Constitutional reform in Ecuador

A good friend forwarded this article from Reuters, and asked what I think of President Rafael Correa. I haven't anything interesting to add to this analysis, which sounds convincing, so I'll just pass it on. Ecuador's Correa moderate despite radicals' pressure by Alonso Soto. I will be writing more about that country, especially its major urban centers, for our coming book on the history of architecture and urbanism in Latin America. The country's urban history goes back many centuries, since even before Quito became the northern capital of the great Inca empire. These days my main contact with Ecuador is through its many citizens living here in Spain.

For background, check out the BBC Country profile: Ecuador

How to rule the world (and how not to)

Nicholas Sarkozy points the world's leaders to the right at the G8 summit conference in Hokkaido Toyako, Japan.

Engler, Mark. How to Rule the World. The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy. New York: Nation Books, 2008.

According to Mark Engler, the masters of wealth have split into two camps about how to rule the world, which leaves an opening for others of us to seize the terrain for a globalization that works for humanity.

In fact, as Engler is well aware and Marx pointed out long ago, the ruling groups have always been divided in many ways by their fierce competition for bigger slices of the wealth. But since World War II and Bretton Woods, they had come to accept a framework of cooperation, by which the elites of the most powerful industrialized economies protected one another from threats to their power from outsiders including any reform-minded elites in poorer nations, rebellious workers or underclass in their own countries, and of course revolutionary movements backed by the USSR or Communist China.

This cooperation was effected in large part by global institutions including the International Monetary Fund and World Bank (using debt-pressure to keep poor nations' economies safe for transnational investors from the U.S., Western Europe or Japan), the World Trade Organization (to make sure the poor nations didn't protect their own industries from rich nations' exports), NATO (backing the economic rules by armed force), and other treaties and agreements. Since one country, the U.S., had the greatest wealth and greatest military force in all these institutions, it was able to assure that they and others (including the U.N.) generally acted in accord with the interests of its own national military-industrial complex. The arrangement did cause occasional inconvenience for big U.S. corporations, however, since it required them to abide by the same rules that they demanded of everyone else and for important international actions to be agreed upon by all the major players.

The Bush government team changed all that. They have acted repeatedly outside the international institutions to make separate trade deals outside the WTO and IMF, and defied international law, the World Court and the UN (demanding exemptions from international law for U.S. troops abroad, invading Iraq, Guantánamo, etc.). This has split the world's elites, who no longer had much of a say in the actions of the world's biggest power.

The two camps of the would-be rulers of the world are those who want to go back to something like the older international system, and the U.S. go-it-aloners and their (very few) allies abroad. But the Bush-Cheney offensive of the past 8 years has brought both systems to a crisis. The old mechanisms of global control are broken. For example, almost all of Latin America has now freed itself of the destructive control that the IMF had over their economies. And the attempted new style of control, an unabashed and undisguised Pax Americana, is proving unsustainable. The U.S. cannot fight all the wars its policies provoke, and can't even win in the big ones it has got into now, in Iraq and Afghanistan. And the country's economic might also looks precarious.

Engler points out the fallacy of the slogan, "There is no alternative" to globalized capitalism as we know it. There is always the alternative of saying, as Bolivia has recently to water and gas companies seeking monopolies, "No." And there are always many alternatives within the system. What there is not is a single, unified opposition movement with a clearly defined program -- and that, Engler thinks, is just fine. And I agree with him. Our last single, unified opposition movement, very tightly unified, its cadres firmly disciplined and marching on orders, the world Communist movement, turned out to be too disciplined and rigid to adapt to ever changing, many-faceted realities.

"Capitalism" is not united and never has been, that has been its strength, what has allowed aspects of it to thrive and grow even as other expressions of it became obsolete and died. Opposition to particular capitalist abuses has to be as flexible and creative as capitalism itself. "Capitalism" is not one thing but many different ways for people to seek private profit from public goods, and there are just as many ways to try to re-channel that private profit motive into public welfare.

