INTERVIEW W/ I. WALLERSTEIN ON “THE INEVITABLE DECLINE OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE”

Agree or disagree with him, world systems theorist, Immanuel Wallerstein always has some stimulating, provocative things to say about a lot of things. In this interview he did in Latin America with Raul Zibechi of the Americas Program at the Center for International Policy (CIP), Wallerstein talks about America Latina’s position within the multipolar world rising rapidly out of the ashes of US domination.

The question it raises for me is, “What is our role here in on the northern front?”

Whatever our work, I think it’s important for those of us in the belly of the ailing beast to read stuff like this as we analyze, dialogue and define our own roles. To remain within the increasingly infantile and infantilizing logic of citizenship, sovereignty and “illegality” has proven itself a very dangerous go-nowhere proposition. Like America Latina, we may well have a historic role- a barbarian’s role, if you will- vis a vis the decline of this empire, but don’t know it-yet. Thinking about the historical position and empire questions can only expand the prevailing politic that’s defined by the parameters of electoral politics or the borders of that isolationist, isolating nation-state box known as the TV (I mean how far can we go with the narcoleptic dualism of the “Are you for Hillary or Obama?” question?)

Quotes like this one about the relationship between social movements and political parties should resonate with those of us pondering how to relate to the Democrat-SEIU-big philanthropy-funded nonprofit complex that brought us the “immigration reform” debacle:

A head-on collision is a problem, as is not doing anything. In my opinion the movements should take a clear stance: support the better parties but without expecting that they will make fundamental changes. It is a defensive position, but it is a matter of trying to maintain autonomy.

Not sure I wholly embrace his social-democrat logic, but it does stir thinking outside that nasty nation-state box. Hope you enjoy the rest of the article.

Thanks to my friends Laura Carlsen and Katie Kohlsted at the CIS for the links to the Americas program.

R

“IT IS ALSO ABOUT THE INTEGRATION OF PEOPLE”: VENEZUELAN AMBASSADOR ON LATINOS & LATIN AMERICA

 

(photo by Jesse Spector of NYC brownstone housing Venezuelan consulate)

A recent interview with Venezuela’s ambassador I did for New America Media.

U.S. Latinos Very Important to Latin America: Venezuelan Ambassador

New America Media, Q&A, Roberto Lovato, Posted: Oct 16, 2007

The National Latino Congreso draws Latino leaders from across the United States to discuss policy and electoral strategy. But the presence of representatives of Latin American governments alongside the U.S.-based Latino groups and community based organizations at the meeting raises intriguing questions about Latino and Latin American identity. NAM Contributing Editor Roberto Lovato spoke with Venezuelan Ambassador Bernardo Alvarez Herrera at the National Latino Congreso in Los Angeles.

What draws you, a representative of the Venezuelan government, to a meeting of U.S. Latinos?

It’s very natural. There are longstanding and deep cultural, economic and political ties between Latinos in the United States and Latin America. We support the agenda in Latin America and we support the Latino agenda in the United States.

Do you feel or are you treated as someone foreign to this kind of meeting?

Even three years ago, it was strange to see people coming from South America at these kinds of meetings (i.e. Latino Congreso). Now, we’re seen as a close reality, as not so distant. There are commonalities and there is even a common agenda developing. It’s very exciting.

Where do you see these commonalities?

I look at the facial expressions here and I see meetings I’ve been to in America Latina (Latin America). I listen to the issues they discuss and they are the same issues: housing, employment, the environment, women’s issues, community development and others.

How do you respond to those who say that, through your work with Latinos and other groups in the United States, you are helping create a fifth column subverting the “American Way”?

In order to understand these kinds of statements and what’s happening today, you need to understand the Cold War. It’s like a 50-year-old man who can no longer read well, one who doesn’t want to accept that he needs glasses. This (U.S.) Cold War vision is blurred and negative and has been an abject failure. It looks for terrorists and finds them wherever it looks.

And where do you see this playing out here in the United States today?

Immigrants in the United States are being looked at as terrorists. First they (the government) began criminalizing them. Now, immigrants are viewed through the lens of “National Security” because the primary threat in the world is now defined as international terrorism. There seem to be good and bad terrorists. It seems that some use the words “terrorism” and “terrorist” when it suits their interest.

