This week, the United States signed a new Declaration on Women’s Participation. Next year, we should each announce the steps we are taking to break down economic and political barriers that stand in the way of women and girls. That is what our commitment to human progress demands. -President Obama’s Address to the United Nations General Assembly, September 21, 2011 (White House)

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton launched the Equal Futures Partnership on behalf of the United States along with 12 other founding members (Australia, Benin, Bangladesh, Denmark, Finland, Indonesia, Jordan, the Netherlands, Peru, Senegal, Tunisia, and the EU). Multilateral stakeholders including U.N. Women and the World Bank and leading businesses and non-profit institutions have also pledged support for the partnership.

Additionally, global health issues affecting children were at the top of the international agenda. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon stated that eradicating polio is at the top of his second-term goals, and he expressed optimism about achieving it in the next few years:

“We have reduced polio by 99% worldwide,” Ban said during the UN General Assembly, and he called on leaders to help Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan eliminate the last remaining cases. Timothy E. Wirth, president of the United Nations Foundation, called it “the most important international meeting on polio eradication in the last 20 years.” (Google/The Associated Press)

Another important task before the General Assembly was coming up with a strategy for creating a new set of international development goals once the MDGs expire.  The MDGs were a set of eight global health and poverty eradication goals world leaders agreed to at the U.N. in 2000; however, they expire in 2015. The international community has begun to nail down the details of a post-MDGs global development agenda. “We need a clear post-2015 development agenda — an agenda with shared responsibilities for all countries, with the fight against poverty at the fore and sustainable development at the core,” said United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (AlertNet).

In his address titled,  “A Call to Ambition,” to the 67th session of the U.N. General Assembly, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon stated,

“Still, we must raise our levels of ambition.  Poverty and inequality remain rampant.  Ecosystems are reaching the breaking point.  The world’s best science is irrefutable:  we must change course.  That is why I have urged world leaders to press ahead with initiatives on sustainable energy, education, nutrition and women’s and children’s health. The economic crisis should not be an excuse to default on commitments to the basics that all people need.”

AUTHOR: Cassandra Clifford
URL: www.bridgetofreedomfoundation.org and http://children.foreignpolicyblogs.com
E-MAIL: Cassandra [at] btff.org

Introduction

The Industry of Poverty has many faces, as it manifests itself in every society on this globe, its effects are similarly devastating for the poor. What constitutes poverty? When is a person considered poor or low income? Is a person poor when he/she has to live off of less than one (1) USD a day? Is a person poor when she/he has only one meal per day? Is a person poor when she/he has no access to the internet, social media, newspapers and an occasional holiday? Or is a person poor because he cannot afford designer clothes?

Theory I: Poverty is in my opinion a state of being determined by objective criteria, more specific the Maslow Pyramid: food, shelter are among others, considered the most vital elements of survival. Higher up in the Maslow pyramid, the needs of the individual are apparently less physiological, more psychological and sociological, in other words less objectifiable, more part of the subjective, the self.

How does one achieve ones goals? What is self-efficacy and what does it attenuate to? Is it self-respect or the respect of others? What is confidence? Is it the precursor for leadership, aspiration and ambition? And what happens if a person lacks respect, confidence and self-efficacy? Is that person considered a poor person as well? Theory II: Poverty thus is also a state of being that is determined by subjective criteria’ in other words poverty is in the eye of the (subjective) beholder.

The two theories are positioned as antimonies, thesis and anti-thesis, in an attempt to demonstrate that poverty is a universalistic conception, determined by local circumstances. The idea is also that by positioning poverty in a thetical-antithetical model, it becomes easier to build an empirical framework to demonstrate that poverty is oftentimes perpetuated because certain businesses profit from the poor and poverty. The thetical-antithetical goes against the Maslow Hierarchy of Needs theory, based on the argumentation that apart from the most basic of needs, needs are not hierarchically ordered. Instead this theory argues that needs are randomly ordered variables,not tied to certain geographical spaces and places, but determined by the individuals needs, wants and socio-economic status in a given society. Of course certain needs are not recognized as important by certain societies, which is presumably why the Maslow theory became outdated. The importance of Maslow’s hierarchy is its physiological premise, in other words, the functioning of humans as living systems, the primary driving force is the considered the basis of human need. The idea that the struggle for live is present in all human beings negates the notion that poverty is the problem of the individual, that the solution to ending is poverty hinges on the individual itself. This blog discusses so called programs and plans to eradicate poverty at micro level, thus from the perspective of the individual and macro level, from the perspective of the state. The majority of these plans are based on the notion that hard work and diligence will end poverty.

Micro-financing in Poor and Rich Countries

Micro-credit programs are excellent exemplifications of what I call the industry of poverty. Micro credit programs are so called small size loans, granted to people with no collateral to back-up the loan. The loan is granted to help poor finance their small businesses, typically home-based enterprises. Micro-finance is typically designed to empower people, in most instances women, in the developing world. Striking feature of micro credits is that it in fact finances and encourages the informal economy, and that it does not incentivize these small scale business to go beyond the informal, to improve and innovate and grow into a full-scale industry that provides work for other people. Micro credits do not come cheap, steep interest rates up to 50% are the norm, and lenders are typically required to become members of a so called “co-operative’ to become eligible for a loan. Being part of the so called co-operation allows lenders to control the borrowers, to ensure repayment. Let me put it boldly, micro-financing will not eradicate poverty, on the contrary; micro-finance only makes it easy for women to continue working from the home, keep the roof over their head and pay school fees for their children. Micro-credit makes life easier, makes it easier to take living beyond the level of subsisting.

Micro-finance will not push the informal economic sector out of obscurity,or help to formalize the informal economy and set the groundwork for sustainable development. Micro financing in fact sustains the structural character of that what poverty factually attenuates to, which is lack of disposition of capital. Feiner & Barker (2006) correctly observe that micro credits do not help elevate poverty, they merely help ease some of its aberrations.

In the western world, micro financing comes in a gamut short term  and small loan schemes, ranging from  pay -day loans and the pawing of possessions to high APR credit cards. Comparable to micro credit in the developing world are the pay-day loans; small short term, high interest loans with ones pay check as collateral. Borrowers are typically low income workers that become chronic borrowers as the interest rate and repayments accrues and income as a result declines. Pay -day borrowers end up in deep trouble, specifically in cases were the total income is used to pay of a loan.  In 2003, Tom Lehman defiantly cautioned government not to intervene in the market, by implementing socialism, because it was not “chronic borrowers that we should fear but chronic government coercion that present the greatest threat to economic efficiency, private property and individual liberty……..A more recent article in the Guardian writes about the effects of pay-day lending schemes on people, the wantonness of spending, consumerism, responsibility and  the lack of regulation by the British government.  What are the long-term effects of these types of financial products on society? Who will pay for the devastation on the individual and on society? What will happen if the individuals cannot repay the loans and finds him/herself on the street? Will society pay the costs of this devastation? Will the person than pawn off all his possessions only to keep on making ends meet? The answer to all these questions is that in recent years, the obscurity of poverty and its aberrations, led to world economic crises, because who knew that poor people were used as cash cows by the banking industry? The problem is that chronic debt burdens society, it fosters greed and economic stagnation.

The Changing World Order: Changing Ideas on Aid and Assistance?

Poverty as an intellectual conception is very hard to qualify. John Kenneth Galbraith tried to define and qualify poverty but ended arguing that the phenomenon of poverty should be approached holistically. Like other scholars after him, Galbraith connected poverty with underdevelopment and latitude, the Southern hemisphere where almost all poor countries were located, were the hardest hit by poverty and economic stagnation.  The rise of the Asian tigers as emerging economies in the 1980s, and, consecutive, the rise of India, China and Brasil as economic powers in the late 1990s have yet to transform intellectual notions on this new global reality. One would presume that the changing world order would usher in a shift in the academic and bureaucratic approach of poverty and underdevelopment.

The challenges that come with change and transformation reverberate in the way aid and assistance is provided. Aid is no longer the summation of East-West dichotomies, no longer is ideology the determining factor for aid and assistance. The problem is that aid and assistance programs do not work, they still fail to elevate poverty and /or generate economic take off. The question is, is do underdeveloped nations actually need assisting and aid? Aid typically comes packed as highly paid technical expertise, brought in by the donating country. Experts from the west fly in to tell the locals how they should run things, and than they fly off again. In Suriname for example, the bureaucracy that oversaw the projects and administered the funding cost more than the myriad of projects proposed between 1960-1980 (Adama 2006). The records demonstrate furthermore that between 1975 and 1980 the only funding approved by the Dutch government was for traveling, negotiating and payment for technical expertise. During that same period not one project proposal became approved and the projects completed were suffering major set-backs! The expectation that Suriname would serve as a petri dish for development is not only thwarted by reality but also by the archives that are littered with plans and ideas that never came to fruition. Neighboring Guyana is another example of a society that was given boatloads of money to fight a proxy Cold War. But president Burnham strategically played the USA and Russia against each other, preaching socialism while appeasing the Americans to get large quantities of aid and assistance to stay in office as a dictator. The same can be argued about president Mobutu of former Zaire, a man who could remain in power because of the aid and assistance from France, Belgium and the USA. There are many more dictators in the Southern hemisphere that during the 1970s and 1980s stayed in power financed by either the USA or the Soviet Union. Many scholars argued that the Cold War impeded South-South solidarity and fostered imperialism and expansive behavior of both super powers.

