Author: mopress

It was not until Robert Rubin became special economic assistant to president Clinton that the US would figure out its strategy of dollar hegemony through the promotion of unregulated globalization of financial markets. Rubin, a consummate international bond trader at Goldman Sachs who earned $60 million the year he left to join the White House, figured out how the US was able to have its cake and eat it too, by controlling domestic inflation with cheap imports bought with a strong dollar, and having its trade deficit financed by a capital account surplus made possible by the same strong dollar. Thus dollar hegemony was born.

—Henry CK Liu

By Greg Moses

DissidentVoice / InfoShopNews / UrukNet

As Islamic states and communities caucus over the crisis in Lebanon, non-Islamic populations in the West also desire some quick way to peacefully deter the hyper-violence of the reigning Washington-London-Jerusalem machine. Ahmed Amr calls our attention to currency activism, a grassroots dollar boycott, suggested by former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad. By withdrawing economic activity as much as possible from the production and circulation of USA dollars, billions of people all over the world might collectively compel substantial and lasting concessions from our steel-tipped oligarchs, if not turn them out naked overnight.

The power of currency activism can be dramatically envisioned upon premises of dollar hegemony worked out in the pages of Asia Times by economist Henry CK Liu. In dialectics marvelous to read, Liu argues that Clinton’s place in economic history was secured by consolidating dollar hegemony as the monetary structure for globalization, a.k.a. neo-liberalism. The care and feeding required by this system explains odd collaborations between Republicans and Democrats, Texans and Saudis, or think about this one: Wal-Mart shoppers and the Communist Party of China (CPC).

Liu’s dollar-hegemony theory explains how Wal-Mart shoppers have the CPC more on the leash than the other way around, because when Lee and Sandy Heartland drop their dollars into the big-box stores crammed with things made in China, what happens is that Chinese money managers have little choice but to preserve their dollar holdings in the form of US Treasury Bonds. The more Wal-Mart shoppers buy, therefore, the more the CPC comes to hold T-bills, and the tighter together we are drawn into the world of dollar hegemony.

To seriously disrupt the productive systems that reproduce dollar hegemony would risk write-downs of all savings dependent on T-bill repayments. So if China is an emerging economic competitor, as everyone can see, Liu stresses that the CPC has more importantly become an embedded financial partner in the dollar’s monetary regime.

Or recall the stashes of cash found and lost in Iraq during the USA-led invasion. Doesn’t a pile of loose dollars count for a most transparent motive anywhere in the world? From the point of view of dollar hegemony, CENTCOM is securing a final frontier with distinct financial topographies.

So an important frontier of dissent has been suggested by Minister Mohamad’s call for oil producing countries to denominate their trade in some currency other than petro-dollars. Indeed this might inscribe a limit to the hyper-violence that dollar hegemony today enables. However, as Ahmed Amr replies, Minister Mohamad’s suggestion will be hard to follow for OPEC managers who would face the same predicament as the CPC in terms of savage losses to their own wealth if the dollar were to suffer. In fact, dollar hegemony helps to explain why the patriarchs if not the people of the Middle East consider Hezbollah retrograde.

As a matter of global economic democracy, Liu has been touting the virtues of currency pluralism while trying to deflate campaigns for belligerent exchange policies. And last week’s refusal by top Western leaders to pronounce cease fire over South Lebanon accelerates the urgency of finding a global activism that can wage simple peace with peaceful tools. Currency pluralism might help. Otherwise, we have been shown a future where we all get sucked into blood games that we can neither begin nor end on our own terms.

If grassroots peace movements could express themselves in currency choices, then we would find new voice in numbers. How many percentage points of monetary withdrawal could make George Bush look up the word magnanimous? It’s a big word, I know, but there are good reasons why people with fleets of F-16s should be compelled to pronounce ethical vocabularies. Those who do not place limits on their own ability to kill are virtually begging grassroots peacemakers to craft real limits for them. In the flashy grins of Western leaders last week we found the promise that we could all be punished some day. The world, including the vast majority of the West, must find some way to grin back.

By Susan Van Haitsma

Among the pieces of good advice delivered to University of Texas graduates by US Ambassador to Mexico, Tony Garza Jr. during his recent commencement address in Austin was to pay attention to “the voice of your own conscience.”

In the same issue of the Austin American-Statesman that related this excerpt from Ambassador Garza’s presentation was a paragraph in the Central Texas Digest section reporting the court martial of UT student and Army National Guard Specialist, Katherine Jashinski, who was sentenced to jail after her conscientious objector claim was denied at Fort Benning, GA.

Jashinski, age 23, is the first woman conscientious objector known to be jailed in the current war. In November 2005, when her conscientious objector claim had been pending for 18 months, Jashinski publicly declared her refusal to participate in weapons training at Ft. Benning in preparation for deployment to Afghanistan.

