Nicaragua on The Huffington Post

Jerry Zezima: The Smoke's On Me

2009-12-16T18:47:00Z

Everybody knows that cigar smoking can kill you, but very few people know why. Here's the reason: Whenever a man wants to smoke, which he can do almost nowhere these days but in his own home, his wife makes him go outside. And there, depending on the season, he either freezes to death or dies of sunstroke.

As the Bible says, ashes to ashes.

Still, I like a good cigar once in a while. And I have had none better than the one I smoked recently. That's because I rolled it myself.

I got a lesson in the fine art of cigar rolling from Julio Polanco, who runs a cigar company called, oddly enough, Polanco Cigars.

The first thing I found out when I went to his shop in Port Jefferson, N.Y., was that Polanco and I have a lot in common. Like me, he has a wife and two grown daughters.

"Does your wife let you smoke in the house?" I asked.

"No," Polanco said. "She makes me go outside."

"My wife doesn't let me smoke in the house, either," I said. "If I get a hankering for a cigar and the weather is lousy, I go in the garage."

"You're lucky you have a garage," Polanco said. "I live in an apartment, so I have to park on the street."

"I guess you can't smoke in the car, either," I said.

"No," Polanco replied, "but I solved the problem by opening a cigar shop. Now I smoke here."

The shop, which is small but nice, has two couches and a large-screen TV.

"A lot of my customers come in to watch soccer," Polanco said. "One guy always wants me to put on Dominican music so he can dance."

"Has anyone ever wanted you to show him how to roll a cigar?" I asked.

"Yes," Polanco said.

"How did he do?" I inquired.

"Not so good," Polanco said. "But at least he didn't cut off any of his fingers. I bet you'll do better."

As I sat at a table behind the counter, Polanco said I could choose one of three kinds of wrappers: Brazil, Sumatra or Connecticut.

"I'm originally from Connecticut," I said. "Can I get frequent flier miles if I choose either Brazil or Sumatra?"

"I don't think so," Polanco said.

"In that case," I replied, "I'll take Connecticut."

The tobacco used for Connecticut wrappers is mild, explained Polanco, who is from the Dominican Republic, where his father, Pablo, founded the company, which fills orders from around the world on its Web site: polancocigars.net.

"The filler for our cigars comes from the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua, which gives them a better taste," said Polanco, who gave me a wrapper and said the veins should go on the inside.

"My veins are on the inside, too," I said as I laid the wrapper on the table and tried pathetically to wrap it, not too loose and not too tight, around the filler. My fingers fairly fumbled as Polanco looked on in amusement.

"You have to put the wrapper at the right angle," he said as he showed me how it's done.

I got the hang of it, sort of, until it came time to use a brush to apply a naturally grown glue (made with tree powder and water) to the edge of the wrapper. I got more glue on my fingers than on the wrapper. Then I had to use a rounded knife to cut the excess wrapper and the tip of the cigar without, somehow, giving myself an extreme manicure.

"You did it!" exclaimed Polanco, who added that it would take me a while (perhaps years) to become a master roller but that I wasn't as bad as that other customer.

I took my cigar home and, a couple of days later, on an unseasonably mild afternoon, went outside for a sensational smoke.

Would my wife have let me smoke my very own creation inside? Close, but no cigar.

Stamford Advocate columnist Jerry Zezima can be reached at JerryZ111@optonline.net. His blog is www.jerryzezima.blogspot.com.

Bonnie St. John: Searching For "She-roes" in Nicaragua

2009-12-09T15:30:26Z

Through the eyes of Darcy (15 yrs old):

Yesterday was life-changing. I could write a book about this one part of my visit to Nicaragua, so describing it in a few paragraphs is going to be a challenge. I'll start at the beginning. The main reason for our visit to Nicaragua: to interview a woman for the book my mom and I are writing together. The book, "How Strong Women Lead," which will come out in 2011, will feature women of all backgrounds - famous, unheard of, and everything in-between- who are leaders of their community or even the known world! We have already interviewed the President of Liberia and are setting up interviews with the Chairman of Deloitte and the CEO of Eileen Fisher Clothing (namely, Eileen Fisher).

The woman we wanted to interview in Nicaragua is Noemi Vivas Ocana who promised to be a shining example of how women lead everywhere, at all levels. She had received a micro-finance loan through Opportunity International when her life was on the edge and now she worked full time empowering other women to improve their lives. Opportunity International had graciously agreed to introduce us and help us meet and interview her co-workers and family to get the full story.

We took a taxi from Granada (where we were staying) to Managua where we met up with the rest of gang before heading down to Masachapa. The cast of characters:

Veronique - our professional photographer, with beautiful, curly black hair as thick as her French accent.

Raquel - our Spanish translator. We would have been completely lost not only without her translations, but her warmth and wisdom, as well. Ruth - an Opportunity International employee from Chicago who took far more notes as we went along than even I did.

Although most of us were complete strangers to one another at the start, by the end of the day we were closer than some become in a lifetime.

The road from Managua to San Rafael carved up a mountain covered in rainforest, the twists of turns of which almost made me sick before we reached the village. Once we got there, we interviewed Noemi for an hour to get a sense of her history and life story.

Noemi grew up in the rural, sea-side village of Masachapa, selling fish and jewelry as a child to support her eight other siblings while looking after them and attending school as well. She had funded her school fees out of her own earnings and often had to take a sibling or two with her to school rather than miss out. Her passion for learning earned her a scholarship to complete high school and a certification that landed her a good government job. But 14 years later when her job was eliminated, she could find no other job to support her three children. She found herself right back where she was as a school girl: selling fish and homemade jewelry to tourists for survival. Living in one of the poorest countries in the world, education sometimes is still no defense against poverty.

In 1998, she received a micro-finance loan from Opportunity International that helped her grow her small business. Moving up from fish to selling shrimp was a boost to her income. Another loan allowed her to buy a freezer and have more quantity to sell with no waste. Gradually, through a series of loans, she worked her way up to a better life.

Noemi was named by her peers as the Treasurer and then President of her "Trust group"--the group of women who support one another with their businesses and loans. Soon she was asked to become a loan officer and help multiple Trust Groups. Now she works as the head of the regional office for Opportunity International overseeing the 17 or so loan officers who support and empower over 1200 women working to support their families.

We broke for lunch--although I abstained, as my stomach still hadn't recovered from the ride up. Afterwards, we continued on in our team van to one of the "trust groups" that Noemi oversees in the nearby village of Masachapa. These are groups of around 20 women who meet on a weekly basis to support each other as mothers, women, business owners, and Christians, in addition to just making loan repayments. It was truly inspirational to see these women of one of the poorest countries in the world coming together to take care of each other and their community.

We also got to see some sharks in a cooler, a couple of guys riding in the back of an open trunk, a lady with a very whiskery chin (but not quite a goatee), and half a dozen stray dogs. What stuck with me the most, however, was when Noemi's daughter burst into tears trying to
describe how much she admires her mother. We interviewed two of her four daughters on the front porch of their house. With Noemi's adopted 3-year-old - who possessed one of the cutest smiles known to man -running around with a teddy bear in hand as Veronique snapped dozens of pictures of her, Rachel humorously translated the girls' responses to our questions about life with their mother, different aspects of leadership, and their ambitions for the future.

The whole experience, however, became its sweetest when we interviewed Noemi for the last time back at her office in San Rafael. By then, I think, the whole gang had become much more comfortable with each other, and everyone had a question of their own for Noemi. It was difficult to end the interview, with the flow of conversation barely halted by the language barrier. Not only were Noemi's answers unique and full of wisdom, but her eyes penetrating and sincere as she spoke. She is motivated by creating a deeper connection between human beings than most people are even aware exists. I don't think I'll be able to resist sharing some of what she imparted to us with teachers and classmates when I return to school on Monday. I wish more of my classmates shared Noemi's passion for education, spirituality, and improving the life of others.

Richard Walden: 7 Gifts that Give Back to the World

2009-11-24T14:47:09Z

This holiday season there are a number of ways you can donate to powerful causes in honor of family and friends that they would wholeheartedly endorse in lieu of a gift:

1. Water purification tablets to disaster-prone areas like Cuba, Haiti, The Philippines, Vietnam and Sri Lanka. Each $125 buys 10,000 tablets delivered by air, each of which purifies over 25 liters of water. Think of the many children whom you'll protect from diarrhea and other water-borne diseases. Recently, Operation USA sent 2 million such tablets to The Philippines after it was struck by several typhoons. Local partner nonprofits distribute the tablets to many of the residents still battling the after-effects of the storms.

2. Why stop there? Drill a water well in East Africa, Central America or South and Southeast Asia. The cost varies but figure $500 if the water table is not too deep. Or, you can dig deeper -- literally -- and allow existing wells to be deepened to reach the water table; that would average $1000.

3. Make a loan to a woman in a rural community so she can launch a small-scale agricultural, animal husbandry or fresh food preparation project. Most of us know how dramatically these loans improve lives by improving livelihoods -- $50 buys 20 chickens; $100 buys 25 chickens, a rooster, materials for a small hen house and some start-up chicken feed; $150 buys a large pig ready to reproduce while an extra $100 provides the pig a cement pig pen linked to a $250 rubber bladder and tubing so the pig's excrement can be processed as biogas to run a stove or heat a small house. The variations of what people use these loans for are endless but most microfinance groups report whole villages being rejuvenated by an infusion of small amounts of capital. The kids get their school fees paid, the family can afford health care and the projects are expanded into real small businesses. Well over 95 percent of the loans are paid back into a small village "credit bank" for relending to others who wish to follow the example of the early borrowers.

4. Vitamin A capsules save a child's sight in many parts of the world where there is a shortage of Vitamin A-rich food. Xeropthalmia is what happens when there is not enough Vitamin A in a child's diet. This not only threatens a child's vision but exacerbates a host of other diseases like malaria and jeopardizes young lives.This gift has astonishing returns on an investment of $45 per thousand Vitamin A capsules, since a child of 5 to 8-years-old only needs 2 capsules taken 6 months apart to provide long-term protection against this insidious condition. You can protect 500 kids for $45, at 9 cents per child! That's the cost of two apple martinis in a trendy club or a movie date with popcorn and parking.

