Libertarian Communism A Definition

Since I continue to get comments from those who attempt to enlighten me as to why you cannot be a Libertarian and a Communist the latest being here.

I thought I would let an expert on the subject explain it. For those who are so blighted by half baked Republican interpretations of both terms that they just don't get it.

This is an exerpt from the 1910/1911 Encyclopedia Britannica entry on Anarchism; by Peter Kropotkin

Anarchism continued to develop, partly in the direction of Proudhonian ‘mutuellisme’, but chiefly as communist-anarchism, to which a third direction, Christian-anarchism, was added by Leo Tolstoy, and a fourth, which might be ascribed as literary-anarchism, began amongst some prominent modern writers.

The ideas of Proudhon, especially as regards mutual banking, corresponding with those of Josiah Warren, found a considerable following in the United States, creating quite a school, of which the main writers are Stephen Pearl Andrews, William Grene, Lysander Spooner (who began to write in 1850, and whose unfinished work, Natural Law, was full of promise), and several others, whose names will be found in Dr Nettlau’s Bibliographie de l’anarchie.

A prominent position among the individualist anarchists in America has been occupied by Benjamin R. Tucker, whose journal Liberty was started in 1881 and whose conceptions are a combination of those of Proudhon with those of Herbert Spencer. Starting from the statement that anarchists are egotists, strictly speaking, and that every group of individuals, be it a secret league of a few persons, or the Congress of the United States, has the right to oppress all mankind, provided it has the power to do so, that equal liberty for all and absolute equality ought to be the law, and ‘mind every one your own business’ is the unique moral law of anarchism, Tucker goes on to prove that a general and thorough application of these principles would be beneficial and would offer no danger, because the powers of every individual would be limited by the exercise of the equal rights of all others. He further indicated (following H. Spencer) the difference which exists between the encroachment on somebody’s rights and resistance to such an encroachment; between domination and defence: the former being equally condemnable, whether it be encroachment of a criminal upon an individual, or the encroachment of one upon all others, or of all others upon one; while resistance to encroachment is defensible and necessary. For their self-defence, both the citizen and the group have the right to any violence, including capital punishment. Violence is also justified for enforcing the duty of keeping an agreement. Tucker thus follows Spencer, and, like him, opens (in the present writer’s opinion) the way for reconstituting under the heading of ‘defence’ all the functions of the state. His criticism of the present state is very searching, and his defence of the rights of the individual very powerful. As regards his economical views B.R. Tucker follows Proudhon.

The individualist anarchism of the American Proudhonians finds, however, but little sympathy amongst the working masses. Those who profess it - they are chiefly ‘intellectuals’ - soon realize that the individualization they so highly praise is not attainable by individual efforts, and either abandon the ranks of the anarchists, and are driven into the liberal individualism of the classical economist or they retire into a sort of Epicurean amoralism, or superman theory, similar to that of Stirner and Nietzsche. The great bulk of the anarchist working men prefer the anarchist-communist ideas which have gradually evolved out of the anarchist collectivism of the International Working Men’s Association. To this direction belong - to name only the better known exponents of anarchism Elisée Reclus, Jean Grave, Sebastien Faure, Emile Pouget in France; Errico Malatesta and Covelli in Italy; R. Mella, A. Lorenzo, and the mostly unknown authors of many excellent manifestos in Spain; John Most amongst the Germans; Spies, Parsons and their followers in the United States, and so on; while Domela Nieuwenhuis occupies an intermediate position in Holland. The chief anarchist papers which have been published since 1880 also belong to that direction; while a number of anarchists of this direction have joined the so-called syndicalist movement- the French name for the non-political labour movement, devoted to direct struggle with capitalism, which has lately become so prominent in Europe.