Engler is particulary good, and amusing, in his critiques of Thomas Friedman's global enthusiasms and the limitations of Joseph Stieglitz's acute denunciations of current practices (though without proposing a radical alternative). Also valuable is his chapter on how countries of Latin America -- backed in different ways by Venezuela's oil wealth and Brazil's enormous agricultural and industrial potential -- are changing the ways the game has to be played.

He gives us no assurance that we can make a better world -- that wiser people with more generous, solidary motives can come to rule it -- but he shows that there is a chance. As for what we can do, I think he's pointing us in the same direction as two older researchers whose books I've mentioned here. See my notes on Alain Touraine, Penser autrement, and Ulrich Beck, Power in the Global Age.

Carboneras

Here's a good collection of images of the village we live in. A long way from our previous home, in Manhattan.

Credit crisis

These two articles from Mother Jones helped me understand. Maybe they'll help you too.

Where Credit Is Due: A Timeline of the Mortgage Crisis. By Nomi Prins

Subprime 1-2-3. By Casey Miner

Spanish crosswinds

Surprisingly after last March's national elections it was the winners -- the Partido socialista (PSOE)-- who appeared to be in disarray, while the losers -- the Partido popular (PP)-- were finally gaining strength. For the first time ever in his political career, PP president Mariano Rajoy got a higher public approval rating than José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, PSOE party leader and president of the government. But the parties' relative positions continue to shift, in interesting ways. For the next four years I expect to see a much more plural politics, where the governing PSOE will need more tactical alliances with other parties, including possibly the PP, in order to get any legislation through.

During the last legislature (2004-2008), the economy was booming and the PSOE government introduced reforms that had wide popular support. (Gay marriage, gender parity in business and government, benefits for families taking care of disabled members, etc.) Meanwhile, the opposition PP was making itself obnoxious and even frightening, taking extreme right-wing positions based on a rhetoric of obvious falsehoods (wild conspiracy theories to explain their 2004 loss). Thus the other parties (Izquierda Unida and the generally left-leaning regionalists and nationalists) almost always voted with the PSOE, giving it an effective majority.

Now the economy is in what the government has finally admitted is a "crisis": the collapse of housing construction and sales has caused record unemployment and business failures, at the same time that rocketing petroleum prices are bankrupting truckers and making everything more costly, and the two forces together are diminishing government revenue (tax collection) and increasing expenses (to cover the unemployed, etc.) The government had a nice surplus in March, but was unprepared for a recession of this magnitude and for months seemed to have no answer except to counsel patience, that things would get better -- but now it doesn't look like they will any time soon, and the "kitty" is fast emptying. Thus, the PSOE needs the support of the other parties more than ever, and has to work harder and make more concessions to keep its alliances.

Meanwhile PP leader Mariano Rajoy surprised everybody by using his defeat to clean house and move to the center, making the PP a much less frightening alternative. Most commentators expected Rajoy to be much weakened after his defeat in March, and possibly even to be replaced. Instead, at the recent party congress in Valencia he not only got himself re-elected, but also replaced the hard-liners (Acebes and Zaplana, most notably) with a new cast of attractive and skillful younger women, and declared over and over again that his was a party of the "center", even distancing himself from his predecessor and former patron, the truly scary and cynical José María Aznar.

But in the PP the "center" is precarious; the right-wingers are still powerful in Madrid and other regions and will keep pushing to defend what Aznar calls the party's "principles" -- a collection of prejudices including alignment with the Catholic Church hierarchy, hostility to immigrants, and defense of private profit over public welfare (e.g., money and other breaks for private hospitals and schools while the public ones are starved for funds).

Meanwhile, at the PSOE's own party congress, the leadership has been forced by their own militants to edge backwards, resisting every step, toward the left. The main issues are women's rights, especially a uniform abortion law, and real separation of Church and State -- which is what the Constitution proclaims, but in fact Spanish taxpayers are still paying the Bishops' Conference €153,100,000 for salaries of Catholic bishops and priests, plus the salaries of the Church's own religion teachers in public schools, Catholic chaplains in the Armed Forces, and much more -- all as a result of Church-State accords signed in 1979. The PSOE leadership now says that they will try to get rid of the crucifixes in state ceremonies, but at least for now won't seek to revise those 1979 accords. But they may be forced by their own party members and other parties to move farther.

