Correa’s Re-Election Poses More Challenges for Social Movements in Ecuador

Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa has marched from one victory to the next. In 2006, he won the presidency, campaigning squarely on a promise to rewrite the country’s Constitution. Two years later, despite stiff opposition from Congress, the Constitution was resoundingly approved by a voter referendum. The new Constitution required new elections, so Correa again ran for president. He won in a landslide on April 26.

But Ecuador’s leading social movements remain skeptical about whether his re-election will translate into the deep social changes promised by the country’s new Constitution. Ecuador’s indigenous federations are still reeling from a bitter fight over a controversial mining law that the President pushed through the interim Congress in January. Many indigenous groups withheld their support for Correa in the April general elections, possibly costing his party a majority in the newly established unicameral National Assembly.

Nonetheless, Correa achieved a feat unprecedented since the 1979 return to democracy: He won a majority of votes (52 percent) in the first round of the presidential election, nearly doubling the amount received by second-place finisher, Lucio Gutiérrez. Correa’s margin of victory can be understood as a combination of factors: public support for his political project, enthusiasm for the relative political stability that accompanied his first term, a divided opposition, and the disrepute of traditional political parties widely perceived as irretrievably corrupt and unaccountable. Indeed, Correa has built his political persona by railing against both the old partidocracia (party-ocracy) and neoliberal economic policies, while shrewdly positioning his party, Movement for a Proud and Sovereign Country (MPAIS or Alianza PAIS), against this old guard.

In April’s National Assembly elections, MPAIS slightly stumbled, falling just shy of the 50 percent plus one vote mark. But the party is by far the largest single political force. Electoral authorities are still compiling the final tally, but it appears MPAIS will secure around 60 of the 124 seats. In passing legislation, Correa will likely have to work with a smattering of smaller leftist parties, which hold an estimated 15 seats. The remaining 50 seats are mostly divided between a handful of conservative parties.

In achieving his many victories, Correa has displayed a combative “with-me-or-against-me” approach in carrying through his agenda. One of his more crushing victories was against the former Congress, which was stonewalling the creation of a Constitutional Assembly. After a 10-month feud, Correa emerged victorious when the MPAIS-dominated Constituent Assembly dissolved the Congress and assumed law-making powers.

But his combative approach is not limited to dealings with the reactionary right. The President has similarly tried to steamroll progressive forces opposing his policies.

Correa’s already tenuous relationship with indigenous and environmental social movements deteriorated when he proposed a new mining law. The legislation offered mining companies unprecedented large-scale open pit mining concessions throughout the country, including on indigenous lands and environmentally sensitive areas. Correa pushed the law through the interim Congress in January 2009, sparking widespread protests. Activists complained the law would negatively impact many rural and indigenous communities and that it was approved without public debate or transparency.

A broad-based grassroots coalition emerged in opposition to the mining law, including the powerful Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), environmental groups, human rights organizations, and youth and urban sectors. Humberto Cholango, president of a CONAIE-affiliated indigenous organization, captured the sentiment against the law in a written statement: “We reject the anti-democratic attitude of the national government and the legislative commission for closing off dialogue, denying a national debate, and rushing through the approval of the mining law, which promotes a model based on the pillaging of natural resources and that favors transnational corporations.”

In the view of these groups, the Correa administration is taking a page from Ecuador’s neoliberal regimes in prioritizing the interests of foreign investors over local people. Popular mobilization escalated on January 20, as opponents to the mining law launched a national “Day of Mobilization for Life” in which tens of thousands participated in marches, roadblocks, and hunger strikes across Ecuador.

The government responded by arresting protesters, and firing bullets and teargas, injuring dozens. Correa dismissed the protesting groups as an “infantile left” made up of “fundamentalists” that cannot be allowed to rise up against his program. Opposition groups countered that Correa’s aggressive posturing and use of force was effectively criminalizing dissent. Finally, in a move widely perceived as an act of retaliation, the government revoked the legal status of Acción Ecológica, a prominent environmental organization that had played a visible role in the protests. (The group’s status was only reinstated after an international campaign of solidarity was launched.)

The mining conflict hardened left-wing opposition toward Correa in the run up to the April elections. Ecuador’s leading indigenous federations gave particularly harsh rebukes. Cholango claimed, “We are not going to support any presidential candidate, because none represent a real alternative for the country.” CONAIE’s vice president Miguel Guatemal similarly commented, “This is a racist and rude government, and in the coming elections we will withdraw our support.”

Although opposition to Correa’s mining law may have been a factor in denying him a majority in the National Assembly, his party should be able to steer its legislative agenda by forming a coalition with one or more small parties of the left. Correa’s need to negotiate with other progressive forces may provide social movements with an avenue to influence the administration’s program and policies.

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Originally published by North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) at https://nacla.org/node/5848.

