PBS Does Neo-Liberal Propaganda, Israeli Reasoning, Power And Ant-idotes
Hernando de Soto a neo-liberal believer in capitalism leader of the Institute of Liberty and Democracy (ILD) was opposed to the Shining Path. The ILD represented a radical captialist approach. He believes in making the capitalist market work by giving legal title to the small holdings of land and the squatter shacks of the poor. It is called ‘The Other Path”. It is the belief that the market system is the way to go. It is an attempt to bring a Swiss style market system which is the model de Soto grew up around when his father left Peru after a coup. The ILD was supported by Fujimori the rightist reform candidate who became president of Peru in the early 1990’s. He passed laws to make it easier for the poor to become property owners.
What is interesting is that this documentary on PBS is not a critical analysis of the effects of his concepts. It is a glorification of capitalism. This is another part of the neo-liberal agenda that is being pushed through PBS and NPR where there is a special emphasis on attacking the left in Central & South America. They make it seem that his Institute for Liberty and Democracy alone was able to free Peru of the Maoist attackers. That is simply not the case. The Fujimori administration used its military and bribes and some reform to destroy the Shining Path. Peasants got titles but terror was also used. As we all know lawyers can rob you with greater ease when there is a legal system to use than when you are outside the law. Isolated individuals clinging to a piece of paper that gives them title is exactly what the capitalist ruling class wants. They know that it becomes harder for people to join together to overthrow a system when they are vested in it. That at least is the hope of the right and the fear of the left.
The ILD may have earnest believers that this is the way for the poor to become middle class. I am sure for some poor easing of the bureaucratic red tape has made it easier to become integrated into the capitalist system. Is that what the world needs? That is a completely different question and the answer to that is contained in the sustainability of such and attempt. Wealth generation for the sake of improving standards of living is all fine and well. Developing internal markets as an alternative to being solely export driven is good if there are protective tariffs that keep the multinationals from swamping the domestic market with cheap products and agricultural staples. What good does the ability to have legal title to a small business if you cannot compete against the multinationals? There needs to be local infrastructure to protect the development of these small local enterprises. That goes against the free market positions of the ILD. Thus I am not sure what the ILD is all about other than a tool to fool the poor into believing in the magic of the market.
This is the decision of the Peruvian Courts regarding the methods used by President Fujimori according to the Washington Post of the Fujimori regime.
“Peru’s Fujimori Gets 25 Years
Former President Is Convicted of ‘Crimes Against Humanity’ for Death-Squad Role
By Joshua Partlow and Lucien Chauvin
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori was convicted Tuesday of “crimes against humanity” and sentenced to 25 years in prison for his role in killings and kidnappings by security forces during his government’s battle against leftist guerrillas in the 1990s.
The verdict, delivered by a three-judge panel on a police base outside Lima where Fujimori has been held throughout the trial, marked the first time that an elected head of state has been extradited back to his home country, tried and convicted of human rights violations.
Human rights activists called it a precedent-setting verdict that upheld the ideal that violent abuses cannot be ignored under the banner of fighting terrorism.
“This is a sentence for all the innocents killed in the dirty war,” said Gisela Ortiz, whose brother was among a group taken from a Lima university and executed in 1992 by a military death squad under Fujimori.
Many people in Peru admire Fujimori for largely defeating the Shining Path insurgency and ending a two-decade war that left about 70,000 people dead. But the tribunal found that Fujimori was guilty of creating and authorizing a military intelligence death squad that killed innocent people.
Despite his years behind bars, Fujimori still casts a wide shadow on Peruvian politics. His political movement remains popular, and his followers account for 13 seats in the 120-member Peruvian Congress. His daughter, congresswoman Keiko Fujimori, is considered a leading candidate to succeed President Alan García and has vowed to pardon her father if elected.
Fujimori’s trial focused on two episodes of killings: a 1991 raid in which 15 people, including an 8-year-old boy, were killed at a barbecue in Lima where the military intelligence unit was looking for Shining Path suspects. This raid, which became known as the Barrios Altos massacre, was followed by the 1992 abduction and killing of nine students and a teacher from La Cantuta University, also by the Colina Group.
Fujimori was also accused of ordering the kidnappings of journalist Gustavo Gorriti and businessman Samuel Dyer in 1992.
Fujimori was found guilty in 2007 and sentenced to six years in prison for ordering an illegal raid on the home of the estranged wife of his former spy chief, Vladimiro Montesinos. Fujimori also faces corruption charges, including wiretapping opposition figures and giving $15 million in government money to Montesinos.”
On another matter we have Israel the American and European outpost in the Middle East. A rumbling of protest. The Goldstone Report is the report on events last winter in Gaza. It blames the vast majority of the violence and human rights violations on Israel. The Israelis are attempting to deflect world opinion but this writer is noting the hypocrisy in that position.
This from the Jerusalem Post
Rattling the Cage: Our exclusive right to self-defense
By LARRY DERFNER
Virtually all of Israel is now speaking in one voice against the Goldstone report, against any attempt to blame us over the war in Gaza. We’ve honed our message to a sharp point and, inspired by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s performance at the UN, we’re delivering it with just the right tone of outrage:
How dare anyone deny us the right to self-defense! How dare anyone deny us the right to fight back against terrorism!