Where the PSOE is taking anything but a progressive stance is on immigration. The government is going along with the new European Union rules, permitting detention of undocumented immigrants for up to 18 months, even if they have committed no infraction other than illegal entry. The government is facing a lot of criticism for this from its own partisans and from its usual allies on the left, but the international pressures (Sarkozy et al.) for the moment seem to be stronger.

Image: Two PP women, Madrid region president Esperanza Aguirre and María Dolores Cospedal, Rajoy's pick as General Secretary of the party, in a 2007 photo; as representatives of opposing tendencies, they may not be so cozy now. Photo from Stralunato.

Post-imperial irony

Farrell, J. G. The Siege of Krishnapur. 1973. 2nd ed. New York: New York Review Books, 2004.

During the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857-58, several hundred British subjects in a fortified compound of the East India company (attended by their anonymous Eurasian servants and Sikh loyalist cavalrymen) fight for their lives, their possessions and their beliefs with increasing desperation until, after all looks lost, a smartly-outfitted rescue party find the few foul-smelling and emaciated survivors in this very funny, ironic and violent vision of the British imperial project.

From the first signs of mutiny, the Collector (chief local official of the Company) takes command (after the fortunate deaths of, first, a senile and incompetent general and then an equally incompetent major), young Lieutenant Harry Dunstaple very skillfully manages the compound’s two cannons, a dreamy young idler (Fleury) acts with comical fearlessness, several young women – Harry’s sister Louise, Fleury’s sister Miriam, and the “fallen woman” Lucy – evolve from their various styles of coquetry to more mature responsibility.

Farrell has great fun with stubborn and irreconcilable 19th-century beliefs that various characters consider more important than their very lives. The Padre (as they call the Church of England priest) pursues first Fleury, then the Collector with his absurd proofs of the existence of God (based on the complexities of nature, which he insists could only be the work of Intelligent Design), the Collector keeps making speeches, sometimes to himself, about the wonders of progress as seen in the inventions at the Great Exhibition (London, 1851), even as the siege forces him to reflect on the wondrous destructiveness of modern inventions and the resistance of India to what he sees as Progress. The one declared atheist in the group, the Magistrate, is ironic and sensible on most topics but is an absolute nut about phrenology, which he thinks explains all behavior. Dr. Dunstaple (Harry and Louise’s father) is so convinced of his theory that “an invisible cloud” (not bad water) is the cause of cholera, and so furious with the younger Dr. McNab who disagrees with him, that he publicly swallows “rice water” from a sick patient – and of course dies, quite unnecessarily, because he refuses McNab’s intelligent treatment. Many eccentric and interesting characters die in violent ways that nonetheless raise a smile because, like Dunstaple's, they are so counter to heroic tradition. One of the funniest scenes is also one of the most violent, in which Fleury is pursued through the destroyed Banquet Hall by a giant, saber-wielding Sepoy while he, Fleury, is unable to extricate any of his many weapons (daggers, pistols) from his cummerbund – until finally he gets an extremely heavy, multi-barreled pistol to fire all its barrels at once, disintegrating the upper half of his assailant.

There are no Indian characters with dialogue except Hari, Anglophile son of a local rajah, whose twisted Anglicisms further suggest the misguidedness of British imperial policy. Farrell also makes the point that a mainstay of the imperial enterprise is opium production in India for export to China.

Indian novelist Pankaj Mishra has written a helpful introduction, contrasting Farrell’s version (the 1973 Booker Prize-winner) to the many 19th century British novels about the mutiny, which (according to Mishra) celebrated the heroism and enlightenment of the British in contrast to the brutish savagery of the Indians. In Farrell’s version, the Brits are no more rational than the zamindars (rural landlords), who try to control monsoon flooding by having a Brahmin sacrifice a black goat. It's a view that became possible (and could find a reading public) only a hundred years after the events.

Image source

Birnbaum: Obama in the Lion's Den

I was impressed by this insightful essay by Norman Birnbaum in today's El País (in Spanish translation), so I looked for the original in English. Thanks to Snuffy Smith for posting it. Snuffysmith's Blog: Obama In The Lion's Den Norman Birnbaum

If you're concerned about US foreign policy, I urge you to read this in whatever language. If you are not, well, I urge you to find another planet, because this one is in trouble.