Today the experiences teach that shifting of wealth from the western world to Asia and Latin America did not increase South-South solidarity, on the contrary. For example, China is not interested in eradicating poverty of the lesser developed nations, China is only interested in gaining control over natural resources and minerals to advance its own domestic economy. China currently has all the hallmarks of a predator hegemon, self-serving and expansionary, and not geared to proliferate its wealth and  knowledge to other societies to in the wording of Robert Gilpin achieve an efficient economy of scale. Indeed the problem of every hegemon is the spread of industrialization, a problem that is closely connected with protectionism at domestic level and the functioning of the international economic order.

Today many western development organizations typically operate at grass roots level; assistance today consists of small scale aid and assistance, such as building houses after disaster, running orphanages, subsidizing NGO’s and support informal sectors of the economy. These activities too are part of industry of poverty, creating a situation of dependency. Again in these cases the sustenance of the informal economy too is cause for concern, because it does not contribute to the eradication of poverty. Problematic is also that foreign aid dispels failure of the state to take care of its citizens, to design a program for poverty, housing and gender policy.

Conclusion

The Industry of poverty is an expansive and prolific phenomenon, that takes on different shapes and formats according to the society. In western societies, pay day loans, high interest and prepaid credit cards, and collection agencies keep poor people in their state of poverty. The industry of poverty in the western world floats on cut-throat interest rates charged to low income people struggling to make ends meet. In the developing world, poor people with no collateral are confronted with the same high interest rates, as they take on a small loan to keep their home-based businesses afloat. The difference between both categories is the latitude, and perhaps preferences of certain goods. Both categories want a better life, roof over their head, food on the table and a steady job.

The aspect of latitude corroborates that poverty indeed should be intellectually objectified, based on the argument of universality, all humans need the same elements to function and stay alive. The subjectivity of poverty is grounded on the forces that drive the individual to take its needs beyond the basics, to work, study and aspire a career as a singer, to become middle class or become a millionaire. The drive to escape poverty is intrinsically humane and humanistic, present in every society.

The rich-poor divide plays out more clearly at macro or state level. Latitude determines the face of the international world order. Western societies have always dictated the terms and conditions of development, sponsoring regimes to strengthened either the western or eastern block during the Cold War. The purpose of aid and assistance was to either contain or spread either capitalism or communism. The reality is that said proxy war did not bring prosperity to the developing world, on the contrary! There is in my opinion no need to for development aid and assistance, specifically in the cases that local expertise and experts will be cast aside, or if it means that receiving countries are required to adopt foreign modus operandi to get funding. Supported by extensive empirical evidence I want to conclude that development aid in its current format does not work and that it only kept an extensive industry of poverty intact that fostered more dependency instead.

AUTHOR: Natascha Adama
URL: http://natascha23.blogspot.com
E-MAIL: nataliapestova23 [@] yahoo.com

Many of these indices are directly relevant for people working in development. They help countries determine how they compare with other states and where they ought to improve their performance. And they help aid agencies decide where and how to invest their resources.

Indicators tracking everything from GDP per capita to poverty to governance are ubiquitous across the field, especially among international professionals. Such numbers are used to determine need, priorities, and strategies (such as whether a government ought to be funded directly).

But do the indicators that have the greatest influence measure the right things? Are they focused on the issues that are most important to development? Can they predict how governments work or how countries will evolve in the future?

Too often, developing countries are assessed on a very narrow set of indicators, leading to an overemphasis on certain programs and “results” that have little to do with their prospects. Reducing poverty and hunger are worthwhile goals but may not reflect how well a country is doing (aid can reduce both without helping a state function better). “Good governance” may indicate good prospects, but bad governance certainly does not point to the reverse, as a long string of countries can attest to (including China, Indonesia, Cambodia, and Vietnam). GDP per capita is widely used to assess how well countries are doing (not least by the World Bank and many leading poverty analysts), but may actually be saying very little about the subject (such as when only elites benefit from natural resource wealth, as in Nigeria, Libya, and Angola).

Indicators on state fragility can easily miss the mark. The Failed States Index, for instance, completely failed to pick up the fault lines that threaten many Middle Eastern countries before the Arab Spring brought them into the open. The 2011 FSI ranked Syria as the 48th most fragile state in the world, but its complex ethnic and religious landscape has always made it far more fragile than it appeared. In 2012, Syria plummeted down to 23rd in the FSI. Next year, it will inevitably be much worse. Bahrain and Libya did not even make the ranking before 2011.

Many of the most important issues for development are not tracked and not included in major indices because they are not easily measured or are simply not considered as important as they ought to be.

In Fixing Fragile States, I wrote:

Development describes a complex process that transforms both the way people think and behave and the system of how they work together. Although economics drives development, politics plays a far greater role in the key take-off stages, with social, business, and government modernization inextricably linked as the process advances.

Do we ever measure how well a people work together? How institutionalized politics is (something quite different than democracy and “good governance”)? How cohesive a population is?

Assessing a country’s political dynamics may not be easy—especially if the goal is to measure it numerically—but is arguably more important than the majority of the indicators we currently use. The right kind of assessment ought to better gauge how resilient a country is, how prone to conflict it is, how stable its current political system is, how likely its elites are to work together to promote progress. All these things help us understand a country’s overall prospects in a way that few existing indicators can.

Measuring politics and political development requires creating a set of indices that reflect—or at least depend upon—the nature of sociopolitical dynamics, the degree of social / political / economic inclusiveness, the institutionalization of the state, the robustness of the rule of law, the level of social capital, the capacity of societies to create wealth (separate from natural resources), and the ability of government to get things done (which may not reflect existing governance scores).

What would these indicators look like? The new assessment criteria would seek to answer questions such as:

1. How great are group-based (ethnic, religious, caste, clan, etc.) economic, political, and cultural horizontal inequities?
2. How equitable is public spending?
3. How equitable are markets?
4. How equitable is the rule of law? Do elites or particular groups have systemic advantages over others?
5. How effective is public authority and the rule of law (taking into account a variety of mechanisms to achieve these)?
6. How inclusive is the concept of citizenship?
7. How equitable is the system of property rights?
8. How inclusive and poverty reducing is growth?
9. How diversified is the economy and exports (which depends on the robustness of institutions)?
10. Is political succession institutionalized and predictable?
11. How much does politics revolve around political parties and policies (rather than ethnicity and patronage)?
12. How much do political leaders depend on group identities to gain, hold onto, or compete for power?
13. How well do formal institutions (such as laws) reflect informal institutions? How widely accepted are these? How well do they penetrate society (as opposed to existing above it)?
14. How much investment is going into large factories (which are more risky than other investments)?
15. What is the level of political risk to invest in a labor-intensive businesses (which require more effort and are more beneficial to a population)?
16. Is the economy producing an adequate number of jobs for young people?
17. How well can the government implement the policies it puts into place (if a road is supposed to be built, does it? How good is it?)?
18. How well can the government project authority across distance (is it as effective in outlying districts as it is in the capital)?
19. Are the government’s capacity and the country’s economic prospects keeping up with increases in education, urbanization, and the expectations of the population?
20. Are levels of dissatisfaction/frustration rising among powerful out of power actors (elites, identity group leaders, youth leaders, religious leaders, etc.)?
21. How secure are populations and property?
22. Are elites sending their cash abroad?
23. Is diaspora returning to invest money, run government offices, and build NGOs?
24. Where do children of elites reside?
25. Are there geographical features (like mountains, deserts, or jungles) that make integrating the population, reducing inequities, or projecting government authority permanently difficult?

Some of these questions could be turned into indicators very easily (the data is available). Others could be turned into indicators by substituting another data source (for instance, tracking how well a government delivers public services at various distances from the capital will give a decent account of how well it projects authority). Many may be hard to assess, and require a more a concerted effort involving more spending on research and analysis.

If politics and political development mattered as much as they should, more effort would be made to create and use such indicators. Without these, we are flying blind, trying to understand the terrain using the wrong instruments.

AUTHOR: Seth Kaplan
URL: http://www.fragilestates.org
E-MAIL: seth [at] sethkaplan.org

The new U.N. report ranks the leading causes of child death as pneumonia, premature birth, diarrhea, childbirth complications and malaria. The report also shows that as deaths to all children under age five have dropped, those occurring in the first month of life have declined more slowly. As a result, newborn deaths now account for 43 percent of child deaths — up from 36 percent in 1990. Overall, the vast majority of child deaths — 83 percent — now occur in sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia.

Save the Children said it is a critical time for Americans to help maintain momentum following a “Child Survival Call to Action,” convened in June by the U.S. government together with UNICEF and the governments of India and Ethiopia. Healthier children are the foundation for more productive, prosperous and stable communities, which benefit everyone, the agency said.

