Author Archives: Reid Mukai

Artist H.R. Giger Dead at 74

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Spokespeople from the Giger Museum have just announced that the Swiss surrealist artist H.R. Giger passed away yesterday of injuries sustained from a fall. His work could be considered prophetic for its explorations of the relationship between organic life and technology, a vision he called “biomechanical”. He was best known for his influential design work for the “Alien” movies. Prior to that he collaborated with cult director Alejandro Jodorowsky on a proposed film adaptation of Dune that was unfortunately never made.

Giger is also known amongst certain free speech activists and punk rock fans for his involvement in the trial of Jello Biafra (the lead singer of the Dead Kennedys), who was prosecuted for distributing copies of the supposedly obscene Giger painting “Landscape XX” with the album “Frankenchrist”. Though Biafra won the case, the legal battle nearly bankrupted his label Alternative Tentacles. Giger’s work has also been featured in Omni magazine and inspired the interior design of bars located in Tokyo, New York and Switzerland. Interviews with Giger are featured in the documentary “Jodorowsky’s Dune” which is currently playing in theaters. Rest in peace H.R. Giger.

Piketty, Meet Orwell: Why Modern Oligarchy MUST Turn Fascist

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By Patrick Walker

Source: OpEdNews.com

If Frenchman Thomas Piketty, for all his brainiac academic wonkiness, has become a U.S. publishing sensation and economics rock star, it’s not merely due to his high-profile promoters. Granted, Piketty touters like Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz carry high-brow clout (rather justified, given their own economics Nobel Prizes), among both fellow economists and intellectually serious progressives; it’s hardly surprising they help set intellectual fashions. But the deeper reason Piketty crossed the Atlantic so well is his timeliness: he had an economic message America’s most politically aware citizens were desperately waiting to hear.

For me (and, I suspect, for millions like me), the translated Piketty message–and I mean translated not just from French to English, but from economics to political activism, is this: your governance is illegitimate, and you now have the go-ahead signal to REVOLT. Not that many of us weren’t ready to revolt anyway (Occupy Wall Street, the anti-XL pipeline movement, and the food service workers’ strike were among the most prominent foreshocks), but the point is that Piketty gave us a new intellectual legitimacy. All true idealists are at some level truth seekers, and nothing gives us the needed conviction to go overturning the social order (a task people of conscience don’t undertake lightly) than indisputable evidence that the current order is illegitimate–a menace to the common good.

Having been irreversibly persuaded ourselves of the need for revolt, we feel free–in good conscience and citing the same evidence that persuaded us–to spread the message of revolt.

Piketty gave us the needed evidence–and as I mean to argue passionately here, Orwell closes the deal. I mean to say the twentieth-century Brit has “crossed the pond” perhaps even better than Piketty, and that we’ll fail to grasp the truly sinister implications of Piketty if we don’t make Orwell his required intellectual “diet supplement.” All modern oligarchic governance must end, in Orwell’s unforgettable image, in “a boot stamping on a human face forever.” Nothing less is at stake in our call to radical action.

Before proceeding, I wish to make one point of intellectual clarity. Careful readers will perhaps have noted that what I called illegitimate, in light of Piketty, is our governance. Now, I could easily have chosen a more familiar word, like government or system or society, but I fear that in doing so, I would have lost needed precision. Even a qualification like political system might not do the trick. For by governance I mean something wider than government and narrower than society, and wish to avoid (for now) distracting questions about the adequacy or legitimacy of the political system bequeathed to us by this nations’ founders. By governance, I means the whole collection of institutions, organizations, laws, and practices that determine how we are actually governed. So in the term, I very much intend to include the media, police and military, political parties, PACs, and other interest groups. Everything variable, in short, that enters the equation of how our nation is governed. It’s the final result of that equation–summarized in the word governance– that’s now provably illegitimate.

As I feel no shame (but rather, great pride) in saying, I write as a tribal progressive–NOT as a tribal Democrat. In fact, it’s my being a tribal progressive that frees me of the intellectual blinders necessarily entailed by being a tribal Democrat. For no tribal Democrat is intellectually equipped to grasp the illegitimacy of our governance, which is clearly–in a system monopolized by two parties–a bipartisan affair. Not that any sane person would say that both parties share culpability equally; anyone who fails to properly assign greater blame to Republicans has respected, heavyweight constitutional scholars like Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein–writers long noted for their nonpartisan balance and objectivity–to answer to. Their deservedly popular book It’s Even Worse than It Looks places the lion’s share of the blame for Congressional dysfunction (the piece of the illegitimacy puzzle they deal with) squarely on right-wing extremism. But our governance is scarcely a matter simply of Congress–or of one party. Any thorough analysis of our current illegitimacy would have to include Congressional Democrats, the Supreme Court, President Obama, the “shadow governance” of the Deep State, and the maggot swarms of lobbyists who descend on Washington daily. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. But it’s hardly my purpose to sort out in depth the agents responsible for our gravely dysfunctional oligarchy, but rather to spotlight its grievous, jackboot-trampling-face consequences. For, as I intend to prove, oligarchs can ultimately rule us in no other way.

