For a decade now, Jim Keady has been trying to kick Nike to the ground  using their shoes as ammo. The former professional soccer player’s crusade against the apparel titan began when he was canned from a coaching gig at St. John’s University for refusing to wear Nike’s products, as required by the school’s $3.5 million endorsement deal – a stand he took after learning what was happening in overseas sweatshops while researching his masters thesis. Accompanied by his professional and personal partner, Leslie Kretzu, he famously tried to shed light on the issue by living on $1.25 US per day for a month amongst Nike factory workers in Tangerang, Indonesia, in 2000.

Nike has a $1.63 billion marketing and advertising budget; they’ve got the best ad firms and public relations films in the world.

“So, when you’ve got that kind of money you can craft any kind of message you want, and anybody that studies marketing or public relations knows that even if something is a lie, if you say it long enough and passionately enough to enough people, it’s going to start being believed as the truth. Which is what Nike’s done – they’ve lied to the consuming public for years.”

read more | digg story

There has been much debate in this campaign about which of our enemies the next U.S. president should deign to talk to. The real story, the next president may discover, though, is how few countries are waiting around for us to call. It is hard to remember a time when more shifts in the global balance of power are happening at once — with so few in America’s favor.

The world is rapidly changing from a unipolar world to a multipolar one. Other countries are rising while the United States is stagnating or even falling. The economies of China and India are skyrocketing upwards, while America teeters on the brink of a recession. In a world in which demand for resources is rising while supply is falling, the countries that can provide oil, natural gas, and coal -- like Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Brazil, and Russia -- will become much more powerful until alternative energies are found. Money is power, and these countries will continue to become wealthier as the prices of these resources continue to rise. (Remember the law of supply and demand?) Once the countries in the European Union can reform their economies, that region will also rise to become an economic power that can rival or surpass the United States.

Again, I must ask: Which presidential candidate is going to be blunt and honest with the American people? Which candidate is going to address -- and propose solutions to -- the fundamental problems that are plaguing the United States? The upcoming presidential election should be about more than silly lapel pins.

From the front-lines of conflicts in Mexico, Argentina, South Africa, Palestine, Korea, 'the North' from Seattle to Genova, and the 'War on Terror' in New York, Afghanistan, and Iraq. It is the story of men and women around the world who resist being annihilated in the Fourth World War.

"The Fourth World War" brings together the images and voices of the human victims of this global conflict.

"A powerful, radical cry from the frontlines of the war on people" (Naomi Klein)

You may watch the movie here or download it with several subtitles using the link below.

[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.560906&w=425&h=350&fv=docId%3D3604591910224149865%26playerMode%3Dsimple%26hl%3Den]

Download the documentary (subtitles in English, French, German, Portuguese and Slovak included)

"The Fourth World War (2003)" @ IMDb

the4thworldwar.blogspot.com

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Arcata and Mad River Railroad, (AAR reporting marks AMR), was affectionately known as the "Annie and Mary". AMR's predecessor, the Union Wharf and Plank Walk Company was incorporated on December 15, 1854, to provide access over the mud flats near the town of Union (later Arcata) to ocean going shipping for a distance of 2.7 miles (4 km). The track was built on wooden rails overlaid with strap iron. It was a horse-powered railroad from the town to the end of a wharf in Humboldt Bay.

On June 14, 1875, the Arcata Transportation Company was incorporated and took over the line and converted to steam.

On July 29, 1881, the Arcata & Mad River Railroad was incorporated. By 1882 the wooden rails were replaced with 35-pound iron rails. In the 1890s the railroad's principal commodities were lumber, shingles, and potatoes.

The first president of the AMR in 1881 was listed as Francis Korbel. Korbel was also the name of the terminus of the AMR. Passenger service was offered on the AMR but ended on June 6, 1931.

The railroad was eventually extended 7.5 miles (12 km) from Arcata to the Northern Redwood Company mill at Korbel. The Northern Redwood Company was owned by the Charles Nelson Steamship Company. It was over 10 years after the arrival of the Northwestern Pacific Railroad (NWP) in Arcata in 1914 that the steamship company allowed an interchange between the AMR and the NWP at Korblex. During the lumber boom of the 1950s, the Annie and Mary served fifteen shippers on its 7½-mile railroad. The average daily car loadings were enough to place the road among the highest paying railroad properties per mile in the United States. At the time of its closure, AMR ran 4 General Electric 44-tonner diesel-electric locomotives and one Whitcomb 80DE-7b 80 ton diesel-electric locomotive. The Arcata and Mad River Railroad is generally considered the first railroad in California.

