rogue economics

Loretta Napoleoni's Rogue Economics is pretty much a must read. On first glance it seems to another of the "we're fucked" variety of planet and political doom of the future. And it is pretty harsh: she goes through the last 18 years looking at the rise of sex and worker slavery (even shipping slavery on the oceans) and environmental crises like overfishing. But what's amazing about the book is that it goes through the effects of globalization on politics using examples like the Bulgarian Mafia and the Italian 'ndrangheta to show how illegal or at least unethical economics skirt around politics in a globalized world. Her perspective is not as dark as you might think, though. In the introduction she basically spells out how her original idea changed. She wanted to write a book about the devastating changes on Eastern Europe and the world after the fall of the Berlin wall. But in her research she basically came across similar historical shifts that allowed these rogue economic forces dominate, i.e., during the industrial revolution. One of the responses to this system has been Islamic Sharia economics and it's stress on investment over speculation. She uses the example of Malaysian which refused all Western aid after the Asian tiger meltdown in the late 90s. Here's an interview with the author on Democracy Now.

siempre presentes (always present)

The first two videos below are from a huge billboard poster is at the University of Buenos Aires Facultad de Architectura, Diseño y Urbanismo. It has the names and sometimes pictures of students who were disappeared by the Argentine dictatorship in the late from 1976-1982. The third video is design professor Martin Groisman talking about the kidnapped children of the murdered students' parents.

another lefty prez in south america

Fernando Lugo was elected the new President of Paraguay. He is a former bishop who sided with landless peasants and pissed off the elite in his diocese. If Latin Americans keep this up, they could form their own version of a democratic-socialist E.U. that could really affect the balance of power in the world. Rising food prices are going to pressure governments to actually do things for their own people. Here's an excerpt from a January interview with IPS news:
IPS: Will you carry out land reform?

FL: We believe Paraguay must recover its credibility on the international stage, and one essential element is land redistribution. In the early 1990s, Paraguay received a 40 million dollar loan from the Inter-American Development Bank to create a national land ownership registry, which to this day has not been carried out. Only 10 to 15 percent in the south of the country has been covered. As long as we lack a credible land registry, people will continue to be duped. The point of departure for land reform is transparency about who owns what land. With the participation of government, small farmers’ organisations and industrial sectors, we could design a land reform process that would not be traumatic or violent, but would be the product of inclusive and consensual negotiation.

IPS: In terms of your plans for the country, to whom do you feel closest: Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, Néstor Kirchner of Argentina, Evo Morales of Bolivia or Hugo Chávez of Venezuela?

FL: Paraguay has to make its own way forward. I don’t think we can import a foreign model. I’m in favour of collective and shared leadership. I think that in some countries there are very strong individual leaders, such as in Chávez’s case, for example. When leadership isn’t shared, individual leaders can cause polarisation, as I believe is happening in Bolivia. I don’t believe in creating a polarised society. We have enough problems already without creating additional conflict. I believe in dialogue as the social instrument to build a country.

jimmy goddamn carter

A story about the former president that really shouldn't be missed...(thanks to sh in my comments for bringing it to my attention)

murga porteña

We met Gabriel yesterday at the Plaza de Mayo protests against the closing of cultural centers in the city by the right-wing city government. He is the coordinator for the the Murga Los Descarrilados de Parque Avellaneda. A murga is a musical street theater group centered around the Rio Plata primarily in Buenos Aires and Montevideo but in surrounding regions as well. Different neighborhoods have different murgas and they perform not only at carnival time but throughout the year. This murga is more of a socialist murga. They perform, for example, for a shoe company party and receive shoes instead of money. They hold fundraisers but never charge anything and are connected to the politics of their increasingly Bolivian populated neighborhood. So they also organize around labor issues like the issue of clandestine factories that produce cheap clothing on Bolivian slave labor.