Now, my calling myself a “tribal progressive” is something of a joke, modeled of course on the notion of unthinking, party-line-towing tribal Democrats and Republicans. In fact, I also self-identify as an intellectual and truth seeker, and therefore as someone for whom–as for Orwell–there’s something deeply sinister in the notion of a banned or off-limits book. Consequently, I’ve been known to indulge myself in authors and works whose reputation among the politically correct Left is, to put it mildly, dubious. Hence, I’ve read with pleasure Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, a thoughtful and thought-provoking work once favorably reviewed by no less a lefty idol than John Maynard Keynes. And I’m now reading Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, a work bearing even the sulfurous stench of favorable reviews by adoring neocons. Yet, it’s reading Fukuyama that–far from reinforcing my faith in current U.S. governance–has, in conjunction with Piketty, obliterated all sense of its legitimacy. In fact, it’s because of Fukuyama (a learned, thoughtful author unfortunate in his associates and admirers–perhaps culpably) that I consider the whole question raised by Picketty as one of legitimacy.

And it’s the crucial question of legitimacy–the very heart of governance–that forcefully links Piketty to Orwell.

So here we’ve reached the heart of my topic. As Fukuyama deeply understands, the very survival of a political system or government depend on its legitimacy in the eyes of enough of its citizens. Crucially, not all of its citizens, indeed not even a majority, but enough citizens wielding the means of force and control to keep the doubters of its legitimacy in line. Hitler, as Fukuyama for example notes, was never elected by a majority, and probably never even freely supported by one. Little matter; the millions of Nazi supporters he did have were able to acquire near-monopoly of the means of force and control in German society, with the lethal consequences known to history. The complacent, misguided souls who cowishly nod their heads to Sinclair Lewis’s famous title statement “It Can’t Happen Here” probably fail to grasp that fascists’ required legitimacy is a minority matter; they certainly fail to grasp that Lewis himself believed it could. The it of course being U.S. fascism–and I believe it’s not only possible, but largely in place, and inevitable if we don’t soon change course.

Why? This is where Piketty’s strongly argued thesis about the nature of capitalism meets the brutal rubber of Orwell’s fascist road. See, Piketty’s central thesis is that the very nature of capitalism, because rewards to capital owners normally accumulate faster than general economic growth, is to produce oligarchic societies. Unless, says Piketty, extraordinary circumstances or government intervention–like high taxes–bring the rewards to capital in line with everyone else’s benefits from the economy. Now, the extraordinary circumstances, like world wars, are hardly desirable, and even depend for much of their effect on giving society a compelling rationale to tax the very rich. But as Piketty is keenly aware, extraordinary circumstances are by definition rare, and barring them, capital-owning oligarchs possess powerful means for thwarting government correctives to natural capitalist inequality. Like, say, buying the governments that would implement those correctives. Which clearly describes our current U.S. predicament–especially after the Supreme Court, itself an oligarchs’ plaything, has made buying our government infinitely easier.

So where does Orwell come in? The quick-and-dirty answer is, in vividly detailing the thoroughly modern, technology-based methods by which a tiny minority, hell-bent on exploiting a majority, recruits a critical mass of supporters (only a minority–though of millions–is needed) to keep the exploited majority at bay. In other words, as the word supporters clearly implies, the tiny minority (in our case, capitalist oligarchs) recruits just enough people who believe the exploitative governance of a majority by a capitalist minority is legitimate. And uses those millions of recruits to hold the exploited majority in terror. For once the majority gradually awakens to the illegitimacy of their exploitation by a handful of oligarchs, only a sizable minority (say, millions) of brainwashed or paid-off recruits wielding powerful modern weaponry, can keep the awakening majority from turning on the oligarchs. In other words, only a fascist government–one that recruits by technologies of propaganda and reigns by technologies of terror–can ultimately serve the aims of modern oligarchs.

Now, Piketty’s own historic examples might seem to refute the notion of oligarchs needing the modern Orwellian toolkit, but citing such historical counterexamples is shallow, and does not account for the fact that times–and above all, technologies–have changed. The key notion is that Orwellian methods are serving the aims of modern twenty-first century oligarchs, not those of nineteenth century France or England–a golden age for oligarchs Piketty often cites. In fact, today’s oligarchs require an economically richer, better-educated populace of servants than their nineteenth century counterparts; and even where they don’t strictly require it, such a populace is a fact on the ground they simply have to deal with–and control.

So, for example, even your average Walmart or McDonald’s peon needs to be–and in fact is–more literate and economically better off than your average eighteenth-century peon (or factory drudge) pure and simple. While condemning large segments of the population to unthinking drudgery (with no leisure for thoughtful politics) remains a perennial part of the oligarch toolkit, it simply can’t play the same role in population control it did when the drudges weren’t even allowed to vote. And of course, with legions of the unemployed poor, often replaced by cheaper foreign workers or robots, now having leisure for politics (if not necessarily thoughtful politics), the old-timey oligarch trick of denying the franchise is quickly making a comeback. But sadly for oligarchs, big enough segments of the U.S. population consider this trick illegitimate that it can never come anywhere close to being the chief means of control. So again, this is where Orwell comes in–and even building support for denial of the franchise requires massive Orwellian propaganda. Oligarchs must thank God every day for a critical mass of fearful, resentful racists and xenophobes–which clearly describes much of the Republican Party’s base.

