The ones we really need to be afraid of

Here is an intense narrative that will help Americans understand how the sophisticated youth of Pakistan (and probably other countries of the East and South) see us, and why we should worry. Very quickly and movingly told. Click on title for my synopsis and comment.

Hamid, Mohsin. The Reluctant Fundamentalist. 1st ed. Orlando: Harcourt, 2007.

Thanks to Andrew Hull for recommending and lending me this book.

Cantankerous crusader

An English friend here in Carboneras lent me this book about a crusading, cantankerous and extremely energetic journalist who had a lot to do with establishing the ground rules for pamphleteers, journalists and today's bloggers -- nearly two centuries ago.


Ingrams, Richard. The Life and Adventures of William Cobbett. London: HarperCollins, 2005.

This is a very detailed bio, focused almost entirely on Cobbett himself (1763-1835), his movements and his voluminous writings, to the point that it is easy to lose sight of the wider context and why any of it mattered. It did matter, however, tremendously. Cobbett's vigorous journalism taking on powerful figures got him into many troubles, including a 2-year jail term, but ended up helping establish truth as a defense in libel actions and thus widen freedom of press in England. His campaign for parliamentary reform was a major contributor to its triumph in 1832 (elimination of rotten boroughs and much else), and his reports on country life in his late collection of articles, Rural Rides, includes vivid portraits of rural life in England, Scotland and Ireland on the brink of the industrial-urban revolution.

It would probably be best to read this after something like E. P. Thompson, so as to get the context and analysis before diving into so much detail of one man's life and career.

Above: Caricature of Cobbett (standing on cart and waving copies of his newspaper to beat his drum) and fellow reformer Francis Burdett (sitting on cart and waving his hat) at the 1806 Middlesex election. Click on image to enlarge.

Gypsies

In last Sunday's El País a Gypsy was featured on both the front page of the newspaper and the cover of the Sunday magazine, in two unrelated stories of people who had become accidental spokespersons, one in Spain and the other in Italy. One was Juan José Cortés (in center of photo at left, with his father and one of his brothers), a clothing merchant and Pentecostal minister in Huelva, Spain, who has become a prominent critic of the Spanish justice system, since his little daughter Mari Luz was murdered by a pervert who should have been in prison (but the judge, overworked or just distracted, had neglected to effect the sentence).

The other was 12-year old Rebecca Covaciu, originally from Rumania, who with her family had been chased from one end of Italy to the other, from Milan to Naples and finally to a secluded and secret rural area near Naples, provided by an anonymous Italian family who had read or seen on TV the family's tribulations.

The very articulate and determined Cortés was profiled and interviewed in the Sunday magazine, refused to make an issue of his ethnicity. He had never felt discriminated as a Gypsy, he said, though he thought that perhaps the Gypsies had "marginalized" themselves (by not participating fully in Spanish civil society). He himself has joined the Partido Socialista (an unusual step for a Gypsy), though he has no intention of running for office.

Rebecca's story is much sadder. She and her little brother were beaten by thugs simply for being foreign Gypsies, and when her father went to denounce the beating, he was beaten by the police -- who, it turned out, were the very same men who, in civilian clothes, had beaten the children.

Gypsies in Spain don't suffer anything like the official discrimination encouraged by the Berlusconi government in Italy, which wants to fingerprint them all and herd them into ghettos. But Gypsies, here known as gitanos, are viewed with a mix of suspicion and admiration. The common view is that they are mostly petty thieves, unreliable and disinclined to steady work -- although every Spanish payo (the Gypsy word for non-Gypsies) I know recognizes that there are exceptions.

The negative stereotype is no doubt exaggerated, but there are real problems. In Andalucía, where more than half of Spanish Gypsies live, seven out of ten children drop out before completing primary school, which makes it harder when they reach adulthood to find steady work. Almost half of those who do work (48%) are self-employed, far fewer than Spanish payos. (Actualidad Étnica) Why do the kids drop out? My guess is that in many cases they feel unwelcome in school, and have few role models in their community to encourage them to continue. And similar factors -- negative attitudes of employers, inadequate preparation and low expectations of job-seekers -- certainly account for the poor employment levels. But if anyone doubts gitano capacities to acquire the needed skills and make good, check out the impressive video of Acceder, an "affirmative action program" that has had great success in preparing gitanos in interview as well as work skills and getting tens of thousands placed in good, skilled jobs throughout Spain.

The admiration is for their lively, rebellious spirit, whose greatest expression is in their music, especially flamenco dance, guitar and percussion of palmas or cajón.