5. You can send a child to school for between $25 to $150. That includes fees, textbooks, school supplies, a uniform and transportation for one child. In rural Vietnam, the average cost is $25 and in rural Nicaragua the costs total $150. For $2000 you can also pay a credentialed teacher in Nicaragua for a year; $1500 in Vietnam; $1200 in Cambodia. Oprah spent $40 million on one school in South Africa, but you can build your own large schoolroom for 50 kids in most parts of Africa, South Asia or Central America for $15,000 to $30,000. In India, poor school hygiene and water are issues in school, in many cases keeping girls from getting a primary education because they do not want to share toilet facilities with the boys. For $5000 you can drill the school water well, install two bathrooms with hygienic toilets for boys and girls, train teachers how to effectively teach hygiene and upgrade the school's food service.

6. A completely outfitted motorized 6 meter-long fishing boat with nets and hooks in post-tsunami and post-war Sri Lanka costs $3500. You know the adage about a man and a fish: The fisherfolk pay back to a village pool of capital for the next fishing family to use.

7. You may be asking by now, what about OUR kids here at home? Awesome Girls in New Orleans provides after school services to at-risk teenage girls at a cost of about $200 per girl per year. in California, nearly 200 nonprofit community health clinics receive medicines, vitamin supplements and clinical supplies donated by many American companies at a shipping cost of $25 for a 30 to 40 pound box; as more people become unemployed and lose their health insurance and access to health care, they use community clinics whose own budgets rarely allow them to pay for more than the rent and a few salaried staff -- They rely on volunteer medical staff and donated supplies to provide the essential social safety net all of us want them to have.

Operation USA, (www.opusa.org) does all of these projects and much more, including health clinics, emergency medical aid to disasters, literacy projects. The best news is that others do this, too. charitynavigator.org a the watchdog group that can lead you to the others. Just be careful of the TV preachers with slick websites who prey (not pray) on the unsuspecting by offering their own catalog of good works!

Nicaragua: Daniel Ortega's Tactics 'Reek Of Authoritarianism', Says John Kerry

2009-11-03T08:56:44Z

Pro-government demonstrators rocked the U.S. Embassy as opposition leaders complained the president is undermining Nicaragua's democracy in his effort to remain in power.

Javier Corrales: Nicaragua: Déjà Coup All Over Again?

2009-11-03T00:21:05Z

This week, the United States helped bring an end to a serious political crisis in Honduras. A similar crisis is now brewing in Nicaragua. This time, the United States won't be as lucky.

In both cases, the root cause of the crisis was the same: elected presidents seeking to prolong their stay in office in violation of constitutional procedures. In Honduras, president Manuel Zelaya insisted on conducting an electoral consultation on whether to have a referendum to end term limits. The attorney general, the Congress, and the Supreme Court deemed this process unconstitutional and ordered the military to remove Zelaya. This coup produced the condemnation of most nations, including the United States, plunging the hemisphere into a serious crisis because the de facto government enjoyed widespread support at home. After many mistakes, the United States finally helped broker an agreement between the de facto government and Zelaya, paving the way for Zelaya's return to the presidency with far more limited powers than Zelaya ever had.

In Honduras, the administration deserves some credit. It stayed true to a widely praised promise made in the April Summit of the Americas: to adhere to international law. The relevant law was the 2001 Democratic Charter of the Organization of the American States, which calls on members to condemn any interruption of constitutional democracy.

But in Honduras, the United States also got lucky. The "condemned government" was ultimately a friend of the United States, respectful of democracy, embarrassed about the possibility of needing to repress, interested in preserving economic ties with the United States, and more important, uninterested in staying in office beyond the scheduled November elections. All of this boosted U.S. leverage.

In Nicaragua, the wrongdoer displays none of these attributes. U.S. leverage there will be close to nil.

The wrongdoer in Nicaragua is president Daniel Ortega. The very same person who tried to establish a dictatorship in Nicaragua in the 1980s, and then tried every possible trick to get himself re-elected until he finally succeeded in 2007, has just convinced a constitutional panel of the Supreme Court, populated by Danielistas, to rule that Article 147 of the Constitution, establishing term limits, is "inapplicable." This ruling has unleashed a new crisis.

There are at least three serious problems with this ruling. First, the ruling itself has few antecedents in the history of judicial review. Essentially, the court declared that an article in the Constitution is unconstitutional. This logic-defying argument has convinced no one in Nicaragua except die-hard Danielistas.

Second, Ortega is replicating Zelaya's tactics of using undemocratic tricks. In this case, the trick consisted of convincing no more than six judges, all Danielistas, to side with the president. This was done behind closed doors and in a matter of days, violating Article 194 stating that only the legislature can change the constitution.

Third, it's not just the procedure but also the actual change that is problematic. To understand the seriousness of both Zelaya's and Ortega's move, it helps to review the history of presidential term limits in Latin America. Presidential term limits are a Latin American invention--an antidote against dictators. They appear for the first time in the 1853 Argentine constitution, written in response to the dictatorship of Juan Manuel de Rosas (1829-1831, 1835-1852). Argentine democratic legal scholars back then were trying to come up with solution to the now well understood problem of incumbent's advantage, the idea that time is always on the side of the incumbent. As time progresses, presidents can co-opt more actors, by appointing more loyalists to the courts, electoral supervisory boards, and the military, and by assigning more state contracts to friends, family and favored groups. In democracies with weak institutions of checks and balances, this advantage is even starker. Some mechanism needed to be invented to stop the clock on presidents, hence presidential term limits.

Most presidential democracies, including the United States, followed suit and implemented some form of presidential term limit in the 20th century. The right of citizens to choose was compromised for the sake of another democratic ideal--safeguarding a level-playing between the incumbent and the opposition.

It is ironic that this criollo democratic doctrine is now under assault in precisely the region where it was born. Many countries in Latin America have relaxed term limits in the past two decades, invariably leading to political tensions. In countries where non-transparent tricks have been used, such as in Honduras and now Nicaragua, the crises have been more explosive.

In Spanish, there is a term for Zelaya's and Ortega's tricks--a golpe desde el estado, in contrast to a golpe de estado, a coup from the state rather than against the state. These golpes desde el estado, whereby the president uses questionable means to erode checks and balances, has become the most recurrent threat to democracy in the region.

The Honduras crisis ended because the United States succeeded in convincing all parties that both types of coups--the golpes de estado and the golpes desde el estado--are inadmissible. But in Nicaragua, this won't happen. Ortega is interested in a confrontation with the United States, not a rapprochement. He is deeply interested in staying in power forever and is not afraid of polarization (after all, he provoked a civil war in the 1980s). Furthermore, unlike Honduras, Nicaragua hardly trades with the United States, so U.S. sanctions will matter little.

In short, the success that the United States had in Honduras won't be repeated in Nicaragua. U.S. diplomats should not conclude that the crisis in Central America is over.

Peter Lehner: A Goal for Copenhagen: Keep the Focus on Enforcement

2009-09-24T14:52:38Z

Few seem willing to address the issue openly, but one of the toughest issues to address when delegates gather in Copenhagen in December for the global conference on climate change will be governance. Many developing nations attending have stressed and under-funded civil systems. Others are torn by armed conflict and human suffering that push enforcement of environmental laws to the fringes of the political priority list. As an experienced environmental prosecutor, I know how hard it is to achieve compliance particularly with environmental laws which are often perceived as not posing the type of immediate threat to public safety that ordinary crimes are -- even in a stable democracy such as the United States. I also know what happens without enforcement: Very little.

Beyond my experience as a prosecutor, I also have a personal connection with a story that proves this point. That experience is with the tale of two modest Central American nations, Costa Rica and Nicaragua -- neighbors who share a long common border, similar environmental laws -- and vastly different records of enforcement. I've watched this tale unfold first-hand for nearly 30 years during frequent visits to the region to help with family businesses in Nicaragua and Costa Rica. (The family coffee farm there is Rainforest Alliance-certified.)

When economic expansion, cheap credit for cattle and laws favoring deforestation all contributed to a dramatic loss of Costa Rica's lush tropical rain forest between 1950 and the mid-1980s, alarm bells went off in the corridors of power. Vast stretches of remaining public forest land were placed under protection, national parks were expanded and reforestation projects launched. With a well-established rule of law and functioning government institutions, the protection worked. A quarter of the nation's territory is national forest land. Forests on privately-owned land are protected with the help of FUNDECOR (Foundation for the Development of the Central Volcanic Mountain Range), a non-profit foundation established to protect Costa Rica's tropical forests. Under a FUNDECOR program, revenue from taxes on gasoline and tourism are used to pay farmers not to cut forested areas of their land. Those monitoring the program say the compliance rate of private landowners is high -- 99 percent, according to one estimate. Moreover, although the situation is far from perfect, in many areas of the country, people really do comply with laws restricting logging.

As a result, Costa Rica's rainforest, which had shrunk from about 60 percent to around a quarter of the country's land area between 1950 and the mid-1980s, began growing again and today once again covers over half the country. Shrewd political leadership coupled with some slick marketing has leveraged the richness of those forests into one of the country's biggest commercial assets. Eco-tourism today is a huge money-spinner and President Oscar Arias talks about a new goal to make Costa Rica the first nation in the world to become carbon neutral by 2021, in time for the country's 200th birthday.

The ingredients to this success: political stability, functioning institutions, a respect for the rule of law, a strong economy and a stable middle class that values quality of life issues, such as a clean environmental quality. Now, with huge economic benefit from eco-tourism, strong environmental practices play an additional role. They protect an important commercial asset. The consistency of Costa Rica's enforcement of environmental laws -- and other legislation -- also creates a level of predictability that encourages new investment across a broad cross-section of the economy.

In neighboring Nicaragua, the story is very different. With income levels about one-fifth of those in Costa Rica, Nicaragua is the second poorest country in the hemisphere (behind Haiti). Poverty, together with a history of political turmoil through much of the past century, have left Nicaragua's government institutions woefully under-funded, inefficient and open to corruption. There is no well-developed culture of compliance with environmental laws or consistent enforcement to assure such compliance. The judicial system is weak and there is no clearly defined political vision of what to do with the forested land.

