Mayor of Buenos Aires Part 1

Well the election is drawing ever nearer here for the Major of Buenos Aires (Jefe de Gobierno). Voting day is on June 3rd and the campaigns have all kicked into overdrive. Although this is only a local election there is the potential for national ramifications.
The mayor of Buenos Aires is a national figure and the post can be a springboard for a future presidential run. That is of course if the time in office was a success, which is by no means assured. The Federal Capital of Buenos Aires is a city within a city; in the States the closest comparison would be D.C. This is where all the big decisions get made for the country, the seat of the national government, the most technologically advanced area, the most populous and the wealthiest. It is home to about 3.5 million people, but it surrounded by a huge sprawl of mostly less well off Argentines totaling all together about 13 million. This election is just for the Federal Capital though and that’s what I want to talk about.
The one major difference that strikes me between campaigns here and in the U.S. is the dearth of candidates. There are literally 10 or 11 people that are running for Mayor. It’s an important position and national figures have been throwing support behind their favored candidates. Even the President, Nestor Kirchner, has stepped in on his party’s behalf. Despite the size of the field I think there are only 3 or 4 with a real shot of winning, but with that many people running you never know what the results will be.
With all the differences between Argentine and U.S. politics there seems to be one common factor, most of the politicians here are pompous assholes. I guess some things just transcend any cultural barrier. It didn’t take me long to figure this out after listening to a few of them speak or reading their platforms. They talk a lot but they aren’t saying anything. Wait a second, is that a Talking Heads lyric? I don’t remember for sure but if it is its spot on.
Not that all of the Candidates here are full of it, there are a few bright spots to speak of. One of these is Patricia Walsh, the MST candidate. I say this because the program she is advocating is a departure from traditional politics and policies. I don’t have the space to lay it all out here, but one point I find very encouraging is her willingness to listen to the people and give not only a voice in the governance of Buenos Aires, but rather the voice. The whole MST party is structured this way; it’s a bottom to top approach that is a very refreshing departure from what I am used to coming from Minnesota.

Wolfowitz Isn't A Lone Soldier

Does it seem a bit ironic to anyone that Paul Wolfowitz resigned as president of the World Bank earlier among charges of corruption? I mean this is the man who upon taking up his position at the bank declared an anti-corruption campaign. Does it really surprise anybody though? Just look at where Wolfowitz came from before heading to the World Bank, the Bush Administration. Granted just being a member of the Administration doesn’t automatically qualify a person as corrupt, incompetent, or dishonest, but it certainly doesn’t help your case either.

Corruption is nothing new when it comes to politics and indeed one would be naïve to think otherwise. The pomposity of this Administration lies in its hypocrisy. The example of Wolfowitz is just one example, but there are plenty more. Of course there is the recent example of Luis Posada Carriles, one of the most notorious terrorists in the Western Hemisphere over the past 25 years, walking freely in the U.S. Another example is the infamous No Child Left Behind policy,

“President Bush's No Child Left Behind law requires public schools to lower the number of dropouts. Failure to do so results in unfavorable actions being taken against local schools, school districts, and individual teachers.

In his latest budget, President Bush cut the federal money for dropout programs to ZERO. The requirement stays in place. The punishments stay in place. The money to help schools reach the goal and avoid the punishments no longer exists.”1

Do I even dare get in the nuclear proliferation debate? Yeah, I have to. This Administration loves to pretend it is against it with a lot of tough talk to Iran and North Korea, yet at the same time the Administration has pulled out of or weakened every major international arms agreement. Meanwhile they tell Iran that they cannot have the technology while India, Pakistan, Israel (all U.S. allies and not signatories of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) as well as Russia and China surround them with thermonuclear weapons.

So the policies are obviously hypocritical to a large extent. Now lets move on to the people. Randall Tobias, former AIDS Czar, got busted patronizing the services of an escort service. Or course he was only using it for the ‘massages’ and I could really care less what he does in his free time, except that the program he was in charge of wouldn’t give aid organizations that help prostitutes and made much of the aid available only if they went to abstinence programs. What a jackass. I believe the appropriate word in Buenos Aires is boludo.

Since we are on this topic we might as well bring up Ted Haggard. While not a member of the Bush Administration, he was a staunch supporter and powerful evangelical preacher who spoke with Bush or his advisers on a weekly basis. I say was because it came to light that Mr. Haggard also used the services of an escort service, this time a male one, as well as dabbled in methamphetamines on the side. This coming from some one who preached against homosexuality and drug use.

