Category: Politics

Why Steve Bannon Beat David Frum in the Munk Debates

“BE IT RESOLVED, THE FUTURE OF WESTERN POLITICS IS POPULIST, NOT LIBERAL”

As a former Lincoln-Douglas and Policy-Forum Debater while attending Jupiter High School, and a teacher of Speech and Debate while working at South Broward High School, I was excited to see an ad for The Munk Debates in my Facebook feed about the above resolution between Steve Bannon and David Frum.

Rather than drawing out who the winner was, I’ll say that it was without question Steve Bannon.

You can see why in my below tracking of the debate.

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Steve Bannon’s first words presented a compelling narrative.

Etiological stories are powerful as they allow for an organic depiction of various actors and values and as it allows the audience to quickly project themselves amongst the group of actors described.

Bannon’s choice was all the more poignant – he describes the people arrayed in the White House speaking to the president during the 2008 financial crisis that caused numerous deleterious social, political and economic across the world. Bannon thus establishes his view of the driving concern of the modern populist movement – seizing power from a transnationally oriented economic elite – the party of Davos. The framing of the story allows the viewer, within the first minute, to either identify yourself as a member of this group – or as someone that has been affected by it.

Bannon then goes to define populism, as understood in this particular moment, to be equivalent with economic nationalism. Economic nationalism, as propounded by Bannon in this instance and shown by his expressed disdain for Richard Spencer, does not care about race, gender preference, sexual orientation or religion.

After a fawning show of respect for Bannon, Frum’s opening speech proceeds to develop a Manichean framework that he will develop throughout the debate. There is a choice between “renewal and destruction; freedom and unfreedom” in this given moment and to side with Frum is to side with the former. Populism is defined as Bannon and Trump and allude them to
I think that Frum made a lot of very unusual statements. For one, he says: “We are here to show that who are who are parents and our grandparents were.” and then states that the same fights that they fought are ours as well. This claim is made without a substantiation, and for those like myself that are deeply versed in American history this appears baseless.

Another aspect of Frum’s case that was peculiar and unpersuasive in their mobilization was his choice of political allusion.
Besides Donald Trump being president, the only other historical events that Frum cites are the Poppy Day and Kristallnacht. While rhetorically powerful points to mention, the bright line showing the connections between the 1918 and 1940 and the present is not. Frum doesn’t just make this poor allusion, but doubles down on it by making an extended point about how it is that Populism divides with more hints to Nazism and Fascism. To reinforce this construction of “the present populists are an echo of former 1940s villains” he then goes on to cite a number of current foreign politicians – which the audience is unlikely to be familiar with – to reinforce his claim that populists are crooks rather than giving substantive examples. Frum’s then fumbles with a prolix description of how those in the current White House are just interested in destroying things (apparently he’s not familiar with Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism & Democracy and the notion of creative destruction) and then is unable to define what the “one assumption” that the new populism is based on because he has gone over in time.

Bannon’s retort that Frum is just smearing the populist movement and stating again how it was that it is previous government politics that drove people to become more politically involved allows him to deflate quickly deflate the case. By putting into context and then ending with a joke related to Trump’s poll numbers, he humanizes himself. More than that, he expands on his narrative, citing Hillbilly Elegy – a book that connects sociologically the deindustrialization of the United States with the opioid crisis.

Steve Bannon cites this as well as the $7 trillion dollars’ wars spent in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the infusion of capital as the motivating factors for why so many people abandoned the traditional Democratic and Republican establishment. He then relates the traditional economic concern for the “Little guy” as the basis of traditional American (settler, colonial) civilization. By following up with the rhetorical point on Canadian’s Commonwealth status gains him extra points given the audience.

One of the points that I think Bannon would have benefitted by responding to Frum’s comment is when he impugns the ethics of Trump for extracting profits from his businesses – as this is a form of financial inducement. While outside the proscribed constraints of the topic – “Be it resolved, the future of Western Politics is Populist Not Liberal” it would have been worthwhile to point out how the Clinton’s liberal policies helped them turn from poor county lawyers to billionaires. Say what you will about Breitbart, some of their reporting, such as on the Clinton Foundation, is worth-reading journalism.

Frum’s rejoinder round two begins with a torturously long admission that Liberal democracy is in crisis, but then claims that “the failures of a good system are not a reason to turn to an evil one.” Another binary sans substantive policy discussion. He states that there is a need to “renew and repair,” but rather than giving any substantive description of what those mean, their correlative in the American social body, or how to address the issues perceived as ills. He instead goes on to bloviate about how inclusiveness is important. After Frum sits down to another round of speech-halting applause, a class on why closing a speech with such a sentiment is bad rhetoric because of the opening it provides the opposing side is then provided by Bannon.

He responds by postulating the fundamental need for the Populist movement to convert others to its position or die as a directive forced in the governance of America. This and his follow up drastically undercuts Frum’s projection of it as xenophobic, racist or religiously intolerant. The succinct 3-part definition that Steve then gives definition to Populism/Economic Nationalism via specific items of Trump’s policies: economic nationalism, America-first security policies and deconstruction of the administrative state.

Given that a significant portion of Frum’s speeches are reminiscing about the political acumen of Bannon and referred to him as a “fiery tribune of Populism” it, functionally debunks Frum’s construction of the operating principles guiding the modern U.S. populist movement.

Bannon states that what is needed is an economic order that does not orient itself to the maximization of shareholder value, but of citizenship value. As someone that’s admittedly not familiar with the writings of America’s Modern Populist Movement, I was rather shocked by this. Bannon directly counters another of Frum’s positions by refuting the notion of populism as “mere destruction” by pointing out that the new NAFTA trade deal that was just organized helps develop a manufacturing hub that will be able to counter East Asia.

Frum tells a long tale meant to highlight how Trump is clumsy and his trade advisor doesn’t have any peer reviewed articles, then makes an introduction of two news terms he wants to introduce to the debate – nationalism and globalism. Describing several cases of one population harming another for various, such as pollution or military action and climate change he makes a national socialist (i.e. Nazi) smear rather than interrogating these new terms in detail and then claims that peace and prosperity are liberal ideas. Since Frum has already admitted by non-rebuttal of earlier of Bannon’s claims that he was a “conservative” involved in all of the government decisions that he now rues – to me this was a shocking admission. Not only does this disprove his claim, but it also shows from to be an unprincipled character as he did not leave in protest of the “illiberalism” that went on in the name of liberalism.

Having myself studied the history, institutions and policies of the EU myself in a graduate seminar at FAU, Bannon’s rejoinder is exactly what I would have responded with to this Frum’s turn of the debate topic from populism and liberalism to globalism and nationalism. Bannon asserts the longstanding tradition of a state within specific geographically definable national limits, and describes the chilling sentiment by many people about the foreign imposition of rules and also the rule by foreign unaccountable agents in some ways over the conditions of their lives. Citizen empowerment is populism. Bannon points to the supply chain changes as positives, as well as states movements to maintain their sovereignty. Bannon also states an eminently quotable phrase. “We have socialism in the United States for the very wealthy, and the very poor, and a brutal form of Darwinian capitalism for those everybody else. The devil gets the hindmost.” Millennials are like serfs in their non-ownership, 20% behind where their parents were in a gig economy without careers.

In another one of Frum’s unfit forensic formulations he responds to Bannon by claiming that “Trump’s economy is the same as Obama’s, but with more tariffs, more inflation and higher interest rates.” Given the impact these three factors have on the totality of America’s economic activity – this is a strange formulation. Substantive descriptions of continuity are absent. After this poorly made point, Frum gives a self-negating formulation – stating that the populists attempts to bring manufacturing back via tariffs shows that they “don’t know what they want” and that “hate doesn’t build”.

Bannon counter’s Frum’s hate point by pointing out that Trump’s first act of travel to visit foreign dignitaries in Saudi Arabia to have discussions on how to eradicate Muslim extremism, how does the Arab world come together to stop Iran, and in some ways advise towards the development of a peaceful social modernity. I think a worthwhile point to include here would have been to point to the massive amounts of fences that have been put up in Europe over the past two years to show provide a counter-factual to Frum’s construction of Europe as “less hateful”. I’ve heard Bannon talk about “the signal and the noise” in other interviews, and he closes the rejoinder by making it.

The debate is then here interrupted by the moderator so that he can ask specific questions. While they are tangentially related to the topic and are generally interesting, I think the moderator failed to sufficiently keep the debate within the framework of the resolution.

Frum claims Trump won in large part by appealing to people’s desires to have a better healthcare system that costs less money, a point which Bannon places back on his lap by stating that it was the Republican establishment that fumbled there, having requested to take this part of leadership over and not being able to follow through. Bannon responds by furthering the definition between establishment Republicans and Populist Republicans by talking about tax rates – which Bannon wants to increase for those that are making more than five million dollars a year. Bannon excuses Trump as getting his “sea legs”

Frum’s competency criticism of Trump seems shallow given the context of the 2016 election – wherein a political outsider who does not follow all of the pre-established paths paved by moneyed interests is governing in a new manner. Individual mistakes are endemic to any such process and while it’s true about his past similar denigrations aren’t now made about the character of Bill Clinton for his failed push for single player health insurance.

Bannon shows that much of this friction stems from contrasting Trump’s policy of quantitative tightening – something not desired by all economic sectors – with Obama’s of qualitative easing as well as a new national security policy that seeks to ensure that America’s allies are paying for their protection as otherwise the burden falls on U.S. taxpayers to the tune of trillions of dollars.

After another faltering deference to Bannon’s biography, this time to his military record, Frum’s response is to give the unsubstantiated claim that by demanding more of their NATO partners, Trump is selling the United States. It’s a weird statement given the lack of context provided, and Bannon shows his smarts by not responding to the claim and instead going back to NATO and national security and then relates this spending to an expressed desire not to be an Empire or an Imperial power expending “deplorable lives” in foreign theaters of war but a Revolutionary Power.

Frum’s rejoinder here about race seems shallow and following this he starts going on about how Bannon and Trump are “selling the country to the Russians”.

While Bannon does not go into detail about this, given the effects of global climactic change will have on the Arctic trade routes over the next 20 years (I am deeply pessimistic about U.S. politicians ability to enact legislation that will allow for the reaching of targets for cutting emissions) there will likely be a major shift in U.S. and Russian trade, collaborative resource extraction projects and military interaction (as more bases are planted to protect the routes) I was hoping that he would. Suffice to say as the questions continue from the moderator Bannon comports himself with equanimity even though the questions are loaded against him. Being familiar with the shocking statistical increase in White Nationalist murders and assaults across the country I found his claim that the left was worse to be disingenuous, even if I could agree with him that attribution of such people’s actions cannot be honestly placed solely at Trump’s feet.

