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Capitalism Won't Save El Salvador |
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Friday, 29 January 2016 14:44 |
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Busch writes: "Market-led development pits private profit against the public good. It can't solve El Salvador's epidemic of violence."
Armed police patrol in San Salvador, El Salvador. (photo: Jan Sochor/Flickr)
Capitalism Won't Save El Salvador
By Michael Busch, Jacobin
29 January 16
Market-led development pits private profit against the public good. It can’t solve El Salvador’s epidemic of violence.
 hen the El Salvadoran government released its annual data on homicides earlier this month, the country received a dubious distinction: the Western Hemisphere’s bloodiest country. According to government statistics, more than 6,600 people were killed last year, rendering Central America’s smallest state the most violent country in the world not at war.
Most of the slaughter is linked — directly or indirectly — to the government’s fight against transnational gangs, and internecine conflicts between the gangs themselves. The effects are far reaching — beyond staggering body counts, the violence has contributed to a steadily building refugee crisis, increased violence against women, and a suffering economy.
Amid all this bad news, a smattering of hopeful stories has surfaced in the media. The articles tend to follow a common pattern, highlighting the potential for small businesses and internationally fostered public-private partnerships to lead El Salvador away from the brink of disaster.
The stories are certainly appealing: apparel factories that go out of their way to hire former gang members and put people to work; United Nations–sponsored development schemes that bring fresh water to rural communities; and multinational private investment schemes that reduce poverty in targeted areas of El Salvador even as the rest of the country’s poor suffer under the weight of dramatic socioeconomic inequality.
It also isn’t surprising that market-based solutions to El Salvador’s problems are suddenly being showcased and advanced. State-based efforts to address the country’s problems, while mixed, have been largely counterproductive. The government has introduced a number of positive policies designed to alleviate stress on El Salvador’s most economically vulnerable people.
Its focus on providing opportunities to youth who otherwise might be tempted to enter lives of crime has been equally admirable. But these initiatives have been dramatically overshadowed by clumsy efforts to confront gang power head-on. Not only is the government not winning the war, it increasingly looks weak and indecisive.
These missteps notwithstanding, the faith in market-based solutions is dangerously misplaced. Capitalism isn’t going to save El Salvador.
Take the case of a garment factory in Ciudad Arce, a suburb of the country’s capital, San Salvador. The small factory — which makes sports apparel for a Pennsylvania company called League Collegiate Outfitters — has been profiled by major media outlets numerous times over the last several years. It’s clear why. The factory’s manager, Rodrigo Bolaños, has cultivated a reputation for hiring former gang members, the disabled, and other people who face difficulty finding a job, and the company trumpets its commitment to investing heavily in its workers.
As the New York Times reported in a recent profile, workers enjoy a wide variety of benefits: from English lessons and high school equivalency classes to subsidized services such as child care, medical attention, reduced-priced meals, and even loans for workers “who want to raise tilapia in tanks at home for extra income.” Taken together, there is a lot to feel good about.
But stories like these obscure a more complicated reality. A public radio feature on the factory, while praising many of the company’s programs to support its workers, pointed out that it effectively operates as a sweatshop. “Driving around the nearby neighborhood where he wants to employ all the graduating seniors . . . factory director Bolaños concedes that the jobs at the factory don’t pay much.”
What does this mean in real, material terms for Ciudad Arce workers? Are low wages actually the basis for sustainable development? In most of the stories that praise market-led development in El Salvador, these lines of inquiry are brushed aside or ignored. Instead, the last word on poor pay — low even by local standards — is given to Bolaños, who insists, unsurprisingly, that “the experience gives people the tools to be successful in life. That, he says, is how the gang situation will disappear from El Salvador.”
There are troubling concerns of political economy at play as well. Small businesses like the factory in Ciudad Arce are routinely subjected to gang extortion. Conventional wisdom holds that El Salvador’s gangs derive their power in great part from narcotrafficking.
While there’s no question the country’s gangs play their part in the regional drug trade, they rely chiefly on shaking down local businesses for revenue. Without an adequate public security environment, small businesses become easy prey for gangs that line their pockets with proceeds from protection rackets.