el hombre nuclear

the apocalyptic buenos aires film festival

Interkosmos was playing in the Abastos shopping mall when the entire block had a blackout. We were eating across the street. They got the lights back on after 10 minutes or so and then another delay getting the subtitles and projections queued up. The people that stayed for the q and a were really excited about the film. An old couple said that they thought they were going to see Aaron Copeland's "The Planets" but were actually pleasantly surprised. I was asked why I thanked Hugo Chavez in the credits and I said I also thanks Judy Garland and Greta Garbo. But I thanked Chavez because he drives the Bush administration crazy. He is one of their failures. While they were obsessed with Iraq, that coup got away from them. And, of course, he is someone who can kick the ass of the US (at least verbally). Huele a sulfre...(it smells like sulfur, the devil was hear yesterday). The next night was a smoke-filled city. They were burning fields in the islands and areas around Buenos Aires and the wind apparently did not agree with them so all the smoke blew into the city. It was like there was a fire around the corner and you kept expecting the smoke to dissipate but it never did.

the black pope

I just had a strange question and answer of La Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo. I have slept probably 3 hours in a plane in the last 36 hours. We checked into our hotel off the airplane in the Abasto neighborhood of Buenos Aires but they wouldn't let us get a room so early so Cat and I walked around the city and I found a DVD rental place that has a bunch of leftie docs about the Montoneros, Tupamaros, etc.. and we went and ate at the Gato Negro, an old and charming cafe. By the time we got the room, I had to deal with festival stuff and then dinner and then my movie and q and a. I tried to speak English but I ended up speaking mostly Spanish, which sounds cool but I may have misread the audience. There were a couple of cranky lefties that did not like or understand what the hell I was doing so they kept the questions focused on why false documentary and how I was kind of making fun of the prisoners and kind of not. A couple Peruvians were there and one remarked again on the facts and what I got right or wrong. What is your concept of ideology is pretty interesting. I kind of rambled with that one talking about evil Soviet bobsledders in the seventies and how after 1989 Marxism is basically forgotten. I want to go back and look at this and remember the good things about the critical analysis of capitalism as well as the authoritarian tendencies of leftist groups. I talked about factionalism as well and how I see my work in the tradition of American satire creating characters that criticize my country and my capitalist ideology from outside the system. The translator and theater guys thought it was great. I felt a bit defensive, especially since many of the critical questions came from people who then got up and left shortly after. Which I thought was lame, by the way. I was tired and managed a 30-minute Spanglish q and a jetlagged so hooray!

Anyway, two women audience members came up to Cat and I and said are you Obama or Clinton, which I thought was funny. I'm Obama because I'm hoping he can do something even though I know he's a centrist, but I'm actually sympathetic to the argument that at this point the two are not far apart and that maybe Hillary would actually be able to get things through the bureaucracy. I asked what they thought and they said that they both were lousy and that Obama scared them. I said why and they said because you don't know anything about him. I talked about the culty criticism of him and one of them told me he was the Black Pope of the Apocalypse, which I thought was an insane and strange metaphor. When I got home, I googled it and found that it's a real conspiracy theory.

jimmy carter jimmy carter

If you count influence of the man, really the century's best president along with Roosevelt is President Carter. He has worked to mitigate the effects of guinea worm, dictatorships and helped transition nations (including Israel lately) to democracy for all. Lately he is meeting with Hamas, which is apparently shocking to all three Presidential candidates. While all the other former Presidents are making millions of dollars in speeches, Carter is working to eradicated guinea worm, meeting with Maoists and criticizing Israel for its apartheid-like politics. Here is the link to George Stephanopolous's interview with him.

"stock market going up, jobs going down, ain't no funky jobs to be found."

That's from 70s James Brown. From yesterday's Guardian, we have a report of yet more food riots. When I was in Iowa City last week, I had a conversation with a farmer who is doing great with the high food prices. "Let the markets work their course." Adele Horn and I tried gently to steer the conversation towards reality mentioning the high cost of food in the third world and government subsidies. He agreed but came back the Ann Coulter's argument that liberals are responsible for millions of malaria deaths in Africa since they worked to ban DDT. I explained that DDT is used widely in Latin America and probably Africa as well. He said no. He went back to his markets argument even though his state of Iowa does not allow corporations to own farm land. If they did, his family would have lost theirs in the 80s probably. I can't remember his name but this story is dedicated to him:

...Tempers flare outside a government bakery as the smell of hot baladi (country) bread wafts out from the ovens. There is pushing and shoving as a worker appears at the window to hand out plastic bags of the rough, round flat loaves - each weighing a standard 160 grams (5.5oz)- to customers.

