McNamara: May He Rest in Darkness

As Voltaire said: We owe respect to the living. To the dead we owe only truth. There are few people of the last 50 years whose lives were tainted with as many brutal excesses of American foreign and economic policy as Robert McNamara. For him, the lives of Japanese civilians, Vietnamese peasants, and the citizens of Third World countries were just numbers on a spreadsheet.

The Time is Not Right

Pity poor Manuel Zelaya. He wants to return to Honduras to assume his powers as President, but Canada, speaking for both itself and the US within the Organization of American States, believes that he should wait awhile. After all, it's only been nine days since he was seized by the military and forcibly removed from the country.

Yesterday, Zelaya, against the wishes of Canada and the US, tried to return to Honduras by plane despite being threatened with arrest. He rallied his supporters from abroad, encouraging them to come to greet him at the airport. He even had the temerity to speak to the throngs gathered outside the Tegulcigapa airport that responded to his call from his plane as it unsuccessfully attempted to land, earning the condescending disdain of the New York Times. By the standards of the Grey Lady, that's just not how its done, going over the heads of the US State Department and the Pentagon, so as independently organize your return to power.

Both the coverage of the NYT and the public comments of the Obama administration echoed the line of the coup supporters in Honduras: the situation in the country is too volatile, and the return of Zelaya could incite violence. Most tellingly, no one in the Obama administration stated that Zelaya had the right, and, indeed, the obligation, to reassume his position as President. Equally disturbing, no one stated that the coup leaders should allow him to land in Tegulcigapa, and turn over control of the Honduran state to him. Nor did they make it plain that, if any violence erupted, as it did briefly yesterday, resulting in two deaths, that the US government would hold the coup leaders and the Honduran military responsible.

So, the fence straddling continues, a fence straddling designed to reduce Zelaya to an Aristide, one either permanently deposed, or one, if allowed to return to Honduras, sufficiently disempowered that the US accomplishes the goal of preserving the hegemony of the oligarchy and the military over Honduran society. It is reported that Zelaya is going to meet Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tomorrow. Off the record sources have made the administration's objective quite clear:

One option under consideration is trying to forge a compromise between Zelaya, Micheletti and the Honduran military under which the ousted president would be allowed to return and serve out his remaining six months in office with limited and clearly defined powers, according to a senior U.S. official.

In exchange, Zelaya would pledge to drop aspirations for a possible constitutional change that could allow him to run for another term, the official said. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic exchanges.

Leaving aside the factual error that Zelaya's proposed constitutional measure would have allowed him to run for another term as President, something that, in the case of Colombia and Uribe, the US is willing to accept, the source candidly acknowledges that the Obama administration wants to typically have its cake and eat it, too. As noted here last Friday, it wants to burnish its credentials supporting democracy by overturning the coup in Honduras, while facilitating a transfer of power to the people responsible for it. Here, we have a classic instance of the mastery of the Obama team in regards to understanding distinctions between symbolism and substance as they seek to fashion a win-win scenario that pleases both domestic progressives and those with vested material interests in Honduras.

If this sounds familiar, it should, as correctly anticipated by Greg Grandin last week:

It seems like what the United States might be angling for in Honduras could be the "Haiti Option." In 1994 Bill Clinton worked to restore Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide after he was deposed in a coup, but only on the condition that Aristide would support IMF and World Bank policies. The result was a disaster, leading to deepening poverty, escalating polarization and, in 2004, a second coup against Aristide, this one fully backed by the Bush White House.

There is only one problem with such expedient, self-serving policy. The people of Honduras are becoming dissatisfied with the coup leadership, as explained by Al Giordano yesterday over at Narco News, with Zelaya having shown himself as willing to put his life on the line. By all accounts, Honduras is far removed from the conditions that prevailed in Venezuela just prior to the 2002 coup, where Chavez had substantial support among the populace and the military.

Even so, Hondurans are still willing to take action to reverse the coup, even if they are not yet willing to embrace a radical program of social change. Perhaps, that is the best that they can hope to achieve at this time, leaving the prospect of a transformed Honduras, liberated from neoliberal exploitation, to another day. There is a, however, a glimmer of hope in the fact that the US and coup leadership are so insistent that Zelaya abandon any hope of serving a second term as President, because it tends to suggest that he is not nearly so unpopular as we are repeatedly told.

Regime Change with a Human Face

I have been too busy to post for the last week or so, because of work and family commitments, but, now, I am back with this brief one. While I was away in Monterey County last weekend, there was a coup in Honduras. And, preliminary indications suggested that the Obama administration, unlike the previous Bush one, was on the side of the good guys.

Think again, in light of this withering analysis by George Ciccariello-Maher:

Previously resigned Obamaphiles, desperate to grasp at any shred of proof suggesting that they were right to get high on hope and expect imminent change, are closing ranks around their government and insisting that the U.S. government’s response to the Honduran coup is proof positive of such change. Some even go so far as to claim that the Obama administration’s support for Zelaya has been “unambiguous,” adding that “complaints that Washington hasn’t acted fast enough to denounce the Honduran coup are silly and ignorant on the face of them.”