In her statement, she explained, “At age 19 I enlisted in the guard as a cook because I wanted to experience military life. When I enlisted I believed that killing was immoral, but also that war was an inevitable part of life and, therefore, an exception to the rule. After enlisting, I began the slow transformation into adulthood. Like many teenagers who leave their home for the first time, I went through a period of growth and soul searching. I encountered many new people and ideas that broadly expanded my narrow experiences. . I began to see a bigger picture of the world and I started to reevaluate everything that I had been taught about war as a child. I developed the belief that taking human life was wrong and war was no exception. I was then able to clarify who I am and what it is that I stand for.”

Jashinski concluded, “I am determined to be discharged as a conscientious objector, and while undergoing the appeals process, I will continue to follow orders that do not conflict with my conscience until my status has been resolved. I am prepared to accept the consequences of adhering to my beliefs. What characterizes a conscientious objector is their willingness to face adversity and uphold their values at any cost. We do this not because it is easy or popular, but because we are unable to do otherwise.”

A motion to reconsider Jashinski’s conscientious objector claim was denied in federal district court. At her court martial on May 23, she was sentenced to 120 days confinement after pleading guilty to a charge of “refusing to obey a legal order.” Having already served about half her sentence, she is scheduled to be released in July.

Before she was ordered to Ft. Benning, Jashinski became involved with a local affiliate of the GI Rights Hotline, a national network of people trained to answer calls from GIs seeking counsel about such issues as harassment, medical problems and discharge options. The local group has been holding regular study sessions since October 2005, and is set to begin taking calls soon. Jashinski says she plans to continue her involvement with the GI Rights Hotline when she returns to Austin.

One of her colleagues in the group says of Jashinski’s tenacity, “She refused to take the easy way out.she chose to follow the process the Army has for conscientious objectors. This long, long journey has been very hard and so few pursue this difficult route. I think it testifies to Katherine’s commitment to nonviolence and her steadfast convictions.”

In his commencement address, Ambassador Garza said, “It is people – the real, human connections we make – that matter most.” The sentiment echoes a statement made by Iraq war veteran and conscientious objector, Camilo Mejia, who, like Jashinski, was incarcerated when his CO claim was denied. “I am confined to a prison, but I feel, today more than ever, connected to all humanity,” Mejia wrote in 2005. “Behind these bars I sit a free man because I listened to a higher power, the voice of my conscience.”

To prepare for and fight wars, most of the world’s societies continue to recruit teenagers, whose belief systems are still in the formation process. Students hear a lot about freedom, yet conscience is a concept that is not usually found in school curriculum. Training our young people to follow orders rather than explore and develop morally and ethically is, I believe, harmful to our society and at its root, un-American.

Young people like Katherine Jashinski and Camilo Mejia, who have listened to the voice of conscience over the orders of the most intimidating institution in the world, have demonstrated what freedom really means.

By Greg Moses

Maybe it’s a symptom, like seeing water on a blacktop road, but something hopeful is emerging from the culture mix of Da Vinci Code and Dixie Chicks. Something related to the value of truth.

In the Da Vinci Code — at the high point in Dan Brown’s plot to uncover the profound secret of a real woman — our heroine depends upon a scholar, who has nothing but a clue, to protect her life against an imperial patriarch, who, armed with a gun and clueless, is about to kill the living truth in the name of the man-made clue.

Since the scholar cannot talk the robber into disarming, he offers up the clue in such a way that in order to grasp it, the imperial patriarch must drop the gun. As the plot literally rises to its pinnacle on this gambit, the scholar demonstrates how disarming a real clue can be.

And in fact it’s not a far toss from this London scene in kilometers or years, that we find the spot where Natalie Maines tossed a real clue into the air when she said: “Just so you know, we’re ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas.” Only this time, the imperial patriarchs didn’t drop their guns. Instead they raised their guns to shoot at the clue and at the woman.

So it’s a fortunate stroke of luck that the Dixie Chicks return to public life the week after the Da Vinci Code hits the big screen as if to ask, what are we going to do this time with the clue, the woman, and the gun?

I like this quote from Jacques Lacan, the feisty French philosopher whose one-volume selection of essays has been finally translated into English after 40 years. I’ve made my way half through it so far. Anyway, here’s the quote:

“We cannot confine ourselves to giving a new truth its rightful place, for the point is to take up our place in it. The truth requires us to go out of our way. We cannot do so by simply getting used to it. We get used to reality. The truth we repress.”

Of course, you’d have to be from Texas in the first place to understand the shame that Natalie Maines does not repress in the fact that the President is from Texas. You’d have to grow up with Dallas and learn it from inside in order to experience it as something besides the Dallas that everyone else knows.