As one of the anarchist-communist direction, the present writer for many years endeavoured to develop the following ideas: to show the intimate, logical connection which exists between the modern philosophy of natural sciences and anarchism; to put anarchism on a scientific basis by the study of the tendencies that are apparent now in society and may indicate its further evolution; and to work out the basis of anarchist ethics. As regards the substance of anarchism itself, it was Kropotkin’s aim to prove that communism at least partial - has more chances of being established than collectivism, especially in communes taking the lead, and that free, or anarchist-communism is the only form of communism that has any chance of being accepted in civilized societies; communism and anarchy are therefore two terms of evolution which complete each other, the one rendering the other possible and acceptable. He has tried, moreover, to indicate how, during a revolutionary period, a large city - if its inhabitants have accepted the idea could organize itself on the lines of free communism; the city guaranteeing to every inhabitant dwelling, food and clothing to an extent corresponding to the comfort now available to the middle classes only, in exchange for a half-day’s, or five-hours’ work; and how all those things which would be considered as luxuries might be obtained by everyone if he joins for the other half of the day all sorts of free associations pursuing all possible aims - educational, literary, scientific, artistic, sports and so on. In order to prove the first of these assertions he has analysed the possibilities of agriculture and industrial work, both being combined with brain work. And in order to elucidate the main factors of human evolution, he has analysed the part played in history by the popular constructive agencies of mutual aid and the historical role of the state.

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Uh Oh Ozone

View of the Ozone layer shot by European Space Agency (ESA) satellite ERS-2

The seasonal ozone hole over Antarctica is reaching a record size previously seen in 2000 and 2003, the World Meteorological Organisation has said.

And since it is spring now down under watch out for break away Ozone....

New Zealanders are being warned to cover up and use sun block as a patch of thin ozone layer moves across the country.



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Progressive Economics Blog

Found this economics blog. Maybe they should be invited to join the Progressive Bloggers seems like a natural fit.

Relentlessly Progressive Economics

Commentary on Canadian economics and public policy

A Blog of the Progressive Economics Forum

The Progressive Economics Forum is a network of Canadian economists with a progressive bent. See the main PEF website here.

The Forum was officially founded at a special meeting at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada in late May 1998. About 125 people attended an introductory panel on the future direction of economics, and about half of those stayed for the formal founding business meeting of the PEF. The business meeting formally adopted our name and a constitution, and elected a Steering Committee to which additional members have been added.

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About Time

This is news in Texas.

Alberta scraps royalty tax credit after 3 decades

- The Alberta government eliminated the Alberta Royalty Tax Credit on Thursday in a move that Energy Minister Greg Melchin said would add $111 million a year to government coffers when it comes into effect on Jan. 1.

The tax credit is one of the last vestiges of the Alberta-Ottawa energy wars of the 1970s, enacted in 1974 to counter a move by the federal government to eliminate tax deductions for royalties paid by oil and gas companies.

Leach suggested that the credit fell victim to politics. All the major candidates in Alberta's Tory leadership race advocate steps to increase the province's share of resource revenues, which amounted to $14 billion in the last fiscal year."We think it's responding to uninformed criticism of Alberta's royalty regime," he added.

Thursday's decision received unqualified support from an unlikely source --provincial NDP leader Brian Mason.

"We are very pleased that the government has finally been forced to cancel this corporate giveaway," he said. "The end of this program means a victory for Albertans."

Now lets adjust that pitiful 1% royalty we get paid for the people of Albertas resources namely the Tar Sands.

Yes it is a sop to the complaints raised about the fact we have the lowest royalty rate in the world. I like the guy who says we are uninformed....we are well informed that we are being ripped off.

First, contrary to popular belief, the Alberta government derives much more in royalties from natural gas than it does from oil. In 2004-05, it received $9.7 billion in resource revenues. Of this, $6.4 billion was from natural gas royalties, $2.0 billion was from oil royalties, andthe remainder was from other sources such as land sales. BMO Report January 2006 Alberta’s Long-range Outlook: “Oil’s Well”

Heck Newfoundland has a higher royalty rate than we do for all that Tar Sands oil.

And lets not forget that the Alberta Advantage did not begin under Ralph but under Lougheed,and it was created by OPEC and the oil boom of the seventies. Yet the Lougheed government still gave out corporate welfare. Without both Federal and provincial state capitalism the Tar Sands would never have been developed.

See

Oil Royalties


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CJSR Fund Drive

Donate to the Far Left of the Radio Dial. Community radio station CJSR is having its annual fund drive. And its a charitable donation, with a tax reciept and great swag. You can't get that from PBS.




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Trade Not Aid Redux

Did you know there are Christians in the Middle East. Why of course you did. But it seems to be forgotten in the propaganda war we experience daily.

Did you know that their are Christians in Palestine. And they are farmers. Did you know that they experience the same repression that their fellow Palestinians do at the hands of the Zionist occupation. Well of course you did.