This is a troubling paradox: without a government that enjoys monopoly over the use of force, market development at the local level ends up strengthening the grip of the gangs.
At the same time, it isn’t clear that local business leaders are entirely victimized by their dealings with the gangs. Even as they pay the mandated protection tax, disturbing evidence suggests that in some cases local businesses partner with the gangs to keep employees from organizing and advocating for their rights. A report issued earlier this year by the Center for Global Workers’ Rights at Penn State University detailed apparent connections between local garment factories and the gangs.
“It is an increasingly common practice of Salvadoran employers to retain the services of gang members,” its authors argue, “when trying to eliminate the presence of independent union organizing.” The report details a number of incidents in which gangsters intimidated, threatened, and physically attacked workers attempting to secure their rights.
At the national and international level, highly touted public-private partnerships (PPPs) are equally questionable. On their face, PPPs are designed to attract foreign investment and include private actors as stakeholders in the provision of public goods. Supporters of public-private compacts point to a standard menu of intended benefits: market growth, job creation, and poverty reduction.
But critics contend these “partnerships” are nothing more than window dressing, concealing schemes to privatize public utilities and strip governments of their sovereign prerogatives. Far from helping communities in need, they argue, PPPs expose local resources to foreign exploitation and lock poor countries into relationships of conditionality with wealthier states. Access to aid, in turn, becomes contingent on market performance.
In El Salvador, a group called the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) has been the major player in facilitating public-private partnerships. Created by the US Congress in 2004, the MCC fashions itself an independent foreign aid agency, operating above the political fray while providing assistance to developing countries in the form of five-year “compacts.”
The MCC’s activities in El Salvador initially focused heavily on the country’s northern region, but since securing a second compact with the government in 2014, the corporation has expanded into other areas. Wherever it operates, the focus stays the same: partnering with private enterprise to increase labor productivity and connect markets inside the country and across borders.
Writing for the Hill’s Congress Blog last year, MCC board member Susan McCue touted the corporation’s successes in El Salvador and outlined its approach. “When MCC invests in a country,” she explained, “it doesn’t simply write a check — it lays out clear expectations. In the case of El Salvador, that means a commitment from the government to work with the private sector to slash red tape and create public-private partnerships.”
According to McCue, her organization enjoys enthusiastic support not just from government officials and local elites, but from ordinary Salvadorans. “At a farm cooperative, workers talked about their gratitude to MCC for providing training and tools that allowed them to diversify into more lucrative crops.” These aren’t simply perceived improvements, McCue argues. “Poverty rates in Chalatenango — where a large portion of MCC’s investments were made — are down.”
What McCue’s glowing review omits is that the MCC actively coerced the government — apparently at Washington’s direction — to roll back a social welfare program targeting poor rural farmers, among other demands.
The program in question, a free seeds and fertilizer plan initiated by El Salvador’s previous president, was designed to prevent hundreds of thousands of subsistence farmers from experiencing food insecurity. Instead it was deemed in violation of the Central America Free Trade Agreement.
The MCC withheld hundreds of millions of development dollars — part of a second, successfully negotiated compact — until the government agreed to eliminate the subsidy and open local seeds markets to international competition.
Even supporters of PPPs were alarmed. As Oxfam noted at the time:
What is concerning about this scenario is that new, eleventh-hour conditions, unrelated to a compact’s content, risk interfering with the formula that served MCC and the Salvadoran people so well during the first compact . . . In fact, attaching new conditions after a compact has been negotiated and approved by the MCC board comes uncomfortably close to replicating the worst history of conditionality in development aid, where reforms aim mainly at donor interests, or become a box-checking exercise to release aid funds.
The MCC ultimately eased away from its demands following public protest, but the lesson was obvious enough: market-led development pits private profit against the public good, and tips the balance in favor of capital.
Is there a better way forward?
