European finance ministers have agreed an £8.7bn bailout for Cypruswhich includes all Cypriot bank customers handing over up to 10% of their savings.

Cyprus becomes the fifth country after Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain to turn to the eurozone for financial help amid the region’s debt crisis, but also faces a possible run on its banks as depositors try to avoid losing up to 10% of their savings.

The savers, half of whom are thought to be Russian, will raise almost €6bn. It is the first time a bailout has included such a measure.

“I wish I was not the minister to do this,” the Cypriot finance minister, Michael Sarris, said after 10 hours of late-night talks in which eurozone finance ministers agreed the package. “Much more money could have been lost in a bankruptcy of the banking system or indeed of the country.”

Without a rescue, Cyprus would default and threaten to unravel investor confidence in the eurozone, a renewed confidence fostered by the European Central Bank’s promise last year to do whatever it takes to support the euro.

However, on Cyprus, initial incredulity at the decision gave way to anger. Co-op credit societies, normally open on Saturdays, were shut for business in the coastal city of Larnaca as depositors started queuing early in the morning to withdraw their cash.

“I’m extremely angry. I worked years and years to get it together and now I am losing it on the say-so of the Dutch and the Germans,” said British-Cypriot Andy Georgiou, 54, who returned to Cyprus in mid-2012 with his savings.

“They call Sicily the island of the mafia. It’s not Sicily, it’s Cyprus. This is theft, pure and simple,” said a pensioner.

The bailout was smaller than initially expected and is mainly needed to recapitalise Cypriot banks hit by sovereign debt restructuring in Greece.

Cypriots with savings of under €100,000 will pay a one-off levy of 6.75%, which rises to 9.9% for those with larger deposits.

The levy on bank deposits will come into force on Tuesday, after a bank holiday on Monday. Cyprus will take immediate steps to prevent electronic money transfers over the weekend.

“As it is a contribution to the financial stability of Cyprus, it seems just to ask for a contribution of all deposit holders,” the Dutch finance minister, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, who chaired the meeting in Brussels, told reporters.

Such levies break the taboo of hitting bank depositors with losses, but Dijsselbloem said it would not have otherwise been possible to salvage its financial sector, which is around eight times the size of the economy.

“We are not penalising Cyprus … we are dealing with the problems in Cyprus,” Dijsselbloem said, adding that that under the programme, the island’s debt would fall to 100% of economic output by 2020.

In return for emergency loans, Cyprus agreed to increase its corporate tax rate by 2.5 percentage points to 12.5%.

This should boost Cypriot revenues, limiting the size of the loan needed from the eurozone and keep down public debt.

The International Monetary Fund managing director, Christine Lagarde, who attended the meeting, said she backed the deal and would ask the IMF board in Washington to contribute to the bailout.

“We believe the proposal is sustainable for the Cyprus economy,” she said, “The IMF is considering proposing a contribution to the financing of the package … The exact amount is not yet specified.”

Cyprus, with a GDP of barely 0.2% of the EU bloc’s overall output, applied for financial aid last June, but negotiations were stalled by the complexity of the deal and the reluctance of the island’s previous president to sign.

Moscow, which has close ties with Nicosia, is likely to help by extending a €2.5bn loan to Cyprus by five years to 2021 and reducing the interest rate.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/16/cyprus-eurozone-bailout-anger

As you may know, AMSTA’s employees are mobilising to ensure the quality of the services provided in the centre. During the mobilisations, they seated themselves at the Sarphatiehuis building claiming an increase of the personnel-bed quota. OSIRA health centre’s employees mobilised last year with similar demands and achieved their goal.

The workload is disproportionately big and the personnel can no longer offer the desired quality of services. Since 2012, the Dutch government has been providing AMSTA with 3,5 million euros for recruiting. But this money was never spent on the personnel. On the contrary, it was made known that it was spent on managers’ training. With the sit-in at Sarphatiehuis building, AMSTA’s employees made sure that the president of the administrative board would get into negotiations. Thus far, the negotiations have not achieved the desired results, therefore mobilisations will go on.

Ben de Valk, president of AMSTA’s administrative board, speaks to the media in deprecatory tones about the employees and launches threats against them. In an interview to De Telegraaf he claimed that due to the repeated work stoppages and the resulting negative advertising, the centre loses patients and incomes. Under attack is also the ABVAKABO FNV trade union.

During the last period, the Dutch government promotes a series of cuts, which increase the pressure upon the administrations of the healthcare centres. The personnel suffers the consequences. Bernard Wientjes, president of the Dutch Organisation of Employers is in total alignment with de Valk, openly stating that employers should not step back. It seems that Wientjes would experience a victory of the employees as a defeat. Such a victory would disrupt his plans, given that the next months are set to be a period of important developments in the central political scene.

The struggle of AMSTA’s employees is also our own struggle. Their victory will be also ours, given that:

1. Either in the short- or long-term, we will all need the right healthcare.

2. Billions are cut in the healthcare sector, a big part of which is about home care. It is estimated that these cuts will lead 100.000 healthcare employees to lose their jobs. If cuts are implemented, we will soon be paying more for less.

3. AMSTA’s administration takes abolition of home care for granted, although final decisions are still to be taken by the government. As a result, employees are already being laid off, while AMSTA’s administration should instead be trying to protect home care. On 6 April, a national mobilisation against cuts on home care will take place, organised by the ABVAKABO FNV trade union.

4. Money management within AMSTA is more and more in the hands of the administration and the bureaucracy. Employees know very well patients’ needs. They also consider unacceptable that the salaries of the administration members are higher that the salary of a minister. If AMSTA’s employees win the fight, it will be made clear that we can bring this phenomenon to an end.

5. ABVAKABO FNV trade union is under attack because it fervently defends the rights of its members and takes their will into consideration as every democratically organised trade union oughts to do. This is unaccepted by the employers. The attack jointly launched by employers’ circles and the Media in the past weeks aims at rendering illegitimate the mobilisations of the healthcare employees. In addition, it aims to turn the trade union movement into a complice in the attempt to abolish the welfare state and, by consequence, to decrease the period during which unemployment benefit is provided, make layoffs easier, impose a salary freeze on civil servants, enforce the cuts the government has decided.

For the above reasons, we kindly request you to send as many support letters as possible in the next days. We will welcome letters from working councils, trade unions, organisations but also individuals and families. Discuss this request with your colleagues and the members of your trade union and send your support letters to Martin Wijnen (see his e-mail above).

With kind regards,

Rob Marijnissen

On behalf of the healthcare employees and

the group of the Vakbondscafé Amsterdam program.  

Nadat we het bericht zagen dat het bestuur van CapGemini de salarissen van ongeveer 300 werknemer wil matigen tot en met 30% besloten we deze brief aan jullie te sturen. Dit bericht is voor ons heel belangrijk want verschillende mensen die in onze groep actief zijn, hebben vergelijkbare ervaringen in Griekenland gehad als werknemers en vakbondsactivisten.