Let’s be clear: no one is saying that U.S. foreign policy is the same under Obama as under Bush, but nor did we expect them to be. Rather, we expected things to look very different while maintaining an underlying continuity. And for anyone who looks closely, Washington’s response to the Honduran coup has been the definition of ambiguity, and such knee-jerk reactions to criticism simply fail to explain the subtle progression of this response, and moreover willfully neglect the subtleties and nuances that State Department officials and Obama himself have deployed.

Let’s lay this out briefly: On Sunday, at a meeting with narco-terrorist Colombian president Alvaro Uribe, Obama issued the following carefully-worded statement: “I am deeply concerned by reports coming out of Honduras regarding the detention and expulsion of President Mel Zelaya. As the Organization of American States did on Friday, I call on all political and social actors in Honduras to respect democratic norms, the rule of law and the tenets of the Inter-American Democratic Charter. Any existing tensions and disputes must be resolved peacefully through dialogue free from any outside interference.”

Such a purposefully-vague statement was meant to communicate a wait-and-see approach: yes, we are “deeply concerned,” but what’s done is done and we must now work toward the reestablishment of “democratic norms.” The implication is clear: fascistic coup leaders are quite capable of leading a transition back toward the very same democracy they attacked, and the United States is still hoping to avoid Zelaya’s return.

Some commentators were understandably perplexed when the text of a conference call with unnamed “Senior State Department Officials” was released later Sunday, claiming that the United States recognizes only Zelaya as the legitimate leader of Honduras, while implying that the State Department would be calling for his return via an OAS resolution. But the sharp disconnect between this statement and Obama’s vagaries would only deepen when Secretary of State Clinton stepped into the fray, contradicting claims by both the president and the unnamed senior officials by insisting that the U.S. is not currently classifying events in Honduras as a coup and is not yet demanding Zelaya’s return, but only a vague return to democratic normalcy.

This, of course was another hedge, allowing the State Department leeway both to negotiate with and carry on business as usual with the coup regime were it to remain and to pressure Zelaya for a conditional return. As to the former, the U.S. seems unwilling to take the risk of cutting direct aid to Honduras, a legal requirement if a “coup” is declared. The latter is arguably more important: the State Department under Clinton most certainly did not support Zelaya’s efforts to radically challenge entrenched elites through a constitutional reform, and will likely pressure him to return humbled and defanged, with no such transformative aspirations.

John Negroponte, for one, sees things this way, arguing that Clinton “wants to preserve some leverage to try and get Zelaya to back down from his insistence on a referendum.” And when it comes to containing and undermining Central American leftists, few know the playbook by heart like Negroponte, who as U.S. ambassador to Honduras during the Contra wars personally oversaw both death squads and the drug trade. Indeed, against all the left-liberal defenders of the Obama administration, it was probably Mara Liason who was closest to the truth when, speaking as one of three panelists on Fox News (all of whom, incidentally, support the coup), argued that:

“I think they are perfectly happy with the outcome… Now, I think it’s the correct public diplomacy and policy to say, of course we’re for the democratically elected president and we don’t like coups in Latin America, but when all the dust settles, they will be perfectly happy to work with this new guy. They are not working to get Zelaya back into power… This is the outcome the United States would have preferred, this is not the method they would want to publicly condone.”

This is the iron fist with a velvet glove: while it may feel softer, it’s as “interventionist” as ever.

But all this aside, what is truly shocking is that the government is being taken at its word in the first place. Here, the White House and State Department functions as a stand-in for the U.S. state as a whole, obscuring an entire history of underhanded interventionism, especially from the CIA. Few have sought more insistently to reveal this dark underside of U.S. interventionism in Latin America than Eva Golinger, whose legal efforts to demand the release of government documents under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) revealed the true extent of the Bush administration’s role in the 2002 coup against Chávez (published in The Chávez Code). Golinger, who has been liveblogging the coup as it has progressed, describes a situation in which it would be utterly implausible to assume the United States government was not at least passively involved:

“The United States maintains a military base in Soto Cano, Honduras, that houses approximately 500 soldiers and special forces. The U.S. military group in Honduras is one of the largest in U.S. Embassies in the region. The leaders of the coup today are graduates of the U.S. School of the Americas, a training camp for dictators and repressive forces in Latin America…The US Military Group in Honduras trains around 300 Honduran soldiers every year, provides more than $500,000 annually to the Honduran Armed Forces and additionally provides $1.4 million for a military education and exchange program for around 300 more Honduran soldiers every year.”

As Greg Grandin described the situation on Democracy Now!: “The Honduran military is effectively a subsidiary of the United States government… if any Latin American country is fully owned by the United States, it’s Honduras… So if the U.S. is opposed to this coup going forward, it won’t go forward.” To which we could add Jeremy Scahill’s response: “Obama and the US military could likely have halted this coup with a simple series of phone calls,” or, we might add, by threatening to pull funding (which now, even after the coup, they seem unwilling to do). When we consider the leverage the U.S. enjoys in Honduras, claims by the Obama administration that they attempted to prevent the coup border on the absurd. Even more absurd, however, are efforts to defend the continued funding of a coup regime as “progress.”