“We know where the children are that still need basic care to survive birth complications and childhood disease, and we know how health workers can save them,” Miles said. “It’s an issue everyone can get behind because every beat matters.”

AUTHOR: Cassandra Clifford
URL: www.bridgetofreedomfoundation.org and http://children.foreignpolicyblogs.com
E-MAIL: Cassandra [at] btff.org

INTRODUCTION

The discourse on non -western cultural expression, its ontology and its fundaments are consistently hijacked by proponents of what I call Eurocommunists; leftist forces in and outside Western academia in fact challenged proponents of capitalism and Western culture nothing more, nothing less. The silence of non-western scholarship in this discourse became cloaked by writers such as V.S. Naipaul, Gabriel Garcia Marques and Wole Soyinka, all writers of the non-fictional, fictional, criticizing and challenging colonialism, imperialism, modernity and “Eurocentricism”.

The absence of credible and good quality scholarship to identify and describe characteristics and patterns of the decolonial and the transitional, the tryst of reform and re-institutionalization gave rise to intellectual fallacy and bias. Indeed, the accusatory tone that works when writing from the premise of artistic freedom, leads to academic abominality.

One of the biggest problems is that today eurocommunism still determines scholarship, specifically in the discourse on cultural dominance, capitalism and imperialism. But do these propositions hold true in the contemporary, determined by other social cultural and technological realities? How can we place these conceptions of the previous century in today’s reality in a world that is reshaped by miscegenation and crossing over of idea and culture?

PRABAL GURUNG, JASON WU, RETU BERI AND THE NEW GLOBAL AESTHETIC

The fashion industry is a clear exemplification of our changing world, of a changing aesthetics and new elites. No longer is fashion determined in Paris, Milan or London. Today’s fashion is determined by the street and global trending and than picked up by the fashion industry.

A new generation of fashion designers emerging from every corner of this globe, setting new trend of what is hip and contemporary, are indeed a sign of the times, ZEITGEIST, but also the symbol of a new weltanshauung, a transforming world no longer revolving around Europe and the North, a new Avant Garde supported by new cultural, political and social elites in various parts of the world.

Fashion is the most prolific sign of the zeitgeist; the crossing over of music and cuisine is a trend that has been developing for a longer period of time, kindled by migratory waves and the demand of Diasporic communities in Europe and the USA.

Indeed these developments symbolize transformation, the acceptance of a new aesthetic that is typically ignored by eurocommunists and proponents of cultural dominance.

Their consistent criticism, denouncing modernity and modernization in fact diametrically opposes the idea of a newly emerging Avant Garde, grounded by a new global and social reality.

MIDDLE CLASSES, POLITICAL PROTEST AND SELF-EFFICACY

The pessimistic stance of the Eurocommunists, who consistently argue the existence of a dominant culture, paraphrase the ideas of scholars such as Frank and Gramsci. This problematic and rather controversial position is oftentimes embraced by laypeople and self-proclaimed academics, whose ideas and perceptions are grounded in what I call experiments of the imagination. To establish a working link between unmet wants and needs and the available resources, one cannot rely on the fictional for credible answers. The nature of conflict that arises if needs and wants are unmet is in fact socio-psychological exercise, objectified by measurements instead of perception.The aptness to organize and aggregate demand can only manifest itself under the strictest of conditions: without the colloquially put “full belly”, a roof over ones head and a steady job, one cannot become neither a political nor a renaissance men. The hierarchy of needs explains why transitional societies oftentimes lack good quality political parties, technical expertise and affable leadership. The universality of the hierarchy of needs also explains uneven global economic and political trending, because poverty is no longer an intricate part longer part of the South. Today the world is a mosaic of fast-growing centers and peripheries scattered over the different continents. The economic crisis taught the world that more than ever, opportunity and self-efficacy are no longer beholden to the western world, but to those strong enough to escape existing spatial interpersonal and gender inequalities (Perrons 2009).

These new economic and social realities call for a different outlook on the relevance of the middle classes and political organization. Eurocommunists have always defied the notion of a strong middle class, apt to challenge the political leadership to demand change and transformation. The relevance of mass parties, eloquently described by seminal scholars such as Giovanni Sartori, their aggregative powers, that helped organize the masses at the beginning of the 20th century, is never recognized by the Eurocommunists, who consistently propose a radical solution to end economic and social disparities. The irony is that a more moderate solution tends to have positive effect on democratization, governance and trust. The skips and bouts of democratization in many developing societies are in fact responsible for ever increasing economic and social disparities, since societies continue to linger on the threshold of either democratic consolidation or breakdown. In such an uncertain environment, economic progress remains at large, and economic disparities become even more challenging to overcome as time passes by.

CONCLUSION

The fight that occurred within western academia between the proponents of capitalism and modernization and the eurocommunists has nothing to do with the people in the developing world. The loud nein so often uttered by anti modernists had no bearing in the reality then and has certainly no bearing with today’s fast advancing world, determined by internet technology and consumerism. People want their needs and wants met, whether they live in North America or in Cameron. The new centers of the world have ushered in new economic and political realities that defy ideas of South-South solidarity and Western style imperialism. China today rivals the former colonial powers in its hunger for raw materials and natural resources, trampling upon the rights of the local people as it scavenges the globe to quench its thirst. But it seems that China’s role as the new predator hegemon is overlooked, overshadowed by antiquated ideas on North-South dichotomies and non-alignment. Lack of analyses on the controversial role of China strengthens my hypothesis that the debate was not about the fate of the people in the Third World, it was about dialetic, about thetical-antithetical, the ideological divide that determined the western world between 1945-1989.

The new Avant Garde brought on by Prabal Gurung and others has not reached the doors of the Academia, because people have yet to accept that times are changing, that dominant cultures today are no longer, and that the theory of the dominant culture is debunked by the empirical, taken over by crossing over and miscegenation , Diasporic preferences and street style. Dominant cultures, have become the classics, the Picasso’s and the Mozart’s, the blueprints and the Canvases on which new Epistemics will build.

AUTHOR: Natascha Adama
URL: http://natascha23.blogspot.com
E-MAIL: nataliapestova23 [@] yahoo.com

South Park’s “Super Best Friends.”

Moderate Christians, especially those living in Western nations, are always shocked when they are reminded that Muslims, so unlike them, do not turn the other cheek when their religious symbols are attacked. Mocking Islam is tantamount to hugging a killer bees hive; the reaction is almost always homicidally violent. Muslims have become so predictable that, in our overly interconnected world where information, intellectually enlightening or idiotic and eroding, can equally spread in an instant, it has become a trend among anti-Islam activists to draw the ire of Muslims and lure them into violence by denigrating their religious symbols. They use it as bait to draw media attention to their platform and enlist new supporters. Muslims, especially Arabs, have become a giant billboard for the likes of Terry Jones and those involved in the production of the besmirching amateur movie to promote their apocalyptic bigotry whilst “revealing” the feral nature of Islam. With a prim scowl, they point an accusatory finger at the raging mobs burning buildings of consulates and embassies and say: “look! Didn’t we tell you these Muslims are inherently murderers, naturally terrorists?” Such violent responses allow racist politicians like Michel Bachmann, Louie Gohmert, Lynn Westmoreland, Trent Franks, and Thomas Rooney to mobilize voters and radicalize Americans against Muslims, even those whose American lineage is a few generations deep. To build a constituency for the November congressional election, Gabriela Mercer, a Republican candidate, herself a Mexican immigrant, is quoted saying:

“If you know Middle Easterners, a lot of them, they look Mexican or they look like a lot of people in South America: dark skin, dark hair, brown eyes. And they mix, they mix in. And those people, their only goal in life is to cause harm to the United States. So why do we want them here, either legally or illegally? When they come across the border — besides the trash that they leave behind, the drug smuggling, the killings, the beheadings — you are seeing stuff: it’s a war out there.”

I saw the 14-minute trailer of “Innocence of Muslims” on youtube. Like millions of people around the world, I wouldn’t have known of it were it not for the demonstrations. The advocates of the movie couldn’t have hoped for a better promotion. No critical insight is needed to see the movie, that allegedly cost five million dollars, is a diarrheal burst of preposterous blasphemy and ribaldry wrapped in buffoonery and delivered in abominably bad acting. There is no point in its depiction of the prophet Mohammed beyond sheer provocation, giving Muslims a metaphorical wedgie.

The question many Westerners are struggling with is whether such divisive speech can be protected; whether it would be counter to our American principles to censor opinions masquerading as boorish irreverence. It is understandable that many Americans would be loath to restrict speech and curtail opinion. After all, you don’t see Christians, Hindus, or Buddhists violently demonstrating every time Jesus, Krishna, or Buddha is ridiculed. A Wall Street Journalist commenting on the Broadway musical “The Book of Mormon” wrote: “Making fun of Mormons in front of a Broadway crowd is like shooting trout in a demitasse cup.” No copies of the WSJ were burnt in Salt Lake City the next day. No movie theaters or British embassies were attacked when Monty Python’s “Life of Brian” came out. Nobody took umbrage at “Bruce Almighty,” where god, played by Morgan Freeman, gives his powers to Bruce Nolan, played by Jim Carrey. Criticism of such work was limited to op-eds and opinion articles.