On May 24, 1985, the AMR was abandoned. In September 1988 the Eureka Southern Railroad purchased the AMR from Simpson Timber Company for $300,000. The AMR had been closed for the two year period (1986-1988) prior to its purchase by the Eureka Southern. Service was briefly resumed in 1994 by the North Coast Railroad. Soon afterwards, landslides in the Eel River canyon closed the line, and no rail service has existed since that time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcata_and_Mad_River_Railroad

The use of a cartoon franchise to market and cross-sell is not new. Snoopy speaks for MetLife, while Yogi Bear hustles family campsites and Shrek peddles cereal. A stuffed animal or an animated cartoon does evoke warm and cuddly feelings. What IS specifically different about Hello Kitty is its employment by Japan to communicate with China, a country it invaded 70 years ago as part of an imperialist policy to take over China's vast resources. Today, the takeover is not being accomplished with the military. It is done with merchandising, wherein consumer goods (serial, mass-produced, inexpensive and therefore attainable objects) are endowed with human qualities and ambassadorial charm. Hello Kitty's pitch is the dream of world peace, harmony, and abundance through mass entertainment, consumption of spectacle, and tourist spending.

And this pitch IS trademarked. Artist Tom Sachs, who just installed his Hello Kitty sculptures at Lever House earlier this month (and famously substituted Hello Kitty for the Baby Jesus at Barney's holiday windows back in 1994), never got permission to use the ambassador's likeness and could face legal action. In New York Magazine, Sachs proclaims, "Hello Kitty is so much a part of our popular culture, I don't think anyone really owns it. It's something licensed by Sanrio, but I think her spirit and love and purity belong to all of us." He could have been speaking for the Japanese Ministry. Maybe Sanrio will let this one slide: it does elevate Hello Kitty into a cultural icon, which is great for business.

Laurie Meadoff, Executive Producer

Laurie Meadoff is the president of and a partner in NextNext Entertainment and an executive producer of Chat the Planet. She found the prototype for Chat the Planet while on a Rockefeller Fellowship in South Africa. Passionately envisioning a world without barriers and prejudice, Ms. Meadoff strives to build bridges through tolerance and understanding, and her tools of choice are television and the internet. She has executive produced programming for Nickelodeon, Disney Channel, ABC, HBO Family, MTV and VH1 and a host of international broadcasters. Read the full bio here.

Question four, by Laurie Meadoff

"How do the cultural clashes between the traditional Indian culture and the emergence of technology such as text messaging and internet dating effect  romantic relationships in India?"

An answer:

To understand the complexity of Indian culture and its new media clashes you need to first see some of their resent leap regarding to technology. India and its inhabitants have an extraordinary longing for technology and other things that I believe comes from an almost childish desirer to understand how things work. Perhaps is this alone a reaction of the impossibility to....

Read more under the globalization page.

The unprecedented accumulation of wealth by a narrow financial elite under conditions of declining real incomes for the vast majority of the world’s population is creating mounting discontent and anger.

This is the significance of a poll conducted across Europe, Asia and the United States by the Financial Times of London and the Harris polling firm.

“Income inequality has emerged as a highly contentious political issue in many countries as the latest wave of globalization has created a ‘superclass’ of rich people,” the Financial Times commented in relation to the poll results, which were published Monday.

The FT/Harris poll found overwhelming majorities throughout Europe expressing the view that the social chasm between the financial elite and the rest of the population has grown too large. In Spain, for example, 76 percent said that social inequality had grown too great, while in Germany the figure was 87 percent.

In China, which has become the low-wage manufacturing center of the world, subjecting millions of workers to exploitation while producing a new class of billionaires and multi-millionaires, 80 percent said that inequality in income was too great.

In the United States, the most socially unequal of the advanced capitalist countries, those who believe the gap has grown too wide are 78 percent.

Substantial majorities of those responding in all eight countries where the poll was conducted expressed the belief that the social chasm will only grow wider over the next five years, while by equally large margins they expressed their support for raising taxes on the wealthy and lowering them on the poor.

Under conditions of deepening crisis wracking the US and global financial system, widespread economic dislocations have rendered the piling up of obscene fortunes by a tiny financial elite all the more intolerable for masses of people confronting declining living standards, the loss of jobs and, over wide areas of the globe, growing hunger.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), global food prices have risen by 45 percent in the last nine months alone, with the cost of some basic commodities soaring far higher—wheat by 130 percent and rice by 74 percent over the past year. With 2.5 billion people—40 percent of the world’s population—living on less than $2 a day, these spiraling food prices confront hundreds of millions with the imminent specter of starvation.