In Griekenland heeft een wet uit 2010 salariskortingen mogelijk gemaakt in de private sector. Hierdoor is het nu mogelijk dat er individuele afspraken tussen werkgever en werknemer gemaakt worden in strijd met de CAO. Het gevolg daarvan was een dramatische toename van grote salarismatigingen en massale ontslagen in tientallen bedrijven.

Zelfs winstmakende bedrijven, actief op de Beurs van Athene en in internationale handel die weinig last van de crisis hadden, hebben van deze wet geprofiteerd en grootschalige bezuinigingen in lonen en personeel geïmplementeerd. Zoals verwacht, was de aankondiging van salarismatigingen gekoppeld aan ontslagdreigingen. Werknemers die niet akkoord gaan met de kortingen krijgen bijna dagelijks ‘waarschuwingen’ van hun directeuren en ‘herinneringen’ van de afdeling personeelszaken over de vastgestelde bedenktijden. Werkgevers spreken heel vaak direct ontslagdreigingen uit en beschuldigen de werknemers, die weerstand bieden, van egoïsme. “Als jullie je zo egoïstisch gedragen word ik gedwongen een paar individuen op te offeren ten gunste van de hele groep. Anders is de hele exercitie voor niets geweest.” (Beëindiging van een e-mail van een manager van een groot mediabedrijf aan zijn medewerkers waarin hij hen vroeg salariskortingen te accepteren).

Het is belangrijk om hier te melden dat er in Griekenland minder dan 40% van de loontrekkers zijn beschermd door een CAO en dat de werkloosheid is toegenomen tot 27% (zelfs 61% onder jongeren).

Door verschillende voorbeelden uit Griekenland en andere landen, en door de ontwikkelingen in de Nederlandse politiek en maatschappij te volgen, zien we de salarismatigingen bij CapGemini als een voorbode van vergelijkbare maatregelen in veel andere bedrijven. Dit is niets slechts een incident, maar een representatief verschijnsel van een beleid dat in heel Europa geïmplementeerd is. Dit beleid probeert de kosten van de crisis af te wentelen op de gewone mensen ondanks het feit dat zij niet verantwoordelijk voor deze crisis zijn. De bezuinigingen die de Nederlandse regering implementeert in onderwijs, zorg etc. en de miljarden belastinggeld die zijn betaald voor de redding van banken, laten zien hoe het hele beeld eruit ziet.

Voor alle bovengenoemde redenen zijn we erg blij dat jullie samen met de vakbonden een standpunt tegen de salarismatigingen hebben ingenomen ipv te onderhandelen over de hoogte van de kortingen. Dat laatste zou de werknemers misleiden en zou ook de weerstand tegen de salariskortingen blokkeren. Wij hebben ook begrepen dat het bestuur van CapGemini de werknemers tegen elkaar uit probeert te spelen op basis van hun leeftijd zodat de ontslagdreigingen effectief worden en de bezuinigingen makkelijker doorgevoerd kunnen worden.

Volgens ons moeten werknemers weerstand bieden tegen de aanval van de werkgevers betreffende lonen en arbeidsvoorwaarden. We moeten ons gezamenlijk verzetten tegen de trucs die ze gebruiken om hun doelen te bereiken. We kunnen de argumenten van de werkgevers weerleggen met initiatieven en acties die de collectieve identiteit van werknemers bevorderen. Op deze manier kunnen we als werknemers weerstand bieden tegen de poging van werkgevers ons uit elkaar te spelen en ons te bedreigen. Zo kunnen we de werknemers beschermen die nu worden bedreigd, maar ook de werknemers die in de toekomst bedreigd zullen worden.

Bij deze willen we onze steun en solidariteit aanbieden aan deze strijd. De vakbonden kunnen hier een belangrijke rol spelen in de organisatie van de weerstand van de werknemers.

Met vriendelijke groeten,
ReINFORM

www.reinform.nl

Throughout Europe we see the same policies to ‘get us out of the crisis’. Banks are being subsidized, labour rights and public services are being destroyed.

- The Netherlands has the highest amount of low-paid and flexible contracts for young people in the whole of the EU.

- 3 out of 4 ‘systemic banks’ in the Netherlands have been nationalized and saved by billions of tax-payers money.

- The Dutch health care system is being dismantled: 100.000 homecare workers are being fired while up to 800 care centers are being closed

- Despite high unemployment people have to work longer. This year pensions for 5,6 million people in the Netherlands will be cut.

- The EU as a whole has been described as Fortress Europe for its zero tolerance and its militarized borders defended by Frontex. In the Netherlands these policies are also severely impacting the working and living conditions of migrants and refugees.

We are calling for an action in Amsterdam the 13th of March in support to the European mobilizations.

Our action will be “A guided tour through the crisis” to reveal what is the real situation in the Netherlands, and what is the responsibility of transnational corporations and European institutions.

When: 13th of March from 16.00 to 18.00. Join us when you can.
Where: We start in front of DNB (de Nederlandse Bank) in Amsterdam: http://goo.gl/maps/vOZmA. The tour will finish at DamSquare.

Facebook event: http://www.facebook.com/events/455892441151001/

‘Naar een Europese Lente’ roept op tot acties, stakingen en demonstraties door heel Europa op 13 maart, en voor een pan-Europese demonstratie en creatieve acties in Brussel op 14 maart. Deze acties zijn gericht tegen de EU Lentetop (14-15 maart), waar regeringsleiders van de EU lidstaten verdere plannen willen maken voor de aanpak van de (euro)crisis.

In heel Europa zien we dezelfde schijnoplossingen om ‘uit de crisis’ te komen. Banken worden gered met overheidsgeld terwijl sociale rechten en publieke voorzieningen worden uitgehold.

- Nederland is het EU-land met de meeste laagbetaalde en flexibele contracten voor jongeren.

- Drie van de vier Nederlandse ‘systeembanken’ zijn nu genationaliseerd en gered met miljarden aan belastinggeld.

- De zorg in Nederland wordt ontmanteld: 100.000 thuiszorgwerkers dreigen hun baan te verliezen en 800 zorginstellingen gaan sluiten.

- Ondanks de hoge werkloosheid moeten ouderen steeds langer doorwerken.

- Vanaf april wordt er ook nog eens gesneden in de pensioenen van 5,6 miljoen Nederlanders.

- Zogenaamde ‘hervormingen’ van de woningmarkt treffen vooral de huursector, waarbij huurders met lagere middeninkomens onevenredig worden getroffen en geen kant op kunnen.