"I've been here since before six and this is what I get," grumbles Umm Islam, her face contorted in fury. "My husband is retired and I have five children and it's not enough."

Others complain of their pitifully small incomes and shortages. In the last two months 11 people have died in bread queues, either from exhaustion, heart attacks, brawls or accidents.

"We are so badly off now we have to eat dogs and donkeys," shouts another middle-aged woman to raucous laughter from the jostling crowd. It sounds like an outlandish joke, but a butcher was prosecuted recently for selling adulterated spiced mincemeat in nearby Giza.

It looked as if this simmering crisis could trigger wider unrest. Last week, four people were killed and scores more injured and arrested in rioting in Mahalla, an industrial town in the Nile Delta, while a general strike left the normally teeming centre of Cairo eerily quiet. "The strike is against poverty and starvation," demonstrators shouted.

Egypt's problems are part of a global phenomenon, in that the price of the wheat it imports - half the country's needs - has tripled since the summer. But price rises have also cruelly exposed the shortcomings of a stagnant, creaking economy and regime. Prices of cooking oil, rice, pasta and sugar have soared, forcing more to rely on state-subsidised bread - at 5 piastres a loaf (about 0.5p) the main source of calories for the 40% of the population who live on or below the poverty line of £1 a day (about 10 Egyptian pounds).

In Egyptian Arabic the word for bread is aish - life - and getting enough of it is a truly existential issue. "The word is pregnant with meaning," says the left-wing thinker Mohammed Sayyid Said. "It's the basic component of life..."

the mother lode

This from Wake Up Wal-Mart:
Never forget the little guys who help along you the way. That old adage is likely ringing in the ears of Wal-Mart execs this morning following Gary McWilliams’ story about how a tiny video-production company is giving the world’s biggest retailer a massive headache.
It’s the story of Flagler Productions Inc., a small firm who for 30 years was employed as to capture footage of its top execs, sometimes in unguarded moments. Its relationship was sealed with a handshake, not a long-winded contract. Two years ago, Wal-Mart dumped Flagler and nearly caused the shop to fold because it accounted for such a large portion of its business.

...The biggest players in the world can’t function without smaller ones to keep them supplied, technologically-sound, and otherwise ticking. To stay afloat, Flagler offered to sell Wal-Mart the whole video archive for several million dollars. Wal-Mart, whose revenue is now over $375 billion, countered with an offer of $500,000.

And the little guy hasn’t forgotten.

protofascism and the consfusion of lesbians

Thanks to Media Matters for this little clip of Christopher Hitchens, protofascist masquerading as charmingly humorous political commentator. Apparently lesbians forget their points when interrupted. In case you've forgotten, Hitchens was the writer outraged that Bill Clinton was a rapist. He also traveled to the Kurdish areas of Iraq and told us how popular Bush was there. He was one of the many voices pushed hard for the war with an Engish accent. And then he wrote a book promoting atheism. And where should we look next to stop the deadly spread of religious fundamentalism? One guess, two syllables: Iran.

black ops patches (tastes like chicken)

Trevor Paglen was on the Colbert Report last night. His book of War on Terror secret military program patches is unreal. I bought the book a couple weeks ago. It is amazing. Hard to believe they are real. Below is the interview. If a commercial plays, I'm sorry. Please be prepared to with your finger on the mute button and eyes squinted.

closing out

The New York Underground closed out last night with The Juche Idea. It was a real honor that they chose my movie to end it with. The screening was great. Their audiences are trained to be open to experimental, funny and unique work. It was a bit sad, especially for the organizers Mo, Kevin and Nellie, who have been working so hard to keep it going the last few years. Que le vaya bien...

whatever happened to baby george?

I feel like George Bush has become this strange character that Bette Davis created in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?. He's living in some horror house, making shit up and murdering people and eating rats. Lying. Saying everything is fine just around the corner. He and all his chums are convinced (some more than others) that we'll be naming battleships and building statues to him in 30 years. What a horror. What an absolute disaster for the planet these eight years of neocon bushies have been.

mccain booed at mlk day

i love this country.