Across Latin America, countries are at an important juncture in their search for appropriate engines of growth. El Salvador is no exception, though its challenges are unique. Business wields enormous influence; the leftist government struggles to maintain power; and, as El Salvador’s 2015 murder rate suggests, insecurity is endemic. Beyond these basic issues, the government must contend with a wilted economy and figure out ways to put people to work.
How to accomplish this is a question without easy answers, but a state focused on guarding the needs of the many against the interests of a few would be a promising start. Free marketeering, however well intentioned or grassroots it may be, is not the solution.
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FOCUS: A Step Toward Election Transparency |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=15946"><span class="small">Bill Moyers, Moyers & Company</span></a>
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Friday, 29 January 2016 12:51 |
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Moyers writes: "Barack Obama once confessed to politics' original sin but has yet to atone for it. He now has an opportunity to do so. I speak of his promiscuous relationship with money in politics."
Bill Moyers. (photo: PBS)
A Step Toward Election Transparency
By Bill Moyers, Moyers & Company
29 January 16
It's time for the president to make federal contractors disclose their political spending.
 arack Obama once confessed to politics’ original sin but has yet to atone for it. He now has an opportunity to do so.
I speak of his promiscuous relationship with money in politics. During his 2008 race for the White House, Obama opted out of the public funding system for presidential campaigns — the first candidate of a major party to do so since the system was created in 1976, after the Watergate scandals. His defection chilled hopes that public funding might enable everyday citizens to check the power of the super rich and their super PACs, countering the influence of “dark money” — contributions that cannot be traced to their donors.
A friend of mine, a prominent conservative Republican who champions campaign finance reform (yes, there are some and we get along marvelously!) recently told me he believes Obama’s decision was a significant blow to the cause for reform. Six years ago, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court tried to finish it off when they ruled for Big Money — unlimited amounts of it — in their Citizens United decision.
In his first State of the Union in 2010, President Obama denounced Citizens United, saying that it would reverse a century of law and open “the floodgates for special interests.” He was just as blunt last year when he declared flatly that Citizens United was “wrong” and had caused “real harm to our democracy.” Right on all counts. Public interest advocates Lisa Gilbert of Public Citizen and Stephen Spaulding of Common Cause recently reminded us that since Citizens United “special interests have spent over $500 million from secret, undisclosed sources.”
Think of it as poison poured into the mainstream of democracy, just as toxic as the lead released in Flint, Michigan’s drinking water.
Americans of every stripe know money corrodes our politics. In a poll last year, The New York Times and CBS found that 85 percent of us think the system for funding political campaigns should be fundamentally changed or completely rebuilt.
President Obama knows it, too. Despite his own apostasy, he has spoken eloquently over the years against the present system.
Unfortunately, he has done nothing about it. He’s gone AWOL in our biggest battle for democracy.
Which brings us back to his confession. During that first campaign for president, the Boston Globe reported that “In Obama’s eight years in the Illinois Senate, from 1996 to 2004, almost two-thirds of the money he raised for his campaigns — $296,000 of $461,000 — came from PACs, corporate contributions, or unions…and many other corporate interests…”
Confronted with this by Tim Russert on Meet the Press, Obama replied: “I have said repeatedly that money is the original sin in politics and I am not sinless.”
Far from sinless, he has in fact been a serial sinner. From repeated campaigns for the state legislature, through his one campaign for the US Senate, to his last campaign for president in 2012, money from organized interests poured into his coffers. The finance industry, communications industry, the health industry — they all had a piece of him, sometimes a very big piece. In his defense, Obama said he could not “unilaterally disarm.” So like the young Augustine of Hippo, who prayed, “Lord, grant me chastity… but not yet,” Barack Obama was saying that when the time arrived, he would sin no more.
Well, Mr. President, it’s time. You have no more campaigns to wage. With a little less than 12 months left in the White House, you have the opportunity to atone for exploiting a system that you have deplored in words if not deeds. You can restart the engine of reform and even demonstrate that Citizens United can be tamed. Just take out your pen and sign an executive order compelling federal contractors to disclose their political spending. In one stroke you can put an end to a blatant practice of political bribery that would be one small step for you and one giant leap for democracy.