I've been puzzled by this strong Spanish ambivalence toward people that I have a hard time distinguishing from everybody else. Payos insist that they can recognize a gitano when they see one. I don't know. Most of them look like other Spaniards to me (check out the BBC's photos of European Gypsies in Testimonios : Los gitanos "europeos", to see if you can identify them). They are believed to have originated in Northwest India, and yes, there are some Spanish Gypsies who look to me more like Pakistanis or Indians. The flamenco singer Diego "El Cigala", for example. But in the many generations since they first appeared in Spain in the early 15th century, they have mixed their genes with the local population so that in most cases (at least for me) its hard to tell, and except when performing, they dress like everybody else. Foreign Gypsies, mostly from Rumania or ex-Yugoslavia, are more identifiable -- they often don't speak good Spanish, travel in bunches and dress very colorfully. These foreigners, especially the conspicuous beggars, can be an embarrassment to the more assimilated Spanish Gypsies.

Anyway, the question comes up because there are several gitano families here in Carboneras, whom I'm learning to identify as I get to know them. They are clustered in particular sections of town, and those I recognize are either manual laborers or unemployed -- I suppose there must be some with white-collar and even executive positions, but then they cease to be visible as Gypsies. And the other reason for my interest is the stirring flamenco music --where many (though by no means all) of the outstanding performers are, or pretend to be, Gypsies. And I'm one of a little group of guys who get together to try to perform it and improve our playing, every Saturday at midday. Some of the guys I practice with may really be Gypsies. The others, like Federico García Lorca in his Romancero gitano, are admirers or wannabes.

Constitutional reform in Ecuador

A good friend forwarded this article from Reuters, and asked what I think of President Rafael Correa. I haven't anything interesting to add to this analysis, which sounds convincing, so I'll just pass it on. Ecuador's Correa moderate despite radicals' pressure by Alonso Soto. I will be writing more about that country, especially its major urban centers, for our coming book on the history of architecture and urbanism in Latin America. The country's urban history goes back many centuries, since even before Quito became the northern capital of the great Inca empire. These days my main contact with Ecuador is through its many citizens living here in Spain.

For background, check out the BBC Country profile: Ecuador

How to rule the world (and how not to)

Nicholas Sarkozy points the world's leaders to the right at the G8 summit conference in Hokkaido Toyako, Japan.

Engler, Mark. How to Rule the World. The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy. New York: Nation Books, 2008.

According to Mark Engler, the masters of wealth have split into two camps about how to rule the world, which leaves an opening for others of us to seize the terrain for a globalization that works for humanity.

In fact, as Engler is well aware and Marx pointed out long ago, the ruling groups have always been divided in many ways by their fierce competition for bigger slices of the wealth. But since World War II and Bretton Woods, they had come to accept a framework of cooperation, by which the elites of the most powerful industrialized economies protected one another from threats to their power from outsiders including any reform-minded elites in poorer nations, rebellious workers or underclass in their own countries, and of course revolutionary movements backed by the USSR or Communist China.

This cooperation was effected in large part by global institutions including the International Monetary Fund and World Bank (using debt-pressure to keep poor nations' economies safe for transnational investors from the U.S., Western Europe or Japan), the World Trade Organization (to make sure the poor nations didn't protect their own industries from rich nations' exports), NATO (backing the economic rules by armed force), and other treaties and agreements. Since one country, the U.S., had the greatest wealth and greatest military force in all these institutions, it was able to assure that they and others (including the U.N.) generally acted in accord with the interests of its own national military-industrial complex. The arrangement did cause occasional inconvenience for big U.S. corporations, however, since it required them to abide by the same rules that they demanded of everyone else and for important international actions to be agreed upon by all the major players.

The Bush government team changed all that. They have acted repeatedly outside the international institutions to make separate trade deals outside the WTO and IMF, and defied international law, the World Court and the UN (demanding exemptions from international law for U.S. troops abroad, invading Iraq, Guantánamo, etc.). This has split the world's elites, who no longer had much of a say in the actions of the world's biggest power.

The two camps of the would-be rulers of the world are those who want to go back to something like the older international system, and the U.S. go-it-aloners and their (very few) allies abroad. But the Bush-Cheney offensive of the past 8 years has brought both systems to a crisis. The old mechanisms of global control are broken. For example, almost all of Latin America has now freed itself of the destructive control that the IMF had over their economies. And the attempted new style of control, an unabashed and undisguised Pax Americana, is proving unsustainable. The U.S. cannot fight all the wars its policies provoke, and can't even win in the big ones it has got into now, in Iraq and Afghanistan. And the country's economic might also looks precarious.

