This Week in the Americas
Fear and Loathing in the North
By Tom Barry
President Bush signed a bill this week authorizing the construction of a 700-mile fence along the U.S.-Mexico border. Immigration experts and counterterrorism experts say that this new plan to barricade the southern border will have little impact on immigration flows and terrorist networks.
This new “homeland security” project is latest in the administration's campaign to impose a politics of fear in the United States that keeps voters supporting militarism and nationalism as the best guarantors of U.S. welfare and security. In this case, the signing of the border security bill in the advent of mid-term elections was in effect a political advertisement designed to convince voters that their security is best left in the hands of tough-minded Republicans.
The politics of fear and hate have long unified the U.S. electorate. For four decades the Cold War created bipartisan support for a military-industrial complex at home and for U.S.-supported “national security states” in Latin America and elsewhere in the third world. The “global war on terrorism” and the post-Sept. 11 attention to homeland security largely revived public support for a foreign policy whose two pillars are fear and power.
Fortunately there are signs that the politics of fear and loathing in the United States are no longer winning the hearts and minds of voters. As evident in the declining popularity of the president and the Republican Congress, the public is losing faith that a foreign policy that asserts global dominance and disdains diplomacy is making the world a safer place.
Three recent polls in the United States show a U.S. electorate that favors a new approach to international relations.
In a poll conducted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, three out of four interviewed expressed concern that the U.S. government was too inclined to play the role of a “world policeman.” Another poll released last week by Foreign Affairs, the magazine of the Council on Foreign Relations, found that 80% of those polled believed that the world was becoming a more dangerous place and nearly 90% considered rising anti-U.S. sentiment worldwide to constitute a national security threat.
Another poll conducted by the Program on International Policy Attitudes similarly underscored the swelling dissatisfaction with the effectiveness of the Bush administration's foreign policy while also finding that a large majority of respondents preferred a radically different approach to international relations, favoring cooperation over unilateralism and U.S. military dominance.
“What kind of foreign policy does the American public want?” That was the central question posed by a new PIPA poll. Among the main findings of this polling of 1,058 Americans were that “the United States would best serve the national interests by thinking in terms of being a ‘good neighbor'” and that the U.S. government “plays too much on the public's fear to justify its foreign policies.”
Seventy-nine percent of those polled believed that “the United States should think in terms of being a good neighbor with other countries because cooperative relationships are ultimately in the best interests of the United States.” That same broad majority opted for the view that the “U.S. should coordinate its power together with other countries according to shared ideas of what is best for the world as a whole.”
Sixty-five percent agreed with the statement: “When the U.S. government justifies its foreign policies to the American people, it plays on people's fears too much.”
The new poll, completed Oct. 15, gives good reason to believe that there is a large sector of the U.S. public that would support a foreign policy that reflects the good neighbor principles of mutual respect and cooperation. It also pointed to the underlying need for a foreign policy based on hope and determination rather than on fear.
Indicators that there will soon be a shift in political power in Congress from the Republicans to the Democrats and new polling evidence of the deep dissatisfaction with current U.S. foreign policy offer some hope that the politics of reason and cooperation are ascending in the United States as the politics of fear and loathing lose their hold.
Tom Barry is policy director of the International Relations Center, online at www.irc-online.org.
New from the IRC Americas Program:
Brazil: What’s at Stake in the Second Round
By Emir Sader
What is at stake in the second round presidential election is whether Brazil will subordinate its future to free trade policies or put its money on the regional integration processes. If Brazil will be a country, a society, a nation—democratic and sovereign—or be reduced to a stock market, a shopping mall surrounded by poverty on all sides.
Everything is at stake in the second round. Facing this situation, no one can be neutral, no one equidistant, no one can be indifferent.
Emir Sader is Brazilian, coordinator of the Laboratory of Public Policies of the University of the State of Rio de Janeiro, and a monthly contributor to the IRC Americas Program. He is the author, among other books, of La Venganza de la História (Ed. Clacso). First published by Carta Maior and translated by Katherine Kohlstedt.
See full article online at:
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/3589
Solar Energy Week Brings Message Down to Earth in Mexico
By Talli Nauman
National Solar Energy Week is like a breath of fresh air, set against the backdrop of politicking over privatization of the Mexican petroleum industry in the upcoming presidential administration. The occasion fuels hope for clean alternatives to the dirty business of oil exploitation.
While the National Solar Energy Association (ANES) was holding its event October 2-6 in Veracruz, on the Gulf Coast of Mexico, the association’s agenda was the most recent addition to an ongoing 30-year effort to structure a national training program to help everyone from kids to scholars to decision-makers to end-users of electricity understand the utility of solar and wind power in cost effectiveness for health and the environment. Once the awareness is raised, great strides can be made in that realm.
Talli Nauman (talli@hughes.net) is an environmental analyst for the IRC Americas Program and founder and co-director of Journalism to Raise Environmental Awareness. This article first appeared in the Herald/Mexico October 9, 2006.
See full article online at:
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/3583
The Dead of Tlatelolco
By Kate Doyle
The Tlatelolco massacre has haunted Mexico for 38 years. Today we have neither an official nor an unofficial version of the massacre at Tlatelolco that explains its enduring mysteries. After eight months of research in official documents, these are the conclusions.
Kate Doyle kadoyle@gwu.edu is an analyst at the National Security Archive in Washington, DC and a collaborator with the IRC Americas Program (www.americaspolicy.org). This article forms part of the Archivos Abiertos series of the National Security Archive and Proceso magazine. The documentation can be found at www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB201/index.htm#documents.
See full article online at:
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/3600
Argentina: Missing Witness Awakens Dark Past
By Marie Trigona
Human rights groups are pointing to provincial police with ties to the 1976-1983 military dictatorship for kidnapping witness Julio Lopez, whose testimony contributed to the first life sentence for a former military officer convicted of crimes against humanity. Will repression cause more disappearances, or make witnesses like Lopez to hesitate to testify?
Marie Trigona is a journalist based in Buenos Aires and a regular contributor to the IRC Americas Program (www.americaspolicy.org). She can be reached at mtrigona@msn.com.
See full article online at:
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/3595
Letters from our Readers
Re: The World Needs its Small Farmers (http://americas.irc-online.org/am/3641)
In her otherwise excellent article, Ms. Carlsen made one comment I disagree with:
“With the advent of the ‘market fixes all' philosophy of recent decades, the structural causes of hunger have been ignored in favor of free market philosophy, technological fixes, and charity-based interventions.”
Corporate agribusiness is about as “free market” an industry as (say) aerospace or Big Pharma. And for all their fake “free market” rhetoric, neoliberal politicians want to keep it essentially state-capitalist. A genuine free market would be corporate agribusiness' worst nightmare.
Among free market policies I'd like to see:
1) eliminating so-called “intellectual property” privileges for GMOs;
2) eliminating regulatory labeling restrictions that prohibit identifying foods as GMO-free;
3) eliminating food libel laws and SLAPP lawsuits;
4) full cost-pricing, rather than subsidies, for irrigation water from government dams, so that giant plantations in rain-poor areas out West are not made artificially competitive against local farmers in rain-rich areas;
5) cost-based pricing to ship freight on the Interstates (i.e., weight-based tolls), so that the cost of shipping stuff thousands of miles from giant agribusiness operations is reflected in the price of the food rather than in our tax bills; and last, but not least,
6) ending U.S. political collusion with landed oligarchies in the Third World, and restoring the traditional property rights of peasant subsistence farmers who have been expropriated in recent decades.
Kevin Carson