Any specific examples?

Take the case of (Cuban-born Venezuelan) Luis Posada Carriles. He planted a bomb on a civilian (Cuban) airplane and killed more than 70 people. That is a clear act of terrorism, but the (U.S.) Department of Justice and the Bush administration refuse to extradite him as we have requested. Meanwhile, we are watching how national security is increasingly being used to deal with domestic, internal issues like immigration. As in the Cold War, national security is used with foreign countries and with people inside the country.

Do you think U.S. Latinos will form part of the integration processes taking shape in Latin America?

The Washington Consensus (U.S. trade and economic policy in Latin America in the 80’s and 90’s) was a failure. We’re developing a new vision of integration. The first priority is to take care of the needs of our people. Then, the priority is integration with our neighbors. And then integration of the cultural base. In the case of the United States, we’re not just talking about Latinos, but African American and other communities as well. For example, we produce energy and we cooperate with families in Venezuela and other countries with different programs. We also cooperate with low-income families in the United States through our heating oil program.

Do Latinos in the United States fit into this integration and, if so, how?

Latinos in the United States are very important to Latin America. They send billions of dollars in remittances to almost every country. Latinos in the United States need to pay close attention to economic policies. Right now, the United States is promoting neo-liberal trade through Free Trade Area of the Americas (ALCA in the Spanish initials). We have joined Cuba, Bolivia, Ecuador, Haiti and Nicaragua to start a different mechanism, the Bolivarian Alternative for Latin America and the Caribbean (ALBA in the Spanish initials). U.S. Latinos should follow what the United States government is proposing through ALCA and what we are proposing with ALBA.

What’s the difference and why should U.S. Latinos care?

It’s just being decided by a small cabal, but seeks consensus between governments and between social organizations and people. Because of their history in this country, Latinos in the United States will easily understand why the main difference between the proposals is that ALBA is not just about the integration of markets. It is also about the integration of people.

GARDENERS GIVING WHAT GOVERNMENT WON’T: MINI-DREAM ACTS FOR MIGRANTS

(Bay Area Gardeners Foundation founder, Catalino Tapia, an unidentified friend and Catalino’s panza sharing a cheerful moment beneath the trees in Redwood City, California)

The big immigration news out of California was Governor Schwarzenegger’s veto of the California Dream Act legislation last week. But the allegedly immigrant Governor is hurting - not killing- California Dreams. Less known, but of no less import than the news of the veto, is this story in today’s SF Chronicle about the Bay Area Gardners Foundation. It tells the very inspired and inspirational tale of Catalino Tapia, a 63 year-old gardener in Redwood City California who started the Foundation along with a dozen other gardeners to help Latino students pay for college.“This year,” according to the story, “the foundation gave out nine scholarships of $1,500, almost double what it distributed in 2006, its first year.”

Tapia came to the US with a 6th grade education and $6 in his pocket and exemplifies a reality that more of us should wake up to: we need grow our own. Whether its families and hometown associations that sent $50 billion in remittances to families across Latin America last year or whether its those atlas-like mothers who who facilitate the upward mobility of white middle class women while carrying and caring for families in the US and Latin America, Latino immigrants are leading. In much the same way that Latin America is leading its own way past the economic and political failure of the Washington Consensus at the root of much migration, immigrants in the US have much to teach us about how to do with and, increasingly, without government.

Again, we see a new more autonomous politic developing as a complement and/or alternative to that “ethnic” politic focused almost exclusively on hitting the government pinata for economic dulces to drop out.

But let me not dwell on the past. Let me instead leave you with that beautiful gardener who reminds me so much of my and many of our parents who carried and poured their tears and sweat into this land so that we might blossom.

Another pic that says so much about why the future is so ours:

When we let these political defeats defeat us we forget what our parents would tell us if we asked them about such a loss: Forget the Dream Act; Remember the Dream - and Act.

VICENTE FOX PROMOTING (TOP-DOWN) OPEN BORDERS / INTEGRATION?