As soon as an uncomplimentary opinion of the prophet Mohammed comes to light, worldwide riots erupt, fatwas are issued, flags and effigies burnt, businesses and official buildings ransacked, people killed. In Sudan, a middle-aged British teacher was jailed for allowing one of her pupils to name his teddy bear “Mohammed.” In September of 2006, The Deutsche Oper Berlin canceled performances of Mozart’s “Idomeneo, re di Creta ossia Ilia e Idamante” because the depiction of Muhammad’s severed head in one of the scenes represented an “incalculable risk” and would endanger its employees and audience. Yale University Press refused to include the controversial Jyllands Posten cartoons in Professor Jyette Clausen’s book about the controversy, “The Cartoons That Shook the World.”  When Trey Parker and Matt Stone, South Park’s creators, tried to parody the Danish cartoons by scripting an animated appearance of Mohammed in one of their episodes, Comedy Central management blacked out the cameo. In subsequent episodes of South Park, Parker and Stone, true to their comedic nature, depicted the prophet Mohammed wearing a mascot’s costume and talking from inside a U-Haul trailer. It hasn’t always been like this; two months before 9/11, “the Muslim prophet with the power of flame” stood next to Jesus, Krishna, Buddha, Joseph Smith, and Lao-tse, the South Park episode titled “Super Best Friends,” to help Stan, one of the show’s main characters, demystify the magician David Blaine.

Why should the world knuckle under to threats of violence when the subject of Islam is broached? Why should there be an exception in deference to Islamic sensitivities?

Well, there isn’t! It turns out that the Danish newspaper that published the affronting cartoons of Mohammed rejected earlier that month cartoons of Christ explaining to the artist who submitted them that they would provoke an outcry. No American film director today would produce a work similar to D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation.” And even if it were, no theater would show it lest the African American community would violently protest. Disney would not release its 1946 musical “Song of the South” for home viewing fearing it would offend minorities. In today’s America. we camouflage censorship with political correctness and no longer allow derogatory epithet like the word “nigger” opting instead for the ““N” word.” Suggesting the Holocaust never happened is a crime in Germany and Israel. The idea that all speech is protected denotes a simplistic understanding of the law. In Chaplinsky vs. New Hampshire, the court wrote:

“ There are certain well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the prevention and punishment of which have never been thought to raise any constitutional problem. These include the lewd and obscene, the profane, the libelous, and the insulting or “fighting words” those that by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace. It has been well observed that such utterances are no essential part of any exposition of ideas, and are of such slight social value as a step to truth that any benefit that may be derived from them is clearly outweighed by the social interest in order and morality.”

The Muslim people’s outrage is most certainly justified, but the violence is absolutely not. If Muslim nations aspire to democracy, aspects of Islam should be openly questioned and objectively criticized without the fear of being accused of heresy, or apostasy, or subjected to grievous harm or death. This is not only a matter of judicial reform; it requires an honest self-examination at the level of the individual citizen and a willingness to accept the skepticism even of those holding antagonistic opinions.

AUTHOR: Ahmed T. B. / Cabalamuse
URL: http://cabalamuse.wordpress.com/
E-MAIL: cabalafuse [at] hotmail.com

The study, authored by William Anderegg of Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford University and Jeffrey Kane and Leander Anderegg of Northern Arizona University, reviews dozens of scientific papers dealing with the ecological impacts of climate change on forests.

Although forests reflect more light and decrease local temperatures, there are a host of other issues that are exacerbated by global warming. Forests reduce the impacts of climate change by sequestering carbon and releasing oxygen, however, less trees means more carbon and less oxygen. This constitutes a dangerous feedback loop. Declining forests are being impacted by global warming and this is interfering with the natural processes that mitigate climate change.

As reviewed in a Mongabay article, “Forests cover 42 million square kilometers or 30 percent of Earth’s land surface…Forests store 45 percent of the carbon found in terrestrial ecosystems and sequester as much as 25 percent of annual carbon emissions from human activities, helping mitigate a key driver of climate change…clear-cutting of forests in the tropics accounts for 8-15 percent of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.”

As stated in Science Daily, “From an ecosystem perspective, forest die-off will also likely affect hydrological processes and nutrient cycles…decomposition of fallen trees releases carbon into the atmosphere, thus producing a warming effect…Debris from fallen trees could also increase a forest’s fire risk.”

These impacts have a very real economic costs. Forests account for trillions of dollars of annual economic activity. Mass tree mortality will incur substantial losses to the timber industry and could cause declines in real-estate property values.

Forests cover 42 million square kilometers or 30 percent of Earth’s land surface. Every continent on Earth is being impacted by forests loss with the exception of Antarctica. In the US, there has been an increase in the incidence and severity of forest fires since 2000. A wide range of forest are being impacted including the Redwood forest in Marin, CA. Rainforest in Borneo. Forests in Southeast Asia, the Russian Far East, and the Amazon has been particularly affected by drought over the past 20 years. Roughly a million hectares of Amazon rainforest suffered from severe drought stress in 2010.

Although more research is required, the study suggest a troubling global trend that could cost billions of dollars and substantially accelerate climate change.

AUTHOR: Richard Matthews
URL: http://www.thegreenmarketoracle.com
E-MAIL: smallbusinessconsultants [at] gmail.com

Introduction: Cultural Hegemony in Marxian and anti-Marxian Thought

We live in the most difficult times since the Great Depression. Just as in the Great Depression when there was political polarization and weakening of bourgeois parliamentary democracy but no revolution, similarly in the early 21st century there is no sign of social uprisings in the Western World undergoing a crisis in the political economy and bourgeois institutions. Why is it that the masses remain docile, a segment gravitating to the extreme right, another segment going as far as street protests, while most remain apathetic? If the political economy does not determine human behavior, is cultural hegemony responsible for shaping the human mind?

In ‘sociological Marxism’, a theory that assumes society runs parallel to economy and state and rejects economic determinism, Marxian intellectual Antonio Gramsci, Karl Polanyi and others were among early 20th century thinkers who developed a theory of cultural domination. Arguing that ideological superstructures (institutions both secular and religious, public and private) dominate to influence the human mind that they did not see as mechanistic, these thinkers placed the class structure in the context of cultural hegemony that is the product of bourgeois constructs rather than an inevitable or natural consequence as mainstream thinkers argue.

Another dimension to understanding cultural hegemony and the evolution of political systems is through the work of Barrington Moore’s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966). Moore examines how social structures under an agrarian and industrial political economy produces certain political outcomes in different parts of the world, focusing on the violence preceding the evolution of ‘democratic’ (bourgeois) institutions. A sociopolitical revolutionary break with the past comes only after there has been an economic transformation that alters social relations. Moore made famous the statement “no bourgeoisie, no democracy”, which of course explains the 19th and 20th centuries, but it leaves questions about the decline of the bourgeoisie in the early 21st century and what that entails for democracy.

While Gramsci, Polanyi and Moore analyzed the dynamics of social class, political economy, social discontinuity, and the role of cultural hegemony from a rationalist or scientific perspective, Richard Rorty, an American philosopher who represented the new generation of right-wingers from the Reagan to the Bush presidencies returned to the assumptions of Thomas Hobbes and Edmund Burke regarding the irrationality of human nature and the conspiratorial nature of demagogue intellectuals preaching revolution in order to improve society and human beings; an otherwise unachievable goal. Besides perpetuating cultural hegemony instead of trying to understand it and suggesting ways for a more socially just society, such a philosophy is intended to reject a rationalist or scientific method of analyzing social class and political economy. The propagandist and populist nature of  Rorty’s philosophy captured the imagination of other populist conservatives throughout the media and political world.

Conservatism, especially in its extreme and especially when it comes from what the mainstream baptizes respectable academic, sells and it sells big with a segment of the population that is suspicious of intellectuals, identifying as ‘elitist’ that have no connection to the ‘common man’. Because conservatism, especially in its populist form, has been an integral part of cultural hegemony that resonates with a receptive audience already indoctrinated in the cultural mainstream. When someone like Rorty or populist talk-show personalities argue that the new Left intelligentsia has been obsessed with castigating the US for having an institution of slavery, a history of racism toward minorities, a militaristic policy that proved unpopular with the War in Vietnam, etc., a large segment with strong nationalist tendencies identifies with such rhetoric and becomes anti-revolutionary. This is the ultimate triumph of cultural hegemony when the masses at whose expense policies are implemented adopt an ideological position contrary to their own interests.

Belaboring the negative institutional traits of society to radically change society is an anathema to Rorty and those promoting cultural hegemony, while true salvation is to be found in working within the system, accepting cultural hegemony that entails institutional conformity. Just like the early Cold War when there was systematic persecution of dissidents from Hollywood to academia and research laboratories, including that of Robert Oppenheimer (Manhattan Project), similarly in the early 21st century there is a major shift toward that political climate of quasi-police state, helped along by cultural hegemony.

