Recognizing the Class War

FinCap Wins Anyway
by JAMES ROTHENBERG


Stories don’t have to be true. They just have to hold our interest. The American story has held our interest for a long time, and it’s even partially true. The early settlers found it tough going, but that was in comparison to an English way of life. They found plenty of people here who were born here. Well, not quite people. Savages. The distinction accounts for all subsequent actions of the one toward the other.

The founders drew up a beautiful set of laws, but that was also to keep in place property arrangements commensurate with position. Liberty was deemed to be the province of all, with the country run by the people who own it.

The westward push was adventurous and heroic, but it also pushed southward some weaker, brown skinned people. The yellow skinned built the railroads and the black skinned built the economy, but the landowners built the legal structure. In this “nation of laws”, nothing has the lasting strength of the legal structure.

There’s a lot of wonderful things about America, the many freedoms, the informality, the modernity, and the special way we associate (sometimes) with the underdog. And it’s not a society where a peddler or clerk can’t chat up a bank president. But the story of America as a classless society is only partially true.

Missing are rigid, caste-like separations. Lines are more subtle and smeared out by a lifetime of ingesting bureaucratic illusion, played out like national theme music, and a relatively good living standard. And even where we openly speak of the “great middle class” it contains a touch of lording it over third world and autocratic countries that have a great “poor class”.

Over the ages class distinctions have been put in place by easily recognized fiat. In America they are infused by corporate law. You can’t step into an airport without hearing over and over again, “Federal law prohibits…dadadadadadadada” , but federal law does not prohibit corporate law, and it is this that helps create the orbital compulsion whereby the lightweights cannot escape from the pull of the heavyweight. Put in relativistic language (for accuracy and with the gain of an apt psychological overtone) the lightweights simply follow the easiest path in distorted space.

Differences in Americans’ status along class lines are internalized, and therefore partially discounted, but there are indications people are beginning to keep closer score, as evidenced by the Occupy movement. Its second stage engines haven’t fired yet. More is going to be needed because a vital Left presence is the only bulwark against nascent fascism, very hospitable to capitalism. It certainly isn’t going to come from our two monopoly political parties. The class disparity between rich and poor is manifest in the way government policy is slanted.

For instance:

Before becoming president, Barack Obama had a lot to say in favor of single-payer healthcare, actually a very bad name. It’s confusing to people and possibly purposely so. How many people actually care about how many entities pay for their healthcare so long as it is paid for by someone other than them? The better name is national healthcare, the model already existing in Medicare.

Perhaps because the very idea of socialism has been crapped on for so long in this country, even proponents of single-payer choose their words carefully, avoiding terms like “socialized” and “nationalized”. That’s why we hear the euphemism, “universal healthcare”.

State propagandists coined the expression “godless communism”, as if this was a property of communism. If it is, the implication is that we have a system of “godly capitalism”. Gets pretty silly. Except that all our state managers take a virtual oath to that god.

Obama actually had a very good chance to move to national healthcare. He had described, and passionately, our present health system as being in a state of “crisis”, not only for its being behind the rest of the developed countries that have nationalized but for being a drag financially, physically, and mentally upon already burdened working people who either didn’t have insurance or couldn’t afford what they did have.

The record shows that when he had the chance to make a change he dealt in the insurance companies, the HMO’s, the drug companies – make that the entire health profit industry – but zero advocates for national healthcare.

Once in the White House, Obama continued his strong support of TARP, bailing big banks out of crisis. What distinguished this crisis from the healthcare crisis was the class of people waiting to be rescued. The rich and powerful are not used to waiting and in a week’s time Wall Street and its enablers in Washington got their dream fix, essentially a massive socialization of trillions of dollars in guarantees to finance capital. One crisis adverted, at least temporarily, the other morphed into the tepid Affordable Care Act, written with the pen and ink of the healthcare industry.

Another example of the ongoing class war is the jobs situation and how it is being dealt with. There are not enough good paying jobs for the people who need them, largely because the people who don’t need them have pinched the availability of good paying jobs in the interest of maximizing shareholder profits. That’s through plant closings, downsizing, outsourcing, offshoring, union busting, and taking wage advantage of a surplus worker pool.

