Guayasamín: I will always return, keep the light on

Guayasamín's hands and faces captured human catastrophe, struggle and perseverance. Though his paintings told the stories of state terror exacted against Latin Americans in decades past, they are still relevant today, as the lives of Iraqis, Colombians and Tibetans are crushed by imperialist ambitions.

“He was a man of Latin American conviction and a fighter for democracy. His work reflects his deep commitment to social progress and to people who have been ignored and exploited. America loses one of the most outstanding men in the world of art but also one of the most loyal and humanistic ones that our America has produced in its entire history. There is no word to express the feelings and memories I have and will always have about this man who has given his best for our people. His memory will stay with us and will be a permanent encouragement for those who seek a better future for humanity.” ~Rigoberta Menchu

Howard the Duck's true identity unveiled (my father) with death of founder Steve Gerber

One Revolutionary Duck
By Eric Mink, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
February 27, 2008

You lose track. You move on. You cobble together a life or fall into one, find yourself in a new universe and lose track of people and things that went before, as the Beatles put it.

I'd long since lost track of Steve Gerber, who died Feb. 10 in Las Vegas, the city where he'd settled. We went through junior high and high school together in University City. We were friends but not buddies. We joked and kidded when we ran into each other in the halls, but our circles of friends didn't really overlap.

We spent a lot of time together, though, working on the senior class assembly — he wrote and directed it; I produced it — and we fought constantly about deadlines and rehearsals and endless idiotic details. We also reveled when our classmates loved the end result: "Dosvedanya, Dosvedanya, Petitsa," a takeoff of "Bye Bye Birdie" with seniors playing Nikita Khruschev, Fidel Castro, Comrade Birdie and Johnny Rosenbergergoldenstein.

Maybe you had to be there.

After high school, Steve, voted funniest boy in our class, ended up at St. Louis University. I headed to college in Washington, D.C., and I don't think we ever saw each other again. I knew that he hooked up with Marvel Comics in New York in the 1970s and that he created the "Howard the Duck" series. But comics were outside my universe by then, and I can't say I paid much attention.

Steve died of complications from pulmonary fibrosis, a condition in which scar tissue in the lungs builds up to the point at which breathing becomes impossible. Steve — officially, Stephen Ross Gerber — was 60.

In the last few days, I've learned that while I wasn't paying attention, Steve Gerber was remaking the pop culture field of comic books. "He brought the sensibility and irreverence of underground comix to mainstream comics," explained my friend and former Post-Dispatch colleague Steve Bolhafner, who's smarter about comics and graphic novels than anyone else I know. "He was doing it for Marvel, and it was hugely successful."

The Los Angeles Times obituary about Steve described him as "a cutting-edge comic-book writer and creator best known for Howard the Duck, the ill-tempered, cigar-smoking Marvel Comics character. . . . Gerber satirized such elements of '70s culture as kung fu, anti-gay activist Anita Bryant, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon and self-help groups."

A New York Times' obit spoke of the alienated view of Gerber's most acclaimed creation: "If most comic books are subversive, 'Howard the Duck' was especially so, because what it subverted was the very idea of the comic-book hero. Howard was not a nice duck. He had no special powers, nor was he brave. But then again, poor Howard was, in the words of the comic's famous tag line, 'Trapped in a world he never made!'"

Interviewed on NPR's "Talk of the Nation," comic book writer Chris Claremont focused on Steve's ill-fated lawsuit against Marvel for ownership of the Howard the Duck character: "It was the same kind of battle in comics that we've just seen sort of concluded in Hollywood with the writers," Claremont said. "It's an attempt for the people who create the work to establish a level of control over what they do and benefit from it after it's published. And Steve was in the vanguard of it."

"Steve Gerber changed comics," wrote Heidi MacDonald in her respected Publisher's Weekly blog about comics. "In a medium where the writing is often suspect or the awkwardness of the enforced pairings of writers and artists results in substandard work, he showed that someone with a unique style could work with any number of artists to create great stories. . . . He fought battles which caused him great personal pain but paved the way to improve things for everyone who came after."

Howard the Duck was reading the newspaper at a coffee shop in Dayton, Ohio, when he saw a wire service item that Steve had died. "I was shocked," Howard told me in a phone interview on Monday.