Bourgeois Values and Indoctrination of the Masses

Does the dominant, or hegemonic social class and the political elites representing that class in pluralistic societies under the guise of ‘democracy’ have the ability to perpetuate the facade of ‘democracy’ behind which operates an economic dictatorship, an increasingly anti-labor and quasi-police  state whose role is to prevent social change? As long as cultural hegemony is effective in shaping the concept of self (Louis Althusser) for the masses, and as long as the masses identify their interests with the dominant social and political class, the facade of democracy and bourgeois culture works to prevent social revolution, even reform that has the potential of leading toward greater social justice.

Cultural hegemony explains modern-day reluctance on the part of workers and the declining lower middle class to resist through revolutionary means. Is it possible that a social revolution is not taking place in the Western World and especially across southern and much of eastern Europe where austerity is devastating the middle class and workers because people have accepted bourgeois values, ideology and institutions to which they see no alternative better than the existing one no matter how horrible it may be? What are some of those values indoctrinated into the minds of the masses, including leftists?

1. Working within the parliamentary system to find solutions to societal problems, because working outside such a framework entails absence of legitimacy as bourgeois society defines it, and the risk of lapsing into chaos if revolution follows means personal and societal disaster.

2. Ardent belief in individualism as the norm and the categorical rejection of communitarian values as deviation from the norm. In practice, this means that if you are rich, it is owing to the merits of your character, not because you have found the key legally or illegally to engage in the process of capitalist appropriation. By contrast, if you are poor, it is your fault, not institutional, because you must lack some trait that prevents you from making it in the open society that offers institutional opportunities to all who become rich. Therefore, the institutional structure is ‘objective’ and thus blameless for the fate of the individual and the multitudes of poor.

3. If the economy is contracting, it is because you and those like you have been living too well in the past, while under-producing, so now you must pay – this is especially true if you are a public employee, generally assumed lazy and overpaid, if not corrupt assuming you have a position that lends itself to making money under the table. In short, upward social mobility experienced in the past must be moderated through the process of downward social mobility for society to find balance, so the workers and middle class must sacrifice for the whole of society, when in reality the sacrifices are intended to strengthen finance capital.

4. If the economy and the state fiscal structure is on the wrong course, it is your fault for immersing in consumerist greed, debt-spending, or not spending enough to stimulate the consumer-based economy, and not paying your fair share of taxes that accounts for your predicament and that of the rest of society. How do all of these contradictory things make sense is in itself fascinating and that people believe it even more so.

The answer rests  in cultural hegemony. Specifically, it has to do with massive advertising as well as the media whose role is to inculcate bourgeois values along with bourgeois guilt into people’s heads. The rest of the institutions, from churches to schools, play a contributing role in the process of shaping the mind and identity, thus the entire society is bathing in the worldview of the bourgeois economic and political elites that transfer blame downward toward the masses, arguing that in an open society people have freely chosen their leaders and institutions, when in reality those have been superimposed.

5. When the economy is on the wrong tract, politicians are to blame and almost rarely business that the political class serves. For example, a recent US public opinion poll finds that 66% blame the lack of economic and job growth on ‘bad policy;, while only 23% blame Wall Street, despite the well-publicized ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement. In short, the vast majority of people trust the corporate structure because they identify it with the ‘national interest’, while they mistrust politicians who in essence are the servants of the corporate structure.This process is also part of cultural hegemony.

6. Cultural hegemony is triumphant because the irrational is triumphant in human nature. It is a myth, perhaps dating back to Lockean philosophy and its influence on Enlightenment thinkers that influenced 19th century socialists including Marx, that human beings are rational and act as such, implying that in cases of social revolution the motivation and intent of those following revolutionary leaders is rooted on idealism.

As much as I regard reprehensible the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes who opposed the English Civil War of the 1640s and the counter-revolutionary Edmund Burke who opposed the French Revolution, there is something to be said about their keen observations regarding human nature manifesting itself in revolutionary times. Is it not the case that the rupture in cultural hegemony took place during the course of the Enlightenment that challenged the status quo, thus providing a sense of legitimacy to the revolution? After Locke was the first philosopher to make a rational case for revolution and he was a major influence on the French in 1789. In short, cultural hegemony has limitations because it is always challenged, and when that challenge reaches a substantial number of people and the nature of the challenge converges with the realities in peoples’ lives, a segment of them will challenge the status quo.

Cultural Hegemony Lessons for the 21st Century

The lessons of cultural hegemony from the past should be applied today, as we look at those who want revolutionary action, but shy away from it. What motivates some to protest, others to adopt a more militant position, and the vast majority to do absolutely nothing except complain to their family and friends? Has cultural hegemony suppressed any sense of idealism of aiming toward social justice? Is the majority of the population immersed in ‘bourgeois pragmatism’ – paying bills for now, taking care of family, satisfying immediate needs and trying to advance their careers in the age of careerism that cultural hegemony promotes?

If people are facing a bleak future for themselves and their children unless they embrace the institutional structure, how can they possibly unhinge from cultural hegemony, which is all they hear and see in the media, and in any institutional or social setting? How can people break away from bourgeois values and practices? This sense of ‘bourgeois pragmatism’ is also an integral part of the brainwashing process, to be absolutely crude about it, given that indeed this is a result of multifarious forces from society and the result of long-term historical and traditional (religious and secular) influences.

This concept of bourgeois pragmatism that has its roots in the 19th century, made a return in the 1980s onwards with Richard Rorty among others who adamantly opposed social revolution, any more than they believed in redemption of human beings or their progress through revolution. Unlimited freedom and allowing people to muddle through their problems is what these advocates of ‘bourgeois pragmatism’ favored; in short, early 19th century-style social and economic conditions.

Downward Social Mobility vs. Cultural Hegemony

In the past three decades, the Western World has been experiencing uneven income distribution in favor of the top ten percent of the population, mostly at the expense of the bottom two thirds of the people many of whom considered themselves an integral part of the middle class and democratic society. All the studies that have been conducted indicate that downward social mobility have gone hand in hand with the decline of the welfare state and the rapid rise of corporate welfare under the neoliberal model during the age of globalization. In 2010, the Federal Reserve affirmed that the economic contraction entailed that the median American family experienced a living standard comparable to the early 1990s, wiping away two decades of gains. With stocks too risky for many small investors and savings accounts paying little interest, building up a nest egg is a challenge even for those who can afford to sock away some of their money.

From 2008 until the present, the situation I am describing became much worse, and it is expected to deteriorate in the remainder of the decade, as structural unemployment hovers around 10% in Europe and around 8% in the US. If we consider structural underemployment, we have a picture that approximate Great Depression levels, considering that the combined unemployment and underemployment figures account for an estimate 20% of the workforce in the US and a bit higher in Europe. For example, one-third of all Americans between 18 and 29 are underemployed, receiving very low pay, invariably without benefits of a full time worker. One would think that such dire conditions would shake the foundations of bourgeois society. On the contrary, with the exception of some street protests throughout the Western World, a small percentage going to the extreme right (varieties of neo-Fascism), the institutional structure appears sound, at least for now, with no guarantees how long it will remain so.

Arab Spring and Cultural Hegemony

If cultural hegemony works to prevent social change, how do we account for Arab Spring revolts? If by the word ‘revolution’ we mean systemic change, then Arab Spring revolts did not result in systemic change. If by the word ‘revolution’ we imply grassroots, then Arab Spring revolts do not fall in this category, because there was heavy outside interference, especially in the cases of Libya and Syria.

It is true that political change has resulted, but it is not institutional change by any means where Arab Spring has taken root. Still, how do we explain that an otherwise ‘traditional’ religious society, somewhat influenced by modern secular culture and using high tech communications, manage to have a segment of its population mobilize for change, albeit limited to political regime and with external political, financial and military interference? Does Arab Spring prove that the cultural hegemony theory is wrong, or does it validate it, and what are the lessons for the rest of the world’s grassroots movements?

Arab Spring was a revolt against secular, one-party state regimes that lacked legitimacy from the ruling population and represented a notion of sovereignty identified with the early Cold War instead of the 21st century. Muslims rebelled against such regimes to bring change that would reflect traditional values and practices through domestic and foreign policy that their governments did not represent. Cultural hegemony actually worked to promote Arab Spring, given that the rebels by far wanted a return to Muslim roots and social justice within Muslim institutions. 

One reason we fail to see progress on women’s issues, and democracy and human rights, as the West defines those concepts, is precisely because cultural hegemony, especially in the context of ‘political Islam’ operated all along behind Arab Spring. Political Islam, the mixing of religion and politics, has alienated a segment of the Middle East-North African population, but it remains the principal dynamic in Arab cultural hegemony. 