- De EU als geheel word ook wel ‘Fort Europa’ genoemd, vanwege restrictief migratiebeleid en gemilitariseerde bewaking van de EU-buitengrenzen door Frontex. In Nederland heeft dit beleid vergaande gevolgen voor de werk- en leefsituatie van migranten en vluchtelingen

- ‘Belastingparadijs’ Nederland helpt multinationals wereldwijd miljarden aan belasting te ontlopen.

Wij voeren actie om te laten zien dat we het anders willen.

Doe mee met de Europese mobilisatie en kom op 13 maart naar de actie in Amsterdam.

Onze actie is een ‘rondleiding door de crisis’ die laat zien hoe de crisis in Nederland uitwerkt en wat de verantwoordelijkheid is van multinationale bedrijven en Europese instellingen.

We beginnen om 16:00 uur naast het gebouw van de Nederlandse Bank: http://goo.gl/maps/vOZmA De tour eindigt op de dam.

Jihadi flags and An-Nahda Islamist flags were seen side by side in the demonstrations in Tunis on 16 February. There was a big crowd, although not nearly as big as that of opposition supporters for the funeral the previous week of Chokri Belaid, the leftwing militant assassinated by an unidentified group. His murder weakened public support for An-Nahda, united its opponents and provoked discord in its ranks. The prime minister and secretary general of the Islamist party, immediately deserted by most of his friends, proposed to form a “government of national expertise without political affiliations”. Encouraged by opposition bodies, by the General Tunisian Workers’ Union (UGTT), the army, employers, Algeria, western embassies, the idea was to suspend the An-Nahda government temporarily, pending the introduction of a new constitution and fresh elections. The demonstrators on 16 February opposed this, claiming that An-Nahda was “legitimate” and that it was the victim of conspiracies by the media, foreigners, especially the French, “counter-revolutionaries” and “remnants of the old regime”.

It is surprising to hear such Jacobin tirades from such a conservative political body. Since they came to power after elections in October 2011, the An-Nahda Islamists have shown little inclination to upset the economic and social order. Like their Egyptian counterparts and their — dwindling — paymasters in the Gulf monarchies, they have tried to combine extreme capitalism with ancient family and moral values. Their speeches appeal to similar parties by describing opponents in the strongest terms: “First they cut the roads and block the factories, and now they are claiming the government is not legitimate,” Rachid Ghannouchi told his partisans. “An-Nahda is Tunisia’s backbone. To break it or exclude it would damage the country’s national unity.”

That’s what the argument is all about.

Shared plan to break up the state

Where does national unity begin and end? What sacrifices must the Tunisians make and what risks must they take to preserve it? That an Islamist party held a key position in the government was not an issue a year ago when it was a matter of drafting a new constitution, not very different from the old one, and readjusting economic development to the benefit of provinces that had been neglected for decades. But the question is not quite the same when An-Nahda’s failure — the constitution not yet adopted, public order in danger, no investors in sight, poor regions still as poor as ever — lends strength to more radical Islamist groups that must be included in the political game lest they take up armed violence. But, while co-opting these groups might gradually normalise a few extreme militants, the corollary is further Islamisation of Tunisian society.

Hence the opposition suspicions. Far from conceding that dialogue and persuasion have so far enabled An-Nahda to forestall a violent expression of Salafist and jihadi views, the opposition considers that there are no firm distinctions between these groups and that they all harbour the same political and religious plan to break up the state. There is a video from last April that has become famous, in which Ghannouchi explains to the Salafists that they will have to be patient, suggesting that they and An-Nahda might have simply split tasks to achieve their common aim: one group to make placatory speeches, the other to scare off opponents. The obscurity of the internal workings of An-Nahda tends to confirm this interpretation.

But there is a danger of underestimating the tensions within the ruling party, seen to spectacular effect in the latest government crisis. In a thoughtful and informative report on the Salafist challenge, the International Crisis Group concluded that “An-Nahda itself is divided: between religious preachers and pragmatic politicians as well as between its leadership’s more flexible positions and the core beliefs of its militant base. Politically, such tensions give rise to an acute dilemma: the more the party highlights its religious identity, the more it worries non-Islamists; the more it follows a pragmatic line, the more it alienates its constituency and creates an opening for the Salafis” (1).

However, the opposition is unwilling to admit that the worst has been avoided thanks to An-Nahda, still less to accept that the Islamisation of public institutions — education, culture, justice — in a country with 11 million inhabitants may be the price for quelling the violent tendencies of some 50,000 jihadis. Stirred by Chokri Belaid’s assassination and emboldened by the immense crowd at his funeral, it doesn’t give much credence to the An-Nahda leader’s troubles. “Ghannouchi was never willing to denounce the Salafists or the jihadis,” said Riadh Ben Fadhel, leader of a centre-left opposition group, the Modernist Democratic Pole. “He said they were the heart and soul of the revolution, they reminded him of his youth, they were part of the Islamist family, they were lost sheep. With them, Ghannouchi has an enormous pool of potential voters and a militant intervention force at his disposal, enabling him to mount a direct attack on the democratic camp, employing highly organised militias and never showing his own face. He uses them to do his dirty work. But now the masks are off.”

UGTT under attack

The tone is little softer on the UGTT side (2). The two main forces are openly at war with each other. The Leagues of Protection of the Revolution (LPR) attacked the trade union headquarters in December. Six months earlier, the UGTT regional office in Jendouba had been targeted by Salafist forces. “We are fighters, accustomed to the hostility of the government and of violent groups,” said Nasredine Sassi, director of the central trade union research department. “But this is the first time the UGTT has been attacked in this way. It reflects official political statements, including statements by a number of ministers, denouncing union activities.”

The Tunisian left, in politics and associations, is now united in its opposition to An-Nahda. It no longer hesitates to describe it as “extreme right” or even as a “fascist party”. The memory of the common sufferings of democrats and Islamists during the dictatorship faded in just a few months. And at the same time the leaders of what was, under Ben Ali, the single party ceased to be ostracised.

Ahlem Belhadj, chair of the Tunisian Association of Democratic Women (AFTD), responded ironically to the suggestion of An-Nahda peacefully coopting religious extremists: “They are so well integrated that there are training camps in Tunisia and hundreds of Tunisians are dying in Syria and Mali.” She considers that An-Nahda’s economic policy, which is “even more neoliberal than Ben Ali’s”, leads to increased unemployment among young people in working-class districts, with the danger that some of them may become radical and violent.

Fabio Merone, a researcher specialising in Tunisian Salafism at the Gerda Henkel Foundation, also thinks that Salafism, like all jihadism, is the product of social change. He said that in Ben Ali’s time the Tunisian myth worked for the middle class but excluded those who lived in a different Tunisia, who fled to Italy or joined religious groups. Salafism “does not come from the moon or from Saudi Arabia: it is the political formation of young people reacting to banishment and denied education.” But Ben Ali’s cultural desert may also have prompted a quest for identity, a gap that Wahhabi preachers filled.