The list goes on and on, but I think the point is made. It has gotten so bad that when I heard about Wolfowitz’s problems at the World Bank my response was, “Yeah, that sounds about right”. Being surprised or shocked at how low these people can sink is no longer even an option, it is just taken for granted.

bio fuel/bio foe

A new report by the US Department of Agriculture has projected that the growing biofuel industry will use 27% of this years U.S. corn crop. Even though it is also projected that the crop will be a record 12.46 billion-bushels there is significant concern that stockpiles will be running low going into next, when biofuel demand is expected to continue its rise. Who cares right? I mean you don’t even really like corn so we might as well use it instead of buying oil from those pesky Arabs. Well let me lay out what is wrong with this picture, because there is definitely something wrong.

First of all biofuel itself is a tricky thing. It sounds so much better than petroleum and yet when you burn it, especially when it is made from corn, it isn’t cleaner. So there goes your ‘its better for the environment’ theory.

Well it might not be that green but at least it reduces our dependence on foreign oil. This is indeed true, it puts the U.S. in a more strategically secure position, at least as far as energy supplies go. When you can grow fuel instead of importing it from potentially hostile regions you are, at least in theory, spared from having to fight wars for control of resources. Of course in practice it is advantageous for the U.S. to control as many resources around the world as possible, regardless if it consumes them or not.

So a point for and a point against. Here is what tips the scale. Turning corn (food) into a fuel when people go hungry everyday in that same country doesn’t seem right to me. In the richest society in the history of the world many millions of people go to bed hungry every night. And it doesn’t stop there. Much of U.S. corn has, since the implementation of NAFTA, been exported to Mexico where it is turned in to tortilla. Tortilla is the staple of lower classes in Mexico and the main source of calories for many millions in that country. With more and more of U.S. crops been set aside for biofuel purposes the price of tortillas has been on the rise in Mexico, sparking widespread protest earlier this year. The Mexican government was forced into the position of setting a price cap so people could afford to eat. Is this really something we should be powering our cars with at the expense of so many peoples lives?

And here is the real kicker, cleaner and more efficient biofuels can indeed be made, not from potential food crops, but from others such as sugar cane or even switch grass. Look at Brasil for more encouraging approach to biofuel. It is developing the sugar cane option, I see no good reason why the U.S. should not as well. Of course I would prefer no biofuels at all and a move towards a much cleaner technology, but the U.S. seems incredibly reluctant to do this. And by the U.S. I mean the government. The population in general is clearly behind reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but since when does it matter what the people want?

Beware of those touting biofuels as some sort of response to global warming. We can and should do much better than that.

Not all terrorists are created equal

The U.S. is often accused of double standards and hypocrisy in its foreign policy, human rights, and pro-democracy hubris when it comes to pursuing its own interests. This can easily be seen when one of the justifications for the Iraq war was to bring to democracy to the people of Iraq, while at the same time the U.S. enjoys rather cozy and lucrative relations with China. The fact that China has horrible human rights record and an authoritarian government doesn’t seem to matter when it boils down to the ‘important’ issue: trade. The China case is just one of a number of hypocritical stances taken by the U.S. and for that simple reason it doesn’t even stand out that much.

One recent case though seems to me to go head and shoulders above a lot of this hypocrisy, the situation surrounding Luis Posada Carriles. Some of you have heard of him before, others have not so I will give a little background information. Carriles is an anti-Castro Cuban militant that was once employed by the CIA. He has been tied to numerous bombings and terrorist plots over the years, most often funded by the CIA (this was apparently before the U.S. considered terrorism a bad thing, how the tables have turned). The most notorious crime he is connected with though is the 1976 bombing of Cuban plane that resulted in the death of all 73 people on board.

Sounds bad right? Well unfortunately it gets worse. He was jailed in Venezuela and was undergoing trial for the bombing when he escaped in 1985. After trying his hand in a few more plots over the years he ended up being jailed in Panama in 2000 for plotting an assassination attempt, but he received a Pardon and left the country 4 years later. He made his way into the U.S. at some point after that and was rightly detained by U.S. authorities.

But not on terrorism charges, rather on charges about lying to immigration officials upon his entry into the country. Both Cuba and Venezuela demanded that he be extradited to them to continue facing trial for his alleged crimes or that he be tried for them in the U.S. as is laid out in the Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts Against the Safety of Civil Aviation, a UN international agreement.

Pretty straightforward, right? Well the U.S. has refused to hand over Carriles or try him on terrorism charges, preferring to simply pursue the immigration charges in blatant disregard for international law. The fact that international law is being ignored is of course nothing new to the U.S. but the fact that a world recognized terrorist is the beneficiary of it should something rather disturbing to all U.S. citizens.

And to top it all of the judge in Carriles’ immigration case dismissed yesterday leaving Carriles a free man within the U.S.