Now here is an interesting point of view from one of them. A pig farmer whose land is being annexed by Israel and their Berlin Wall. Their bulldozers have destroyed the basic farm economy of the Palestinians. Their security wall and military outposts do not allow Palestinians access to the market. And they have been doing this for years before Hamas took power. So lets not use that as an excuse. The Wall Destroys Palestine's Olives, Farmers and Agriculture

Like their attack on Lebanon their occupation and domination of the Palestinians is as much an economic war as it is a political one. They do not want competition from the Palestian farmers whose lands are fertile and productive. And have been the source of the agriculture exports of both countries since Israel was formed. So they destroy their economic competition and have done so since 1967. Now they are doing it with bulldozers, illegal settlements and the security wall.

Palestinian farmers fear advance of West Bank wall

Fellow farmers in Jayyous, in the region known as the “garden” of the northern West Bank, made a living selling their fruits and vegetables before the wall was built there in 2004. Up to half of the population of 3,500 people now get aid from organisations such as the World Food Programme.

The wall separates the farmers of Jayyous from two-thirds of their land and six water wells, which are now on the Israeli side of the barrier. Two gates that were supposed to allow them access were closed by Israel during harvest times and fruit rotted on the vines.

Mr Sous does not want aid. The Hamas-run Palestinian Authority is under a western aid embargo aimed at moderating the militant group but Mr Sous has no need of aid, so far. “I don’t want to sell my land or leave. I just need to be able to make my living.”

See the farmers don't want Aid they want Trade. This should appeal to the capitalist sensabilities of the the right wing in North America. Any Blogging Tories, neo-cons, liberaltarians or free traders willing to take up their cause? Nope, they would rather critize CUPE for calling for a boycott of the Israeli Aparthied State.

A state which benefits by its monopoly of power over the farmers, their competitors in Palestine. A state which uses the Palestinians as a cheap labour source. A state which isolates them and keeps them imprisoned in occupation zones.

The agricultural sector in Gaza has a significant position within the local society as it supplies food products to the majority of the local population. Moreover, its contribution to the economy of the area is noteworthy as an earner of foreign exchange. Its share of the GDP is about 10 %. About 20 % of the employed labour force in Gaza worked in the agricultural sector in 2004, with many more considered to be active in informal agriculture . Moreover, in times of political-economical difficulties such as the prevailing intifada, the sector is known to absorb large numbers of unemployed people who lost their jobs in Israel or in other local sectors of the shrinking economy (PARC, 2004)Gaza Urban Agriculture Palestine

The resulting destruction of agriculture in the West Bank and Gaza are increasing the desertification of the area. The environmental damage to Palestine is key to the occupation efforts. With the destruction of farmland comes further settlement opportunities and urban construction on occupied territory, which creates an economic boom for real estate and construction companies in Israel.

Since the founding of Israel in 1948 the Zionists have justified this destruction of the farmlands by promoting the myth that the Palestinians are lazy and unproductive. It was because the Palestians were in direct competition with them for agricultural exports and still are.

War is just capitalist competition by another name.

See:

Israel

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Soldiers In Our Streets

Remember the warning during the election that the Conservatives would put soldiers in the streets of Canadian Cities. Well it happened. In Ottawa. On Friday. Thousands of 'demonstrators' rallied to support the war in Afghanistan. They happened to be not average, severely normal Canadians. Nope they were our armed forces personnel, their families and the military brass. They were paid civil servants released to go to the rally. And they were addressed Nuremburg Rally style by the Fuerher himself.


Prime Minister Stephen Harper speaks to the rally on Parliament Hill in support of Canada's troops in Afghanistan. (Tom Hanson/Canadian Press)

"Your actions here today are a tangible sign to (soldiers) that their service is not unseen, their actions are not unappreciated and indeed their sacrifice is appreciated greatly," said Gen. Rick Hillier, chief of defence staff, who stood for most of the rally beside Pte. Michael Spence, a soldier wounded in a recent friendly-fire incident.

Does anyone else get nervous when our armed forces gets political and rallies for war. Not in memory of the fallen, but to support war, to support more funding for more weapons of war..Hello. It looks like Thailand. Can you say Coup detat.

Hillier said it is important that the Armed Forces connect with the public.

"We got distanced from society these past decades and when something went horribly wrong, our society, our population was quite eager and quite willing to dispense with us . . . and simply become our critic," he said."We're no longer going to let that occur. This is your army and navy and Armed Forces," he told the crowd.