It’s bad for the country when there are too few good paying jobs. At the extremes it leads to disillusionment, anxiety, depression, despair, and social unrest. It’s bad for government coffers also because of decreased payroll taxes. And when it comes to a certain point it is detrimental even to finance capital that expects and relies on working class consumption. No money, no spend.

Domestic needs are taking a back seat to our imperialism, a psychopathic use of American power bent on world domination. If you can beat them, why join them? All this national treasure, manpower, and brainpower could be directed toward repair and replacement of our 20th century infrastructure. A modern layer of this infrastructure is high speed internet. Access to fast broadband connections are the new necessity for the 21st century and many countries are putting the U.S. to shame in this department, the NSA notwithstanding.

What happens if we put these two desirable things together? 1) Putting people to work 2) Rebuilding infrastructure. What comes to mind and what came to mind at the beginning of the Obama presidency is a public works program on a grand scale, the template of which was created in 1933 as part of the New Deal. Whatever consideration Obama gave to the much talked about idea it is certainly not part of the present deal.

But it’s not too late. It may even be a better time because efforts to boost the economy with easy money have proven inadequate. Federal Reserve bond buying and low interest rate policy have done wonders for Wall Street and corporate profit and loss statements but, again, that’s just the impatient rich and powerful. The jobs aren’t coming back even with real negative interest rates.

Obama and his advisors are aware of predictions of economic stagnation into the foreseeable future, but they are also aware of the nervousness of finance capital whenever a socialist idea is advanced. Maybe it’s time for the president to convince them that it’s in everyone’s interest. More realistically considering Obama’s penchant for pleasing the owners, maybe it’s time for finance capital to convince the president that the government is the employer of last resort. FinCap wins anyway.

Is Obama the Worst US President Ever

I Ain't Joking
by RON RIDENOUR


Yes, I mean it: the worst ever!

We’ve had James Monroe and his doctrine of supremacy over Latin America. We’ve had Theodore Roosevelt and his invasion of Cuba; Nixon, Reagan, Bush-Bush and their mass murder, and all the war crimes and genocide committed by most presidents. Yes, but we never had a black man sit on the white throne of imperialism committing war crimes.

And there he is, murdering even more people in Afghanistan than Bush, backing coups in Latin America, continuing to undermine Iraq, sending drones, mercenaries, saboteurs to Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Uganda, Libya and now Syria. He bores deeper into several African countries, rich with oil and minerals, than his white predecessors, Democrats and Republicans. The US is eliminating the few secular governments that there were in the Middle East and North Africa.

Obama is busier fulfilling total USAmerican world domination than even Bush, Reagan and Nixon.

He is the president for US corporations. With his black Kenyan roots he can walk into Africa’s rich parlors and black “White Houses” and communicate with these butchers better than any of the capitalist class’ earlier presidents, all of them white.

Obama is worse than them, precisely because he betrays all his black “brothers and sisters” in the US, all except a few rich and opportunistic ones. He was the hope; he would improve their lot, and that of the poor, the working people. But he has done nothing of the sort. Instead, he takes from the poor and middle class  to give to the rich, the worst criminals on Wall Street, the war industry, the oil and mineral industries. Virtually all of his economic advisors hail from Wall Street and in many cases were central figures in the enormous economic crimes of the last few years that have stolen hundreds of billions, even trillions of dollars from the poor and the middle class. His top militarists, Homeland Security thugs, and CIA killers are some of those that Bush used — most of them Republicans.

As commander in chief, he has had the national hero Bradley Manning tortured. He seeks to destroy Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange. I gave a speech in front of the US embassy in Copenhagen when Obama was to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, for Christ Sake

Here are excerpts:

“We live in a state of permanent war and Obama continues this system, as he must, because no president of the USA can significantly moderate or abolish that brutal system. It is of no consequence what one’s color, gender or sexual preference is. Changing or abolishing imperialism can only occur when gigantic numbers of productive and service workers wake up and fight for such. And we must do so with our own political parties not the dominating capitalist parties, Democratic or Republican, or in Denmark with the current array of political parties.

Tomorrow this black president for capitalism and its wars-for-profit will receive the so-called Nobel Peace Prize. This is an absurd hypocrisy, even more so as it occurs just days after he announced sending 30,000 more murdering US troops to Afghanistan where the resistance forces, fighting for their country’s legitimate sovereignty, will righteously receive them with weaponry.