Frum’s closing is weak. He falters at two points in making his points and can again only make an appeal based on poorly-explained historical precedent that populism will fail. When Frum states that “Liberal democracy is stronger than it looks because human kindness and decency is stronger than it looks.” I can’t wonder what he’s referring to as he’s agreed with so many of Bannon’s understanding of politics from Bush II to the Obama. He then goes on an extended diatribe reiterating the binary terms by which he has referred to throughout the debate which – given what speech acts have transpired better the orators – rings hollow. Frum has simply agreed to so many earlier points that I read the caricature he presented of Trump and other populists as disingenuous. When Bannon opens his response with describing David Frum’s speech as “Very good, and irrelevant”. It certainly matched my own assessment. Bannon’s assessment that the future will either be left or right populism, i.e. Bernie Sanders/Jeremy Corbyn or Trump/Bolsonaro is also my reading of the current moment. As evidence to the anti-institutional sentiments of this moment in history, Bannon points out how none of the “traditional” Republicans – backed as they were by think tanks and major donations by billionaires – were able to beat Trump. Giving a final emphasis to his point by alluding to other major upheavals in the U.S., Bannon states that it is the fourth turning moment and therefor it has to be the time of populism. Though I would not have understood the depth of what he meant by this had I not already ready The Fourth Turning, it was still a well-enough explained concept that it related to the resolution in a powerful manner.

At the end of the debate, for all the reasons describe in my comments above, I believe that Steve Bannon won the debate.

That said, I’m surprised that Facebook didn’t consider as part of their collaborative production with the Debate forum a scorecard on their website. It’d be an interesting to see how people actually tracked and responded to the debate. A little bit more pre-planning would have made for more interesting results that that which was given.

In a last bit of commentary related to the debate I have to admit being curious as to the protest that the moderator alluded to in the opening. After doing a little bit of digging online, I was amused to learn that one of the organizations that was involved in the demonstration outside and that may be responsible for the protestor interrupting Bannon was none other the front group for the Venezuelan State in Canada: The CPC and the Hugo Chavez Front. I find this to be yet another example of Orwellian Irony given that the economic goals of their Bolivarian project are actually pretty aligned with that of Bannon’s Economic Nationalism and that both projects – via different methods – are involved in re-writing/re-interpreting the law in radical ways.

Hugo Chavez Front is one of the Venezuelan government’s 5th Estate Front Organizations.

Review of Whose Truth? Sovereignty, Disinformation and Winning the Battle of Trust 

Whose Truth? Sovereignty, Disinformation and Winning the Battle of Trust by John T Watts presents an overview of the social of the current media landscape basedonn themes and insights garnered from the 2018 Sovereign Challenge Conference. The article is interesting not only because it showcases how it is that disinformation can have a negative impact on the way in which societies function, but also as it is in part a strong criticism of the incentives and key performance indicators of the current media environment in general. I’m going to review how the internet has changed the habits and incentivizes of stakeholders, and then relate this to the general political concerns that are the primary focus of Watts’ article. Also, for clarification, when I speak of news in this review I’m speaking of political news and not entertainment news, sports news, etc. 

The erosion of professionalism in the online media space is not just a concern of Watts, but one voiced by literally every media analyst that I’ve read over the past several years. Having worked several years as a digital marketer, and as someone that’s heard fake news content sent via email chains and social media posts make their way into people’s conversations on and offline as well as their systems of belief – I find the trend to be a significant one to be wary of. People mistaking the name Nostradamus for Quasimoto because of Notre Dame is one thing, but people believing patently false information leads can lead to a low level of aversion to political involvement or high level reactions to fake stories that involve targeted murders of people – as demonstrated by a number of recent mass shootings. While these types of lies, misinformation, disinformation and outright propaganda are most prevalent on non-institutional web pages without the same pressures to maintain high publishing standards, the legacy news outlets have been affected pressures caused by the internet and new consumption habits as well. 

One way of lowering costs to deal with declining sales and advertisements has been to decrease the number of professionals hired to vet stories or content at the same time that the amount of content produced and distributed is increased. This need to produce ever more content to compete with other news producers leads to a sort of race to the bottom. As trained journalists are expensive, those without appropriate training or professional adherence to specific standards take their place. Because of the “never finished” nature of a website – unlike print, it can be quickly amended with corrections – any errors discovered can be amended AFTER publication. Additionally, computer programs that have been fed learning material to read and rephrase other outlets news – like the Washington Post Bot the did just this – also helps with the increasing amount of news that is now being published without the going through the previously existent gatekeeper/editorial process. 

The leftist media scholar Jodi Dean describes how this dynamic related to the political her article Communicative Captialsim: Circulation and Foreclosure of Politicsas such: “with the commodification of communication, more and more domains of life seem to have been reformatted in terms of market and spectacle. Bluntly put, the standards of a finance- and consumption-driven entertainment culture set the very terms of democratic governance today.” 

Watts’ suggestion is to be both honest and hold news outlets and platforms more accountable: 

“Advertisers would get greater return on investment if their message was attached to better quality material that properly engages the reader. Their brand can also suffer harm if it is associated with poor quality or misleading material. By demanding that their advertising is proven to be associated with high quality material, they will eventually realign some of the market forces and shift the incentives of the producers.” 

This is not all that can be accomplished without veering into the delegation of increased powers for the state to regulate of the media, media platforms or the internet in general. Platforms themselves, like Facebook and Twitter, can start to place a greater enforce on enforcing their community standards. This has been seen of late in the wake of people spreading false news and hate speech as well as coordinated efforts of ideologically motivated actors to behave in such a way as to “hijack” the algorithm which decides to place content in people’s feed.   

The internet is incredibly impressive for enabling individuals to find others with specific, niche, and in some cases fringe, interests and beliefs. Because of this, a multitude of internet enabled subcultures has developed, while already established ones grew larger. In many ways this is a positive as it grants people the ability to find those with similar affinities and engage with those digitally. However online subcultures also create “echo chambers where views are validated and reinforced, and individuals are incentivized within those subcultures to develop and amplify the core beliefs of the group” (Watts). After the recent shooting in Pittsburg, for example, I looked through a number of Facebook groups and I would normally never read and was frankly shocked by the hateful rhetoric in there. When I attempted to engage them, rather than any sort of genuine engagement with these people the discourse devolved to name calling, something I’d not experienced since middle school, and antisemitic comments. 

The political concerns related to this are multitudinous. For a business enterprise one is how high profile cases could result in fees or penalties. Legal liability for activity that occurs as a result of such platforms at this point is low risk given the U.S. regulatory environment, however given European legislation it’s possible that this might happen in that United States as well – which would thus mandate that another layer of coders and censors seek to ensure that they are not subject to whatever the penalties associated with regulatory violations. 

It’s because of this that after reading Watt’s article, it’s hard not to see that those who express alarm over this essay, such as Andre Damon, and about several Facebook Pages being unpublished not as reporters but as ideologues presenting a caricature of reality. For one, they ignore the legal context in which Facebook operates. Secondly, they write primarily on behalf of news institutions that have been breaking the terms and conditions of Facebook, Google and Twitter; have a prior working relationship with such organizations; or have an ideological affinity to such a degree that they refrain from a thorough investigation of the matter. 

An issue of greater concern is how this new informational medium could potentially be exploited by para-state and state actors in order to suit their strategic geo-political plans. In the news there’s been an increasing number of cases of emotionally unstable individuals either self-radicalizing or coming under the influence of others to commit acts. Furthermore, misinformation affects many other patterns of thought and behavior – and while a certain receptivity to such thoughts is an obvious precondition to adoption – informational warfare is real. 

One of the conclusions Watts makes is that in this age of informational, hybrid warfare it is important for the corrective solutions not to inadvertently feed into the narratives of would-be disruptive actors. Given that a permanent monitor of such behavior would be costly and perhaps send the wrong message to users, this is why Facebook has opened up awards for those that find them. I think this is a great message as it serves to show the power of community self-regulation. There’s a lot more to say about details and examples – but I think as Watts’ report is worth reading I’ll more or less end it here. 

 

In closing, I’ll share a not so minor criticism that I have of Watts report: the poor operationalization of American’s trust towards businesses and government. Watts defines this solely as evidenced within the Edelman Trust Barometer and doesn’t provide any greater historical context – which is a problem. While Watts rightly argues that a shared interpretation of reality is one of the glues of a social order the changing perception of a social order should be contextualized. Ascribing the declining lack of trust to “generational aspects”, he ignores a number of major newsworthy, historical events, how it was that Americans experienced and thus interpreted them. 

 

For example, there is the fact that Americans were sold a patently false narrative in the wake of 9/11 by the highest level of governance to initiate the war in Iraq that has cost trillions of dollars and the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Then there is 2008 financial crisis, which was caused by the adoption of the financial industry’s proposed regulatory changes; an underfunded and lax regulatory government apparatus; and widespread fraud that resulted in millions of Americans losing their savings yet no major criminal charges being filed against those that were involved. These are just two of many examples as to why a decline in the trust for such private enterprise and public office in general could occur – yet in Watts assessment of shifting views, they don’t get even a passing mention. 

 

Winning the battle of trust requires honesty and transparency if it is to be a genuine win, and not merely a change of perception. An enlightened citizenry ought not to presume the offices of elected representatives or corporate board rooms are working in their interests. Though just personal anecdotes to illustrate this point, I can think of several teachers that have expressed to me that they were delaying retirement but at least three years in order to try to make up the money that was lost as a result of the financial crash. A significant number of American students that I’ve spoken have correctly pointed out that were it not for the money spent on wars in the Middle East that universal health care and federally subsidized college for all would not sound like Utopian ideals that merit pillorying by the Council of Economic Advisors. 

 

Review of To Be a Revolutionary by Padre Guadalupe Carney

“The spirit of the Lord has been given to me,
For he has anointed me.
He has sent me to bring the good news to the poor,
To proclaim liberty to the captive
And to the blind new sight,
To set the downtrodden free,
To proclaim the Lord’s year of favor.”