In a statement released last week, FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf cited as a key cause of this looming catastrophe, “the problem of financial speculation. Investment funds speculate on futures markets and help push up the price of commodities, including food commodities.”

The decision by the Financial Times, the authoritative voice of the City of London, to conduct the poll on income was representative of growing unease within the world’s ruling elites over the threat that unprecedented levels of social polarization combined with economic crisis will trigger a sharp resurgence of class struggle.

Thus, at last week’s meeting of the 27 European Union finance ministers in Brussels, soaring compensation for corporate executives was described as “scandalous” and a “social scourge.”

“The excesses of captains of industry we have seen in several countries and sectors in the euro area are really scandalous, and we continue to examine how something can be done in terms of professional ethics and taxation to combat these excesses,” commented Jean-Claude Juncker, chairman of the Eurogroup.

A public furor was touched off recently when a Dutch CEO cashed in bonuses and stock options worth $124 million. By American standards, the pay package was hardly unusual, but average CEO compensation in the Netherlands stands at barely one quarter the prevailing level in the US.

Juncker, who is both prime minister and finance minister in Luxembourg, said that the European Commission would require its member countries to report on “what they are doing to combat this social scourge.” Several governments in Europe have drafted legislation that would impose high levels of taxation on oversized executive pay packages.

The real concern of the European bourgeoisie was made clear by Juncker, who warned that average working people “won’t understand if we urge them to moderate their wage demands if we don’t also say we no longer accept having a situation where certain top managers have executive salaries—and benefit from golden parachutes—that bear no relation to their performance.”

In other words, given overly flagrant gorging at the top of society, demands for those at the bottom to tighten their belts may light the fuse to a social powder keg.

Along the same lines, the Financial Times last week published an admonishing column by David Rothkopf, author of Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They are Making and a former deputy undersecretary of commerce for international trade under the Clinton administration.

“The credit crisis is exacerbating the emerging backlash against corporate excess,” he wrote. “Elites make billions on markets whether they go up or down and their institutions win government support while the little guy loses his home. Multinational chief executives 30 years ago made 35 times the wages of an average employee; today it is more than 350 times. The crisis has focused attention on the obscene inequities of this era—the world’s 1,100 richest people have almost twice the assets of the poorest 2.5 billion.”

Rothkopf concluded his piece with a warning that the financial oligarchy must save itself by curbing its excesses. “By recognizing that there are public interests to which they must respond, the financial superclass can stall the fate of previous elites,” he wrote. “To succeed at that they must shun their arrogant ‘leave-it-to-the-market’ explanations for the inequality they have helped foster.”

This warning about suffering “the fate of previous elites,” is unquestionably severe, particularly in the pages of Britain’s leading financial newspaper. Who does the author have in mind: the French aristocracy? Russia’s Romanov dynasty? Clearly, within ruling circles, the threat that mass resentment over inequality is creating conditions for social upheavals and even revolution is being taken very seriously.

Rothkopf’s advice that the ruling elites respond to “public interests” and be less arrogant will hardly solve the problem, which is fundamentally rooted not in the undoubted rapaciousness and arrogance of those profiting off forms of financial speculation that threaten to unleash famine over large parts of the globe, but rather in the workings of capitalism itself.

It was Karl Marx, more than 140 years ago, who developed the “Theory of Increasing Misery” to explain this inherent feature of capitalist production.

“Accumulation of wealth at one pole,” he wrote, “is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its product in the form of capital.” [1]

No single element of Marx’s analysis of capitalism has been subjected to more intense and sustained criticism by the apologists for the profit system than this thesis. Expansion of capitalism and the accumulation of wealth, they have argued, would inexorably lead to increased living standards for the broad masses of working people.

The fallacy of this argument and the correctness of Marx’s analysis is once again being confirmed not only in the cold language of statistics, but in the increasingly explosive struggles of masses of people confronted with the impossibility of obtaining the essential means of survival, which they are being denied by a system of production based on private profit.

Note:
[1] Karl Marx, Capital, I, Chapter 25, section 4

Four of every five Americans want the country to move in a different direction, which makes this presidential election, potentially, one of the most pivotal since World War II.