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Climate Change Skeptics the New Flat Earthers

When the Wall Street Journal published and editorial this summer attacking the scientific facts behind global warming and climate change it strayed from its usual area of expertise in economics to tangle with science.

Now of course economics is not a science, no matter how hard it tries to be one. It is at best a statistical model. As G.B.Shaw said if you put all the economists in the world end to end they would still not reach a conclusion.

Well the WSJ editorial got much play in the conservative blogosphere and in the right wing press as yet another conclusive reason to deny the obvious, and to deny the 'science' of global warming. It's called grasping at straws. Or in this case hockey sticks. It attacked a graph produced by a climate scientist that modeled global warming over the past 900 years that appeared similar to a hockey stick. The blogosphere and the usual right wing flat earthers had a field day with it.

Well here is a challenge made to the WSJ and to all those of you who oppose the science of global warming, which puts you in the same camp as the creationists. It's from a column in Scientific America. Not known for being a kooky journal.

Fiddling While the Planet Burns

Will the Wall Street Journal's editorial writers accept a challenge to learn the truth about the science of global climate change?

By Jeffrey D. Sachs

The Wall Street Journal editorial page has for years railed against these scientific findings on climate change, even as the global consensus has reached nearly 100 percent of the scientific community, including the reports commissioned by the skeptical Bush White House.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page completely ignored this report. Instead, it cited a report commissioned by Congressman Barton from three statisticians with no background in climate science, who quibbled with aspects of Mann's methodology. Yet climate scientists quickly showed that addressing the criticisms has no practical effect on Mann's conclusions. Nonetheless, on this thoroughly flimsy and misleading basis, the editorial page declared that "there's no reason to believe that Mr. Mann, or his 'hockey stick' graph of global temperature changes, is right," called the research "dubious," and said that the climate science community "often more closely resembles a mutual-admiration society than a competitive and open-minded search for scientific knowledge." In other words, it hid the evidence and trashed climate science.

Many of the paper's own reporters laugh or cringe at the anti-scientific posture of the editorials, and advise the rest of us simply not to read them. Nevertheless, the consequences of those editorials are significant. The Wall Street Journal is the most widely read business paper in the world. Its influence is extensive. Yet it gets a free pass on editorial irresponsibility.

As a neighbor to the paper at Columbia University, the Earth Institute has repeatedly invited the editorial team to meet with leading climate scientists. I've offered to organize such a meeting in any way that the editorial board would like. On many occasions, the news editors have eagerly accepted, but the editorial writers have remained safe in their splendid isolation.

Yes Mr. Sachs is that Mr. Sachs, the economist not a climate scientist. But he has them ready to take on the flatearth society that is the editorial board of the WSJ and the science reporters at Fox.

RealClimate heartily endorses such an approach and, while we leave it to others to judge who the 'world leading' authorities are, we'd certaintly be willing to chip in if asked. To those who would decry this as a waste of time, we would point to The Economist who recently produced a very sensible special on global warming and proposed a number of economically viable ways to tackle it, despite having been reflexively denialist not that many years ago. If the Economist can rise to the challenge, maybe there is hope for the Wall Street Journal....

Any takers?


See:

Global Warming


Climate Change




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The Pentacost of Poverty

Your Sunday Sermon.

Ok folks what do these two points have in common?


Empire of Oil: Capitalist Dispossession and the Scramble for Africa
Michael Watts
Everyone’s worst urban nightmare—Lagos—grew from 300,000 to 13 million in over fifty years and is expected to become part of a vast Gulf of Guinea slum of 60 million poor along a littoral corridor 600 kilometers stretching from Benin City to Accra by 2020. Black Africa will contain 332 million slum dwellers by 2015, a figure expected to double every fifteen years. The pillaging and privatization of the state—whatever its African “pathologies”—and the African commons is the most extraordinary spectacle of accumulation by dispossession, all made in the name of foreign assistance. The involution of the African city, notes Mike Davis (Planet of Slums, Verso, 2005) has as its corollary not an insurgent lumpenproletariat but rather a vast political universe of Islamism and Pentecostalism. It is this occult world of invisible powers—whether populist Islam in Kano or witchcraft in Soweto—that represents the most compelling ideological legacy of neoliberal utopianism in Africa.