Of course, racism and xenophobia are the hardly only Orwellian propaganda tools for recruiting oligarch lapdogs, though it must admitted they have served –and will long continue to serve–Republican oligarchs admirably. Patriotism, especially of the self-interested zero-sum variety where foreigners’ agendas and competition for resources and market share make them a threat to “our way of life,” has admirably served oligarchs from both parties. This has been especially true of fossil fuel oligarchs, who’ve successfully brainwashed Americans on the “energy independence” necessity of fossil fuels–even though our nation has been dramatically affected by the global climate harm these outmoded fuels are causing. And fossil-oligarch propaganda is remarkably adaptable; fossil fuels’ role as geopolitical muscle can be stressed now that large-scale plans for export prove the energy-independence argument was always hogwash.

But neither propaganda nor force exhaust the control tools in the oligarch toolkit; the fact is, there are certain “oligarch support industries” that have distinct trickle-down benefits. Not that trickle-down economists ever worked in the manner its ideologues proposed; in fact, the successful trickle-down depends on Big Government in a way that would have horrified trickle-down economics’ original small-government proponents. Understanding the mechanism involves understanding what I mean by “oligarch support industries”; by and large, I mean the industries, based on force and spying, that either distract attention from oligarchs, or potentially crack skulls on their behalf, once the legitimacy of their governance has been shaken in the eyes of large segments of the population. Offhand, I’d say this constitutes all branches of the U.S. military, mercenaries, and military contractors; government and private surveillance organizations; and police and private security organizations. Now, no one ever went broke serving the needs of the rich; in fact, providing oligarch support industries has become a huge U.S. business sector. But the very hugeness of that sector has swollen well beyond meeting oligarch needs, and can only be attributed to a perverse (perverse because it depends on Big Government) form of trickle-down.

See, precisely because no one ever went broke meeting the needs of the rich–and protecting their sorry asses in case the legitimacy of their governance breaks down is a huge oligarch need–investors in oligarch support industries soon become–if they weren’t already–oligarchs themselves. Now, a standard part of Piketty’s model is that oligarchs spend a portion of their vast wealth to buy government, in order both to protect and expand their already excessive wealth. Unsurprisingly, oligarchs created by oligarch support industries behave in exactly the same way: they invest heavily in lobbying government to support and expand their industries. Now, since the oligarch support industries in question straddle the public and private sectors, the lobbying successfully expands jobs–essentially, spying and potentially cracking skulls, both inside and outside our government. In no other case I can think of has “trickle-down economics” been so wildly successful. And even without oligarch propaganda, the overly swollen leagues of soldiers, spies, cops, rent-a-cops, and surveillance and weapons manufacturers–by now swollen well beyond the original protection needs of their oligarch employers–have a vested interest in serving oligarchs both inside and outside their industries.

And of course–though legally and morally this is not supposed to be the case–one must include many elected officials, elected and unelected judges, and journalists in corporate-owned media–as unofficial members of the oligarch support industries. While Republicans are clearly worse, it’s clear once again that these illegitimate members of the oligarch support industries are bipartisan–as was most recently proved by the eleven Democrat Senators (let’s brand them “the Keystone Eleven”) who were ready to surpass even Obama’s service to fossil fuel oligarchs by taking approval of the environmentally insane Keystone XL pipeline out of his cowardly, dithering election-year hands. Clearly, these Democrats are prepared to use the fascist jackboot against conscientious Americans on behalf of fossil-fuel oligarchs, since thousands of heroic citizens are pledged to civil disobedience against the unconscionable pipeline.

While the “boot stamping a human face” approach, backed by fascist pro-government courts, has already been used against Occupy Wall Street, I suspect approval of the XL pipeline will show us fascism–Orwellian brutality supporting Piketty’s increasingly dominant oligarchs–in its most blatant form. This will be, of course, because enough conscientious citizen have seen through oligarch propaganda to realize oligarch agendas threatens humanity’s very survival. So bipartisan is the push for pro-oligarch fascism that eleven Democrats openly decided noble Keystone protesters deserved Orwellian brutality.

Until we widely disseminate the fact that Orwell is other side of Piketty–that a “boot stamping on a human face forever” is the logical conclusion of runaway economic inequality–we’ll never (until we’re ALL destroyed by climate change) see an end to illegitimate oligarch rule.

The Mother’s Day Proclamation

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The piece commonly known as the Mother’s Day Proclamation was originally titled “Appeal to Womanhood Throughout the World” written in 1870 by Julia Ward Howe in response to the American Civil War and Franco-Prussian War. In 1872 Howe proposed an official observance of a “Mother’s Day for Peace” on June 2 of every year but was unsuccessful. Mother’s Day as we know it in the US today was established by Ann Jarvis in 1908. Her campaign was inspired by her efforts to honor her recently deceased mother Ann Reeves Jarvis, a peace activist who cared for wounded soldiers on both sides of the Civil War and created Mother’s Day Work Clubs to improve public health. In honor of Mother’s Day and the remarkable women who founded it, the following is the full text of Julia Howe’s “Appeal to Womanhood Throughout the World”:

Arise, then, women of this day! Arise all women who have hearts,
whether our baptism be that of water or of fears!

Say firmly: “We will not have great questions decided by
irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking
with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be
taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach
them of charity, mercy and patience.