And yet there’s growing evidence that despite the plethora of important issues, the election may yet be undermined by the usual madness — fear-mongering, bogus arguments over who really loves America, race-baiting, gay-baiting (Ohmigod! They’re getting married!) and the wholesale trivialization of matters that are not just important, but extremely complex.

I agree. If this election is decided because of flag lapel pins, slanderous rumors about a candidate's religion, gay marriage, and whether a candidate placed his hand over his heart during one recitation of the Pledge of Allegience, then I will lose what little hope I still have for the United States.

There are important issues that need to be addressed, and they need to be addressed now: reforming America's education system, adapting to a high-tech, globalized world, rescuing the dollar and preventing future hyperinflation, replacing the country's broken infrastructure, removing our addiction to oil, and fixing the country's bankrupt finances. And that's just a few of the issues. The candidate who can tell the American people the honest, blunt truth and come up with significant, inspiring plans to change these things will be the one who wins in November.

"Israel should focus on the creation of an economy based on the quality of the products it manufactures and not on their low price," said [Cohen] at the Israel President's Conference hosted by President Shimon Peres today...

"Israel should base its economy in a way to preserve a stable and growing economy. The model of low pricing is not suitable for Israel. The economic model that suits Israel is a model that mainly produces high-quality products. Investors see Israel as a magnet for investment because of the success of its start-ups. Investment has quadrupled in recent years."

The price that a business lists for a product or service is not only relevant towards revenue; it is also an integral part of marketing. If a product has an extremely low price, overall sales will increase, but people will perceive the quality of the product to be low. If a product has an extremely high price, sales will decrease, but people will believe the product to be superior. (If a person buys a $1,000 bottle of wine, he will believe that the wine is inherently better -- even if he knows nothing about wine -- than a $20 bottle.)

Israel faces an economic delimma: Should it follow the China and India's lead by marketing itself as a country whose labor costs are low, or should it bill itself as a country that produces high-quality (though expensive) products, particularly in the high-tech industry?

Cohen is correct. Israel should choose the latter option. As Israel grows, its cost of labor will be unable to compete with other countries that are less developed. Wages and inflation are increasing in China and India, so global companies will likely outsource to other countries that are even less developed in the future. As the dollar continues to fall against the shekel, U.S. companies will earn less and less profit (in dollars) by outsourcing to Israel. (The only exception is in a niche market: I know several outsourcing companies here that employ native speakers of English -- and pay them absurdly low wages -- to work in sales and other areas for client businesses in the United States.)

The high-tech industry is Israel's core competency and unique product quality -- the country is on the same level as Silicon Valley and Bangalore, India. Israel needs to leverage this fact. If Israel produces high-quality goods at higher prices, then wages will increase here as a result. When wages increase, people will spend more money in Israel -- and that will bolster the rest of the economy as a whole.

I'm not sure why this guy doesn't get more play. I'm thinking because he sounds wrong to both sides of the extreme: the Right thinks he too soft on emerging powers and too willing to concede American hegemony; the Left abhors his framing America as the harbinger of peace and prosperity as well as the blueprint for future global integration. He threads the needle's eye, able to coordinate the complexities that surround us with alarming grace. He's post-postmodern: willing to take a clear moral position while recognizing the world exists in multiple contexts.

His website is here. His most recent weekly article here. And I'm not sure I'm willing to have serious political, economic or social conversations with anyone who hasn't spent a decent apprenticeship with his work.

This audio is a good introduction of his frenetic monologues. You will inevitably miss something, so listen again.

p.s. I'm back from Cambodia! Pictures to follow.

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I'm on the fence about this book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. On one hand, John Perkins, the author, appears far too self-satisfied and convinced of his own importance, intimating that he played a key role in multiple major events in recent world history and elisively comparing himself to Paul Revere in the closing pages of the book, even while cursory examination of his biography reveals that he was, in the grand scheme of things, a fairly minor player. His is a sensationalist and melodramatic account, low on reasoned argument and high on fear-inducing intimation. It's a fluffy book -- its key points could be summarized in a few pages -- that seems to be emulating Dan Brown more than the early American revolutionaries like Tom Paine that he cites as his inspiration. This is a pity, because the people Perkins needs to convince if he really wants to change standard operating procedure in what he terms the global "corporatocracy" are unlikely to be swayed by Da Vinci Code-style smoke and mirrors.