The media fail to mention that this is the second time Obama has sent additional troops to Afghanistan. Within his first 100 days in office, he ordered an additional 17,000 troops to supplement the 38,000 then present. Soon, there will be nearly 100,000 US troops and some 40,000 more from other countries, including the Banana Republic of Denmark.

While Bush was tied down in Afghanistan and Iraq, Obama takes up imperialism’s demand for blood in Latin America. The nine ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance of the Peoples of Latin America) countries have formed a cooperative trade, political and social network in the past five years and are making deep inroads into capitalism’s territory. Bush was powerless to combat this development which started by Cuba and Venezuela, in 2004. But the new “black” president saw a weak link in Honduras where the oligarchy and the thoroughly US-dominated military organized a coup d´etat with Obama-backed generals assisting. Then came the illegal elections a week ago, held under an armed curfew, which Obama declared to be legitimate even as the real president (Manuel Zelaya) and his patriotic supporters in the hundreds of thousands sought to have him reinstated.

Since that speech, Obama also supported the removal of progressive Catholic priest and President Fernando Lugo in Paraguay.

The first “black” president ran on a peace ticket, a position which he has reversed. Nor has he significantly fulfilled any other of his somewhat progressive campaign promises, such as closing down Guantanamo’s torture factory.

“I Have a Dream Drone” has become Obama’s mantra.

What Does the World Think Now?

Obama Raises American Hypocrisy to Higher Level
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

What does the world think?  Obama has been using air strikes and drones against civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and probably Somalia.  In his March 28 speech, Obama justified his air strikes against Libya on the grounds that the embattled ruler, Gadhafi, was using air strikes to put down a rebellion.  

Gadhafi has been a black hat for as long as I can remember.  If we believe the adage that “where there is smoke there is fire,” Gadhafi is probably not a nice fellow. However, there is no doubt whatsoever that the current US president and the predecessor Bush/Cheney regime have murdered many times more people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia than Gadhafi has murdered in Libya. 

Moreover, Gadhafi is putting down a rebellion against state authority as presently constituted, but Obama and Bush/Cheney initiated wars of aggression based entirely on lies and deception.  

Yet Gadhafi is being demonized, and Bush/Cheney/Obama are sitting on their high horse draped in cloaks of morality. Obama described himself as saving Libyans from violence while Obama himself murders Afghans, Pakistanis, and whomever else. 

Indeed, the Obama regime has been torturing a US soldier, Bradley Manning, for having a moral conscience. America has degenerated to the point where having a moral conscience is evidence of  anti-Americanism and “terrorist activity.” 

The Bush/Cheney/Obama wars of naked aggression have bankrupted America.  Joseph Stiglitz, former chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, concluded that the money wasted on the Iraq war could have been used to fix America’s Social Security problem for half a century.   Instead, the money was used to boost the obscene profits of the armament industry. 

The obscene wars of aggression, the obscene profits of the offshoring corporations, and the obscene bailouts of the rich financial gangsters have left the American public with annual budget deficits of approximately $1.5 trillion. These deficits are being covered by printing money.  Sooner or later, the printing presses will cause the US dollar to collapse and domestic inflation to explode. Social Security benefits will be wiped out by inflation rising more rapidly than the cost-of-living adjustments.  If America survives, no one will be left but the mega-rich.  Unless there is a violent revolution. 

Alternatively, if the Federal Reserve puts the brake on monetary expansion, interest rates will rise, sending the economy into a deeper depression. 

Washington, focused on its newest war, is oblivious to America’s peril. As Stiglitz notes, the costs of the Iraq war alone could have kept every foreclosed family in their home, provided health care for every American child, and wiped out the student loans of graduates who cannot find jobs because they have been outsourced to foreigners.  However, the great democratic elected government of “the world’s only superpower” prefers to murder Muslims in order to enhance the profits of the military/security complex.  More money is spent violating the constitutional rights of American air travelers than is spent in behalf of the needy. 

The moral authority of the West is rapidly collapsing.  When Russia, Asia, and South America look at Europe, Australia and Canada, they see American puppet states that contribute troops to the aggressive wars of the Empire. The French president, the British prime minister, the “president” of Georgia, and the rest  are merely functionaries of the American Empire.  The puppet rulers routinely sell out the interests and welfare of their peoples in behalf of American hegemony. And they are well rewarded for their service. One year out of office former British prime minister Tony Blair had a net worth of $30 million. 

