Detroit

The American auto industry is on the verge of collapse. Yet again, the brilliant minds of finance didn’t see it coming. If you turn to your expert economists on TV or any major newspaper, you’ll find them either debating whether or not the bottom has been reached or how long will the recession last. This is seriously disturbing given the fact that these number crunchers are suppose to be able to read balance sheets and cash flow statements and predict this stuff months, if not years, in advance. Of course there are exception, but they’re a mere handful, and at the moment, very hard to find.

Needless to say, the market is in a panic now after hearing about the chiefs of the big three Detroit automakers go to Nancy Pelosi and warn her of the impending bankruptcy if the $25 billion loan they seek isn’t coughed up as soon as possible. (Bear in mind that they’ve already received $25 billion earlier this year to help them build more fuel-efficient cars.) Bankruptcy would entail massive job losses not just for the automakers but also for the supporting businesses, and most importantly, eliminate the possibility of ever emerging out of bankruptcy as no one in their right mind would buy a car from a company in such dire financial condition.

That said, Barack Obama seems to be for some sort of bailout (judging by his speech today): “I have made it a high priority for my transition team to work on additional policy options to help the auto industry adjust, weather the financial crisis and succeed in producing fuel-efficient cars here in the United States of America,” he said. This seems disturbingly wrong on several levels.

First, the problem isn’t just that GM can’t produce better cars, it’s that people aren’t buying cars and trucks right now because of the economic downturn, and the Detroit Three are so big that they simply can’t adjust to what the market is telling them. Helping these behemoths make more fuel efficient cars would’ve made sense three years ago when Toyota started its climb to the top of the industry, but now is the time to let them become small, efficient and more competitive. Simply put: let them close factories, get rid of models that don’t sell, lay off people and figure out what size works.

Second, these companies suffer from terrible deals struck with their unions. By all estimates, the crippling costs of health care, pension plans and other benefits would continue to harm them in the long run even if the market was to turn around and their factories were to start churning out more fuel-efficient vehicles. They need to renegotiate these benefits with their unions and now seems like the perfect time to do so. The workers can either accept a reduction in their benefits or risk losing their livelihoods forever – chances are they’ll cave in.

To conclude, the Detroit Three are simply not competitive any more. They’ve been making mediocre cars and trucks for years, and now, because of the economic downturn, must scale back operations. Unfortunately, scaling back isn’t something that can occur at the flick of a switch when it comes to giant factories employing thousands of people (well, it probably can, just look at how quickly entire manufacturing companies moved across the border), and because of that, factories are still up and running, cars are still being produced, people are still employed (although 100,000 jobs have been cut in the industry since 2006), and money is being spent.

It would make sense to let nature take its course on these companies and for the government to provide assistance to all those who would become unemployed as a result. The kind of assistance that would help these people get an education and learn another trade. This should probably go hand-in-hand with other assistance that keeps them (not the automakers) from falling into complete financial collapse, although that may be unavoidable.

There simply is no other sensible strategy. What Obama is suggesting will simply lead to more begging by these companies six months from now. And then what? We move on to bailing out the airlines? Smarter economists have said recovering from this recession could take up to five years. The employees at these factories need to be told that their companies are about to die and they have to move on – find another job; all those who were employed in manufacturing did exactly that when their jobs moved away to the Third World. Sure, the pace of change is much faster this time, but people have to adjust. Times have changed. Obama promised change. Now’s the time for him to step up and deliver it, even if it’s not the kind he had in mind.

Vote for nobody

Raytheon 9

After watching the indiscriminate destruction Israel unleashed on the citizens of Lebanon in 2006, nine activists from northern Ireland decided to take action. They broke into the offices of Raytheon, the local arms manufacturer supplying the Israelis, smashed open a few of their computers and halted production. They now stand trial. Support the Raytheon 9.

Enlightenend Westerners

Just read a story about a town in Australia coming together to oppose a proposal to build an Islamic school there. Needless to say, residents of this former penal colony had perspicacious arguments to offer against the project: “‘Why hasn’t anyone got any guts? They’ve got terrorists amongst ‘em… They want to be here so they can go and hide in all the farm houses… This town has every nationality… but Muslims do not fit in this town. We are Aussies, OK.’”

