Roy on the NGO-ization of politics

Arundhati Roy on the NGO-ziation of politics, from her talk Public Power in the Age of Empire:

It will be easy to twist what I'm about to say into an indictment of all NGOs [non-governmental organizations]. That would be a falsehood. In the murky waters of fake NGOs set up or to siphon off grant money or as tax dodges, of course there are NGOs doing valuable work. But it's important to consider the NGO phenomenon in a broader political context.

In India, for instance, the funded NGO boom began in the late 1980s and 1990s. It coincided with the opening of India's markets to neo-liberalism. At the time, the Indian state, in keeping with the requirements of structural adjustment, was withdrawing funding from rural development, agriculture, energy, transport, and public health. As the state abdicated its traditional role, NGOs moved in to work in these very areas. The difference, of course, is that the funds available to them are a minuscule fraction of the actual cut in public spending. Most large funded NGOs are financed and patronized by aid and development agencies, which are in turn funded by Western governments, the World Bank, the UN, and some multinational corporations. Though they may not be the very same agencies, they are certainly part of the same loose, political formation that oversees the neo-liberal project and demands the slash in government spending in the first place.

Why should these agencies fund NGOs? Could it be just old-fashioned missionary zeal? Guilt? It's a little more than that.

NGOs give the impression that they are filling the vacuum created by a retreating state. And they are, but in a materially inconsequential way. Their real contribution is that they defuse political anger and dole out as aid or benevolence what people ought to have by right.

They alter the public psyche. They turn people into dependent victims and blunt the edges of political resistance. NGOs form a sort of buffer between the sarkar [government] and public. Between Empire and its subjects. They have become the arbitrators, the interpreters, the facilitators of the discourse. They play out the role of the "reasonable man" in an unfair, unreasonable war.

In the long run, NGOs are accountable to their funders, not to the people they work among. They're what botanists would call an indicator species. It's almost as though the greater the devastation caused by neo-liberalism, the greater the outbreak of NGOs. Nothing illustrates this more poignantly than the phenomenon of the U.S. preparing to invade a country and simultaneously readying NGOs to go in and clean up the devastation.

In order make sure their funding is not jeopardized and that the governments of the countries they work in will allow them to function, NGOs have to present their work in a shallow framework more or less shorn of a political or historical context. At any rate, an inconvenient historical or political context. It's not for nothing that the "NGO" perspective is becoming increasingly respected.

Apolitical (and therefore, actually, extremely political) distress reports from poor countries and war zones eventually make the (dark) people of those (dark) countries seem like pathological victims. Another malnourished Indian, another starving Ethiopian, another Afghan refugee camp, another maimed Sudanese . . . in need of the white man's help. They unwittingly reinforce racist stereotypes and re-affirm the achievements, the comforts, and the compassion (the tough love) of Western civilization, minus the guilt of the history of genocide, colonialism, and slavery. They're the secular missionaries of the modern world.

Eventually - on a smaller scale but more insidiously - the capital available to NGOs plays the same role in alternative politics as the speculative capital that flows in and out of the economies of poor countries. It begins to dictate the agenda.

It turns confrontation into negotiation. It depoliticizes resistance. It interferes with local peoples' movements that have traditionally been self-reliant. NGOs have funds that can employ local people who might otherwise be activists in resistance movements, but now can feel they are doing some immediate, creative good (and earning a living while they're at it). Real political resistance offers no such short cuts.

The NGO-ization of politics threatens to turn resistance into a well-mannered, reasonable, salaried, 9-to-5 job. With a few perks thrown in.

Real resistance has real consequences. And no salary.

Peak Oil

With a flurry of attention in recent weeks (due in no small measure to the skyrocketting price of gas), it seems the concept of "peak oil" is finally beginning to enter the public consciousness in a big way. James Howard Kunstler lays out the prospects in the latest issue of Rolling Stone:

Carl Jung, one of the fathers of psychology, famously remarked that "people cannot stand too much reality." What you're about to read may challenge your assumptions about the kind of world we live in, and especially the kind of world into which events are propelling us. We are in for a rough ride through uncharted territory.

Kunstler is writing for an American audience, but there is little in what he says that doesn't apply to Canadians as well -- especially given our dependence on natural gas to heat our homes for much of the year.

"Global Credit Scam"

More from Stan Goff's highly recommended book Full Spectrum Disorder: The Military in the New American Century, this time on the "global credit scam" known as dollar hegemony, the bubble on which the whole world economy sits, and on which US power is entirely dependent:

The citizens of the United States are only indirectly paying for our military adventures. In fact, the source for funding U.S. wars is also the fountainhead of the U.S. standard of living. The true source of funding for American adventurism is to be found in the central banks of Europe, China, Japan, and elsewhere. They are paying for U.S. wars. Since the U.S. abandoned the gold standard in the wake of Vietnam (where U.S. gold reserves were depleted almost to their legal limit), these central banks—holding U.S. Treasury bonds, which are basically IOUs—have been tied to U.S. currency. The dollar is effectively shored up by oil state investments in dollar-denominated assets and slaked like a vampire by the external debts of ruined economies. No country can afford to wean itself without risking the collapse of the whole house of cards. The U.S. is in the unique position of being able to print as much money as it wants to cover current account deficits, which has indebted the U.S. to the point that they know, and their creditors know, that they will never pay it back.