-Jesus in Luke 4:18-19


Padre Guadalupe’s autobiography To Be A Revolutionary is dedicated to the poor people of the world and the biblical quote above opens his tale of transformation from normal North American youth concerned with finding the answers to the bigger questions in life to Jacobin priest in Honduras to Christian Revolutionary. Padre Guadalupe’s autobiography ends in questions as well, though not from his hand but that of his parents. They tell their story of trying to find out his last days.

They know that he joined a group of armed irregular troops protecting the border from attacks and theft by right-wing guerillas supported by America. They knew that Padre Guadalupe was captured and killed in a raid, but the exact events leading to his murder and where his body now lies is unknown. As for those that had previously been arrested that could speak to what happened? All have since been killed. Padre Guadalupe has become one of the many Latin American desaparecidos. As I think this book clearly shows, it’s due to his absolute commitment to helping make Honduras, and to a lesser extent all of Central and South America, a Christian Socialist Community.

The singular focus which Padre Guadalupe shows in his devotion to bettering the life of Honduran campesinos is incredible. After his expulsion from Honduras, over 30,000 people whose lives he has touched in a positive way sign a petition so that he will be allowed to return to the country which he has been naturalized in. But he did not start out with such single-mindedness.

When describing his youth, he frequently recounts his love for sports, his enjoyment of working outside, his gratitude for the blessings and privileges in his life as well as a puckish disdain for authority. Working as an engineer in the European front of World War II and the joy it gives him makes his turn towards the church seem somewhat unusual. However, because of the underlying humanism that he’s brought to his work and romantic relations, and that his brother did so as well, makes the decision to seem natural nevertheless.

Not having great familiarity with the Catholic religion and the training of its clergy, I found the anecdotes and histories that Guadalupe shared to be generally amusing. Especially given that it was occurring at a time when many changes were in the air that would later be codified in the Vatican II council and the 1968 Medellin Bishops conference. The conflicts he narrates about him with his superiors over rules and regulations takes on different tenor knowing that much of what he goes through will soon no longer be requirements. As interesting as these area, however, it was once Padre Guadalupe (he did not yet adopt this name) first begins his time in Latin America that his personality really gets the chance to develop himself in a manner contrary to that of the fake Christians, the violent and duplicitous land-owners, the various forms of vendepatrias and sell-out politicians. Conceiving himself as a clarion voice of truth and justice, he does not dogmatically reject collaboration with the “goddless communists” but sees them as important allies since they fight for the same thing – The creation of the Kingdom of God on Earth.

Because of his advocacy of the poor, even during his period of anti-communism Father Guadalupe faces slander campaigns in the press. It’s this’ along with meeting and interacting on the political level more and more with Marxists; and beginning to read the works of Marx that he starts to understand the traditional antipathy that the church had for such political activists as emerging from the churches defense of private property – the maintenance of which helped keep their coffers filled and clothes gilded with gold.

Whereas previously his work focuses on radio schools to help with literacy, creating workers collectives to better their labor and political conditions; fighting against land seizure; etc. individually – he comes to see this as an interconnected political struggle that must be lead by Socialists and leavened by Christians.

The chapter entitled The Birth of a Christian Revolutionary and other section towards the end Father Guadalupe begins to describe how all true Christians need also be Marxists. Since armed revolution seems counterintuitive to the mission of Christ’s Love, he first explains that Christ’s life cannot be properly understood without a historical, materialist (i.e. Marxist) understanding of the times, that it’s similarly imperative to understand the present in such a manner and then relates this to the Catholic Church’s Just War doctrine:

  • “Revolutionary insurrection can be legitimate in the case of evident and prolonged tyranny that gravely violates the fundamental rights of the human person and dangerously hurts the common good of the country, whether it proceeds from a single person or from evidently unjust structures.”
  • When all the other non-violent methods have been tried without success
  • When the war will no produce worse injustices than the existing ones.
  • Where there is a probability of succeeding.

In his own words, Father Guadalupe states “being a Christian demands being a revolutionary and a socialist, and to be a revolutionary and a socialist one has to use the Marxist-Leninist science of analysis and transformation of the world, then a Christian needs to understand Marxism.”

While there is little biblical exegesis here on these issues, Father Guadalupe provides the titles of the liberation theology books that have had the biggest impact on his transformation into a Christian Revolutionary – some of which I have linked to below.

More compelling than such hermeneutics the extensive autobiographical descriptions of the type of Christ-driven life Father Guadalupe lived, one defined by total commitment to organizing the poor so that their conditions are better rather than providing guidance to those that are already comfortable, i.e. the bourgeoisie members of the faith, this isn’t really needed. The priests in the book that argue against him, and on behalf of foreign financial interests or domestic juntas set up to protect illegally seized land, come off looking bad. After all, Christ certainly would not have defended those with pockets already bulged from wealth stealing heads of cattle from those that don’t even own a home.

Limited Bibliography

Juan Luis Segundo
Grace and the Human Condition
Our Idea of God
The Sacraments Today
The Evolution of Culpability

Bishop Proano of Ecuador
Evangelization, Conscientization, and Politicalization

The Post-Peace Accord Era in Colombia and The Continued Danger of Public Political Discourse

FARC amongst the trees, a chica in the streets

Using a 21st century iteration of a creative writing style stolen from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, I like to engage in a public forums via a variety of different names, voices, and worldviews.

Some people play SIMS, I like to Spy and Mettle in other ways.

Whatever the ethics, it begets all sorts of unique stories based on hard to get data, like the anecdote and context I share in the below article.

Previously I’ve written about the dangerous-for-Leftists atmosphere in Colombia. Others that have spent a much longer time in the field and in the stacks have called this political genocide and noted that the social effects of this are profound and deleterious. I can now add my own small experience to such a literature.

Photo from an assassination attempt on an indigenous leader Rogelio Mejía

In response to a comment on an article about the political genocide of Communists in Colombia Reports, I cited the empirical fact that by looking at all available evidence, civilians were significantly more likely to be killed by the State and by the Paras then by the FARC. I didn’t say, though it’s equally true, that by far the most targeted political assassinations comes from the Right and not the Left.

What the response was, well, I’ve attached a screen shot of it to let it speak for itself as well as some other of this person’s comments found after some further research as I think it provides telling insight into the values of people that are antagonistic to the FARC specifically and Marxism genereally.

The USMC & the CIA: A Home White Supremacist Anti-Communists

So as you can see the guy who wants to torture and kill Communists also has some pretty strong, visceral feelings towards the “non-white” races.

A number of researchers have called such a belief system and practice as racial capitalism. Some have instead used the phrase Manifest Destiny, while others simply call it Americanism.

It’s a view of the world which justifies Whites engaging in conquest, colonization, dispossession, enslavement and environmental destruction – AKA all the things that “civilized white” North Americans have brought to the South as a means of controlling resources and ensuring trade and labor relations are profitable.

Trying (and Failing) to Place a Face on Hate

That the U.S. has directly and indirectly played a major role in shaping Latin America’s geo-politics isn’t new news, it’s history.

Nevertheless the comment having a full name and statement of profession so piqued my curiosity, I decided to if I could find out anything about this person.

I don’t know if any of the people in the above snapshot of a search on Facebook is the person saying I should be electrocuted and that minorities are sub-humans – but I do know that it’s not General David Rodgriguez. His service record only shows his time in Latin America as being part of the U.S. invasion of Panama.

Our brief exchange is not now available for verification by looking at the Colombia Reports article, as shortly after this exchange transpired Colombia Reports disabled the public comment function, however those with Disqus accounts, can search and confirm that this is not a Photoshop job.

The Ethnic and Religious Cleansing Power of Capitalism

Percentage of Afro-Colombians Voting for Peace in Bojaya, Department of Chocó

The story related to the above image is particularly devastating and makes everyone look bad – the Government for non-intervention; the Paras for using the civilian population as a human shield; the FARC for unintentionally killing non-combatants. And it’s also indicative of which demographics have been most affected by the civil war violence – the poor, Afro-Colombians and Indigenous communities.

It’s because of this that in the final Colombian Peace Accords there is explicit language wherein the Colombian government formally recognizes that the injustices inflicted against black and indigenous communities are the historic “product of colonialism, slavery, exclusion, and it’s drive to dispossess them of their lands, territories, and resources.”

This is the rationale for the inclusion of this section in which they are guaranteed protection, the ability to participate in elections and to self-govern themselves whenever possible.

And though the accords are now signed, as former Marine and CIA operative David Rodriguez’s comments show, there are still people that would like to throw that out and return to open violence against certain ethnic, racial, religious and political persuasions.

No Justice, No Peace

Given all the bullets fired and blood shed from opened veins throughout Latin America, it’s understandable why people don’t like to to talk about the region’s past.

It’s profoundly traumatic for many and saying certain things publicly certain could mean that your name winds up on a list that means you will be killed. But since the signing of the peace accords, despite the still simmering violence in the form of assassinations of political figures and civilian massacres, it’s important to be aware of the values and intentions of the actors involved in the violence and to work to public delegitimize the voices that long for it’s return.

Moving Forward, Together

Anthropomorphizing is certainly never always an appropriate form of argument, but I’ve always found it an insightful metaphor for the body politic and in this case I think it particularly instructive.

Just like when an individual is in a state of sustained panic and there is conflict over contrary instincts (people vs. profits); when executive functions and allocations of energy are no longer operating at an optimal level of survival (civil war); when external forces are relied upon to assist violent contractions rather than relying upon a new constitution (foreign intervention to preserve what is better served by forming a new constitution), peace is achieved from the negation of these and the sublimation to a new state of existence.

How can this be achieved? Through building bridges and through self-promotion.

Self-promotion entails the motions of going through and assessing one beliefs, values and abilities and clearly expressing it others.

Silencing the voices that would if they could bring about a return to practices of political genocide is part and parcel of that promotion. In another discipline, we’d call this reputation management.

Breaking free from the past in this particular circumstance of a bi-lateral peace agreement, requires that the negative voices which would threaten growth and development must be shown for what they are – violent white-supremacists that have Ayn Randian like disdain for non-capitalist socio-economic arrangements.

While this brief anecdote is unlikely to change all hearts and minds overnight, it’s part of a narrative that now needs to be shared far and wide as it hasn’t been told enough in the capitalist press. I’m hoping that some discerning Americans may now look with a new light on the stories that they’ve been told about the FARC and America’s involvement in the region and start to reassess the felicity of the stories they’ve heard.