We women of one country will be too tender of those of another
country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs. From
the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own.
It says “Disarm, Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance
of justice.”

Blood does not wipe our dishonor nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons
of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a
great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first, as women,
to bewail and commemorate the dead.

Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the
means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each
bearing after their own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
but of God.

In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask that a
general congress of women without limit of nationality may be
appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient and at
the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the
alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement
of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.

For more information on the history of Mother’s Day, visit the Zinn Education Project.

Saturday Matinee: Elite Squad

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“Elite Squad” (2007) is a gritty and smart action/political thriller set in Rio de Janeiro circa 1997. It’s a typical police procedural drama on the surface, but director José Padilha instills it with a political complexity and cynicism likely gained by his first-hand experiences making his previous film, the excellent documentary “Bus 174” (2002). The plot centers on Captain Nascimento, leader of a special forces team who intends to quit his post but must first find a successor who can navigate not just the street level criminality of the poverty stricken city but the government’s rampant corruption, incompetence and stifling bureaucracy as well. As accomplished as the film is, the 2010 sequel, “Elite Squad 2: The Enemy Within” is even more emotionally and intellectually compelling and politically scathing.

Watch the full film here.

The Vindication of Daniel Ortega

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By toni solo

Source: Axis of Logic

North American and European economies continue to be stuck with intractable, if for the moment moderate, stagflation. Prices for most household purchases steadily increase while majority incomes stagnate. By contrast, corporate incomes increase, subsidized by Western government and Central Bank policy. The resulting increase in inequality is clearly a deliberate policy outcome responding to the weakening of Western economies relative to global counterparts led by China and Russia.

Among those counterparts, Latin America, for long one of the world’s most unequal regions, is playing a leading role demonstrating how to reduce inequality. That is true to some extent in Brazil and Argentina, but it is particularly the case in the bloc of countries grouped in the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA). Western governments and corporate media regularly criticise the governments of ALBA members like Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua while omitting the solidity and consistency of those countries’ economic and social success over the last seven or eight years. Nicaragua is a perfect example of that pattern, having achieved the highest regional decline in inequality along with Bolivia and Ecuador.

A July 2013 World Bank paper “Deconstructing the Decline in Inequality in Latin America” shows that ALBA members Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua are the countries that had most reduced inequality as of 2011. Nicaragua had the highest average GINI coefficient year-on-year fall of  2.6% between 2000 and 2011. The figures for Bolivia and Ecuador are 2.05 and 1.99 respectively. In terms of an overall decline in the GINI coefficient in the region the figures for the period covered by the World Bank report are that Bolivia’s dropped 15.5%, followed by Nicaragua (12.2%), Argentina (10.7%), Peru (8.7%) and Venezuela (8.5%). (The figure for Ecuador is absent because data prior to 2003 were unavailable.)

Nicaragua in macro
Nicaragua is a Central American and Caribbean country with a population now of over 6 million. For decades it was the second poorest country in the Americas. Devastated by a US government contrived war in the 1980s, from 1990 to 2007 the country was governed on neoliberal principles dictated by foreign donor governments and multilateral financial institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. In January 2007, President Daniel Ortega took office leading the second democratically elected government of the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional.

2007 was the year in which global economic crisis followed the collapse of the Western financial system. Despite Western propaganda to the contrary, the effects of that crisis clearly persist. Even so, over the last five years, in that highly adverse international economic environment, Nicaragua has maintained better growth than its Central American neighbours, averaging over 5% a year. That success is the result of socialist inspired policies, responsive to the country’s emphatically Christian culture, based on the fundamental principles of solidarity and shared responsibility in all areas of national life.

The 2013 report of the United Nation’s Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) places Nicaragua among the more successful regional economies on a variety of indicators. For example, between 2010 and 2013, foreign direct investment more than doubled from US$491m to US$1004m, representing a much greater percentage improvement than in Costa Rica (43.5%), Honduras (8.7%) and Guatemala (40.5%). In El Salvador, the same indicator almost doubled, but at a much lower level from US$117m to US$224m.

Nicaragua’s international trade is now well over twice the value of its exports in 2005. In Latin America and the Caribbean in 2013, only Peru had higher fixed capital growth than Nicaragua as a percentage of GDP. Nicaragua’s figure of 29.2% is about 7% greater than Costa Rica and Honduras and over double that of El Salvador or Guatemala. Price inflation has held at around 7% for the last three years. Foreign external debt is around 31% of GDP. Foreign reserves are over twice those of 2006. In August 2013, two years after Nicaragua exited its last IMF programme, the IMF’s deputy director for the western hemisphere declared Nicaragua’s economy to be solid and stable.

Global context
The current crisis in the West suggests similarities with the prolonged economic crisis in North America and Europe from 1873 to 1896. The Western powers resolved that crisis through a virulent burst of imperialist aggression, setting the stage for the global wars of the 20th Century. Since the end of World War 2 in 1945, the appearance of democracy in the West has depended on externalizing onto the majority world the costs of mitigating and managing inequality in Europe and North America.