On the other hand, there's a great deal about what Perkins has to say that rings true in a very disquieting way. It is the case that Perkins worked for the companies he says he worked for and in the locations he says he did, and it is the case that the basic historical details which he recounts are corroborated by established sources. Moreover, Perkins is not the first to write on the growing linkages between government, big business, and international institutions -- though some who do so are as or more sensationalistic as he, other more dispassionate scholars have attacked the same issues, often classing them under the heading "military-industrial complex" (a concept that, by my count, Perkins mentions but once, and only in passing). Mainstream media have revealed the deeply troubling connections between the Bush Administration and Halliburton, for example, and cursory examination of the resumes of some of the other prominent people Perkins touches on in his book seems at least not to contradict his assertions. Anyone who's compiled their own resume should know that there's a lot that gets left unstated or hides below the surface in any such document. It also by this point is fairly common knowledge that, for example, the CIA has had and likely continues to have a hand in assassinations and other maneuvers in countries where the "national interest" of the US is at stake, and Perkins' account of these actions' impact on locals in those countries illuminates in telling terms the problematic nature of the US' habit of international interference.

In the end I think Perkins has something important to say, but it's a pity he chose to say it in the terms he uses here. He employs his own relatively uncreative vocabulary for dealing with these issues ("corporatocracy", "economic hit man") when terminology already exists that would help plug him in to the broader discussion of the issues. His motivation for doing this seems to be to play up the impact of his tale, but sadly it seems to have the opposite effect: making him seem like more of a fringe character than he perhaps in truth is. Corruption in the World Bank and the military-industrial complex are of vital importance to current affairs -- but they also, I think, don't have the overwhelmingly determinate force over world events that Perkins seems to want them to have, at least for the sake of blockbuster-izing his tale.

The verdict: It's good beach reading if you want to think a little bit too. But for real investigation and analysis of these issues, look elsewhere.

CSPANJUNKIEdotORG

May 18, 2008 C-SPAN

[vodpod id=Groupvideo.1219820&w=425&h=350&fv=%26rel%3D0%26border%3D0%26] from www.youtube.com posted with vodpod

.

see

Each mode of leadership described appear to be differentiated by one being political and the other economic. But both share in dominating the world and this is what the world will no longer subscribe as Engler describes in the report.

Enjoy! Its really worth the time and the sources are embedded to further understand the big picture.

Globalizers, Neocons, or...?

The World After Bush

By Mark Engler

Picture January 20, 2009, the day George W. Bush has to vacate the Oval Office.

It’s easy enough to imagine a party marking this fine occasion, with antiwar protestors, civil libertarians, community leaders, environmentalists, health-care advocates, and trade unionists clinking glasses to toast the end of an unfortunate era. Even Americans not normally inclined to political life might be tempted to join the festivities, bringing their own bottles of bubbly to the party. Given that presidential job approval ratings have rarely broken 40% for two years and now remain obdurately around or below 30%—historic lows—it would not surprising if this were a sizeable celebration.

More surprising, however, might be the number of people in the crowd drinking finer brands of champagne. Amid the populist gala, one might well spot figures of high standing in the corporate world, individuals who once would have looked forward to the reign of an MBA president but now believe that neocon bravado is no way to run an empire.

One of the more curious aspects of the Bush years is that the self-proclaimed “uniter” polarized not only American society, but also its business and political elites. These are the types who gather at the annual, ultra-exclusive World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland and have their assistants trade business cards for them. Yet, despite their sometime chumminess, these powerful few are now in disagreement over how American power should be shaped in the post-Bush era and increasing numbers of them are jumping ship when it comes to the course the Republicans have chosen to advance these last years. They are now engaged in a debate about how to rule the world.

Don’t think of this as some conspiratorial plot, but as a perfectly commonsensical debate over what policies are in the best interests of those who hire phalanxes of Washington lobbyists and fill the coffers of presidential and congressional campaigns. Many business leaders have fond memories of the “free trade” years of the Clinton administration, when CEO salaries soared and the global influence of multinational corporations surged. Rejecting neoconservative unilateralism, they want to see a renewed focus on American “soft power” and its instruments of economic control, such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and World Trade Organization (WTO)—the multilateral institutions that formed what was known in international policy circles as “the Washington Consensus.” These corporate globalists are making a bid to control the direction of economic policy under a new Democratic administration.

There is little question that the majority of people on the planet—those who suffered under both the corporate globalization of the Clinton years and the imperial globalization of George W. Bush—deserve something better. However, it is far from certain that social justice advocates who want to encourage a more democratic approach to world affairs and global economic well-being will be able to sway a new administration. On the other hand, the damage inflicted by eight years of neocon rule and the challenges of an increasingly daunting geopolitical scene present a conundrum to the corporate globalizers: Is it even possible to go back to the way things were?