Ditto with Dixie. You’d have to be a Dixie Chick in order to expect something better from Dixie and take up your place within it. And this is why Natalie Maines had to say what she said when and where she said it. Otherwise we’d have a right to wonder if its the new Dixie or the old where the Chicks take up their place.

As for the rest of the F-U-T-K country music crowd, it’s too bad they got caught the second time around with their guns still in their hands, their bullets still whistlin Dixie the old fashioned way. Because we have to ask, how long has country music been nothing but the tunes we play as we pick up the gun of imperial patriarchy and get used to its reality all over again.

By Greg Moses

OpEdNews / CounterPunch / UrukNet / BellaCiao / DissidentVoice

On the stock-market channel Friday afternoon, just before commercial time, comes news that the Senate of the USA has declared Inglés the “national language” of state. Then comes the commercial, cutting to a Chinese couple standing in a busy airport, somewhat startled by a youngish white man who rushes up to them and says “welcome to America” in Chinese. “I practiced all morning,” says the gleamy-eyed realtor. “I hope you understand. Welcome to America!” The Century 21 realty company calls this new series of ads, “Agents of Change.” But if it’s true that the bi-lingual aspirations of the eager realtor qualify him as a change agent, where does that leave the Senate?

When the term “national language” was inserted into immigration legislation this week, it both revealed and escalated power attached to English proficiency. On the one hand, the language of the so-called compromise immigration bill already would require English proficiency as a condition of citizenship. Or as one Senator put it: “If you fail to pass the English proficiency exam, you will be deported.”

To this clear and distinct requirement was added another warning: “Unless otherwise offered or provided by law, no person has a right, entitlement, or claim to have the Government of the United States or any of its officials or representatives act, communicate, perform or provide services, or provide materials in any language other than English” (SAMDT4064). The timing and placement of that language says watch out, when it comes to communicating in languages other than English, the USA is fed up trying.

And so another pander-to-fascists week came to an end in Washington, with little remembrance of the fact that the Senate had declared 2005 “The Year of Foreign Language Study” (SR28); or that legislation is pending “to construct a language arts facility at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Artesia, New Mexico” (S2274); or that the 911 Commission said, even according to compromise co-author Sen. Kennedy, “we ought to give emphasis to other languages and that that was in our national security interest.”

The pander-to-fascist context seemed to relieve many observers from worrying overmuch that anything serious or long lasting will come from the President’s call to send National Guard troops to the Mexican border. As in: “isn’t he just pandering to fascists? Isn’t that what this troop thing is really about?” And then moving on to the next issue, as if it matters not at all that based on this week’s fascist pandering soon enough the troops will actually start moving into place.

When the President announced plans for troop deployment, his so-called target audience was only half satisfied. A “Minuteman” spokesman called it a “stop-gap” measure, which again seemed to help observers take comfort that the President was being only a little fascist. More progressive voices picked up the “stop-gap” language and therefore contributed to the impression that the President was being mostly insufficient, stupid, or crazy; when in fact sending thousands of troops to the Mexican border follows the same logic of radical excess that has motivated pre-emptive war, global strike, and torture camps. If this logic has to stop sometime, why not now? In solidarity with a rising immigrant rights movement, the Quakers seemed to get it. So did the ANSWER coalition. This time, these likely suspects are joined by enough insiders that maybe we can quietly snuff this troop deployment before it starts.

Refuting the charge that the troop deployment was merely a pandering insufficiency was none other than the Vice President himself, who came out of his bunker long enough to record an interview on a right-wing radio show that was promptly published at the White House web site. In the interview, the number two leader of the free world explained that good troops can make good fences, and of course good fences are what good neighbors are made of.

Most stunning was the sudden relevance of the New York press, headlining in a timely manner the crucial context to keep in mind: that this is the month when billion dollar bids will be submitted for a megamammoth border contract called SBInet (the Secure Border Initiative Network). Bidders will include such military-industrial behemoths as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon. Most interesting is the last-minute entry of the European-based Ericsson company, because they provide surveillance along the Russia-Finland border, matching up nicely with the ideological model of the USA-Mexico border pushed by the fascist crowd’s cold-war compulsions.

On the question of ideological models, it would be prudent to consider that the Vice President’s description of the next Mexican border sounded a lot like the Israeli border with Palestine. In this context, the Bush-Cheney troop deployment will provide free of charge to the winning bidder of border security services a cadre of perma-temp employees who are already trained, dressed for photo-ops, and security-cleared (in case you missed the simultaneous news this week that the agency in charge of security clearances was shutting down because of poor budgeting).

Sad to say during election year in the USA, it still helps to be a little fascist. Everyone seems to comprende.