A key witness to that fact is former French President Jacques Chirac who in the 2008 documentary “10 mai Africaphonie” stated, with uncharacteristic honesty, “We forget one thing…namely that much of the money in our wallets comes precisely from the exploitatation over centuries of Africa. Not completely, but a lot of it comes from the exploitation of Africa. So we have to show a bit of common sense. I won’t say generosity, but common sense, some justice to render to Africans… you might say ….what was taken from them. As much as necessary, if we want to avoid the worst convulsions or difficulties with the political consequences these might bring in the near future.”

As the West’s neocolonial options recede, most clearly in Asia and Latin America, the United States and its European allies embrace more than ever the logic of fascism, the alliance of corporate interests and coercive government. Domestically, their policies protect wealthy elites while cutting back on provision for education, health care and social security. Overseas, to intimidate Iran, destroy Libya and attack Syria, NATO country governments have allied themselves with feudal tyrannies like Saudi Arabia and Qatar and with Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.

To intimidate Russia, they have funded, trained and supported murderous neonazi groups in Ukraine while deploying military resources including missile systems around Russia’s borders. To intimidate China, they harrass North Korea, encourage Japanese nationalism and increase military deployments in the Pacific. Extensive military deployment is also a key element of Western efforts to reset their countries’ neocolonial control in Africa in response to China’s growing influence there.

The perfidious dollar
Underlying these developments is the end of global dollar hegemony and the steady emergence of multipolar alternatives. China, Russia and various countries in Asia and Latin America are conducting trade more and more in their own currencies or even, in the Latin American and Caribbean ALBA framework, in kind. As Western economic dominance declines, especially relative to Russia and China, the United States and the European Union compensate increasingly overseas with terrorist subversion and outright military aggression. Their corrupt political and economic system staggers like a zombie from one crisis to the next.

The Western powers cling to vestiges of their former global power by continuing to dominate the world’s financial system and through ruthless military barbarism. Their financial dominance persists in large part because commodity prices, especially oil and gas are denominated internationally in dollars. In 1971, the US government floated the dollar in order more freely to fund the Vietnam War and its broader imperialist foreign policy. Since then, in effect, only the United States has been able to use its own credit to fund economic growth and finance deficit spending.

Every other country has needed dollars in order to ensure their people’s economic development, mainly to guarantee energy needs and attract foreign investment. Even the wealthy Eurozone countries and Japan are subject to that dollar hegemony. The US Federal Reserve and its Primary Dealer network manage dollar liquidity in the global financial system. The Primary Dealers are all subsidiaries of crooked, giant North American, European and Japanese global financial corporations, too big to fail and too big to jail. They act in close collusion with the Federal Reserve and the other Western Central Banks, monitoring and managing international financial, currency and commodities markets.

Low wages and deregulation
The various mechanisms of dollar hegemony necessarily promote deep inequality around the world because international competition to earn dollars via exports encourages low wages, restricting domestic demand in the exporting countries. Ever since the 1980s the pernicious low wage effects of dollar hegemony have been progressively compounded by neoliberal propaganda for radical deregulation, urging low taxes, attacking organized labour and dismantling financial and commercial controls, especially of international capital flows. Incomes in the West began to stagnate as the rate of profit for Western corporations slowed and former well paid jobs were outsourced overseas.

The demise of the Soviet Union signalled a deregulation boom. In Europe and North America, mergers and acquisitions increasingly concentrated corporate power, strengthening the drive for deregulation. The resulting fraudulent financial innovation and free transfer of capital across the world lead to the Long Term Capital Management debacle and the Mexican, Russian and Asian currency crises of the 1990s. Despite these disastrous outcomes and the subsequent Enron and Worldcom scandals, deregulation continued to drive asset bubbles and easy credit so as to compensate for stagnant incomes, especially in the United States, leading directly to the crisis of 2007.

Poverty reduction in Nicaragua
This dead hand of decrepit neoliberal corporate capitalism was choking the Central American economies when Daniel Ortega took office as President of Nicaragua’s second democratically elected Sandinista government in January 2007. In such a dismal international economic context, poverty reduction represented a monumental challenge. Even so, President Ortega’s Sandinista government quickly set out in an extremely determined way to reduce poverty with a policy program whose many components are worth listing, if only because they show what can be done by an extremely poor country despite largely adverse international conditions. Extreme poverty in Nicaragua has been cut from over 17%  in 2006 to just over 5% now.

Addressing intractable balance of payments difficulties, the government sought to broaden Nicaragua’s trade with Latin America, the Russian Federation, Asia  and elswhere. Similarly, the government diversified its development cooperation, maintaining links with traditional partners in North America, Europe and Asia but also deepening its relationships with Venezuela, Cuba, Mexico and Brazil. Attracting greater foreign investment was also a key policy objective. Joining the ALBA framework, led by Venezuela and Cuba, freed up around US$500 million a year to invest primarily in production but also in major social programs.

To give Nicaragua’s overwhemingly agricultural economy much needed domestic stimulus, government programmes have prioritized small and medium producers of basic grains, cattle and coffee. The cooperative sector received support and resources to develop existing production cooperatives and form new ones. Small and medium sized businesses benefited from greater access to credit. The government has prioritized tourism, ensuring that it integrates closely with other sectors of the economy, especially small and medium sized businesses.