 

In his war against Libya, Obama has taken America one step further into Caesarism. Obama did Bush one step better and did not even bother to get congressional authorization for his attack on Libya.  Obama claimed that his moral authority trumped the US Constitution.  The hypocrisy reeks.  How the public stands it, I do not know: 

“To brush aside America’s responsibility as a leader and--more profoundly--our responsibilities to our fellow human beings under such circumstances would have been a betrayal of who we are. Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different. And as president, I refused to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves  before taking action.”

This from the Great Moral Leader who every day murders civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan and Yemen and Somalia and now Libya and who turns a blind eye when “the great democracy in the Middle East,” Israel, murders more Palestinians. 

The American president, whose drones and air force slaughter civilians every day of the year went on to say Libya stands alone in presenting the world with “the prospect of violence on a horrific scale.”  Obviously, Obama thinks that one million dead Iraqis, four million displaced Iraqis, and an unknown number of murdered Afghans is just a small thing. 

The rest of Obama’s speech showed a person more capable of DoubleSpeak and DoubleThink than Big Brother and the denizens of George Orwell’s 1984.

The Stink in the Super Bowl

by Robert Shetterly

Wednesday, February 9, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

“Part of the main plan of imperialism… is that we will give you your history, we will write it for you, we will re-order the past…What’s more truly frightening is the defacement, the mutilation, and ultimately the eradication of history…”

--- Edward Said

It would be hard to imagine any ardent advocate of the military/industrial complex not reveling in what the Super Bowl has become --- a veritable marketing orgy of violence and consumption --- advertisers spending millions per minute to pander to our desire to own more stuff while fighter jets roar overhead reminding us of how the right-to-stuff is protected. Why must a football game become a vehicle for materialism and the power that defends it? I like football, played it pretty well in high school, and still think that in spite of the performance enhancing drugs & obscene salaries, the game itself is one of the few more or less honest of our mass cultural diversions. But the integrity of the game itself drowns in the toxic soup of values being dished up.

However, I have no need to belabor what should be obvious to anyone.

Instead, something far more insidious was presented to the world minutes before the opening kick-off. A short video, 111 seconds, narrated by the actor Michael Douglas, portrayed The Journey of American History --- its culmination being Super Bowl XLV.

The video consisted of a quick series of icons, both events and people, from our history, each one meant to strike a chord of collective pride, courage, triumph or suffering. In quick succession we saw in black and white the Statue of Liberty, suffragists marching, an image from the Dust Bowl, a landing craft at D-day, John Lennon’s image on a peace poster, JFK at his inaugural saying, “Ask not….,” MLK, Jr. intoning, “I have a dream…,” Rosa Parks, the Challenger lifting off, someone pick axing the Berlin Wall, the floods of Katrina, FDR speaking, Muhammad Ali gesticulating over a downed opponent, Ronald Reagan smiling, Lindbergh, the flag raising at Iwo Jima, a similar flag raising at 9/11, Amelia Earhart, Ray Charles, the moon landing, a scene from the Depression …. I’m sure I’ve missed a few. Michael Douglas’s minimal narration began by saying that this was our journey. And after Dr. King’s image, Douglas picked up the theme of the dream, our dream & our belief in that dream. With the images of 9/11, he said that this was our darkest day…. But the flag as still there! He said, “We never give up. How could we?”

And then the video shifted to the teams in the Super Bowl. Douglas said that tonight we are united in the journey of these teams as quick images of chicken packers in Green Bay and a steel mill in Pittsburgh flashed by. Douglas said that dreaming and believing have brought us to this moment of collective celebration and that that is Our Journey.

That’s our journey? It began with the Statue of Liberty? Not with the genocide of Native Americans, slavery and the crucial assumption that nature was to be feared, conquered and exploited? If I claim that I am telling you about my journey, and tell you only the good parts, what have I told you? What have we learned about the nature of journeys?

If I tell you that my darkest day was the time I was victimized and fail to mention the time I victimized someone else, what do you think I have learned from my experience?