Monthly Review January 2006 James Straub Unions and Evangelicals In The Rust Belt

However, it remains undeniable that Bush’s Ohio victory did come in part from a massive outpouring of socially conservative evangelical Christians to the polls. A large majority of these Republican evangelicals were blue-collar Ohioans voting against their self-interest, many mobilized by Burress’s anti-gay marriage amendment.

Africa and America share a common problem. One has no manufacturing base and the other has lost it. When the poor get poorer they turn to religion rather than revolution. And in particular to evangelical faiths ( be it charismastic Islam or Christianity) and faithhealers, witchdoctors, etc. that profess a direct relationship with god, possession by god in fact (pentacost) , to feel that they have power in a world where they are in fact powerless.

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right

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Happy Birthday Mrs.Satan

An advocate of Free Love, womens rights, workers rights, free thinker, first published the Communist Manifesto in here weekly newspaper, spiritualist, and successful Wall Street wheeler dealer. Oh yes and she was the first woman to run for President of the U.S. Her opponents called her Mrs. Satan.


I'd rather travel the hardest path of matrimony than follow your footsteps

This Harper's Weekly cartoon by Thomas Nast warns against the allure of the Free Love movement advocated by Victoria Woodhull.


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Free Trade and Africa

Funny thing synchronicity. No sooner had I finished this mornings rant here about Aid and Free Trade than I should find this article in the latest issue of Monthly Review, the Independent Socialist monthly from the U.S. It too refers to Easterly and the neo-liberal arguments for trade not aid and its distortions of the market in Africa. It is available on line.

REVIEW OF THE MONTH
Empire of Oil: Capitalist Dispossession and the Scramble for Africa
Michael Watts

William Easterly, former high-ranking World Bank apparatchik, in his new lacerating demolition of structural adjustment—“a quarter century of economic failure and political chaos”—boldly states that the entire unaccountable enterprise of planned reform is “absurd” (http://www.nyu.edu/fas/institute/dri/Easterly/). It was Africa after all that was the testing ground for the Hayekian counter-revolution that swept through development economics in the 1970s. It began with the publication of Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Agenda for Action (known as the “Berg Report”), the first in a series of World Bank reports that focus on the development problems of sub-Saharan Africa. This was the first systematic attempt to take the Chicago Boys experience in post-Allende Chile and impose it on an entire continent. The ideas of Elliot Berg and his fellow travelers marked the triumph of a long march by the likes of Peter Bauer, H. G. Johnson, and Deepak Lal (ably supported by the monetarist think tanks such as the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Mont Pelerin Society, and the astonishing rise to power from the early presence of Leo Strauss and Fredrich Hayek of the “Chicago School”) through the development institutions like the World Bank. Long before shock therapy in Eastern Europe or even the debt-driven “adjustments” in Latin America, it was sub-Saharan Africa that was the playground for neoliberalism’s assault. According to the United Nations, twenty-six of thirty-two sub-Saharan states had a “liberal” economic regime by 1998. Almost all had experienced some sort of structural adjustment program in the wake of the Berg report.

The neoliberal tsunami broke with a dreadful ferocity on African cities, and the African slum world in particular. Reform—the privatization of public utilities creating massive corporate profits and a decline in service provision, the slashing of urban services, the immiseration of many sectors of the public workforce, the collapse of manufactures and real wages, and often the disappearance of the middle class—was remorselessly anti-urban in its effects, as Mike Davis documents in Planet of Slums (Verso, 2005). As a consequence, African cities confronted the horrifying realities of an economic contraction of 2–5 percent per year combined with sustained population growth of up to 10 percent per annum (Zimbabwe’s urban labor market grew by 300,000 per year in the 1990s while urban employment grew by just 3 percent of that figure).

The neoliberal tsunami broke with a dreadful ferocity on African cities, and the African slum world in particular. Reform—the privatization of public utilities creating massive corporate profits and a decline in service provision, the slashing of urban services, the immiseration of many sectors of the public workforce, the collapse of manufactures and real wages, and often the disappearance of the middle class—was remorselessly anti-urban in its effects, as Mike Davis documents in Planet of Slums (Verso, 2005). As a consequence, African cities confronted the horrifying realities of an economic contraction of 2–5 percent per year combined with sustained population growth of up to 10 percent per annum (Zimbabwe’s urban labor market grew by 300,000 per year in the 1990s while urban employment grew by just 3 percent of that figure).