Economic democracy
This democratization of the Nicaraguan economy has radically transformed the position of women. Flagship programmes like Zero Hunger and Zero Usury, as well as property titling programmes and social housing are all directed at women beneficiaries. President Daniel Ortega’s insistence on genuine democracy and national reconciliation made possible tripartite agreement on a minimum wage framework between government, labour unions and employers organizations. Since 2010, that framework has ensured an annual increase in the minimum wage several percentage points greater than the rate of inflation.

In the last three years, those domestic stimulus measure were accompanied by administrative measures relating to equitable tax and social security reform which have helped significantly increase government revenue and stabilize the social security system for the foreseeable future. As Nicaragua’s economy generates progressively more formal employment, both tax revenue and social security income benefit. ECLAC reports that while formal employment has declined throughout the rest of the region, in Nicaragua it has grown steadily through 2012 and 2013

One key mechanism reducing inequality has been to use subsidies in the most sensitive areas affecting ordinary families’ costs. Apart from free health care and education, the government subsidizes the cost of public transport. Bus companies in the capital Managua receive preferential prices for fuel, oil, tyres and spare parts in exchange for pegging fares at 10 US cents. Taxis in Managua as well as inter-urban and acuatic transport in the rest of the country also receive similar benefits enabling the Transport Ministry and local municipalities to negotiate favourable fare tariffs for transport users.

Low income families benefit from subsidized electricity for consumers using under 150Kw a month. The government also operates a retail network offering basic food stuffs at preferential prices through local general stores. Over 58,000 families have benefited from subsidized or free housing. Low-income families nationwide have benefited from a free construction materials program enabling impoverished families to repair defective roofs.

Other social investment programs include assistance for people, especially children, with disability as well as food support for vulnerable groups such as the elderly. The Amor para los más Chiquitos programme has helped around 32,000 very young children at risk, ensuring they enjoy care, education and attention rather than ending up on the streets. That programme has worked with over 420,000 families providing advice and guidance in the care of young children under 6 years old. The government’s efforts to promote social stability also encompass property titling programs that have issued over 180,000 title deeds bringing security of tenure to over 800,000 people.

Health, education, infrastructure
Health and education are crucial expenses for most families in Nicaragua as everywhere else. The availability of free public health care has made a massive difference to low income families who cannot afford private care. The government is steadily equipping the public health system with the resources it needs to improve its services year by year. Emphasising preventive health care, government vaccination programs applied over 4,100,000 doses in 2013. The Casa Materna programme, almost tripling facilities to assist expectant mothers in rural areas, has helped the government reduce maternal mortality, which fell 35% from 2007 to 50 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2012.

Likewise in education, government expenditure improving infrastructure is accompanied by a range of programmes supporting low income families. The Merienda Escolar programme for adequate nutrition for primary school children, ensures provision of meals for over 1,000,000 pre-school and primary school children. Low income families also get help with schooling inputs. Apart from regular primary and secondary education, the government has invested heavily in vocational technical training for young people and improved access to education in rural areas. Follow up to the successful literacy programs of the government’s early years is consolidating the eradication of illiteracy. Education programmes for children with special needs include the integration of children with slight disability into the regular school system as well as dedicated programmes for children whose disability is more severe.

The transformation of government social and economic policy is physically much more obvious in terms of energy and infrastructure. National road, port and airport infrastructure has been almost completely renovated. Construction is on schedule of the new oil refinery being built near León with the Venezuelan State oil company PDVSA. Dependence on oil fired thermal generating stations has dropped from over 80% to less than 50% of the country’s generating capacity thanks to investment in renewable energy sources. Work on the long delayed Brazilian financed Tumarin hydroelectric project on Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast should begin later this year. Also by the end of this year the results of the feasibility studies for the Interoceanic Canal will permit work to begin on that epoch making project and its sub-projects. These include an interoceanic rail link and pipeline, new airports and two deep water ports on the country’s Pacific and Caribbean coasts.

Confidence, security, democracy
Domestic and international confidence has been fundamental in making all this transformational social and economic investment happen. Despite a comparative lack of resources, Nicaragua’s police and army are acknowledged to have the best record in the region combating narcotics and other organized crime. Overseas, Nicaragua’s community oriented policing is recognized as a model, largely because the country has prevented the spread of the gang culture prevalent in neighbouring El Salvador and Honduras. While common delinquency remains a persistent problem, enhanced security in rural areas has been crucial in encouraging the small and medium farm production that has transformed Nicaragua’s agricultural economy since 2006.

The success of the Sandinista government’s economic policies has resulted from consensus-building  with private business organizations and labour unions by means of constant consultation with all sectors of the national economy. Similarly, government social policy has been developed in close collaboration with the country’s municipal authorities. Many resources and implementation of much social and economic policy have been channelled through the country’s 153 local authorities. The positive impact of that strategic partnership is most obvious from investment in improved municipal infrastructure, in sports facilities for young people and in support for local small and medium sized businesses.

Another fundamental component in the success of President Ortega’s social and economic strategy  has been the deliberate and active promotion of the role of women. Previously, women in Nicaragua were in effect structurally excluded from both economic and political life, denied their legitimate role in decision making and as economic agents. Nicaragua is now acknowledged among the world leaders in guaranteeing political representation for women. Less well known is the transformational role of women in Nicaragua’s economy through access to resources via government programs like Zero Hunger and Zero Usury and ensuring property titles to families previously without secure tenure. All those programs prioritize women beneficiaries.