One of them, Saudi-trained Bechir Ben Hassen delivered an address during the demonstration on 16 February to an audience that included militant members of the ruling party, jihadi groups and ministers, including the (unveiled) minister for women’s affairs. The event was duly noted at UGTT headquarters. Sassi said: “This government should be in its ministerial offices settling the Tunisians’ problems, not out on the street organising demonstrations and haranguing the crowd.”

“The problems to be settled” can be identified by a look at the vacancies column inLa Presse de Tunisie. A Canadian entry on 17 February invited qualified “bricklayers, butchers, nurses and dental hygienists” to emigrate. A Tunisian semi-trailer company was seeking a warehouseman “with a university degree”.

‘It’s Ben Ali all over again’

‘In Sassi’s opinion, “The government is no nearer to solving the economic and social problems, particularly unemployment. It’s Ben Ali all over again.” The UGTT, noting with dismay that the absence of regional development encouraged the informal economy, called on the government “to develop an appropriate infrastructure at Gafsa, Sidi Bouzid and Kasserine, in the border areas where smuggling is rife.” Milk, tomatoes, pasta and mineral water, often bought at state-subsidised prices (3), are exported illegally to Libya to be sold for much more — to such an extent that there are now shortages in Tunisia and the price of basic commodities is rising sharply. As journalist Thameur Mekki said: “We haven’t had to import milk since the second world war. The state stands by and does nothing. They are powerless, they strut about on TV instead of being at their desks. And when they are at their desks, they are busy Islamising the state.”

According to Workers’ Party spokesman Jilani Hammami, a pillar of Chokri Balaid’s Popular Front, “the new government had to start again from scratch. So there was no recovery programme. It pursued the same course as Ben Ali, counting on Qatar and Saudi Arabia and getting nothing.” An-Nahda’s dream of “Muslim-Arab” solidarity never materialised. Instead of gifts from the Gulf states (the Tunisian authorities had expected $5bn from Qatar, according to the economic information site African Manager), Tunisia got only small loans ($500m) at relatively high rates of 2.5%. At about the same time Japan lent it $350m at 0.95%.

The International Monetary Fund had a “very good opinion” of Ben Ali’s Tunisia. In 2008, then-managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn considered that “its economic policy is sound and is, I think, an example that the emerging countries would do well to follow.” Could the IMF make up for the Gulf states’ shortcomings? The trade union headquarters expressed few reservations. As Sassi said: “The UGTT has nothing against the IMF. The secretary general received Christine Lagarde and delegations from the World Bank in these very offices. We know the country can no longer survive outside the global system but we are trying to guide policies in the right direction. We have told the World Bank ‘you supported Ben Ali. Now you must show that you are willing to support democracy with pilot projects for the development of less-favoured regions’.”

The Popular Front is more proactive. It is against Tunisia’s status as special associate of the European Union: “A relatively unproductive economy based on exports and depending on highly vulnerable SMEs will always be at the mercy of key decision-makers in Europe”. It also insists that payment of the foreign debt should be suspended for three or four years, so that the 18% of the Tunisian budget usually allocated to these payments can go to creating jobs. As Jilani Hammami says: “If France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, the United States and the Gulf states really care about Tunisia, they should suspend payment of the debt.” He does not have much hope of this.

According to Thameur Mekki: “Should purchasing power continue to decline and insecurity to increase, it will spell the end of consent for democracy. At present, the Tunisian people have no use for it.” The Salafists are well established in the least-favoured districts and they plan to take advantage of the state’s failings to become key players in the economy, including the informal and underground economy, to preach and take root. “They say ‘look, nothing works, it’s because people are not listening to the prophet’. They want to persuade them to reject elections and political parties, and accept of their own free will what the Salafists present as the final solution: strict application of Islamic law” (4).

Others are more optimistic. Ahlem Belhadj considers that women’s rights are already “agreed even in parties that were not inclined to demonstrate earlier. Thanks to resistance in civil society, right and left, the laws have remained intact.” The vigilance of the popular movement, the crowd at Chokri Belaid’s funeral, the incipient regrouping of progressive forces and the divisions within An-Nahda also encourage Ben Fadhel to think that “the battle to Islamise Tunisia can only be lost.”

Source: http://mondediplo.com/2013/03/01tunisia

The third industrial revolution might come with personal or digital manufacturing, when what used to be bought in a shop could be made at home with such tools as laser cutters, 3D printers and computer numerical control (CNC) milling machines (1). They are all based on the same principle, using software to help guide the movements of a machine tool, and the one that has attracted the most media attention is a printer that prints three-dimensional objects, with a nozzle that lays down a plastic material layer by layer. Designs for the printer of such objects as doorknobs or bicycles can be downloaded from the net.

The media articles featured one of the many commercial 3D printers, but the technology was developed by a loose network of hobbyists or “makers”, whose homemade 3D printer is called RepRap. They are rooted in the world of free software and strive to apply the same values and practices to manufacturing; some aspire to democratise the means of production and abolish consumer society. It is often predicted that 3D printing will reduce labour costs and lessen the incentive of firms to outsource production to low-cost-labour countries (2). This idea, which is closer to a respectable business outlook, is endorsed by the publisher of Makemagazine, which also organises annual Maker Faires in major US cities.

At the New York 2011 Faire, I noticed a certain dissonance with the revolutionary ideals. A corner of it was dedicated to “the Print-Village”, with 20 booths devoted to the RepRap and its many derivatives. Nearby was a much larger pavilion with many exhibitions of sophisticated CNC machines, and one booth that stood out — it was for the “Alliance for American Manufacturing”, between American steel manufacturers and United Steelworkers (USW), and had red, white and blue banners with the message “Keep it made in America”. A hostess handed out badges with the same message; she confessed to me she found it ironic to be doing that here, next to the machines descended from a technology that contributed so much to the destruction of factory jobs in the US and elsewhere.

The historian David Noble has shown that CNC machinery came out of numerical control (N/C) machinery — automated machine tools — which originated in the context of the cold war (3), its development largely funded by military contracts. The technology was thought to be crucial to the arms race against the Communist enemy, and the fight against unions; a major source of union strength was the workers’ knowledge monopoly over the production process.

Fooling the employers

This had been identified by Frederick W Taylor, in his principles of scientific management: “The managers assume … the burden of gathering together all of the traditional knowledge which in the past has been possessed by the workmen and then of classifying, tabulating, and reducing this knowledge to rules, laws and formulae which are immensely helpful to the workmen in doing their daily work.” The pages preceding this quote describe the ways that workers can pretend that they are working at full speed to fool their employers. A benchmark of average performance had to be established so that lazy, dishonest workers could be detected, but when engineers were sent in to measure worker productivity, the workers learned how to fool them too.