Very nice. Puts everyone else on the defensive. The right to self-defense is up there with motherhood and apple pie - who’s going to come out against it, especially for us, for Israel, for the Jews, for the people of the Holocaust?
The right to self-defense - perfect.
But I’d like to ask: Do the Palestinians also have the right to self-defense?
We probably wouldn’t admit it out loud, but in our heads we would say - again, in one voice - “No!”
This is the Israeli notion of a fair deal: We’re entitled to do whatever the hell we want to the Palestinians because, by definition, whatever we do to them is self-defense. They, however, are not entitled to lift a finger against us because, by definition, whatever they do to us is terrorism.”
By definition whatever capitalism wants is good and whatever anyone else things is debunked as illegitimate.
This is from the Jerusalem Post
“Abbas associate: We made a mistake by deferring action on Goldstone Report
By AP AND JPOST.COM STAFF
A member of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s inner circle said Wednesday that the Palestinian leadership had erred by suspending action on the Goldstone Report.
The comments came as the first such acknowledgment after days of angry protests in the West Bank and Gaza.
The UN report alleged that both Israel and Hamas had committed war crimes during Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip last winter.”
As you may recall action on the Report was delayed by the UN at the Request of the Obama Administration. It was agreed to by the Palestinian ruling body which led to protests by Hamas and others in Palestine. You can read the report on my blogroll link if you care to.
The war for control of the world’s resources is heating up. We are in a slow motion battle that will either end in justice for all or another slug-fest for dominance between the Chinese led coalition of Asian powers and the Western powers led by the USA. A third block of the South may be formed with Brazil and Venezuela taking the lead. If they can convince the middle east, India and Africa to join them they may be a real power but most likely they will simply be marginal players in the battle between Chinese and United States blocks. Japan may switch to China if it can get rid of American occupation forces. Russia is already cooperating with China, and Africa has except perhaps in the vital Niger Delta become more and more influenced by the Chinese. The French especialy still maintain a strong influence in west Africa but China is making its presence felt in the east and south in particular. Will India go to the western block or return to its position as a leader of the South remains to be seen. It has a natural competition with China and antipathy to the Muslim world that has led to it being in a strange alliance with the USA, and Israel.
But I wander. The issue at hand is being decided in the forlorn hills of Afghanistan. This place with little inherent reason for anyone to care about it has become the focus of the world in the great game for control of the last of the Oil. This is not about Al Qaeda, that is merely the smokescreen. It didn’t have anything to do with Iraq and has very little to do with Afghanistan. It is just not polite for power elites to bare their fangs and show their bloody vampiric lust so blatantly. So a soothing balm of little lies are spread to keep the victims in a state of complacency while the dirty work is done. That is why the illicit crops of Opium and Coca are so vital. They provide the secret funding source for black operations that do not dare show up in Congressional oversight hearings. Better to keep the pretense of a war on terror than to acknowledge the real war for oil in the minds of politicians of both parties.
Only a few brave souls like Barbara Lee occasionally make a point of objecting or refusal like Cynthia McKinney who decided to fight the power from the outside. I commend their efforts but they are so few and the machine is so vast. What can a puny centrist like Obama do? He is simply more window dressing on the vicious reality.
There is still hope for a just peace with a real negotiated and equitable distribution of the worlds resources. This is to be based on a recognition of the rights of all for a share of the wealth and a recognition that it is finite. We can either leave it up to the invisible hand of god and let the chips fall or we can act intelligently and equitably. It is our choice. War is not inevitable. It is only desirable for those who profit from blood and gore. These vampiric forces have been sucking on the teat of our collective lives for too long. Why do we let them? I say because we have been drugged into passivity. TV programing like that one on PBS for the intelligentsia, irrational tirades about home and family for the less astute, it all works together. Literal drugs for those of us likely to take physical action against the state and a police state to keep in line the more criminally endowed. It works, barely, but it has kept us in line for a long while. But now with such easy access to information how will they keep us down? Only by giving us so much choice that we drown in the proliferation of viewpoints. If we take an individualistic path, seek our own way, an anarchistic vision is the only way for them to fragment us enough to keep from uniting in a manner that is truly threatening. As long as we do our own thing we are harmless insects. When we unite like a colony of army ants, we can sweep all before us. Think about it.
Anarchism is only a path to collective action. But if we refuse to make the move to the collective intellectual responce then we are trapped in narcissism. That has been the liberal western dilemma and it must be overcome. We must learn to work as a collectivity, as individual note in an orchestrated performance, with a non hierarchic networked responsiveness. We do it unconsciously all the time and advertisers manipulate that. We have to become self aware members of the collectivity, not robots but autonomous agents of collective action for transformation. The more turned on we are the more light we shine on the path ahead. Hence the shining path….
Tags: Against Capital, Capital, Neo-Liberal Market Answers, Oil Politics, Paper Identity, Shining Path