Category: Politics

Bolivian Prospects

by Matthijs Krul

The Movimiento Al Socialismo (MAS) of the reigning President of Bolivia, Evo Morales, has won the regional elections held on April 9th of this year.(1) Morales is the first elected President of Bolivia to be fully Native American, despite the great majority of the Bolivian population being Aymará or Quechua. For most of its history, the country has been governed by a swift succession of military dictators, vassal oligarchs of the United States and assorted strongmen. Universal suffrage was only introduced in 1951 by the reformist MNR party, which was subsequently overthrown by a series of juntas.

Much of the conflict has revolved around the main economic products of Bolivia: its enormous tin mines (it is the world’s largest tin producer) and the coca leaves grown as export crop by the country’s many poor farmers, which forms the basis for the drug cocaine. Continue reading “Bolivian Prospects” →

Two Minor Notes on Job Creation and Atheist Policy

by Matthijs Krul

The mirage of ‘creating jobs’

In this time of crisis, unemployment is once again high on the public’s agenda. In the United States, even official unemployment has reached figures as high as 10%, and in many Western European countries things are not much better. Hundreds of billions in public debt have been piled up to combat this, because every politician knows that their continuance in office depends first and foremost on satisfying the constituents’ demands, and what they demand is jobs. But here as always the limits of the liberal understanding of the world show themselves immediately, namely in the way they go about defending their employment policies. Everywhere in the Western states the emphasis is on the process of ‘job creation’ by the capitalist market system. Everywhere the one criterion for a measure or bill is whether it will or will not make the market ‘create jobs’.

A recent article in Time magazine illustrates the issue quite well. Continue reading “Two Minor Notes on Job Creation and Atheist Policy” →

Crisis in Greece

by Matthijs Krul

A commonly heard expression among politicians and newspapers during this economic crisis has been the phrase “too big to fail”. It refers to the basic principle under capitalism that in times of crisis, which capitalism necessarily engenders every now and then, the largest companies and banks cannot be allowed to go bankrupt. Smaller businesses can go bankrupt, millions can become unemployed, but a truly ‘free’ market solution of bankruptcy for all overinvested corporations would so thoroughly destroy any modern advanced economy that it would inevitably lead to revolt and revolution. To stave this off, any amount of tax money and borrowing is therefore justified to save banks and companies of such size that their fall would risk taking everything else with it. As a result, real unemployment in the United States is estimated to be around 16%, yet enormous sums in the billions of dollars have been borrowed by its government to prop up the profitability of its largest banks and insurers, from AIG to Goldman Sachs.(1)

Yet rarely is this expression used for an entire country, even though there is no reason why entire economies should not have the same position within regional wholes. Where Iceland has now gone essentially bankrupt as a result of its ultraliberal banking policies and the subsequent extortion of its debtors by the Netherlands and Great Britain, its small size and relatively one-sided economy prevents this from becoming a major economic problem. The same cannot be said of Greece. Continue reading “Crisis in Greece” →

Crisis in Haiti

by Matthijs Krul

When an earthquake of 7.0 on the Moment scale struck the country of Haiti recently, this led to a total collapse of the government, economy and social institutions of this already plagued country. Some 200.000 people are estimated to have died, on a total population of about 9 million – the proportional equivalent of some 7 million Americans dying at once. It killed also the opposition leader, the Archbishop, and most of the staff of the United Nations mission in Haiti, MINUSTAH. There has subsequently been an outpouring of foreign aid and medical support from many countries around the world. And yet the question about this long-suffering country remains: how come it was so poor and so unprepared? Haiti is not far from the United States, one of the world’s richest countries, and yet it is itself one of the world’s poorest, and has been so for a long time.

To understand Haiti’s history, we must go back to the days of Columbus. Continue reading “Crisis in Haiti” →

BAE and the Arms Trade

by Matthijs Krul

The British arms manufacturing giant BAE (British Aerospace) has been fined some 286 million pounds sterling for bribing government officials in Third World countries to place orders with their company.(1) Among other activities, they bribed officials in Tanzania to order an advanced radar system for defense in that country, even though Tanzania is not likely to be at war with anyone and is one of the poorer nations in the world. What makes the case all the more remarkable is the fact that earlier on British prosecutors intended to prosecute over bribery of Saudi officials to the same purpose, but that a combined action from then Prime Minister Tony Blair and the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, quashed the case, in order not to offend the Western ‘allies’ in Saudi Arabia. In this manner, they showed that neither rule of law nor combating theocracy mean anything to the gentlemen politicians who rule our countries, but that only strategic maneouvers do. Little seems to have changed since the days of the ‘Great Game’ and the Victorian approach to international relations. Continue reading “BAE and the Arms Trade” →