecoms group Sistema, which controls assets in Bashkortostan, and may also gain access to lucrative oil and gas projects in Russia’s Far North, the government said.

Sistema, in turn, was looking to deepen investment in its Indian mobile unit, Sistema Shyam TeleServices, with more than $600 million, the government said in a statement.

Russia aims to more than double trade with India to $20 billion by 2015. Putin is expected to preside over deals worth more than $10 billion, spanning defense, nuclear power and fertilizers, when he visits this week.

The Moscow Times for more

by THALIF DEEN

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 2 (IPS/TerraViva) Against the backdrop of a two-week U.N. meeting on gender empowerment, the London-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) has blasted the government of Saudi Arabia for its feudal system of justice where women continue to be victimised because of their gender.

A Saudi court has sentenced a woman, Sawsan Salim, to 300 lashes and 18 months in prison for filing harassment complaints without the required accompaniment by a male guardian.

While her husband was in prison, Salim sought the help of a local judge to gain the spouse’s release.

The verdict, says HRW, reflects the discriminatory system of male guardianship in Saudi Arabia, in which women are prohibited from many acts without the presence of a male guardian.

“Women’s rights in Saudi Arabia are somewhat worse than in other countries in the region because of the male guardianship system,” Nadya Khalife, HRW’s women’s rights researcher for the Middle East, told IPS.

She said the existing system prohibits women from making day-to-day decisions about their lives, including work, education or travel.

Inter Press Service for more

(Submitted by Abdul Hamid Bashani Khan)

by KEITH NURSE

Two weeks ago, leaders of all the governments of Latin America and the Caribbean (save the coup-installed president of Honduras) concluded a three-day “summit” on Mexico’s Maya Riviera with a majority commitment to move toward the formation of a new hemispheric organization, tentatively called the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States. The proposed organization, which would exclude the United States and Canada, would promote South-South political economic relations as a springboard to development. Six years ago, NACLA published an essay by economist Keith Nurse calling for a similar strategy. We re-publish it here as essential background for an understanding of the new commitment to a strengthening South-South relations in the Americas. NACLA Eds.

(This article originally appeared in the November/December 2003 edition of NACLA Report on the Americas.)

The articulation of an alternative framework for development cannot stop with a critique of the neoliberal agenda championed in recent years by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization. Quite the contrary: While it is true that the institutions that shape patterns of global finance and trade must be confronted forcefully, it is also true that meaningful and sustainable alternatives to the present state of affairs must be premised upon a profound rethinking of the dominant ideas that for the past several decades have shaped the “developmentalist project.” This must involve not only a rethinking of the values and images of a preferred society, but also a reconceptualization of the goals, processes and indicators of development itself.

These ideas are based on the observation that the historical practice of development has failed to address the essence of underdevelopment: the continued leakage of capital and other assets from the developing world to the developed economies. We must remember that underdevelopment has its flipside, overdevelopment, and that to discuss one without the other is to adopt a fragmented view of the development problematic. The argument here is that modernization and the Third World development process has all too often been premised on the notion of “catching-up” to the North. A corollary of this misguided way of framing the problem is that a country can overcome the income gap by borrowing capital, close the technology gap by attracting foreign direct investment, and narrow the cultural gap by adopting western institutions and value systems.1 From the perspective of the developed, western, colonizing countries, this reinforces an ethnocentric conception of development as a “civilizing mission”—a matter of saving “the natives” from themselves.

North American Congress for Latin America for more

(Submitted by Abdul Hamid Bashani Khan)

BOSTON GLOBE EDITORIAL

Fox News performer Glenn Beck set some kind of record for combining ignorance and chutzpah when he told viewers to run away from any church where the terms “social justice’’ or “economic justice’’ are spoken. These are “code words,’’ Beck warned. He then held up a Nazi swastika and the Communist hammer and sickle, saying both represent the banner of social justice.

Christian clerics, both conservative and liberal, were commendably quick to remind Beck of the Sermon on the Mount. Members of Beck’s own Mormon faith objected that he was scorning their belief that care for the poor is a divine commandment. Indeed, an injunction to seek social justice is common to nearly all sects. And Beck was no less confused about the Nazis’ disdain for social justice and Bolshevik cynicism about the same. Beck’s fatwa on the politics of faith makes it plain he is someone who literally does not know what he is talking about.