More so I hope in whatever little way possible that this helps bring an end to the still simmering violence and helps build bridges between former antagonists so that together they can build a stronger, safer country together. Cause let’s be honest – the U.S. would sooner carpet-bomb all of Bogota then ever let the FARC come top power in a move that could help reconstitute Gran Colombia or a Bolivarian United States of Latin America.

 

Personal Reflection on Immigration and America

Me with my grandmother

Since I’ve started throwing out and packing my possessions to prepare for my move overseas, I’ve been thinking a lot of my Grandparents.

They came from the desirable countries. From Denmark and Russia. Neither side had any grasp of English before they first set foot on American soil. Neither side had anything other than pluck and their trades and a small bit of savings tucked away to make their way in the New World. They adapted to their environs, raised families and by most accounts flourished – but does that mean that they ever really became Americans?

By mere merit of my birth within territorial borders, does that really make me an American or is there something else that I should look to? I’d venture yes, I’m an American, but not for the reasons you think.

Despite excitement of days off school, the grandeur of fireworks, and the pleasant fictions told to children about: Independence; Noble Savages living in Peace with Entrepreneurial White Settlers; Supremely Ethical Founding Fathers; Dead soldiers fighting Worthy Wars abroad and Dead Leaders fighting Worthy Wars at home – my fondest memories as a boy never revolved around National Holidays and their accompanying spectacles of obeisance and foods that encourage obeseness. Instead I remember with vivid precision the energy and joy the different brought to religions and cultural costumes and practices of my Grandparents.

Though I can’t speak Danish or Yiddish, hearing my grandparents speak bilingually and participating in these ceremonies as a child deeply affected me. Joy, of course. But also alienation. On both sides, I felt like I’d lost something that had been for a long line unbroken in my family. I felt like it weighted on me. All the more so as I was the fruit of a union between what once were families of award winning pig farming Epicureans and solemn Orthodox Rabbis.

I remember their warm laps and doting attention to the millions of questions I had about their stories, their struggles. Each side shared stories about outbreaks of state-sponsored violence around them. They weren’t happy as it was some long-time dream to sever ties with all that one’s ever known and go to a strange land with better opportunities, but because the conditions which for generations had once allowed their forebears to sustain family life and line so deteriorated.

Now joining the demographic pool of the 8.5 million people born in American living abroad, I can’t help but think of my grandparents own voyage to a new world.

Their struggles are on my mind as while the forces which motivated them to pack up their things and leave is quite different in tenor, the violence of primitive dispossession is similar in effect to that enacted in the various markets in which people make their day to day way in the world. The opportunities for “good living” in the United States are rapidly disappearing and will continue to deteriorate further.

I say this not to invoke the rhetoric of disaster now popular because the most apt embodiment of the venality and corruption that is the American Ruling Class sits in the White House. No, Trump is but a symbol, a symptom of a deeper systemic illness rather than some special case. I say this as I’ve reviewed the metrics and can reasonably foresee that to have the family life like my grandparents aspired to, I would have to work myself to death so many of my compatriots do.

If America was once great for letting my grandparents in – those that were fleeing from violence – then it’s not now. In fact it’s reasonable to say that America is the opposite of great since its actions and those of its allies forcefully displace millions.

Defining America’s greatness as the people and energy that composed it – the courageousness of some to brave the acclimation process to a foreign culture, a foreign language, foreign business environments – then the Great Land that was once America is now outside its borders. In fact it’s reasonable to say that America is the opposite of great since those which direct the state openly display xenophobia and ahistorical cultural chauvinism – the same trends in different form which helped form my Grandparents decision to leave.

Were we to look to the ability of people to raise family and enough capital to live a good life as the basis for greatness, we’d see that the conditions today are quite different from then. The institutional embodiment of America, the political organization of the ruling class, Federal and State governments since the 70s have worked to erase the human face of what was always an oligarchy.

As I think about leaving the land that is America to live what I see as the noble ethos of America – meaning bravery to place oneself in uncomfortable situations to personally and professional develop and not the flipside of that spirit, the ignoble ethos which dispossessed natives, engaged in the slave economy and constructed a legal system and press thatjustified these and other injustices – I also cannot help but think of the life and work of Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. It is January 15th, after all, and while it wasn’t my intention to leave on such a date it does seem appropriate.

A year to the day before his assassination, King said something that had his contemporaries listened to and acted upon would have drastically changed the current shape of America:

“Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism.”

Had the people of King’s time been more attuned to the long-term truth and acted with vigor to excise these qualities from the economy, from society, from the culture rather than fighting for their minor advantages I might feel better about staying. But they did not, and so I do not, and so I go – just like my amazingly brave Grandparents, on to greener pastures.

There Will Be No Quality Democracy As Long As There Is No Ethics in Politics

René Ramírez, National Secretary of Higher Education, Science, Technology and Innovation, interviewed by Orlando Perez

Translated from El Telefrago by Ariel Sheen

For the academic, 2016 “can be read as the year of the end of the long 20th century in historical terms”. He adds that Brexit, the victory of Donald Trump in the United States and the death of Fidel Castro symbolically mark a turning point in the correlation of forces worldwide, both political and economic. Álvaro García Linera points out that it is the end of globalization.

What is your new book called?

‘The Great Transition: In Search of New Common Senses‘.

Why the great transition?

In reference to the book by Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation. I locate what happened in Ecuador in this decade in the framework of the political dispute, of the neoliberal background that marked two decades lost for the country and Latin America. There is a historical absurdity of wanting to point out that 10 years is enough to make a structural transformation, as some politicians like María Paula Romo and Guillermo Lasso have mentioned. That is to have no idea of ​​history, neither Ecuadorian nor global. That is impossible, even more so when institutions created to generate an oligarchic society had to be dismantled and, after destroying it, to rebuild another that seeks the common good of the great majorities. If someone is being dragged by the current in the direction of a waterfall, the first thing to do is to steer the boat to take another direction. These ten years have allowed us to re-direct the ship, sailing against the current of world power relations and generate enough social energy to go towards peaceful waters and be able to anchor in a good port. Part of the great transition involves having redirected the ship, while improving the welfare of its passengers.

Does this mean that there is not a decade won?

Of course there is a decade won. And we have another decade ahead of us to win, but it is first a decade to contest. However, we must make a historical reading of the decade gained. Beyond the social results, which are clearly positive. Ppoverty has been reduced, consumption levels have improved, income levels, universal access to education and health, among others. There is a decade gained in political terms justly because the possibility of continuing to dispute a transformation of social structures to build a new social order: the construction of a sustainable human democracy is alive; that is, the society of good living.

What are the historical conditions identified in this transition that make the great transformation viable?

That there has been a dismissal / constituent moment, where the citizenry manifests the need to sign a new social covenant pact that generates a new social order; that the new social pact allows a structural transformation and that the political decisions that accompany the new pact have been structuring actions that allow us to configure the conditions of possibility of being able to dispute the great transformation.

The dismissal / constituent moment is clear, but does the new social pact make a new social order possible?

I have absolutely no doubt it does. The horizon of meaning is embodied in the new constitutional text. There are multiple paths for transformation. For example, we must pass:

1) from anthropocentrism to biocentrism;
2) from colonialism and patriarchalism to the pluridiverse society (plurinational and intercultural);
3) from exclusively representative democracy (which is consubstantial to capitalism) to sustainable human democracy, based on social participation and deliberation;
4) from market capitalism (social de-commodification) to the social and solidarity economy and, 5) from the mercantilist corporate state to the popular sovereign state guaranteeing rights.

Europe raised the construction of the Welfare State and that has been the last proposal for the construction of a new social order (after the failure of the offers of society made by the Soviet bloc). Now it seems that the right begins to dismantle it. In this framework, the road was based, among other aspects, on recognizing the equality of citizens with respect to social rights based on representative democracy. Undoubtedly, the constitutional proposals of South America are moving in that direction and the progressive governments have made rapid progress in reducing poverty, inequality and democratization of rights. But in the world that we live that is insufficient. The “new modernity”, if the term fits, goes through the construction of plurinational societies. This is what the Constitutions of Ecuador and Bolivia, which without a doubt are in the vanguard in these terms. While this was raised in the South, in Europe last week in two days, 340 migrants died trying to reach their land. In fact, in 2016 the record number of 4,300 deaths in the Mediterranean was reached with three times fewer arrivals of migrants by sea than in 2015.

Europe is now synonymous with obscurantism and barbarism. Equality has to live with diversity and recognize the diversity of identities that exist in the world. In this framework, the vanguard is to recognize universal citizenship and the recognition that unitary Plurinational States can be built respecting the pluriculturality of identities and nations that coexist in each territory. In Polanyi’s diagnosis of the rise of fascism in the mid-twentieth century, he shows how xenophobic nationalism was a reaction against the enormous inequality caused by the free market. It was a social defense mechanism. In our days, in it’s own unique way, it seems that history repeats itself.

In the economic sphere, what are the transitions that make the transformation viable?

Globally, you might think that 2016 can be read as the year of the end of the long 20th century in historical terms. The Brexit, the victory of Trump and the death of Fidel symbolically mark a watershed in the correlation of forces worldwide, both political and economic. Only the rejection of Trans-Atlantic and Trans-Pacific treaties and the exit of the EU from Great Britain configure another scenario in the world panorama. García Linera points out that it is the end of globalization. Personally I think it is the beginning of another globalization. Ecuador must think about that framework.

In these 10 years has been able to walk disputing the sense of the barbarism of what is capitalism but obviously within capitalism. The autistic left believes that it was viable to do it from another system. Impossible! Sometimes I feel that this left doesn’t understand what power means, while the right has a great understanding not only of its meaning but also how to exercise it.

In summary terms, I can point out that in the book I argue that in this decade there have been three actions (at different speeds) that are essential to continue disputing a great transformation:

1) a great deconcentration of capital;
2) a new original socio-ecological accumulation;
3) a large accumulation of physical capital.

It remains a task of the vanguard to build a form of productive organization where redistribution is produced and produced by distributing. We propose the construction of a social economy of knowledge built from a collaborative logic.

In these processes, other common meanings must be configured to break the hegemony of the exchange value and a new social value-based appropriation based on life and use value. We must break with the society that knows the price of everything, but knows the value of very few things. The construction and appropriation of such a sensibility is the urgent task of the second transition now in dispute.

Does the left that you call autistic point out that the big winners are the capitalists? What do you think about this assertion?