What is especially striking is that the fear that Africa was largely marginal to the circuits of capitalist accumulation and global resource flows during the 1980s and might be marginalized further, in some respects, proved to be a massive understatement. It is almost shocking to think that in the 1970s, Africa accounted for 25 percent of FDI to the third world. By 2000 it had crashed to 3.8 percent (Africa’s share of world FDI is currently less than 1 percent).

It is no surprise that against this backdrop the development establishment flails around wildly. On the one side stands former World Bank economist William Easterly for whom all aid (“planning”) has been a total (and unaccountable) failure. The solution is not to plan at all. Rather than planners—in his view the IMF/IBRD stenographers are really Stalinists in neoliberal garb—and the likes of Bono and Tony Blair, we need to find a raft of “searchers” like microcredit guru Mohammed Yunus. On the other stands the one-man industry otherwise known as Jeffrey Sachs who seeks to expand foreign aid—$30 billion a year for Africa—and to initiate a Global Compact by which “the rich will help save the poor,” who are as much hampered by poor physical geography as governance failure.

The African accumulation crisis, and the dynamics of capital and trade flows, are in practice complex and uneven. In addition to oil (and the very few cases of manufacturing growth in places like Mauritius which are little more than national export-processing platforms), the other source of economic dynamism is the (uneven) emergence of global value chains. This can be seen especially in relation to high-value agricultures (fresh fruits and vegetables) in South Africa, flowers in Kenya, green beans in Senegal. Such forms of contract production, typically buyer-driven commodity chains in which retailers exert enormous power, have created islands of agrarian capitalism that contribute to and deepen patterns of existing inequality across Africa and further the interests of business elites, which are often not African. The deepening of commodification in the countryside in tandem with demographic pressures (caused as much by civil war and displacement as high fertility regimes) has made land struggles a vivid part of the new landscape of African development.

See:

Africa

Neo-Liberalism

Aid

Oil



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Free Trade Not Aid

My fellow blog combatants from the right will be surprized that I agree with them.

Aid is not the anwer; economic freedom is says Damination, which by the way is one of the better Blogging Tories. Thoughtful and insightful articles can actually be found here, even though I disagree with them. As I will here.

It is a review of Wayne Easterly's book which the neo-liberal CATO Journal has also reviewed.

The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good
by William Easterly
Reviewed by Prakash Loungani
Cato Journal
An Interdisciplinary Journal of Public Policy Analysis
Volume 26 Number 2, Spring/Summer 2006

In 1982, Peter Bauer coauthored an article with the title “Foreign Aid
Isn’t.” This title could serve as an apt summary of William Easterly’s new
book. In “Development Aid: End It or Mend It” (International Center for Economic Growth, Occasional Papers No. 43, 1993), Bauer railed against calling it aid because “it promotes an unquestioning attitude. It disarms criticism, obscures realities, and prejudges results. Who could be against aid to the less fortunate? The term has enabled aid supporters to claim a monopoly of compassion and to dismiss critics as lacking in understanding and sympathy”
Bauer then went on to note the more substantive criticism that “the term also clearly implies that the policy must benefit the population of the recipient countries, which is not the case.” Easterly agrees: “ The West spent $2.3 trillion on foreign aid over the last five decades,” he
writes, adding that he feels like “a Scrooge” for pointing out that all this “well-meaning compassion” has brought about little improvement in the lot of the world’s poor.

We can look at Canada's foreign aid as an example it has been aimed at prop up Canadian trade with the developing world. The money goes to governments who then purchase goods and services from Canadian businesses. It is another corporate subsidy. For instance our much lauded aid to Afghanistan is perfect example of this.

Afghan mission cost: $3.5B or far more

Documents tabled in the House on Monday also listed the top 20 highest-value contracts issued in connection with the Afghanistan deployment. The single largest line item was a $200-million contract for logistic support at the Canadian base in Kabul, awarded to a joint venture of Quebec engineering firm SNC Lavalin and California-based Pacific Architects and Engineers (PAE).

The government has also spent $92.4 million for Nyala armoured patrol vehicles made by General Dynamics Land Systems, and $37.9 million on howitzer artillery pieces from BAE Systems in the U.S. and Britain.

Two foreign companies, based in United Arab Emirates and Monaco, were paid more than $10 million to provide accommodations and food for Canadian troops in Kandahar.

