CGNorena Weekly

The Ups and Downs of the Journey to a More Perfect Union

Nobody said that the journey to “a more perfect union” the American Constitution promised all of us would always be pleasurable or beautiful. To begin with, the very concept of “a more perfect union” is in itself a difficult one to comprehend. How can a union that is perfect become better?

More than a thousand years before the American Constitution was written, Saint Augustine reminded us that “the perfection of this life is nothing more than the attempt to be perfect.” The very attempts to perfection, however, do not always represent a move toward it nor are in themselves pleasurable or beautiful.

In the last two weeks of the Democratic presidential primaries the world has been exposed to some vistas of American political life that have all the beauty of garbage in the kitchen sink. It all began with a slightly misguided step taken by the frontrunner in the race toward the nomination of the Democratic party, Senator Obama. He simply forgot that whatever he would say in public would sooner or later (rather sooner than later) be given the worst possible interpretation. What he said in public was that folks in the “small towns” of Pennsylvania were “bitter” at their government, and that as a result they were “clinging” to their own traditions, such as “guns and religion.”

The Clintons’ reaction to those words was an explosion of contrived indignation, a reaction that spread through the American media withquestionable unanimity and force. One could not help but to smell the hideous stench of a poorly disguised trace of racist feeling hiding deep among the worst “angels of our nature.” The stalemate Obama spoke about in his historical speech on race had been broken. American pundits of all labels—the Brooks, the Shields, the Kristols, the Krugmans , etc—joined in the ritual act of communal condemnation; the only male black candidate to the Presidency of the United States in history was being intellectually lynched for everybody to see.

We should admit that one has to make an effort of good will to explain Obama’s reference to guns. The most benign interpretation is to say that what he meant was that rural people “in small towns” like to go hunting for a distraction from the terrible headlines on the newspapers and in television. Hunting, in this view, is mainly an escape from the terrible things Obama would like to change.  Obama’s critics point out with some justification that hunting is a legitimate activity that is not by any means the exclusive property of farmers in “small towns” (remember our mellow Vice President) nor often a simple distraction from the political mess of our days. The reference to “small towns’ might be slightly condescending but not bad enough to exclude somebody form the race to the White House.

The problem with the mention of “guns’” in juxtaposition with “religion” is admittedly more difficult to explain.  It is almost impossible to imagine what one could say what is that taking a gun for hunting ducks and holding religious beliefs share in common. Does Obama think that what moves people to kill ducks is roughly the same as what impels them to believe in the existence of a personal God who punishes sin and rewards virtue in an afterlife?  The Senator is far too intelligent to even think about such nonsense.

To complicate the situation, these irritating statements were made in San Francisco, the Sodom and Gomorrah of America according to the Neo-cons of the Christian Right. That is why the holier-than-thou severe judges of Mr. Obama did not hesitate to accuse him of elitism, condescendence, and arrogance. One can fear, they said, all those vices from a candidate to the Presidency of the United States that is irresponsible enough to refuse to wear on his lapel the glorious flag of beautiful America. But that is not all. Some of the people who intellectually lynched Obama did not hesitate to maintain that his statements were inspired by – are your ready ? – Marx himself!

Let me elaborate on this. Marx was the first philosopher to teach that human beings are “alienated” (namely “estranged, “ bitter and frustrated) in society not because they are religious, but that they are religious because they are alienated in society. But Obama never said that. He simply said that the political deceptions and abuses of the day compel some human beings to “cling” to religion as the one reliable, constant, value of their earthly existence. The bitterness Obama spoke about is not the cause of religious belief, but the transient reinforcement of it by the fear of imminent death on the streets of Baghdad or the panic of losing your home or your job or your pension or your health insurance. Bill Clinton –most likely one of the main agent provocateurs of last week’s furor against Obama- was so freaked out by the whole situation that he did not hesitate to tell Americans that rather than feeling bitter they should be proud of their  being deceived, betrayed, and abandoned by the present administration.” Excessive anger obviously inspires ridiculous thoughts.

What is most amazing and encouraging about this sad episode is that apparently most American people have refused to be unduly impressed by it. The sober, fair, prudent and discreet majority of Americans have taken all the verbiage of Obama’s critics as shocking evidence of what linguists think is the first condition of mutual understanding in human discourse: a certain reserve of charity. If you are predisposed not to like what your partners in conversation have to say, most likely you will not be able to understand a word they say. Understanding each other presupposes some benevolent attitude in those who do the talking and the listening.

The better angels of American nature have prevailed: Obama seems still ahead in the national polls. We are moving closer to a “more perfect Union.”

Globalization: Why is the USA blamed for many of its failures?