Howard — Howard Tockman, another U. City classmate — probably was Steve's closest friend through high school and college. "I used to do a Donald Duck voice," he recalled, "so when Steve came up with the character, kind of a combination of Donald Duck and Groucho Marx, he named him Howard the Duck."

In high school, "we were all kind of carefree and joked around," said Tock, as he was known. We put out a comedy magazine called 'Nerve' from Steve's basement. Some of what was in 'Nerve' was political and social, and some of it was just silly. Steve had a very sharp wit. He could reflect humorously about something in a very dark way."

As fog blankets Vancouver...

...cranes sing to the moon

A new era for Bolivia's campesinos?

One of my fondest memories of Bolivia is walking in the mountains around Coroico, east of La Paz, summiting the Cerro Uchumachi and hiking through the fields of coca. The campesinos working their plots ignored the invasive gringo as I strolled along the path to the waterfalls, contemplating how this bitter little leaf was at the center of so much dispute. Certainly the situation has improved for Bolivia's cocaleros, as they have one of their own in the Presidency and no longer suffer the worst abuses of the repressive, U.S.-sponsored eradication campaign.


But is the future of the Bolivian peasant any more secure today than during the neoliberal period?

From 1985 to 2005, the role of the campesino in Bolivian society (and of agriculture in the economy) diminished due to reduced state support for the sector and trade openings to agricultural goods. Rural-to-urban immigration was propelled by worsened conditions and prospects for peasants, although many that make up the new semi-proletariat in sprawling urban zones like El Alto retain to some extent a rural identity and return to the countryside for varying periods of time.

Campesino organizations have had a growing impact on Bolivian politics, playing important roles in the contestation over neoliberal reforms and the resignation of two presidents viewed as hostile to their interests. In 2005, Evo Morales was elected to the Presidency on a broad reform platform, one pillar of which was a new agrarian reform and associated interventions in the Bolivian countryside. But shifting from ‘protest’ to ‘program’ has been a challenging process. Today’s campesinos and the Morales Government must contend with both a global free market context and the domestic economic framework that was reproduced by it.

Morales has implemented a series of agrarian changes that together constitute a deepening of state intervention into the sector, including an expansion of low-interest micro-credit for rural development. A large portion of this financing, as well as hundreds of tractors, has been donated by Venezuela, as part of a tri-lateral trade and integration agreement between Venezuela, Bolivia and Cuba. This accord, known in Bolivia as the Peoples’ Trade Agreement (or the TCP-ALBA), has also been the source of funds for infrastructure and productive development, including the paving of roads in rural Bolivia and the construction of factories designed to industrialize coca into tea and other non-illicit products. When in Bolivia this past April, I had the opportunity to tour one for these factories under construction in Lauca Eñe (see photo below), and talk with local officials who enthusiastically supported the project. Additionally, Venezuela has committed to import all Bolivian soy products no longer purchased by Colombia, following the latter country’s ratification of a trade agreement with the United States; however, Venezuela has only partially made good on this commitment.


The financial and technological resources Bolivia is receiving from Venezuela represent a constructive response to the global capitalist setting from which neither country will be able to extricate itself anytime soon. Chavez's act of solidarity provides some relief to the country’s campesinos, yet too strong a dependence on Venezuela would render Bolivia precariously vulnerable to external changes beyond its control.

In the present round of agrarian reform, Morales proposes the distribution of 20 million hectares to 2.5 million rural residents by 2011. This has been passionately challenged by rich landowners, as is normally the case with the expropriation of private property. It is hard to envision that more campesino blood will not be shed as this process advances. However, it is much more difficult to visualize economic and social improvements in the Bolivian campo absent genuine agrarian reform.

The free market vs. global health

When the global economy settled into the Chicago School of Economics’ visible hands in the early 1980s, the health sector was by no means exempted. The face of health services and health policy was deeply impacted, and over subsequent years would swap the comprehensive Alma Ata ‘health for all’ idealism of 1978 for a narrower focus on health interventions for a small number of diseases. The shift in health policy exemplified the era’s general migration from Keynesian social democracy and corporatist development to the anti-development market hegemony of the Washington Consensus. The de-articulation of the state in the area of health care, replaced by the primacy of the market and privatization of the sector, would have profound impacts on those living in the most extreme conditions of poverty around the world.