The decade is won because the whole society won. The difference is that in comparison with the preceding decade, these ten years before had a deliberate priority: the poor and the workers.

In my book I show how the growth during these 10 years went largely to the poor and working class. Participation in the pie (which, incidentally, doubled) decreased by 10% for the capitalists and was distributed among the workers and in that so-called mixed economy (for example, popular economy, cooperatives, etc.). In these ten years, decisions were made that disputed a de-accumulation of capitalist logic; that is, that it passes from hands -either in stock or in future flows- of the capitalists towards society, either directly or indirectly through the State.

Here are some examples: the compensation of the two biggest social robberies in the history of the country. With the audit of the external debt and the recovery of the bank bailout of 2000; the social recovery of oil revenues; the financing of the doubling of the human development bonus destined to the poorest financed with the profits of the private banks are examples of this deconcentration of capital.

In structural terms, we must be vigilant that the trade agreement does not entail a re-concentration of the accumulation in transnational capital and that the original accumulation produced in this decade will not serve to generate accumulation elsewhere, but will produce a larger concentration of wealth where the economy it is produced. This develops a domestic pattern of economic diversification and specialization.

Likewise, there has been a new accumulation of socio-ecological capital and a democratization of access to programs which enhance human capacities. Access to education, health care, social security. Avoiding the emission of 6.3 tons / year of CO2 as a consequence of the change in the matrix energy, etc. Is it not amazing that the average life of Ecuadorians has increased 5.5 years in the past decade?!

In this transition, it is important to develop non-speculative physical capital to make another types of accumulation viable: roads, hydroelectric plants, ports, airports, etc.

What we must have clear about is that in the current scenario there has been an accumulation that did not exist before. The right is rubbing his hands over this. After this wealth that did not exist before was created, the Right seeks to concentrate the benefits in a few hands on national and / or transnational capitalists. They want to freeze the increase in social spending for 20 year and, impose the elimination of the state’s obligation to guarantee initial and secondary education made public and free by Temer. They want a reduction of the government investment in Science and Technology a la Macri. Then there’s Lasso’s proposal to privatize social security so that each “one chooses” its provider in the name of freedom.

it is clear evidence of a new accumulation that the great capitals in our continent intend to do or are already doing after the social decade won by the progressive governments. The proposal of the right: the appropriation of human capacities and institutions of common interest. We must realize that in Argentina, and Brazil, for example, the dispute over transformation has become very opaque.

What should be the strategy?

In the contest to constitutionalize Ecuadorian society, we must be clear about the meaning of the history we are currently experiencing. A free flow of goods and services does not necessarily place us in the nexus of the world economy. As I point out in my book, it seems that 2017 will be the beginning of the 21st century.

That strategy is of the last century and would plunge us into the worst dependency in history. When I talk about the great transition in the book, I also point out that it is not a single transition, but two: the one that Ecuadorians sign and that is embodied in the constitutional text and the one that happens on a world scale: the transition from industrial capitalism to cognitive capitalism based both on processes of speculative financialization of the economy.

The new commercial policy will be directed towards the management of intellectual property. This strategy must then be linked to intelligent inclusion in the powerful circuits of generation of knowledge, technology and innovation. And all this within a framework that addresses the needs and potential of our peoples.

Unfortunately, I see very little debate about what is the role of science in social transformation and what strategy of technological development ought be followed in Ecuador’s coming decades. Ecuador will not get out of the development traps previous set unless it has a clear strategy of how to break the technological and cognitive dependence it has. And it must know how to defend the biodiversity that it has.

It is not fortuitous that in world treaties countries are forced to put in penal codes randing from sanctions to imprisonment when copyright or property rights are undermined. Yet nothing is done when the biodiversity of our countries is stolen! This is biopiracy!

In my book I proposed that the new geopolitics is already contesting this knowledge-biodiversity relationship. That is why, the strategy I propose is for bio-knowledge for the good living of our peoples and nationalities. Thank God we have oil, but we must also be clear that only through deliberate social collective action can we be a tertiary exporting country of knowledge and technology. Thank God we have Galapagos, but thanks to the will of the Ecuadorians we are building Innopolis.

What do you mean when you point to the little debate that takes place on these issues in the electoral process?

It is very sad to see how we have fallen into the democracy of the “encuestología”, that the government opposition consists simply in opposing everything the government has done according to their surveys. That is no proposal for how the future should be goverened. Not only that, if one analyzes what the candidates say, the country would fail sooner rather than later. Ecuador has no monetary policy towards the dollar, so trade policy may be cut for obvious reasons. This is heard in the proposals of the candidates who say they will lower taxes, will remove the tax at the exit of foreign currency or the advance of income tax, etc.

When the government put up safeguards, among other reasons, to defend dollarization, the right immediately went out to attack it. It wants to guarantee quality rights as in the ‘first world’, with a fourth world tax system. This is unfeasible! If such actions take place, Ecuador will soon have to exit dollarization (if the price of a barrel of oil changes radically upwards). I think we are in a very serious debate in the economic field in the electoral process.

One more point: the repressed past is being disputed. The right says: the government spent too much, now it is necessary to amend through sacrifice. It is punitive morality which seeks to induce fear and solve it by pointing to a scapegoat. In all the opposition speeches a negative messiah is announced and the pitiful tone of Ash Wednesday of the revolutionary carnival is heard. The left must continue to dispute the future, to hope, to embody the conviction that it is possible for all of us to live well, here, today and in this land called Ecuador. Let hope overcome fear!

What role do the media play in this dispute?

The media are the main tool of power used by the right to produce disenchantment and despair. The news, the newspapers try to build the society of fear, of suspicion, of distrust. The news that grows most in audience are the ones with the most blood. To this is added the social networks. This new public sphere allows anonymous trolls to defame without any public responsibility.

Their strategy of pyramidalization (I think this means reinforcing hegemony) when trying to generate the news of the week is clear: they use the massive media and the big ‘influencers’ who have many followers in their social network accounts. Not those who are random private media journalists. Therefore, one of the main principles that must be challenged in tofay’s democracy is truth and defense of the public sphere.

As a citizen I would expect that any candidate for the Presidency of my country will always be attached to the truth and have the courage, in case of being wrong, to clarify and ask for public apology for the mistake they made. Not that lying ought be used as a deliberate strategy to win votes. That is the strategy of a right without morals. We must be clear that there will be no quality democracy as long as there is no ethics in politics and as long as the truth does not reign in the public sphere.

There is a left that indicates that it has been a wasted decade. What do you think?

I agree with the point made by Emir Sader: for those that see is as wasteful decade, it is because they wasted the decade. The question asked by the Brazilian sociologist is pertinent: if governments like the Citizen Revolution are responsible for the return of the right, as these groups usually affirm, then why is this ‘ultra left’ not strengthened? Because they have not taken advantage of the weakening of progressive governments and thus taken their place? No. It is simple. It is because they have no popular base and their arguments have not penetrated any sector of the population.

This left should learn that they are also responsible for their actions or non-actions. Unfortunately, the right has been much more astute and efficient in political terms than this left. It is no coincidence that this left in the next elections has no direct spokesperson as a presidential candidate. A left without a town, it is not a left. In this sense, it seems that the left noun remained large. Yes, they have wasted this decade!

What is the role of politics in this regard?

Perhaps as important as the viability of the contest is that the same described transition has been made within a democratic and peaceful framework. The process of social reconfiguration, having these characteristics, has allowed us to recover the trust in the other and above all the capacity of citizen astonishment in the face of social injustice – which has allowed people to move from indignant anger to the hope of a mindful citizen hope. The right is astute in pointing out that institutional confidence, citizen’s hope in and the recovery of politics are the main weapons that progressive processes have to move forward.

In this context, it is vital for the right to disenchant, to despair of citizenship and to dismantle the image of politics as a space to create a just social order. In this framework, it is necessary to understand political action as a means but also as an end to the process of change. In this way, political action must create a virtuous circle, based on actors that support and push change, and that the change they sustain and support strengthens them. Faced with the society of mistrust and fear that the right seeks to establish as a common sense, one of the main challenges that Lenín Moreno has is to restrain the citizenry – as he does- in order to continue with the hopeful spirit we have had in these 10 years, which implies generating another aesthetic in politics.

What Social Democracy Do We Speak Of In 21st century Ecuador?

Descriptive statistics from Ecuador’s 2013 legislative elections, provincial deputies

Original text by Oscar Perez, Director de el Telegrafo

Translation by Ariel Sheen

In Europe, social democracy is not only going through its worst moment in history, but it has revealed itself as a tendency of those that are right of center. This is evident through the means of those that practice power in its name, the impact of policies on their respective countries, and in the frustration of those social groups that placed their hope in them. At the same time, however, there are still leaders and groups advocating within the social democracy camp for exit from the parliamentary process.

All this infighting is occurring during a period of emergence of various fascist right tendencies found deep within various electorates. The silence of Social Democrats on the triumph of Donald Trump in the USA and the lack of debate on the possibility of a fourth term for Angela Merkel is not something for which we should be grateful.

And in Ecuador? What remains of the social democratic programs that Rodrigo Borja raised despite the antagonism of the oligarchic right? Programs that he could never fulfill, for the same reasons that now lead us to think that it is an impossible political project for a country like ours.

Is it enough to mention the slogan “social justice with freedom” to reflect the crisis evident in this current of thought? Should we think of the social democratic project in Ecuador merely as those consisting of political representatives that claim this label? Could it be that having stretched the Ecuadorian political process to the left in the last 10 years forced a certain social democratic nostalgia without a proper analysis of its real content?

It is very convenient to appeal to the center and talk about absolute consensus. It sounds good – like something found in a self-help manual for times of existential crisis. The European and Latin American reality, however, tells us several truths about where such verities of political centrism leads.

If what is now described as Ecuadorian Social Democracy could adequately explain how society functions – perhaps it could also explain to itself why it has not exercised power for more than 20 years? And something else: why are those who now represent this movement not so different in their visions from the right? Why do certain right-wing actors join those self-described Social Democratic organizations without any misgivings? They will tell me that there are also others, of those who were called left. Yes, as it also happens in the US, where ‘libertarian’ groups that defend homosexuals, ecology and women now join Trump without any misgivings.

In practice there is not much difference between what so-called Social Democrats and what the Social Christians, the Christian Democrats and the right-wing libertarians propose. In fact, many of them have their best representatives in the media, in blogs and in the media or the many International NGOs with representatives in Ecuador.

