Monday, March 31, 2014

The rich elites of Venezuela attempt another coup

With all the recent focus on events in Ukraine, other conflicts around the world have been somewhat overshadowed. This includes the recent protests in Venezuela, where across the country there have been street demonstrations, attacks on government buildings, and attacks on protestors by the police.
Where the western media has covered this story at all, it has usually attempted to portray it as a heroic uprising against a corrupt and repressive regime, fitting it neatly into the same narrative as the Ukraine Euromaidan protests. This is unsurprising, of course, as this has been the western media’s approach to Venezuela ever since the late Hugo Chavez came to power, and the current government is led by his successor Nicolas Maduro.
In truth, and as always tends to be the case in Venezuela these days, the protests are actually being coordinated by the various right-wing opposition parties that appeal to the rich elites that used to rule the country before Chavez. They have not managed to win an election since Chavez came to power – and despite their inevitable claims of vote-rigging, no less of a capitalist figurehead than former US President Jimmy Carter has stated that those elections were free and fair. Quite simply, while Chavez was alive, the poor majority in Venezuela were happy to vote for him and support his attempts at wealth redistribution, meaning the opposition never had a chance of winning.
To make up for this lack of electoral popularity, the opposition did not try to come up with new policies that would actually appeal to the poor supporters of Chavez – instead, they decided to try and overthrow Chavez by force. With assistance from the USA, they succeeded for a few days in the early 2000s, but the people of Caracas hit the streets in a genuine popular demonstration and reinstalled their president. They also attempted to bring down the Venezuelan economy by encouraging strikes in the nationalized oil company, but this failed too. At that point, the opposition was out of ideas, besides complaining about how unfair it was that they were no longer in charge of the country, as they had been for hundreds of years.
With Chavez gone, and the less charismatic Maduro replacing him, the opposition parties finally had a chance to make some progress, and came much closer to winning the most recent election. However, rather than continuing to build on their gains and wait until their next chance to democratically win the presidency, they have once again decided that street protests and attempted coups are more their style. Hence, the protests have been focused in rich areas of the country – the poorer side of Caracas, where the people support the government, has barely seen a peep of action; while the richer half of the city, particularly around expensive private schools and universities, has seen large demos.
Ultimately, despite some setbacks, the Chavista project has helped the poor of Venezuela to gain back some of the wealth and power that the elites have gathered for themselves over the centuries. It has redistributed wealth, and, with the help of doctors from Cuba, given medical access to the population. The fact that Chavez and those that follow in his footsteps are having some success can be shown by the response of those elites – rather than engage in electoral battle, they consistently choose to try to sabotage and overthrow the government instead. Without the drive and ambition of Chavez, the Maduro government faces a difficult battle ahead, but it is a battle to create a new and more equal Venezuela for the future, and they should not be thrown off course by these elitist protests.

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Friday, March 28, 2014

Historical Justice, Brought Up-To-Date

A big topic of conversation today (well, it's a big topic among the people I talk to, anyway...) is that of climate justice. Roughly speaking, this means the need to take into account that some countries have a historical responsibility for the large amounts of pollution they have created, while other countries need help dealing with the effects of that pollution, and with ensuring that they do not create an equally large amount of pollution. Thus, the historically responsible countries should help the other countries. Simple, when you put it like that, but it's actually quite complex to arrange in practice.

It does bring to mind another similar, but much older, issue that has also been in the news recently – that of reparations for slavery. The effects of the slave trade between Africa and North America and the Caribbean are still being felt sharply even today, 150 years after the American Civil War ended slavery on that continent (and even longer since it was ended in much of the rest of the world). We see the relative poverty and discrimination against black people in the US; the resource based economies of the Caribbean that keep them poor; and the conflicts and troubles of places in West Africa where slaves were taken from.

Whenever these issues are brought up, western nations tend to try and bury their heads in the sand and ignore the people asking the questions. They are scared that if they admit any wrongdoing in the slave trade, they will be expected to pay billions of dollars in compensation and reparations for the damage they did over the centuries. And although we might say that maybe they should pay that money, they rightfully point out that handing over huge amounts of money to governments in countries that have conflict and corruption problems may not be the wisest solution – unless we want to help boost the balances of a few secret Swiss bank accounts.