The move from social democratic to neoliberal strategies for health governance represented not merely an unfortunate retreat by the global community in terms of its willingness to confront one of the world’s most vital development concerns, but also a regression into the logic of self-interest rooted in a quasi-religious faith in Adam Smith’s invisible hand. However, the reason that the free market’s hand cannot be seen probably has less to do with invisibility, and more with its absence. That is to say market principles cannot be trusted to distribute health services, as they are rendered inaccessible to some of the people who most need them. It is only through deliberative action by social forces, employing a redistributionist agenda, that universal access to health care could conceivably be realized.

Global health governance in two acts

Two distinct periods mark the contemporary thinking and practice of global health governance. The first, stretching from the end of the second World War to 1980, is rooted in the Keynesian or social democratic idea that one of the essential roles of the state is to strive to meet the needs of society. In terms of health, this meant the expansion of government-funded programs with the ambitious but generally elusive goal of universal coverage. However, with the onset of the 1980s debt crises and debilitating inflation rates, ‘developing’ countries of the world warmed to the Washington Consensus doctrine of an austere state in which the priority of balancing financial accounts left little room for ambitious health programs. Following the advice of the international financial institutions and the U.S. Treasury Department, most of the world accepted the neoliberal framework, swallowing the bitter pill of shock treatment as a necessary evil on the road to stability. One of those shocks would turn out to be access to health care by those living in poverty.

With the adoption of the Declaration of Alma Ata in 1978, global health governance within the United Nations, and subsequently the World Health Organization (WHO), advanced toward a framework of universality, egalitarianism and multilateralism. The Declaration ambitiously set a deadline (now long passed) to achieve a benchmark in global health: “the attainment by all peoples of the world by the year 2000 of a level of health that will permit them to lead a socially and economically productive life.” The Alma Ata agenda included the concept that health is a human right, and affirmed that states and the international community have a responsibility to provide comprehensive primary health care, complemented by health initiatives undertaken at the family and community level.

In the early 1980s, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) oversaw the implementation of neoliberalism around the world. Public health joined other social services in being recast within a market framework. Across the Third World, frayed but tangible social safety nets were replaced by things somewhat less concrete than nets: ideas and promises, framed in a model presented as the only remaining option. The ‘end of history’ had arrived, and with it the foremost question of political economy had been settled: the state should adopt a subservient economic role to let the market do its job. One of the tenets of the new consensus was the efficient provision of social services, which included an opening for the private sector into what was previously, in many instances, principally or entirely a public domain; the incorporation of competition into the provision of social services; and the application of user fees. Under the new framework, the commitment to primary health care was stripped bare, replaced by a much more limited strategy that sought to address a narrow range of health interventions while ignoring the broader health context.

By the early 1990s, many began to question the uneven economic outcomes that accompanied the neoliberal framework. The World Bank initiated a series of programs to address issues of equity, such as the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) debt reduction initiative and micro-credit lending, which provided some relief to impoverished countries and people while maintaining its free market approach and continued conditionality. In its 1993 World Development Report, “Investing in Health”, the Bank advocating for open competition between public and private health care service providers, the elimination of protections for domestic suppliers, and reduced government spending on high-cost, tertiary medical facilities and training. The state’s focus should be on providing low-cost clinics for essential services and maintaining health policy frameworks in which both the public and private sector can operate side-by-side. Such an approach, they argued, represents a practical strategy for confronting the scarcity of health resources. Competition among suppliers of health services will reduce the cost of service, improving access and the ability to deliver health care to a broader segment of the population, the Bank reasoned.

By 2000, the global health agenda was centered on private-public partnerships and stakeholder participation, maintaining the limited role for the state. This theme of a circumscribed state was also the centerpiece in the ascendant power of the third pillar of neoliberalism, the World Trade Organization (WTO). To the present day, privatization and market principles continue to occupy the centre of the global health agenda, under the purview of the WTO, international financial institutions and aid agencies.