Engler points out the fallacy of the slogan, "There is no alternative" to globalized capitalism as we know it. There is always the alternative of saying, as Bolivia has recently to water and gas companies seeking monopolies, "No." And there are always many alternatives within the system. What there is not is a single, unified opposition movement with a clearly defined program -- and that, Engler thinks, is just fine. And I agree with him. Our last single, unified opposition movement, very tightly unified, its cadres firmly disciplined and marching on orders, the world Communist movement, turned out to be too disciplined and rigid to adapt to ever changing, many-faceted realities.

"Capitalism" is not united and never has been, that has been its strength, what has allowed aspects of it to thrive and grow even as other expressions of it became obsolete and died. Opposition to particular capitalist abuses has to be as flexible and creative as capitalism itself. "Capitalism" is not one thing but many different ways for people to seek private profit from public goods, and there are just as many ways to try to re-channel that private profit motive into public welfare.

Engler is particulary good, and amusing, in his critiques of Thomas Friedman's global enthusiasms and the limitations of Joseph Stieglitz's acute denunciations of current practices (though without proposing a radical alternative). Also valuable is his chapter on how countries of Latin America -- backed in different ways by Venezuela's oil wealth and Brazil's enormous agricultural and industrial potential -- are changing the ways the game has to be played.

He gives us no assurance that we can make a better world -- that wiser people with more generous, solidary motives can come to rule it -- but he shows that there is a chance. As for what we can do, I think he's pointing us in the same direction as two older researchers whose books I've mentioned here. See my notes on Alain Touraine, Penser autrement, and Ulrich Beck, Power in the Global Age.

Carboneras

Here's a good collection of images of the village we live in. A long way from our previous home, in Manhattan.

Credit crisis

These two articles from Mother Jones helped me understand. Maybe they'll help you too.

Where Credit Is Due: A Timeline of the Mortgage Crisis. By Nomi Prins

Subprime 1-2-3. By Casey Miner

Spanish crosswinds

Surprisingly after last March's national elections it was the winners -- the Partido socialista (PSOE)-- who appeared to be in disarray, while the losers -- the Partido popular (PP)-- were finally gaining strength. For the first time ever in his political career, PP president Mariano Rajoy got a higher public approval rating than José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, PSOE party leader and president of the government. But the parties' relative positions continue to shift, in interesting ways. For the next four years I expect to see a much more plural politics, where the governing PSOE will need more tactical alliances with other parties, including possibly the PP, in order to get any legislation through.

During the last legislature (2004-2008), the economy was booming and the PSOE government introduced reforms that had wide popular support. (Gay marriage, gender parity in business and government, benefits for families taking care of disabled members, etc.) Meanwhile, the opposition PP was making itself obnoxious and even frightening, taking extreme right-wing positions based on a rhetoric of obvious falsehoods (wild conspiracy theories to explain their 2004 loss). Thus the other parties (Izquierda Unida and the generally left-leaning regionalists and nationalists) almost always voted with the PSOE, giving it an effective majority.

Now the economy is in what the government has finally admitted is a "crisis": the collapse of housing construction and sales has caused record unemployment and business failures, at the same time that rocketing petroleum prices are bankrupting truckers and making everything more costly, and the two forces together are diminishing government revenue (tax collection) and increasing expenses (to cover the unemployed, etc.) The government had a nice surplus in March, but was unprepared for a recession of this magnitude and for months seemed to have no answer except to counsel patience, that things would get better -- but now it doesn't look like they will any time soon, and the "kitty" is fast emptying. Thus, the PSOE needs the support of the other parties more than ever, and has to work harder and make more concessions to keep its alliances.

Meanwhile PP leader Mariano Rajoy surprised everybody by using his defeat to clean house and move to the center, making the PP a much less frightening alternative. Most commentators expected Rajoy to be much weakened after his defeat in March, and possibly even to be replaced. Instead, at the recent party congress in Valencia he not only got himself re-elected, but also replaced the hard-liners (Acebes and Zaplana, most notably) with a new cast of attractive and skillful younger women, and declared over and over again that his was a party of the "center", even distancing himself from his predecessor and former patron, the truly scary and cynical José María Aznar.

But in the PP the "center" is precarious; the right-wingers are still powerful in Madrid and other regions and will keep pushing to defend what Aznar calls the party's "principles" -- a collection of prejudices including alignment with the Catholic Church hierarchy, hostility to immigrants, and defense of private profit over public welfare (e.g., money and other breaks for private hospitals and schools while the public ones are starved for funds).

