Developmental States: The Next Generation

For three long decades, neoliberal capitalism pitilessly savaged the planet, blighting billions of human lives and wrecking entire continents for the sake of a tiny oligarchic elite.

But beginning in the late 1990s, resistance movements began to emerge. In the beginning, they were tiny -- a handful of protests here, a scattering of workers there. But the resistance grew and grew. The handful turned into an armful, armfuls into gatherings, gatherings into crowds.

All across the planet, working people fought back -- and began to win victories.

One of the most significant of these victories was the construction of mighty developmental states. These were peaceful, democratic revolutions which took back national economies bankrupted by predatory foreign neoliberal elites and from their no less predatory comprador underlings.

The first group of developmental states emerged around 1999 or. Their most obvious manifestation: the BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India and China), trillion-dollar behemoths who are rapidly becoming the leading engines of the world economy.

But the story doesn't end there. The next generation of developmental states is emerging, born out of geopolitical necessity and ongoing struggles for human dignity and social justice. Here are some snapshots of the process:

Bangladesh: Al-jazeera: Bangladeshi labourers demand more pay

Egypt: In These Times: In Egypt, Arab World’s ‘Largest Social Movement’ Gains Steam Among Workers

Indonesia and Turkey: Antara: President arrives in Turkey

Israelo-apartheid Commits Suicide

The Young Turks' moderator, Cenk Uygur, rips the mask off the rotting, zombified shambles of the US Empire and shows just how hideous its worm-eaten visage has become: "US Citizen Executed In Israeli Flotilla Raid?"

Israelo-apartheid's goons shot 19-year-old Furhan Dogan, an unarmed aid worker on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, four times in the head in international waters. Why? Dogan and his fellow passengers were trying to deliver desperately needed humanitarian supplies to the 1.5 million people of Gaza locked down by a cruel and illegal Israeli blockade.

Dogan was born in the US and has an American passport. Israel murdered a US citizen. And contrary to Israel's pathetic attempts to smear the Freedom Flotilla, attempts so obviously and outrageously untrue as to border on clinical psychosis, Dogan was neither an al-Qaeda agent nor a suicide bomber. He was a US citizen engaged in the most honorable thing any human being can ever do -- peacefully upholding the human rights of other human beings.

Dozens of eyewitnesses aboard the ships confirm Israeli forces opened fire on Dogan and the other unarmed aid workers from helicopters. The attack occurred in international waters, and targeted ships flagged in Turkey, the US and other EU countries. This was no rogue operation, it was approved by the highest levels of Israel's government. As such, this was not just an outright massacre, it is an act of open war by Israel on Israel's *own allies*.

But the business of an increasingly deranged and doomed US Empire is empire, which means it will do nothing to restrain its increasingly deranged and doomed puppet state (Israel gets $3 billion in cash from the US every year -- not loans, straight up cash). Here's the official US response to the murder of nine defenseless aid workers and the Mafia-style shooting of an American citizen in the head: the events were a tragedy requiring investigation.

But there are powerful social forces which *will* restrain Israel, forces which have consigned settler colonialism in all its forms to the trash heap of history. First of all, Israel has run out of regional enemies: it's at peace with Egypt and Jordan, Syria doesn't want war, and Hezbollah in Lebanon simply wants to be left alone. Second, the EU is in no mood to kowtow to Wall Street banksters or US imperial gangsters, while Turkey is a regional superpower and growing stronger by the day. There will be bigger and better Freedom Flotillas, and the blockade of Gaza will be defeated.

America's Chernobyl

I'm old enough to remember the Chernobyl disaster, the worst-ever nuclear accident in human history. It was the moment when the Soviet monopoly-state forever delegitimated itself as an agency of modernization (or even moderate competency).

Now the US Empire is experiencing its very own Chernobyl -- not from a nuclear plant, but from a deep-sea well pouring millions of gallons of raw petrocarbons into the Caribbean.

What was most shocking about the spill aren't BP's lies, prevarications, and incompetence, but the manner in which the entire edifice of petro-fundamentalism has crumbled down. This disaster wasn't a once-in-a-lifetime, "black swan" event, it was the predictable result of incompetent, bought-off Federal regulators (basic safety features were never mandated), Federal policies which systematically privileged petrocarbons over renewable energy (drilling instead of conservation), and above all, the toxic ideology of market fundamentalism (what's good for BP's shareholders is good, and the eco-system be damned).

I suppose this is how postmodern Empires die -- not with a bang, but with a landscape/seascape of ecological ruination.

PBS has a live feed of the spill here).

Olympus, Meet Kratos

Every world citizen should give thanks to the citizens of Greece, who followed the advice of Kratos, protagonist of Sony Santa Monica's magnificent God of War franchise, and refused to accept the malign dominion of Zeus -- a.k.a. Euroliberalism.

The credit markets of Europe's smaller Mediterranean nations have been getting hammered by bond traders in recent days. But the EU is not a small player in the world economy. It is a behemoth with a 16 trillion annual GDP, the largest single economy on the planet. Just like the BRIC nations, which have vast financial resources and fundamentally sound economies, Europe can defend itself against speculators. The only question was whether it had the political will.

This question has been answered. At long last, the EU rolled out the trillion-dollar bailout package they should've instituted long ago.

This isn't the end of the story. The people of Greece have opened the Pandora's box of transnational democracy: the faint, flickering and yet ineradicable hope for a different and better world is now alight, from the streets of Athens to the forests of Orissa, and from the tenements of Rio de Janeiro to the apartment blocks of Moscow.

The BRICs Build Their Neighborhood

Big doings from BRIC-land. Here's the state of play:

1. Brazil and China signed a raft of multilateral agreements covering everything from financial cooperation to joint infrastructure investments and research consortia.

2. Brazil is launching a full-scale national infrastructure program. About $1 trillion will be channeled into the economy over the next four years -- enough to raise growth rates from the tepid 3% average during the early 2000s to tigerish 5-7% levels. This should also drive regional integration, boosting Brazil's neighbors.

3. Russia is bailing out the Ukraine to the tune of $40 billion in subsidies over 10 years, or about $4 billion/year. That may sound like a lot, but Russia has half a trillion dollars in reserves, far more than it needs, and helping out its neighbor isn't just the right thing to do, it's the smart thing to do. Ukraine has huge potential -- low debt levels, an extremely well educated population, lots of university students, etc. -- all it needs is a bit of cash to launch its very own Eurasian developmental state.

4. Inter-BRIC cooperation: a raft of agreements between Venezuela and China, and a new coordinating body to network their respective development banks.

8-Mile America

Every day, the irrationality and brokenness of this Empire plumbs new depths. Wall Street's sleazoid scam artists are rolling in billions, while our children -- our *future*, the last people who should ever be made to suffer for the mistakes and follies of adults -- are thrown on the scrap-heap.

There's just no money for the kids, cry the partisans of Empire.

There's plenty of money.

It's just spent on trillion-dollar bailouts for failed banksters and trillion-dollar budgets for failed colonial wars.

This shambles of a dying Empire now spends more on war than it did during the Cold War, despite the fact that (1) 80% of humanity lives in electoral democracies, and (2) China has a small military and is undergoing significant democratization. Here are the numbers:




Source: Military Budget of the United States

Podding

Podcasts come to Uplink: the first two are online for your listening pleasure.

Apologies for the less-than-stellar sound, I'm running all this on a budget of exactly zero.