At this point the question has to be: why? Granted the U.S. certainly doesn’t like or approve of the governments in Cuba or Venezuela so I can at least understand the reluctance to hand Carriles into their custody. But why let a known terrorist walk free in U.S., I mean at least give him trail here. Perhaps I am being cynical, but the only other reason I can think of is that in for about a year, from Jan 30 1976 to Jan 20 1977 George H. W. Bush served as Director of the CIA. If Carriles was brought to trail on terrorism charges he would inevitably bring to light many details of that agencies policies and secrets, probably putting George senior in a bad light. The fact that his son is in the White House and this administration has repeatedly rejected bringing Carriles to justice is just a bit too much for me.

It brings me to the conclusion that the U.S. hypocrisy only continues to spread. Terrorist are evil and bad when they come from the Mid East, but when they come from Cuba and are anti-communist not only do they escape punishment, they get a welcome into our country. Don’t think the rest of the world isn’t paying attention. They certainly are. This Orwellian double-speak can only go on for so long before it catches up with us.

Why I will vote for a third party

I found myself the other night stuck in the middle of another heavy political talk. My counterparts in this were a fellow norteamericano and a Swedish traveler I recently met. And I use ‘stuck’ in the loosest of possible ways, for in reality I seemed to be pursuing the debate as hard as the others. In fact the Swede’s role mainly consisted of being an attentive listener. I can understand that, the world of US politics is baffling enough its own citizens let alone foreigners. So what issue had delved so whole-heartedly into you might be asking. Voting. Specifically using voting as a means of changing the present two party structure dominant in U.S. Politics. We had earlier dismissed the idea of revolutionary overthrow of the existing order as an unlikely scenario for the time being so we where pretty much left with voting as the only alternative.
Basically it came down to this; the system desperately needs a change. This involves new groups coming into power. This is accomplished by replacing this the exiting powers (democrats and republicans). The next step, well that’s where we diverged. I advocated voting for a third party while my friend favored the Democrats. The Swede didn’t understand the problem.
Well my friends the problem is like this. The argument for voting for the Democrats often follows the logic of it’s the lesser of two evils, that the Dems aren’t really giving the people what they want or even offering a divergent alternative in most cases, but that is still better than letting the Republicans run things.
I hate that argument; it misses the whole goddamn point. We are electing these people to represent our interest and us and yet they consistently do not. They show no sign of beginning soon. They show every sign of continuing on the same old course as they always have, following an agenda that, while it obviously reflects somebody, it clearly is not the majority of U.S. citizens. This is reflected over and over in multiple public opinion polls on many issues. Just to give one, nuclear disarmament.
These people do not deserve our votes and will not receive mine barring drastic changes in party politics in the future. I am voting for a third party. “But voting for a third party is like a vote against the Democrats” often goes the rebuttal. I got some news for you, voting for a Democrat is like voting for a Republican, they are the same thing. Two wings of the same party, a right wing and a central wing. Think I am wrong on this? Who’s the one always telling you that voting for a third party is a waste of a vote: the Dems or Republicans. Who controls campaign finance reform and public campaign finance power: the Dem and Republican controlled Congress. And what two parties have historically teamed up to prevent a third from gaining a foothold: you guessed it, the Dems and Republicans. (For a perfect example of this see Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing ’72)
It’s clear to me that these two parties have a very strong interest in remaining in power together and only together. In this way they can pursue their own agenda without fear of a challenge, for even if the people are dissatisfied and vote them out at the next election it is assured that another will take their place. And since it is congress and not the President that has the power to change the financing rules we can be assured that no change will be forthcoming soon. Just look at all the money Obama and Clinton have raked in already, $25 million plus and we are still 1 1/2 years from the election.
Any expectation that the stranglehold the two parties have on the system is going to come from with in is pure fantasy. It will clearly have to come from without and this can only be accomplished with the rise of other parties into the legislative branch and hence congress. This is why voting for a third party is not a waste. It is essential if there is to be a change. It will not happen at once, but it must start from somewhere and build momentum. The main point is it must come from the outside the current parties.
I will leave you with a quote from Trotsky I recently came across that seemed to capture the spirit of my feelings well. He was writing about the growing unrest in Spain the1930’s before civil war erupted there, but it still is relevant today.
“It is needless to say that the democratic slogans under no circumstance have as their task to draw the proletariat closer to the republican bourgeoisie. On the contrary, they create the basis for a victorious struggle against the bourgeoisie of the Left, making it possible at every step to disclose it’s anti-democratic character. The more courageously, resolutely and implacably the proletarian vanguard fights for the democratic slogans, the sooner it will conquer the masses and undermine the ground beneath the feet of bourgeoisie republicans and socialists reformists, the more faithfully their best elements join us, the sooner the democratic republic will be identified in the mind of the masses with the workers’ republic.” – Revolution in Spain (1931)