However, a recently announced plan by the heads of various Caribbean states provides a much better way of looking at the reparations issue. Rather than directly asking for money, they are asking for European nations to help with medical treatment and education on the islands, and to help forge cultural and political links between the Caribbean and the West African nations that most of their citizens originally came from. This could help these countries become less reliant on western money, rather than more so – as an educated, healthy population with strong trading links with others countries would be much more able to fend for itself.


Hopefully, this plan will prove more amenable than demands for monetary reparations have proven to be in the past, and the European states will help it to get off the ground. It could provide some excellent opportunities for communities that have been oppressed and exploited throughout history, but it could also provide a good example for how we can approach climate justice in the future. Rather than obsessing about money and figures, we can instead focus on working together to provide the skills and resources necessary for poorer communities to survive climate change – whether that be the ability to make their own solar panels or hydro electricity, or to build houses in ways that will resist sea level changes, or anything else. This will take a lot of coordination, and, yes, will cost some money – but if we can manage to agree to do this kind of thing over the incredibly divisive topic of slavery, then we should be able to manage it when it comes to environmental issues that affect us all.

[ historical justice, climate justice, American civil war, Carribbean states, European states, Swiss bank accounts ]

Wednesday, March 26, 2014

Will Scotland go it alone?

The debate around Scottish independence has been heating up in recent weeks, with the vote now only six months away. The latest developments are revolving around politicians from other jurisdictions telling the Scots what they’ll be missing out on if they have the nerve to vote for self-government. All of the three main parties in the UK parliament have insisted that an independent Scotland will not be allowed to use the British pound as part of a currency union; the government has also said that Scotland will lose its access to the national broadcasting company, the BBC (despite the current existence of a BBC Scotland). Jose Manuel Barroso, the head of the European Commission, has also claimed that it would be difficult for Scotland to join the EU as it would be seen as encouraging other secessionist movements in Belgium and Spain.
This is all curiously reminiscent of another debate that occasionally pops up around the independence question – that of Britain’s North Sea oil reserves, which are undoubtedly much closer to Scotland than to the rest of the union. For some time, British politicians loudly huffed about how all of the oil would rightfully still belong to the UK. Of course, legally speaking, the situation is much more complicated than that, and legal opinion probably backs a Scottish claim to the reserves – unsurprisingly, those British politicians have not been so loud since this became clear.
A similar situation applies to the debates around the pound and EU membership – basically, it’s never as simple as politicians with particular agendas are making out. Scotland has contributed greatly to the current strength of the pound, working with the other nations of the UK to build it up into one of the world’s foremost currencies over the last three centuries. To assume that they can simply be cut off from their historical currency seems premature at best. Equally, while Barroso has pointed to potential Spanish objections to Scotland’s EU membership, Spain has happily come out and said it has no problem – it considers the situation to be suitably different from its position with Catalonia, Galicia, and the Basque country as to not set any unfortunate precedents. Once again, the pro-union politicians have been left looking silly.
The Scottish National Party have consistently claimed that the UK is trying to ‘bully’ Scottish voters by promising to take things away from them when they have no right to do so. It increasingly appears that they are right, but this is no surprise. The relationship between England and Scotland has long been one of bullying and exploitation. The UK government helped to ethnically cleanse the Highlands of their original people in order to assist rich landowners in raising sheep; and it has been suggested that the transport links in Scotland (and Wales for that matter) resemble the kind described by Eduardo Galeano in The Open Veins of Latin America – extraction economies designed to transport resources from the interior to the ports and to London as quickly as possible, rather than to assist the local people or economy.
The Scottish people increasingly feel like they have been taken for granted and kept relatively poor for too long, and the current macho posturing from London is only exacerbating this impression. For the UK, the colonial era has been drawing to an end for some time – many considered that chapter of history closed when Hong Kong was returned to China in 1997 – but many politicians are still finding it difficult to come to grips with a world in which long-exploited nations and peoples are allowed to stand up for themselves and make their own decisions about government. It seems that it may soon be time for another chapter to be written, as one of the oldest colonies of all finally gets the chance to govern itself again.