Challenging the neoliberal order

Critics of the neoliberal approach to health have leveled their guns at privatization, arguing that social services like health are a public good that must remain in public hands. The development of a separate, private health regime, explains the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and the BC Health Coalition, leads to two-tiered provisioning and draws financial resources away from the public system and into the private realm. With the development of a private system, profit-motivated providers begin to practice ‘cream-skimming’, the attendance to easy-to-treat patients, thereby minimizing risk while maximizing income, and for recruiting talented physicians away from public service into the private sector since they are typically able to offer them higher salaries. Such a dichotomy inevitably reinforces existing social inequalities and de-valorizes the public system, potentially rendering it unsustainable.

One of the principal loci for global health debates in recent years is the patent protections codified within the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement of the WTO. In the TRIPS Agreement, countries were restricted from providing patent-protected drugs, except through direct purchasing from the patent holder, including the development of generic alternatives. The impact of this language has been an incalculable number of deaths of people priced out of access to life saving medicines.

Various researchers have looked at the empirical effects of the expansion of global markets on health. In the southern India state of Kerala, Thankappan linked neoliberal reforms, including social sector expenditure reductions and the imposition of user fees, to a five-fold increase in health care costs, regressively affecting the poorest people of Kerala at a rate of 768% as compared to the richest, whose costs rose by only 254%. He also found a decrease in the quality of the public health system, as budgetary limitations affected the availability of supplies, including drugs. The Third World Network similarly documented the decreased usage of health facilities in four African countries after the introduction of health care user fees. Studies conducted by Janes in Mongolia found that the effect of privatization in the secondary and tertiary areas of the health system alongside a universal yet limited public system of primary care was that it created an uneven, fragmented system that denied access of care above the primary level to the vulnerable poor, and resulted in heightened maternal mortality among rural poor women. And in Latin America, Hershberg and Rosen argue that the reduction of state expenditures on public health and the shift of resources toward privatized health care shrank already inadequate and underfunded systems.

A final area that has been impacted by neoliberal restructuring is that of government spending on social programs, including sanitation and health infrastructure. The reduction of public expenditures has for more than two decades been one of the conditions demanded of countries that sought loans from the IMF and World Bank. The result was described by Hong as a “drastic decline in [disease] control and prevention measures”. Chossudovsky has documented the linkage of budget cuts and the resurgence of deadly diseases including cholera, yellow fever and malaria in Sub-Saharan Africa; malaria and dengue in South America; malaria, tuberculosis and diarrhea in Vietnam; and the bubonic and pneumonic plague in India.

Among the voices calling for a new approach to global health governance, some posit that health services in ‘developing’ countries can be improved through piecemeal modifications to the present order, such as the relaxation of patent protections and the allocation of more resources toward health. The Third World Network and other groups based in the Global South, as well as many northern non-governmental organizations, more accurately contend that much deeper action is necessary, and that only through a wholesale abandonment of the neoliberal model can the structural root causes of poor health be addressed. At the foundation of neoliberalism is the belief that the state must assume a minimalist role, which is both inherently contradictory to equitable access to health and the process of development, and contrary to the 1978 commitment made by the majority of the world in Alma Ata.

Useful sources (ask me for other references cited above):
1. Chossudovsky, M. (1997). The Globalisation of Poverty: Impacts of IMF and World Bank Reforms. Penang, Indonesia: Third World Network.
2. Hershberg, E. and F. Rosen (2006) Latin America After Neoliberalism: Turning the Tide in the 21st Century? New York, NY: The New Press.
3. Hong, E. (2000). “Globalisation and the Impact on Health A Third World View.” Penang, Indonesia: Third World Network.
4. Janes, C., O. Chuluundorj, C. Hilliard, K. Rak and K. Janchiv (2006). “Poor medicine for poor people? Assessing the impact of neoliberal reform on health care equity in a post-socialist context.” Global Public Health, 1(1). Pp 5-30.
5. Katz, A. (2005). “Reappropriating Health for All, By and For the People, After 25 years of Neoliberal Capture”. Geneva, Switzerland: People’s Health Movement.
6. Priest, A., M. Rachlis and M. Cohen (2007). "Why Wait? Public Solutions to Cure Surgical Waitlists." Vancouver, BC: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and the BC Health Coalition.
7. Thomas, C. and M. Weber (2004). “The Politics of Global Health Governance: Whatever Happened to ‘Health for All by the Year 2000’?” Global Governance 10. Pp 187–205.

¡NAFTA for the Amazon! (Alert from Public Citizen)

When Big Oil companies are going full steam on a stealth lobbying mission for more access to the Amazon, it doesn't take a geological engineering degree to realize that whatever they are pushing is probably bad for the environment.

So, it's more than a little disturbing that Democrats in Congress are scheduling a vote on one of Big Oil's top legislative priorities - an expansion of NAFTA to the South American country of Peru that would give them powerful new rights to ravage the endangered Amazon rainforest.

Indigenous leaders from the Peruvian Amazon are in Washington, DC right now urging the U.S. Congress to save their Amazon rainforest home and help stop global warming by defeating the Bush administration's proposed NAFTA expansion. But they need our help!

Please urge your representatives in Congress to save the Amazon from Big Oil's Peru NAFTA scheme - and vote NO on HR 3688, the Peru "free trade" agreement (Peru FTA).

Take action here.

Bush's NAFTA expansion to Peru, which would extend NAFTA's most environment-ravaging provisions to cover the upper Amazon basin, is at the top of the agenda for multinational oil companies like Chevron-Texaco, a co-chair of the U.S.-Peru Trade Coalition.

The Peru deal includes new rights for Big Oil that extend even beyond NAFTA's awful provisions. The proposed pact would empower multinational oil and gas to drag Peru's government to World Bank tribunals to demand compensation for changes to the corporations' exploration and exploitation contracts that could undermine their "expected future profits." What this means is that the Peru FTA would allow these firms to crush measures Peru's government might take to protect the Amazon rainforest.

Big Oil is well aware of this hidden provision in the Peru FTA. In fact, they call it a "significant improvement" over other trade deals in an official report for Bush's energy industry corporate advisory committee on trade.

In a recent letter to the U.S. Congress, environmental groups that work on protecting the Amazon rainforest wrote:

Given the challenges that the world faces to stem global warming, we simply cannot afford to advance trade agreements that we are certain will result in the deforestation of critical tropical rainforests.

In short, Big Oil's Peru NAFTA push will help heat up the planet and reduce our energy independence.

The Peru FTA is slated for a vote before the end of October, so we need to move fast. Please act now to make sure your Representative and both of your Senators know where you stand.

Landmark Supreme Court ruling protects health care workers, strengthens union bargaining position

In early June of 2007, the Supreme Court of Canada handed down an important labour ruling, rejecting sections of BC’s anti-union Bill 29, and in the process declared for the first time that the right of Canadians to collectively bargain is protected under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The case, brought by a coalition of unions representing workers in the health care field, has long-range national implications and may significantly strengthen the negotiating position of unions during bargaining.

In 2002, the Campbell Liberals approved Bill 29, effectively ripping up the Hospital Employees Union (HEU) contract and opening the door to extensive privatization. More than 8000 unionized health care and community social service workers were subsequently laid off. Litigation by BC health care unions followed shortly, complemented by a finding by the United Nations International Labour Organization (ILO) that the legislation violated international conventions that protect workers’ rights to freely associate and organize. However, BC courts upheld Bill 29 and other Liberal anti-labour legislation for 4 years, including Bill 94, which in 2003 expanded on its predecessor by allowing private sector companies to cancel union contracts.

The June Supreme Court decision ruled many of these labour rollbacks unconstitutional, which should force the province to amend or rescind the current legislation and renegotiate heath care sector contracts. The Court has given the government 12 months to bring provincial legislation into compliance with the Charter.

The ruling’s implications, however, are farther reaching than the immediate remedies for the health care sector, namely that collective agreements are now on much more stable footing, less subject to the whims of policy makers. As explained by Joe Arvay, lead counsel to HEU in the case, “Workers now have a powerful tool to ensure that the government meets its obligations under freely negotiated contracts. The government no longer has a final veto on negotiated deals.”

Moreover, the decision may prevent the government from ordering unions back to work in the future. “…Whereas governments in the past have been very quick to invoke back-to-work legislation when they simply don’t like the fact that workers are on strike, that back-to-work legislation is not going to be so easy in the future,” said Arvay. For more information, see the HEU website.