Although one or the other speaks in favor of women’s right to choose abortion or homosexuals to marry, they do not want to transform society much beyond that. It sounds very nice to defend the rights of women and sexual diversities, but within a society predicated on a capitalism means tolerance and nothing else.

This is how they conceive how our society should be: tolerance of diversity, but continued exclusion of opportunity via maintenance of in the distribution of wealth; women ought to be protected from assaulted or violated but not from market conditions which deny them decent jobs. Young people are free and sovereign, but only to sustain the market as good consumers and not as citizens part of a project of collective social transformation.

As the Colombian philosopher Santiago Castro-Gómez said recently in a lecture at La Falco: The only way a society can be changed is by transforming the common sense of our peoples and by taking institutions (not only in the state sense). From there can be exerted real and revolutionary political power!

Even if it is hard for them to recognize it, the new social democrats are actually right-wing libertarians. They have not learned from Rodrigo Borja much less the classics of international social democracy. This is neither meant to stigmatize nor underestimate their political performance.

On the contrary, I say this only to provide evidence for their political role during electoral campaign times. They do this to differentiate themselves from Alianza PAIS. They declare themselves to be anti-reformists to death, with all the consequences that this entails, but then agree with many of the postulates of the Right on the role of the State, fiscal matters, the state of the world economy and the quality of democracy in terms of rights of participation or social inclusion.

Of course, since intellectuals are very busy contributing to electoral campaigns, and profiting as consultants, pollsters and political marketing strategists – as could be seen in the last Political Communication Summit, held in Quito – they do not want to reflect on this. Perhaps this is because their intense work schedule does not give them time to reflect.

And yet there are still some truly independent intellectuals (some of them who write in this newspaper luckily) who have touched on Creole social democracy’s open wounds. Something that can hardly be recognize themselves when one is silent about major developments that have happened in Spain, France, Germany or England over the past two decades.

The question is open and involves a response that in the middle of the electoral campaign should force a more serious debate: what social democracy do we speak of in Ecuador in the 21st century?

*

¿De qué socialdemocracia hablamos en el Ecuador del siglo XXI?

En Europa la socialdemocracia no solo atraviesa el peor momento de su historia, sino que se ha revelado como una tendencia de derecha antes que de centro, no solo por sus prácticas en el ejercicio del poder, sino por el impacto de sus políticas en sus respectivos países y en las sociedades de bienestar de las que tanto se preció. Al mismo tiempo hay líderes y grupos que disputan en el seno de esa socialdemocracia una salida por la izquierda.

Todo eso ocurre cuando la emergencia de derechas y tendencias fascistas cala hondo en el electorado. No es gratuito el silencio de la socialdemocracia sobre el triunfo de Donald Trump en EE.UU. y el casi nulo cuestionamiento a la posibilidad de un cuarto período para Angela Merkel.

¿Y en Ecuador? ¿Qué queda de representación de la socialdemocracia que Rodrigo Borja enarboló en plena disputa con la derecha oligárquica y con un programa que nunca pudo cumplir por las mismas razones que ahora nos llevan a pensar que es un proyecto político imposible para un país como el nuestro? ¿Basta con mencionar un eslogan (justicia social con libertad) para reflejar esa corriente de pensamiento en crisis en el mundo? ¿Se puede pensar en una socialdemocracia a la ecuatoriana a partir solo de la representación y las figuras de algunas personas que se autocalifican de ese modo? ¿No será que haber estirado hacia la izquierda el proceso político ecuatoriano de los últimos 10 años obligó a cierta nostalgia socialdemócrata sin el debido análisis sobre su real condumio?

Es muy cómodo llamarse de centro y hablar de consensos absolutos. Más bien huele a un manual de autoayuda en tiempos de crisis existencial, pero la realidad europea y la latinoamericana nos gritan varias verdades sobre las neutralidades o los centrismos políticos que ya sabemos dónde terminan. Si lo que ahora se autocalifica de socialdemocracia ecuatoriana pudiera explicar cómo entiende a nuestra sociedad, quizá podría también explicarse a sí misma por qué no ha ejercido el poder hace más de 20 años. Y algo más: por qué quienes ahora la representan no son tan distintos, en sus visiones, de la derecha, tan así que determinados actores de la derecha se afilian a esas organizaciones autocalificadas de socialdemócratas sin ningún recelo. Me dirán que también hay de los otros, de los que se llamaban de izquierda. Sí, como también ocurre en EE.UU., donde los grupos ‘libertarios’ que defienden a los homosexuales, la ecología y las mujeres ahora se afilian a Trump sin ningún recelo.

En la práctica no hay mucha diferencia entre lo que plantean los autodenominados socialdemócratas y lo que proponen los socialcristianos, los democratacristianos y los libertarios de derechas (muchos de los cuales tienen a sus mejores representantes en los medios de comunicación, en los blogs y en las ONG internacionales asentadas en Ecuador con representantes nacionales).

Aunque uno que otro hable a favor del aborto o del matrimonio homosexual, en el fondo no quieren transformar la sociedad. Suena muy bonito defender los derechos de las mujeres y las diversidades sexuales, pero dentro de un capitalismo intenso maquillado de tolerancia y nada más.
Así conciben nuestra sociedad: tolerancia con las diversidades aunque estas sigan siendo excluidas en la distribución de la riqueza; que las mujeres no sean agredidas ni violentadas pero que no tengan trabajos dignos ni sean sujetos de la transformación colectiva; y que los jóvenes sean libres y soberanos, pero para sostener al mercado como buenos consumidores y no precisamente como ciudadanos.

Como dijo hace poco el filósofo colombiano Santiago Castro-Gómez en una charla en la Flacso, del único modo que se puede cambiar una sociedad es transformando el sentido común de nuestros pueblos y tomándose las instituciones (no solo en el sentido estatal) para desde allí ejercer poder político real y revolucionario.

Los nuevos socialdemócratas (que no han leído los libros y reflexiones de un Rodrigo Borja y menos de los clásicos de la socialdemocracia internacional) son en realidad unos libertarios de derechas aunque les cueste reconocerlo. No es ni un estigma ni una subestimación a su actuación política.
Todo lo contrario, solo es la constatación de su rol político en tiempos de campaña electoral porque para diferenciarse de Alianza PAIS no solo se declaran anticorreístas a muerte —con todas las consecuencias que ello depara—, sino que coinciden en los postulados de la derecha sobre el rol del Estado, materia fiscal, estado de la economía mundial y la calidad de la democracia en cuanto a derechos de participación o de inclusión social.

Claro, como los intelectuales están muy ocupados en contribuir a las campañas electorales, en calidad de asesores, consultores, encuestadores y estrategas de marketing político (como se pudo constatar en la última Cumbre de Comunicación Política, desarrollada en Quito) no han querido reflexionar sobre esto.

Quizá por falta de tiempo dado el trabajo intenso al que están sometidos, pero hay todavía algunos intelectuales verdaderamente independientes (algunos de ellos que escriben en este diario por suerte) que han tocado en las heridas abiertas que tiene la socialdemocracia criolla y que muy difícilmente pueden reconocerse como tales cuando callan sobre lo ocurrido en las 2 últimas décadas en España, Francia, Alemania o Inglaterra.

La pregunta está abierta y conlleva una respuesta que en plena campaña electoral debería obligar a un debate más serio: ¿de qué socialdemocracia hablamos en el Ecuador del siglo XXI? (O)

 

For an American take on a similar theme, watch this:

 

Real News on Fake Amazon Reviews

A Case Study of Commodity Fetishism in the Age of Communicative Capitalism

Amazon has a serious problem with fake reviews populating their website. So much so that Forbes, NYMag, NYPost, C|Net, and Fortune are all writing about it.

After reviewing findings from data-based research by Ming Ooi, one of the co-founders of Fakespot, he offers this blunt assessment of Amazon’s reviews ecosystem: “About 40 percent of reviews we see on Amazon are unreliable.”

This video also goes details the issue:

In this blog post I’m going to examine to distinct types of fake reviews, examine it’s commercial and political effects and then outline how it is that Amazon should be handling them.

Why go through the work of explaining this?

For one, as someone that has almost 150 book reviews on their website as a means of monetization, I find sending referral traffic to a website with a consumer rating function that has been hijacked by marketers to be highly unethical.

Secondly, I find the unresponsiveness of Amazon to taking simple steps to prevent this to be reflective of a corporate environment that

Let me give you two case study examples of products that I’ve recently come across that illustrate what I mean.

Freewrite: The Juicero of Word Processing

I use the same computer for word processing as I do for my marketing business, I know how susceptible to distraction the various alerts I have set up and immediate access to the internet can be. Thus when I first saw the Kickstarter ad for the Freewrite I was interested. I clicked the sponsored post in my Facebook feed, and began to read their promotional literature. As I did, my initial excitement on a new tool faded on learning of it’s features and price.

Unlike others that have written negative reviews of the product after using it, I could tell without even investing $550 into it that it was, quoting Mashable, pretentious hipster nonsense.

Identifying Fake Amazon Reviews

Leading up to Christmas, I started to see ads announcing that the second generation of the product had been released. Hopeful at first that maybe they’d changed their product to address what I and others saw as flaws in it’s features, I was disappointed to learn that they hadn’t. And I was also confused. Fully aware that my preferences aren’t universal, I still surprised at the high number of gushing customer review ratings on Amazon.

When I started to dig deeper I noticed a number of abnormalities in those people that were reviewing it. For one, you’ll notice that a large number of the 5 star reviews are all written by people that have only ever reviewed one product: The FreeWrite.

I didn’t take screenshots of them all, but if you look at some of the other reviews you’ll notice that a lot of them also have only one or two reviews for items that were written years ago.

31 of the 42 reviews, or 74% of the 5 star reviews for FreeWrite all occur within a nine day period – between November 21st and November 30th 2016. Here’s the data from Amazon that I collected should you want to review the numbers yourself. Many of them have a length and style that is directly mirrors FreeWrite’s own marketing material and at least two reviews come from those that were incentivized to write it based upon being given the product for free. Why else, after all, would someone write a 2,300 word review of it?

Marketing Authenticity Whilst Acting Suspiciously

Despite what their video would have you believe, Stephen King DOES NOT endorse FreeWrite

Above I said that FreeWrite is like the Juicero. How so? Well, they both created much hyped, over-priced products that poorly deliver on their promises. Like Douglas Evans, founder of Juicero, they then moved on to another project that is at it’s core, well, ridiculous.

