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	Open borders for capital, closed minds for culture by Gary Younge USA   US conservatives are increasingly keen to interpret their country"s woes primarily in terms of threats from abroad.   The dramatic turning point in the career of Will McAvoy, the once inoffensive network anchor in the new hit drama The Newsroom, comes when he"s asked to explain why America is the best country in the world.   McAvoy tries to dodge the question. But when pushed he sheds his milquetoast persona to deliver a tirade.   "There is absolutely no evidence to support the statement that we"re the greatest country in the world," he yells at a stunned audience. "We"re seventh in literacy, 27th in math, 22nd in science, 49th in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality [and] third in median household income … When you ask what makes us the greatest country in the world, I don"t know what the hell you"re talking about – Yosemite?"   In melancholic tones McAvoy then opines: "We sure used to be," before going on to mourn the loss of the nation"s moral purpose, innovative prowess and consensual possibilities.   The reverence for a lost, idyllic American past merely mixes mythology with amnesia. America has had many great achievements in its short lifetime. But while it may be returning to a gilded age it cannot claim a golden one.   "The essential characteristic of a nation is that all its individuals must have many things in common," wrote the 19th-century French philosopher Ernest Renan. "And must have forgotten many things as well." In just the postwar period, you"d have to forget McCarthy, segregation, Nixon, several assassinations, Vietnam and Iraq – to name but a few.   Nonetheless, the notion that America is in decline has gained a firm foothold in the national psyche over the last decade or so. A plurality (45%) believes the country"s best days are in the past; almost as many (42%) think China will overtake the US as a world power. Bookshelves and newsstands are filled with explanations. In 2001 60% said economic globalisation was a positive development; two years later it was 42%; last year it was down to 36%.   This angst is found on both sides of the aisle. In 2004, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry wrote the preface to a collection of Langston Hughes poems entitled: "Let America be America Again". Republican candidate Mitt Romney insists he"ll return the nation to a day when "each of us could walk a little taller and stand a little straighter".   But while liberals are more likely to see the roots of this crisis as domestic – growing economic inequalities, religious zealotry, corporatisation of media and politics – conservatives are increasingly keen to perceive the primary threat as external: immigrants, Islam, foreigners and foreign trade.   The most marked slump in support for economic globalisation over the last decade has been among Republicans, as has the sharpest increase in anti-immigrant sentiment and fear of the threat of "radical Islam".   It is in this light that Romney"s gaffes in London, the constant questioning of Obama"s American identity and the attacks on Romney"s record as a venture capitalist must be understood.   For among a core group of Republicans "foreign" has become an epithet – a slur wilfully blurring the distinction between non-American, un-American, liberal, non-Christian and non-white.   Paradoxically, those most likely to insist the US is the leader of the free world are simultaneously those most likely to both fear and disparage the very world they insist on leading – whether it"s free or not. To these people America"s best days were when Americans did not care what the rest of the world thought of them and the rest of the world loved them for it.   This trend is most obvious in a popular line of attack on Obama that implicitly – and increasingly explicitly – challenges his claim to be American.   Last week one of Romney"s top men, John Sununu, said he wished "this president would learn how to be an American". Romney himself claimed the president espoused a philosophy that was "in some respects foreign to the American experience".   This is of course a proxy for race made popular by the birthers, who, despite all the evidence, insist Obama was born in Kenya. In a world where direct racial attacks are out of bounds, "foreign" becomes a useful metaphor. This man, it says, is essentially not like us or even from us.   Branding him Muslim, as though this too were in itself an insult, has the same function. A recent poll revealed the proportion of Republicans who believe Obama is Muslim has doubled since 2008 and now stands at almost a third. The trouble with these dog whistles is now that everyone can hear them they are scarcely worthy of the name.   Romney had barely landed in London before an adviser explained the reason he appreciates the "special relationship" more than Obama is because Romney is "part of an Anglo-Saxon heritage".   But race is not all these attacks are about. For the continent they"re most likely to tar Obama with is not Africa but Europe – ostensibly a region of economically failed states pampered by overly generous welfare that also happen to be allies. "This president takes his inspiration from the capitals of Europe," said Romney. "We look to the cities and small towns of America."   It"s with this mindset that Romney undertook his disastrous trip to Britain, described in his book as a small island that "with few exceptions doesn"t make things that people in the rest of the world want to buy". It"s for this reason that accusations of outsourcing at Bain Capital, where he was once CEO, and ads about his offshore bank accounts have made him vulnerable.   For the party most likely to champion patriotism and leverage parochialism is also the party most likely to be bankrolled by multinationals and champion free trade. A significant portion of the Republican base – white working-class men – have seen their livelihoods threatened by the very neoliberal globalisation that their party seeks to extend. Profit has no intrinsic interest in patriotism, and capital, increasingly, is unfettered by the nation state. The capitalism they vote for and the capitalism they actually experience couldn"t be more different.   But in the absence of any real opposition to that trend – Democrats support it too – many Republicans reach for the comfort blankets of hyper patriotism and xenophobia and the more accessible targets of immigrants, foreigners and Muslims.   Open borders for capital and closed minds for culture; classically liberal economics and classically illiberal politics.   Source: The Guardian.