During this interview with Larry King, former Mexican President Vicente Fox appears to advocate open borders, albeit a top-down version lead by hemispheric and global elite interests:

Such statements promoting Fox’s rather garishly titled new book, Revolution of Hope, are causing the Bush Administration to cringe as they issue statements clarifying that they don’t “think that that’s something we’re actively considering.” Fox and the Bush are giving Lou Dobbs and former Swift Boater-turned closed border activist, Jerome Corsi even more fodder for their futile efforts to build Fortress America.

This should be watched, especially by those of us lacking any vision beyond the border walls. This causes me to ask “If Vicente Fox and Lou Dobbs have positions about this, what is the ‘progressive position’ with regard to regional integration?” Is there an alternative to the top down or closed border vision? Though we’ve not yet articulated such an alternative, at least some of us are shortcircuiting Fox and others efforts to give credibility to the continuation of the top-down politica that’s ruined so many lives, including that of murdered New York media activist, Brad Will, and Mexican activists repressed by Fox and his successor, Felipe Calderon.

Please remember to dream beyond the walls of civilized discourse.

R

BROWN WATERS, CLEAR WATERS RUN DEEP AT LATINO CONGRESO

This week’s Latino Congreso taught me that, from Maywood, California to the Bronx and Cochabamba, Bolivia, brown people are drinking brown water. I also learned about the deepening wells of of elite fear beneath racist metaphors like “brown tide rising” used to describe the political ascent of Latinos across the continent.

But what struck me most was how problems like the dirty brown water are giving rise to a political clarity and unified vision unprecedented in the annals of hemispheric history. Like the oceans and subterrenean waterways that have always united us beneath the surface, political agendas from the Canadian border to Patagonia are starting to flow from the same source: the pursuit of justice.

I heard this from 22 year-old Latino Congreso delegate Karen Linares. After looking at a thick, rusted pipe and a bottle of brown water used as part of the presentation by a South LA activist on a panel about “Water Justice”, very smiley Salvadoran-Mexican college student Linares got a serious look about her. “The L.A. river water running by my house is full of filth. I saw the same brown water in El Salvador. In Tijuana you see the sewage trickling down the dirt roads.” Asked whether a and what, if any, connection existed between what she saw in her neighborhood and in her parent’s homelands the rather “shy” (ie; “You should talk to my friend cuz this is my first event and she knows more”) answered, “Clear water runs upward where the money runs. Brown water runs down where poor brown people are.” In listening to Linares’ “shy” brilliance one hears the political music of the spheres, the hemispheres being written.

The beauty I found running through the Congreso was in how the line connecting Linares’ issues and consciousness to the rest of the continent is growing. “I look at the facial expressions here and I see meetings I’ve been to in America Latina” said Bernardo Alvarez, the US Ambassador of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela who also attended the Congreso as part of a large Latin American contingent. “I listen to the issues they discuss and they are the same issues: housing, employment, the environment, women’s issues, community development and others. We support the agenda in Latin America and we support the Latino agenda in the United States.”

Though not yet concluded, the Latino Congreso has already managed to channel the insurgent energies of its more than 1,500 delegates towards the development of a broad, inclusive and different Latino agenda that brings together and connects many issues. For example, members unanimously passed a resolution calling on the US to stop signing trade agreements they believe are one of the primary causes of immigration. Also connecting several issues, Oscar Chacón, Executive Director of the National Association of Latin American and Caribbean Communities, a National Congreso convener said “NAFTA has been the main cause for more than 1.3 million Mexican campesinos to lose their livelihoods. Not surprisingly, the number of Mexicans who have emigrated to the United States rose 60 percent in the first six years after NAFTA,” adding “We can only resolve immigration issues by addressing the bigger question of what is forcing so many people to emigrate in the first place. The first step is to stop expanding the same agricultural rules of NAFTA to Peru and other Latin American nations.”