Compliance could be enforced through the design of the machinery. In the early 19th century, the British mathematician Charles Babbage travelled to observe different branches of industry, and then produced a catalogue of ingenious mechanisms by which the honesty of servants and workers could be ensured in the absence of their master. He declared: “One great advantage which we may derive from machinery is from the check which it affords against the inattention, the idleness, or the dishonesty of human agents” (4). Babbage is chiefly remembered as the “father of computers”, due to his pioneering experiments with calculating machines; his Analytical Engine was programmed with punched cards, “software” that was used a century later in N/C machines.

Noble explained how software realised the dreams of control of Babbage and Taylor: “Essentially, this was a problem of programmable automation, of temporarily transforming a universal machine into a special-purpose machine through the use of variable ‘programs’, sets of instructions stored on a permanent medium and used to control the machine. With programmable automation, a change in product required only a switch in programs rather than reliance upon machinists to retool or readjust the configuration of the machine itself.”

The aim of reducing managers’ dependency on skilled machine operators was an incentive behind the development of N/C technology, as were the need to manufacture parts that could not easily be constructed manually, the imperative of increasing productivity and, as far as the researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) were concerned, the joy of solving mathematical problems. Noble argues there were alternatives that would have had less adverse consequences for workers, but these were deliberately not pursued (5).

A repressed memory for makers

This puts the enthusiastic claims for 3D printers into perspective. One claim is that laid-off American workers can find a new source of income by selling printed goods over the Internet, which will be an improvement, as degraded factory jobs are replaced with more creative employment opportunities. But factory jobs were not always monotonous. They were deliberately made so, in no small part through the introduction of the same technology that is expected to restore craftsmanship. “Makers” should be seen as the historical result of the negation of the workers’ movement. Many high-profile makers are students and teachers at MIT, which played such a decisive role in the creation of N/C and CNC technology. This history returns as a repressed memory for makers, in their obsession with abandoned factories and scrapyards. Detroit, the global symbol of deindustrialisation, is repeatedly featured in Make magazine and associated blogs (6).

Catherine Fisk, a lawyer, has gone through old trials in the US in which employers and employees confronted each other over the ownership of ideas. In the early 19th century, courts tended to uphold the customary right of workers to freely make use of knowledge gained at the workplace, and attempts by employers to claim the mental faculties of trained white workers were rejected by courts because this resembled slavery too closely. As the knowhow of workers became codified and the balance of power shifted, courts began to vindicate the property claims of employers (7). This lends a different aspect to the makers’ ideas about alternatives to copyright, such as free software licenses and Creative Commons. Some researchers have warned that these might end with workers exploiting themselves (8). There is a crowdsourcing platform owned by Amazon, where net users are invited to solve simple tasks, such as identifying people in photographs. The average income of an “employee” is $1.25 an hour (9).

Plans are already being worked out for integrating home 3D printers into a flexible production line; and it is easy to see how this could lead to downward pressure on wages in the industry. When I suggested this to Adrian Bowyer, the instigator of the RepRap project, he agreed, but said: “It might not be such a bad thing for workers, because they would not have to buy as many things in stores.” So the struggle is to be fought out at the point of consumption, involving intellectual property legislation and the design of the tools made available to the general public.

While some hobbyists strive to develop a machine that corresponds to their ideals about distributed production, entrepreneurs, investors and intellectual property lawyers back a very different idea of what the 3D printer might become. The stakes were spelled out in the Technology Bill of Rights, proposed in 1981 by the International Association of Machinists (IAM), when CNC machines were making inroads into manufacturing industry. The manifesto declared: “The new automation technologies and the sciences that underlie them are the product of a world-wide, centuries-long accumulation of knowledge. Accordingly, working people and their communities have a right to share in the decisions about, and the gains from, new technology.”

Source: http://mondediplo.com/2013/03/10makers

These are some of the numbers recently published by a foundation financed by a New York company that analyzes data for business intelligence, which deployed the same techniques to look at the worldwide trade in human trafficking.

While slavery is illegal across the globe, the SumAll Foundation noted, there are 27 million slaves worldwide, more than in 1860, when there were 25 million. Most are held in bonded servitude, particularly after taking loans they could not repay. Slaves cost slightly more now, with a median price of $140, compared with $134 per human then. Debt slaves cost on average $60; trafficked sex slaves cost $1,910.

“The big shocker for us was the implicit value of human life compared with different commodities,” said Dane Atkinson, chief executive of SumAll, the company that financed the foundation with 10 percent of company equity, or $500,000. “Life is cheaper than some bottles of wine.”

On average today, a person is a slave for six years, after which the person usually escapes, repays the debts holding them, or dies. Most of the world’s slaves are in South Asia.

The foundation obtained the data from a number of sources, including United Nations and World Bank reports, but also criminal filings and reports from human rights organizations and third-party accounts.

“Another big shocker for us was how poor the data quality is,” said Mr. Atkinson. “We come from a corporate world, where reliability is within about 2 percent. There are lots of donations to fight slavery, but very little is done to make the cost clear to people.

Fishing appears to be the most common occupation of child slaves — practiced this way in Cambodia, Ghana, Uganda, Indonesia, the Philippines and Peru. In Madagascar, children are enslaved to gather stones.

Seeking to shock people to gain attention, the SumAll Foundation put its data into a snappy-looking graphic that wouldn’t at a superficial glance be out of place in a mail order catalog.

“Looking for an extra pair of hands to get you through the winter months?” the copy reads. “You’ll find a slave that is right for you at an eye-popping price.”

While this may open the group to charges of sensationalism, Mr. Atkinson said it was an effort to make clear that the developed world is also a consumer of slave labor. “There is a lot of first-world spending geared toward slavery,” he said.

As to whether he’d bring up any connection with slavery to his own corporate customers, he said, “we’re not brave enough to do that yet, but it’s something we’d like to surface. We’re talking to more sources so we can elevate some ugly numbers about how many consumer goods in the U.S. in some way touch slavery.”

 

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/06/global-slavery-by-the-numbers/

Correspondence from Bulgaria: “The events and developments of the Bulgarian Winter”

Up to this time, protesting has been taking place daily (from February, 12 until today, March, 3). Every afternoon people gather at the city centers and protest. This happens in over 40 cities and villages, even in areas where no protests had ever happened before.

The protests initially targeted the recent extremely high electricity and heating bills (one pays these two separately in Bulgaria). In the meantime, in the city of Varna, a citizen had set himself on fire as a means of protest. His condition is still critical. This was followed by even more massive demonstrations, which were initially peaceful (as had been announced on the Internet), but changed to violent ones. This happened mostly in Sofia where people with their faces covered with hoods were at the at the first lines of confrontation with the police. The presence of young members of neonazi and far-right groups has been reported, who have been gathering and organizing at sports fan clubs before the demonstrations. Many, mostly peaceful protesters, where injured in these confrontations with the police, since the police attacked almost anyone it could, especially on the night of February 19. Considering the norm in protests in Bulgaria, this is something unheard of.

