RED EYE 3/30/11

U.S. uses ‘aid’ as imperialist tool

GW, 3/4 — If anyone is still suffering from the delusion that aid is all about charity, devoid of foreign policy interests, they should wake up now…Countries are frank about their mixed motives.

The largest recipients of U.S. aid, to take the world’s biggest donor, are not the poorest countries but those the U.S. sees as strategically important. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy remarked: “Aid is a method by which the United States maintains a position of influence and control around the world.”

Women big force in Egypt revolt

NYT, 3/6 — …Egypt’s popular revolution was the work of men and women.…At its height, roughly one quarter of the million protesters who poured into the square each day were women. Veiled and unveiled women shouted, fought and slept in the streets alongside men, upending traditional expectations of their behavior. 

The challenge now, activists here said, is to make sure that women maintain their involvement…. “Revolution is not about 18 days in Tahrir Square and then turning it into a carnival and loving the army….We have simply won the first phase.”Roughly 25 percent of Egyptian women work outside their homes….But…42 percent of women cannot read or write and almost no women are political leaders.

Europe uses dictators vs. migrants

NYT, 3/10 — The turmoil in Libya and elsewhere in the region has toppled or undermined North African dictators who negotiated a web of benefits from Europe, including aid and diplomatic standing, in return for stopping immigrants seeking to cross the Mediterranean. Without the assistance of those [dictators], many in Europe worry that they will face new waves of...immigration not only from the liberated areas in the north, but from much of sub-Saharan Africa as well.

The immigrants would arrive at a time when much of Europe — struggling with high unemployment and lethargic economies — is already awash with anti-immigrant sentiment…and many countries say that they are simply incapable of absorbing poor migrants.

“In Italy, there is really a panic,” said Anna Triandafyllidou, a migration expert with the Hellenic Foundation for European Policy. “Everything is up in the air, and no one knows what to do.”

Unable to build the kind of border fence that the United States has erected to keep Mexicans [out], countries like Spain and Italy have spent years forging close relationships with North African leaders, persuading them to prevent migrants from trying to sail the rough seas of the Mediterranean. In return, Morocco, Tunisia and particularly Libya sometimes used brutal tactics to keep immigrants from ever getting near European shores….Now….hundreds of young men…were eager to tell visitors their message: “We want work.”

Using crisis as anti-worker trap

NYT, 2/25 — …From Chile in the 1970s onward,…right-wing ideologues have exploited crises to push through an agenda that has nothing to do with resolving those crises, and everything to do with imposing their vision of a harsher, more unequal…society.

Which brings us to Wisconsin 2011….The governor’s budget bill would deny collective-bargaining rights to public-sector workers….But his attack on unions has nothing to do with the budget. What’s happening in Wisconsin is, instead, a power grab — an attempt to exploit the fiscal crisis to destroy the last major counterweight to the political power of corporations and the wealthy. And the power grab goes beyond union-busting. The bill in question is 144 pages long, and there are some extraordinary things hidden deep inside.

For example, the bill includes language that would allow officials appointed by the governor to make sweeping cuts in health coverage for low-income families without having to go through the normal legislative process….”The department may sell any state-owned heating, cooling, and power plant or may contract with a private entity for the operation of any such plant, with or without solicitation of bids….This sounds…like a perfect set-up for cronyism and profiteering….Indeed, there are enough suspicious minds out there that Koch Industries, owned by the billionaire brothers who are playing such a large role in [governor] Walker’s anti-union push, felt compelled to issue a denial that it’s interested in purchasing any of those power plants. Are you reassured?....Union-busting and privatization remain [the] priorities.

Sounds like we need communism

NYT, 3/7 — Education is the key to economic success. Everyone knows that the jobs of the future will require ever higher levels of skill….

But what everyone knows is wrong….Computers, it turns out, can quickly analyze millions of documents, cheaply performing a task that used to require armies of lawyers and paralegals. In this case, then, technological progress is actually reducing the demand for highly educated workers.