This sad story reminded me of Gary Younge’s take on the new xenophobia sweeping Europe and the West:

To believe in a European utopia before Muslims arrived is delusional

It is pernicious to regard prejudiced views within migrant communities as exclusive to either them or their cultures

In October, a promising young Iranian-German footballer, Ashkan Dejagah, refused to go to Israel to play for the German under-21 team in a European qualifier. Dejagah, who was born in Iran and came to Germany as a child, claimed if he went to Israel he might be denied entry into Iran. His decision not to go sparked accusations of antisemitism from German Jewish groups alongside calls from some politicians that he be dropped from the team (after some deliberation, German officials decided to keep him on the team).

The debate that followed shed light on how much you have to know, and how much you have to forget, to become German in some eyes, and laid some ground rules for Dejagah’s inclusion and integration. “Whoever represents Germany, whether a native German or an immigrant, has to identify with the history and culture of our society,” said Ronald Pofalla, the general secretary of the conservative Christian Democrats. “If he does not want to do so out of personal political reasons, then that national jersey should be removed.”

There are at least six million reasons why Dejagah would be better off not identifying with German history and culture when it comes to contemplating a visit to Israel. But, for the time being, here are just two. First, he will find a far less murderous recent history of antisemitism in his Iranian heritage than he will in his German. Second, if any nation exemplifies the limits of integration without a vigorous culture of anti-racism it is Germany – the European nation where Jews were most assimilated and almost found themselves wiped out.

The point is not to handcuff the likes of Pofalla to their history but to liberate them from self-delusion. No competition between Iran and Germany to see who has hated Jews least can produce a winner anyone can be proud of. But in Pofalla’s case it illustrates that when you live in a street full of glass houses everybody should think twice about what they throw and who they throw it at.

This is not a lesson confined to Germany. It has become a Europe-wide habit to refer to Muslims in particular and migrants in general as though they are barbarians who must either be civilised or banished, before they pollute the egalitarian societies in which they were either born or now live. Lacking all sense of humility, self-awareness and historical literacy, Europe’s political class acts as though these communities not only manifest homophobia, sexism, antisemitism, political violence and social unrest, but also as though they invented them and introduced them to an otherwise utopian continent.

Take France. Following the recent riots there, Jacques Myard, a nationalist deputy, explained the disturbances thus. “The problem is not economic. The reality is not economic. The reality is that an anti-French ethno-cultural bias from a foreign society has taken root on French soil and it is feeding on basic anti-French racism even if the rioters have French nationality.”

The French may need to import many things – from trashy popular films to fast food – but the one thing they have long produced themselves is a culture of riotous assembly. I have seen farmers hurl livestock at police, and ducked as students converted street furniture into missiles. There is nothing foreign about rioting in France.

In Britain, the emergence of “home-grown bombers” is mentioned as though this is a new development, when in fact we have been growing our own bombers for years. We have a whole evening dedicated to burning one – it’s called Guy Fawkes night.

Then there was the late gay Dutch anti-immigration activist, Pim Fortuyn. “I have gay friends who have been beaten up by young Moroccans in Rotterdam,” he said. “In Rotterdam we have third-generation Moroccans who still don’t speak Dutch, oppress women and won’t live by our values.” There was, it seems, no gay-bashing or sexism in Rotterdam before the Moroccans came.

One need not be in denial about the existence of prejudice in migrant and Muslim communities to grasp how pernicious it is to regard those views as exclusive to those communities or to be the result of their cultures. Nor need we be squeamish about challenging prejudice, regardless of where it comes from. The notion that bigotry in Muslim and migrant communities presents a multicultural conundrum is just one more straw man among many. You enforce the law, without fear or favour. You promote equality to all and for all. There is no conflict between this and racial equality – it is a prerequisite for it. If an imam doesn’t like women walking past his mosque in a bikini, that’s too bad for him. If an MP doesn’t like women walking into his surgery in a niqab, that’s too bad for him, too. Both have the right to say what they think – provided it doesn’t promote violence – but women have the right to wear what they like.