After 10 days of continuous protesting and a people who were not giving in to efforts of terrorization, Boiko Borisov, the prime minister of Bulgaria announced the resignation of his cabinet on February 20, since the resignation of his finance minister Simeon Djankov the previous day did not prove to be enough to calm down the situation in the entire country. Elections were planned for July, but will now take place in May. Many believe that this was done to avoid pushing the situation to extremes, so that the ruling party can have a chance to get reelected.

In the meantime, however, the demonstrations had already been transformed into protests against the corrupted political system of Bulgaria of the last 23 years (since the fall of communism in the country in 1989 until the present day). People continue going on the streets with slogans such as “We do not want the same faces in the same game, but a change of the system!”. The political parties, now more than ever, have lost credibility, since all these years every party coming to power had been promising changes that were never carried out. The organized demonstrations are strictly against the political parties and are called online (mostly on facebook), most of the times by citizens, as had happened in the city square movements in Greece, Spain and the Arabic Spring.

Despite the massive radicalization and rage against the political parties, the people have not yet managed to create a general direction of a possible counter-proposal. It is a fact that in the demonstrations participate in common from nationalists-fascists to self-organized anticapitalistic and anti-racist initiatives (for example people from the Bulgarian “Occupy” group that arrive with a banner with the words “We’re done with the self-deception. Self-organization – daily social action!”). This explosive composition of the demonstrations peaked on February 24, when the activist block with the anticapitalistic and direct-democratic slogans was subject to an attack by the young fascists-hooligans that were also part of the demonstration. Some of the activists (including women) were hit by these so-called “patriots”. The reaction of the simple citizens who tried to stop the fascists shouting “Provocateurs!” and the self-collected reaction of the activist block helped end this situation. It is true that the presence of extreme-rightists in the demonstrations has influenced the slogans heard. Slogans such as “Hero Bulgarians!” and “No more new mosques in Sofia” as well as the national anthem of Bulgaria are routinely heard. Furthermore, during the demonstrations, only Bulgarian flags are allowed.

On the other hand, various tensions and proposals have been developed by citizens such as: writing a new constitution, changing the system on the basis of the Icelandic model of governance, participation and citizen control on power. For this reason, general assemblies of citizens have formed wherein people try to formulate their requests. Also, around two or three electronic platforms have been developed where people can vote and form proposals. On the 1st of March a Bulgarian social forum was created in Sofia to highlight subjects as: direct democracy, social ecology and participatory forms of economy. The Bulgarian people for the first time are getting in a process of dialogue and search for grassroots alternatives and, despite the various difficulties, this alone is an important precedent for the movement. Its results remain to be seen, what is important, however, is that we woke up!

(The original article in Greek can be found at: http://efimeridadrasi.blogspot.gr/2013/03/b.html )

The police campaign to intimidate and even terrorize the anti-mining movement in north-eastern Halkidiki took a new turn this morning when several platoons of riot police entered the village of Ierissos, allegedly to summon witnesses to the regional police HQ in Polygyros and to conduct house searches. Residents initially reported 6 platoons, but later concluded that the number of riot policemen was much, much higher. Officers from national security and anti-terrorism units also participated in the raid.

Residents quickly gathered at the entrance of the village. The riot police marched into the village, throwing large quantities of tear gas (video 1, video 2, video 3). Multiple eyewitnesses, including the headmaster, report that tear gas was thrown inside the secondary school, which had to be evacuated. One student was wounded after taking a hot from a tear gas canister. Several people are reported to be suffering from breathing problems and need medical care.

The police spokesman, in an phone interview on SKAI TV, denied that any tear gas had been used and claimed that the breathing problems were due to the fumes of tires burnt by residents at makeshift roadblocks. TV presenter Popi Tsapanidou couldn’t but answer: “You’re kidding me.”

Two members of parliament, one from SYRIZA and one from PASOK, denounced the behaviour of the police in parliament this morning. No official response was put forward by the government yet.

The riot police is reported to have pulled back to the local police station at the edge of the village around 12:30 EET. Ierissos resident @katerinaelikaki reports however as of 13:15 that policemen are conducting house searches. The pictures below are hers.

http://international.radiobubble.gr/2013/03/the-police-assault-on-ierissos-near.html?spref=tw

The press of course went into high dudgeon, and not just for the obvious reason that it’s one thing for opponents in the Middle East to call the United States the Great Satan and another thing for the president of a Latin American country to personally single out its president as Beelzebub, on US soil no less.

I think what really rankled was that Chávez was claiming a privilege that had long belonged to the United States, that is, the right to paint its adversaries not as rational actors but as existential evil. Latin American populists, from Argentina’s Juan Perón to, most recently, Chávez, have long served as characters in a story the US tells about itself, reaffirming the maturity of its electorate and the moderation of its political culture. There are at most eleven political prisoners in Venezuela, and that’s taking the opposition’s broad definition of the term, which includes individuals who worked to overthrow the government in 2002, and yet it is not just the right in this country who regularly compared Chávez to the worst mass murderers and dictators in history. New Yorker critic Alex Ross, in an essay published a few years back celebrating the wunderkind Venezuelan conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Gustavo Dudamel, fretted about enjoying the fruits of Venezuela’s much-lauded government-funded system of music training: “Stalin, too, was a great believer in music for the people.”

* * *

Hugo Chávez was the second of seven children, born in 1954 in the rural village of Sabaneta, in the grassland state of Barinas, to a family of mixed European, Indian and Afro-Venezuelan race. Bart Jones’s excellent biography,Hugo! nicely captures the improbability of Chávez’s rise from dirt-floor poverty—he was sent to live with his grandmother since his parents couldn’t feed their children—through the military, where he became involved with left-wing politics, which in Venezuela meant a mix of international socialism and Latin America’s long history of revolutionary nationalism. It drew inspiration from well-known figures such as Simón Bolívar, as well as lesser-known insurgents, such as nineteenth-century peasant leader Ezequiel Zamora, in whose army Chávez’s great-great-grandfather had served. Born just a few days after the CIA drove reformist Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz from office, he was a young military cadet of 19 in September 1973 when he heard Fidel Castro on the radio announce yet another CIA-backed coup, this one toppling Salvador Allende in Chile.

