The Daily Grasshopper

With apologies to Marvin Gaye, I'm going to go a little further today than usual in trying to explain "which way the wind is blowing," which is what a good weathervane will do for you (the "Daily Grasshopper" takes its name from the weathervane atop Faneuil Hall in Boston - congratulations to Robyn Su Miller of Quincy, Mass., for figuring it out within about 45 minutes of my announcing the contest).

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To read old editions of the "Daily Grasshopper," or to subscribe your friends and family members, visit http://www.dailygrasshopper.com. Thanks. On to the news...

If there are still some people out there who believe George W. Bush when he says his proposed invasion of Iraq is all about safeguarding the American people from weapons of mass destruction, I ask you to please go to page A9 of today's Boston Globe and read this article:

http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/064/nation/Specialists_hits_efforts_to_secure_Russian_arms+.shtml

Entitled "Specialists hit efforts to secure Russian arms," it gives a pretty clear picture of the very real dangers the world faces from the former Soviet Union's vast chemical and nuclear arsenals. For a fraction of what we're going to spend on war in Iraq (remember, those are your tax dollars over there in the Persian Gulf), we could be taking vast quantities of weapons of mass destruction out of circulation. Here are the relevant sections from the piece:

"The specialists also warned that Washington's focus on a potential war to disarm Iraq has diverted attention from what they consider the gravest security threat of the modern age: a poorly secured arsenal of chemical weapons, deadly pathogens, nuclear materials, and meagerly paid weapons scientists in Russia and other former Soviet states...

[Jon] Wolfsthal [deputy director of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington] said he believes that priority should be given to securing weapons in the former Soviet Union.

'We're about to spend upwards of $100 billion on handfuls of weapons' in a possible Iraq campaign, he said. 'Alternatively, we have trouble getting $2 billion a year [over the next decade] to deal with a poorly protected, poorly accounted for arsenal.'"

At this stage of the game, I can only hope that folks are being extremely cautious about taking the pronouncements of the Bush administration (and their lackeys at the major news networks) at face value. Speaking of which, our old friend, Ari Fleischer, the Bush mouthpiece, is back in the news today, commenting on behalf of his boss on the North Korean government's decision to send MiG fighter jets up to tail a U.S. "reconnaissance" plane:

"We are consulting on how this incident will be protested and discussing with [South Korea and other allies] the most appropriate way to lodge it. This kind of reckless behavior by North Korea will only lead to further international isolation of North Korea."

Don't you love it? The U.S. government is chomping at the bit to plunge us into World War III, primarily out of a desire control the Iraqi oil supplies for the foreseeable future, thereby greatly increasing the likelihood of terrorism here and making our nation a pariah abroad - and it's the North Koreans who are being "reckless," and making themselves the subject of "international isolation." Alas, there's no indication in the Reuters piece that Fleischer's remarks were intended to be ironic. Ari, do you read the newspapers at all, or do you just grab your talking points and march straight for the podium?

I must say, even if it is short-lived, the arrival on the world scene of something resembling real democracy, as exemplified by the Turkish parliament's vote against U.S. troop deployment on Saturday, has given me great hope. It's a treat to open the daily papers and read quotes like these:

"Administration officials say there are several obvious reasons why Turkey has refused to go along with the deal. The main one, they concede, is that opinion polls indicate that nearly 90 percent of the Turkish people oppose a war with Iraq, and a newly elected government cannot afford to defy the wishes of a majority on such a vital issue."

("Powell Says U.S. Can Wage War on Iraq Without Turks" NYT article, p. A11)
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/05/international/middleeast/05DIPL.html

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"The Turkish Parliament's vote against allowing U.S. troops to use Turkish bases is stunning when you consider that the Bush team had offered the Turks a dream package - $6 billion in aid and new weapons, and veto power over the future of Iraq's Kurds. But there is something admirable about the Turkish democracy's refusing to be bribed into a war its people don't want. It would be shameful for us to force the Turks to vote again - considering that their Parliament gave this war more thought than the U.S. Congress."

("Chicken à la Iraq," Thomas Friedman op-ed in NYT, p. A27)
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/05/opinion/05FRIE.html

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"When Turkish lawmakers rejected a resolution last week that would have allowed as many as 62,000 American combat troops to set up a base against Iraq, they did not just complicate the Bush administration's plans for war.

In the eyes of many Turks, they ushered in a new era in Turkish democracy. Messier and more unpredictable than what came before it, perhaps, but a system that is proving more open than what most Turks have seen.

'People said they wanted a democracy in Turkey, and now they have one,' said Cuneyd Zapsu, a senior adviser to Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the leader of the ruling Justice and Development Party. 'Turkey is a real democracy.'

As the Turkish people continued today to mull over the dramatic vote of last Saturday, in which the Parliament rejected the American military plan by a narrow margin, the idea that something profound had changed in Turkey's politics continued to reverberate here.

There was shock, especially in financial circles, that the Turkish government had gravely miscalculated, spurning its most important ally, the United States, as well as $6 billion in direct aid the country could have used to draw down its dangerously high public debt."

("In Defeat of U.S. Plan, Turks See a Victory for Democracy," NYT article, p. A11)
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/05/international/europe/05TURK.html

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"All of these culminated in a negative parliamentary vote, to the surprise of almost everyone. But why should it have surprised? After all, Turkish legislators, like their American counterparts, listen to their conscience, and are sensitive to their constituencies."