Evans is now marketing the unproven benefits of the dubiously named raw water he sells while AstroHaus tried to bring to market ClapBoss – a device that mandates you spend money and time programming a device that you can just as easily do without. It wasn’t just schadenfreude that made me happy to see that this project didn’t get funded, but a deep and genuine disdain for marketing language that mobilizes concepts such as “Freedom” and “Control Over Your Life” to encourages people to buy products such as these. I’d go so far as to venture that any person that would prefer a $550 FreeWrite to $510 dollars worth of books and some notebooks and pen or word processing software like Scrivener aren’t real writers. That said, let me add I’ve never used Scrivener, I wasn’t paid to point this out and that if you ascribe to a historical materialist view of the world you’ll notice a troubling paradox in the reviews of products that could actually lead to freedom and control over your life.

Financial Incentive Not Sole Factor For Fake Reviews

As a subject area expert, George Ciccariello-Maher frequently writes, lectures and speaks on the subject of Venezuela and American political economy. One of my favorite history books of the past several years, in fact, was We Created Chavez by GCM. In my review of the book I favorably compared it’s prose to that found in C. L. R. James’ work on the Haitian Revolution The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, a historian that’s quoted several times in the book.

Full disclosure, thought we’ve never met – we did both present research at the 2013 Rethinking Marxism: Surplus, Solidarity and Sufficiency 2013 Conference at UMASS Amherst – me critically defending the democratically elected government of Venezuela and Bolivarianism, he on decolonizing dialectics.

For those familiar with American history and political economy and that aren’t white nationalists, the tweets for which he received negative press was funny, neigh, hilarious. Those that didn’t like it – which was much of the commentariat – didn’t get it and thus misrepresented views. In an interview GCM gave with The Inquirer, he explains as follows (Link to BET’s coverage of the State Farm Insurance tweet added by me):

“On Christmas Eve, I sent a satirical tweet about an imaginary concept, ‘white genocide,'” For those who haven’t bothered to do their research, ‘white genocide’ is an idea invented by white supremacists and used to denounce everything from interracial relationships to multicultural policies (and most recently, against a tweet by State Farm Insurance). It is a figment of the racist imagination, it should be mocked, and I’m glad to have mocked it.”

Historical Ignorance and Revisionism in Amazon Reviews

Following this the White Nationalist press got upset and mobilized their base, which also happens to have intersectional affinities with Venezuelans in Miami. The above screen shot shows how Google searches for “White Genocide” and “George Ciccariello-Maher” both peaked following his tweet going viral.

The ramifications of the Tweet wasn’t just Google searches, however, but a campaign of harassment and death threats that lead to GCM being placed on leave and an attempt at delegitimizing his academic work via the means that most used online means of commerce in America – Amazon.

Amazon Reviews and The World Turned Inside Out

The above Amazon user yentl’s sole contributions to Amazon are typical of others like it in level of insight and engagement following the uproar over two tweets by GCM. In fact, the seven reviews by yentl shown above are all for books written, translated or co-edited by George Ciccariello-Maher and are all the same – “It makes me want to Vomit!”. Similar depth of insight and engagement with the text abounds in other reviews.

I didn’t take the time to go through all of his books on Amazon, but it’s worth noting that 42 of the 63 review for We Created Chavez occur within a one week period in March of 2017 and a 3 day period in December of 2016. For those that want to check my methods, feel free to review this data sheet I made.

Amazon and Authentic Reviews

With these two cases in mind, it’s easy to see that the majority of positive reviews are done from financial motivation and those that are negative are ideological in origin. It’s also easy to see how Amazon can help prevent these sorts of false distortions of reality from being considered real.

For one monitoring negative or positive spikes in reviews and flagging them for review prior to publication.

Secondly Amazon needs to take Abuse Reports seriously. I’ve reported a number of reviews that are clearly either spam or ideologically motivated only to see that several days, weeks, months later that they remain online as a genuine “experience” of the product.

Since Amazon claims they want to be the brand of Customer Experience, they need to address this. Now. While the tenor of political discourse is no where near as bad as it is elsewhere, there needs to be a greater degree of vigilance to ensure honest communication about the merits of products and worldview. What’s at stake here isn’t just about whether or not someone chooses to buy something – but the need to be vigilant towards a platform with “democratic aspirations” from inadvertently  promoting the widening and deepening of false consciousness.

Cocaine Cartels Contra Communism: Don Berna, Alborada and Political Discourse in Colombia

Since 2003 on December 1st across Medellin a large number of people in the lower strata barrios celebrate with bacchanalia and fireworks. The first is the birthday of Pablo Escobar, however this is not a celebration in honor of him, but the man that may be most responsible for his downfall and death – Don Berna.

December 1st 2003, marks the official demobilization of Don Berna’s Cacique Nutibara paramilitary bloc. To show his continued influence despite his officially putting down arms, Don Berna paid for fireworks and gunpowder to be set off show the extent of his continued control over 10 of the 16 Comunas of Medellin despite his officially “laying down arms”.

Not everyone celebrates this holiday, and depending on who you ask there are those that see the celebration of the day as shameful. For those that do, you’ll see the same sort of enthusiasm that July the 4th is celebrated in the United States.

When I was in Medellin I was lucky enough to witness the fireworks display from the penthouse rooftop of a friend and then attend a block party. My iPhone didn’t capture video nearly as nicely as the one below and I didn’t want to dar papaya at the party so documented nothing, but it will give you the idea of how large an event it is.

Don Berna is now probably most notably known in America today via the depiction of him by Mauricio Cujar in the Netflix series Narcos. I haven’t watched the series so can’t speak to his acting performance. I can, however, speak to the context in which the acts of Don Berna took place that lead to such a day of celebration and how huge an affect the man has had on Colombian politics.

First Formation of Narco Class Consciousness

The Palace of Justice Siege

During the second week of November in 1981, the 26-year-old daughter of Fabio Ochoa Restrepo was kidnapped from the University of Antioquia by M-19, a Marxist guerrilla group. Considered by some to be the man behind Pablo Escobar, $12 million was demanded from Don Fabio for her release. Responding to this following her release, on Dec. 2, 1981 a small plane dropped leaflets announcing the formation of the group “Death to Kidnapers,” which became known by its Spanish acronym MAS, over a Cali stadium during a soccer match. The leaflet said MAS had been formed by 223 leading drug traffickers that organized to resist the leftists preying on their families and that they would carry out “immediate and public execution” of Leftists. Unable to adequately defend themselves against the well-funded attacks, the leftist insurgencies in Colombia soon started to engage in narco-trafficking themselves in order to match the money and weapons that they and the State forces had at their disposal.

In one of the most deadly events in Colombian history four years later, The Palace of Justice was siege by the same Marxist group, M-19. This resulted the public deaths of many federal justices, the burning of legal documents related to Pablo Escobar and the Medellin cartel and a sea change in how the Colombian government decided to handle Pablo and how Pablo’s allies started to view him. The Castaños, one of the most powerful criminal clans in Medellin, for instance grew distant from Pablo Escobar because of Escobar’s stated affinity for left-wing guerrillas, his alleged links to M-19 and another rebel group, the National Liberation Army (Ejército de Liberación Nacional – ELN). Their patriarch had been killed by the FARC and their zeal for the bloodletting of leftists was notorious.

Whether or not M-19 had the backing of Pablo Escobar is subject to debate. Given a little bit broader context, it becomes understandable why this the beginning of the end. These were, after all, times when any sort of public support or expression of sympathy to Leftists was considered just cause for classification as a enemy of the state, placement on a list of subversives and scheduling for capture, execution and disappearance of the body.

Pablo Escobar: Populist with Leftist Leanings

Pablo Escobar was no communist. In fact, if his son is to be believed then he, like Manuel Noriega, was involved with the CIA in profiting of the funneling of cocaine into the United States in order to circumvent oversight by the legislative branch to raise money to fight the Communist, nationalist, anti-colonialist, nativist insurgent movements in Central America. His particular flavor, however, was populist.

This excerpt from Colombia Elites and Organized Crime, written for the U.S. Justice Department, details the differences between Berna and Escobar as it relates to this succinctly:

“In contrast to Escobar, Berna did not pick a fight with the government, kill police and judges, or kidnap elites. He understood that the police were an implacable enemy but could be a superlative ally. The police’s increasing control over resources and the political importance of their battle against El Patrón made them a type of bureaucratic elite. And they used this power to influence how Colombia’s government deployed its military, judicial, and political resources.

Don Berna was to place himself at the heart of this criminal-bureaucratic elite alliance that proved pivotal in the battle against Escobar.”

This interview with one of Pablo Escobar’s most used sicarios is further evidence to categorize Pablo as a narco-populist of sorts.

The Danger of Populism in the Cold War Period

Populism in Latin America is a a frequent recurrence. No surprise given the history of colonial expropriation and rule of locals resources and lands. In the context of the Cold War, however, populist political beliefs meant that Pablo was an unreliable ally and thus a major potential threat. His willingness to attack local allies and minor political functionaries was one thing, but to materially support Leftists for political work greatly upset his allies and meant he came to be classified as a potential major geo-political threat. How so?

Looking at the international scene first – Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala were all in the midst of major political upheavals where nationalists, nativists, anti-colonialists and Communists were united against the scions of the old colonial elite. Pablo Escobar had already established willingness to openly kill members of the established economic and political elite in Colombia. Were he to funnel his profits from the operations towards the guerrillas in that region – or in Colombia – rather than to the Contras and the group that would later be the model for the AUC, Los PEPES, it could significantly effect the tide of the dirty wars and political genocide then occurring in Central America under the aegis of “nation building”.

Had the Communists, their sympathizers and other varieties of nationalistic combatants advocating for anti-colonial style land and labor reforms had weapons with the financial backing that Pablo could have supplied, it’s likely they’d not have been so overwhelmingly slaughtered. But this did not happen and instead the U.S. supported forces, that would later be tried and convicted for genocide, won.

Domestically Pablo had made enemies through expropriations and high taxes on the crime families to fund his war against the state. But that was not all, The Castaños had grown distant from Pablo Escobar because of Escobar’s stated affinity for left-wing guerrillas, and his alleged links to M-19 and another rebel group, the National Liberation Army (Ejército de Liberación Nacional – ELN).