It’s an open-and-shut case. In fewer than five minutes, you could face the cameras and announce your decision:
My fellow Americans. I have today signed an executive order requiring any company with a federal contract to disclose how much they spend on politicians and lobbyists, and who is receiving their money.
There are several reasons for this.
First, federal contracting is big business. In 2013 alone, the United States government spent about $460 billion dollars on contracting, with $177 billion of that going to just 25 companies. Since the year 2000, the top 10 contractors have raked in $1.5 trillion in federal contracts.
That’s your money. All of it comes from taxpayers. And as the economic analyst Robert Reich reminds us, you are footing the bill twice over. You pay for these corporations to lobby for those contracts. Then you pay for the stuff they sell us. It’s only fair that you see how much it costs for corporations to buy influence.
Second, there is a direct relationship between what a corporation spends on campaign contributions and the amount it receives back in government spending. Federal contractors have long been banned from contributing to federal candidates, parties or political committees, but that ban does not apply to their executives, shareholders and political action committees. In fact, since the Citizens United decision in 2010, contractors have been free to contribute unlimited amounts of undisclosed money to super PACs and the shadowy operations known as “social welfare organizations.”
It’s now possible for companies that get government contracts to secretly — let me say it again, secretly — spend untold amounts to elect and re-elect the very legislators who are awarding them those contracts. That’s wrong. It’s a terrible conflict of interest that undermines the integrity of government.
Some of you will remember that I said the Citizens United decision would harm democracy. I wish it were not so, but I was right; this secrecy in influence peddling by federal contractors is a bad thing. It wastes your money. It distorts the relationship between your government and business. It works against start-up entrepreneurs who can’t afford to hire lobbyists or make political contributions while entrenched old-line companies hire former government officials — members of Congress and their staffs in particular — to steer business their way. Let’s put an end to these practices, once and for all.
Third, an open democracy is an honest democracy. Disclosure is the foundation of public trust in government and business, while secrecy invites corruption. Even the Supreme Court justice who wrote the majority opinion for Citizens United acknowledged this to be true. Justice Anthony Kennedy belongs to another party than I. He adheres to a different ideology. But listen to what he wrote: “With the advent of the Internet, prompt disclosure of [political] expenditures can provide shareholders and citizens with the information needed to hold corporations and elected officials accountable for their positions and supporters. Shareholders can determine whether their corporation’s political speech advances the corporation’s interest in making profits, and citizens can see whether elected officials are ‘in the pocket’ of so-called moneyed interests.” I agree with Justice Kennedy.
You see, undisclosed money — “dark money” — is not “free speech” as its proponents claim. To the contrary. It’s a threat to free speech, especially to citizens like you. Even if you believe money is speech, don’t you and every other American have a right to know who’s speaking? Secrecy weakens democracy’s backbone, causing it to become brittle — so brittle that fractures are now commonplace. That’s one reason Washington is broken and dysfunctional.
As Justice Kennedy himself — the author of the Citizens United decision, remember — recently admitted, our system “is not working the way it should.” The executive order I have signed today is a step toward helping us see why it is not working and giving us a way to start fixing it. We are casting sunshine on a system badly in need of light.
Sadly, I must report to you that Republicans in Congress are opposed to sunshine. They prefer government do business in the dark, out of your sight and away from the prying eyes of reporters. But the Sunlight Foundation has discovered that over one recent five-year period 200 of the most politically active corporations spent a combined $5.8 billion on federal lobbying and campaign contributions and, in return, got $4.4 trillion in federal business and support. Yes, $4.4 trillion — with a “t.” That’s an enormous return on their investment in lobbyists and politicians.
Earlier this month I delivered my last State of the Union address to you. I told you that, “We have to reduce the influence of money in our politics, so that a handful of families or hidden interests can’t bankroll our elections. And if our existing approach to campaign finance reform can’t pass muster in the courts, we need to work together to find a real solution.”