In 1972, Saudi Arabia said it intended to buy up U.S. companies—productive capital instead of bonds. The U.S. showed its sword, telling the Saudis in no uncertain terms that this would be considered an act of war. The deal was subsequently sealed that the Saudis could invest as non-controlling stockholders and in Treasury bonds, in exchange for certain “security” arrangements. The Saudis helped establish the petro-dollar, and the U.S. was safe in the catbird seat.

Now Europe, for example, had to pay for its oil in dollars, loaning their own value, as it were, to the U.S. for dollar paybacks through Treasury bonds. Europe was being forced to maintain large reserves of dollars to defend themselves from currency speculators, after the U.S. also abandoned fixed currency exchange rates. But this meant that the U.S. could pay for oil in money that it could print, which it did—a practice that would normally devalue the currency in an open market, were it not for the fact that the same devaluation would now wipe out creditors like Europe. This catch-22 remains the basis of dollar hegemony, which is the basis of U.S. economic hegemony. And it means that the U.S. government's debt is now a kind of Mafia arrangement, where Europeans and all the rest are essentially being “taxed” by this practice. They know the U.S. will never pay back its debt, but if they try to sell off their Treasury bonds, the dollar will crash down around all of them, beginning with their own central banks. So they are making “loans” via Treasury bonds that they already know they'll never get paid for. This is what is financing U.S. militarism.

Review of Multitude

Check out my review of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Multitude in the first issue of Upping the Anti, if you're into that sort of thing.

Blow the Bank Down

Here are a few choice readings aimed at clarifying the significance of Paul Wolfowitz's appointment as President of the World Bank.

First, from back in April 2003, a remark that highlights the audacity of the neocons' wolfish assault on multilateralism in their recent choice of WB Honcho -- one wolf eating another:

The World Bank, under the direction of James Wolfensohn, is posing a problem for neocon Wolfowitz. The World Bank, though dominated by the U.S. which has 16.2% of voting shares, has an institutional loyalty to multilateralism. As U.S. unilateralism advocated by U.S. neocons gives the back of the hand to the very foundation of the U.N., which is the institutional manifestation of multilateralism, there is predictable conflict between the two Wolfs. The World Bank Wolf is a neo-liberal, while the Defense Department Wolf is a neocon.

(Henry C. K. Liu, quoted in Stan Goff's Full Spectrum Disorder)

Second, a penetrating analysis by the Global Justice Ecology Project on the renewed synergy of military and economic domination within US foreign policy:

In 2002 Wolfowitz was one of the primary authors of the Bush administration's National Security Strategy. In it he advocated pre-emptive war with Iraq. It further calls for U.S. economic and military domination in every corner of the world and promotes the idea of pre-emptive attacks on any nation that in some way threatens American interests. These ideas are not new, however, and were preceded by two others, a September 2000 document put out by the neo-conservative Project for a New American Century (which Wolfowitz chairs) and a Defense Department report Wolfowitz co-wrote in 1992.

The 1992 and 2000 reports are very similar. Both promote a global missile defense system; budget increases for the U.S. Defense Department; small, deep penetrating nuclear weapons; and the specific targeting of Iraq, Iran and North Korea. In the 1992 report, Wolfowitz argues that the U.S. should be active in "deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role." And the Times Online (of the UK) writes that in this report, Wolfowitz, "envisaged the use of nuclear, biological and chemical weaponry pre-emptively, 'even in conflicts that do not directly engage U.S. interests.'" In its 2000 document, the Project for a New American Century promoted the idea that U.S. global dominance could be advanced by "some catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor."

With this history, the nomination of Wolfowitz to lead the World Bank is a clear sign that the Bush Administration is determined to use whatever avenues it can to pursue its goals of "full spectrum dominance" over the rest of the world. Under current World Bank President Wolfensohn, the Bank has been somewhat resistant to advance the agenda of the Bush administration by financing projects in Iraq. With Wolfowitz at the helm, however, Vallette projects that "the World Bank may be able to complete what the Iraq Invasion started two years ago: U.S. corporate control over the world's second-largest oil reserves."

[...] While Wolfowitz has been promoting violence to force populations into subordination, as the new head of the World Bank, he will be mastering the art of economic coercion as well.

And finally, a razor-sharp piece by George Monbiot challenging the faulty assumptions of those who decry Wolfowitz's nomination to an institution that's been morally bankrupt since its inception:

Wolfowitz's appointment is a good thing for three reasons. It highlights the profoundly unfair and undemocratic nature of decision-making at the bank. His presidency will stand as a constant reminder that this institution, which calls on the nations it bullies to exercise "good governance and democratisation" is run like a medieval monarchy.

It also demolishes the hopeless reformism of men such as Stiglitz and George Soros who, blithely ignoring the fact that the US can veto any attempt to challenge its veto, keep waving their wands in the expectation that a body designed to project US power can be magically transformed into a body that works for the poor. Had Stiglitz's attempt to tinker with the presidency succeeded, it would simply have lent credibility to an illegitimate institution, enhancing its powers. With Wolfowitz in charge, its credibility plummets.

Best of all is the chance that the neocons might just be stupid enough to use the new wolf to blow the bank down. Clare Short laments that "it's as though they are trying to wreck our international systems". What a tragedy that would be. I'd sob all the way to the party.