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Monday, March 24, 2014

The Need for International Women's Day

There was International Women's Day recently, the 8th March. You probably heard about this, as the day has become increasingly prominent in the media over the past few years. Of course, with increasing recognition inevitably comes increasing criticism, and International Women's Day is now invariably accompanied by the shrill cries of certain male commentators who argue that there is no need for a day to specifically recognize and address issues that face women, and to ask why there isn't an international men's day.

The second of those criticism is easily addressed by pointing out that there is an official, UN-sanctioned International Men's Day. It's on November 19th, so don't forget it and feel free to celebrate as much as you want. The other issue requires a little bit more looking at – is there still a need in the modern world for a day that focuses on women-specific problems? I think there is, because, contrary to what some people convince themselves of, there are still many problems and inequalities facing women around the world.

Physical violence and abuse, particularly from close relatives and partners, for example. During the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, for example, around 6,600 US soldiers have been killed. During the same time period, 11,700 women in the US have been killed as a result of domestic violence – not too far from double the number of soldiers. Female genital mutilation is still a fairly common practice around the world, and is not only an issue in underdeveloped countries – there is currently a debate going on in the UK about protecting young female students who are taken to their ancestral communities to be circumcised during high school breaks.

UN statistics suggest that at least 250,000 rapes (primarily of women) are reported annually. That data only covers 65 countries, and has no way of taking into account the number of unreported rapes or the prevalence of rape in war zones or other lawless areas – so we can safely assume that the real number is much, much larger. Meanwhile, the conviction rate for reported rapes remains shockingly low – despite some rather flagrant twisting of numbers by the Crown Prosecution Service, the number of reported rapes in the UK that end in convictions is below 10%. In the US, where conviction rates are slightly higher, recent years have seen numerous high profile cases in which victims have been disbelieved, ostracized, or blamed for their own predicament – such as the case of the rapists in Steubenville, Ohio, star football players on the high school team, who were essentially treated by the local community as if they were the victims of the rape they committed.

Discrimination remains an issue as well, even if statistics are improving here. Women are still statistically likely to be paid less than men in equivalent jobs, and are less likely to be promoted to positions of power. The few prominent women in positions of power – such as Marissa Mayer at Yahoo or Hilary Clinton – are often pointed to as a way to suggest that the 'glass ceiling' has been shattered. But they remain the exception to the rule, rather than heralding a new era of equality.


So International Women's Day remains important, because it provides an opportunity to bring attention to problems like these and to highlight the fact that many women around the world remain poor, exploited, and oppressed – and the fact that not all women are in that situation doesn't detract from this. However, rather than focusing on this for only one day a year, it would be much better if we could remove the need for International Women's Day altogether by making every day one in which we focus on ending violence, discrimination, and inequality against all people.

International Women’s Day, 8th March, physical violence, Crown Prosecution Service, Steubenville, discrimination, Marissa Mayer, Hilary Clinton, glass ceiling ]

Wednesday, March 19, 2014

The Crimean Referendum: Illegal, but not unexpected

So it seems that the Russian annexation of the Crimea is now a done deal – the blatantly fixed referendum has passed (and with a mere 96% of the vote, a very poor show compared to the 100% that Kim Jong-un received in the North Korean election a few days before), Russian troops completely control the region, and Crimea will soon become part of the Russian Federation, with the EU and the US issuing little more than cursory denunciations. The next step may well be for Russia to foment similar unrest in Donetsk and other eastern Ukrainian cities too, in the hope of pulling off the same stunt twice.

This is almost the exact opposite of what we hoped would happen in previous blogs on this topic. Instead of unity, Ukraine now has only a worsening division. Instead of peace, the government is calling up a national guard to prepare for an undeclared war. And instead of security, ethnic Ukrainians and Tatars are having to decide between fleeing Crimea or suddenly finding themselves in a country they do not wish to be in.

But as much as the west complains, it really only has itself to blame for the situation. After the invasions of Afghanistan (somewhat justified by the 9/11 attacks at least) and Iraq (completely unjustified by any measure), the attacks on Libya, the proposed attacks on Syria, and the constant pressure to conform being put on other sovereign states like North Korea and Iran, it would be foolish to expect other superpowers not to look at the way the US (and to a lesser extent the EU) behaves and to decide to copy them. After all, if one large, powerful, and well-armed country can get away with invading others for their own personal gain, then why can't the rest of them?