The Revolt of the Corporatists

Throughout their time in office, despite fulsome evidence of failure, George Bush and Dick Cheney have maintained a blithe self-confidence about their ability to successfully promote the interests of the United States, or at least those of their high-rolling “Pioneer"-class donors. Every so often, though, the public receives notice that loyalists are indeed scurrying to abandon the administration’s sinking ship of state. In October 2007, for instance, in a front-page story entitled “GOP Is Losing Grip On Core Business Vote,” the Wall Street Journal reported that the party could be facing a brand crisis as “[s]ome business leaders are drifting away from the party because of the war in Iraq, the growing federal debt and a conservative social agenda they don’t share.”

When it comes to corporate responses to the President’s Global War on Terror, we mostly hear about the likes of Halliburton and Blackwater—companies directly implicated in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and with the mentality of looters. Such firms have done their best to score quick profits from the military machine. However, there was always a faction of realist, business-oriented Republicans who opposed the invasion from the start, in part because they believed it would negatively impact the U.S. economy. As the administration adventure in Iraq has descended into the morass, the ranks of corporate complainers have only grown.

The “free trade” elite have become particularly upset about the administration’s focus on go-it-alone nationalism and its disregard for multilateral means of securing influence. This belligerent approach to foreign affairs, they believe, has thwarted the advance of corporate globalization. In an April 2006 column in the Washington Post, globalist cheerleader Sebastian Mallaby laid blame for “why globalization has stalled” at the feet of the Bush administration. The White House, Mallaby charged, was unwilling to invest any political capital in the IMF, the World Bank, or the WTO. He wrote:

“Fifteen years ago, there were hopes that the end of Cold War splits would allow international institutions to acquire a new cohesion. But the great powers of today are simply not interested in creating a resilient multilateral system.... The United States remains the only plausible quarterback for the multilateral system. But the Bush administration has alienated too many players to lead the team effectively. Its strident foreign policy started out as an understandable response to the fecklessness of other powers. But unilateralism has tragically backfired, destroying whatever slim chance there might have been of a workable multilateral alternative.”

Frustrated by Bush’s failures, many in the business elite want to return to the softer empire of corporate globalization and, increasingly, they are looking to the Democrats to navigate this return. As a measure of this—the capitalist equivalent of voting with their feet—political analyst Kevin Phillips notes in his new book, Bad Money, that, in 2007, “[h]edge fund employees’ contributions to the Senate Democratic Campaign Committee outnumbered those to its Republican rival by roughly nine to one.”

This quiet revolt of the corporatists is already causing interesting reverberations on the campaign trail. The base of the Democratic Party has clearly rejected the “free trade” version of trickle-down economics, which has done far more to help those hedge-fund managers and private-jet-hopping executives than anyone further down the economic ladder. As a result, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are running as opponents of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and of a newer bilateral trade deal with Colombia, a country in which organizing a union or vocally advocating for human rights can easily cost you your life. The tenor of the current campaign represents a significant shift from the 1990s, when top Democrats were constantly trying to establish their corporate bona fides and “triangulate” their way into conservative economic policy.

Still, both candidates are surrounded by business-friendly advisors whose views fit nicely within an older, pre-Bush administration paradigm of corporate globalization. The tension between the anti-NAFTA activists at the base of the Party and those in the campaign war rooms has resulted in some embarrassing gaffes during the primary contest.

For Hillary Clinton, the most notable involved one of her chief strategists, Mark Penn, a man with a long, nefarious record defending corporate abuses as a Washington lobbyist. As it turned out, Penn’s consulting firm received $300,000 in 2007 to support the “free trade” agreement with Colombia. Even as Clinton was proclaiming her heartfelt opposition to the deal and highlighting the “history of suppression and targeted killings of labor organizers” in that country, a key player in her campaign was charting strategy with Colombian government officials in order to get the pact passed.

The Obama campaign found itself in similar discomfort in February. While the candidate was running in the Ohio primary as an opponent of NAFTA, calling that trade deal a “mistake” that has harmed working people, his senior economic policy adviser, University of Chicago professor Austan Goolsbee, was meeting with Canadian government officials to explain, as a memo by the Canadians reported, that Obama’s charges were merely “political positioning.” Goolsbee quickly claimed that his position had been mischaracterized, but the incident naturally raised questions. Why, for example, had Goolsbee, senior economist to the Democratic Leadership Council, the leading organization on the corporate-friendly rightwing of the party, and a person praised as “a valuable source of free-trade advice over almost a decade,” been positioned to mold Obama’s economic stances in the first place?