Ciccariello-Maher's evaluation of the US response raises a lot of interesting questions: Did the Obama administration order the Honduran oligarchy to take action? Probably not. Did the Obama administration know in advance that it was going to happen? Probably, for the reason put forth by Grandin, although we cannot dismiss the possibility that people within the US military and intelligence community held back their knowledge just long enough for it to go forward.

There are other questions that we can answer more confidently. Is the Obama administration willing to take action to compel the perpetrators of the coup to relinquish power. Not yet, and possibly not ever. Indeed, consistent with Obama's trademark caution, he is having it both ways as long as he can, giving the perpetrators of the coup time to legitimize their rule while distancing himself from their actions. Some time soon, he will be compelled to take a clearer stance, and there is no reason to believe that he will act contrary to the wishes of the military industrial complex and order it to sever its historic ties the Honduran oligarchy.

At the risk of looking very silly, I don't see Zelaya ever returning to power, and, several months from now, after the military junta has conducted a farcical election to create a democratic veneer for itself, the US will urge the rest of Central and South America to acquiesce to reality. For, while Obama may not be willing to sully his hands with the dirty work of regime change in the Americas, he will be perfectly willing to enjoy the fruit of the labors of those who do.

Ride the Tiger

I will be the first to admit that I'm not especially knowledgeable about Iran. Outside media coverage of the country has been limited since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Combine that with the demonization of the country's political leadership within the US since the hostage crisis, and the impediments to reliable information become even more severe. Even otherwise responsible journalists like Robert Dreyfuss find themselves recycling tired, embarrassing stereotypes about the populace when they are impertinent enough to support Ahmanijedad. Anti-Zionism and anti-imperialism become evidence of a virtual fascist movement.

My political perspective has been shaped by two touchstones. First, Tariq Ali published one of the most incisive critiques of the Islamic regime in his chapters related to Iran in The Clash of Fundamentalisms. Based upon his encounters with exiles, he describes life within Iran as one of a stifling conformity, with women and young people especially estranged from the remorseless constraints of fundamentalist life. But, as with any inflexible social system, it is not uniformly enforced, as the powerful were able to buy their way out of marriages, morals charges and military service (a matter of urgency during the Iran-Iraq War). If this society could be summarized in one sentence, it would be this: Do as we say, not as we do.

Second, as someone who came of age in the period leading to the 1979 revolution, and encountered the history of US involvement in Iran, I have always been insistent that the Iranians should decide their destiny in the absence of American intervention. As readers of this blog know, I am generally negative about the policies of the Obama administration, but, on this one, Obama has gotten it right. Through past actions, and present day threats, the US government has figuratively cut out its tongue when it comes to making statements about Iran. A country that refuses to disavow the possibility of launching airstrikes against an imaginary nuclear weapons program, airstrikes that could even involve nuclear weapons, while imposing economic sanctions, has nothing to say about what is transpiring there. At most, it can say this: the future of Iran is something to be decided by Iranians, hopefully in the most non-violent way possible.

On the left, there is a vibrant, creative debate about how to respond to the protests. Some believe that Ahmanijedad did win the election, and that Mousavi and his patron, Rafsanjani, represent a neoliberal alternative that will retain the oppressive state apparatus while impoverishing workers even more:

In the history of social revolutions, it often happened that leftists helped to bring about social revolution (socialist or nationalist), and then, after the overthrow of the ancient regime, a faction of revolutionaries (usually centrists) liquidated left-wing and right-wing revolutionaries as well as defenders of the ancient regime.

That's what happened in Iran, too. The revolution did in its leftists, as well as rightists. But, over all, the Iranian Revolution has done more good than bad for a majority of Iranians, making Iran the best country -- the most democratic! -- in the Middle East today.

Others believe that the protests can create an opportunity for the Iranian working class to rediscover its voice and obtain the right to independently organize:

. . . Reza Fiyouzat makes what seems to be to be a far more compelling point, though: "The most class-conscious, the most politically active of the Iranian working classes, are by far the most anti-government. How do we know this? We know this because they invariably end up in jail." Well, quite.

The issue of class is important here, not because the workers are angels with whom we may not ever differ, but because their organised power is necessary to make even these democratic demands effective. Even if the protesters were all middle class, I would want them to win. Truth be told, I would want them to win even more than they bargained for - to win so comprehensively that they gave a shot in the arm to the working class and facilitated their rapid self-organisation outside of the Islamic Labour Council approved unions. Never mind a general strike: what is urgently needed is the reappearance of the shoras. And we have seen the riots spread chaotically to working class areas of Isfahan (see also), where the protesters drove out the police, and the southern city of Yazd. The protests have spread to workers districts in southern Tehran. Reports of working class turnout are appearing, albeit infrequently, in some of the English-language press.