This affinity made Don Berna, who’d had his leg shot off by Communists during an assassination attempt, have even more reason to despise Pablo’s relationship of convenience than his boss being killed by Pablo when he was supposed to be his head of security.

Narco Nation-Building: Filling Pablo’s Power Vacuum

 

With Pablo’s influence ousted as a result of Don Berna’s alliance-building, business as usual, in a way, could more or less return to normal. Whether or not there was a meeting of political elites that voted up or down to express confidence in Don Berna’s operations is really besides the point. On a practical level Berna was given reign to enforce control networks of narcotics production and distribution, various local criminal activities and organized protection rackets.

Don Berna’s Armed Defense groups, such as the Cacique Nutibara Bloc, literally encircled Medellin. They pushed into neighborhoods to cleanse those that expressed sympathy for them or advocated for a variety of human rights. They pushed out into areas long considered the FARC’s in order to combat the group directly and to take over the fertile land they occupied so as to turn them into coca fields. The Leftist insurgents, soon found themselves turning to the cocaine business to fund them as without it they could not withstand the superior weapons and numbers made available to the Narcos given their bumper profits from the cocaine trade.

Throughout Colombia urbanization was happening at a rapid pace, and still is. People living largely outside capitalist relations – on self-sustaining farms that traded little – were legally and illegally evicted from their land and filled the urban centers. This large scale political-economic transformation was financed largely by the money and armed power granted by the cocaine trade and further financed political influence in the form of bribes, threats of and actual violence, organized voting drives and other means. Put simply, as long as the elites profits were no longer under threat, they largely turned a blind eye to the primitive accumulation of capital that plagued the countryside and low strata parts of the cities where they never visited anyway.

Bullets, Not Ballots: Limiting Leftist Political Discourse with Cocaine Powered Anti-Communism

The scope of the slaughter of Latin American Leftists is such that many historians and political scientists have used the term politicide to describe U.S. supported military actions throughout Central America and Colombia. The problem I see with such a conceptualization, however intuitively appealing that it is, is that it obfuscates that actions of the guerillas. Their activity was similarly aligned with the plata o plomo ethos and they avowedly sought the liquidation of the bourgousie.

Regardless of this, the effect of this class warfare was to drastically alter the politics of the possible, as well as the debatable. Critical words against those in power overheard and reported to the wrong person could mean that one was then placed on a limpieza‘s list of people to cleanse. The press too shirked from speak truth to power lest they join the long list of now dead community activists and hundreds of dead journalists.

Cocaine is still one of the primary means that Colombian Communist guerilla groups raise money. 

Lest this be seen as solely emerging from this period, it reflects a long-standing disdain for anti-systemic political committments going back to the period of La Violenca.

The net result is a political culture amongst the lower class that largely refuses to engage with certain critiques of power and the politics that such assessments proscribe. Instead they pray for the benevolence of an economic elite (that for generations has shown willingness to murder those that threaten to expose the ill-gotten means behind their wealth) resign themselves to life’s poor conditions and exploit others for their enjoyment with little to no care to as to who it harms. The phrase for this condition: Que gonorrea!

This combined with general historical ignorance within the population  means that people don’t know why the F.A.R.C. and E.L.N. fight. This problematics as without the deeper understanding of history and politics it makes the it easier to seduce the People with promises whose fulfilment is always further down the horizon.

Parties and Partys in Colombia

So what the hell does all this have to do with Alborada?

Well, with this context in mind it’s easier to see why some don’t like to celebrate it – Alborada is a celebration of the successful cleansing of leftists and lumpen that didn’t follow the political and economic dictates proscribed by La Oficina de Envigado. While the FARC and the ELN certainly continued to exist in rural areas and some smaller cities, their cleansing from Medellin was so total they they felt confident enough to lay down arms and set off fireworks for a man that had over 11,000 murders attributed to him. If this seems shocking, consider this: if the FARC had stayed and turned the government into an arm of their organization, how many more thousands of people would have been killed as they attempted to impose their poetic, narcissistic political order. This Alborada is, in a way, also a celebration of the lives that were saved by preventing such a tragedy…

Sometimes people that aren’t nice must be given some free reign, in other words, in order to prevent something worse from transpiring.

Miami – an area in Antioquia that prior to U.S. assistance was previously a major processing facility in the cocaine trade.

 

Review of Law in a Lawless Land: Diary of a Limpieza in Colombia

“The objective of memory is to highlight both the struggle of the dead
and the nature of the powers that silenced them.”
—Luis Carlos Restrepo

As part of my pre-visit area studies and research for Unraveling, I picked up Law in a Lawless Land: Diary of a Limpieza in Colombia by Michael Taussig prior to going to Medellin. A first person account told in a diary format over two weeks, Taussig recounts the dynamics, shares the stories of others and contextualizes the history of the region to explain the murders that once made Colombia the world’s murder capital. While conditions and the murder rates have drastically changed since then, it’s still a place where massacres of campesinos over access to land still occurs to this day.

Taussig’s journal describes in at times uncomfortable details a number of large-scale public killings, referred to as limpiezas in Spanish, as well as the backgrounds of the actors and the historical context in which they occur. Besides this, Taussig also reflects on the role of memory and accountability from a personal in reflections on the process of writing a journal as well as in the political sense, ie – through which means hegemony is formed.

Indigenes, Viciosas, Delincuentes, Traficantes, Paras, Sicarios, Guerrillas, Policia y la Ejercito Oh My!

While many of the participants in the conflict are prone to describing things in terms of good or evil, what is really going on is conflict over modes of production and access to fertile and resource rich lands. Though the quote from Karl Marx’s work Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations is one that opens Michael Taussig’s other book The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, I think it a good one for quickly that describes the primary driver for conflict here as well.

Thus the ancient conception in which man always appears (in however narrowly national, religious or political a definition) as the aim of production, seems very much more exalted than the modern world, in which production is the aim of man and wealth the aim of production.   

While not nearly as knowledgeable as Taussig about Colombia’s past or collective psyche, my experience with various social strata in Medellin and Jerico, a pueblo in Antioquia, provided me a similar view. Those that primarily outside the capitalist mode of exchange for supplying their daily needs seemed more peaceful, calm and happy then those that depended on it.

In a long passage discussing the transformation of Cali’s agricultural lands in the 1950s and 1960s, Taussig describes how the thousands of peasants, who were outside the capitalist mode of production as the variety of plants they would grow and rotate provided them with all they needed were forcibly dispossessed so that a foreign born family could grow and export sugar. These instances of rapid proletarianization helped contribute to the problems faced within the cities – people without capital or many skills flocking to them – and were accelerated once cocaine became the crop of choice for those wanting to live beyond subsistence means.

 

When You Don’t Want Your Haters To Know Your Name

The immensity of the cocaine market drove traffickers to form paramilitary organizations to seize land and routes with high use value from the FARC and other large scale farmers. Unable to effectively contest such a well-financed group and still keep their scruples, the FARC got into the protection and trafficking rackets so that they could survive as an organization. Armed conflict over this left many frightened and dead , however this was not the full extent of the new dynamics influencing Colombia’s political economy. Large nuber of addicts too cropped along with a profound incentivization for “bad behavior” as la vida facil – or the drug-dealing/trafficking life – was known to be sweet, but short.

Planfleto Amenzas, or warning pamphlets, like the one above along with the graffiti signs of paras scrawled around the community are the first indication that the paramilitaries are soon coming in for a cleansing of such mala gente. Translating the above picture, it says the following:

“We will be killing all rat bastard sons of bitches, leftist communists, defenders of human rights and the process of peace and restitution of the land, student communist groups, unionists and guerillas.”

Then continues to name the people that will be killed following by the ominous entre otros, or “among others” and a warning that caught or informed upon for helping these people will also be receive lead.

Sometimes warnings are not so explicit and people must rely upon word of mouth news networks or wait until AUC graffiti was painted someplace public to know where and when the AUC was.

The Massive Scope of the Conflict

At the time of this book’s publication in 2002, Michael Taussig states that he’s been visiting Colombia to do fieldwork for 30 years. While the intensity of the civil war has halted, there are still multiple bad effects that stem from the narco-trafficking. There are neighborhoods that require thousands of police in Bogota to clear out the open air drug markets made by vendors and addicts and anyone visiting the area around El Centro in Medellin has seen the improvised encampments filled with bazuco addicts.

Taussig describes in details various encampments and characters he encounters in such places in a way the bring much needed levity to the stories he’s sharing. Behind those moment of levity, however, is the underlying fear. Fear of being seen with the wrong person. Fear of saying the wrong thing. Fear of your name showing up on a computer provided to the paras by the military. In numerous anecdotes the absolute terror felt by those in towns undergoing a cleaning is clear. Just as who is behind these, the local power elites.

¡No Tiene Sentido!

One of the recurring themes in my readings thus far on Colombia which is again reinforced here, is how distorted the reporting of the events are in Colombia. Many journalists fear intimidation, harassment, assault or death as reporting a story in the wrong way would could mean various armed groups would target them, so often they distort reporting in favor of the government or the paras or do not report on important events at all.  The result of this is a collective unreality on all sides.

Threats of violence aren’t the only reasons why mass delusions as to the acts of the government, the paras and the guerillas are reported in a manner that later is corrected in the evidentiary findings of human rights NGOs.

Besides the stick, there is the carrot. Writing about the paradoxical viewpoint that many Colombians have, Taussig points out on page 76 the following commonplace hypocrisy of many Colombian political commentators:

“How is it that while the pandillas, or gangs of the young preoccupy everybody to the point of collective hysteria, while the bandas of the local upper class rarely get talked about? Is it because the bandas have for so long been a part of reality and that many people, or at least many influential people, get fat on them?”

The corruption in the country is notoriously endemic. In fact when asking one taxi drive in Medellin what he thought about the President Santos he want on a long rant about how all the politicians were corrupt – Liberals and Conservatives alike – and that stated that there’s no party that represents the poor and the campesinos except for the FARC, who would never come to power given so many people disliked them for the reason I said above. As a result, leading to million and billions of dollars of state money going to development projects. Maybe a few dollars goes in the pocket of a reporter, or maybe the ownerships of the new outlet gets some money out of it so exercises editorial control, or maybe a company that purchases advertising threatens to pull money if certain things are said. Either way, there are are lot of incentives to sow confusion in community by incomplete or false reporting.