Meanwhile, at the PSOE's own party congress, the leadership has been forced by their own militants to edge backwards, resisting every step, toward the left. The main issues are women's rights, especially a uniform abortion law, and real separation of Church and State -- which is what the Constitution proclaims, but in fact Spanish taxpayers are still paying the Bishops' Conference €153,100,000 for salaries of Catholic bishops and priests, plus the salaries of the Church's own religion teachers in public schools, Catholic chaplains in the Armed Forces, and much more -- all as a result of Church-State accords signed in 1979. The PSOE leadership now says that they will try to get rid of the crucifixes in state ceremonies, but at least for now won't seek to revise those 1979 accords. But they may be forced by their own party members and other parties to move farther.

Where the PSOE is taking anything but a progressive stance is on immigration. The government is going along with the new European Union rules, permitting detention of undocumented immigrants for up to 18 months, even if they have committed no infraction other than illegal entry. The government is facing a lot of criticism for this from its own partisans and from its usual allies on the left, but the international pressures (Sarkozy et al.) for the moment seem to be stronger.

Image: Two PP women, Madrid region president Esperanza Aguirre and María Dolores Cospedal, Rajoy's pick as General Secretary of the party, in a 2007 photo; as representatives of opposing tendencies, they may not be so cozy now. Photo from Stralunato.

Post-imperial irony

Farrell, J. G. The Siege of Krishnapur. 1973. 2nd ed. New York: New York Review Books, 2004.

During the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857-58, several hundred British subjects in a fortified compound of the East India company (attended by their anonymous Eurasian servants and Sikh loyalist cavalrymen) fight for their lives, their possessions and their beliefs with increasing desperation until, after all looks lost, a smartly-outfitted rescue party find the few foul-smelling and emaciated survivors in this very funny, ironic and violent vision of the British imperial project.

From the first signs of mutiny, the Collector (chief local official of the Company) takes command (after the fortunate deaths of, first, a senile and incompetent general and then an equally incompetent major), young Lieutenant Harry Dunstaple very skillfully manages the compound’s two cannons, a dreamy young idler (Fleury) acts with comical fearlessness, several young women – Harry’s sister Louise, Fleury’s sister Miriam, and the “fallen woman” Lucy – evolve from their various styles of coquetry to more mature responsibility.

Farrell has great fun with stubborn and irreconcilable 19th-century beliefs that various characters consider more important than their very lives. The Padre (as they call the Church of England priest) pursues first Fleury, then the Collector with his absurd proofs of the existence of God (based on the complexities of nature, which he insists could only be the work of Intelligent Design), the Collector keeps making speeches, sometimes to himself, about the wonders of progress as seen in the inventions at the Great Exhibition (London, 1851), even as the siege forces him to reflect on the wondrous destructiveness of modern inventions and the resistance of India to what he sees as Progress. The one declared atheist in the group, the Magistrate, is ironic and sensible on most topics but is an absolute nut about phrenology, which he thinks explains all behavior. Dr. Dunstaple (Harry and Louise’s father) is so convinced of his theory that “an invisible cloud” (not bad water) is the cause of cholera, and so furious with the younger Dr. McNab who disagrees with him, that he publicly swallows “rice water” from a sick patient – and of course dies, quite unnecessarily, because he refuses McNab’s intelligent treatment. Many eccentric and interesting characters die in violent ways that nonetheless raise a smile because, like Dunstaple's, they are so counter to heroic tradition. One of the funniest scenes is also one of the most violent, in which Fleury is pursued through the destroyed Banquet Hall by a giant, saber-wielding Sepoy while he, Fleury, is unable to extricate any of his many weapons (daggers, pistols) from his cummerbund – until finally he gets an extremely heavy, multi-barreled pistol to fire all its barrels at once, disintegrating the upper half of his assailant.

There are no Indian characters with dialogue except Hari, Anglophile son of a local rajah, whose twisted Anglicisms further suggest the misguidedness of British imperial policy. Farrell also makes the point that a mainstay of the imperial enterprise is opium production in India for export to China.

Indian novelist Pankaj Mishra has written a helpful introduction, contrasting Farrell’s version (the 1973 Booker Prize-winner) to the many 19th century British novels about the mutiny, which (according to Mishra) celebrated the heroism and enlightenment of the British in contrast to the brutish savagery of the Indians. In Farrell’s version, the Brits are no more rational than the zamindars (rural landlords), who try to control monsoon flooding by having a Brahmin sacrifice a black goat. It's a view that became possible (and could find a reading public) only a hundred years after the events.

Image source

Birnbaum: Obama in the Lion's Den

I was impressed by this insightful essay by Norman Birnbaum in today's El País (in Spanish translation), so I looked for the original in English. Thanks to Snuffy Smith for posting it. Snuffysmith's Blog: Obama In The Lion's Den Norman Birnbaum

If you're concerned about US foreign policy, I urge you to read this in whatever language. If you are not, well, I urge you to find another planet, because this one is in trouble.