As you might have guessed, I find this latter perspective more compelling, but the first one is not without credibility. For example, the protests that brought down the communist regimes of Eastern Europe and the USSR resulted in nearly incomprehensible immiseration for most people, as the old apparat, with the willing help of foreign investors, spirited away the resources of many of these countries while interior ministries and intelligence services suppressed any dissent. Furthermore, ethnic violence exploded throughout the Caucasus, with the countries of this region ruled by gangsters. We should not blithely dismiss similar outcomes in Iran if the Mousavi/Rafsanjani faction prevails.

Even so, is it possible to avoid such traumas by holding fast to a repressive social system imposed by a discredited elite? To ask the question is, as the saying goes, to answer it. It is also important to note that the revolutions in Eastern Europe and the USSR occurred as neoliberalism was in the ascendancy, while it is now in decline, making it plausible to suggest that an Iranian revolution could carve out the path advocated by Ali, a rejection of the fundamentalisms of both American neoliberalism and extremist Islam. Indeed, American policymakers and journalists seem to vaguely sense this troubling possibility. Unlike with the anti-communist revolutions of the late 1980s and early 1990s, support for the protesters is not uniform and unequivocal. And, then, there are the geopolitical fears, what if the people of Saudi Arabia and Egypt get the same idea?

Finally, as an anarchist, it is hard for me to oppose a movement directed against religious forms of social control. One of the central tenets of anarchism is a condemnation of the feudal powers assumed by religion over everyday life. As someone told the Angry Arab:

. . . I am glad that you are defending neither Ahmadinejad nor Mousavi. It is frustrating that everyone I talk to from Pakistan to Egypt loves Ahmadinejad and is shocked to hear that many Iranians think he is ineffective and embarrassing. Meanwhile every Westerner seems to think that Mousavi is a great reformist or revolutionary, and some kind of saintly figure beloved by all. He's an opportunist crook. That being said, I support the students and protesters in Iran, even the ones chanting Mousavi's name. I believe they are putting their lives on the line to fight for greater freedom, accountability, and democracy within the Islamic Republic, and they have to couch that in the language of Islam and presidential politics in order to avoid even greater repression than that which they already face. A friend who is in Iran right now confirms: "half the kids throwing rocks at the police didn't even vote." To me, that means that they are not fighting for a Mousavi presidency, but for more freedom, which they must hide under a green Mousavi banner in order to have legitimacy in the eyes of the state."

Even in the absence of immediate economic concerns, workers can find this just as objectionable as purportedly more secular intellectuals. The challenge is, of course, for workers to participate with such effectiveness so as to economically empower themselves as well:

Strike in Iran Khodro:

We declare our solidarity with the movement of the people of Iran.

Autoworker, Fellow Laborers (Laborer Friends): What we witness today, is an insult to the intelligence of the people, and disregard for their votes, the trampling of the principles of the Constitution by the government. It is our duty to join this people's movement.

We the workers of Iran Khodro, Thursday 28/3/88 in each working shift will stop working for half an hour to protest the suppression of students, workers, women, and the Constitution and declare our solidarity with the movement of the people of Iran. The morning and afternoon shifts from 10 to 10:30. The night shift from 3 to 3:30.

Laborers of IranKhodor

If they can strike against the Ayatollah Khamanei, one hopes that they can also strike, if it becomes necessary, against those that replace him if the protests blossom into a successful revolutionary movement.

I Want to Support My President

Hard to imagine a more horrible piece of legislation, a bill that combines more funding for the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan with loan guarantees for the International Monetary Fund. Naturally, enough House Democrats repudiated past commitments to get it passed over Republican opposition.

Obama to California: Drop Dead

Apparently, there are a few people in the White House who have awakened to the fact that the California budget crisis imperils any possible economic recovery. But, faced with a choice between strict adherence to neoliberal policy, or preventing the complete evisceration of California's safety net, such as, for example, the elimination of welfare, as well as the reduction of public education to a skeletal system of warehousing children, they are still, of course, choosing the former. Trillions for banks? No problem. 24 billion for California, and possibly billions more for other states in a similar situation, like Michigan? Forget about it.

Post-Katrina Blues

From an article by Trinh Le and Jeffrey Buchanan at Counterpunch:

Despite President Barack Obama's decision to allow residents living in FEMA Trailers to remain in their trailers while the federal government partners with residents to find permanent housing, the Biloxi City Council is preparing to take action to kick these hurricane survivors out of their city. The Biloxi City Council will vote June 16th on an ordinance, backed by the City's community development office, forcing FEMA trailers to be removed from residential zones by August 9th. Housing and human rights advocates have denounced the proposed ordinance as another step in the victimization and marginalization of residents with disabilities, low income, elderly, immigrant, and minority survivors of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita by their elected officials.

Chuck Rogers, a long-time Biloxi resident is currently living in a trailer along Redding Street as he works with Hope Community Development Agency, a community-based nonprofit working to find permanent homes for Katrina survivors, to redesign a new home for his lot. He is eager to move out of his trailer but now fears the city council ordinance will set back his plans to rebuild saying, "I'm just trying to do the best I can to build to the future."

"I think it's important that the city recognizes that everyone has not recovered completely from Katrina and that a number of people are still working on their homes," said Ward 2 Councilman Bill Stallworth, an outspoken critic of the ordinance who also serves as Executive Director of Hope Community Development Agency. "It will be unconscionable for the city to throw its citizens onto the streets."