One of the main goals of globalization is to help the development of the world’s poorest countries. Yet, when the leaders of globalization convene anywhere in the world- be it Davos, Montevideo, or Denver– protests erupt in a most violent manner. Without exception, the protesters are mostly young or citizens of poor nations. Their unequivocal message is that globalization sacrifices the local interests of their underdeveloped countries to the corporate interest of the rich industrial nations, particularly the United States of America. When President Bush attends those meetings, his plane lands in a distant airport, a helicopter transfers him to a remote mansion near a city where the traffic is diverted from his path, and the streets are crowded with more Marines than you can find at Camp Pendleton. The protesters do not like America. No matter what Bush keeps on saying, it is becoming increasingly dangerous to be an American in 2008.

There has never been an economic policy that did not hurt some people and benefit others. Globalization, as any human institution, is no exception to that rule. The problem is that, according to many experts, globalization hurts mostly the very people it intended to help: poverty in the world has significantly increased, even in rich countries with a constantly increasing GDP, even in the American empire, a rich country with many, many poor people. The rich in the rich countries have become richer, and the poor in the poor countries have, for the most part, become poorer.

Forty percent of the 6.5 billion inhabitants of this planet live in poverty, some of them in extreme poverty: they survive on an income of one dollar per day. Africa has gone from a 41% poverty rate in 1981 to 47% in 2001. Nigeria, a country that in the last thirty years has earned a quarter of a trillion dollars in oil revenues, has seen its per capita income declined by 15% from 1975 to 2000. The number of Nigerians who live in extreme poverty has increased from 19 million to 84 million. Globalizations has missed Nigeria.

What is the part of America in this human tragedy? American financial aid to underdeveloped countries has consisted mostly in loans and grants, unfortunately more of the former than of the later. The recent American mortgage credit crisis is only a local reenactment of the international crisis of poor nations burdened by debts they cannot afford to pay.back. Even Russia and Argentina have defaulted in their debts to historically high levels. Poor nations, that borrow too much anyhow, have to bear the risk of subsequent increases in interest rates, unexpected or cleverly manipulated fluctuations in exchange rates, national decreases in income due to natural disasters, such as the tsunami, or the collapse of exports. The United States, as the leading lender in the world, is sometimes blamed for all the burdens of the indebted borrowers. Accepting assistance from the IMF often brings with it a loss of economic sovereignty. Grants bypass some of the problems of loans, but the greed and bribery of unscrupulous rulers who specialize in money laundering, makes them often even more risky. Financial aid to poor countries is often translated in high levels of pollution and low levels of research and innovation.

The financial institutions that work as investment banks for the Third World are seen by others as American institutions: the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank. and the World Trade Organization (WTO). Only the USA has an effective veto power on the IMF; the president of the World Bank is appointed by the US President without any consultation with the American Congress and much less with the approval of borrowing nations.

The power to decide conflicts is invested in international tribunals that are often held in contempt by the US as threats to its unilateral hegemony and sovereignty. Bush’s cavalier attitude toward the International Criminal Court, the United Nations, or international treatises such as the Kyoto Protocol, have spoiled the image of our country as that of a fair, honest, and impartial arbitrator.

Poor countries have specific grudges against the United States. American agricultural subsidies, the source of one third of farm income in the USA, are rightly blamed for the global depression of farm goods prices. American agricultural subsidies translate into lower incomes for millions of poor farmers in underdeveloped countries unable to compete with he lower price of American imports. The resulting poverty of farmers spreads to those who sell goods to the farmers: tailors, butchers, storekeepers, and barbers. It does not take much for misery to spread.

To add insult to injury American agricultural subsidies are seldom given to poor, small, family farmers. In fact, 87% of the money goes to the top managers of large agricultural conglomerates in the USA. American corporate welfare exacerbates the problems of poor farmers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. American taxpayers provide American cotton explorers – the largest group in the world – with almost 4 billion dollars in annual subsidies, subsidies that bring havoc to cotton farmers and producers of textiles all over the world.

The provisions of the Uruguay Round (1994) regarding the marketing of generic drugs –drugs that cut into the profits of drug companies– has in fact reduced the access of under developing countries to the production of those drugs, a tragic consequence to those affected with AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa, for example.

Bilateral trade agreements, favored by the USA, tend to favor trade with some nations at the expense of other countries: as a result of NAFTA the trading of textiles with Mexico has increased at the expense of American trade with Guatemala or Bolivia.

American monopolies, such as Microsoft’s dominance in PC’s (87% of the market), spreadsheets, and the Internet amount to an unlawful monopoly of knowledge, price increases, and insufficient innovation, as the European Union has frequently (and with some success) argued in international litigations.

Rigged international auctions; unfair trade sanctions; trade barriers disguised as tariffs; unleveled fields created by asymmetric trade agreements; the undemocratic balance of power between rich and poor countries in legislating trade, all this and much more, has given the United States a bad name before the tribunal of international public opinion. No wonder Senator Obama has insisted in his campaign in the urgent need of radical change, all the way from the bloody streets of Baghdad to the offices of the United Nations in New York.

The numbers provided here have been almost exclusively taken from two magnificent books on globalization by he Nobel Prize winner economist Joseph E. Stiglitz: Globalization and its Discontents, 2001, and Making Globalization Work, 2006.