Chacón and other Congreso delegates also passed resolutions around such “non traditional” Latin issues as Renewable Energy, Farm Bill Reform, Production, Ocean Management , Green Schools and many others. And, of course, they also addressed the very continental issue of how to turn brown water into clear water - and clear continental thought. Have a a clarisimo day

R

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY: A NEW FRONTIER IN GLOBAL IMMIGRATION DEBATE

(Racist pic of “Mexifornia” drivers license, a favorite of the anti-immigrant set)

Politicians and technologists of all stripes and in most countries are mining the global immigration crisis for opportunities to advance their agendas. This report in today’s BBC about a controversial new immigration proposal made by French President Nicolas Sarkozy is a case in point. According to the report, “… the legislation would demand the relatives take a DNA test to prove their applications were genuine.”

Sarkozy’s proposals are neither new nor solely a European innovation. Earlier this year, U.S. Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., and Maricopa County, Ariz., Sheriff Joe Arpaio, proposed taking DNA samples from undocumented federal detainees as a way to facilitate identifying and tracking potential terrorists. The ACLU and other critics of science and technology “solutions” view such proposals as a way of paving the path towards application of such technologies to the general populace. Shortly after 9-11, for example, Larry Ellison, head of software behemoth Oracle, offered to provide the government “free” (renewals and upgrades would cost billions) software for the creation of a national ID card. Some have even said that the National ID components of the recent immigration reform proposal are what actually killed it. REAL ID and other immigrant and technology proposals follow the same logic of using immigrants to advance political and business fortunes in the name of “combating terrorism”, “Homeland Security” and other now thoroughly normalized terms.

Time to fear what’s normal.

WE ALL SINK OR SWIM IN THE PACIFIC

Read the business pages and you’ll find with liquid clarity that we have indeed been immersed in the much-vaunted Pacific Rim Century for some time (actually forever if you forget the what they force-fed you in world history class). Whether its the recent recall of toxic Barbie Dream Houses made in China or the pressure on Steven Spielberg to relinquish his role as artistic advisor to Olympics sponsor China for its support of the Sudanese mass murderers in Darfur, its hard to ignore what happens around the Pacific any more.

In fact, here is where the Great Game of Geopolitics (not to be confused by Parker Brothers or Mattel products or Xbox games of global domination) will be defined; Here not in the Atlantic is where will be decided the fate Of América.

Consider this piece from the right wing, Moonie-owned Washington Times about the “increasing concern” in Washington about Venezuela’s Simon Bolivar satellite project which, the story tells us, will allow the Chavez Administration to “develop an integrated ground- and space-based air defense — presumably against the United States.”

While interesting to note the fantastical hypocrisy of the Bush Administration - the same guys who’ve spent billions building their own failed and unproven Star Wars satellite air defense system, more indicative of the hemispheric zeitgeist is that you can cut the word “China” from the article and paste “United States” as you wax nostalgic for US preeminence in 20th century, the “American Century.”

Further illustrating that everybody’s fortunes fall and rise with the ebb and flow of Pacific power, is the political-economy of pop-ups. Before I could even start reading the Washington Times story on their website, I was forced to watch two pop-ups, one chock-full of Pier One Imports products (some of which will also be joining Barbie and her lead-toxic Dream House on the dung heap of recalled merchandise) from sweatshops in Asia and the other promoting Intel microchips also produced there.

Whether or not we know or act on it, Pacific Rim dynamics determine with increasing intensity what we play with, who we play with and who will rule the world. So, embrace the Pacific Rimmer within.

MORE TROUBLE IN TOYLAND: DORA BUSTED FOR TRAFFICKING TOXICS

In yet another sign that the outsourcing of US jobs is cheapening the life of even the youngest among us, El Segundo, California-based toy company, Mattel , announced its 3rd recall this year due to concerns about lead paint in more than 11 products manufactured in China. Among the more than 850,000 toys being recalled worldwide are public TV icon Dora the Explorer and several items from global legend Barbie’s house.

Even dogs and cats can’t escape the effects of buying the American Dream on the cheap as the US Consumer Product Saftey Commission also announced that Barbie’s Dream Puppy House™ (lead paint on dog) and Barbie’s Dream Kitty Condo™ Playset (lead paint on cat) were starting to resemble the lead paint-laced homes in poorer neighborhoods where kids play with Dora and Barbie.

La Barbie and homegirl waiting for federales in her lead-based hood.