My record on this issue may not inspire confidence, but I offer this executive order as an act of genuine penitence. And I pledge to you that in my remaining months as president I intend to take more steps to put right what I have helped to keep wrong. When I leave this office next January there will be no private citizen in the country more active in the fight to save our public life from the pernicious grip of private greed.
I am not a saint; I am a sinner. But I have been born again — again. And this time I will keep the faith. If you believe in democracy, join me.
Thank you and good night.
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FOCUS: A Mosquito Net Descends Across the Americas |
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Friday, 29 January 2016 11:47 |
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McKibben writes: "The Zika virus provides a glimpse into a future we should do everything possible to avoid, a terrifying reminder why the fight for a stable physical planet is the fight of our time."
Climate activist Bill McKibben. (photo: 350.org)
A Mosquito Net Descends Across the Americas
By Bill McKibben, Reader Supported News
29 January 16
e are a few weeks away from the 70th anniversary of Winston Churchill's famous speech in Fulton, Missouri, the one where he announced (with Churchillian timbre) that "from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent." He named the geopolitical fact that would dominate the globe for the next 40 years, the single factor that would focus, and often warp and distort, everyone's worldview for most of the rest of the 20th century.
Sometime in the last 10 days, a mosquito net has descended across the Americas. It is unlikely to cause armed conflict between great powers, but unless we are very lucky, the new divisions it creates are likely to linger, truncating and deforming relationships, and changing the way that rising generations view the world in which they live.
And in the meantime, it's pure agony for women and families across Latin and South America. The Zika virus has been in circulation in Africa for some time, apparently, but in the last two years it made a decisive crossing into South America -- perhaps into Brazil, perhaps with the World Cup soccer tournament. In any event, in this previously unexposed population it is producing a particularly horrifying havoc. Last year, 4,000 microcephalic babies were born in Brazil -- that is, babies with small, rounded heads. (They were called "pinheads" in the 19th century, when they were common sideshow exhibits. It's gross -- and we've since, thank God, learned to think more thoughtfully about children with birth defects -- but there's no denying the visceral pain the image still evokes.) This increase, from the normal baseline of a couple of hundred cases, obviously alarmed Brazilians -- there are at the moment 220,000 troops deployed across the country. Their job is to turn over flowerpots and empty tires of standing water.
That's because it's mosquitoes that spread zika. Aedes egypti, in particular, the same species that spreads other newly worrisome diseases, such as chikunyunga. In some measure, that rapid spread is paced by climate change. As the New York Times said in the first story about the disease, researchers are particularly worried that "climate change may be allowing viruses like Zika to thrive in new domains." The World Health Organization pointed out this morning that the hot, wet El Nino was part of the story -- and of course they've been tracking the worldwide spread of dengue, carried by the same mosquito, as that long-feared disease finds vast new swaths in which to thrive. The concern is obvious, since global-warming creates new habitats for mosquitoes -- they love the warmer, wetter world we are systematically building. As Maria Diuk-Wasser of Yale's School of Public Health told Scientific American in 2013, speaking before the Zika scare, "The direct effects of temperature increase are an increase in immature mosquito development, virus development and mosquito-biting rates, which increase contact rates (biting) with humans."
In any event, the disease is spreading very rapidly, as one again would expect in an area with such tight air links. By last week, the Centers for Disease Control had listed 24 countries that American women thinking of becoming pregnant should avoid (a warning that came too late for some; a microcephalic baby was born in Hawaii a few weeks ago, to a mother who had traveled to Brazil early in her pregnancy). By this week, the major air carriers in the region had announced they would refund the tickets of any passengers who no longer wanted to travel into the Zika zone.
Inside that zone, of course, was where the real damage was being done. To their credit, health authorities seemed to be speaking up promptly, and not minimizing the crisis. In Brazil, Colombia, and Jamaica, health ministers urged residents not to become pregnant. In El Salvador, the authorities said last week that couples should postpone pregnancy until at least 2018. That's remarkable, and perhaps unprecedented, like something out of a particularly grim Margaret Atwood novel. Imagine what it must be like to be pregnant right now in some Recife favela or Kingston slum, just waiting to see if your child is born damaged.