	As long as the rich can speculate on food, the world"s poor go hungry by James Goodman, Heather Stewart The Observer, Fairfax News & agencies   As long as the rich can speculate on food, the world"s poor go hungry, by James Goodman.   Obviously, to overcome poverty we have to overcome the causes of poverty, and the big causes of poverty today are largely untouched by ai. Poor countries are still forced to pay off unpayable debts. The global poor are facing ever-higher food prices, driven by speculation. And climate change is already destroying lands and livelihoods.   The United Nations warns that these three factors are now reversing global development. To stop this we need radical change.   We need complete debt cancellation. We need to dismantle financial institutions that use debt to control poor countries, and we need to require banks to finance public goals, not derivatives.   We need to ban food speculation and protect the peasant farmers, who produce the bulk of the world"s food. We need to halt "market access" rules and limit large-scale agribusiness.   We need real action to leave fossil fuels in the ground - to stop mining coal, oil and gas. And we need to pay our climate debts to poor countries that are facing climate change now.   Utopian? Yes, but necessary now, to overcome the wholesale reversal in development the UN is warning of.   Our global financial crisis began in 2008 - the financial crisis in poor countries began in the late 1970s, and hasn"t stopped for breath.   Billions of dollars each year are still transferred from poor to rich. In 2008, $100 billion was given in overseas aid; in the same year, rich countries pocketed $600 billion in debt repayments.   The debt burden of developing countries became unpayable when the interest on development loans was suddenly hiked in the early 1980s. Just like subprime mortgages in the US, development loans turned into a debtors prison.   After the 2008 financial crisis, rich countries spent more than $20 trillion in bank bailouts and economic stimuli (incredibly, $20 trillion is a fifth of global income). The total debt of all 128 developing countries stands at $3.7 trillion. It can be cancelled if we want it to be. Scandalously, the food crisis in developing countries has passed us by, almost unnoticed. Yet it is the biggest threat to poverty reduction.   Farming in many developing countries has been decimated by "free trade" rules under the World Trade Organisation (WTO). Countries have become dependent on food imports, leaving the poor vulnerable to price hikes.   From 2006 to 2008, the global price of food doubled, forcing an additional 180 million people into destitution. Why is food suddenly so expensive? The answer came in 2008, when prices halved with the financial collapse, and then doubled again with the financial recovery.   Speculation on food prices was big business after the US lifted its ban on the practice in 2000. About $13 trillion surged into food commodities from 2006, and then out again in 2008, and then back in again by 2011. That"s why we should reverse the WTO"s "market access" agenda and support peasant agriculture - rather than global agribusiness - and reimpose the ban on food speculation.   The third threat to poverty reduction - climate change - is already having a devastating impact on the global poor. Nine of the 10 people displaced by climate change live in developing countries. Poverty is already on the increase due to floods and shortages of fresh water and sea-water inundation related to climate change. The World Bank says $100 billion is needed now, each year, to help poor countries cope with the impacts of climate change. Obviously, rich countries are most able to stop burning fossil fuels. We are most to blame for the problem and yet still we stall. And aid donors (including Australia) still refuse to accept that climate aid should be in addition to development aid.   The debt, food and climate crises are the key drivers of global poverty. Rich countries are responsible for all three crises, and can address them if they have the political will. Why don"t they?   The Occupy movement told us that governments are captured by the new global rich. In 2012, the World Economic Forum calculated that 1 per cent of the world"s population - just 70 million people - own half of the world"s wealth. That "1 per cent" is the problem. They have no interest in addressing the causes of poverty because they profit from rising food prices, spiralling debt repayments from poor nations and the booming carbon economy.   The WEF - ironically, the forum for the "1 per cent" - says this unprecedented scale of global inequality now poses the biggest risk to its interests. It is high time that risk was made real.   * James Goodman is an associate professor at the University of Technology, Sydney.   20th May 2012   Financial crisis ''will drive up debt repayments for poorer nations'', by Heather Stewart, The Observer.   Poor countries can expect to see their debt repayments to the rest of the world increase by an average of a third by 2014, as they battle with the consequences of the financial crisis in the west, according to a new report by the Jubilee Debt Campaign.   