("The U.S. Misread Turkey's Mood From the Start," Ismail Cem op-ed in WSJ, p. A14)
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People should reflect on the significance of what is happening here - what the Turkish vote signifies. I wrote in an earlier essay about the "pro-democracy" movement that has been growing in strength around the world in the last decade or so, largely in response to the effects of corporate-led globalization (http://www.netway.com/~pkeaney/012003mlk.html). The vote in Turkey's parliament last weekend has the potential to be seen, years from now, as a major turning point, like the protest against the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999, in the global struggle for a society that truly respects the rights of all individuals - where our nation's "self-evident truths" are given more than the lip service that we get from today's so-called leaders.

Those in the aforementioned "financial circles," the people who make up the "virtual senate" that I referred to a couple of days ago, are accustomed to being able to bring enormous financial pressure to bear on countries that try to break free from the "free market" model. As I've written before, the principles of "free trade" overwhelmingly favor those who are already wealthy and powerful (and to a lesser extent, millions of consumers in the industrialized world - you and me), and tend to have disastrous effects on the vulnerable. In a world where 3 billion people live on less than two dollars a day (http://www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/Facts.asp#1), that's a lot of harm being done in the name of "free trade."

(There's a full page ad on p. A7 of today's New York Times for the Hewlett-Packard Company that has phony "action shots" of models posing as brokers haggling on a stock market floor with the tag line: "Money makes the world go 'round, servers make the money go 'round." Each day, well over a trillion dollars changes hands in international currency markets, whereas trade in goods and services amounts to about $25 billion. The currency trades are simply "money making money" and don't produce anything but wealth - for a relative few).

Yesterday, I juxtaposed the Wall Street Journal's description of the International Monetary Fund's (IMF) "austerity measures" with the one I had provided a day earlier. Today, the New York Times offers a similarly frank look at what the international lending institution imposes upon the citizens of countries like Turkey in exchange for billions in foreign aid. Here's their description:

"The austerity measures include cutting farm subsidies, curbing wage increases, laying workers off at state-owned enterprises and cutting back on big and popular public works projects."

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/05/international/middleeast/05DIPL.html

And, once again, mine:

"Basically, in exchange for foreign investment, governments have to agree to radically restructure their domestic economies to create a favorable climate for corporate interests. That includes raising taxes and interest rates, slashing social spending, loosening restrictions on foreign investors, and gearing the domestic economy for export production. The interests of the people, sort of like the overwhelmingly antiwar position taken by the people of Turkey, typically get short shrift in this process."

As for the existence of the "virtual senate," the body of international capitalists who are able to sway government opinion merely by deciding where to park their investment dollars, it's not in dispute. I know it sounds like a conspiracy theory to some of you, but it is talked about openly. This is from the same article in today's Times:

"Americans, on the other hand, say that Turkey can benefit economically if President Saddam Hussein is removed in Iraq and that, in any case, Turkey has no choice but to adopt the austerity measures because the international markets demand them.

'The bottom line,' said an administration official, 'is that if the Turks don't meet their financial targets, the markets will batter them.'"

The problem with allowing the tiny fraction of the world's population that makes up the "international markets" to decide foreign and economic policy for the rest of us is that their interests are in no way compatible with ours. In fact, the outcomes they want are probably at odds with our interests in the vast majority of cases. My thinking on this topic is not exactly original, by the way. In a past essay, I quoted from "When Corporations Rule the World," a 1995 book by David Korten (Kumarian Press). Here's some more (remember, this was written almost ten years ago):

"The ability to move massive amounts of money instantly between markets has given speculators a weapon by which to hold public policy hostage to their interests, and they are increasingly open about calling attention to it. Economist Paul Craig Roberts of the Cato Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank devoted to the propagation of corporate libertarianism, lectured President Clinton in a Business Week op-ed piece:

The process is simple. If the speculators who are shuffling hundreds of billions of dollars around the world decide that the policies of a government give preference to 'special interests' - by which they mean groups such as environmentalists, working people, or the poor - over the interests of financial speculators, they take their money elsewhere, creating economic havoc in the process. In their minds, the resulting economic disruption only confirms their thesis that the policies of the offending government were unsound." (p. 203)

Tom Friedman earns superior marks for cynicism with his comment today that "there is something admirable about the Turkish democracy's refusing to be bribed into a war its people don't want." Bear in mind that he writes for the New York Times, which is based in the U.S., and is considered a "liberal" news source. And he's saying, almost wistfully, that a government that represents its people, and doesn't buckle under to threats from the global superpower and its eager partners, the international investors, is "admirable." How's that for jaded?

But Friedman understands how things work, I'll give him credit for that. And for those who are having trouble making the connection between this nation's planned war on Iraq and the spread of "free market" ideology (as I've been trying to do here at the "Daily Grasshopper" for a while now), I'll let Mr. Friedman spell it out for you (from his 1999 book on globalization, "The Lexus and the Olive Tree"):

"For globalization to work, America can't be afraid to act like the almighty superpower that it is... The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist - McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps."

The extreme form of unregulated capitalism that emerged at the end of the 20th century ("globalization") is creating a small group of global elites - the "virtual senate" - and a giant pool of second-class citizens - all the rest of us. Because of the fundamentally unjust distribution of the world's resources that has resulted from adherence to the "free market" approach, both here and abroad, the system has to be maintained by the threat of force. Or the use of force, if the "hidden fist" is no longer adequate to the task. Then it becomes the very visible fist, such as we see assembling in the Kuwaiti desert.

Maybe the Hewlett-Packard ad should say "Money makes the world go 'round, servers - and the armed services - make the money go 'round."