More importantly, the video portrayed a series of American moments and heroic people and equated them with the Super Bowl as though they are all on a continuum of social progress and equally indicative of our finest character. In the parlance of our time, it was simply a portrayal of connecting the dots: Statue of Liberty, suffragists, FDR, D-day, JFK, Rosa Parks, MLK, Jr. … Super Bowl. All on the same line, of equal weight. If this is the trail of dots we need to follow, it’s a trail that leads us deeper into the dark woods, not out of it.

Obviously the Super Bowl is an excuse to celebrate materialism and militarism. Weren’t those two of the “triplets” (the other being racism) that Dr. King identified as being the forces that were destroying the values of this country and leading us to spiritual death? Many of the dots in that time line figure one way or another in the struggle for some kind of justice. How does the Super Bowl do that? It does, but only if you consider the real triumph of this country not its democratic values but its economic system, capitalism. And you can’t tell the difference.

In his “I Have a Dream” speech, Dr. King described the American Dream as consisting of the “riches of freedom and the security of justice.” The blatant message of Super Bowl is the freedom of riches and the justice of security. Very different things.

People, like many of our students today, who know little history except for the façade of history, and people, like many students today, who have not been taught to think deeply, would accept the message of Michael Douglas’s version of our journey. Without any critique, it felt good.

Who wrote that script for him?

Clearly its intent was to equate the apotheosis of violence and consumption with the struggle for social justice. Its intent was to drain the real courage and meaning of our most important and most necessary social struggles by equating them with corporate power --- corporate power being the same force that did and does impede social and economic justice. The video’s intent was to show that the behavior and interests of Halliburton are on the same moral timeline as the behavior and interests of Rosa Parks.

We generally think of imperialism, as Edward Said was when he made the comment above, as the military/economic process of one country exploiting another. Imperialism, though, is the same within a country. Propaganda and false history, combined with poor education and a corporate press, are used to subjugate people to the benefit of their own powerful elites. It stinks. It stinks in Iraq and it stinks in Wichita.

Douglas said, “We never give up. How could we?” Give up what? Fighting for justice or fighting for profit? His choice of words reminded me of another person who asked the same question. Dorothea Lange went into internment camps in the western US during WW II where our government had imprisoned Japanese Americans. She photographed what was being done to these people in the name of the freedom of security. She went to bear witness. Most Americans had no idea nor wanted to. Fear justifies most anything and denies the consequences. After being there & witnessing this crime against humanity, Dorothea Lange said, “This is what we did. How could it happen? How could we?”

What is our journey?

I know little about Michael Douglas except that he is a fine actor and that he recently survived a bout with serious throat cancer. I suspect that both of those factors made him a good choice as the narrator for this bit of dangerous propaganda. Conquering a deadly disease tends to add credibility to one’s professed integrity. But with this video he was helping to proliferate a cultural cancer that is destroying us all.

I noticed that he was sitting right behind George Bush and Condoleezza Rice in the luxury boxes.

The Problem with Design...

...Imperialism or Thinking Too Small? 

ALEX STEFFEN, 15 JUL 10

Bruce Nussbaum has stirred up a fierce debate with his new article Is Humanitarian Design the New Imperialism?. Nussbaum criticizes groups like Project H, Acumen Fundand Architecture for Humanity for being perhaps naive about the post-colonial landscape they face in Asia and Africa:

Is the new humanitarian design coming out of the U.S. and Europe being perceived through post-colonial eyes as colonialism? Are the American and European designers presuming too much in their attempt to do good?

What's more, Nussbaum says, we ought to be focusing our efforts closer to home: "And finally, one last question: why are we only doing humanitarian design in Asia and Africa and not Native American reservations or rural areas, where standards of education, water and health match the very worst overseas?"

Of course, Emily Pilloton of Project H has shot right back, saying it is Nussbaum himself who is out of touch with the younger generation of humanitarian designers, designers who are well-aware of the cultural and political landscapes in which they're working, and are in fact increasingly focused on problems closer to home:

It is only through this local engagement and shared investment that the humanitarian design process shines. It is through this personal connection to place and people that the human qualities of design rise to the top of the priority list, through which our clients are no longer beneficiaries, but experts and co-designers right there with us. In his infamous address titled “To Hell With Good Intentions,” Ivan Illich puts this beautifully: 'If you have any sense of responsibility at all, stay with your riots here at home...You will know what you are doing, why you are doing it, and how to communicate with those to whom you speak. And you will know when you fail. If you insist on working with the poor, if this is your vocation, then at least work among the poor who can tell you to go to hell.' We all have to learn how to be citizens again: citizens first, and designers second. Citizenship is inherently local, defined by our connection and commitment to the places we best know and most love.