And legal research isn’t an isolated example….High-wage occupations that grew rapidly in the 1990s have seen much slower growth recently….Conversely, jobs that can’t be carried out by following explicit rules — a category that includes many kinds of manual labor, from truck drivers to janitors — will tend to grow even in the face of technological progress.

Most of the manual labor still being done in our economy seems to be the kind that’s hard to automate…There aren’t many assembly-line jobs left to lose. Meanwhile, quite a lot of white-collar work currently carried out by well-educated, relatively well-paid workers may soon be computerized. It’s no longer true that having a college degree guarantees that you’ll get a good job, and it’s becoming less true with each passing decade.

So if we want a society of broadly shared prosperity, education isn’t the answer — we’ll have to go about building that society directly….We need to guarantee the essentials…to every citizen.

Faith in capitalist future fading

GW, 3/4 — When it comes to class, Americans have long seen themselves as potentially rich…A Gallup poll in 2005 showed that while only 2% of Americans described themselves as “rich”, 31% thought it very likely or somewhat likely they would “ever be rich.”

But events are forcing a reappraisal of that self-image. Social mobility has stalled; wages have been stagnant for a generation. It is in this light that the growing resistance to events in Wisconsin must be understood….As the prospects of becoming rich diminishes, many are simply trying not to become poor….This tension brought thousands to the streets in all 50 states to support Wisconsin unions last weakened.

Polls suggest the public is siding with the unions….For if organised labour has fallen out of favor, the illusion that you can make It on your own is not far behind…Half the country thinks its best days are behind it.

 Banned film big hit in Mexico

GW, 3/11 — An attempt to ban a Mexican documentary about a young man wrongly convicted of murder twice has created a box-office hit. The film has proven popular with audiences. Then a judge ordered regulators to ban cinema screenings and interest in the movie soared. Released last month, Presumed Guilty was [promoted as an expose of the Kafkaesque world of Mexican justice that picks on poor people who can’t afford good lawyers, and almost always convicts them.

Afghan women get no U.S. help

GW, 3/11 — Although Afghan women’s rights were a prominent part of the rhetoric of [western] invasion, today the treatment of women under the Taliban is increasingly being dismissed as part of local culture…There is little appetite among U.S. politicians for protecting women in the region….The west will turn its eyes away from Afghanistan, even though “the insurgents still kill children, they still put poison in the food of schoolgirls, they throw acid in the face of schoolgirls, they burn schools. They still exist.”

….Gender studies…dispute claims that culture is to blame. “These people have been tossed to the wind and displaced, the old society has been eroded. Girls being given away to pay for opium debts, that’s hardly traditional. Now it is the people with the guns, the money and the drugs runners who have the power.”…

Few would argue that improvement have been made in women’s rights in the last decade.

He says U.S. needs a new motto!

United Features, 2/28 — Recent events in Washington and Wisconsin have me thinking that maybe we should just go ahead and change the national motto to something more truly reflective of today’s America. Forget…
In God we Trust”…Anyway, here’s my suggestion” “Money Talks.” Think about it.

Egypt’s nice army is big business

NYT, 3/6 — Few Americans worked more closely with Egypt’s military than Maj. Gen. Michael A. Collings….General Collings said the Americans were not able to track the for-profit arm of the Egyptian military _ a conglomerate that runs factories, farms and high-tech corporations…..Will a military so deeply invested in a system that conferred great economic and political power be willing o let go?

First hit private unions, then public

LAT, 2/26 — “The game goes like this,” as one pro-union political consultant I spoke with put it. “Destroy private-sector unions, reduce private-sector health and retirement benefits, then say “Hey, how come those public employees get such (relatively) good benefits? That’s not fair.” He scoffed at those now insisting that thy like private but only public unions: “Private-sector union are only ‘OK’ one they are completely emasculated.