Conclusions

Some thinkers assume that more than anything people crave safety an security, and on the fears of those cultural hegemony rests. Some argue that actualizing their potential is just as important for human beings, but this entails having an institutional structure that permits and promotes those possibilities. I have argued in the past that revolution is possible in this century. Many factors have to converge for a revolution to take place. It is true that revolutions rarely take place amid economic contractions, but economic hard times eventually prepare the stage for uprisings that may fester in the minds of people for many years before they act. Modern technology has made it possible for cultural hegemony to be challenged, but real conditions (socioeconomic status and lack of prospects for a better future) in peoples’ lives must be such that they will free themselves of cultural hegemony’s grip to embrace social change. 

AUTHOR: Jon Kofas
URL: http://jonkofas.blogspot.com
E-MAIL: jonkofas [at] yahoo.com

Introduction

1. Sustainable growth or long-term contraction?
Can the level of steady growth and development that the US, Japan and Western Europe experienced during the early Cold War, or the kind of growth that China, India and Brazil experienced in the last two decades be sustainable and carry with it the rest of the world economy? Was such growth  achieved at the expense of periphery nations exporting raw materials and importing manufactured goods, and could the uneven trade and income relationship on a world scale continue to provide sustainable development in the 21st century? Some believe this would be the case, but if the basic geographic and socioeconomic structure does not change, is it not reasonable to conclude the same problems will exist down the road, thus precipitating contraction within spurts of growth regionally instead of sustainable growth globally?

2. Globalization under the Neo-Liberal Model.
Will the era of globalization under the neo-liberal model persist, regardless of its detrimental impact on the welfare state and on laboring and middle class incomes? If the current model does not persist, will there be a trend toward regional blocs that will become increasingly protectionist? Will there be new models of integration in Europe and US to compete with China, or will there be increased tendency toward national economic sovereignty? This a difficult question to answer, for it challenges the imagination to see how globalization under neo-liberalism can proceed without precipitating self-destructive tendencies in the economy, and creating extreme social and political volatility.

3. Does the Bretton Woods best serve the 21st century economy?
Will international agencies, especially the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank continue to play the significant role they have been in the last fifty years, or will there be a revision of Bretton Woods as the focus for economic growth shifts from West to East? Helping to manage the world economy has been easy for the IMF and World Bank because they have had the backing of governments, commercial banks and corporations behind them. How long this will last is a matter of public confidence in the political and financial institutions that back the IMF and World Bank. What if the consensus widens that these financial institutions are impediments to growth and national sovereignty, serving only very large corporate interests?

4. Concentrated Wealth and Chronic Poverty
Will there be a greater concentration of wealth or better distribution to allow for lessening of poverty and upward social mobility? Will the chronic problem of endemic poverty be solved around the world, or will it actually worsen and increasingly spread to  advanced countries as statistics currently indicate? There are optimists, arguing that endemic poverty can come to an end and upward social mobility can be realized. Maybe some day egalitarianism can be achieved, but it would have to come after systemic change in society and I seriously doubt that it will be in the 21st century that seems to be repeating some structural patterns of Imperialism in the 19th century, especially 1880-1914.

5. Global Struggle for Raw Materials
Will the struggle for water, minerals, and raw materials in general intensify and cause regional conflicts? All indications are that nations will fight on behalf of their corporation for control of raw materials and markets, using all kinds of ideological and political justifications to stake their claim. The struggle for raw materials and markets is never a ending one and it could explode into a global war in this century after a possible large-scale depression in the 2030s. However, the fear of mutual destruction owing to massive weaponry, including nuclear on the part of a number of countries, may be a deterrent.

6. What is the European Union’s role in the world economy? 
At the start of this decade, the situation appears more dire for the full and associate members of the Europe Union, once the envy of the world as the most progressive integration model of a regional bloc, but on the verge of an uncertain future. In 1947, President Harry Truman realized that without a strong and stable Europe, the US could not possibly be strong politically, economically and militarily. To some degree, this remains true today in the age of even greater inter-depedence in the world economy, and with Asian economic ascendancy threatening the traditional Western balance of power. Given that the US has spent its way into a weak monetary situation owing to record public debt and balance of payments deficits, it is in no position to help stabilize Europe as it did in 1947 with the Marshall Plan. This means that the Western nations face a very serious crisis that is at its root political but manifesting itself in the economy with social and political consequences. 

7. Can Developing Nations provide the stimulus for 21st century growth?
Can Africa, Latin America and smaller Asian and Eurasian nations that account for less than 20% of the world’s GDP provide the impetus for growth and sociopolitical stability in the 21st century, given that US, Western Europe and Japan seem to have reached a point of irresolvable contradictions in the political economy? The Third Third has the largest reserves of raw materials and cheapest labor with the largest potential for growth and development. Developing (or more accurately, underdeveloped nations) is where China certainly is investing for the 21st century, followed by the traditional G-7 nations also competing for markets and raw materials, especially strategic minerals.

Regional blocs, including the recently formed CELAC that includes 33 Latin American and Caribbean countries, but excludes the US and Canada, may have an impact on containing the globalization/neo-liberal momentum that swept across the world in the last two to three decades. Could regional blocs, nationalism and sociopolitical instability preclude the rapid growth and development of developing nations needed to provide a stimulus for the world economy in the 21st century? Does the fact that there is a heavy-handed foreign policy on the part of the US and its European partners help or hinder the development of underdeveloped nations like Iraq, Afghanistan, Middle East and Africa? Could the clash of civilizations – East versus West – continue to impede growth and development in the Islamic world that the US and the West has stigmatized with the war on terror?

8. Is finance capitalism at the root of economic volatility and decline? 
The combination of a number of things could mean a very difficult three to five years for the world economy, but longer-term there may be even bigger structural problems unless governments begin to do a better job of regulating, monitoring, and enforcing mechanisms of accountability. The idea of securing profits for the financial sector at the expense of the rest of society – profiting  when times are good and still profiting when times are bad – is not one that workers and the middle class will tolerate forever.

One can imagine a world in which banks and finance companies determine everything from monetary and fiscal policy to labor and social policy; a world where socioeconomic polarization is even worse than it was one hundred years ago on the eve of the Great War in 1914. This scenario does not have to play out, but given the current trends in the political economy of the West as well as other nations like Russia and India, it may be very plausible.

Society will not tolerate forever numerous banking scandals involving illegal activities, including deals with drug lords and other underground entities engaged in international weapons trade, while the taxpayer pays for bank bailouts. Perpetual manufactured speculation on government bonds that drives up rates and prevents a quick economic recovery in every sector from housing to manufacturing and keeping unemployment high is not something that society will tolerate forever.

The lack of a coordinated monetary policy on the part of central banks, with the ECB playing games with rhetoric instead of adopting a realistic monetary policy to free the regional bloc from its downward trend indicates that the creditor-debtor nation gap will impede growth and development, not just regionally, but globally. In the absence of monetary and fiscal policy intended to absorb the large unemployed and underemployed population and raise living standards does not leave room for optimism. Not only will there not be steady economic growth and development given the policies intended to concentrate capital in the top one percent of the world’s population, but there will not be harmonious social and political conditions in the rest of the decade or the rest of the century.

9. Can the BRIC nations save the world economy?
So where do we go in this century, given where we have been in the past and were we are currently with the BRIC nations providing some light at the end of the economic contraction cycle? The global economy at the start of the 21st century is not off to a good start, although the notable exceptions are Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC) countries with enormous potential but with the largest percentage of the world’s population and the world’s poor. Besides having a serious poverty problem, BRIC nations are not exactly models of social justice or Norwegian-style democracies. Moreover, they have the potential of sociopolitical instability owing to the contradiction of rapid short-term GDP growth, while the poor-rich gap persists due to a very slow upward mobility that would account for a strong middle class. In short, the ‘Asian-Eurasian’ miracle has a limited time span with some structural risks.

10. Is there a Science/techno fix for society?
Can science and technology provide a solution to economic problems and can science and technology alter the consumerist atomistic values that go along with the existing political economy, or is the solution strictly political? Every government and every international organization from the UN agencies to the OECD emphasize that innovation is key to societal economic and social health in the 21st century. Science and technology will make vast strides to improving the quality of life, but that quality of life would be too expensive to afford for the majority of the earth’s population. Science and technology available today can solve world hunger and water shortage problems, but if it is not profitable for corporations to do so, it does not take place. Science and technology can provide medical assistance to children in sub-Saharan Africa and Central America, but if it is not profitable for pharmaceutical companies, they will do nothing. The science/techno-fix is a mirage unless policy is behind it to support its application to humanity, all of humanity.