Boston Globe

by B. R. GOWANI

Two hundred lashes and prison for a year
An Asian maid in Jeddah was made to hear

The master’s family sounded a hiss
Cause the food served contained her piss

Such is the way the humiliated pay back
Their revenge often has no whack

Whether South Africa, Australia, or Spain
Everywhere people feel the same pain

The US slaves had to de-memorize their roots
They were told so by their masters in suits

Unbearable cruelty they suffered for long
‘Twas too much even for those who were strong

So they would in their master’s food, spit
To bear the brunt and sharpen their personal wit*

Sorry for the little informative detour
But now lets’ continue our old spoor

For long, the Arab masters have drinking been
US Cock Cola and Pissy Cola without a grin

Just a few drops of Kidney Cola; big deal
To serve you they are always on their heel

(*In leftover food spit the master-bums
In callousness slaves were denied the crumbs!)

B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com

The PRC’s Dilemma in the Global Crisis

by HUNG HO-FUNG

he subprime mortgage crisis and ensuing global downturn led many to speculate whether any challenger might emerge to replace the us as the dominant player in the capitalist world economy. [1] Because the financial crisis in the us and global North had originated in high indebtedness, low productivity and overconsumption, it seemed natural to look to their polar opposites—the East Asian exporters’ huge holdings of us debt, productive capacity and high savings rates—to identify likely candidates. Immediately after last year’s collapse of Lehman Brothers lifted the curtain on the global recession, there were proclamations of the final triumph of the East Asian, and above all Chinese, model of development; American establishment commentators concluded that the Great Crash of 2008 would be the catalyst for a shift of the centre of global capitalism from the us to China. [2]

But by the spring of 2009, many had realized that the East Asian economies were not as formidable as appearances had suggested. While the sharp contraction in demand for imports in the global North had led to crash landings for Asia’s exporters, the prospect of either the us Treasuries market or the dollar bottoming out presented them with the difficult dilemma of either ditching American assets, and hence triggering a dollar collapse, or buying more, preventing an immediate crash but increasing their exposure to one in future. State-directed investment, rolled out late last year under the prc’s mega-stimulus programme, fostered a significant recovery for China as well as its Asian trading partners, but the growth generated is unlikely to be self-sustaining. Chinese economists and policy advisers have been worrying that the prc will falter again once the stimulus effect fades, as it is unlikely that American consumers will be picking up the slack any time soon. Despite all the talk of China’s capacity to destroy the dollar’s reserve-currency status and construct a new global financial order, the prc and its neighbours have few choices in the short term other than to sustain American economic dominance by extending more credit.

In what follows, I will trace the historical and social origins of the deepening dependence of China and East Asia on the consumer markets of the global North as the source of their growth, and on us financial vehicles as the store of value for their savings. I then assess the longer-term possibilities for ending this dependence, arguing that, to create a more autonomous economic order in Asia, China would have to transform an export-oriented growth model—which has mostly benefited, and been perpetuated by, vested interests in the coastal export sectors—into one driven by domestic consumption, through a large-scale redistribution of income to the rural-agricultural sector. This will not be possible, however, without breaking the coastal urban elite’s grip on power.

New Left Review for more

An Assessment of the Threat Posed by the Terrorist Group Headquartered on the Afghanistan-Pakistan Border

by BARBARA SUD

A U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) in July 2007 assessed that al-Qaeda had “protected or regenerated key elements of its Homeland attack capability, including: a safehaven in the Pakistan Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), operational lieutenants, and its top leadership.”1 It was not as comfortable for the group as Taliban-controlled Afghanistan had been before the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the group had lost many key personnel over the years, but the Pakistan safe haven allowed al-Qaeda to act with virtual impunity to plan, train for, and mount attacks. In 2009, however, U.S. officials frequently touted al-Qaeda’s unprecedented losses of mid-level to senior commanders since the NIE—at mid-year, for example, as many as “11 out of 20 of the Pentagon’s most wanted-list”2—to concerted strikes by U.S. unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the FATA. The casualties also have included prominent regional leaders who helped facilitate al-Qaeda’s safe haven, such as Pakistani Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud, killed in August. Terrorism specialists increasingly characterized al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden as a mere figurehead, and at least before September 2009, it appeared that al-Qaeda had been unable to train operatives for attacks in Western countries since mid-2008 or earlier.

New America Foundation for more

(Submitted by reader)