More specific to Nicaragua has been the consolidation of the country’s Caribbean Coast into the national economy. That process has been a continuation of the historic autonomy project for Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast initiated under the first Sandinista government in the 1980s. In the next five to ten years, the economy of the Caribbean coast is likely to change radically. It has become an ever more popular tourist destination. The recovery in 2012 of Nicaragua’s maritime territory, usurped for decades by Colombia, has opened up new commercial opportunities. The Interoceanic Canal and its sub-projects will definitively end the area’s historic and geographic separation from Nicaragua’s Pacific coast.

Daniel Ortega – Central America’s leading regional statesman
Based on broad consultation and consensus, President Daniel Ortega has implemented strategic policies through a ministerial team led operationally by Rosario Murillo, successfully managing all the various complex factors in relation to social investment, the macro and domestic aspects of economic policy, infrastructure development and energy policy, fiscal and administrative reform, trade and agricultural renewal and security. He has done so constrained by the continuing international economic crisis and in the face of relentless, vicious national and international disinformation campaigns. But the results speak for themselves and explain why Nicaragua’s political opposition have been unable to muster more than 10% support nationally for well over a year, while support for President Ortega is consistently well over 60%.

Aside from the incomparable figure of Fidel Castro, Daniel Ortega is the most outstanding statesman of Central America and the Caribbean of the last thirty years. Rosario Murillo stands with Dilma Rousseff and Cristina Kirchner among Latin America’s women leaders transforming the region’s societies and economies. Under the leadership of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, Nicaragua’s government team has proved by any measure to be among the most effective in Latin America and the Caribbean. Many Western government officials will acknowledge that in private. Multilateral organizations have recognized it publicly for years now. It is long past time for the Western corporate and alternative media to recognize it too.

The Economics Of Marriage

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rings

Michael Snyder recently wrote an interesting analysis of the relationship between the declining economy and the declining state of marriage in the U.S. While I share much of the same concerns my perspective is different in certain respects. For example, I do not share the same alarm Snyder has regarding the trend of unmarried couples cohabitating. In some cases it’s preferable to living alone and can provide an equivalent sense of interpersonal support as marriage on a day to day level. However, I would agree that the institution of marriage has a generally positive impact on social and domestic cohesion (though it’s unfortunate that the state gets involved for tax purposes or when incompatible couples are pressured to stay married for reasons of religion or tradition).

Another point of disagreement is regarding the declining rate of childbirth. If humanity (especially the governments and corporations it creates) continues to consume, pollute and wage wars at the current rate, a voluntary reduction in birth rate may ethically create the needed time to change or reverse such trends before they cause a mass die-off. Child-free adults also have more potential to keep up with current events and be politically active. Snyder rightfully points out that the current economic structure is destroying jobs but failed to mention that with increased technology and automation, the fact is that less workers are needed in modern societies. The choice of not having children can be seen as an adaptation to current economic reality. So how will we survive as an aging majority population? Probably with the help of technology and the children of immigrants.

 

The Economics Of Marriage

By Michael Snyder

Source: Investment Watch

According to a startling new study conducted at Bowling Green University, the marriage rate in America has fallen precipitously over the past 100 years.

In 1920, there were 92.3 marriages for every 1,000 unmarried women.  In 2012, there were only 31.1 marriages for every 1,000 unmarried women.

That is not just a new all-time low, that is a colossal demographic earthquake.

That same study found that the marriage rate has fallen by an astounding60 percent since 1970 alone.

As a result, U.S. households look far different today than they once did.

Back in 1950, 78 percent of all households in the U.S. contained a married couple.  Today, that number has declined to 48 percent.

That is a very troubling sign if you consider the family to be one of the fundamental building blocks of society.

When young people are asked why they are delaying marriage today, one of the things that always seems to get brought up is money.  There is a feeling (especially among men) that you should achieve a certain level of financial security before making the big plunge.

And it is a fact that the more money you have, the more likely you are to be married.  Just check out the following stats about income and marriage from a recent Business Insider article…

83% of 30- to 50-year-old men in the top 10% of annual earnings are married today, whereas only 64% of median earners and half of those in the bottom 25th percentile are hitched.

Now, compare that to men in 1970, whose marriage rates were 95% (top earners), 91% (median earners), and 60% (bottom 25th percentile of earners), respectively.

A lot of people like to think that “love is the only thing that matters” when it comes to marriage, but the cold, hard numbers tell a different story.  In fact, one very shocking survey discovered that 75 percent of all American women would have a problem even dating an unemployed man…

Of the 925 single women surveyed, 75 percent said they’d have a problem with dating someone without a job. Only 4 percent of respondents asked whether they would go out with an unemployed man answered “of course.”

“Not having a job will definitely make it harder for men to date someone they don’t already know,” Irene LaCota, a spokesperson for It’s Just Lunch, said in a press release. “This is the rare area, compared to other topics we’ve done surveys on, where women’s old-fashioned beliefs about sex roles seem to apply.”

Unfortunately for American men, there simply are not enough good jobs to go around.  In fact, the number of working age Americans without a job has increased by 27 million since the year 2000, and businesses in the U.S. are being destroyed faster than they are being created.