11. Lessons from history
After the end of the Cold War, a number of scholars from around the world tried to determine what geopolitical model the world resembles, agreeing that most likely it is that of pre-1914. The world’s political economy based on globalization and neo-liberalism, combined with raw US-NATO military intervention in non-Western areas as a means of resolving conflict certainly suggests that we may be back in the pre-1914 era. However, history may resemble itself but never exactly repeats itself because conditions change on a daily basis. The world of regional blocs today is very different than the spheres of influence in the pre-WWII era, or even in the Cold War eras when the Soviet bloc, the US-bloc and the non-aligned represented a certain order with a degree of predictability. Today we have very distinct signs of instability in the political economy, signs that may predict sociopolitical instability.

a. Expansionary Cycle of neo-liberalism and globalization1980-2000
 Easy credit/low interest rate era of 1980-2000 coincided with the Reagan-Thatcher launch of strengthening corporate welfare capitalism at the expense of social welfare and middle class incomes. This era was also known for neo-liberal triumph and globalization embolded by the downfall of the Communist bloc. Finance capital took advantage of the impetus that neo-liberalism provided to free itself of many regulatory restrictions that had been in place as a safety net in periods of economic contraction. Although the credit economy under a regime of regulations can function to best serve a pluralistic society, the credit economy cannot possibly be blamed because finance capitalists abuse, manipulate and corrupt the credit system in order to score quick and large profits, knowing that the entire house of cards will come down crashing as it did when the Lehman Brothers case erupted to trigger the current global recession.

Despite the deep economic contraction of the market economy from 2007 until the present, neo-liberals continue to defend the exact same system that caused the contraction. Refusing to accept that capital concentration causes vast distortions as it chokes off demand and leaves surpluses that the market cannot absorb, they argue that government is at fault because government has monopoly on the money supply and the fiscal system. This is true, except that government monetary and fiscal policy follows whatever direction finance capital wishes, because the ‘national interest’ is currently identified with finance capitalism – to some degree even in quasi-statist China. Anything that impedes finance capitalism, such as social welfare programs and a progressive tax system, is deemed dangerous to the political economy that has proved self-destructive and ruinous to the general welfare of society.

Added to this era of ebullient neo-liberalism and globalization was the advent of China that helped to provide an immense stimulus to the world economy. That China took a global lead in capitalism, although its own brand of a mixed economy, emboldened the apologists of globalization under the neo-liberal model. What went wrong in the process of all of the global economic growth was the loosening of regulations and relaxed oversight to the degree that banks were dealing with drug international lords and illegal gun dealers, to say nothing of fixing Libor rates and manipulating the bond market through hedge funds/CDS products, buying government debt and concealing it so that creditworthiness is not impacted, etc.; all of these illegal or at the very least highly questionable activities under the watchful eye of the political class that did nothing while receiving funding to run political campaigns, or bribes to supplement personal wealth.

We are now witnessing the convergence of a number of factors accounted for the beginning of the 21st century crisis, which entailed using the public debt as a pretext to transfer income from the middle class and workers to the corporate and finance capital sector, as well as capital transfer from the periphery countries to the core where capitalism has been suffering from its worst crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Given the structure of the political economy from 1980 to 2000, which followed finance capital’s directives as evidenced by fiscal and monetary policies, in essence central banks serving the markets instead of regulating them for the general welfare of society, the contracting cycle was inevitable.
 
b. Recessionary Cycle 2007-present: Public Debt Crisis and Austerity
The manufactured war on terror after the tragedy of 9/11, combined with a new wave of defense spending in the first decade of the 21st century, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that cost an estimated one trillion dollars, put an enormous strain on the global civilian economy. The crisis of finance capitalism promoted by the ‘below prime’ and other speculative enterprises caused public debt crises not just in the US and core nations (G-7), but sent public debts of many nations into risky territory that allowed for speculators to bid for higher interest rates until it became prohibitive to borrow in the free market.

Austerity policies imposed across Southern and Eastern Europe, something that was unthinkable two decades ago, suggests a heavy handed neo-imperialist direction, given that such policies have been reserved for Third World nations far too vulnerable to resist the power of core nations imposing austerity. In essence this means that the EU is creating a two-tiered economy with the strong and thus hegemonic economies on the northwest tier and the weaker and “dependent” economies in the south and east. Especially amid this crisis, creditor countries demand from weaker EU members lower taxes for direct foreign investment, fewer restrictions on capital movement, liberalization of all vital sectors of the economy, including privatization of public enterprises so that foreign investment penetrates and eventually dominates such sectors.

In return, they extend loans with interest rates higher than most home mortgages, and they saddle the debtor countries with cumulative foreign debt that will keep them perpetually dependent in every respect, from finance and trade to technology and essential pharmaceuticals. In an environment where the strong capitalist countries have been trying to perpetuate their economic, financial, monetary, trade, military, ideological and political hegemony over weaken nations the world is now experiencing a redefinition of the integration models based on some level of reciprocity. Clearly, the regional blocs were and remain in a state of realignment, as the models of integration are changing to reflect a sphere of influence scenario – as in pre-1914 – rather than mutual benefit scenario as globalization and neo-liberalism had promised.

c. Declining incomes and the specter of economic nationalism 
Statistics regarding working class and middle class incomes in most countries, including the G-7, suggest a steady decline for the past three decades or so. For example, in 1978, the US average hourly wage was $8.96 in real terms as compared with $8.57 in 2008, reflecting not just wage stagnation, but real downward socioeconomic mobility. It is estimated that 80% of the total income increase in the last three decades has been going to the top 1% of income earners, while the middle and bottom income groups resorted to increased borrowing at the same time as the public sector that was spending to buttress the corporate welfare system.

As workers and the middle class feels the downward income pressure amid rising personal debt, and as they are not optimistic about their children’s future, the tendency is to become more inclined to support economic nationalism. As time passes, economic nationalism of both the left and right ideological orientations is gaining momentum at the grassroots level. Europeans are losing faith in the common currency – Southern and Eastern Europeans losing faith for different reasons than northwest Europeans. Economic nationalism is also finding expression as a reaction to globalization in Latin America and around the world, in areas where people identify globalization with the corporate structure of the G-7. It is possible that popular support for economic nationalism increases throughout the first half of this century, expressing itself in a variety of political parties, business circles and social movements. This would entail an uphill battle for the continuation of globalization under the neo-liberal model.

12. The Population vs. Resources Debate
If population were to remain frozen for the next two decades, would the world avoid a possible great depression in 2030s; even if population were to drop by one billion, and resources across the board were to rise by 20% would the capitalist economy avoid a major contracting cycle under the model of massive capital concentration, uneven economic development, speculative, parasitic and corrupt banking and corporate practices, a state fiscal structure intended to buttress finance capital?

Finally, if poverty rises during contracting cycles, why has much of the Western World experienced downward social mobility in the past four decades amid a period of economic growth? Even if the state were to do everything that finance and corporate capital requested, short of allowing people to die of starvation in the streets, is it theoretically possible that the market economy can avoid economic contractions in the future, and a major one in the 2030s?

The projections for the rise in the population from the current 7 billion to 11 billion by the middle of the 21st century, and the limited energy, water, and food resources will be a major source of global sociopolitical instability, especially since the exploitation of natural resources rests primarily in the control of Western multinational corporations. Considering that the US has just under 5% of the world’s population but accounts for 25% of the world’s consumption, or 5% more than China and India combined whose population is more than seven times higher than the US. It is troubling, if not the ultimate social injustice, that 12% of the world’s population in North America and Western Europe currently accounts for 60% of the world’s private consumption spending, while one-tird of the world people living in Asia and sub-Sahara Africa account for just 3.2 percent of the world’s private consumption.

Some are optimistic that urbanization in Asia and Africa will result in higher living standards. While it is true that no rural-based economy has reached high income levels, and that rich countries are urban, it is not true that all urban countries are rich. If that were the case, Latin America with a large concentration of its population in urban areas should have been as developed as US and Canada. In the first decade of the 21st century, the average annual  urbanization growth was 2%, while in the Middle East and Africa it was 3%, and in Asia Pacific 2.7%. Concerned about rapid population growth and the lack of resources to meet the rising demand, the UN has warned about a global labor market recession especially in the underdeveloped nations and possible social unrest.
 
UN figures show that 324 cities with a population of over 750,000 has a rise of 20.0% in the last decade, with Africa, Middle East, Asia Pacific and Latin America as leaders. Currently at one billion people, Africa will see a doubling of its population in the next half century, thus accounting for 20% of the world’s population. Multinational corporations are counting on a continued surplus labor force that will keep consumption expanding horizontally, while keeping wages low.

13. The Green Solution – Cyber-Eco-Bourgeois Revolution?
Some have argued that 21stcentury economics means thinking ‘green’, but I have argued that the green movement is not much more than a Trojan Horse of finance capitalism. (Green Movement: Corporate Trojan Horse) To a large degree, not just governments, but a large segment of the population chose to surrender national  sovereignty to finance capital in exchange for the promise of consumerist paradise. Prevalent in developed and semi-developed countries, the cyber-eco-bourgeoisie (1970s-present) are now on the verge of a new revolution that is redefining the foundations of bourgeois liberal democracy. There is a “cyber-eco-bourgeois revolution” currently unfolding; a systemic change not in the mode of production but in thought and way of life that is a continuation of the Enlightenment spirit. Technology and contradictions in the political economy will continue to foster the evolutionary development of this post-web middle class. The cyber-eco-bourgeoisie will become more evident once it emerges from its nascent stage and reconfigures the entire social and institutional structure just as the mercantile bourgeoisie and their successors did in their time. 