"Biloxi will run afoul of the federal Fair Housing Act if the trailer occupants it displaces include high numbers of racial minorities, persons with disabilities, or single mothers with children," noted Reilly Morse, an attorney with the Mississippi Center for Justice.

Nearly 4 years have passed since Katrina struck New Orleans, and the victims are slowly, but surely, melting into an indistinguishable populace of poverty. Sadly, they appear doomed to live as perpetuately internally displaced people.

They Aren't Hiding Their Intentions

From an article by Barry Grey at the World Socialist Web Site:

Testifying Wednesday [June 3rd] before the Budget Committee of the House of Representatives, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke demanded that Congress and the Obama administration map out a program of austerity measures to bring down record budget deficits. Bernanke made clear that the heart of this program should be sharp cuts in social spending, including basic entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare.

“Maintaining the confidence of the financial markets,” Bernanke said in prepared remarks to the committee, “requires that we, as a nation, begin planning now for the restoration of fiscal balance.”

The phrase “confidence of the financial markets” is a euphemism for the interests of Wall Street and major international banks and investors. In demanding the preparation of austerity measures to be imposed on the American people, Bernanke was speaking in behalf of the financial elite whose massive taxpayer subsidies have been the major cause of the explosive growth over the past year of the federal deficit and the US national debt.

It is all going according to plan.

Hat tip to rjones at All Over the Board.

Cost of Doing Business

From The Guardian:

The oil giant Shell has agreed to pay $15.5m (£9.7m) in settlement of a legal action in which it was accused of having collaborated in the execution of the writer Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other leaders of the Ogoni tribe of southern Nigeria.

The settlement is one of the largest payouts agreed by a multinational corporation charged with human rights violations. Shell and its Nigerian subsidiary SPDC have not conceded to or admitted any of the allegations, pleading innocent to all the civil charges.

But the scale of the payment is being seen by experts in human rights law as a step towards international businesses being made accountable for their environmental and social actions.

In the past, it has been notoriously difficult to bring and sustain legal actions involving powerful corporations.

The settlement follows three weeks of intensive negotiation between the plaintiffs, who largely consisted of relatives of the executed Ogoni nine, and Shell. "We spent a lot of time trying to put together something that would be acceptable to both sides, and our people are very pleased with the result," said Anthony DiCaprio, the lead lawyer for the Ogoni side working with the New York-based Centre for Constitutional Rights.

5 million dollars will go towards a trust fund to support educational and community initiatives in the Niger delta. It will be interesting to see how it is implemented, because there is a possibility that the fund will become yet another form of social control.

Let's hope that it doesn't happen. Here is what the Center's press release says about it:

One of the aspects of the settlement is to establish The Kiisi Trust. “Kiisi” means “progress” in the Ogoni languages. The Trust will fund education, health, community development and other benefits for the Ogoni people and their communities, including educational endowments, skills development, women’s programs, agricultural development, small enterprise support, and adult literacy.

The Trust Deed was made by the Estate of Ken Saro-Wiwa, Owens Wiwa, the Estate of John Kpuinen, Karalolo Kogbara, Michael Tema Vizor, the Estate of Saturday Doobee, the Estate of Felix Nuate, the Estate of Daniel Gbokoo, the Children of Barinem and Peace Kiobel, and the Estate of Uebari N-nah. This trust will facilitate community participation in decisions related to the use and enjoyment of the Trust Fund, and emphasizes the importance of transparency in its operations.

According to the Center, the settlement is only the beginning of a process of reconciliation:

The Ogoni people have many outstanding issues with Shell, and it is Shell’s responsibility to resolve those issues with the Ogoni people themselves. The Plaintiffs do not speak for the Ogoni people, nor have they attempted to resolve those issues.

The Center has won a great victory within the constraints of the Anglo American legal system. But the amount of the settlement is, sadly, merely the cost of doing business for a transnational energy company like Shell. For example, would it induce Shell to act differently in the future? There is good reason to doubt it. So, in this respect, the settlement is the beginning of a process, not the end of one, as recognized by the Center.

Film Notes: Summer Hours

When my wife and son are away, I get to indulge myself in one of my favorite pastimes, watching movies. First, there was The Girlfriend Experience last Sunday, then Summer Hours while biking around San Francisco on Wednesday.

Summer Hours is a French family story centered around the decisions that the siblings must make in relation to the estate left by their deceased mother, a warm, beautiful country home filled with the artwork, sculptures and furnishings acquired during the her life through her association with her uncle, a respected, if now largely forgotten, artist. The French, it seems, are no longer special, and even the French have reconciled themselves to it.

Assayas, the writer and director, tells the story through a conventional narrative in his typically naturalistic style of subdued light and color. His emphasis is upon our integrated experiences of work, family and culture as it has evolved over time. Early on, we discover that France is no longer a large enough canvas to contain the ambitions of its middle class. Helene, the matriarch, is celebrating her 75th birthday with her three children and their grandchildren. One of her sons, Jeremie, is a business executive in China, while her daughter, Adrienne, is a designer living in New York. Only Frederic, her other son, remains in France as a professor of economics in Paris.