Because of this, illegal logging operations all too often out-muscle municipal authorities who are responsible for forest management but have few of the resources needed to fulfill the task. Today, Nicaragua's forests occupy roughly half the territory they covered in 1950 and continue to shrink in size, albeit at a slower pace than a decade ago. A dramatic turn-around any time soon seems too much to hope for.

My point here is that it will be critical to focus in Copenhagen on steps that take the realities on the ground into consideration. Only such steps can make a difference. Environment specialist Michael Levi at the Council on Foreign Relations is correct when he calls it "a waste of time" to focus too heavily on near-term, legally binding carbon emissions caps for developing countries. They may sound serious, but, as Levi points out, they are largely toothless. Verification is difficult and punitive measures highly unlikely.

There's no silver bullet that can resolve the carbon emissions problem in Copenhagen, but there are steps that can be taken to help developing nations strengthen their institutions and, with that, enforcement.

Under provisions of the Central America Free Trade Agreement's (CAFTA) environmental chapter, for example, the United States is working with governments in the region, including Nicaragua, on a program to strengthen environmental legislation. This work includes a public awareness campaign about a provision in the agreement that enables individuals to sue for compliance.

Shortly after coming to office, the Obama administration declared it planned tough enforcement of environmental provisions in America's trade agreements. Such steps are crucial because the sooner developing countries learn there is a visible upside to responsible environmental practices then pressing for enforcement will be seen more as an asset than a liability. Then we will be on the way to real change.

Follow NRDC's Countdown to Copenhagen.

This post originally appeared on NRDC's Switchboard blog.

Jim Luce: Pro Mujer: Journey Towards Women's Empowerment In Latin America

2009-09-22T11:36:02Z

Twenty years ago, a friendship between two women of different cultures and backgrounds cemented, and a bond was formed to create a women's development organization -- to empower women -- throughout Latin America.

Lynne Patterson, an American school teacher, and Carmen Velasco, a Bolivian professor in psychology, wanted to use their shared passion and expertise to help the poorest women in Bolivia achieve economic and social well-being.

Carmen and Lynne met in El Alto, Bolivia.

Seldom have cross-cultural partnerships produced such exceptional results. In 1990, Lynne and Carmen founded Pro Mujer, a women's development organization that offers credit, access to savings accounts, healthcare, and training to poor women entrepreneurs in Latin America.

They began by meeting women in houses and courtyards in El Alto. Their first task was to understand how to provide useful training to women in the barrios. These were semi-literate indigenous women, ages 30 to 40, who were qualifying for food donations.

Like the women's consciousness meetings of the 1970's in North America, Lynne and Carmen asked the women to answer basic questions: Who am I? What are my strengths? What are my goals? "This was the first time these women had ever been asked such questions," Lynne told me recently. "These were women sitting on a blanket with their kids, and they began to talk, to open up, to share their dreams."

With her increased income and savings, Pro Mujer in Bolivia Client
Flora Callisaya bought her own land and a house.

Lynne and Carmen eventually developed a participative process whereby the women reflected on their own experiences and began to think about their own lives and what they wanted for themselves and their children.

For example, when asked, How did your parents teach you? and How are you teaching your children?, they quickly saw traditional patterns emerging and repeating. "We watched our brothers go to school, while we stayed home to do the housework."

Lynne and Carmen quickly realized that their work was nothing short of ending centuries of racism, social and economic exclusion, and gender discrimination against women. While they wanted to help provide a better life for the women in the community, it was the women themselves who asked for help to start or improve small businesses.

The women's priority was to generate income which would enable them to provide life's basic necessities for their families. Lynne and Carmen first developed a training course in business skills. All the women made business plans.

Once they had their plans, they asked for credit to put these plans into practice. These women lacked the education and skills needed to access credit from commercial banks, but were smart and willing to guarantee each other's loans.

The regular group meetings provided an opportunity to give women the ongoing training they needed to develop themselves and their abilities. Microfinance and education became the means to an end --the empowerment of women, which Lynne and Carmen saw as the most effective way of alleviating poverty.

To develop Pro Mujer's unique integrated approach and group-based methodology, Lynne and Carmen first observed successful microfinance models, including Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. But given the specific needs and cultural differences in Latin America, they developed an innovative model that responds to the region's specific economic needs and cultural conditions. This model combines health care support and training with credit.

Poverty and health are deeply intertwined. If a woman or her child falls sick, she will not be able to run her business or care for her family. That is why Pro Mujer offers healthcare and health education to clients and their children.

Pro Mujer focuses on women because they are more apt to use their earnings and savings to better feed their children, care for their children's health and enroll their children in school. Women value the services they receive from Pro Mujer and recognize the vital role of health care and education in making a lasting impact on the futures of their children.

Pro Mujer reaches out to women whose income does not cover basic food, shelter, health, and education needs. These women engage in small income-generating activities such as food processing, sewing and weaving, shopkeeping, craft-making, and renting bicycles.

Pro Mujer staff provide check-ups through the mobile clinic in Peru.

"Credit alone is not enough to lift women and their families out of poverty," explains Lynne. "Just as the poor need access to credit to earn an income, they need access to healthcare and education to prevent illnesses that deplete their savings and wipe out their livelihoods."

Pro Mujer has grown organically in Latin America. A key to the distribution of its integrated services is its group lending or communal bank methodology. Pro Mujer organizes women into communal banks, groups of approximately 25 women who apply for loans as a group.

These women guarantee each other's loans; if one cannot pay, the others pay for her. The bank's leaders often recruit other women whom they trust to repay their loans. Such group guarantees result in low delinquency rates.

The communal banking methodology of Pro Mujer is best suited for women living right at the poverty line or below. Women who have only each other's word as a guarantee for repayment.

A Pro Mujer client helps her daughter with homework in Nicaragua.

Each communal bank has its own name and identity. It is a grassroots group with its own officers and agenda. Each group manages its loans; screens members; documents loans; ensures, tracks, and deposits loan payments; and provides a guarantee for the rest of the group. The groups meet at neighborhood centers once or twice a month.

These centers serve as the nexus of women's financial, health, and educational services. In short, all interventions needed to move the community forward. Simultaneous to financial services, women receive health care support and training. They have access to pap smears at low or no cost.

Cervical cancer is a leading killer of women in Nicaragua. Approximately 700 out of 9,000 clients in Nicaragua who have had a pap examination were found to have pre-malignant tumors. Women then become role models for the next generation.

At Pro Mujer poor women learn to embrace their strengths and believe in their own abilities. As one woman said, "For the first time in my life someone believes I can succeed."

Many of the children of the women that Lynne and Carmen began to help 19 years ago are currently studying in universities. Pro Mujer now offers education loans for elementary and high school education, and has a partnership with the Ministry of Education in Peru. Pro Mujer now serves 222,000 women and more than one million children and family members in Argentina, Bolivia, Mexico, Nicaragua and Peru.

In the past 19 years, the organization has disbursed over US$582 million in small loans, and provided healthcare and training to hundreds of thousands of women and their families.

Pro Mujer's success stems from its ability to directly address the structural problems of poverty and the need for employment and social security. It continues to provide health care where local governments fail to provide it. If the United States cannot provide adequate health care to its people, one can only imagine the challenges for countries with fewer resources.

Pro Mujer in Mexico Client Matilde Cruz works with clay.

The next stage for Pro Mujer is to scale up its services so that it can help thousands more women in Latin America who don't have access to financial or health services and lack the support of a strong social network like the one that Pro Mujer provides.

"We now have competition in the world of microfinance," Lynne told me. "We must provide the best services at the best prices, while remaining client-focused and maintaining our core mission of poverty alleviation and self-empowerment."

Surpassing Lynne and Carmen's vision, Pro Mujer is helping some of the poorest women in Latin America to increase their income, develop their full potential, and claim their basic human rights, enabling them to become agents of change in their families and communities.

Lynne and Carmen are thought leaders and global citizens. They sparked an initiative that has given thousands of poor Latin American women and their families the opportunity to live with dignity.

Gary Shapiro: Trucks, Drugs and NAFTA: Time for Congress to do the Right Thing

2009-07-29T09:55:13Z

Rarely a day goes by without a new story of troubles roiling our southern border. Violent drug gangs outgun the Mexican army, and the Mexican government struggles to restore civil society and rule of law.

Further south, police and demonstrators face off in the streets of Honduras. Avowed U.S. enemy Hugo Chavez uses his oil wealth to prop up sympathetic regimes in Bolivia and Nicaragua, while supporting an insurgency against a pro-American government in Colombia. As the leader of the global economy, the United States thrives in a stable world -- and Latin America becomes more chaotic by the day.

One effective way we can help restore stability to Latin America is through economic engagement. But instead of extending a stabilizing hand, we have largely turned away, as evidenced by stalled trade agreements with Colombia and Panama.

The latest insult to our Latin American neighbors was Congress' decision to prohibit Mexican trucks from coming into America, despite the fact that those trucks usually roll back to Mexico laden with American exports.

In fact, trade between the United States and Mexico totaled $368 billion in 2008, making Mexico our third-largest U.S. trading partner. One would think that in difficult economic times our legislators would be doing everything in their power to open new markets to American goods, not close them.

Of course, Mexico did not take lightly to the U.S. closing our border to their trucks -- that's why they're called "trade wars." Citing United States' failure to its NAFTA commitments, the Mexican government instituted retaliatory tariffs on $2.4 billion worth of U.S. manufactured and agricultural exports on March 19th. The tariffs, which are allowed under the rules of international trade, range from 10 to 45 percent.

This protectionist tit-for-tat has impacted a range of U.S. companies trying to compete in the Mexican market. A June 8th letter from 24 U.S. legislators to President Obama noted that "many companies are being forced to shift production abroad or simply stop shipments."

"Over $1.5 billion in U.S. manufactured products and $900 million in U.S. agriculture products are impacted by the retaliatory tariffs," the letter continued.

What's worse is that companies are preparing to close lines in the U.S. and shift production to Canada, where duty-free treatment continues. The shift in production will cost local communities jobs with a ripple effect all the way along the supply chain.

Mexico has said it will not remove the tariffs until the U.S. government reinstates the cross-border program or otherwise adheres to the NAFTA accord, under which Mexican trucks are permitted to enter the U.S. (and U.S. trucks may likewise enter Mexico.)