And it is by far the largest aid package that Canada is giving to any developing country. It is in short war profiteering as much as it is Aid for development. See my; Foreign Aid Or War Profiteering

No country in the world receives more foreign aid from Canada than Afghanistan. Ottawa is committing $100 million a year until 2011. Earlier this year, the United States turned over responsibility for a large part of Afghanistan to NATO, which includes Canada. Under American leadership, Senlis said $82 billion US was spent on military operations in Afghanistan, compared with $7 billion US on development since 2002. Development a slow road in unstable Afghanistan

NGO's themselves are the new form of business which fail to actually use business practices because they are in the compassion business. Whether directly state funded or charities their record is one of too little too late, and a complete failure to follow good business practices. Which is why so much international aid fails to reach those that need it. One merely needs to reflect on recent crisises such as the Indonesian Tsunami or the earthquake in Pakistan to see the failure of international AID. And its corruption. In the latter case funds to Pakistan for aid were diverted to Muslim terrorists.

The failure of this mode of business can be seen in Afghanistan.

A fact-packed report issued in June 2005 by Action Aid, a widely respected NGO headquartered in Johannesburg, makes sense of the workings of that world. The report studied development aid given by all countries globally and discovered that only a small part of it - maybe 40% - is real. The rest is "phantom" aid; that is, the money never actually shows up in recipient countries at all.

Some of it doesn't even exist except as an accounting item, as when countries count debt relief or the construction costs for a fancy new embassy in the aid column. A lot of it never leaves home. Paychecks for American "experts" under contract to USAID, for example, go directly from the agency to their US banks without ever passing through the to-be-reconstructed country. Much aid money, the report concludes, is thrown away on "overpriced and ineffective technical assistance", such as those very hot-shot American experts. And a big chunk of it is carefully "tied" to the donor nation, which means that the recipient is obliged to use the donated money to buy products from the donor country, even when - especially when - the same goods are available cheaper at home.

The US easily outstrips other nations at most of these scams, making it second only to France as the world's biggest purveyor of phantom aid. Fully 47% of US development aid is lavished on overpriced technical assistance. By comparison, only 4% of Sweden's aid budget and only 2% of Luxembourg's and Ireland's goes to such assistance. As for tying aid to the purchase of donor-made products, Sweden and Norway don't do it all; neither do Ireland and the United Kingdom. But 70% of US aid is contingent upon the recipient spending it on American stuff, especially US-made armaments. Considering all these practices, Action Aid calculates that 86 cents of every dollar of US aid is phantom aid.

In 2001, Andrew Natsios, then head of USAID, cited foreign aid as "a key foreign-policy instrument" designed to help other countries "become better markets for US exports". To guarantee that mission, the State Department recently took over the formerly semi-autonomous aid agency. And since the aim of American aid is to make the world safe for American business, USAID now cuts in business from the start. It sends out requests for proposals to a short list of the usual suspects and awards contracts to those bidders currently in favor. (Election-time kickbacks influence the list of favorites.) Why it's not working in Afghanistan

As I wrote here Marx also agreed that trade was essential to the development of capitalism within the rotting structure of old fuedalist nations like India. But that was not all that was required. Any more than trade and aid and reconstruction will create a capitalist economy in Afhganistan.

These small stereotype forms of social organism (the village community .ed) have been to the greater part dissolved, and are disappearing, not so much through the brutal interference of the British tax-gatherer and the British soldier, as to the working of English steam and English free trade. Those family-communities were based on domestic industry, in that peculiar combination of hand-weaving, hands-spinning and hand-tilling agriculture which gave them self-supporting power. English interference having placed the spinner in Lancashire and the weaver in Bengal, or sweeping away both Hindoo spinner and weaver, dissolved these small semi-barbarian, semi-civilized communities, by blowing up their economical basis, and thus produced the greatest, and to speak the truth, the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia. Karl Marx

Industrial production was also required in fact Marx criticized the monopoly of British Imperialism and its failure to create a competitive mode of production, because it was not in the interests of the monopoly capitalists of his day, in this case the Dutch East India Company. Anymore than it is in the interests of the international monopolies today. Who use the state and its trade agreements to further their own profit and power. American corporations like Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill for example, who are the new Ductch East Indian Companies of today. Who live off subsidies at home and preferntial trade deals abroad.