If pressure from the base of the party lets up after the elections, it would hardly be surprising to see a victorious candidate revert to Bill Clinton’s corporate model for how to rule the world. However, a return to a pre-Bush-style of international politics may be easier dreamed than done.

The Neocon Paradox

To the chagrin of the “free trade” elite, the market fundamentalist ideas that have dominated international development thinking for at least the last 25 years are now under attack globally. This is largely because the economic prescriptions of deregulation, privitization, open markets, and cuts to social services so often made (and enforced) by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank have proven catastrophic.

In 2003, the United Nations’ Human Development Report (UNHDP) explained that 54 already poor countries had actually grown even poorer during the “free trade” era of the 1990s. The British Guardian summarized well the essence of this report:

“Taking issue with those who have argued that the ‘tough love’ policies of the past two decades have spawned the growth of a new global middle class, the report says the world became ever more divided between the super-rich and the desperately poor. The richest 1% of the world’s population (around 60 million) now receives as much income as the poorest 57%, while the income of the richest 25 million Americans is the equivalent of that of almost 2 billion of the world’s poorest people.”

Such findings led UNDP administrator Mark Malloch Brown, in a remarkably blunt statement, to call for a “guerrilla assault on the Washington Consensus.”

In fact, in 2008, such an assault is already well under way—and Washington is in a far weaker position economically to deal with it. The countries burned by the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98, for instance, are now building up huge currency reserves so they never again have to come begging to the International Monetary Fund (and so suffer diktats from Washington) in times of crisis. Moreover, virtually the whole of Latin America is in revolt. Over 500 million people reside in that region, and over two-thirds of them now live under governments elected since 2000 on mandates to split with “free trade” economics, declare independence from Washington, and pursue policies that actually benefit the poor.

In late April, economist Mark Weisbrot noted that, with so many countries breaking free of its grasp, the IMF, which once dictated economic policy to strapped governments around the world, is now but a shadow of its former self. In the past four years, its loan portfolio has plummeted from $105 billion to less than $10 billion, the bulk of which now goes to just two countries, Turkey and Pakistan. This leaves the U.S. Treasury, which used the body to control foreign economies, with far less power than in past decades. “The IMF’s loss of influence,” Weisbrot writes, “is probably the most important change in the international financial system in more than half a century.”

It is a historic irony that Bush administration neocons, smitten with U.S. military power, itching to launch their wars in Central Asia and the Middle East, and eschewing multinational institutions, actually helped to foster a global situation in which U.S. influence is waning and countries are increasingly seeking independent paths. Back in 2005, British journalist George Monbiot dubbed this “the unacknowledged paradox in neocon thinking.” He wrote:

“They want to drag down the old, multilateral order and replace it with a new, U.S. one. What they fail to understand is that the ‘multilateral’ system is in fact a projection of U.S. unilateralism, cleverly packaged to grant other nations just enough slack to prevent them from fighting it. Like their opponents, the neocons fail to understand how well [Presidents] Roosevelt and Truman stitched up the international order. They are seeking to replace a hegemonic system that is enduring and effective with one that is untested and (because other nations must fight it) unstable.”

Battered by losing wars and economic crisis, the United States is now a superpower visibly on the skids. And yet, there is no guarantee that the coming era will produce a change for the better. In a world in which the value of the dollar is plummeting, oil is growing ever more scarce relative to demand, and foreign states are rising as rivals to American power, the possibility of either going ahead with the Bush/Cheney style of unilateralism or successfully returning to the “enduring and effective” multilateral corporatism of the 1990s may no longer exist. But the failure of these options will undoubtedly not be for lack of trying. Even with corporate globalization on the decline, multinational businesses will attempt to consolidate or expand their power. And even with the imperial model of globalization discredited, an overextended U.S. military may still try to hold on with violence.

The true Bush administration legacy may be to leave us in a world that is at once far more open to change and also far more dangerous. Such prospects should hardly discourage the long-awaited celebration in January. But they suggest that a new era of globalization battles—struggles to build a world order based neither on corporate influence, nor imperial might—will have only just begun.

Mark Engler, an analyst with Foreign Policy in Focus, is the author of How to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy (just published by Nation Books). He can be reached via the website Democracy Uprising.