In the last few days, there have been different takes on this debate from leading thinkers likeCameron Sinclair, Susan Szenasy and Robert Fabricant. Now, I have conflicts of interest all over the place here -- Emily and Cameron are friends, I've sat on a panel and shared ideas with Susan, and Worldchanging's discussing a project with Frog Design -- so I'm not going to take sides, but I find the conversation extremely encouraging.

That said, some things are missing here, I think. In particular, the whole discussion has glanced over two critical realities: the scope, scale and speed of the planetary crisis we face, and the profoundly unequal distribution of access that exists to tools of innovation globally. I don't have time to write a proper essay today, but I'd like to share a few thoughts.

Most of us in the Global North are out of touch with the scope, scale and speed of the problems we face. We live in a global civilization that can measure its life expectancy in decades if it continues to operate as it does today. We know that we're straying beyond a series of non-negotiable ecological boundaries (the most obvious being the concentration of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere). The predicted consequences are profound in a way that's difficult to fully grasp, but could well involve the complete collapse of large portions of human society and almost unimaginable suffering and destruction.

"This is not a small probability of a rather unattractive outcome," as Lord Stern, former Chief Economist of the World Bank, reminds us. "This is a big probability of a very bad outcome.”

This planetary sustainability crisis is impossible to tackle unless the Global North redesigns its own prosperity to be at least carbon neutral (and probably actually  carbon negative) by 2050. Because it takes time for innovations to spread and become universal, that 2050 goal, in turn, means innovating many of our urban land use, transportation and energy systems (as well as the products and services we use) to be  carbon neutral by 2030. Zero impact is the only rational goal,  and we need to be working towards it right now.

In addition, between two and four billion young people are expected to raise themselves into the global middle class in the Global South over the next 40 years, and billions more poorer people will have to find stable systems of survival in a rapidly changing world. The new global middle class can only adopt a bright green, climate-responsible model of prosperity if such a model is available when they need it. That forces us to confront a second planetary reality: the international distribution of problem-solving resources is profoundly unfair.

A gigantic imbalance in capacities and resources exists between the Global North and Global South. This is, obviously, not to argue that Southern designers, engineers and entrepreneurs are less capable (or less innovative) than their Northern counterparts. If anything, the evidence points to the opposite conclusion.

But in Northerners' desires to avoid the pitfalls of cultural imperialism and the failed model of top-down aid (and, let's be honest, to be seen to be down with other cultures), we go whistling past the mountainous reality of power inequality in our global society, and the extent to which, in a knowledge economy, that power is about the ability to generate and deploy ideas.

The Global North has the vast majority of the world's finest universities, libraries and broadband connections. It has the lion's share of the best-trained designers and professional innovators: there are probably more top-level product designers in New York than in all of India; probably more top-flight software engineers in the Bay Area than in all of Africa. That's not even getting into corporate R+D labs, incubators, fellowships, internships and all the other capacity that spins off the design, technology and engineering industries: almost all of which are in the developed world.

What's more, we know that innovation sparks from clusters of talented people in close proximity -- from scenius-- but it catches fire when exposed to capital, subjected to debate (in magazines, at conferences, on campuses) and connected to networks of other equally talented professionals in other fields. Most of those clusters are in the Global North; the remainder are in places (like Sao Paolo and Shanghai) that are already approaching "developed" status. Hotbeds, conferences and venture capital are not fairly distributed around the Earth.

It's a harsh reality that the vast bulk of the world's ability to solve system-scale problems is concentrated in wealthy countries. If a bright green model of prosperity is going to be invented in time for billions of young people to adopt it, big chunks of it will have to come from the Global North and be spread through partnerships between the North and South.