Nor should we be in denial about the idea that certain prejudices may be more prevalent in certain communities. The issue is what we make of that and whether we are prepared to apply those conclusions with equal rigour across the board. The prevalence of child sex abuse in the Catholic church was not, primarily, about Catholicism but single men having exclusive authority over and access to young children and taking advantage of it. No one who wants to be taken seriously has tried to hold each Catholic collectively responsible for these abuses or claim Catholics are inherently predisposed to child abuse, or that the abuse was essentially religious. Even as these scandals have run parallel with the war on terror, no one is claiming that Catholicism represents a threat to our civilisation.

On February 15 last year, the European commission president, José Manuel Barroso, said Europe had to stand up for its core values and express its solidarity with the Danish people after widespread unrest over the cartoons of Muhammad in a Danish newspaper. “If not, we are accepting fear in our society,” he said. “I understand that it offended many people in the Muslim world, but is it better to have a system where some excesses are allowed or be in some countries where they don’t even have the right to say this?”

That same day, in the Commons, the government voted to expand counterterrorism laws by making “glorification” of terrorism a criminal offence. Speaking after the vote, Tony Blair said the new law “will allow us to deal with those people and say: look, we have free speech in this country, but don’t abuse it”.

Herein lies the problem with Enlightenment values, as they have been promoted in recent years. The values are fine. But those who champion them most fervently also do so most selectively. They embrace Muslim women campaigning against sexism, but ignore those fighting racism, Islamophobia or war. They attack Muslim fundamentalist homophobes on housing estates, but align themselves with Christian fundamentalist homophobes in the White House. They demand secularism and assimilation, but view every action by Muslims and immigrants as essentially foreign or religious. In short, they see their own attributes and others’ flaws through a magnifying glass. No wonder their vision of the world is so distorted.

Miseducation of America

Rev. Wright came on the Bill Moyers show last week to explain himself. I was worried the interview would go one of two ways: 1) he’d come off like the fiery, angry black man in the video clips who has white America shaking in its boots, or 2) he’d come off like a certain member of his congregation – apologetic, begging for understanding.

To my surprise, he did neither. Instead, he came off as an intelligent, self-aware, highly-educated, soft-spoken black man who neither disavowed those carefully selected sound bites or projected the bitterness and hate that has been leveled against him and his church the past few weeks.

When asked if his comments were miscommunicated, he replied, absolutely not. Those who went and publicized those sound bites knew exactly what they were trying to communicate. They were trying to paint me as an uneducated, un-patriotic, un-American racist hate-monger, he explained. Uneducated? He has a PhD from the University of Chicago. Un-patriotic? Rev. Wright served several years in the military (Marines and Navy). Un-American? He leads a vibrant congregation on the South Side of Chicago which has several charitable programs serving the less fortunate, troubled or at-risk teenagers and senior citizens. Racist hate-monger? His inter-racial church was actively involved in opposing South Africa’s apartheid back in the 70s when our government maintained strong diplomatic and military ties to the racist country.

So why did his comments, which were six or seven years old (some of them took place the Sunday after 9/11 with church members in the audience who had lost loved ones in the attacks), elicit such a passionate and hateful response? It’s the miseducation of America, he said.

The fact that we can start wars and support policies that kill and maim millions around the world, and not flinch an eye. The fact that we will withhold humanitarian aid to nations because their leaders will simply not do everything that we demand. The fact that this nation clings to the words of its forefathers – We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights – yet does not see the contradiction in enslaving or discriminating against its own people. To not recognize, no, to deliberately ignore these facts from the days we begin to teach our kids in elementary school to the time we become adults – that, is the miseducation of America. Rev. Wright went on to explain that these shared American values are simply not consistent with the words of God, so he preaches on regardless of who thinks what.