1. A cell phone is the first phone many people will use. As people in a society where the telephone (landline and otherwise) is such an importance part of commerce, personal relationships, and nearly every aspect of everyday life, it seems like a stunning revelation that until very recently, much of the world could not communicate instantaneously.  In the rest of the world, there has been little way (and often little reason) to quickly communicate over great distances. The introduction of cell phone, which requires much less infrastructure than landlines and which offers affordable modes of communicating like the text message, now allows people in undeveloped nations to communicate in new ways.  Doctors can send reminders to patients to take medications.  Or as the article says, “farmers would bring their vegetables to a local person with a mobile phone, who then acted as a commissioned sales agent, using the phone to check market prices and arranging for the most profitable sale.” The potential to advance commerce, health, and relief efforts after natural disasters are tremendous.  At the same time, the great potential for drug cartels, gun-runners, and warlords to exploit the technology for destructive ends is quite troubling.

2. In the Dharavi slum of Mumbai, people keep their cell phones in plastic bags to protect from “pummeling rains.” People who do not have the basics of modern life as we know it – electricity, shelter protected from the weather, running water – now own cell phones (Chipchase uses this information to suggest remedies such as water-proof features). What astonishes me about this is the capacity for change if westerners are motivated. Because there is a commercial incentive for western cell phone makers to sell to people in developing nations, we see 3.3 billion cell phone users worldwide. At the same time, since there is little incentive to improve housing for these people, the people with cell phones in the Dharavi slum have pools of water in their homes.

3. In Bangladesh, people have found informal ways to transfer money using phones. In many small towns, a “phone lady” will have a cell phone which she lets people use for the cost of the minutes plus a small fee. If someone working in the city wants to transfer money to his mother in a small village, s/he would buy cell minutes give the “phone lady” the access code and then the “phone lady” would give the mother cash (minus a small fee). We are living through a moment when our technologies have greater potential than our minds can currently envision. For quite some time to come, we will sudden bursts of creativity as people discover ways to change facets of society using existing technology. These “backdoor” money transfers will almost certainly give way to official, regulated money transfers. More automated text messaging will become available. Soon farmers will not call or text grocers to give prices, but will simply maintain live data (on something like a cell phone web page) that a variety of grocers can check.

These advancements will come from developing nations and be refined and institutionalized in western nations. And on all these advancements, Americans will be the last to know (see part 2 tomorrow). That’s because only in places with no alternatives will people find ways to make do. In a country gluttonous with landlines, cell phones, radios, satellite radio, BlackBerrys, WiFi, television, a trillion web sites, we can choose to ignore the potential of each technology. In places without this communicative wealth, they need to get the most of out what they have.

The Times picture of the hot dog stand at Queen West and Spadina belies the vibrant cool of this very intersection. Most of the city's design firms are within 3 blocks walk, the fashion district across the street, the best Queen West clubs a block either way, and Chinatown 3 blocks North. We've had coffees at the Lettieri (behind the hot dog stand) many times with friends.

The Frugal one explores on foot, and finds the mix of cultures from one street to the next exhilarating. These are real communities within the city, with ethnic restaurants and shops interspersed with the typical Big City coffee shops, boutiques, and clubs.

As I walked north, Ossington became more Vietnamese (billiards, video stores), then Portuguese (banks, sports bars) and a bit Italian (kitchen supplies). Very multiculti — no wonder Jane Jacobs, the proponent of urban diversity, settled in Toronto.

Toronto - city of the future, happening today. That may be why our "new Jane Jacobs" Richard Florida also settled here, to take his spot at the Rotman School of Business at U of T.  Paul Krugman's piece about Berlin's alt-transportation in the same Times edition (Stranded in Suburbia), could have been written about Toronto as a sizeable city on the brink of transforming, from mostly-cars to mostly-not. Give us a couple of years. Transformation takes time. To see how far our collective awareness has come, just follow neighbor Greg Greene's documentaries, End of Suburbia and Escape from Suburbia. Many people scoffed at the End of Suburbia, but just a few short years later, the scenarios are real and are playing out every day. At the end of this day, a large dense, walkable city with great neighbors is the perfect getaway, and the perfect next place to live.

Pitching his message to Oregon's environmentally-conscious voters, Obama called on the United States to "lead by example" on global warming, and develop new technologies at home which could be exported to developing countries.

"We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times ... and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK," Obama said.

"That's not leadership. That's not going to happen," he added.

He's correct. Americans need to adapt if it wants to prosper in the years ahead.