This kind of muscular geopolitics was common on both sides throughout the Cold War of course. Just as Russia annexed Ukraine and much of the rest of Eastern Europe at that point, so the US considered the Caribbean and Latin America to be its own 'sphere of influence', and American presidents had no qualms about sending troops to crush even minor deviations from the free-market capitalist script on tiny, defenceless islands like Grenada, or funding death squads and propping up dictators in Nicaragua or Chile.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine, the Baltics, Hungary, and more all became relatively free of Russian influence and able to follow their own path. However, the USA continued to go along with the now outdated idea that they had a right to interfere in the affairs of other countries – they were still playing the geopolitics of the Cold War, only without any real opposition anymore. But as the years have gone by, Russia has begun to flex its long-dormant muscles again, hoping to gain back some of the power it has lost over the past twenty years. The war with Georgia in 2008 was the first, relatively small, step. The Ukraine situation is a much larger one. And Russia's role model throughout all of this – the US and its continuing imperialist actions.


So the western politicians and newspapers are correct from a purely neutral standpoint. The Crimean referendum is a sham with no basis in international law. And Russia is pursuing a blatant policy of expansionism. But before we complain too much, we perhaps need to take a long look in the mirror and ask ourselves – where did they get the idea for that from? What influenced them to start expanding again? And we might just find that the answer is closer to home than we like to admit.


American presidents, ana shell media, ana shell media press, attacks on Syria, blatant policy of expansionism, Cold War, collapse of Soviet Union, Crimea become part of the Russian Federation, Crimean Referendum, cursory denunciations, defenceless islands, dictators in Nicaragua, free-market capitalist script, imperialist actions, interfere in affairs of other countries, international law, invasions of Afghanistan, Kim Jong-un, minor deviations, muscular geopolitics, personal gain, playing the geopolitics, purely neutral standpoint, Russian annexation of the Crimea, Russian influence, Russian troops, sovereign states, sphere of influence, Ukraine situation, undeclared war, well-armed country, western politicians, worsening division

Friday, March 14, 2014

Time to Pop Political Bubbles

We've all heard a lot in the past few years about 'financial bubbles'. These are situations in which investors become extremely confident in a particular resource and invest more and more money into it. Prices inflate, and people become even more confident, which leads to more investment, and so on – the bubble inflates. There was a housing bubble before the 2008 financial crisis, and the famous 'dot com' tech bubble of the late 90s. In truth, the confidence was based on assumptions that proved not to be true – for example, the housing bubble was founded on the assumption that cheap credit would be available forever. When that stopped being true in 2008, people could no longer pay their mortgages, and the bubble popped. When bubbles pop, it's usually because investors start to panic, worried that the fundamentals of their investment are not as strong as they initially appeared to be. They withdraw their money, and the market comes crashing down. This happened to the dot coms, and also to the Southeast Asian bubble economy in 1997.

So financial bubbles are well known, but what about political bubbles? This is a term suggested in a recent book by the political scientists Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole, and Howard Rosenthal, Political Bubbles: Financial Crises and the Failure of American Democracy. They suggest that behind every financial bubble, there is a political bubble – a collection of policies and ideologies that encourage certain market behaviours. Financial bubbles and the crises they lead to are enabled by the political bubbles that grow up before them. The comparison between the two seems obvious – political bubbles are ideologies that people put too much faith into, without examining the underlying truth. In this analogy, eventually people should realize the hollowness of their beliefs, and the political bubble should pop. However, it seems to me that this last element – the popping – does not actually happen to political bubbles with as much regularity as it does to financial ones. The political kind seems to be considerably more robust and able to withstand even the popping of its financial sibling. Let me give you some examples.

It is clear today that the belief that we have a free market in which everyone has equality of opportunity is blatantly false – every day governments intervene in the market through subsidies and tax breaks for corporations, and tariffs on the import of goods from other countries, and the barriers to entry in the economy get higher every day. But according to the political bubble of the free market, if Bill Gates and I were to each start a new business today, we would have an equal chance of success, and the winner would depend entirely on our personal qualities and the strength of our product. Anyone with an ounce of common sense knows that this is not true, because Bill Gates is starting the game with hundreds of billions of dollars, which gives him an inevitable advantage in our supposedly 'free' market. The idea that the free market will lead to a 'trickle down' of wealth and make us all rich is equally discredited by the increasing income gap we see in the world today. And yet, the political bubble around the 'free market' is so huge that even after the unregulated, free market system of the financial sector completely and utterly failed, we believe the solution is to keep doing more of the same.