Thankfully, Congress now has an opportunity to hit the "reset" button on this needless and economically harmful dispute. Today, Senate Transportation-HUD Appropriations Subcommittee will mark up its draft fiscal 2010 spending bill. As part of this process, they have the opportunity to reauthorize Mexican trucks to come across the U.S. border.

I urge the lawmakers to make the reauthorization, and hope they choose the economy, our consumers and our national security over narrow protectionist interests.

Gary Shapiro is the president and CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association.

World In Photos: July 28, 2009 (SLIDESHOW)

2009-07-28T16:10:37Z

Here is the HuffPost's selection of photos of today's news and events from every corner of the globe. Check back Monday through Friday for this HuffPost World feature.

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Nicaragua Abortion Ban Forces Rape, Incest Victims To Give Birth

2009-07-27T13:34:00Z

In predominantly Catholic Nicaragua, an all-out ban on abortion, regardless of any potential risk childbirth poses to the mother, is drawing fire from Amnesty International (AI), the Guardian reports. AI, in its report, documents many cases of young girls victimized by rapists or family members who are nevertheless forced to give birth, and as a result, the rate of suicide among teenage girls has soared upward, according to the Guardian.

"There is only one way to describe what we have seen in Nicaragua ‑ sheer horror," Kate Gilmore, Amnesty International's executive deputy secretary general, told a press conference in Mexico City. "Children are being compelled to bear children. Pregnant women are being denied essential life saving medical care."

She added: "What alternatives is this government offering a 10-year-old pregnant as a result of rape? And a cancer sufferer who is denied life-saving treatment just because she is pregnant, while she has other children waiting at home?"

According to the Guardian report, Sandinista President Daniel Ortega won the 2006 election by supporting the ban, which went into effect in July of 2008 and punishes women who get abortions, and the medical workers who assist them, with prison.

In May, Amnesty International pushed the Nicaraguan government to adhere to a call from the United Nations Committee against Torture for the policy to be revised.

"The Committee is sending a clear message to the Nicaraguan state: So long as the complete ban with no exceptions is in place, you will be in breach of your international legal obligations to protect human rights," said Widney Brown, Senior Director, International Law and Policy at Amnesty International. "If this complete ban were to stay, women and girls would continue to be at risk of torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. Such inaction would show a cruel indifference to the physical pain, psychological anguish and lack of human dignity this law causes women and girls in Nicaragua to suffer by denying and thwarting their access to essential medical treatment during pregnancy."

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Zelaya Crosses Border And Returns To Honduras As Police, Supporters Clash

2009-07-24T15:57:48Z

EL PARAISO, Honduras — Ousted President Manuel Zelaya took a symbolic step into his homeland Friday, vowing to reclaim his post a month after soldiers flew him into exile.

But he stayed less than 30 minutes before returning to Nicaragua, saying the risk of bloodshed was too great. He said he would give talks with the coup-installed government another try.

Zelaya Sets Up Nicaragua Base To Prepare A Dramatic Return Home

2009-07-24T08:11:41Z

Eric Ehrmann: Honduras... The Big Backstory

2009-07-20T16:03:36Z

The dramatic call for "insurrection" by deposed Honduran president Mel Zelaya and the 72 hour ultimatum issued by the Organization of American States (OAS) are reminders of how just much the stakes have escalated since negotiator Oscar Arias won the Nobel Prize trying to bring peace to his region a generation ago.

Mara Salvatrucha gangs now exercise the same de-facto government status the Mafia once had in Sicily thanks to a wide berth from Zelaya. His main backer, Venezuela, is now a Russian client giving the Kremlin a beachhead in South America. Sandinista lite Nicaragua has become the poorest nation in the Americas. And Cuba, apparently still sponsoring terrorism, was reinstated to the OAS in a Zelaya organized effort just days before his army removed him from power.

Hondurans earning $1800 a year in real wages and neighboring Nicaraguans earning just $475 want economic equity,effectivo, not the social equity that US president Barack Obama's foreign policy vision offers them.

More social unrest in Latin America could complicate Washington's emerging soft power strategy, which morphs the US from global superpower to kinder gentler top cop for the world economic order. Obama wants to take the war out of the war on drugs while Honduran gangs who haven't had their alpha drives stepped on by Harry Potter books sell crack in Chicago for less than a value meal. No 40 hour work week, no problem; sweatshop labor issues get wrapped in a tidy package by consultants like former assistant secretary of state Otto Reich.

To complement the makeover of American might one would expect Washington to have top line intelligence and embassy resources to not only predict but prevent getting blindsided by diplomatic train wrecks like Honduras. The fact that they didn't show up gives legs to the Miami Herald story in which Fidel Castro blames Zelaya's ouster on the US Embassy in Honduras.

The White House denounced the action in Honduras as "illegal." But that call requires Washington to cut off all but humanitarian aid and could jeopardize the big Soto Cano base outside Tegucigalpa used by a large contingent of US military and civilian advisers that is critical to Pentagon regional security strategy and logistics.

Known as Palmerola, when the US armed the Contras and return trips carried contraband back to governor Bill Clinton's Arkansas, the base boasts runways long enough to handle C-5 aircraft carrying 219,000 pounds of helicopters, troops and weapons. NGOs, wonks and media amping up the noise to volume ratio for the US to end its military presence in Honduras might ask themselves just how comfortable they'd feel when Russia exploits the power vacuum their recommendations would create. Although mafia drug war games have become the rage on Facebook, the realpolitik reveals Honduras as a pawn in a geopolitical picture larger than what the Obama administration likes to paint.

Prospects of an Obama flip-flop on Honduras and Zelaya's friendship with Fidel and Raul Castro and the Venezuela-Russia connection play into the hands of Republicans searching for issues in the run up to mid-term elections. Thanks to Jimmy Carter's giveaway for globalism, Chinese interests operate the key ports on both sides of the Panama Canal. Iran is trying to sensitize Latin America's large middle eastern population to the politics of revolutionary Islam and working with Venezuela and Russia to broker nuclear technology to the highest bidder.

Prospects of having Ahmadinejad tag team with Venezuela on nuke deals when Hugo Chavez is having a Prozac moment has caused enough consternation that in a meeting earlier this year with Mossad chief Meir Dagan, Saudi Arabia agreed to authorize overflights by Israeli aircraft in the event facilities in Iran need to be taken out.

So far, $20 million in cutbacks in aid to Honduras have been announced. But influential Cuban-American congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, senior Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee with strong ties to Miami anti-Castro groups, has formally requested to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that aid to Honduras not be stopped. Zelaya's visit with Fidel and Raul Castro in Havana did little to raise his popularity among her constituents. Obama's relations with Cuban Americans could become more problematic now that assistant secretary of state-designate, Arturo Valenzuela, recently testified before the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the full rehabilitation of Castro's Cuba is the crowning achievement of the Inter-American system.

As long as globalism and free markets fail to distribute wealth more equitably relative deprivation and political instability will ratchet up. Latin Americans know that dollars, drugs and NAFTA flow north and south, But Washington took the Latin out of Latin America during Bill Clinton's presidency, with the State Department servicing the southern hemisphere with an assistant secretary of state for western hemisphere affairs. That job, in its various makeovers, has the highest churn rate of all regional assistant secretaries of state in the post World War II era. As Oscar Arias said in his 1987 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, "peace has no finish line."

Nicaragua's Ortega: US Intelligence Planned Honduran Coup

2009-07-20T09:44:48Z

July 19 (Bloomberg) -- Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega accused unnamed U.S. intelligence agencies of planning the coup that ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya without the knowledge of President Barack Obama.

Iran's Rumored Nicaraguan "Mega-Embassy" Set Off Alarms In U.S.

2009-07-13T00:46:59Z

For months, the reports percolated in Washington and other capitals. Iran was constructing a major beachhead in Nicaragua as part of a diplomatic push into Latin America, featuring huge investment deals, new embassies and even TV programming from the Islamic republic.

Honduras Coup: World Leaders Call For President's Reinstatement

2009-06-29T12:56:09Z

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras — Police and soldiers clashed with thousands of protesters outside Honduras' national palace Monday, leaving at least 45 people injured, as world leaders from Barack Obama to Hugo Chavez demanded the return of a president ousted in a military coup.

President Manuel Zelaya said he would seek to return to his country Thursday and reclaim control of the government. He said he would accept an offer from the head of the Organization of American States to accompany him to Honduras.

Bob Harris: A Near-Zero-Cost Approach to Do-Gooding: My 375th Kiva Loan

2009-06-16T04:02:56Z

Maria Shriver promotes it, Hillary Clinton talks it up in commencement speeches, and the guy who thought it up won a Nobel Peace Prize: microfinance may the world's fastest-growing and arguably trendiest form of lending a hand.

If the news hasn't yet reached you through the media haze of Jon & Kate, Heidi & Spencer, and Sarah & Dave, microlending is an extremely simple idea: people like you and me in the industrialized world help folks in the developing world not with outright aid (which is obviously essential in many situations, but can distort economies if misapplied) but with tiny loans which reach the borrowers at a much cheaper interest rate than they could get any other way.

Some guy in Mongolia needs feed for his cattle? You and 50 total strangers front him $25 each. A cabbie in Beirut needs to fix his taxi? Maybe 50 other people chip in online. A beauty salon in Tajikistan is running short on supplies? Point, click, loan money.

Metaphorically, it's not giving someone a fish, and it's not teaching someone to fish; it's helping a fisherman patch a hole in his rowboat so he can get on with life.

Kiva.org is a Bay Area start-up that quickly became a global leader in online microfinance, and there you'll find basically what looks like an eBay for doing good: drop-down menus, photographs and bios of potential borrowers from all over the world, and a shopping basket and PayPal checkout, just like you're buying stuff instead of loaning cash.

Six months ago, I had the same questions you might right now. Is it really as easy and rewarding as its advocates say? Is it actually safe to put your own money in? You really get paid back, the recipients get clean water filtration or a new ox or a better ceiling or whatever they need, and everybody's happy?

So far, after making 375 loans to people in 42 countries, I can say with some growing certainty: yup.