Awash in oil wealth, Venezuela throughout the twentieth century enjoyed its own kind of exceptionalism, avoiding the extremes of left-wing radicalism and homicidal right-wing anticommunism that overtook many of its neighbors. In a way, the country became the anti-Cuba. In 1958, political elites negotiated a pact that maintained the trappings of democratic rule for four decades, as two ideological indistinguishable parties traded the presidency back and forth (sound familiar?). Where the State Department and its allied policy intellectuals isolated and condemned Havana, they celebrated Caracas as the end point of development. Samuel Huntington praised Venezuela as an example of “successful democratization,” while another political scientist, writing in the early 1980s, said it represented the “only trail to a democratic future for developing societies…a textbook case of step-by-step progress.”

We know now that its institutions were rotting from the inside out. Every sin that Chávez was accused of committing—governing without accountability, marginalizing the opposition, appointing partisan supporters to the judiciary, dominating labor unions, professional organizations and civil society, corruption and using oil revenue to dispense patronage—flourished in a system the United States held up as exemplary.

Petroleum prices began to fall in the mid-1980s. By this point, Venezuela had grown lopsidedly urban, with 16 million of its 19 million citizens living in cities, well over half of them below the poverty line, many in extreme poverty. In Caracas, combustible concentrations of poor people lived cut off from municipal services—such as sanitation and safe drinking water—and hence party and patronage control. The spark came in February 1989, when a recently inaugurated president who had run against the IMF said that he no choice but to submit to its dictates. He announced a plan to abolish food and fuel subsidies, increase gas prices, privatize state industries and cut spending on health care and education.

Three days of rioting and looting spread through the capital, an event that both marked the end of Venezuelan exceptionalism and the beginning of the hemisphere’s increasingly focused opposition to neoliberalism. Established parties, unions and government institutions proved entirely incapable of restoring legitimacy in austere times, committed as they were to upholding a profoundly unequal class structure.

Chávez emerged from the ruin, first with a failed putsch in 1992, which landed him in jail but turned him into a folk hero. Then in 1998, when he won 56 percent of the vote as a presidential candidate. Inaugurated in 1999, he took office committed to a broad yet vague anti-austerity program, a mild John Kenneth Galbraith–quoting reformer who at first had no power to reform anything. The esteem in which Chávez was held by the majority of Venezuelans, many of them dark-skinned, was matched by the rage he provoked among the country’s mostly white political and economic elites. But their maximalist program of opposition—a US-endorsed coup, an oil strike that destroyed the country’s economy, a recall election and an oligarch-media propaganda campaign that made Fox News seem like PBS—backfired. By 2005, Chávez had weathered the storm and was in control of the nation’s oil, allowing him to embark on an ambitious program of domestic and international transformation: massive social spending at home and “poly-polar equilibrium” abroad, a riff on what Bolívar once called “universal equilibrium,” an effort to break up the US’s historical monopoly of power in Latin America and force Washington to compete for influence.

* * *

Over the last fourteen years, Chávez has submitted himself and his agenda to fourteen national votes, winning thirteen of them by large margins, in polling deemed by Jimmy Carter to be “best in the world” out of the ninety-two elections that he has monitored. (It turns out it isn’t that difficult to have transparent elections: voters in Venezuela cast their ballot on an touch pad, which spits out a receipt they can check and then deposit in a box. At the end of the day, random polling stations are picked for ‘hot audits,’ to make sure the electronic and paper tallies add up). A case is made that this ballot-box proceduralism isn’t democratic, that Chávez dispenses patronage and dominates the media giving him an unfair advantage. But after the last presidential ballot—which Chávez won with the same percentage he did his first election yet with a greatly expanded electorate—even his opponents have admitted, despairingly, that a majority of Venezuelans liked, if not adored, the man.

I’m what they call a useful idiot when it comes to Hugo Chávez, if only because rank-and-file social organizations that to me seem worthy of support in Venezuela continued to support him until the end. My impressionistic sense is that this support breaks down roughly in half, between voters who think their lives and their families’ lives are better off because of Chávez’s massive expansion of state services, including healthcare and education, despite real problems of crime, corruption, shortages and inflation.

The other half of Chávez’s electoral majority is made up of organized citizens involved in one or the other of the country’s many grassroots organizations. Chávez’s social base was diverse and heterodox, what social scientists in the 1990s began to celebrate as “new social movements,” distinct from established trade unions and peasant organizations vertically linked to—and subordinated to—political parties or populist leaders: neighborhood councils; urban and rural homesteaders, feminists, gay and lesbian rights organizations, economic justice activists, environmental coalitions; breakaway unions and the like. It’s these organizations, in Venezuela and elsewhere throughout the region, that have over the last few decades done heroic work in democratizing society, in giving citizens venues to survive the extremes of neoliberalism and to fight against further depredations, turning Latin America into one of the last global bastion of the Enlightenment left.

Chávez’s detractors see this mobilized sector of the population much the way Mitt Romney saw 47 percent of the US electorate not as citizens but parasites, moochers sucking on the oil-rent teat. Those who accept that Chávez enjoyed majority support disparaged that support as emotional enthrallment. Voters, wrote one critic, see their own vulnerability in their leader and are entranced. Another talked about Chávez’s “magical realist” hold over his followers.

One anecdote alone should be enough to give the lie to the idea that poor Venezuelans voted for Chávez because they were fascinated by the baubles they dangled in front of them. During the 2006 presidential campaign, the signature pledge of Chávez’s opponent was to give 3,000,000 poor Venezuelans a black credit card (black as in the color of oil) from which they could withdraw up to $450 in cash a month, which would have drained over $16 billion dollars a year from the national treasury (call it neoliberal populism: give to the poor just enough to bankrupt the government and force the defunding of services). Over the years, there’s been a lot of heavy theoretically breathing by US academics about the miasma oil wealth creates in countries like Venezuela, lulling citizens into a dreamlike state that renders them into passive spectators. But in this election at least, Venezuelans managed to see through the mist. Chávez won with over 62 percent of the vote.

Let’s set aside for a moment the question of whether Chavismo’s social-welfare programs will endure now that Chávez is gone and shelve the left-wing hope that out of rank-and-file activism a new, sustainable way of organizing society will emerge. The participatory democracy that took place in barrios, in workplaces and in the countryside over the last fourteen years was a value in itself, even if it doesn’t lead to a better world.

There’s been great work done on the ground by scholars such as Alejandro Velasco, Sujatha Fernandes, Naomi Schiller and George Ciccariello-Maher on these social movements that, taken together, lead to the conclusion that Venezuela might be the most democratic country in the Western Hemisphere. One study found that organized Chavistas held to “liberal conceptions of democracy and held pluralistic norms,” believed in peaceful methods of conflict resolution and worked to ensure that their organizations functioned with high levels of “horizontal or non-hierarchical” democracy. What political scientists would criticize as a hyper dependency on a strongman, Venezuelan activists understand as mutual reliance, as well as an acute awareness of the limits and shortcomings of this reliance.