Cyberspace-Eco Social Order is inevitable with the evolution of the bourgeoisie, largely because objective conditions will bring it about. The working class or at least a segment will be co-opted into the cyberspace-eco-bourgeois movement in more conservative countries like the US and UK, where institutions are under the firm control of traditional socioeconomic and political elites. In countries with a history of strong working-class consciousness labor will maintain greater socio-political cohesion and may forge alliances with other radical groups–students and cyber-eco bourgeoisie–as a way of retaining political influence. Whether co-opted by or antagonistic to the cyber-eco bourgeoisie, the comprador bourgeoisie inside and outside the formal economy, as well as the working class and its role in society will be influenced, if not largely determined, by the new middle class. Though this is already a reality in the rapidly evolving division of labor for the most advanced countries in high-tech sectors, it will become a reality for the entire world for that is at the core of the both the mode of production and mode of technology.

14. Conclusions

a. Social Discontinuity
Capitalism has been evolving in the past five centuries and it will continue to evolve in the 21st century in order to meet the economic, social and political conditions of societies and the nation-state. Short of grassroots revolutions in the core nations spreading to the periphery, I do not see social discontinuity threatening the capitalist system for the next one hundred years. This is because the system still has enormous room to grow and expand geographically and to continue integrating more segments that are currently on the fringes but have tremendous market-based potential. None of this spells good new for social justice, just as it entails continued uneven social and economic growth on a world scale under very tenuous political and social conditions.

b. War and Revolution
In the distinct absence of political multilateral solutions to conflicts, the advanced capitalist countries will resort to militarist hegemony solutions that will impede economic and social progress. Small wars and uprisings will likely be on the rise during this century. These are always an impediment to economic growth and development, especially for the countries on whose soil the conflict unfolds. Given current trends on the political economy, wars on a small scale as well social unrest not just in developing but also in advanced capitalist countries are a certainty owing to the reality that instant information and communications systems have made people more aware of the social injustice that exists and options before them. In fact, the 21st century may experience much worse social turbulence than the second half of the 20th century. In such social uprisings, and not the kind funded from foreign governments like those in Libya and Syria, may rest the seeds of systemic change and the hope for a better future.

c. Value System Change
For culture to survive and flourish society must have a degree of shared values it is willing to wholeheartedly embrace – spiritual as Hoffman maintains or material as Marxists argue – but also prosperity even if concentrated within a small group of people, hegemonic elites that foment the growth of the education, the arts, sciences and other cultural endeavors. At the same time, hegemonic elites that essentially create and propagate the dominant or mainstream culture are invariably successful in convincing the majority of the population to revere the cultural values and aesthetic achievements emanating from it only if there is not only an idealistic ultimate goal but a practical aesthetic aspect to culture.

While economic determinism has an impact in cultural trends–in everything from elite to popular culture–economic determinism is by no means alone in shaping culture from ancient to modern times. Value system change is inevitable and with it will come systemic change. However, throughout history there are rare examples of the elites that hold power yielding it voluntarily. This means that the 21st century will go through very difficult times as societies struggle to change in order to best serve the majority of the people and not an increasingly small minority.

AUTHOR: Jon Kofas
URL: http://jonkofas.blogspot.com
E-MAIL: jonkofas [at] yahoo.com

Introduction

Assumptions and Dogmatic Viewpoints

The dominance of other disciplines in developing studies has created a shift from heuristic methods of analysis to more hermeneutic methods of analysis. To put in less complicated phrasing: Scholars were primarily immersed in the idea of “uniqueness” and “exotic-ness” in fact juxtaposing phenomena of the developing world in Weberian antimonies while ignoring the empirical. Also problematic was the denial by western and non-western scholars of what I qualify the principle of universality of theory; in other words, theories can be used to underpin the empirical, explain a wide array of phenomena, without avail. Indeed it was easy to deny the universal character of political science theory, by focusing on the contemporary, instead of looking at historical parallels. For example, socialism emerged in a time when the world begged for answers outside the realms of blatant capitalism, a historical period of social movement and political activism, a period of struggle and war. How did these periods affect the developing world, did it kindled parallel patterns or did foster divergent patterns? And if so, what was the reason?

Another characteristic of “development studies” was the imbibing of Marxism..more specific Marxism and its derivatives, Leninism, Maoism and communism became fixed fixture in the works of seminal Latin American, African and Caribbean scholars. Raul Prebish work is an exemplification of how determining leftist ideas were on analysis for underdevelopment and economic stagnation; The work of Andre Gunder Frank (1969), sits at the other end of the spectrum, dogmatic and historical inaccurate. One of the pinnacles of Franks work is his depiction of third world elites, Lumpen Bourgeoisie, people with limited access to international (western networks). The sheer racist character of this depiction, belied by the way western societies embraced non-western literature, music and art during that specific time period. Interesting is that Frank only became challenged by proponents of capitalism, whose rickety position was in fact equally dogmatic and presumptuous. Proponents of capitalism, led by Walt Rostow argued that the restructuring of the Third World could only occur in stages, to let said societies ripen and mature into total industrialization. We all know that such did not happen, in fact, the failure of said theory that development could occur in three stages form the strongest argumentation against capitalism or development aid and assistance for that matter.

But there is another confounding and very important factor that frustrated the emergence of credible and good quality political science research and that is MONEY. The number of grants and fellowships given to scholars to stimulate well-rounded and credible research is below par; papers written by scholars who try to introduce new methods of research are typically rejected, because the intentions are good but there are no examples, no “Eminence Grise” to help guide them carefully but surely onto the slippery-sloped path of the academia. Many non western scholars do not make it, they oftentimes lack metier to make it through and those who make it pay a steep price.

The other side of the coin is that many scholars from Latin America and Africa have a stake in the fostering of old dogmas, ideas of exotic far-away places that are intrinsically unique, far away places that can only be analyzed by traipsing through the doldrums of a complex anthropology. Said scholarship derives their raison d’etre from being unique and one-of-kind, oftentimes combining activism with scholarship.Being unique and one of a kind offers possibilities to receive stipends and scholarship. In the Netherlands, the NWO is specifically keen on spending money on ‘allochtonen’, to stimulate so called minorities to enter the inner sanctum of the academia. The issue is that academia is not an NGO, they expect scholars to perform, they cannot allow mediocrity in their confines, nor can they deal with social and political activism and normativity.

Specifically worrisome is the negative stance by academic disciplines grounded in philosophy and the literature, to study developing societies from a different perspective stems from old-school ideas of colonialism and imperialism. The consistent challenging of Europe and Eurocentrism has not advanced scholarship or scholarly writing, on the contrary. We don’t know how said scholarship views China, the emerging power with a ferocious appetite for minerals and raw materials? Do they think that South-South solidarity will keep Africa, the Caribbean out of harms way? Do they believe that China has the best intentions, that for them the Flying Gees rule will apply, all in the name of South-South solidarity? Will Chinese ideas on human rights and civil liberties become dominant, determining the course of democracy in the developing world these forthcoming decades?

Recent Developments

Since 2007, collaborative efforts initiated by the University Metropolitana Ixtapalpa in Mexico City, have resulted in the revaluation and the rethinking of political science and its place in the developing world. Party Systems theory developed by (Sartori Mair et al, 1990) were used to analyze political systems in Latin America and the Caribbean (Adama 2010). From an earlier date stems the Latino Barometro, a democratic barometer, that foretells how democracies in the region will develop. Africa, the Arab world and Europe developed barometers inspired by the Latino Barometro. Other collaborative efforts by Ixtapalpa are underway, and involve a large study on transnational suffrage, a research specifically valuable for societies such as Suriname, Turkey, Morocco, the Dutch, French and Anglo Antilles, funded by the Mexican government.

These developments are promising, but we are still a long way from home. For instance, being labelled Bourgeois and part of the system, when one tries to introduce new viewpoints and conceptions is not only inaccurate, it also shifts away from that what is important. What do we need to know, and how will we advance scholarship and knowledge of developing and transitional societies, specifically during this era of global transition, a decade of the decline of capitalism and a resurgence of political conservatism and dogmatism in Europe, events that call for the viewpoints of political scientists all over the globe. Where will money for research come from? And how can we change and transform curricula and teaching methods to train and coach new scholars apt to use methods of social science research.

The economic crisis in Europe and its the unprecedented parallels with the peso-crisis of the 1980s and the Baker Plan developed by the Americans have yet to become analyzed and debated. What can Europe learn from Latin America and the Asian Crisis? Will they learn or wallow in a self-imposed isolation brought on by ideas of superiority? Susan Strange and Robert Gilpin (1989) were the first to warn that capitalism was walking on its last legs, the Americans felt that their hegemony would last and last…….

How did Latin America fare and what is the role of the OAS, CARICOM? Why is Chaves not ostracized by his Latin American peers? What is the role of ASEAN in silent revolution in Myanmar, a detente that came as a surprise.

Internet has brought the world closer, and has fostered more parallels than we care to know.

AUTHOR: Natascha Adama
URL: http://natascha23.blogspot.com
E-MAIL: nataliapestova23 [@] yahoo.com