I first got my feet wet with a loan to a small grocery in Uganda, chosen from the hundreds of potential recipients on the site for reasons both charitable and crass: I wanted to loan to somebody who really needed it, but whose business I at least understood well enough to feel fairly confident about repayment. (As if $25 would make a difference in my life, comparatively? I'm a bit ashamed at even thinking it, but hey, if it was in the back of my mind, it might be in yours, too.)

Pretty soon, however, visiting the site, and then reading all the stories of people building lives and communities all over the world got to be inspiring -- addictively so.

You want to put your own troubles in perspective? Spend a few minutes mulling the resourcefulness of people like Poung Teak, a 39-year-old Cambodian father of three who climbs palm trunks for a living. (He taps the sap near the top and refines it into sugar for resale.)

My first reaction: dude supports three teenagers by shinnying up trees all day? Um, sure -- I can spot him $25 until payday.

That's the sort of stuff you find there, over and over. It's hard not to find a few extra bucks. (In my case, I have spare cash in my pocket from writing a bunch of luxury travel reviews. Putting that money into Kiva somehow feels like karmic balance.) Plus, you realize that by building economic bonds like this, not through state and corporate mechanisms but on virtually a person-to-person level, you're sending a palpable, practical message of peace and shared humanity into parts of the world that need it most -- and where we need to send it most.

This morning, for the first time in my account, three loans -- to a Nicaraguan tailor, a Peruvian student, and a Filipino grocer -- were paid in full. A few hours later, the very first loan I made -- to that grocery in Uganda -- was all paid up as well.

Sure, you can pocket the money when it comes back. (Which is almost always does -- Kiva's overall default rate is currently less than two percent. Given recent stock market downturns, you may well do better with Bolivian woodworkers than the S&P.) But where's the fun in that?

So today, the $25 that came back from Nicaragua, I sent to a student in Costa Rica. The cash from Peru went to another shopkeeper in Uganda, and the money that came in from The Philippines went to a teacher in Mozambique.

When your loans get repaid and you shuffle the money off to somebody else, it feels like you're running your own tiny foundation.

And remember: this costs me virtually nothing, other than the time value of the money while it's out of my hands and the rare one or two percent of loans that default. (That said, I haven't had a single default so far.) And for that fair price -- a few farthings above free -- you get to reach across the world like this:

Neat, huh?

Some Kiva lenders think of their loans as like a personal savings account that does good while it's floating around. In my own case, if I keep tossing a few bucks in here and there for a few years, eventually the account may dwarf my IRA. And now that repayments are starting to keep my account almost reloaded on its own, this is starting to look like a lifetime hobby.

It's one you might enjoy yourself.

If you'd like to play, too, check out Kiva.org. Those folks deserve a medal -- which, I am sure, they would melt down, convert to hard currency, and then loan to a shepherd in Tanzania. (Not even really kidding. They seem extremely cool that way.)

(You can also check out my lender page there if you're curious. There's also my site or my Twitter feed for related splurts. But let's be clear: Kiva built the ark here. I'm just one of the creatures that wandered on.)

US-Nicaragua Aid Cut Due To Concerns Over Democracy

2009-06-11T09:34:47Z

WASHINGTON — The United States on Wednesday canceled more than $60 million in assistance to Nicaragua, citing concerns about democracy, rule of law and a free market economy in the Latin American nation now led by a former Marxist guerrilla leader.

The board of the Millennium Challenge Corporation, a U.S. taxpayer-funded operation set up by former President George W. Bush to fight poverty in developing nations, said it had cut $62 million from a $175 million program for Nicaragua because of problems in recent elections.

Amy Goodman: The Free Market's Marked Men, From The Niger Delta To The Amazon

2009-06-09T23:39:49Z

Ken Saro-Wiwa and Alberto Pizango never met, but they are united by a passion for the preservation of their people and their land, and by the fervor with which they have been targeted by their respective governments. Saro-Wiwa was executed by the Nigerian government Nov. 10, 1995. Pizango this week was charged by the Peruvian government with sedition and rebellion, and narrowly eluded capture, taking refuge in the Nicaraguan embassy in Lima. Nicaragua has just granted him political asylum. Two indigenous leaders -- one living, one dead -- Pizango and Saro-Wiwa demonstrate that effective grass-roots opposition to corporate power can take a personal toll. Saro-Wiwa's family and others just won a landmark settlement in U.S. federal court, ending a 13-year battle with Shell Oil. Pizango's ordeal is just beginning.

Peru and Nigeria are a world apart on the map, but host abundant natural resources for which the U.S. and other industrialized nations hunger.

The Niger Delta is one of the world's most productive oil fields. Shell Oil began extracting oil there in 1958. Before long, the indigenous peoples of the Niger Delta suffered from pollution, destruction of the mangrove forests and depletion of fish stocks that sustained them. Gas flares constantly lit up the sky, fouling the air and denying generations a glimpse of a dark night. The despoliation of traditional Ogoni land in the Niger Delta inspired Saro-Wiwa to lead an international, nonviolent campaign targeting Shell. For his commitment, Saro-Wiwa was arrested by the Nigerian dictatorship, subjected to a sham trial and hanged with eight other Ogoni activists. I visited the Niger Delta and Ogoniland in 1998, and met Ken's family. His father, Jim Wiwa, did not mince words: "Shell has a hand in the killing of my own son."

Family members sued Shell Oil, charging it with complicity in the executions. They were granted their day in U.S. court under the Alien Tort Claims Act, which allows people outside the U.S. to bring charges against an offender in U.S. courts when the charges amount to war crimes, genocide, torture or, as in the case of the Ogoni Nine, extrajudicial, summary execution. Despite Shell's efforts to have the case (Wiwa v. Shell) thrown out, it was set to be tried in a New York federal court two weeks ago. After several delays, Shell settled, agreeing to pay $15.5 million.

Saro-Wiwa's son, Ken Wiwa, said:

"We now have an opportunity to draw a line on the sad past and ... face the future with some hope that what we've done here will have helped to change the way in which businesses regard their operations abroad. ... We need to focus on the development needs of the people. ... We've created evidence, an example, that with enough commitment to nonviolence and dialogue, you can begin to build some kind of creative justice. And we hope that people will take their signals from that and push for similar examples of creative justice, where communities and all the stakeholders where oil production is are able to mutually benefit from oil production, rather than exploitation and degradation of the environment."

Peruvian indigenous populations have been protesting nonviolently since April, with road blockades a popular tactic. At issue is the so-called U.S./Peru Trade Promotion Agreement, which would override protections of indigenous land, granting access to foreign corporations for resource extraction.

This week, eyewitnesses allege that Peruvian special forces police carried out a massacre at one of the blockades. Pizango, the leader of the national indigenous organization the Peruvian Jungle Interethnic Development Association, accused the government of President Alan Garcia of ordering the attack:

"Our brothers are cornered. I want to put the responsibility on the government. We are going to put the responsibility on Alan Garcia's government for ordering this genocide. ... They've said that we indigenous peoples are against the system, but, no, we want development, but from our perspective, development that adheres to legal conventions. ... The government has not consulted us. Not only am I being persecuted, but I feel that my life is in danger, because I am defending the rights of the peoples, the legitimate rights that the indigenous people have."

Saro-Wiwa told me in 1994, just before he returned to Nigeria, "I'm a marked man." Pizango has challenged the powerful Peruvian government and the corporate interests it represents. Pizango is now marked, but still alive. Will the international community allow him, and the indigenous people he represents, to suffer the same fate as Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni people?

* * *
Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
***
Amy Goodman is the host of "Democracy Now!," a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 750 stations in North America. She is the co-author of "Standing Up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times," recently released in paperback.

copyright 2009 Amy Goodman
Distributed by King Features Syndicate

Mark Weisbrot: Vulture Funds Lobby Against Argentina, Trying To Use the U.S. Congress In Public Relations Campaign

2009-06-05T17:36:38Z

One of the differences between the United States and most other developed countries is that the Congress can have a foreign policy of its own, and one that does not necessarily coincide with the objectives of the executive branch.

This is generally a good thing, since it allows the citizenry to have influence that it does not have in most European countries, and to limit some of the damage that the executive branch is often doing around the world. It was the U.S. Congress that, under pressure from the anti-war movement, eventually cut funding for the Vietnam War; and in the 1980s a well-organized, mostly religious-based movement pressured Congress to cut off funding for Ronald Reagan's brutal insurgency in Nicaragua.

Occasionally, however, individual members of Congress - representing special interests -- can be an annoyance when the executive is trying to maintain or repair relations with other countries. Such is the case with U.S.-Argentine relations, which fell to a low point during the Bush years, and which President Obama would like to improve.

Now comes Eric Massa, a freshman Democratic Representative from Corning in the state of New York, introducing legislation on May 20 that would seek to punish Argentina by, among other things, denying the country access to U.S. capital markets.

Some background: in December of 2001 the government of Argentina defaulted on about $81 billion (plus interest) of its sovereign debt, as a result of a general economic collapse that followed a deep recession. In 2005 about 75% percent of the defaulted bondholders reached an agreement with the government that paid about 30 cents on the dollar. The remainder, with some $19.4 billion, held out with the hope of getting more later.

The "holdouts" have a lobby group in Washington, the "American Task Force Argentina (ATFA)." It is headed by former Clinton administration officials, who are trying to use the U.S. Congress to put pressure on Argentina. The lobbyists include "vulture" fund investors (see below), who buy up defaulted debt at a small fraction of face value and then use lawsuits and other pressure tactics to fight for the face value of the bonds.

If there is an injustice in Argentina's default, it is that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) - which had as much responsibility as anyone in the world for the deep recession that pushed half of Argentina's population below the poverty line -- ended up collecting on its loans in full. But that is another, longer story.

The fact is that Argentina's default was an unavoidable part of an economic collapse. It was also a necessary precondition for the country's economic recovery, which began just three months after the government stopped payment on its public debt. In just under seven years Argentina's real GDP has grown by 66 percent, about the best performance in the hemisphere, pulling more than 11 million people out of poverty and reversing much of the damage that was done under IMF tutelage in the prior decade.

Argentina's debt before the default was simply unpayable. In the United States and most other countries, we have bankruptcy laws that enable a debtor to get out from unpayable debts and start afresh. In the world of sovereign debt, there is as yet no comparable mechanism other than default.