Changing Venezuela by Taking Power

Hot off the presses: a new book by journalist Greg Wilpert on Chávez and Venezuela. If it is not available at your local bookstore, you can buy it for $18 on Amazon. I have not yet read this one, but pleasurably devoured another that Greg wrote/edited in 2003, Coup Against Chávez in Venezuela. For his older book, here's the link.

About Changing Venezuela by Taking Power:

"Venezuela under Hugo Chávez could be a model for peaceful revolution — or, as this definitive history shows, it could all be undone by the spectres of the past.

Since coming to power in 1998, the Chávez government has inspired both fierce internal debate and horror amongst Western governments accustomed to counting on an obeisant regime in the oil-rich state.

In this rich and resourceful study, Greg Wilpert exposes the self-serving logic behind much middle-class opposition to Venezuela’s elected leader, and explains the real reason for their alarm. He argues that the Chávez government has instituted one of the world’s most progressive constitutions, but warns that they have yet to overcome the dangerous spectres of the country’s past: its culture of patronage and clientelism, its corruption, and its support for personality cults—all of them fuelled by the attention and interference of a succession of US administrations."

And some kind words from Noam Chomsky:

“This fascinating study—deeply informed, penetrating in its analysis, comprehensive in scope—explores the historical and socioeconomic roots of the Venezuelan initiatives of recent years, the conflicts they have engendered, the achievements and pitfalls, the animating ideals of a genuinely participatory society, and the prospects for realizing them in ways that, if successful, might have significant impact not only for Latin America but well beyond."

Beautiful BC... or is it?

Enviro-porn from Vancouver's North Shore, atop Mount Seymour:


Looking down on sleepy Vancouver, Jason spies something unusual:


Oh no, could it be true...?


Zombie attack!


Just another sign of urban decay, brought to you by Mayor Sam Sullivan.

A good day for imperialism

Just as Bush's neoliberal nominee to head up the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, wins unanimous approval from the Bank's board (see May 20 posting), the U.S. Democratic leadership has caved to corporate interests and embraced a NAFTA-like agenda on trade policy. A new Bush-Democrat trade deal is expected to usher in another wave of trade agreements, this time with Peru, Panama and South Korea, and possibly a deal with the world's greatest killer of labour union activists, the Uribe Administration in Colombia. It's a good day for imperialism.

So, to all my friends in the States who swore that the Democrats taking Congress would mean a new America... well, it kinda looks like the same old thuggish Empire.

Here's what Public Citizen's trade guru Lori Wallach had to say about the deal: "The Democratic majority arrived with a fair trade mandate from a public strongly opposed to staying the course on the failed Bush trade agenda. It is incomprehensible why any Democrats would ever prioritize reviving Bush trade deals opposed by their entire base... over launching their own proactive trade agenda."

Well actually, it's not incomprehensible, since most Americans don't know the first thing about trade policy, other than they don't want to lose their jobs to a person in China, Mexico, or any country for that matter. Sure, a great many in the labour movement are joined by some environmentalists and the occasional anarchist or progressive Christian with an astute analysis of trade. But this paltry 5 percent (10?) of the U.S. population has found it difficult to overcome either the economic influence that export-oriented multinationals have on both parties or the hegemonic discourse of the irreversibility of "globalization". So, a big shout out to Thomas Friedman and all his fellow globalist wankers.

PC blasts the Bush-Democrat trade deal because it (among other problems):

- Fails to alter the outrageous NAFTA "Chapter 11" foreign investor privileges that create incentives for U.S. firms to move offshore and expose our most basic environmental, health, zoning and other laws – policies strongly advocated for by Democrats – to attack in foreign tribunals.

- Does nothing to address the NAFTA-style farm rules that resulted in 1.3 million Mexican peasant farmers losing their livelihoods. This is predicted to create dislocation and misery for large numbers of people, increase production of cocaine and cause instability in developing country trade partners.

Perhaps most telling about the true nature of the Bush-Democrat trade deal is that it has won the support of the National Association of Manufacturers, a conservative industry group at the forefront of the push for trade liberalization. So there's that. Credit is due, however, to all the lower and mid-ranking Congressional Democrats who continue to battle within the party's ranks to push a progressive trade policy.

To read Public Citizen's entire press release, click here: Bush-Democrat trade deal