That production rests on the supreme rule of capital. The centralization of capital is essential to the existence of capital as an independent power. The destructive influence of that centralization upon the markets of the world does but reveal, in the most gigantic dimensions, the inherent organic laws of political economy now at work in every civilized town. The bourgeois period of history has to create the material basis of the new world — on the one hand universal intercourse founded upon the mutual dependency of mankind, and the means of that intercourse; on the other hand the development of the productive powers of man and the transformation of material production into a scientific domination of natural agencies. Bourgeois industry and commerce create these material conditions of a new world in the same way as geological revolutions have created the surface of the earth. Marx

The inherent logic of free trade and the idea of creating productive capitalism in Africa and other non industrialized developing countries is counter intuitive to those who would maintain their monopolies. In other words large Transnational corporations and banks are not interested in development perse, because it would lead to competition against their own interests.

Nearly all of Easterly’s conclusions serve to highlight the prescience of Bauer’s work.
While the book’s main targets appear to be Jeffrey Sachs, the United
Nations, and bilateral aid agencies, international financial institutions
(IFIs) such as the World Bank and the IMF that make loans to lowincome
countries also come in for strong criticism. Though these loans
are made conditional on countries carrying out agreed reforms, Easterly
questions how effective this “intrusive and complex conditionality” turns
out to be in practice. One reason why conditions are ineffective is that
“each loan is an attempt to engineer paradise rather than do piecemeal
reforms”
The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good


An example of how Transnational corporations distort the market can be found in China's newly developing Fordist economy. Privatization of state enterprizes is a local phenomena while the state capitalist controled industries are becoming Private-Public Partnerships (P3's) with global multinational corporations.

Huang, Y. (2003) Selling China: Foreign Direct Investment during the Reform
Era. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. finds that overseas Chinese capital has been an important means though which the non-state enterprises have overcome the distortions in China’s capital markets.
By contrast, the direct investment by foreign multinationals has gone mainly to SOEs.
Much of this capital has been misappropriated. The multinationals retain ownership of
nearly all technology. They also provide the marketing outlet for most of the industrial
exports from the non-SOEs, which have become processing centers of multinational firms.
For an enthralling account of how multinational investments to modernize state enterprises
have failed, see Crissold, T. (2004) Mr. China. London: Constable and Robinson.
The Economist (2004) “ Growth Spreads Inland.” November 18: 13.
(2005) “Special Report: China’s Champions.” January 8: 59–61.
Deepak Lal
A Proposal to Privatize Chinese Enterprises and End Financial Repression
Cato Journal
Volume 26 Number 2, Spring/Summer 2006

Over and over again we see that the only alternative to Aid is not trade, free or fair because trade and aid are two faces of the same coin.

he U.S. approach to globalization has been ad hoc, relying on the bilateral influence of the U.S. Treasury and private financial firms, such as Moody's and Standard & Poor's. European policymakers, in contrast, have sought to create new rules for the international system and empower international organizations, such as the EU, OECD, and IMF, to enforce them. French policymakers invented the doctrine of "managed globalization" as an alternative to U.S.-centric ad hoc globalization. A handful of French policymakers—all of them socialists, paradoxically—first liberalized France and then, upon taking leadership roles in international organizations, sought to organize and manage the process of globalization with new jurisdictions and rules.The vast majority of capital flows not from rich to poor countries, but rather among the rich countries of the EU and OECD. With a few exceptions, China, India, and Brazil among them, most developing countries have little access to financial globalization. How Europe Wrote the Rules of Global Finance


What is necassary for the development of capitalism is industrialization in particular Fordism. The creation of mass industrial production in the cities. This can be supplemented by localized craft and agricultural production. But in reality these can never replace the need to create jobs in the cities. Capitalization of industry is not on the agenda for the WTO, IMF or any other form of bilateral or multilateral trade agreements. And it certainly is not the focus of international aid.

The reality is that State Capitalism was never implemented successfully in the vast majority of the Third World despite the nationalist struggles against colonialism for the last four decades. Like Zimbabwe these regimes are pure and simple autarky. Despite their left wing rhetoric. Only where State Capitalism existed in countries like Viet Nam, China, Iran. etc. have the preconditions been met for the development of an industrialized economy. As I have said before it is because State Capitalism in all its forms (the Soviet model, the fascist model, the Roosevelt model and the Keyensian model) is the historic development of capitalism in the late 20th Century. It is required for the centralization of capital in the nation state.

As Marx said; That production rests on the supreme rule of capital. The centralization of capital is essential to the existence of capital as an independent power.

See:

Africa

Aid

Afghanistan

Marx

Capitalism

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