Global

The current political-economic crisis in Argentina, at first glance, appears to be the resultant snafu of a corrupt government that is itself the legacy of an even more corrupt government which itself arose from the ashes of a military junta that was more preoccupied with killing off any perceived political enemies than in actually running a country. Upon closer inspection, however, the grave state of the Argentinean economy can be blamed almost entirely on self-serving, foreign meddling which, through the powerful vehicle of the International Monetary Fund, prevented Argentina’s leaders from enacting sound economic reforms that may have obviated the debt default, which is now unavoidable.

I arrived back from Colombia tired but very, very happy with the trip. I have nothing but the highest praise for Witness for Peace volunteers Jess and Julia who organized our delegation to travel and learn about the realities of life for ordinary people — our brothers and sisters — in Colombia. Following are a few observations from Colombia, a country with more School of the Americas (aka Assassins) graduates than any other country:

How many people do you know who claim to be skeptical, who pride themselves on their distrust for authority, who like to pretend that they’re wise to the ways of the world — and then, every time there’s a war, they swallow the lies of the government with all the gullibility of a three-year-old child in the lap of a department store Santa Claus? Don’t fall into that trap yourself! Learn to identify and refute official misinformation when you see it. Let’s count down some of the common misconceptions about this war:

Lie #5: “We’re not at war with the Afghan people — look, we’re bringing them food!”

Several years ago, while I was a student at Columbia University’s School of In- ternational and Public Affairs, one of the hottest topics of debate was an article Harvard’s Samuel Huntington wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine titled “The Clash of Civilizations?”

The article caused such a furry that a veritable “who’s who” of scholars wrote responses. Never one to pass up an opportunity, Huntington expanded his article into a book by the same title.

After the end of the Cold War, some academics, commentators, and practitioners were optimistic about the positive changes that they vigorously maintained were just over the horizon. Huntington did not see so rosy a picture. In the world now devoid of the two balancing, stabilizing superpowers, Huntington saw a coming clash of ancient, inherently adverse cultures. These cultures, suppressed by the geopolitical realities of the Cold War, would in the post-Cold War world lead to an inevitable and largely unpreventable war between civilizations.

There's something happening here

What it is ain't exactly clear ...

It's time we stop, children, what's that sound

Everybody look what's goin' down.

-- Buffalo Springfield

AUSTIN, Texas -- In New York City last year, about 3,000 people died in the attack on the World Trade Center. In New York City last year, 30,000 people came to the new federal limits on welfare. Another 19,000 will lose assistance this year. New York has lost 95,000 jobs since Sept. 11. It lost 75,000 jobs in the year before that. There are now 30,000 people in the city shelters.

Now find the numbers for your town. In Austin, the only organization that provides help to women with breast cancer and no health insurance has just cut its staff from 30 to six, with an equal impact on the help that can be offered. Homelessness is up, shelter populations are up, food distribution centers and soup kitchens are overwhelmed.

The art of the deal is a media dream: Savvy achievers get to the top. Guile and artifice -- even outright deception -- may well be part of the game, but there's nothing like success. One way or another, money and centralized power end up calling the tunes. Or so the media script often goes.

From its beginnings a half-century ago, the Pacifica radio network set out to be quite different. Listeners tuned in for something else -- a much more inclusive embrace of human creativity and political dissent. Like most endeavors, there were failures and crises along the way. But even with Pacifica's tumultuous history, the last three years have been times of extraordinary upheaval.

Two words -- "censorship" and "democracy" -- summarize much of what has been at stake in the national battle over Pacifica.

Now, some very good news: Democracy is winning.

Mainstream news accounts have finally fingered Battelle Memorial Institute, the spooky Dr. Strangelove Institute in Columbus, as ground zero in our domestic military-industrial anthrax scare. With five people dead and eighteen ill, Battelle’s role in directing the Defense Department’s “joint vaccine acquisition program” is now coming under heavy scrutiny.

Battelle, in partnership with Michigan-based Bioport, has a virtual monopoly on military anthrax vaccine production in the U.S.. British and U.S. news accounts describe Bioport’s owner as a top secret British biowarfare consortium, Porton Down. Perhaps not ironically, the Chairman and CEO of the Porton Down company is Fuad El-Habri, a bin Laden family associate. Laura Rozen’s interesting article for the website Salon is must reading on the subject.

From Frederick Douglass to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. for more than a century, the dominant political perspective within the Black Freedom Movement was “integrationism.” This political approach emphasized the deep commitment and sacrifices African Americans had made to enrich and expand America’s democracy.

African Americans had, afterall, fought in all of America’s wars, and had made enormous social and economic contributions to the nation’s welfare. Blacks believed in the Constitution and the inherent fairness of democratic institutions. Therefore, according to this argument, it only was reasonable to accept blacks as being full civil partners in the construction of the American nation. All structural barriers which impeded the free and fair access by African Americans to economic development, political decision-making and individual advancement should be eliminated.

There are many ways to measure the destructive impact of structural racism on the African-American community. Perhaps the most important effects are on our health and physical well being. The National Medical Association of Washington D.C., initiated several years ago the “National Colloquium on African American Health,” consisting of a team of outstanding black physicians, scientists and NAACP leader Kweisi Mfume, among others. Their 2001 report, “Racism in Medicine and Health Parity for African Americans,” should be required reading in every black household.

As long as public health records have been kept in the United States, African Americans consistently have had significantly shorter lifespans than white Americans. In 1995, life expectancies for whites were 76.5 years, and were 69.6 for African Americans. The age-adjusted death rate per 100,000, however, was 466.8 deaths per 100,000 for whites, and 738.8 deaths per 100,000 among black people, about 58 percent higher.

AUSTIN -- And a happy New Year to all the friendly folks at the Henry Cisneros' special prosecutor's office, now coming up on its seventh year. Cisneros, who left office five ago as Clinton's housing secretary, is back in San Antonio doing good works in the area of affordable housing. But his special prosecutor David Barrett, like Ol' Man River, he just keeps rolling along.

Cisneros, having long since pleaded to a misdemeanor and paid a $10,000 fine, is no longer a target of investigation, but Barrett is reportedly still investigating someone who did or did not tell him something about Cisneros. It's bound to be a high crime, since the entire flap was over whether Cisneros had lied to the FBI -- not about whether he had given money to his ex-mistress (an affair that was both over and public knowledge well before Cisneros ever went to Washington) -- but about how much he had paid her.