President Obama yesterday urged fast development of vaccines and treatments (there are none at the moment), which is good. And today the World Health Organization (burned by its slow response to Ebola) announced it was scrambling to put plans into action. But in the meantime, the fears are so visceral and the images so graphic that it's possible to imagine a future where easy contact begins to break down. (Zika has also been tentatively linked to a bizarre condition called Guillain-Barre, whose victims are paralyzed for weeks or longer.) The social and ideological stresses of the 20th century divided the world into distinct camps; now, as we are forcing the planet's physical systems to change at the same breakneck pace, it seems possible that we'll see a replay of those divisions, this time along epidemiological lines, and as usual making life hardest for those who have done the least to cause our problems. Zika provides a glimpse into a future we should do everything possible to avoid, a terrifying reminder why the fight for a stable physical planet is the fight of our time.
Bill McKibben is scholar in residence at Middlebury College, and the author of "The End of Nature, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities" and the "Durable Future and Earth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet." He is also the founder of 350.org, the global climate campaign that has been actively involved in the fight against natural gas fracking.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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Six Responses to Bernie Skeptics |
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Friday, 29 January 2016 09:49 |
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Reich: "If both house of Congress remain in Republican hands, no Democrat will be able to get much legislation through Congress, and will have to rely instead on executive orders and regulations. But there's a higher likelihood of kicking Republicans out if Bernie's 'political revolution' continues to surge around America, bringing with it millions of young people and other voters, and keeping them politically engaged."
Robert Reich. (photo: Richard Morgenstein)
Six Responses to Bernie Skeptics
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
29 January 16
- “He’d never beat Trump or Cruz in a general election.”
Wrong. According to the latest polls, Bernie is the strongest Democratic candidate in the general election, defeating both Donald Trump and Ted Cruz in hypothetical matchups. (The latest RealClear Politics averages of all polls shows Bernie beating Trump by a larger margin than Hillary beats Trump, and Bernie beating Cruz while Hillary loses to Cruz.)
- “He couldn’t get any of his ideas implemented because Congress would reject them.”
If both house of Congress remain in Republican hands, no Democrat will be able to get much legislation through Congress, and will have to rely instead on executive orders and regulations. But there’s a higher likelihood of kicking Republicans out if Bernie’s “political revolution” continues to surge around America, bringing with it millions of young people and other voters, and keeping them politically engaged.
- “America would never elect a socialist.”
P-l-e-a-s-e. America’s most successful and beloved government programs are social insurance – Social Security and Medicare. A highway is a shared social expenditure, as is the military and public parks and schools. The problem is we now have excessive socialism for the rich (bailouts of Wall Street, subsidies for Big Ag and Big Pharma, monopolization by cable companies and giant health insurers, giant tax-deductible CEO pay packages) – all of which Bernie wants to end or prevent.
- “His single-payer healthcare proposal would cost so much it would require raising taxes on the middle class.”
This is a duplicitous argument. Single-payer systems in other rich nations have proven cheaper than private for-profit health insurers because they don’t spend huge sums on advertising, marketing, executive pay, and billing. So even if the Sanders single-payer plan did require some higher taxes, Americans would come out way ahead because they’d save far more than that on health insurance.
- “His plan for paying for college with a tax on Wall Street trades would mean colleges would run by government rules.”
Baloney. Three-quarters of college students today already attend public universities financed largely by state governments, and they’re not run by government rules. The real problem is too many young people still can’t afford a college education. The move toward free public higher education that began in the 1950s with the G.I. Bill and extended into the 1960s came to an abrupt stop in the 1980s. We must restart it.
- “He’s too old.”
Untrue. He’s in great health. Have you seen how agile and forceful he is as he campaigns around the country? These days, 70s are the new 60s. (He’s younger than four of the nine Supreme Court justices.) In any event, the issue isn’t age; it’s having the right values. FDR was paralyzed, and JFK had Addison’s Crohn’s diseases, but they were great presidents because they fought adamantly for social and economic justice.
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he theme of this year’s 