Madrid notes

Yesterday for the first time we drove to Madrid (we usually take the train, but track work is interrupting service), about 600 kilometers from Carboneras, which in our Smart For Two means only 45 liters of gasoline, so the shock of the record-high price (over €1.25 a liter for 95 octane) was puny compared to what it means for truckers and fishermen, both of whom are on or about to go on strike in many parts of Spain. The fishermen are caught between two big problems: the high price of gasoil, and the low price that the big buyers are paying for their product (plus that other problem that they prefer to ignore, the declining availability due to over-fishing). They are demanding that the government do something, and want to make consumers suffer (by shortages of goods that are not shipped) so that they will pressure the government, but what the government can do is not much. Fuel taxes in Spain are already much lower than in most of the rest of the European Union, and Spain has little to say about the price of imported oil. Long-run remedies (e.g., converting to other forms of fuel or changing the ways goods are transported) will be very long run and fiercely resisted by those with a stake in the present way of doing things. So the big truckers strike scheduled for tomorrow is just a futile expression of frustration.

Which reminds us of other futile outburst of frustration, where anger and violence have been directed at irrelevant targets. And that brings to mind the show we saw today at the Musel del Prado, Goya in Times of War.

It covers Goya's many genres from 1794 to 1820, but the highlights are the two large, famous canvases of "The 2nd of May, 1808" and "The 3rd of May, 1808," given special attention on the 200th anniversary of those bloody events in Madrid. On the second of May the common people and especially the poor rose up in a furious attack on the troops loyal to the French king, José Bonaparte (Napoleon's brother); on the third, those forces of order responded with brutal reprisals. Goya's paintings cry out against the irrational violence of both days -- wild and uncontrolled in the first scene, cruelly disciplined in the second. They are wonderful, frightening paintings, now meticulously repaired from the damage they suffered when they had to be evacuated from the bombings by Nationalist (and German and Italian) forces during the Spanish Civil War, another example of great destructive rage directed against the wrong targets. On the 2nd of May, killing French soldiers was not going to reduce hunger in Madrid; and the reprisals on the 3rd weren't going to help, either.

Goya knew about the horrors of war, which he portrayed in series of drawings and engravings. Makes us think of Baghdad.

Anyway, all these things are far more serious than the transport strike is likely to be, though who knows -- such deliberate disruptions of normal life can go wildly out of control, escalating to enormous violence.

I'm outta here!

Like the dark guy with the horns in the picture, I'm getting out of the bullring. Last October I promised an essay here on Spain every week, originally on Fridays and later on Sundays, just as though I were still a working journalist getting paid to meet deadlines. It was kind of fun as an experiment, and maybe good discipline, even though I was late a couple of times, and last week missed altogether. Now after about two dozen of of those almost-weekly essays, I've managed to touch most of the topics in Spain that most puzzled me and I'm releasing myself from that commitment. From now on, back to occasional reflections, on Spain or other things, as they occur to me and I have the time to develop them.

But first, a note on things to watch for in this country. The recently re-elected socialist government has had enormous luck in facing such stupendously clumsy opposition on the right and disorganization of the smaller forces to its left (especially the internecine battles of IU), but sooner or later the Partido Popular or some successor is going to pull itself together to attack its real vulnerabilities. First of all, the huge and sudden plunge in the construction industry and everything related, producing what the government calls a "profound deceleration" rather than a “crisis” -- but means record unemployment and mortgage rates. Not the government's fault, but it is their responsibility, and the “deceleration” may be deeper and longer than they're prepared for. And the other obvious vulnerability: the Partido Socialista Obrero is currently the only left party in power in Europe (unless you consider Gordon Brown "left," and consider England "Europe" -- but let's be serious).

To see all the original blog entries on Spain, back to 2003, click on the keyword "Spain" below.

More on globalization

I meant to post this earlier. It's still relevant.
Truths for a new world of them and us by Philip Stephens