Over the course of the film, we discover that Jeremie left to work in China because of the lack of similar opportunities in the European Union, and a promotion to Beijing means that it is unlikely that he will ever return to France. Similarly, Adrienne has become so acclimatized to life in the US, with an impending second marriage, that her time in France will be even more limited. Only Frederic has followed path that has allowed him to preserve his French cultural identity. Adrienne and Jeremie have been scattered by the winds of globalization, a wind that has also worn away the prestige formerly accorded academics like Frederic.

The family estate is an allegorical repository of the French cultural heritage. Full of paintings, sculptures, panels, furniture and vases, they are subjected to the process of classification and categorization that Edward Said identified as central to the French imperial enterprise in Egypt. A country that once imposed its cultural standards upon others finds itself experiencing the same processes of subordination. The family is caught between the contradictory hopes of keeping this rich collection within France or maximizing potential profit from the sale of it.

Assayas returns to an old theme, the means by which the intellectualization and monetization of art go hand in hand. At one point, Frederic permits Helene's servant to take any vase that she wants. She selects one that she often used to display flowers, without knowing that it was crafted by a well known 19th Century modernist. As she walks home with it, she talks to herself about how she selected something ordinary, because, after all, what would do with something that carries the burden of artistic achievement. The scene recalls one from an earlier Assayas flim, Late August, Early September, a scene where the teen aged lover of a deceased novelist of the May '68 generation receives a Keith Haring print from him through his will. She keeps the print under her bed, connected to it because of its emotional content as opposed to its desirability if offered at an art auction. Similarly, Helene's servant is drawn to the vase as a memorialization of their relationship.

Assayas counterposes an alternative appreciation of art as an expression of our experiences and relationships as a substitution for the abstractions of intellectual content and financial value. Other Assayas preoccupations also emerge. For example, his interest in the shadow that May '68 casts over its progeny and those that follow manifests itself when a police officer informs Frederic that his daughter, Sylvie, has been arrested for shoplifting. The officer also tells Frederic that he discovered a useable amount of a controlled substance in her purse. Frederic can't say much, as he uses marijuana himself, but involuntarily starts making parental demands about the boyfriend that he believes must invariably be involved, understanding all along that he is acting precisely like his parents did, and the parents of the May '68 generation did. For Assayas, renewal lies along a path of youthful transgression, a path that he personally traveled and addressed fictionally in his 1994 film, Cold Water.

Hence, Assayas suggests that another world is possible when Sylvie and her friends have a party at the estate at the conclusion of the film. They immediately proceed to plug in stereo equipment and computers and blast out music throughout the house. They respect the house, and yet this respect does not prevent them from putting it to their own uses, to incorporate their own social identity into it. Sylvie leaves the house and takes her boyfriend to a place where she and Helene watched the harvesting of fruit when she was a little girl. Despite the rational calculations of responsible adults, the young and the old will inevitably preserve and renew France as a lived experience as opposed to the warehousing of artifacts.

Film Notes: The Girlfriend Experience

Looking back wistfully, Hal Ashby attempted to capture the zeitgeist of that period when the expanding horizons of the 1960s imperceptibly receded. He did so by profiling the life of a popular, libidinous Southern California hair dresser in the final hours leading to the 1968 election. The movie was, of course, Shampoo, and Warren Beatty portrayed the hair dresser, George Roundy, in one of his best performances. Roundy discovers that the power of money and the need for emotional security trumps the willingness of people to take the risks required to achieve personal fulfillment.

Over three decades later, Stephen Soderbergh has remade Shampoo, but, apparently, in such a way as to render it unrecognizable to most people, even movie critics. In The Girlfriend Experience, a high end call girl, Christine, portrayed by Sasha Grey, a porn star, navigates her way through a world that Roundy could have only vaguely anticipated, a world where the circuits of capitalist exchange have moved beyond the commodification of sex to the commodification of personal relationships themselves. In a disjointed narrative that remains faithful to the broad outline of Shampoo, Christine provides her New York City clients with something more addictive than sex, the illusion of a perfect relationship.

While Christine has sex with her clients, this is not her selling point. Rather, it is her willingness to spend most of her time with them as if she was their girlfriend as she goes to Manhattan clubs, restaurants and movies with them. Indeed, while she doesn't always have sex with them, she always ends up listening to them. She does so with feigned empathy as they engage in meandering dialogues about their families, their jobs, and, most especially, their financial anxieties. Because, just as Shampoo is set in the hours before the 1968 election, The Girlfriend Experience captures the moments in the lives of Christine, her boyfriend and her clients in the days before the 2008 one.

Hence, her clients are terrified and disoriented as they live through the collapse of the financial system. Frustrated with their loss of control over their investments and businesses, they compensate by perpetually offering Christine financial advice. Invariably, they supply her with such insights as to buy gold, because there is no way of knowing when this is going to end. As you have probably already guessed, they never, with one exception, show any interest in her life, and they certainly don't want her to express any opinions beyond banalities such as I definitely think relationships are about communication, don't you?