Due to a lack of economic opportunities, a rising percentage of our young people have been giving up on the “real world” and have been moving back in with Mom and Dad.  For much more on this, please see my previous article entitled “29 Percent Of All U.S. Adults Under The Age Of 35 Are Living With Their Parents“.  And when you break down the numbers, you find that young men are almost twice as likely to move back in with their parents as young women are.

But economic factors alone certainly do not account for the tremendous decline in the marriage rate that we have witnessed in this country.  Shifting cultural attitudes also play a huge role.

A whole host of opinion polls and surveys show that Americans simply do not value marriage and having children as much as they once did.  For example, the Pew Research Center has found that the younger you are, the more likely you are to believe that “marriage is becoming obsolete” and that “children don’t need a mother and a father to grow up happily”.

In fact, an astounding 44 percent of all Americans in the 18 to 29-year-old age bracket now believe that “marriage is becoming obsolete”.

And why should they get married?  Our movies and television shows constantly tell them that they can have the benefits of being married without ever having to make a lifelong commitment.

This sounds particularly good to men, since they can run around and have sex with lots of different women without ever having to “settle down”.

But there are most definitely consequences for this behavior.  The “sexual revolution” has left behind countless broken hearts, shattered dreams, unintended pregnancies and devastated families.

In addition, the U.S. has become a world leader when it comes to sexually-transmitted disease.

It is hard to believe this number, but according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention approximately one-third of the entire population of the United States (110 million people) currently has a sexually transmitted disease.

So nobody should claim that the “sexual revolution” has not had any consequences.

But most Americans don’t actually run around and sleep with lots of different people at the same time.  Instead, most Americans seem to have adopted a form of “serial monogamy“.

In America today, most people only sleep with one person at a time, and “living together” is being called “the new marriage”.

According to the CDC, 74 percent of all 30-year-old women in the U.S. say that they have cohabitated with a romantic partner without being married to them, and it has been estimated that 65 percent of all couples that get married in the United States live together first.

Many believe that by “trying out” the other person first that it will give them a much better chance of making marriage work if they eventually do choose to go down that path.  Unfortunately, that does not seem to work out very well in practice.  In fact, the divorce rate for couples that live together first is significantly higher than for those that do not.

And when it comes to divorce, America is the king.

For years, the U.S. has had the highest divorce rate in the developed world.

But it wasn’t always this way.  Back in 1920, less than one percent of all women in the United States were currently divorced or separated.  Today, approximately 15 percent of all women in the United States are currently divorced or separated.

So why are so many people getting divorced?

Of course there are a lot of factors involved (including money), but a big one is cheating.  According to one survey, 41 percent of all spouses admit to infidelity.  Many Americans simply find it very difficult to stay committed to one person for an extended period of time.

As a result of what I have discussed so far, it is easy to see why people in our society are so lonely and so isolated.  Less people are getting married, more divorces are happening and couples are having fewer children.  This means that our households are smaller and we have far fewer family connections than we once did.

100 years ago, 4.52 people were living in the average U.S. household, but now the average U.S. household only consists of 2.59 people.

That is an astounding figure.

And the United States has the highest percentage of one person households on the entire planet.

But we weren’t meant to live alone.  We were meant to love and to be loved.

Often, those that are being hurt the most by our choices as a society are the children.  They need strong, stable homes to grow up in, and we are not providing that for millions upon millions of them.

When you look at just women under the age of 30 in the United States,more than half of all babies are being born out of wedlock.

That would have been unimaginable 100 years ago.

And of course when there is no marriage involved, a lot of times the guy does not stick around.  At this point, approximately one out of every three children in the United States lives in a home without a father, and in many impoverished areas of the country the rate is well over 50 percent.

In addition, women are waiting much longer to have children than they once did.

In 1970, the average woman had her first child when she was 21.4 years old.  Now the average woman has her first child when she is 25.6 years old.

The biggest reason for this, once again, is money…

In the United States, three-quarters of people surveyed by Gallup last year said the main reason couples weren’t having more children was a lack of money or fear of the economy.

The trend emerges as a key gauge of future economic health — the growth in the pool of potential workers, ages 20-64 — is signaling trouble ahead. This labor pool had expanded for decades, thanks to the vast generation of baby boomers. Now the boomers are retiring, and there are barely enough new workers to replace them, let alone add to their numbers.

We are waiting longer to have children and having fewer of them, but those children are needed for the economic future of this country.

Fifteen years from now, one out of every five Americans will be over the age of 65.  All of those elderly Americans are going to want the rest of us to keep the financial promises that were made to them.  But that is going to turn out to be quite impossible.  We simply do not have enough people.

In the end, the economics of marriage does not just affect those that are thinking of getting married or those that are already married.

The truth is that the economics of marriage affects all of us.

Video News Roundup

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5/7 RT interviews a survivor of the Odessa massacre who witnessed police complicity in the violence:

5/6 Mark Dice on the NSA and freedom of speech:

5/6 A NextNewsNetwork report on a test of the limits of religious freedom in Oklahoma:

5/5 Before Snowden there was NSA whistleblower Russ Tice, who has had suspiciously less corporate media coverage. Fortunately WeAreChange and other independent journalists are helping to get his message out:

5/5 GlobalResearchTV posted this PressTV report linking chaos in Ukraine to US policy:

5/5 Lee Camp on the military-industrial complex: