Catalyst

Bloggers: Bigger Job Still Undone: VOTE OUT THE MYTH!

I was so outraged I shouted at my car radio. The interviewer on “All Things Considered” was asking Democratic Congressman Dave Obey what was going to happen to fiscal responsibility now that the Democrats, with their reputation for government spending, were taking over power from the Republicans. To add unbelievably shameless insult to injury, President Bush went on to warn the new Congress to be responsible in dealing with budget issues.

What planet have these people been living on?

Even the openly Republican Omaha World Herald in its lead editorial December 21^st noted that “the speed with which Republicans abandoned their historic devotion to spending restraint these past six years has been astounding. . . . Republicans ill-served the country by abandoning their support of budget restraint.” The editorial writers express surprise that the promise of a return to “woefully needed discipline in the wake of a fiscal process gone entirely off the rails” is coming from Democrats. And they sprinkle the editorial with a liberal dose of suspicious comments like “if the [Democrats] mean what they say.”

If the myth that the Republicans are the fiscally responsible party and the Democrats are the profligate spenders is allowed to stand unchallenged, the step toward responsible government made in this last election will be reversed all too soon

Every conscious or unconscious expression of that myth must be confronted immediately with the facts. For the last quarter century, not only have Republicans presided over the most blatant fiscal irresponsibility, they have let it be known that it was part of a deliberate strategy to “starve the beast” – to put the federal government in such terrible financial condition that it is rendered ineffective.

Do interviewers and editorial writers not remember that it was a Republican president 25 years ago who took the national debt that he had inherited from the previous 204 years and doubled it in two terms? Do they forget that it was Republicans who repudiated their own president, George H. W. Bush, when he tried to be fiscally responsible by raising taxes? Have they blotted out the fact that it was Democrat Bill Clinton who painfully restored fiscal discipline and handed a significant budget surplus to the incoming George W. Bush – who rapidly redistributed it to his wealthy base?

How many decades of blatantly contrary evidence does it take to deflate a myth like the one the Republican party and its media enablers – whether consciously or unconsciously – are promoting?

That myth has to be shown up for what it is and destroyed. It builds an unconscious foundation of false and destructive assumptions that have the power to control political decisions. It has already done far too much damage to too many people. Twenty-five years of living this lie is enough.

Posted by Jim Hug, SJ - President, Center of Concern.

Disintegration in Darfur

The situation on the ground, as a variety of official and private firsthand witnesses indicates, shows a horrific violation of human rights: killing of children, sexual abuse and rape of girls and women, forced uprooting of population, burning of villages, attacks on Internally Displaced People camps, targeting of unarmed civilians. . . The urgent task is stopping the violence, the destruction, the impunity. The victims are not just statistics; they are real people.

These words were spoken by Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Vatican ’s permanent observer to the United Nations, in an address to the Human Rights Council on December 13, 2006 .

Even as the U.N. and the rest of the world is preoccupied by the swearing in of the new secretary general, Ban Ki Moon, what to do about the war in Iraq, and getting to the bottom of the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, the situation in Darfur is continuing to disintegrate.

Only three months after a peace agreement was signed between the Sudanese government and one faction of rebels, the UN's top humanitarian official, Jan Egeland, reported that the situation in Darfur is "going from real bad to catastrophic.” The latest count is 2.5 million people in Darfur displaced from their homes and at least 400,000 thousand killed and there have recently been reports of increases in violence, rape, and murder.

The conflict in Darfur has now begun to destabilize the entire region.  The violence has followed the fleeing people of Darfur into Eastern Chad , and Human Rights Watch reports that hundreds of Chadian civilians have now been killed and at least 10,000 displaced by recent militia attacks on approximately 60 Chadian villages. (At least 70,000 Chadian civilians have been displaced since 2003.) The Chadian militias are suspected of being supported by the Sudanese government, which has an interest in destabilizing Chadian ruling powers, who have supported Sudanese rebels fighting against the Sudanese government.

Inhabitants of villages in southeast Chad are now falling victim to the same types of atrocities that have been seen in Darfur . A UNHCR worker in the region recently told of “a young father with his eyes gouged out, elderly women with third-degree burns on their backs and arms caused by collapsed thatched huts set aflame, miles and miles of brushland torched. Communities that had long lived in harmony have turned on each other."

63,000 people now fall into the “internally displaced” category in eastern Chad, in addition to the 218,000 refugees from Darfur in 12 camps in that region. The UNHCR website now refers to the crisis as the “Chad/Darfur Emergency” and on December 4, UN agencies announced the decision to withdraw their personnel from 6 of the camps in that region.

The long-term consequences of such disintegration could be catastrophic. In his address, Tomasi referred not only to regional destabilization, but also “[t]he disruption of agriculture” which will affect the production of food, exacerbating the struggle for resources that was fodder for the conflict in the first place. In addition, the prolongation of the conflict will affect long-term “intergroup relations” and will continue to cause grave psychological problems for “traumatized refugees.”

The continuation of the conflict is inexcusable. Each day the conflict continues, refugees continue to face starvation, disease, and rape. Those who remain in their villages in Darfur—and now increasingly in Chad as well—face violent attack, death, torture, and rape. The inability of the international community to effectively intervene becomes even more inexcusable as one considers the “political arrangements and commercial interests” that Tomasi accuses the international community of allowing to stand in the way of the UN Security Council of taking real and effective action.

It is true that finding a feasible solution must be approached carefully. Skilled diplomacy is needed to convince certain Security Council members to unite for action, and even more care must be taken to convince the Sudanese government, which is worried about maintaining power and control of resources, that international action is not disguising a racist plot to unseat the Arab rulers.

But these difficulties are no excuse for an absence of action. And there is no shortage of respectable groups offering good advice. For example, the group Africa Action recently released "Leveraging New International Action on Darfur," a plan for how the U.S. can vastly increase its use of diplomacy with key actors to jolt the international community from immobility and build consensus on deployment of a U.N. force. Likewise, hundreds of religious leaders around the country recently sent a letter to U.S. Special Envoy to Sudan Andrew Natsios to demand a strengthening of U.S. efforts to secure an international peacekeeping force in Darfur .

It is a matter of biblical justice. “Behold,” the book of Ezekiel warns, “this was the guilt of your sister Sodom : she and her daughters had arrogance, abundant food, and careless ease, but she did not help the poor and needy” ( 16:49 ). If we continue to ignore the cries of the people of Darfur , we risk not only countless more deaths of the innocent, but also a further unraveling of our relationship to one another as a human family and the degradation of our moral existence.

Posted by Jill Rauh, Program Associate for the Education for Justice Project.

Pinochet's Legacy: Tyranny, Brutality, and Economic Disaster

This is a time "to pray for the soul of Gen. Pinochet, but also for the soul of Chile" Cardinal Francisco Javier Errazuriz of Santiago. Monday, December 11, 2006. The Chicago Tribune.

There is no question Augusto Pinochet was a bloodthirsty fascist, and the notion that we would pray for his soul – not his victims – challenges my ideas of forgiveness and love. However, I think Cardinal Errazuriz’s point is one of reconciliation, the violence Pinochet stood for should not continue in a cycle after his death.

Many news outlets are reporting on the Pinochet regime’s dark and murderous reign, and some have included details of the complicity of the governments of the U.S.and Great Britain. Pinochet’s state sponsored terrorism and violent repression are well documented, but what has become muddled in the wake of his death is, of all things, his transformation of Chile’s economy.

Marketplace, a news program focusing on business, economics and money and often heard on NPR, reported on Monday December 11th, that after Pinochet’s 1973 military coup and murder of democratically elected President Salvadore Allende, “(Pinochet) then turned his country into a laboratory for free market reform. He removed trade barriers, created an independent central bank and privatized social security.”

Dan Grech, a reporter for Marketplace went on to say: “Even Pinochet's worst critics admit his economic model has been a success.”

While it has become fashionable to point out Allende’s flaws, giving credit to Pinochet for his economic policies is completely misguided. In fact, crediting Pinochet with anything other than proving that unchecked economic liberalization will lead directly to economic disaster is a blatant disregard of the historical record.

As author and economist Greg Palast chronicles here, in the first ten years of Pinochet’s rule, unemployment rose from 4.3% to 22%, real wages declined by 40%, and by 1990 the number of people in poverty doubled – from 20% to a stunning 40% of the population.

Make no mistake, it was not dumb luck that Pinochet was able to cripple a once thriving economy the way he destroyed a once fully functioning democracy. According to Palast, “...the General abolished the minimum wage, outlawed trade union bargaining rights, privatized the pension system, abolished all taxes on wealth and on business profits, slashed public employment, privatized 212 state industries and 66 banks ...”

This is what led President Ronald Reagan’s State Department to report: “Chile is a casebook study in sound economic management.”

Pinochet’s economic policies had nothing to do with Chile’s economic growth of the past two decades. It was not until Chile was on the brink of utter economic collapse, and its citizens took to the streets that Pinochet restored many of the programs and controls he had previously abolished. It was the restoration of those measures that allowed Chile to recover and thrive.

Chile’s economic growth has clearly been in spite of Pinochet’s legacy and of the neo-liberal economic orthodoxy, not a result of them.

Bob Lyon

Donor Outreach Coordinator

Center of Concern

The link to Greg Palast’s full article on Augusto Pinochet’s disastrous economic policies: http://www.gregpalast.com/tinker-bell-pinochet-and-the-fairy-tale-miracle-of-chile-2#more-1551

An article on Pinochet by Christopher Hitchens, whose reporting ten years ago in Harper’s magazine was among the first to reveal the extent of U.S. involvement in Pinochet’s rise to, and brutal grip on power: http://www.slate.com/id/2155242/

In Defense of 'Fair Trade'

International trade issues have frequently emerged as a topic in recent Washington Post editorials.  Last week, Robert j. Samuelson in his editorial “’Fair Trade' Foolishness” argued that “In the name of “fair trade,” we may punish our own exporters.”  Samuelson goes on to suggest that opposition by Democratic leaders to the pending free trade agreements with Colombia and Peru signifies “trade obstructionism.”  The basic crux of his argument is that the indictment against free trade is largely wrong and that now is precisely the time for the U.S. to be involved in trade negotiations to expand export markets. 

Samuelson’s analysis and reasoning are a sleight-of-hand exercise in factual manipulation and omission that would make any magician proud: 

• Yes, “from 1980 to 2006, the trade deficit jumped from $19 billion to an estimated $786 billion, or from less than 1 percent of gross domestic product to about 6 percent.”  But, as a study by the Economic Policy Institute points out, during that time the trade deficit fluctuated.  After climbing to around2.5% of GDP in 1986 it began to decline until reaching around 0% in 1992.  NAFTA went into effect in 1994 and the WTO in 1995 – right around the time that we began to see a much sharper increase in the trade deficit as a percent of GDP  – reaching around 6% in 2006.     Many factors contribute to a trade deficit or surplus, but we can’t ignore the role of trade liberalization.
• Yes, “employment in the same period rose from 99 million to 145 million,” and “Every three months, 7 million to 8 million U.S. jobs disappear and roughly an equal or greater number are created.” But, this assumes that all jobs are equal and the reality is that they are not.  The jobs being created are overwhelmingly in the services sector which pays less and offers fewer benefits than manufacturing.  A manufacturing or skilled services job paying $17/hour plus benefits is NOT the same as a minimum wage retail job.  To properly analyze the benefits and costs of trade liberalization, we can’t ignore these details.
• Some U.S. exporters may benefit from these trade agreements.  Of course, this assumes that they offer a product of interest to consumers in the importing country, which they may or may not, and that consumers can afford to buy it. More importantly though, free trade agreements cover much more than market access (lowering and eliminating tariffs in other nations) which is what would be of interest to exporters.  They lower U.S. tariffs as well, and are therefore of interest to workers and companies that would have to compete with imported goods.  The same holds true for our trading partners.

“Free Trade” is not as simple as Samuelson portrays.  FTA’s cover a host of issues that profoundly impact the flow of goods and services, access to those goods and services, job prospects, the functioning of democratic governments, and shared resources like the environment.  For example, FTAs also cover:

• Investment – Establishes rules on who gets to set up a business in the country and what rules they must follow;
• Services – Establishes rules on who gets to sell services in a country and how they will or will not be regulated;
• Government Procurement – Sets out the criteria by which the government will determine from whom to buy goods and services;
• Intellectual Property – Usually extends patent lives and establishes stronger enforcement.

The impacts on the economies and societies of our trading partners can be even more  severe, especially if they are a developing country with many people living in poverty.  Are more jobs being lost than created?  Are the jobs created able to support a family and allow them to move out of poverty?  When for-profit companies begin offering services-like electricity or telecommunications-are the poor and those in remote areas being left out?  When patents are strengthened (which keeps prices high), particularly on medicines and agricultural inputs like seeds, are the poor effectively denied access to
life-saving medicines and vital agricultural inputs?   

It’s a complicated picture, and Samuelson’s over-simplification of the situation adds  nothing to the debate over how to address the reality that every free trade agreement  creates winners and losers in the U.S. and among the citizens of our trading partners.  Criticizing “free trade” is not to be obstructionist, but to be seeking more just and  equitable trade rules for all.