Of course, it is quite possible that the Argentine government will reach a settlement with the "holdout" bondholders, and there has been some movement in that direction in the last year or so. A settlement would restore Argentina's access to international credit markets.

Ironically, the harassment from Eric Massa and ATFA makes it less likely that such a settlement would be reached, because the "vulture funds" that they represent are playing a different game. They want their pound of flesh: i.e., they are gunning for the face value of the bonds and are willing to throw any of the more realistic creditors (among the holdouts) under the bus to get as much as they can. The vultures are therefore undermining other creditors, including current bondholders whose investment is not in jeopardy, but would increase in value if Argentina had full access to international credit markets.

Who are the constituents that Eric Massa and ATFA represent? A look at fifteen bondholders that hold more than $25 million each in claims against Argentina shows that nine of them have addresses in the Cayman Islands. One of these is NML Capital Ltd., a vulture fund affiliate of the hedge fund firm Elliot Associates (a member of ATFA), run by founder Paul Singer. According to Bloomberg News, NML Capital bought at least $182 million of Argentine debt for 15-30 cents on the dollar. Singer has taken a gamble that paid off in Peru in 2000, he made a 400 percent profit from the Peruvian government through lawsuits and harassment.

The vultures will not get very far with Argentina, where not only the government but the political opposition and the Argentine people overwhelmingly are determined not to surrender to them. But they can make a settlement with the other creditors more difficult and also hope to throw obstacles on the road to better U.S.-Argentine relations.

That appears to be the main potential of Massa's bill in Congress, and of course the ATFA lobby group's efforts: to create the false impression that the "holdouts'" debt is an impediment to improved U.S.-Argentine relations. This is certainly not true for the Obama administration. But the opposition media in Argentina can exaggerate the seriousness of this Congressional effort (which has almost no chance of becoming law) to try and undermine President Cristina Kirchner's government. It's all smoke and mirrors: an elaborate, well-funded international public relations effort.

This column was published by The Guardian Unlimited on June 5, 2009.

Ashley Rindsberg: Torture as Literature

2009-05-25T15:21:00Z

A little while ago the attorney general of the United States accused the nation he serves of being a nation of cowards on questions of race. Mr. Holder was nearly right: America has not yet become, but is becoming, a nation of Donkins -- the "deserving creature that knows all about his rights, but knows nothing of courage, of endurance, and of the unexpressed faith, of the unspoken loyalty that knits together" a group, or, in Donkin's specific case, the crew of the ship Narcissus in Joseph Conrad's novella, The Nigger Of The Narcissus.

Donkin, a scrawny, embittered, but not unintelligent deckhand in Conrad´s sailing story, is the type of person who knows what he deserves but has never known and never wanted to know why he deserves. He is an expression of part of the modern personality -- a man who lives only by rights guaranteed, not by rights fought for or rights earned. He is as close to a child as a man can be and even resorts to tantrum, which comes in the form of riot.

Traveling recently in Nicaragua, I came across a man on a dirt road. This man spoke softly and when he did it was with a British accent. He had piercing blue eyes and gave a strong impression of all-knowing serenity. We began to talk. The conversation drifted towards politics and war, and quickly the man's serenity didn't so much evaporate as boil into rage. He became nearly violent talking about former US involvement in Central America and he spat near my feet and slammed his foot on the ground to signify America's crushing of, in his view, a latent Guatemalan democracy of the 1970s and 1980s.

He challenged me to explain what makes America so great and why it should be considered different from any other country, even North Korea or China. I responded that it was rule of law and the ability of citizens to elect their government, and the recourse they have to alter law or replace government if they so choose. He quickly rejected this and said that the same law which provides freedom permits America to bomb and murder the innocents of other countries. And then in an angry (and a little ridiculous) effigy, he tore up an imaginary piece of paper that to him symbolized the falsity of American law and the governance and values which support it.

Despite the British accent the man was, by rights, an American. After twenty years in the US, he holds an American passport, has voted in many American elections, participated in numerous American peace protests, and fiercely asserted to me that he is just as American as me or any other citizen of the US.

It later dawned on me that this man is the Donkin of our day. He is individuated and atomized, isolated from the society he harshly criticizes, eager to criticize it harshly, yet happy to make use of the many political amenities it provides. He has not asked himself how he arrived at the rights he enjoys, nor how those rights are maintained. For him, all the structures which work toward and maintain the foundation of American political life -- liberty -- are structures of corruption, cruelty, deviousness, and greed. This much he admitted to me freely.

Like Donkin, this man revealed that beneath the calm exterior he was in truth "concentrated and angry, gloating fiercely over a called-up image of infinite torment -- like men gloat over the accursed images of cruelty and revenge, of greed, and of power." And like this man, so much of today´s media, which expresses the political attitudes of chunks of Americans, is now similarly concentrated on these images of cruelty, revenge, power and, most of all, torment.

In many cases, the images are real ones -- the abuses at Abu Ghraib, the greed of war profiteers, the corruption of Washington back-scratching. The problem today, however, is the obsessive focus on these anomalies and the generalization of these exceptions to characterize the behavior of America as a nation. The torture issue is the latest and most acute one. It has sent political leaders like Nancy Pelosi into disgraceful tailspins of accusation against American security agencies. It has evoked the desire of rights groups like Amnesty International for a photographic schadenfreude, an obscene exhibition of abuse. And it has evinced populist calls for the trial, imprisonment and, in some cases, even torture of former American leaders.

Clearly, the Donkins of America have never had a louder voice. The strength of their chorus now gives them the appearance of plurality. This is fine when things are going well and the sailing is smooth. But when the next national storm confronts America, the automatic impulse to imprecate the nation combined with the widespread sense of ultimate entitlement will make it impossible for the country to act with sufficient strength to confront its troubles.

The pendulum has clearly begun to swing the other way: the unity, faith, and support for the nation that America experienced after September 11th is giving way to distrust and fragmentation. Many of these same voices of discontent complained that the Bush administration cultivated a culture of fear -- a paranoia regarding America's purported enemies. But today, it seems we are slowly being driven towards a culture that fears not America´s enemies but America itself. If this is not the beginning of Donkinism on a national scale, I do not know what is.

Jesse Larner: Pete Seeger, "Folk Music" and the Left

2009-05-08T14:16:00Z

May Third, 2009, was Pete Seeger's 90th birthday. WNYC in New York hosted a retrospective of his work, and an hour long program, "The Protest Singer: An Intimate Conversation with Pete Seeger." NPR aired an "appreciation." There was a big concert in his honor at Madison Square Garden. Some great artists, including some of the ones I most admire, like Bruce Springsteen and Emmylou Harris, performed.

As someone on the left who loves folk music, I understand that I'm supposed to feel mystically uplifted by the dean of activist folkies. But for those very reasons -- because I believe in a humanist political order, and because authentic folk music speaks to me -- I never could stand Pete. I don't question his dedication or his energy. It's just that I think them unfortunate. His conception of "folk music" has done tremendous damage, and his politics have done tremendous damage, and these things are connected.

Seeger's been very influential. Most Americans, when they think of "folk music," think of the 50s and 60s "revival" of that form: the songs, and versions of songs, made popular by him, The Weavers, Joan Baez, the Kingston Trio. This is a mistake. The songs these people became famous for singing are pretty, denatured coffee-house comforts that have little to do with the life that informed the originals.

The thing to remember about folk music -- both in the common American sense, as meaning the music of the South and of Appalachia that goes back to the ballads of the British Isles, and in the larger sense, as any traditional music of a specific local tradition, such as the Delta Blues -- is that it is complex music by and for people who are not simple. Folk music is an oral tradition, which is why it is often thought of as the low music of hillbillies and sharecroppers. Literate culture looks down on what is not transcribable, and in doing so limns the limitations of snobbery. But griot cultures know and understand marvelous things. Morgan Sexton or Skip James expressed at least as much of the sense of life as Beethoven did.

Griot culture preserves history and meaning and cultural identity in story and song. That's why there are so many murder ballads, because traumatic events have to be worked through, and when people can't read, this is how it's done. But the folk tradition is not a quantitative tradition; it doesn't deal in facts, it deals in meaning. And the most profound meanings can't be addressed head on.

The wall is high
Mr. Fox has a little red eye

- Mr. Fox, traditional

Oh he kissed her and he hugged her and he turned her around
And pushed her in deep water, where he knew that she would drown

- Little Omie Wise, traditional

Ambiguity and suggestion are very powerful, and the whole matter can't be explained. Robert Johnson leads us on for several verses in what seems to be a mere love song, repeatedly telling us what a kind-hearted woman he has. Then he gets down to business:

I got a kind-hearted woman
But she study evil all the time
She bound to kill me
Just to have it over mine

- Robert Johnson, Kind-Hearted Woman Blues

If you think that Mr. Johnson can't be deadly serious about both the kind-hearted part and the evil part, you've missed something important about folk music, the blues, women, and men.

The folk tradition is a deadpan tradition. It doesn't say too much, and it doesn't tell the listener how to think or feel. It describes, and suggests, and lets the listener find the depths in the song. Here's Doc Watson singing Tom Dooley:

Hang your head Tom Dooley, hang down your head and cry
You killed poor Laurie Foster and you know you're bound to die

He sings it quickly, with very little inflection or obvious emotion.

In this world then one more, then where do you reckon I'll be?
'Way down yonder in the holler, boys, hanging from the old oak tree

There is a fatalism here, but it belongs neither to the narrator nor to Tom. It's the fatalism of unsentimental justice.

The Kingston Trio recorded this song in 1958, won a Grammy for it. This version is pretty, with intricately arranged harmonies. The Trio's voices trail off on the chorus Hang down your head Tom Dooley... with anguished artistry. There's a poignant pause between "Tom" and "Dooley." But there's no power, no existential challenge in it. It is only what it sounds like, a cheap and gaudy theft by people who don't even know what they're stealing.

Here's Peter, Paul and Mary singing Woody Guthrie's "Bound for Glory" (not technically folk music, but I'll get to that in a minute). Woody did understand the folk tradition, and this comes through in his original. Peter, Paul and Mary use it to make a point: their voices quaver with outraged, pious indignation. O the injustice! The effect is the same as hearing Joan Baez sing "A Maid of Constant Sorrow" with operatic control, or Ella Fitzgerald -- I know I'll get in trouble for this -- drain all the dirt and sex and rage and joy out of jazz with her famous technique.