Obviously, complexities abound. Some of the world's most innovative thinking is happening on "the edges" of the wealthy world, in newly emerging economies. The Global North often stifles innovation with outdated codes and regulation. Many designers in New York or London may mot have the foggiest clue what on-the-ground challenges present themselves in the cities of the Global South, and so lack the ability to design solutions at home that will have a broader value. Many people cannot afford to participate in the major capitalist forms of innovation diffusion. Furthermore, flowing innovations to the bottom billion is wrought with difficulties. Some nations suffer from a hipness invisibility (what some have called the Ninja Gap), which makes them unable to draw even the most modest notice from folks in a position to help them solve problems. Finally, the ability of experts operating in ignorance of context to screw a system or place up beyond recognition should never be underestimated.

Yet, yet, yet... the reality is that we inherited a broken future, and designing a better one is going to take the whole-hearted participation of hundreds of thousands of creative, innovative people in the cities of the Global North. It's going to take grappling with remaking our own cities and systems into sustainably prosperous forms -- and doing it with an eye to global realities, the need for innovation diffusion and the cultural minefields involved. It's ultimately going to take redesigning (or at least reconsidering) pretty much everything about the way our cities work.

So, perhaps it's worth shifting the debate a little to discuss the obligations of not just humanitarian designers, but all designers to design responsibly? Maybe presumption is less the problem than a lack of planetary thinking.

Imperialist US?

By Robin Hanson · June 15, 2010 2:45 pm ·

Recent US war history in a nutshell: Responding to an ‘01 terror attack on NYC by activists from Saudi Arabia, funded by Pakistan, and trained in Afghanistan, the US in ‘03 attacked Iraq, supposedly because they had “weapons of mass destruction,” never found. US denied it wanted control of the strategic resource-rich Persian Gulf, saying it remains there to “nation-build.”  In ‘07 US geologists reported Afghanistan has $1 trillion in mineral wealth, and then in ‘09 the US more than doubled its Afghanistan troops, supposedly to fight terrorists and “nation-build.”  It now denies it wanted the minerals:

Col. Dave Lapan, a Pentagon spokesman, told reporters Monday that the $1 trillion figure didn’t surface until recently because a military task force working on the issue had been focused on Iraq. … It wasn’t until late last year that the task force got around to looking at a 2007 study by the U.S. Geological Survey. That’s when the group estimated the minerals’ value, Lapan said. The New York Times first reported the $1 trillion figure on Sunday night.

Many are suspicious of US motives in both Iraq and Afghanistan. An ‘04 worldsurvey:

Majorities in all four Muslim nations surveyed doubt the sincerity of the war on terrorism. Instead, most say it is an effort to control Mideast oil and to dominate the world. … There is broad agreement in nearly all of the countries surveyed – the U.S. being a notable exception – that the war in Iraq hurt, rather than helped, the war on terrorism. … Solid majorities in France and Germany believe the U.S. is conducting the war on terrorism in order to control Mideast oil and dominate the world. … Large majorities in almost every country surveyed think that American and British leaders lied when they claimed, prior to the Iraq war, that Saddam Hussein’s regime had weapons of mass destruction.

Today in Afghanistan:

The Pentagon’s announcement that Afghanistan possesses $1 trillion worth of unexploited minerals will have the unintended consequence of confirming one of the most deeply entrenched conspiracy theories among Afghans.  Many Afghans I have spoken with believe firmly that America wants to permanently occupy the country in order to take Afghan land and resources. Even educated Afghans friends who generally support a temporary US presence have told me the same. I had to laugh when one suggested that Americans would want to move to Afghanistan to snatch up Afghan land for homes. … For many Afghans, it makes no sense that the US cannot wrap up the Taliban – so an imperialist land grab becomes a plausible explanation.

Historians agree that once upon a time colonial powers, including the US, did invade nations to try to gain their natural resources. (Not clear they benefited overall though.)  The world is now asked to believe that the US has lost this inclination and ability – gosh, the US folks who chose to attack Afghanistan didn’t even know it was a gold mine, honest.  Nor did Iraq’s oil influence invading it.  So why didn’t the US invade lots of other nations similarly plagued by terrorists, or nations like Iran, North Korea, or Pakistan that threaten nuclear instability?  It’s just random, the world is asked to believe.

I can see why the world is skeptical here. Now I can also understand the position that the US is no longer organized or capable enough to purposely target and gain advantage from invading resource-rich nations.  What I can’t understand is how folks who believe this can simultaneously believe the US is organized and capable enough to “build nations,” a task where we’ve seen little success lately, and a task made even harder by widespread suspicion of US motives. Really, that’s your story?!