This leads to another bubble – the public sector bubble. Instead of accepting the end of the free market and putting extra regulations on the banks to ensure the same problems don't arise again, we have become caught in a bubble which tells us that the problem is the public sector. In this bubble, the crash wasn't caused by the banks, it was caused by a bloated public sector that accumulated too much government debt. Government debt is, for sure, not the greatest thing in the world – but to suggest that it caused the 2008 crisis is idiocy of the first order. And yet, as a society, we believe it to such an extent that governments around the world have been given a mandate to cut health services, education services, benefits to the disabled, and other hallmarks of a civilized society – all while leaving the banks alone. This bubble is nothing new – it's been building for some time. You can see it in the structural adjustment programmes of the IMF and World Bank in the 1990s and 2000s, where developing countries were told their problem was government spending on education rather than the crippling debts the rich countries had forced on them.

One more bubble before we finish, something a little more contemporary – the attacks on Russia that we have seen during the Winter Olympics. Certainly Russia has its problems of autocratic leadership and a lack of civil rights for minority groups, but much of the western coverage has been hysterical. Everything has been criticized, from the stray dogs to the hotel rooms being too small. The political bubble at work here also goes back a long way – to the Cold War, and even to the attacks on Bolsheviks that were common in western newspapers in 1917. It's a bubble that tells us that Russia is different, undeveloped, somewhat barbaric – and it's a narrative that we lap up, as it conveniently allows us to ignore the problems in our own societies by reverting to a simplified, fairytale version of the world.


These political bubbles hang around for a lot longer than the financial bubbles that often accompany them, and are more pernicious because they are often much harder to identify. It is easy to see when housing is overpriced, but not so easy for any of us to sit down and think deeply about the ideologies that lie behind our understanding of the economy or society. In many cases, these are ideologies that we are indoctrinated with every day – through newspapers, advertisements, universities, and so on. But it's something we need to start doing if we are ever going to pop these bubbles and allow ourselves to think freely.

[ political bubbles, financial bubbles, financial crisis, Noaln Mccarty, Bill Gates, Winter Olympics, Cold war, Bolsheviks, NRGLab ]

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

The cult of celebrity

I try to avoid spending too much time reading internet news sites these days, largely because each week seems to bring a focus on some new celebrity controversy, relegating topics of real importance to the bottom of the page. Some American football player rants about an opponent, the internet goes wild. Justin Beiber gets arrested for his latest idiocy, the internet goes wild. The Mayor of Toronto does anything, the internet goes wild (though admittedly, that's a special case since he's only a celebrity because of his continual bizarre behaviour). But luckily, the last week or two has seen the golden combination of celebrity controversy and serious political issues.



The actress Scarlett Johansson appeared in a commercial for Soda Stream during the halftime show of the Superbowl. Soda Stream is an Israeli soft drink company that has its main factory on settled land in the West Bank – that is, on land which has historically belonged to Palestinians, but which has been appropriated by the Israeli state, illegally according to international law. This is, not surprisingly, rather controversial, and Johansson has been criticized by many people who believe that settler businesses that use Palestinian land should be boycotted. Johansson disagrees, and claims that because Soda Stream hires some Palestinian workers, it is 'building a bridge of peace' in the conflict-torn region.

Soon, the anger over this issue turned on the international NGO Oxfam, for whom Johansson was an 'ambassador'. Oxfam seem to have fiddled while the crisis grew around them, until eventually Johansson quit her role with the NGO, citing a 'fundamental difference of opinion'. The issue rumbles on, and will probably continue to do so for a while, but it seems like Oxfam are off the hook for now, and the focus of the anger is firmly back on Johansson and Soda Stream. However, rather than focusing on the issue of the Jewish settlements – of which more than enough has already been written on the internet – I'd like to focus on a different aspect of this episode.