For this bowdlerization of the folk tradition -- deeply disrespectful to the people who created it, I may add -- Pete the tireless popularizer of fake folk music bears much of the blame.

It's worse than that, and here's where the politics comes in. I've tried to describe the power of folk music, because it is important to understand that this power is not amplified when made explicit, when harnessed to an agenda. It is negated. Folk music is about life, and politics is only a small part of life. Not that a political tone must always be a failure in any music of the people. Woody drew on folk traditions for his melodies and style, putting his own lyrics on top. But he could do this effectively for two reasons: Because he deadpanned his biggest points, and because he was part of the life he sang about. He actually was a dust bowl farmer, he really did hobo around on the trains and pick fruit in the California camps and do factory work and get beaten up for standing up for the Union. He had a right.

Who the hell was Pete? He came from a distinguished family of musicians and academics afflicted with self-conscious class-consciousness; his father, Charles Louis Seeger, although from an old Puritan patrician line, joined the radical Industrial Workers of the World in the 1930s, a form of ostentatiously slumming solidarity that predicted much about his son's future. Pete was a professional musician from a young age, Harvard dropout, assistant to folk archivist Alan Lomax, and dedicated political activist. He knew everything about folk music, except what it is.

It's hard to play any music properly without bothering to understand its true context, which usually means being born into a culture, although it doesn't have to. One of the very few coffee-house folkies who understood the material was Bobby Zimmerman, a Jewish kid from Hibbing, Minnesota, pretty far from both the Mississippi Delta and Appalachia. With a lot of study, he did something remarkable: He was able to bend the tradition to his personal artistic purposes, while still being true to its essence and power. This is very, very hard to do, and after moving to New York and taking the name of a Welsh poet, young Bobby was able to put politics into his songs precisely because he didn't indulge in the righteousness of Pete, and because he mostly steered clear of overt polemic, letting the stories tell themselves through exquisitely observed detail. "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," "Who Killed Davey Moore?" -- these are political masterpieces in cameo form, torn from contemporary headlines. Dylan could make the point without making the song about himself. Listen to him take elements of the old English ballad "Oxford Town" and successfully apply them to the atrocities of Philadelphia, Mississippi:

Oxford Town in the afternoon
Everybody singing this awful tune
Three men died 'neath the Mississippi moon
Somebody better investigate soon

The casual ironic distance of that "somebody" is enormously powerful. Pete would have sung about how we're all in this together, we are all brothers and sisters! We must fight for a new world together! Dylan stands back and gives you room to think about that "somebody."

Dylan sang "Only a Pawn in Their Game," his valedictory to Medgar Evers, at the 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington at which Martin Luther King gave his "I Have a Dream" speech. At that event he performed live in front of several hundred thousand people, and eventually for untold millions more who watched the documentaries and heard the recordings. He had just turned 22, and he was hailed as the new Woody -- he sure sounded like him! -- and drafted by the aging lefties of Woody's generation as the political troubadour of a generation. And oh how these folksong radicals, many of them communists or fellow travelers, were delighted at this bright young lad, so dedicated, orthodox and predictable!

And how infuriated when it turned out that he wasn't! Dylan was nobody's spokesman, nobody's pet "protest" singer, and he was singing about life, not about politics. At 22, he had the adoration of millions as well as the artistic and erotic companionship of the beautiful Joan Baez, at that time far more famous and respected than he was. He could have translated this into a particular kind of role. He wasn't interested. When he got into the abstractions of Mr. Tambourine Man, and especially when he picked up an electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, the folk establishment turned on him. Pete Seeger himself threatened to cut the power cables with an axe, revealing himself as the blind reactionary he truly is. (I should say that Seeger has for many years insisted that he was only upset because the sound quality was so poor, that he wanted the crowd to hear Dylan. I believe this to be a lie; or, more charitably, an example of the malleability of self-interested memory.)

And what were the politics that Pete wanted Bobby to take up with such earnestness? We can judge by the causes and the masters he gave himself to. The term "communist" is a charged one, and means different things to different people (although the legitimate spectrum of interpretation is not so wide, nor at one end so benign, as that of "socialist"); but it's perfectly clear that Seeger worked hard all his life for communism—to be clear: for Leninism, whether he would have called it that or not—regardless of how long he was actually in the party. I've gathered over the years that he's been motivated by a particularly naïve vision of collectivist romanticism. Nothing wrong with that, so long as it doesn't make one blind to the totalitarian mindset lurking behind the urge to perfect social relations. In Seeger's case, there's no sign that he ever confronted that problem.

He joined the Party in 1939, and after the Hitler-Stalin pact he sang, on his 1941 album "Songs for John Doe," against going to war with Germany. After Operation Barbarossa in June of that year, he had the record pulled and offered FDR his support. Oceania is at war with Eurasia; Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia. His loyalties were pretty clear, and they were with American liberal democracy only insofar as it aligned with other forces. He went on to sing against standing up to the Soviets in the Cold War (whole thing was our fault), in praise of Ho Chi Minh ("He educated all the people, he demonstrated to the world: If a man will stand for his own land, he's got the strength of 10.") He made fun of the rubes who opposed Castro ("I believe in God and Senator Todd and in keeping old Castro down.") Seeger was always there to defend any left-wing totalitarian government or revolution, in word and song. He dutifully opposed the war in Iraq and even in Afghanistan. Some things this great humanitarian political troubador didn't write about? The Yalta Pact and its consequences, the East German rebellion of 1953, the Soviet Gulag, Kim Il Sung's death camps, the Soviet invasions of Hungary in '56 and Czechoslovakia in '68, the insanity of the Cultural Revolution in China, Mao's murderous career (maybe 30 million dead, but eggs and omelets, you know), Leninism in Nicaragua, Che Guevara's sadistic psychopathy... I could go on.

OK, in 1993(!) he allowed that Stalin was a bad guy after all. Seeger admitted to Ron Radosh, former communist turned communist debunker (and a former banjo student of Seeger's) that he, Pete, "should have asked to see the gulags" when he was in the USSR (he also suggested that Radosh surely had better things to do with his life than to go around exposing the extent to which many American communists took orders from the Comintern, and served as active agents in the struggle to overthrow liberal democracy). But even in turning against Stalin, Seeger lets himself and his cause off the hook. In 2007(!) he wrote a song condemning the long-dead dictator that includes this line: "He put an end to the dreams of so many in every land..." and blames Stalin for everything that went wrong with the Russian Revolution. Another evasion, of course, since totalitarianism was in the revolutionary bloodstream long before Stalin. Just ask the SRs.

Seeger equivocated further. Although Stalin gets the blame for totalitarianism, the problem wasn't really Stalin, you see, or communism. It was "the human faith in violence."

Radosh had a rather friendly and warm reaction to his old teacher's epiphany, a mere 70 or so years too late. The right wing polemicist Mark Steyn had this to say about Pete's observation, and Radosh, on second thought, endorsed Steyn's view.

Explaining how Stalin had "put an end to the dreams" of a Communist utopia, Seeger told Ron Radosh that he'd underestimated "how the majority of the human race has faith in violence". But that isn't true, is it? Very few of us are violent. Those who order the killings are few in number, and those who carry them out aren't significantly numerous. But those willing to string along and those too fainthearted to object and those who just want to keep their heads down and wait for things to blow over are numbered in the millions. And so are those many miles away in the plump prosperous western democracies who don't see why this or that dictator is their problem. One can perhaps understand the great shrug of indifference to distant monsters. It's harder, though, to forgive the contemporary urge to celebrate it as a form of "idealism."

One might even say that this form of "idealism," and the celebration of it, is disgusting.

Seeger has the dubious distinction of having received both the Presidential Medal of the Arts from Bill Clinton, in 1994 in a ceremony at the Kennedy Center, and the Felix Varela medal, Cuba's highest honor, for "his humanistic and artistic work in defense of the environment and against racism." Accepting an award from Castro is one of those clarifying events for those who may be trying to figure out how to think of Seeger. You just can't do such a thing and expect to still have a shred of credibility as a defender of human rights, as a believer in liberty or democratic values or basic human decency. It's laughable. Except that it's horrible, and a betrayal of all those people writing and singing and creating in fear in Castro's prison of a country. Or being tortured in his dungeons. So much for solidarity.

I started out by saying that the damage Seeger did to music was connected to the damage he did in the political sphere. Both were a kind of condescending sentimental reductionism that masked a fierce identification with power. In publicly associating himself with an agenda of decency (racism is bad) while more subtly advocating some very destructive ideas (the Soviet Union is no threat to us, the government should control the economy), he developed a nonthreatening vernacular that helped to turn "folk music" into a kind of mush—all that "If I had a hammer" and the now-deservedly-lampooned-by-the-right "Kumbaya" stuff. Pete was the one who taught adults to sway to "Puff the Magic Dragon," even if that particular song can't be laid at his door.

Seeger had the courage of the true believer. He was willing to go to prison rather than testify before HUAC—and he made his refusal on the honorable grounds that he had the right to say and write whatever he wanted under the First Amendment, not on the usual right-not-to-incriminate-oneself Fifth Amendment grounds. I admire him for this. But remember the governments he was defending, while letting it be known, around the world, how awful American capitalist imperialism was. As late as the mid-90s, when there really was no excuse for continued naivete about the Sandinista period in Nicaragua, Seeger was endorsing a volume of poetry by former Sandinista interior minister Tomas Borge.

The sad and degrading fact is that Pete never really meant it, all that stuff about fighting for justice. Or, more accurately, never meant what he thought he meant. In reality, he was fighting for his own self-righteous conception of the moral, meaning that he knew what was best for you and me, and he admired those who didn't flinch from enforcing it. I'll speculate that Pete's frequent lectures on standing up for the little guy or the unions or about living in collectives where we all take care of each other reflected a certain unease with his own attraction to naked, dictatorial power—how often the secret bully finds his vocation as a preacher!—and that it accounts for some of his more infantile quirks: Around the sound box of his banjo, Seeger has written "This machine surrounds hatred and forces it to surrender." (Seeger was inspired by Woody, of course, who was less sentimental. His guitar said "This machine kills fascists." The writing on the guitar of the talented English communist singer Billy Bragg pays tribute to Woody's instrument.) Both music and politics are a means to an end for Seeger, and that end is by no means as benign as his amazingly whitewashed public image—check out what the Kennedy Center says about the old fraud—would suggest.