Through their attainment of great wealth, Christine's clients therefore find themselves incapable of resisting the transformation of human relationships into a form of consumption whereby one can purchase a partner that will go to the movies that you want to see, listen raptuously to everything that you have to say and go to bed with you whenever you ask. In response to an inquisitive reporter's question as to whether she believes that there is anyone who wants her for who she is, she responds: If they wanted you to be yourself, they wouldn't be paying you. Yes, Christine gets it, even if the reporter does not. She gets paid precisely because she is willing to strip away those all too human qualities of annoyance, independence of mind, fatigue and disinterest that always manifest themselves periodically in any real relationship.

Christine provides, in effect, a simulacrum of a relationship, bringing to mind a quote from a great French film of the early 1970s: the simulacrum is superior to the original. Or, more precisely, the simulacrum is always more irresistable than the original, with all its imperfections. As Robert Abele of the Los Angeles Times described the film: . . . an exquisitely filmed piece of urban impressionism that, unfortunately, leaves one feeling that a sleek gadget has been needlessly purchased. Implicitly analogizing Christine to a sleek gadget is an admittedly brilliant insight, but she is most assuredly not needlessly purchased. Soderbergh is telling us a cautionary adult fairy tale about how we have moved beyond the fetishism of objects to the fetishism of people.

Perhaps, the most disturbing aspect of the film is the extent to which Christine and her clients internalize the values of this world without question. The only collective ethos expressed by the characters is one of self-promotion and enrichment. They are incapable of the contemplative reflection of alternatives, even as one of the greatest speculative financial bubbles in history unwinds before them. Instead, they aspire to be among the few that escape the wreckage unscathed. The scriptwriters, Brian Koppelman and David Levien, empower their characters to give expression to it through dialogue that is so banal, so spot on, as to be unintentionally hilarious. In fact, one can argue quite convincingly that The Girlfriend Experience is actually a black comedy.

Soderbergh and the scriptwriters tell this story by means of a narrative that is chronologically fragmented, with a visual emphasis upon cool, modernistic interiors of loft apartments, fashion boutiques, warehouses and restaurants. Colors are consciously drained of their vibrance. Overall, the effect is mildly claustrophobic, an urban environment drained of any spontaneity, one in which its protagonists measure their success by recourse to cynical calculation. Soderbergh has cited Antonioni's The Red Desert as an influence, but the precision of the compositions within an experimental narrative also invoke the work of Oshima Nagisa and Peter Greenaway as well. In this instance, Soderbergh exposes the soullessness of contemporary, neoliberal Manhatten much in the same way that Oshima did in regard to the utilitarian Tokyo of the late 1960s. There is an extreme formalism on display here, one deftly executed on a level commonly associated with the most daring and creative filmmakers.

Most impressively, the tone of the film is consistent throughout. Greenaway has said something to the effect that the challenge for a filmmaker is to take an idea and relentlessly follow it through to its conclusion, and Soderbergh accomplishes this difficult task here. Characters are portrayed in a low key naturalistic way devoid of sentimentality, paradoxically rendering them more accessible to audience identification. Rarely have I seen a film in which I was immediately able to recognize and relate to the characters upon contact as I was with this one. I was engrossed as I was carried forward from scene to scene. Predictably, critics get enmeshed with the fact that the lead, Grey, is also a porn star, and, in most instances, derided her performance. But I thought it was quite fine, because it seamlessly blended into the overall mood. Most professionally trained actresses would have brought an artifice to the role that engendered a more emotional audience response that undermined Soderbergh's intentions.

The Beginning of the End (Part 4)

From The German Revolution: 1917-1923, a rich, profound, tragic history written by Pierre Broue:

It seems that from November 1921, the magnates of German industry decided that the general situation must deteriorate before it could improve; runaway inflation to wipe out Germany's debt, bring the state to its knees before them, exhaust the working people, and leave the great capitalists alone as masters of the situation. The mark fell steadily throughout 1922, and its fall became precipitous when the Ruhr was occupied.

From an article in the Financial Times by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard:

Richard Fisher, president of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank, said: "Senior officials of the Chinese government grilled me about whether or not we are going to monetise the actions of our legislature."

"I must have been asked about that a hundred times in China. I was asked at every single meeting about our purchases of Treasuries. That seemed to be the principal preoccupation of those that were invested with their surpluses mostly in the United States," he told the Wall Street Journal.

His recent trip to the Far East appears to have been a stark reminder that Asia's "Confucian" culture of right action does not look kindly on the insouciant policy of printing money by Anglo-Saxons.

The reporter's reference to Confucian culture as a reason for Chnese objections is quite humorous. I'm not aware of people from any culture that appreciates having the value of its assets diminished through deliberate government policy.