Bolivians approve new constitution

On January 25, 2009, Bolivians approved a new constitution, voting 61 percent in favor and 39 percent against, realizing a long-standing demand of Bolivian social movements and fulfilling a principal campaign pledge of President Evo Morales. The 411-article constitution represents an attempt to break with Bolivia’s colonial past, and the legacy of poverty and exclusion that plagues much of the country’s indigenous majority. Among the key features of the new constitution are provisions that (a) give greater rights to indigenous peoples (in such areas as recognition, systems of justice, education, religion, language and territory), (b) provide the state greater control over the economy (notably, over the country’s natural resources), (c) secure access to health care, education, food and water as ‘rights’, and (d) permit the president to sit for two consecutive terms. In the case of Morales, this allows him to stand for one additional term in an election to be held later this year. Additionally, Bolivians voted overwhelmingly to limit large agricultural land holdings to 5,000 hectares (12,355 acres), although this will not be applied retroactively to those who already hold large tracts of land.

Constitutional approval came despite strong criticisms from business and autonomist groups in the eastern departments of the media luna that the Constituent Assembly’s drafting and ratification process was illegal, as well as objections by social movements and organizations that too many concessions were made to appease the opposition (such as lack of retroactivity in agrarian reform). Ethnic, class and regional cleavages produced recurrent conflicts throughout the process of writing and approving the new constitution, climaxing in the September 11, 2008 massacre of 20 pro-Morales campesinos in the northern department of Pando. Though it appeared at times that the gridlock was insurmountable, international observers, most notably from the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), played an important role in breaking the impasse between Bolivian parties, resulting in a compromise that was approved by a majority of the Bolivian Congress in October 2008. That body will now have the task of legislating over dozens of issues that arise out of the new charter.

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."

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.

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."

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

Just another day in BC

While preparing for our kayak trip, Cedar (friend, not tree) put forth the argument that people fight wars because "we are all the same"; I countered that humanity is frequently, sadly compelled to violence and stupidity. Cedar is also frightfully amused by the song "Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy" which I think should be banned from the airwaves, along with all country music (agreed, we keep Johnny Cash). And he likes eggplant, which I suspect to be the root of all evil. Fortunately, we are dear friends and concur on a multitude of other matters, from the virtues of feminism and bi bim bap to the magnificence of the song "Baby, I'm an Anarchist" by Against Me!So, we ignored the rude sign that alleged private property and hiked past crimson flowers to the top of Keats Island, our kayaking destination. We had just navigated seal-infested waters off the Sunshine Coast to arrive at the forested island. Bald eagles oversaw the voyage.

But when we reached the island's summit, a gaggle of summer-camp Christians appeared out of nowhere, and informed us of the day's late hour. And Cedar and I thought, "Ahhhh! -- the kayak rental store back on the mainland is about to close!" Thank god we had some Christians around. (They also confirmed that eggplant is the root of all evil; they should know, as they have some sort of book that explains these things.)

After a hasty descent to the boats, we sailed back through the five-foot swells, passing more alien-faced seals that wanted to capsize us, and arrived into the harbour just in time. The sun was going down and the spray of water was glorious. We celebrated with Canadian beer and Chinese food, and then retired to his little cabin on the hill to rage on about some global injustice until sleep overtook us.

Police brutality, rabid raccoons and the fire-bombing of Dresden

Those of you who know my friend Stevie-G (esquire) always assumed his day of reckoning would arrive sooner or later. No one can go very long with his unique array of personal fascinations without ending up bent over a police car. But the delivery of his disciplining came not at the hands of a baton-wielding cop, but the endearing and sprightly Rhea; the scene was not the streets of Chicago, but Vancouver's campy Police Museum. Shortly after this photo was taken, Steve and this blog's author became bunk-mates in the museum's jail cell. It was just like old times on the Coolville Ridge farm back in Ohio.

However, the bags of weed on display at the Police Museum could not have rivalled that which was subsequently smoked under the ancient cedars of Stanley Park, as well as the New Amsterdam Cafe, the tidy downtown venue that showcases the city's sometimes-enlightened drug policies. Next door, at the office of the Marijuana Party (yes, a political party), we chatted with a pink-dreadlocked woman named Kiwi, who politely explained to a man of eastern European descent how the ayahuasca root they were selling makes one hallucinate. It turned out Kiwi and I used to live in the same house on Victoria Drive, which would account for certain noises... Meanwhile, in the adjacent room of the New Amsterdam Cafe, groups of young people lounged on couches smoking pot and hash from devices called "volcanoes" that vaporize the drugs without burning them. All the THC, none of the lung damage, they say.

Hiking in Stanley Park, I was chased by a devious raccoon, who apparently thought my bag of clothes and a new cell phone charger was something edible. I was ready to kick the little bugger (sorry, vegans, self-defense), but then it veered off to pursue a woman with crackers, who actually hand-fed the rascal. We escaped to a sushi joint, where Rhea asserted that many Filipino families (as her own) are not overly fond of Japanese people, owing to Japan's brutal occupation of the Philippines during WWII. But she liked the food anyway.

It was a flawless day, capped with a glass of red wine and a conversation with Chicory, world's best dog, about how much we love our adopted country. Oh, and I finished Vonnegut's brilliant Slaughterhouse Five, about the WWII fire-bombing of Dresden (which killed more people that either atomic bomb). The book's best line: "The United States of America has been Balkanized, has been divided into twenty petty nations so that it will never again be a threat to world peace." So it goes.