What Rev. Wright didn’t touch upon, and what I think says a lot about the discourse, is that this is a problem for white America and white America only. (Mind you that when I say “white America” here I mean those who had the harsh words for Rev. Wright.) I have yet to find one Black, or Latino, or Asian or African American who disagrees with anything that he said. What if Obama came out and revealed to white America, which is either delusional or stupid about racism – a topic too long to cover here, that minorities would agree with just about everything Rev. Wright said. Look at how we’re handling the illegal immigration issue, or the racial disparity in our prison population, or the countries we’re invading and bombing to the stone age, or the state of our inner city schools, or who doesn’t have access to health care, or the lack of minorities in our government, etc. etc. etc….

In conclusion, if there’s anyone who needs to have a conversation about race relations in this country it is white people. Correction, delusional white people who think America is simply perfect in everything it does and stands for. They remain incredulous of ideas and opinions that reflect reality or shake the foundation of their vision of Americana which goes through life unquestioned. Needless to say, America isn’t perfect nor do I think anyone expects it to be, but there are many out there who are now re-considering Obama because of what Rev. Wright said. If we continue to apologetically brush this issue aside or pretend like Rev. Wright was in the wrong here, then this discourse goes nowhere and the only thing that comes out of it is yet another opening for the neocons to pander to “patriotism” like they did with evangelicals four years back with the gay marriage issue.

Power to the People!

Jeff Halper, on the magnificent hole in the wall:

The people of Palestine have done it again, taking their own fate in their hands after being let down by their own “moderate” political leadership and, indeed, the entire international community in their struggle for freedom. Early this morning they simply blew up the wall separating Gaza from Egypt, breaking a siege imposed on them by an Arab government in collaboration with Israel.

We, the peoples of the world, should take great pride and encouragement in this quintessentially civil society refusal to accept subjugation, to abandon their fate to governments, including their own, for whom the lives of ordinary people are simply grist for their political charades — Annapolis and its subsequent “peace process” being but the last cynical expression. For the Palestinians represent far more than just themselves. Their refusal to submit to the dictates of governments, or to governments’ lack of interest in the well-being of people in general, reflects the desire of billions of oppressed people for identity, freedom, a decent life and actualization of their collective and individual rights and potentials. Most of the oppressed, the “wretched of the earth” as Franz Fanon called them a half-century ago, are too preoccupied with the daunting daily struggle for survival to organize and resist. Others do resist in a myriad of ways, but are most often repressed by their own political and economic “leaders,” disappearing anonymously from view. In a few cases they have managed to mount effective resistance to oppression, even to prevail — though the billions spent on “counterinsurgency” warfare by the US, Europe, Russia, Israel and many “developing” nations augur ill for peoples attempting to overthrow oppressive regimes.

In this the Palestinians stand at the forefront, in the front lines of peoples’ insistence everywhere that their rights, well-being and fundamental values as human beings be respected by governments. And they do so (and I write this as an Israeli with great sorrow and shame) against one of the world’s strongest and most ruthless military powers — a power that has dispossessed them from 85% of their land, which is trying to transform its occupation into a permanent regime of apartheid, which has spent decades impoverishing and disenfranchising them; the fourth largest nuclear power which nevertheless casts itself as the victim. Not only have the Palestinians experienced the dehumanization all oppressed and colonized peoples experience, not only have they been made into the embodiment of the rich and powerful’s greatest fear, evil “terrorists” who may tear down their privileged “civilization,” but they have been turned into guinea pigs. Israel is able to gain an edge in the counterinsurgency industry and win entree into the heart of the American military/hi tech complex by turning the Occupied Territories into a laboratory for the development of fiendish weaponry and tactics intended for use against people.

And yet the Palestinian people — and in particular those who remain sumud, steadfast, in Palestine — continue not only to resist but to surprise and confound its would-be Israeli master at every turn. Despite unlimited control, a complete monopoly over the use of force, utter callousness and a vaunted Shin Beit, Israel’s military intelligence, Palestinians vote as they want, resist, carry on their daily lives with dignity — and blow huge holes in the walls and policies constructed in order to imprison and defeat them.