Leaders of the G8 economies, including the US and Japan, at the summit at Camp David expressed their concerns at the current state of the European economy.   But many far less powerful states will be severely hit by the events playing out across Europe, Jubilee''s Tim Jones says: "Impoverished countries could be dramatically affected by the worsening European financial downturn."   Just as in the first wave of the global credit crunch, poor countries are likely to suffer falling income from exports as demand from recession-hit European countries declines; from capital flooding out of the country as banks and other multinational firms repatriate funds to shore up their finances back home; and from declining revenue from migrants living in Europe who send cash back to their families.   In its report The State of Debt, Jubilee uses predictions from the IMF andWorld Bank to show that among 61 poor countries it analysed, total debt repayments are expected to rise by a third on average over the next two years as a result of the slower growth in the rest of the world.   The recession of 2008-09 ended a long-term decline in many poor governments'' debt repayments. Intense public pressure from a global coalition of campaigners had earlier helped to bring about widespread debt cancellation among scores of poorer countries.   Jubilee''s research shows that international debt relief, championed by Gordon Brown in the UK and administered by the IMF and the World Bank under the so-called heavily indebted poor countries (HIPC) scheme, helped to cut debt repayments sharply, from 20% of government revenue in 1998 to less than 5% in 2010.   There is evidence that the benefits have been felt by ordinary families in those nations: in Tanzania, for example, school fees were abolished after the country was granted debt relief in 2001, and primary school enrolment jumped to 82%, from less than 50% in the late 1990s.   More recently, however, the burden of debt has begun to increase again as governments have borrowed to tide themselves over during the last few tough years. In many cases, the new lending has come from the IMF, which bailed out countries in distress when the downturn first hit. There has also been a large increase in private-sector lending to the world''s poorest countries, while new international players such as China and India have begun to exert growing influence across Africa, building everything from giant container ports to five-star hotels, usually with money loaned to the host country.   Some countries that received international help with debt, including Ethiopia, Mozambique and Niger, could soon be spending as much on repayments as they were before they received that relief. Jubilee fears that this may be sowing the seeds of a future crisis. Many HIPC countries have large current-account deficits, revealing a strong reliance on foreign finance. That could leave them highly vulnerable if investors decide to pull out their cash, as they undoubtedly would if a Greek exit from the eurozone sparked a rush towards the world''s safe havens.   Max Lawson, head of policy at Oxfam, says developing countries will find it harder to cope with a fresh financial crisis in Europe because many dived into the red to cope with the credit squeeze of 2008-09. He argues that the IMF, then under the leadership of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, allowed governments extra leeway to prevent the downturn hitting social spending such as education and health budgets.   But many developing countries are now being urged by the IMF, under Christine Lagarde, to implement strict spending targets to eliminate the deficits run up over the past few years. "Their advice to poor countries tends to mirror the G8 mood," Lawson says. "We were briefly Keynesian in the north, and the IMF became more flexible, but now it''s all about austerity."   Kate Dooley, of Save the Children, agrees that the world''s poorest countries will pay a hefty price for the renewed turmoil in Europe. "The problem this time around is really high unemployment," she says: this hits migrant workers from poor countries hard, and cuts off the flow of so-called remittances they were sending back home. "The other is the lower capital flows because of the recapitalisation of the banks in Europe."   Jubilee would like to see governments given the power to impose so-called capital controls, limiting the flow of short-term, speculative cash in and out of vulnerable economies. And debt campaigners have long called for an international system for arbitrating cross-border debts and ensuring both creditors and debtors are dealt with fairly.   In fact, Jones suggests the answer to Europe''s travails will be for it to have its own jubilee, and write off some of the unpayable debts of countries such as Greece and Portugal. He says: "Europe rapidly needs to move away from austerity and bailing out reckless banks, and cancel debts which are too high."
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