Oxfam were obviously very reluctant to get rid of Johansson, to the extent that it appears she had to quit rather than being kicked out, despite the fact that her actions and public statements obviously go against most of what Oxfam stands for. Clearly, the idea of losing a 'celebrity ambassador' for their brand was painful for the NGO – a rather embarrassing state of affairs, as it suggests that PR and media relations are taking priority over the actual message. This also raises the question of why exactly humanitarian causes like those Oxfam champions need these celebrity ambassadors – who have also been employed by various UN agencies for many years now.


It seems to say something rather unflattering about our contemporary culture that issues of famine, war, conflict, and natural disasters seemingly need to be filtered through the lens of celebrity in order for us to care about them. We have become so deferential to those who are richer and more powerful than ourselves that the plight of the poor and oppressed is of no importance to us until the star of We Bought A Zoo decides to tell us about it. This explains why Oxfam seemingly didn't want to let Johansson go – she might be saying the wrong thing, but at least she's saying something, and without the glossy sheen that celebrity provides to a cause, no-one will pay any attention. Let's hope that the plight of the Palestinians and the struggle to remove the Israeli settlements will be kept in the public eye from this point on, even after the gossip magazines have moved on to the next celebrity controversy.

[ mayor of Toronto, Scarlett Johansson, Superbowl, NGO Oxfam, UN agency, We bought a zoo, NRGLab, Soda stream ]

Wednesday, March 5, 2014

The end of Bitcoin?

Last week, one of the largest Bitcoin exchanges in the internet, Mt. Gox, announced that it was filing for bankruptcy. A week before that, it had been a repository for over $400 million worth of the digital currency, and now it was down to nothing. Mt. Gox blamed a ‘hacking’ attack for the loss of the money, but questions remain over exactly how that much money can suddenly disappear – understandably enough, the people who had Bitcoin invested in Mt. Gox are rather angry, and death threats to the CEO have already begun to pour in. For most of us, however, this is rather a confusing subject – what exactly is going on here?
Bitcoins are a digital ‘cryptocurrency’. Essentially, they provide an online, and largely unregulated, replacement for ‘real’ money. They are not recognized as legal tender by any government in the world, but there is nothing to stop individual merchants accepting them as payment, and then converting them back into legal money by selling them on the open marketplace that sites like Mt. Gox were supposed to provide. One of the great advantages of Bitcoin, its proponents say, is that it allows money to be moved anonymously and outside of the traditional banking system. Grand claims have subsequently been made that this will help people protect their wealth from autocratic governments, and could be used to provide mobile banking services to the poorest people in developing countries.
In reality, of course, that isn’t what Bitcoin has been used for. The combination of anonymity and the requirement for a fair amount of technical knowledge means the currency has been monopolized by westerners with various agendas. In particular, it’s fairly useful for money laundering, and was also used to buy drugs and other illegal goods and services on the now defunct Silk Road website. It’s also become an investment opportunity – as the use of Bitcoins became more normalized, investors sunk money into them, and pushed the ‘real world’ price up to sometimes astronomical levels (although the price has also fluctuated rather wildly). Even today, in the wake of the Mt. Gox scandal, one Bitcoin is worth almost $680.
And there’s the real brunt of this issue. The people who had money invested in Mt. Gox have not really lost $400 million. They lost maybe a few thousand dollars each, which they invested when the price of Bitcoin was lower. The financial bubble around Bitcoin simply inflated that money to ridiculous and unsustainable proportions. These are not the poorest of the poor who are being hurt, or brave defenders of our freedom in the face of government tyranny – they’re just a bunch of libertarian westerners who could afford to throw down a thousand dollars on an unregulated digital investment product. They gambled, they chose the wrong place to do it, and it blew up in their faces. But this was never an issue of helping the poor – it was just rich kids playing around with finance like usual.
It looks like Bitcoin will stumble on despite the loss of so much money – there are many other exchanges beside Mt. Gox, and hopefully most of them will be somewhat better run. But if Bitcoin does collapse in the next year or two, don’t worry too much – we won’t be losing a tool for freedom and for lifting people out of poverty, as some have argued; we’ll just be getting rid of yet another pointless, puffed-up financial bubble that only really benefits the rich.

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