Posted by Kristin Sampson, Senior Research Associate of the Engendering Economic and Social Policy project.

New ideas, new directions for Iraq . . . but is anyone listening?

The month of November brought a flurry of new reports and ideas about what should be done about the situation in Iraq—the situation that is seen by an increasing number of people as the biggest quagmire of George W. Bush’s six years in office. At least two of these new reports are worth becoming intimately familiar with: a new Bishops’ statement on a responsible transition in Iraq, and the findings of the Iraq study group, whose report is scheduled to be “officially” released on Wednesday, but whose details have been leaked bit by bit over the last week.

1) The Bishops’ Statement (Nov. 13, 2006)

The bishops’ statement, by President of the Bishops’ Conference, Bishop William S. Skylstad, challenges U.S. leaders to engage in a “substantive, civil and non-partisan discussion of ways to plan and secure a responsible transition in Iraq.”

Acknowledging that the bishops “have repeatedly expressed grave moral concerns about military intervention in Iraq and the unpredictable and uncontrollable negative consequences of invasion and occupation,” Skylstad states that the intervention in Iraq “has brought additional moral responsibilities to help Iraqis to secure and rebuild their country.” Short of setting a timetable for withdrawal, the bishops instead urge that “our nation's military forces should remain in Iraq only as long as their presence contributes to a responsible transition.”

Skylstad then highlights several benchmarks that urgently must be met in Iraq, including: “fostering adequate levels of security; curbing wanton killings, indefensible terrorist attacks and sectarian violence; strengthening the basic rule of law; promoting economic reconstruction to begin to create employment and economic opportunity for Iraqis; and supporting the further development of political structures and solutions that advance stability, political participation, and respect for religious freedom and basic human rights.” The work must be done by Iraqis, he says, but the “United States and its coalition partners have a moral obligation to continue and intensify efforts with Iraqis, other countries in the region and the international community toward achieving these benchmarks.” He particularly emphasizes the importance of involving the Arab and Western European nations in the international effort for regional stability.

2) The Iraq Study Group Report (to be officially released Wednesday)

Although the official release date is scheduled for Wednesday, details of the report created by the nonpartisan Iraq Study Group, led by James A. Baker III and Lee H. Hamilton, have been leaked throughout the past week. The report is similar to the bishops’ statement in that it recommends the increase of U.S. trainers working in Iraqi units, to better equip them with the skills and resources they need for success. But unlike the bishops’ recommendation, the report sets a timetable for phased withdrawal from Iraq starting in 2007 and ending in 2008. Another major recommendation of the report is for increased and serious engagement with other key partners in the Middle East, including direct interaction with Iran and Syria. The report suggests a regional conference on Iraq or broader Middle East peace issues, as well as direct, high-level talks with Iran and Syria.

Noting the Commonalities

Despite the disagreement from all sides about whether the U.S. should begin withdrawing troops and if so, when, there are some actions that almost everyone seems to support:

• International partnerships are essential and must be strengthened. The U.S. must look to the international community for guidance, direction, and partnership in greater ways than ever before. With John Bolton now having resigned from his post at the UN, hopefully this will open new doors for improved international relations at the UN, the forging of equal partnerships, and multilateralism. The U.S. cannot solve the Iraq crisis by itself.
• In particular, the U.S. must engage Iran, Syria, and the entire Middle East in its efforts for stability. It is time to engage in real dialogue to move forward and to truly engage Iran and Syria, in particular, in Middle East peace.
• Whether U.S. troops remain or leave, there must be a serious evaluation of efforts for reconstruction (almost all infrastructure categories are now worse than pre-war levels) and training of Iraqi forces.

Is Anyone Listening?

It is no secret that George W. Bush is stubborn, often to his own detriment. And it is unclear how seriously he intends to consider recommendations from anyone. His National Security Advisor, Stephen J. Hadley, had been ambivalent in the days leading up to the release of the Iraq Study Group report, stating on the one hand that Bush is seeking a “new way forward” and will make “significant changes,” while on the other hand continuing to use “stay the course” rhetoric.

So the questions remain: Will President Bush take seriously recommendations that are put forth? Will the administration continue to spur important allies in the Middle East that could be key to healing the conflict? Although the correct path to the greatest success (or the best avoidance of utter failure) in Iraq is far from clear, President Bush would do well to set aside his pride and to listen to recommendations of the experts.

Posted by Jill Rauh, Senior Project Associate, Education for Justice.