Over the years, this or that leftist has pronounced themselves “disillusioned” with Chávez, setting out some standard drawn, from theory or history, and then pronouncing the Venezuelan leader as falling short. He’s a Bonapartist, wrote one. He’s no Allende, sighs another. To paraphrase the radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens in Lincoln, nothing surprises these critics and therefore they are never surprising. But there are indeed many surprising things about Chavismo in relationship to Latin American history.

First, the military in Latin America is best known for its homicidal right-wing sadists, many of them trained by the United States, in places like the School of the Americas. But the region’s armed forces have occasionally thrown up anti-imperialists and economic nationalists. In this sense, Chávez is similar to Argentina’s Perón, as well as Guatemala’s Colonel Arbenz, Panama’s Omar Torrijos and Peru’s General Juan Francisco Velasco, who as president between 1968 and 1975 allied Lima with Moscow. But when they weren’t being either driven from office (Arbenz) or killed (Torrijos?), these military populists inevitably veered quickly to the right. Within a few years of his 1946 election, Perón was cracking down on unions, going as far as endorsing the overthrow of Arbenz in 1954. In Peru, the radical phase of Peru’s military government lasted seven years. Chávez, in contrast, was in office fourteen years, and he never turned nor repressed his base.

Second and related, for decades now social scientists have been telling us that the kind of mobilized regime Venezuela represents is pump-primed for violence, that such governments can only maintain energy through internal repression or external war. But after years of calling the oligarchy squalid traitors, Venezuela has seen remarkably little political repression—certainly less than Nicaragua in the 1980s under the Sandinistas and Cuba today, not to mention the United States.

Oil wealth has much to do with this exceptionalism, as it also did in the elite, top-down democracy that existed prior to Chávez. But so what? Chávez has done what rational actors in the neoliberal interstate order are supposed to do: he’s leveraged Venezuela’s comparative advantage not just to fund social organizations but give them unprecedented freedom and power.

* * *

Chávez was a strongman. He packed the courts, hounded the corporate media, legislated by decree and pretty much did away with any effective system of institutional checks or balances. But I’ll be perverse and argue that the biggest problem Venezuela faced during his rule was not that Chávez was authoritarian but that he wasn’t authoritarian enough. It wasn’t too much control that was the problem but too little.

Chavismo came to power through the ballot following the near total collapse of Venezuela’s existing establishment. It enjoyed overwhelming rhetorical and electoral hegemony, but not administrative hegemony. As such, it had to make significant compromises with existing power blocs in the military, the civil and educational bureaucracy and even the outgoing political elite, all of whom were loath to give up their illicit privileges and pleasures. It took near five years before Chávez’s government gained control of oil revenues, and then only after a protracted fight that nearly ruined the country.

Once it had access to the money, it opted not to confront these pockets of corruption and power but simply fund parallel institutions, including the social missions that provided healthcare, education and other welfare services being the most famous. This was both a blessing and a curse, the source of Chavismo’s strength and weakness.

Prior to Chávez, competition for government power and resources took place largely within the very narrow boundaries of two elite political parties. After Chávez’s election, political jockeying took place within “Chavismo.” Rather than forming a single-party dictatorship with an interventionist state bureaucracy controlling people’s lives, Chavismo has been pretty wide open and chaotic. But it significantly more inclusive than the old duopoly, comprised of at least five different currents: a new Bolivarian political class, older leftist parties, economic elites, military interests and the social movements mentioned above. Oil money gave Chávez the luxury of acting as a broker between these competing tendencies, allowing each to pursue their interests (sometimes, no doubt, their illicit interests) and deferring confrontations.

* * *

The high point of Chávez’s international agenda was his relationship with Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the Latin American leader whom US foreign policy and opinion makers tried to set as Chávez’s opposite. Where Chávez was reckless, Lula was moderate. Where Chávez was confrontational, Lula was pragmatic. Lula himself never bought this nonsense, consistently rising to Chávez’s defense and endorsing his election.

For a good eight years they worked something like a Laurel and Hardy routine, with Chávez acting the buffoon and Lula the straight man. But each was dependent on the other and each was aware of this dependency. Chávez often stressed the importance of Lula’s election in late 2002, just a few months after April’s failed coup attempt, which gave him his first real ally of consequence in a region then still dominated by neoliberals. Likewise, the confrontational Chávez made Lula’s reformism that much more palatable. Wikileak documents reveal the skill in which Lula’s diplomats gently but firmly rebuffed the Bush administration’s pressure to isolate Venezuela.

Their inside-outside rope-a-dope was on full display at the November 2005 Summit of the Americas in Argentina, where the United States hoped to lock in its deeply unfair economic advantage with a hemisphere-wide Free Trade Agreement. In the meeting hall, Lula lectured Bush on the hypocrisy of protecting corporate agriculture with subsidies and tariffs even as it pushed Latin America to open its markets. Meanwhile, on the street Chávez led 40,000 protesters promising to “bury” the free trade agreement. The treaty was indeed derailed, and in the years that followed, Venezuela and Brazil, along with other Latin American nations, have presided over a remarkable transformation in hemispheric relations, coming as close as ever to achieving Bolívar’s “universal equilibrium.”

* * *

When I met Chávez in 2006 after his controversial appearance in the UN, it was at a small lunch at the Venezuelan consulate. Danny Glover was there, and he and Chávez talked the possibility of producing a movie on the life of Toussaint L’Ouverture, the former slave who led the Haitian Revolution.

Also present was a friend and activist who works on the issue of debt relief for poor countries. At the time, a proposal to relieve the debt owed to the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) by the poorest countries in the Americas had stalled, largely because mid-level bureaucrats from Argentina, Mexico and Brazil opposed the initiative. My friend lobbied Chávez to speak to Lula and Argentina’s president Néstor Kirchner, another of the region’s leftist leaders, and get them to jump-start the deal.

Chávez asked a number of thoughtful questions, at odds with the provocateur on display on the floor of the General Assembly. Why, he wanted to know, was the Bush administration in favor of the plan? My friend explained that some Treasury officials were libertarians who, if not in favor of debt relief, wouldn’t block the deal. “Besides,” he said, “they don’t give a shit about the IADB.” Chávez then asked why Brazil and Argentina were holding things up. Because, my friend said, their representatives to the IADB were functionaries deeply invested in the viability of the bank, and they thought debt abolition a dangerous precedent.

We later got word that Chávez had successfully lobbied Lula and Kirchner to support the deal. In November 2006, the IADB announced it would write off billions of dollars in debt to Nicaragua, Guyana, Honduras and Bolivia (Haiti would later be added to the list).

And so it was that the man routinely compared in the United States to Stalin quietly joined forces with the administration of the man he had just called Satan, helping to make the lives of some of the poorest people in America just a bit more bearable.

By Greg Grandin

Source: http://www.zcommunications.org/on-the-legacy-of-hugo-ch-vez-by-greg-grandin