Empowering the People

I recently spent a weekend helping out the people of Santa Fe, a city about a 7-hour bus ride to the northwest of Buenos Aires. Recent torrential rains have caused widespread flooding across much of the area and the city of Santa Fe was one of the hardest hit areas. When I saw the pictures of homes almost completely submerged in the newspapers I knew I had to do something to help. I asked my buddy Fede, a local student at the University of Buenos Aires and activist, if there was anything I could do. Two short days later I found myself on an overnight bus to Santa Fe with a group of UBA students.
The city of Santa Fe proper is pretty sizable with a population a little of 500,000. Although the whole city was affected by the flooding it was particularly bad on the outskirts of town in the barrios where most people live in an impoverished condition. It was to these barrios that we were heading. Our goal for the trip, or at least what I understood to be our goal, was to distribute clothing, food, medicine, shoes, mattresses and other sorely needed materials to the local impoverished peoples. Students or other residents of Bs As donated everything we brought. We ended up having so much that we couldn’t fit it all in the holds below the bus and were forced to fill up the vacant seats and isle.
As we pulled into Santa Fe in the early hours of Saturday morning I was excited to get to work distributing the aid goods. Little did I realize that our trip had a much larger purpose that simply handing out goods. We filed off the bus and into a small building that turned out to be the local MST (Socialist Workers Movement) party HQ. The MST had cosponsored the trip from Bs As and it was only now that the real meaning of the trip was becoming apparent.
We had an hour-long briefing before heading to the barrios. I listened patiently, not really understanding much of what was being said, but luckily I had Fede close by to translate for me (I was the only foreigner there, probably the only foreigner in all of Santa Fe at that point). Basically Fede broke it down like this: we are here to organize the people so that the can stand together with one voice and demand from the government what is owed to them. I also found out at this time that a similar but even worse flood had happened four years ago. All the promises by the provincial and federal government to provide measures to prevent another flood, like dikes, pumps, drainage systems, had all come to nothing. And now the people were being left to rot once again.
The rest of the day was spent in the barrios going door-to-door handing out flyers for a popular assembly meeting to be held later on that day. I say door to door, but the truth of the matter is that many of the places we went to had no doors, windows or much else. Forget about doorbells, without doors you can’t even knock. I quickly learned that clap of the hands was the accepted way to inquire if someone was inside. Most people took the flyers but were a bit puzzled about why we were there and what we were doing. Although we explained our intentions to give the people themselves a voice you could see that these people had been burned many times in the past and were skeptical about any improvements happening. It was a disheartening to see this, but it was very inspiring when we talked to someone and a passion was ignited within them.
At 5:30 the assembly met in front of the local grade school in the only place available in the barrio, the middle of a dirt street. About 40 people showed up, mostly women, but also some older men and youths. Clearly a chord had been struck as all these people came to see what was going to take place, but there was a deep sense of skepticism as well. The assembly opened with a MST leader explaining the situation about the flooding and the absolute lack of government action. He explained that the people deserved much better and it was indeed possible if they stared to act together on a community level so that their voice would be heard.
A fierce debate ensued between those who agreed that it was time to come together and those who felt that it was a waste of time because the government would never help them out. At first the latter of the two groups held the edge in the argument. On man in particular was really pessimistic about any influence the people could have on the government. By the end of the assembly the mood had drastically changed thanks to a few passionate voices, including a few from the UBA students. The man that was so pessimistic at the beginning offered to put his small kiosk at disposal of the community as information and distribution center. It was as stunning and inspiring turn around.
The assembly decided to meet the following week and the hope was that the number of people attending would increase. The issue we came to raise was that of flood protection, but with the people given a chance to talk of their problems other concerns arouse such of lack of any public transport in the barrios. Already the people were developing a common and popular consensus on social needs. It was a great sight to see these people who earlier in the day had seemed so down and condemned to poverty leave the assembly with a glimmer of hope for change in the future.
After distributing the clothing and other aid we all headed back to the MST HQ to talk about the positive and negative experiences of the day, ways we could improve in the future, and how we could apply the lessons of social organization back in Bs As and beyond. All the students got back on the bus for our ride back to Bs As a short 24 hours after originally departing. It was a productive day though, one that has given me a new outlook on the power of social and popular assemblies and the power that it gives to those who otherwise have very little. All of the intellectual and theoretical efforts that go into socialist thought are very important to the cause, but it is only through direct action that reality is shaped. That is perhaps the most important lesson I learned in Santa Fe.