All this is not on the minds of those desperate people who surged into Egypt today. They may not have the “Big Picture.” Yet they deserve the respect and gratefulness of every person who cherishes a better world based on human rights and dignity, a world that is inclusive. As an Israeli Jew, I have been saddened and mortified that my own people, after all they have experienced, cannot see what they are doing to others. But on a larger scale, not as an Israeli Jew but as a human being, I take heart in the Palestinians’ active refusal to be ground under a global system that is producing unimaginable wealth and power for a few at the expense of the growing ranks of the wretched.

I am not a Palestinian; I am not one of the oppressed. I only hope I can use my privilege in an effective way in order to redeem the gift the people of Gaza have given all of us: the realization that the people do have power and can prevail even in the face of overwhelming power. We may each express our responsibility towards the people of Gaza in whatever way most suits us, but as the privileged we must do something. We owe the Palestinians and the Palestinians writ large at least that.

Jeff Halper is the Coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) and a candidate, with the Palestinian peace activist Ghassan Andoni, for the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. He can be reached at jeff@icahd.org.

Bhutto’s mindless war

I can’t count the number of times I heard someone from Pakistan predict that she would eventually get killed. It was baffling to see her regurgitate the same speech about “religious extremism” over and over again. Is this really Pakistan’s problem, I wondered? Or is terrorism only a problem in Pakistan to the extent that Musharraf has decided to confront the Taliban on behalf of the Americans?

Terrorism is not Pakistan’s problem. The biggest problem for the average citizen in Pakistan seems to be the skyrocketing prices of household goods. “A poll in late November by the International Republican Institute, a U.S.-based non-profit group, gave respondents a choice of 12 issues that would determine which political party they would support. A whopping 53 percent of 3,250 people picked inflation, followed by 15 percent who chose unemployment and 9 percent who chose poverty. Only 6 percent picked terrorism; just 2 percent chose democratic reforms.”

So why was she so vocal about terrorism? For one, she didn’t have anything else to offer. Looking at her previous two stints as prime minister, it’s clear she didn’t do much. So, like Bush, she latched on to an issue which played on people’s fears and provided precisely the kind of slogans one needs to corral supporters in time of an election. Second, her only other issue was Musharraf’s dictatorship. During the martial law last month, she became the savior of democracy and demanded that the constitution be restored and Musharraf step down as the head of the Army, otherwise, she would boycott the elections. He did both, and just like that, the dictatorship problem went out the window.

The other reason why she spoke out against “religious extremism” so much is because of the friends she made overseas when she made the war on terrorism a top priority. The US would not have been so active in seeking a power-sharing deal between Bhutto and Musharraf if Bhutto wasn’t so vocal about her opposition to “Islamic extremists.” In fact, it’s not hard to imagine Bhutto being as irrelevant as Nawaz Sharif if she came back from exile without terrorism as her raison d’etre.

In the end, Bhutto’s fist-waiving was a sham. Musharraf’s been tackling the same problem for years and it has only gotten worse – not for the populous, which is mostly concerned with feeding itself, but for Musharraf and the Americans. The people who she labeled terrorists in Pakistan are the same people who protected the interests of the Americans as well as the Pakistanis for over two decades prior to 9/11. For the Americans, these men played a key role in the collapse of the Soviet empire. For Pakistan, they kept India and Afghanistan at bay during the Cold War, and now fight a proxy war against India in Kashmir. Calling them terrorists and promising a war against their leaders because they’ve fallen out of favor with an overseas ally was not only senseless, but did nothing to resolve the problems faced by the average Pakistani who is yearning for a more stable and prosperous country. Hopefully, Bhutto’s replacement will realize that and make Pakistan the top priority – not the West.

Media and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Let’s begin with a truism: the media plays a major role in shaping public opinion in contemporary democracies. In the US, many will argue that it’s the media that keeps the public blind to some of the most pressing problems of the world, focusing instead on catering to the masses’ voracious appetite for sensationalist entertainment with simple-minded ‘good vs. evil’ narratives. This of course not only waters down our discourse to “they’re evil” and “we’re freedom-loving,” but it also sets in motion the tendency to forgo facts.