Leftists who go along with the sunny idea of Seeger as a principled do-gooder (Amy Goodman's birthday piece is sadly typical) do enormous damage to their own causes, to their own deeply-held beliefs in human rights, liberal democracy, and a more just society in which ordinary people have as much control as possible over their own lives. As someone on the libertarian, democratic left, I find such tributes to Pete embarrassing, and infuriating.

Seeger released an album last year to show he's still going strong. It's called At 89. It's ridiculous, earnest, puerile nonsense, on every predictable topic from "telling false from true" to PCB pollution. With high seriousness, Seeger manages to channel the voices of both the "last surviving whale" and a noble Indian of the Hudson River Valley encountering Europeans for the first time ("They had many words that we did not know.") If he weren't such an unpleasant person, one could feel sorry that he's come to this. But then one remembers that "come to this" is wrong; this is what he's always done. How sad that Bruce Springsteen, a much better man and a much better artist, feels any debt to this charlatan! Bruce has more real feeling for working people than Pete ever had - he's shown it again and again, from Nebraska to The Ghost of Tom Joad to any number of his ballads about the power and subtlety of life, and of life on the margins, and he knows the folk music importance of not saying too much—listen to "Highway 29" on Tom Joad. Bruce's millions don't detract from his authenticity. Class, of course, is about far more than money.

One more thing. In my childhood home, we had an old Pete Seeger record that got played a lot. It had a track called "How can I keep from singing?" that was about justice and the human spirit. It included these lines:

When tyrants tremble
Sick with fear
And hear their death knells ringing
It sounds an echo in my soul
How can I keep from singing?

As I kid I found this a bit savage -- we're not about revenge and enjoying the fear of others, are we? But I thought about this line in 2003, when Seeger was talking and singing and agitating against the Iraq war. If there ever was a tyrant, Saddam was one. And a few years after those 2003 protests, his death knell in fact rang (although he made a braver death than many might have guessed beforehand. No trembling, no apparent fear.)

Now, one can argue that the Iraq war wasn't worth it, although I would not. One can argue that it was officially justified with lies, poorly prepared and carried out; that there was insufficient American interest in the sociology of power in Iraq and in the psychological and political condition of the Iraqi people, with all of which I certainly would agree. But one cannot object to tyranny and be opposed to Saddam's removal, and I have no doubt, none at all, that Seeger would have opposed any American attempt to do this by force; which is to say that he would have opposed the very possibility of the end of Saddam and his murderous regime. And he somehow did manage to keep from singing when the old tyrant fell.

Another moment of great clarity. Pete Seeger wants the tyrants dead—but only the right kind of tyrants, and it should never be the United States that kills them. I guess that "death knell" in the song was marking off a death by old age.

One of the most embarrassing songs on At 89 is called "False from True." Seeger sings,

But I promise you, and you, brothers and sisters of ev'ry skin,
I'll sing your story while I've breath within.

Please, no. Not in my name!

Buchanan: Nicaragua's Ortega "Scrub Stock"

2009-04-24T15:46:59Z

For the last decade or so, Washington has indulged Pat Buchanan as a sort of crazy political uncle.

Ben Cohen: The Hypocrisy of the West

2009-02-05T14:39:07Z

With the financial meltdown in full swing, western governments are swinging into action to revive their economies with massive stimulus bills and spending programs. Financial institutions too big to fail are receiving bucket loads of cash, while a multitude of industries wait for their piece of the pie. Obama is proposing huge investments in infrastructure and green jobs, while Gordon Brown and the EU promise much the same.

The West responds to economic crises with swift government intervention, while it tells Third World Nations to do the opposite. 'Structural Adjustment' was the phrase coined by the IMF and World Bank -- a technocratic word to describe the gutting of public institutions in the countries they were supposed to help. Third World countries were ordered to cut government spending, allow private companies to take over state functions (like providing water, electricity and education), and borrow at extremely high interest rates. The results were catastrophic, and countries like Brazil, Chile, and Nicaragua were plunged into economic hell. Hyperinflation, mass unemployment, poverty and food insecurity soared while deficits multiplied exponentially.

Family living in derelict building ~ Managua, Nicaragua, originally uploaded by cromacom.

The West insisted this was the best road to economic prosperity, ignoring the inconvenient truth -- that they had not taken their own advice.

Central planning, protectionism and corporate welfare created the societies we live in today -- the power of capitalism to create wealth by itself was nothing more than a myth, a weapon the rich would use to lecture the poor. You live in the jungle of savage capitalism while we use the state to build our businesses and solidify our wealth.

The ideologues insisted that neo liberalism worked, ramming it down the throats of their own countries with the same religious fervor. Wealth was created, but only at the top, while the rest of the country crumbled. The financial tsunami that wrecked Latin America in the 1980's had finally landed in the North, culminating in the spectacular meltdown of giant institutions deemed invincible 6 months before.

And our response? To use the same measures we always have in creating wealth and stability. We used the power of the government to regulate, protect and subsidize.

We may pull out of this awful mess in the coming months if our governments react to the will of the people. Wall Street must pay, jobs must be created, and the wealth must be spread around. We know this, and our governments know it too.

Yet the Third World is trapped in a spiral of debt, privatization and deep, persistent poverty. They exist in a precarious state of neo colonial dependency and cannot follow our path out of economic disaster because we insist they don't. We may believe colonialism is dead, but our treatment of the Third World reveals otherwise. We may not govern their countries directly, but the results are tragically similar. It is only the methods that differ.

Perhaps the almighty shock we have received will sway power back towards the disenfranchised, and perhaps we will have more sympathy for their plight. We can mourn the death of capitalism, but know that it never really existed -- not here at least.

Ben Cohen is the Editor of The Daily Banter.com

Mimi Kennedy: An Open Letter to Tom Daschle

2009-02-02T17:26:02Z

Mr. Daschle, you are now exactly the wrong man for health care reform.

It is clear you will work for a solution that is a political compromise -- and now, any compromise you might attain will be lethally vulnerable. From all sides, your compromise will be attacked as the work of a man unwilling to pay his fair share of burdens he willfully imposes on others, of a man who's not even cognizant of his actions when he ducks those burdens.

To progressive Democrats, you appear as a man in denial, blissfully ignorant of the tight fiscal and legal constraints in which others live. Denial has devastated America, during the Bush Administration. You appear to be a man who hates what he preaches others to do: pay taxes, believe in government. You appear to be a man who preaches equality but cannot practice it, who is most comfortable in positions that elevate him above the shared norm.

This is fatal for the effort to educate the public about an equal-access health care system. Appearances are not truth. But every politician knows that his or her image, as well as his or her actions, can make the difference between failure and success.

If the people could vote knowledgeably on this issue, they would not vote for middle men -- insurance companies -- to gamble with our tax money and our health, selling financial "products" at a profit. We would vote to pay our doctors and nurses fairly for services rendered, and for access to preventive care and education about our own physical health, which is sorely lacking even in the 21st century. We would not vote to give shareholders the maximum possible return on their investment in health insurance companies that decide on delivery of care. But shareholder interests are the legal responsibility of any for-profit company. Few health-insurance company shareholders grasp the irony that their profitable investments will be wiped out, by the very system that created them, at the time of their physical demise.

For-profit does not belong in a taxpayer-funded health system. For-profit means cutting medical services to patients, and payments to providers, to preserve profits. It means closing the business if it can't be profitable -- leaving people and communities in the lurch. When the taxpayers mop up after such lousy investments, it is more expensive than ever, as the bail-out of our supposedly safe banks, which were hell-bent on maximizing profit to the extent of ignoring all fiscal responsibility, has shown.

Your closeness, Mr. Daschle, to the health insurance companies and their executives, suggests a willingness to add them to the taxpayers' payroll. If this position were credible for another Secretary of Health, it is unfortunately without credibility in your case. You are a delinquent taxpayer, which undermines our trust in your fiscal judgment.

I often rue that the web of justice seems to catch so many Democrats, while much more venal Republicans slip through. For whatever reason, you are caught in that web. Without a microscope, Americans can see you do not share their accountability. However deft a politician you are, they will question your health care solution, whatever it is. Your colleagues in the bubble may not see this. They will vote you in. The trouble will come later, in selling your solution to the public. The only way to avoid trouble for the Administration's health care reform effort, down the road, is to withdraw.

Since the time of Richard Nixon, there has been a strange lack of will in the media to identify the real cause for Americans' anger at politicians who fall, publicly and spectacularly. But the reason is blood, though the political "Gate" of the day may be the mechanism. It is not whether Vietnam, Somalia, Bosnia, Nicaragua, Iraq went badly or well -- there is usually disagreement on that question. The shame is that innocent blood was shed by this leader, and during the time of bloodshed we, the American people who are supposed to self-govern, were unable to stop it. However righteous a war or the arguments for war seemed for a time, the blood is on our hands, and an unrighteous war makes it very difficult to wash away. Your leadership in the rush to war in Iraq amplifies your tax delinquency. The doubts about the truth of the Administration's casus belli, the agenda for the New American Century, and testimony from Administration whistleblowers were all available and evident, but in your position as Democratic leadership, you failed to bring it forward. By omission and commission, you assented to pay for the war and the shedding of innocent blood. With our economy in shambles, the public discussion about your appointment doesn't center on the war, but the fact is there: you helped put blood on your hands and ours.

That your intentions are good and that you've done much good, I don't doubt. Your constituents and colleagues praise you. But you had the challenge of a very difficult and bloody time, and however innocuous you thought your failings were then - the very thing that makes people uneasy with your judgment --their revelation makes you sadly unfit for the position of high priority to which our president nominated you. He cannot withdraw his support without doing tremendous political damage to himself. It is up to you to withdraw and be rewarded with some consolation prize, which you will be, by both staunch friends and those, like me, who will applaud a long-delayed moment of grace.

Mimi Kennedy
Chair, PRogressive Democrats of America