Here is the Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 edition of interesting reads from around the world.

US-Czech Missle Defense Shield Plan Signed
The Czechs are against it. The Russians are upset. I am not sure it works. But this is the first that I have seen of my former professor in months. I suppose I am glad she is still on the job. She was a great professor. Secretary of State, not so much. A video report from the Associated Press:

Corruption Trial of former Thai PM Thaksin Shinawatra Begins
The former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra today went on trial in Bangkok’s supreme court accused of corruption. The criminal trial is the first against Thaksin, the billionaire owner of the Manchester City football club, since he was ousted from office in a pro-royalist military coup in 2006. The former prime minister is accused of having corruptly used his position to help his wife, Pojaman, to buy land. The full report in the UK Guardian.

Qatar Emerges as a Regional Broker
I was very close friends with Daniel Pearl. We were fraternity brothers at Stanford. We last saw each other in August 2001 in India and we had a conversation about how the Middle East was changing. Danny said, watch Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. That’s the future of Arab politics. Danny, as always, was ahead of his times. He was a brillant journalist even at the Stanford Daily. I miss him. This story in today’s New York Times highlights Qatar’s emergence as a mediator of disputes. It is not by coincidence either that Al Jazeera is based in Doha. In terms of liberalism, Qatar is hardly liberal but it is opening up.

Canada to Deport Robin Long
Canada as a haven for conscientious objectors may be ending. Canada intends to deport Robin Long. 25, a US Army deserter as early as Monday. There are approximately 200 Americans seeking refuge in Canada at the moment. More from Toronto’s Globe and Mail.

Germany Ponders Giving the Children the Right to Vote
Every German citizen should have the right to vote in national elections, even those under the age of 18, says a group of parliamentarians. They’ve proposed a law that would allow parents to vote for their children. Deutsche Welle covers the latest German lunacy.

Germany Detains Rwandan Genocide Suspect
Callixte Mbarushimana has been arrested in Frankfurt attempting to fly to Russia. He is wanted in Rwanda and France on charges of genocide. More from Deutsche Welle.

Iran Tests Its Missiles
Iran has test fired nine long- and medium-range missiles, including one which it has previously said could travel as far as Israel and U.S. bases in the region, state media reported on Wednesday. Separately, the Israeli media reports that the Saudis are not opposed to an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. More from Haaretz.

Slovakia To Join EuroZone in January 2009
Fistful of Euros reports on Slovakia’s official ascension into the EuroZone of common currency. Europe as an economic concept gains greater currency but it is in the political unity realm where citizens retain mistrust of Brussels. The Slovak krona will convert to euros at 30.126 to 1 — which is the current rate.

Male-Female Pay Gap in the Netherlands
Men still earn an average of 11.8% more than women doing the same job, according to research by Mercer and ADP in a report from Dutch News. However, in some industries women earn more than men.

Mexico’s Drug Wars Cost Two Officials Their Jobs
The capital city’s police chief and head prosecutor resigned Tuesday amid growing public outrage over a bungled bar raid that resulted in 12 deaths. The resignation of Police Chief Joel Ortega and prosecutor Rodolfo Felix came the same day the city’s Human Rights Commission issued a scathing denunciation of the deadly law enforcement crackdown last month on a club packed with teenagers celebrating the end of the school year. The full story in the Los Angeles Times.

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Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog. My post, my choice of topic. My activism.

Parts one, two and three.

The highlight of the session “Women Confront Globalization” was the screening of a rough cut of the film Poto Mitan - Haitian Women, Pillars of the World Economy, directed by Renee Bergan (she is also the founder of Renegade Pictures ) and she co-presented it with anthropologist Mark Schuller of UC Santa Barbara, co-director of the film.

Poto Mitan means “central pillars” in Kreyo (Haitian Creole) and it is clear that this is in reference to the women presented in this film. These are women who struggle with the familiar problems women face in the Global South: poverty, raising kids alone, working in factories for global brands for low wages (roughly $1.80 per day) and horrific working conditions. Add to that the sexual violence and harassment that these women experience when they try to fight back and organize through unions or other structures.

As bad as it is, it becomes even worse when the factories close their doors for good, leaving these women with no sources of income. Why do the factories close? Because global capitalists do not like unstable countries. They much prefer authoritarian regimes who can keep people (that is their generally feminine workforce) in line and Haiti has had its share of political turmoil and violence in recent history, including brutal food riots a few months ago. Also, since China gained greater access to the world through the World Trade Organization, a lot of other, albeit, poor countries cannot compete with cheap workforce and cheap exports (and again, a stable country managed by a regime that cares very little for human and workers rights).