One can find ample evidence of this practice in the coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I’ll end this short post by sharing a critique by MIFTAH, the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy, of the coverage Hamas’ mortar attacks received following the Sharm El-Sheikh talks:

“According to mainstream Israeli and US media organizations, Palestinians broke the ceasefire only two days after the historic Israeli-Palestinian ceasefire agreement at Sharm El-Sheikh. It is true. Palestinians fired several rounds of mortars and homemade rockets, weapons that have killed people in the past, at illegal Jewish settlements in Gaza on 11 February. Luckily, no one was hurt in the attacks. However, these media are either marginalizing or not reporting at all some very relevant facts, in particular that Israeli troops killed two unarmed Palestinians in separate incidents prior to the attacks, and that the rocket and mortar attacks were carried out explicitly as a response to the killings . . . Israel should therefore be held responsible for endangering the calm in the region . . . Yet the Israeli and American publics are hardly likely to think so, simply because they do not know … The liberal Israeli daily Ha’aretz, often celebrated for its unbiased approach, points an unambigous finger of blame at the Palestinian organization that claimed responsibility for the mortar and rocket attacks: ‘Hamas Rockets Deal a Blow to Sharm Optimism’ (Ha’aretz staff, Ha’aretz, 11 February) . . . The Atlanta-based CNN . . . (cnn.com, 10 February), referred to Palestinian attacks on ‘Israeli communities in Gaza’, but with not one word spilled on the prehistory of the attacks . . .

The media pressures contributed to the search for accountability among Palestinians for the Palestinian attacks. That is good media work. But should accountability not be demanded for the preceding deadly attacks? Not according to the Israeli and US media whose absolute silence on the matter speaks volumes . . . “

It certainly does. More on this later.

Pakistanis are falling for it. Again.

It feels like 1990 again. The days when Pakistan was facing political and economic turmoil the likes of which can be found in the country today. The day when the president/chief of the army decided to impose a state of emergency to “curb extremism.”

I’ll be honest, I admired Musharraf for quite some time after he burst on to the political scene in the late 90s. He stood out. He decided he had had enough of the political graft, corruption, kick-backs, and every other word in the dictionary that means “stealing from the people and not getting anything done.” He was new and therefore couldn’t possibly be any worst than the last two. He seemed like a man of action and Pakistanis all around the world were happy to have him at the helm.

Alas, Pakistanis fell for it again.

After months of slowly losing political ground (and every other ground), he decided to shut the country down today. This after striking a deal with the woman he spoke vehemently against when he first came to power. Hell, he spoke out against her just a few months ago when he swore the likes of Bhutto and Sharif would face justice whenever they found the fortitude to return to the country.

Regardless, as is the case with power-hungry lunatics like him all over the world, he doesn’t want to let go and will do anything to hold on. Hence the reason why Bhutto is now in Pakistan and Sharif is still hiding in his hole somewhere in England, Dubai or Saudi Arabia.

Bhutto, the Harvard educated, moderate, modern, democratic woman who’s probably stolen more from the coffers of Pakistan than any other politician is now foaming at the mouth. She’s found the weakness that she’s been waiting for since her “self-imposed exile” began years ago, and is now days away from tearing apart the legacy of Musharraf and starting her own – again.

But Musharraf isn’t done yet. He has Western “backers” who are watching this very closely. They haven’t seen a General as obedient and resolute as this since the good ol’ days of the 80s in Central America. And they’re not going to let him fall this easily. But if he must go, then they will make sure he finds the right successor. This is where Bhutto will come in. Because regardless of the mud she’s thrown at Musharraf in the last few months, she is one of those few “moderates” in Pakistan that the West would love to have in power. She’s “anti-extremism,” pro-business, pro-West; everything but original, courageous or bold. The saddest thing about all this is that she and her party still have a substantial following in the country – so the worst is yet to come.

Deja vu.