With that said, I'm still a deflationist, for the reasons presented by Mike Whitney yesterday:

The economy is in the grip of deflation. Commercial banks are stockpiling excess reserves (more than $850 billion in less than a year) to prepare for future downgrades, write-offs, defaults and foreclosures. That's deflation. Consumers are cutting back on discretionary spending; driving, eating out, shopping, vacations, hotels, air travel. More deflation. Businesses are laying off employees, slashing inventory, abandoning plans for expansion or reinvestment. More deflation. Banks are trimming credit lines, calling in loans and raising standards for mortgages, credit cards and commercial real estate. Still more deflation. Bernanke has opened the liquidity valves to full-blast, but consumers are backing off; they're too mired in debt to borrow, so the money sits idle in bank vaults while the economy continues to slump.

It is important to note that the Chinese concerns and Whitney's deflationary perspective are not contradictory. It is possible for economies around the world to continue to contract, even as the US deliberately orchestrates a decline in the value of the dollar. In this, Americans would experience the worst of all possible worlds, domestic deflation and continued job losses even as the cost of imported goods increased dramatically.

In such a situation, American capitalists could achieve many of the goals described by Broue in the context of German capital in 1923. Whereas the German capitalists hoped to inflate their way out of reparations, the American ones would likewise seek to inflate their way out of its foreign debt through currency devaluation. Whereas German capitalists wanted to destroy the autonomy of the working class, American ones want to eliminate what little remains of the social protections of the Great Society and the New Deal. In each instance, they have decided that the general situation must deteriorate before it could improve.

Could it get as bad here as Germany as 1923? Doubtful. But when finance capital plays these sorts of games, the door is opened to all sorts of unpredictable consequences. Indeed, the phrase the law of unintended consequences now hints at ominous, heretofore inconceivable possibilities.

Enemies Everywhere

From the Associated Press:

Venezuela and Bolivia are supplying Iran with uranium for its nuclear program, according to a secret Israeli government report obtained Monday by The Associated Press.

The two South American countries are known to have close ties with Iran, but this is the first allegation that they are involved in the development of Iran’s nuclear program, considered a strategic threat by Israel.

“There are reports that Venezuela supplies Iran with uranium for its nuclear program,” the Foreign Ministry document states, referring to previous Israeli intelligence conclusions.

It added, “Bolivia also supplies uranium to Iran.”

The report did not say where the uranium was from.

There was no immediate comment from officials in Venezuela or Bolivia about the report.

Perhaps, Israel can launch airstrikes against them, too, expanding any war with Iran to South America as well. All in all, it sounds remarkably similar to the Niger forgeries, documents leaked by Italian intelligence in 2002 that purportedly established that Iraq had been attempting to purchase processed uranium from Niger for nuclear weapons development.

By way of background, there is a strong belief among Venezuela leftists and some in the military that Israel was involved in the 2002 unsuccessful coup attempt against Chavez. I was also told during my trip to Venezuela in 2005 that Chavez, sometime after taking office in 1998, removed a number of Israeli operatives providing unspecified services to the Venezuela military and intelligence services. He did it because he believed that they were using these positions to gather information that could be used against him. Recently, Chavez ordered the removal of the Israeli ambassador in Caracas in protest against the assault upon the civilian populace of Gaza.

One should not dimiss the possibility that the hostility towards Israel within Venezuela is coloured by a residue of anti-semitism directed towards Jews generally. Even so, Chavez apparently had good reason to be concerned. After all, Israel supported Somoza in Nicaragua, and subsequently provided military assistance to the contras. Not surprisingly, Israel also provided provided military assistance to El Salvador and Guatemala in their armed struggles with the left during this same period. In the case of Guatemala, Israel assisted the government's brutal campaign of near extermination against its indigenous populace when the US was legally prohibited from doing so. And, as you might have guessed, Israel had good relations with Pinochet in Chile as well, selling weapons to him, despite his flirtation with a notorious neo-Nazi sect.

Closer to home, at least from a Venezuelan perspective, Israel has supplied weapons to Colombian paramilitaries since the 1980s, and continues to do so. Similarly, Israel participated in the dirty war in Argentina. Chavez, and the left throughout South America, understand what many in the US do not, that Israel has been an implacable enemy of leftist movements in South America, violent or non-violent, for decades. Furthermore, it has provided material assistance in their violent suppression by rightist governments and social movements. Such a history lends credibility to the belief of some Venezuelans that Israel, through the Mossad, was involved in the 2002 coup. No doubt the Bolivians are aware of this history as well, and wary about Israeli involvement in their country.

But are Venezuela and Bolivia supplying Iran with uranium? Hard to say, although the report comes across as embarrassingly propagandistic. The Associated Press article states that Venezuela has undertaken no action to mine its estimated uranium reserves, while Bolivia does so. It is, of course, possible that Venezuela is involved in the delivery of Bolivian uranium to Iran. If so, what is the significance? Is it illegal for them to do so? Of course, it is common for countries to sell uranium to other countries for use in nuclear power generation facilities, as Australian does in relation to China, and Russia now does in relation to the US. If Iran is merely involved in the development of nuclear power, consistent with the most recent National Intelligence Estimate and the findings of the International Atomic Energy Agency, one would assume that such purchases, if they ever happened, transgress no international laws. Oh, by the way, did I forget to mention that the report also claims that Venezuela is also a Hizbullah sanctuary?