So, the women of Haiti, especially those who live in the Cite Soleil, a slum on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, try to figure out how to survive. It is this struggle that the movie powerfully conveys.

Even though we were presented a rough cut, the film already looked incredibly professional. The interviews with the women were very powerful even though it seems that we have heard these stories the world over as the problems these women face seem universal. I guess that is one of the characteristics of globalization: to create common problems for certain categories of people who then have to dig and tap into their national and cultural resources to solve them. Especially considering the fact that globalization presents a basic survival problem for women and their children in many parts of the Global South.

As Mary Hawkesworth aptly stated, globalization is a gendered phenomenon. (Deeper development on Gender and Globalization can be found here .)

The film also illustrates several other dilemmas of globalization:

The fact that as bad as factory jobs are, they are often better than ekeing out a living in environmentally stressed rural areas, as is especially the case in Haiti.

Also, the fact that one major relationship of power in the global era is between highly mobile capital and fixed labor: these women have nowhere to go whereas factories are easily open and closed pretty much anywhere in the world depending on which places owners find desirable locations. And right now, Haiti is not desirable at all. This is one of the major imbalance of power that clearly puts labor at a massive disadvantage.

But the women in the film, like so many women around the world, have no choice but to fight to find imperfect solutions to problems not of their own making.

This film is a lesson in courage.

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Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog.

Two good pieces on Al Qaeda landed in my Newsreader this week and they both point in the same direction, albeit in different terms. The first one is from Tony Karon who questions the current relevance of Al Qaeda as the big post-9/11 bogeyman. For Karon, Al Qaeda is irrelevant and always was. In this respect, Al Qaeda is comparable to Trotsky… Huh? How does the comparison apply?

“Al-Qaeda is irrelevant, and yet U.S. hegemony in the Middle East is facing an unprecedented challenge from Islamist-nationalist groups. To understand the link between al-Qaeda’s weakness and the greatly expanded strength of groups such as Hamas, Hizballah, the Muslim Brotherhood and, of course, Iran, over the past seven years, it’s worth turning to the 20th century precedent: Leon Trotsky and his followers vs. the larger, nationally-focused parties of the left in the mid 20th century.

Trotsky rejected pragmatism and compromise by nationally-based leftist movements and insisted, instead, that they subordinate their specific national interests and objectives to the fantasy of “world revolution.” And as a result, long before his murder by Stalin, he found himself holed up in Mexico City, manically firing off communiques denouncing all compromise, and being largely ignored by the more substantial parties of the left world-wide. He had become an irrelevant chatterbox, caught up in a frenzy of his own rhetoric while world events simply passed him by. The same can be said of Bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri — it is not al-Qaeda, but the likes of Iran, Hamas, Hizballah, and the Muslim Brotherhood that represent the future of the nationalist-Islamist challenge to Western power in the Middle East.”

What makes Al Qaeda seemingly powerful are two factors: the one mentioned by Karon, that is, the fact that the United States treats Al Qaeda as this omnipresent threat of global proportion and reacts to every action as if it were the beginnings of a terrorist apocalypse. The second one, which I think is relevant here and contributes to the first, is that fact that Al Qaeda, being a non-state group, articulates itself opportunistically to nation-based movements (Algeria, Philippines, Indonesia, or Iraq).
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In February 2007, President Bush announced that the United States would create a new military command for Africa, to be known as the Africa Command or AFRICOM, to protect U.S. national security interests on the African continent. Previously, control over U.S. military operations in Africa was divided between three different commands: European Command, which oversaw North Africa and most of sub-Saharan Africa; Central Command, which had responsibility for Egypt and the Horn of Africa; and Pacific Command, which administered the Indian Ocean and Madagascar.

The new command set up shop in Stuttgart, Germany in October 2007, as a sub-command of the European Command, and is scheduled to become a separate, fully independent command in October 2008. The Pentagon has intended to establish a headquarters – or set of regional headquarters – on the African continent. But now those plans appear on hold.

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Here is the Thursday, May 29th, 2008, edition of interesting reads from around the world.

The Rome Summit, Part III
In advance of next week’s Summit in Rome of world leaders at the headquarters of the FAO, the UK Guardian is exploring the global food crisis. In Part III, the series looks at the rise in food bills in Britain.

British Housing Prices Fall Sharply
The decline in the British housing market accelerated this month with prices falling at their fastest rate since the recession of the early 1990s. UK house prices fell by 2.5% in May compared with April – the biggest month-on-month decline since the building society started tracking the market in 1991. At £173,583, the average home is worth 4.4% less than in May 2007 – the biggest annual drop since December 1992. More from UK Guardian.

TICAD
African leaders meeting in Japan at the TICAD conference called Thursday for greater market access and improved infrastructure to better their agricultural sector while donor nations focussed on improving agricultural productivity in the face of soaring world food prices. All Africa and the International Herald Tribune report from Japan.

PM Brown Rebukes the US on Cluster Bombs
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown overrules his military and bucks the U.S. to support a treaty aimed against the munitions blamed for civilian deaths. In a major diplomatic defeat for the U.S., Britain broke ranks Wednesday and joined more than 100 nations in agreeing in principle to an international ban on cluster bombs, the small, insidious weapons that have killed thousands of civilians in the aftermath of battle. The Los Angeles Times has more on this story.

The Israeli Political Crisis
Israeli Defence Minister and former Prime Minister Ehud Barak called on Prime Minister Olmert to step aside while he resolves the corruption probe that may lead to his indictment. Haaretz reports that early elections are a possibility while the Jerusalem Post reports that Olmert has no intentions of quitting.

Argentine Farmers Suspend Exports & Block Roads
In a brief follow up to my post, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner Has A Problem, Argentine farm groups suspended grain exports and relaunched road blockades nationwide Wednesday, trying to overturn export taxes that have sparked waves of protests. More from the Miami Herald. The crisis in Argentina should it continue will impact global food prices.

Germany Willing to Admit Iraqi Refugees on One Condition
Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats on Wednesday said they would like to see Germany take on thousands of refugees from Iraq. The hitch? They only want the Christians. More from the Der Spiegel. There were nearly 4 million Iraqi Christians before the US-led invasion. Prosperous by Iraqi standards, Iraq’s Christian minority has suffered greatly as they are caught in the crossfire of Sunni versus Shi’ite warfare.

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Senator Clinton’s recent comments on an “umbrella of deterrence” to protect allies in the region in an effort to contain and restrain Iranian ambitions is receiving some criticism primarily from the usual suspects of liberal A-list bloggers like Josh Marshall and Matt Yglesias who should know better. Deterrence works. As a critic of US militarism and American Empire, I support policies such as nuclear deterrence because they have worked to keep the peace and because they are far cheaper than having a string of permanent bases, conventional deterrence, across the region. Clinton’s “umbrella of deterrence” is really in fact only a modest expansion and a slight reorientation of existing US deterrence policy. Deterrence dates back to the early stages of the Cold War to the American decision to defend Greece and Turkey in March 1947 from communist insurgencies. It bodes well for both Mrs. Clinton and the Democratic party to pick up the mantle of Harry S. Truman and to defuse the GOP on national security by embracing The Truman Doctrine.

I want to correct one misinterpretation by Matt Yglesias of the Atlantic Magazine:

I don’t have any strong objections to the idea of extending the US “nuclear umbrella” to protect Israel in case of an Iranian nuclear attack

Senator Clinton did not limit the umbrella of deterrence to Israel. It is actually as much intended to protect US allies in the Gulf and whatever emerges from the wreckage that is Iraq. Matt Yglesias is probably not aware that it is the Gulf Sheikdoms that fear Iran the most. And they have good reason to. Bahrain is a Shi’ite majority state with Sunni rulers. Manama’s strained relationship with Tehran is nothing new. Other Gulf states including Saudi Arabia have large pockets of Shi’ites as well.

I will write more on this later.

Paraguayans went to the polls on Sunday April 20th to elect a new President and a new Congress. After 61 years of rule by Colorado party, early results indicate a three to six point victory for the left-centre party, Alianza Patriótica para el Cambio (APC). The candidate of the APC is a former bishop, Fernando Lugo, 61, who left the Church to run for the Presidency. His opponent was Blanca Olevar, 50, of the Colorado party and the former coup leader (ret) General Lino César Oviedo of the right-wing Unión Nacional de Ciudadanos Eticos (Unace).

For how this affects the United States, please continue reading.

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