Finished!

After three months a handful of stops and starts, I've finally finished Sean Wilentz's The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln. It is a beast - a beast - of a book, and I'm quite proud of myself for getting through it, however well-written it is.

My dad always says that when you study something in enough detail, then you end up studying everything. That happened a bit in this book - now everywhere I look I see founding fathers and divisive aristorats and democratic rabble-rousers. two examples from today's news. First, Congress's refusal to pass the $700 billion Wall Street bailout (700,000,000,000? What does that number even mean?) harkens straight back to Andrew Jackson's anti-banking instincts, and all the populist rhetoric that it rode on. Second, watching Ecuador fight over and pass its new constitution - a 444-article tome, and Ecuador's twentieth in 200 years - makes me marvel at how sturdy our own little constitution has proven, despite the hardly guaranteed development of democracy in the first half of the 19th century. It was a rough ride, no doubt about it.

When a nation becomes a community

Anxiously, I've been tracking from afar the movements of Hurricane Gustav. From the e-coverage, I draw an encouraging note: Americans of all stripes are demonstrating their concern for New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. State governments are at the ready, the GOP convention is turned upside down, and Gustav dominates the electronic print media. There are all number of plausible reasons for this: leftover guilt from the pathetic response to Katrina three years ago, or political calculation of voters' sympathies in the run-up to November, for example. But even if national politicians are looking out for number one, their calculation must be that their constituents actually care about what happens to their southern brothers and sisters, and so they should too.

One of my chief drivers for traveling (and working with MPI) is this: to work and live and breathe in another country is to make that place and its people part of your own community. I follow Zimbabwean politics because I became friends with Zimbabweans during my time in Botswana; Zak tracks Gustav's path as obsessively as I do because, yankee that he is, he made New Orleans his home and New Orleanians his friends.

What I want - and what I hope we at MPI contribute to - is for Americans to extend their community a little farther south than Plaquemines Parish. The way that Americans now consider folks from Louisiana "us" rather than "them," can we not also do for those who have already battled Gustav in Haiti, Cuba, Jamaica, and the Dominican Republic? Sure, they talk kinda funny down there and eat strange things, but hell - have some boudin on a New Orleans sidestreet and then tell me that we don't, too.

On Sarah Palin

"The question should be whether McCain—and all the other Republicans who have been going on for months about Obama's dangerous lack of foreign policy experience—ever meant a word of it. And the answer is apparently not."

-www.Slate.com (see article)

Barack Obama, MPI and Colombia

In his "New Partnership for the Americas," Barack Obama's Latin America team proposes doubling foreign assistance to Latin America to $50 billion. I'll put aside for now the questions of where that money will from, or what good it will do if coupled with his annoying protectionist pandering, and focus on a positive note.* The report says that the money

"...will focus on bottom-up development by concentrating on micro-finance, vocational training and community development programs."

Over the last couple months, the MPI-Ecuador team has been working on solidifying our approach to community development. Our three areas of focus:

• Empower individuals through programs that develop their capacities to advance economically and educationally, and to become leaders in their communities.
• Strengthen institutions by working alongside them to introduce best practices, connect them to national and international resources, and expand their services.
• Build networks by creating stronger links among community members, connecting people to local institutions, and promoting inter-institutional collaboration.

Not bad to be out in front on this one, and glad that Barack sees this one MPIE's way.

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*I can't leave out this (loyalist) criticism of an otherwise forward-looking plan. From the same Obama document:

Oppose the Colombia Free Trade Deal: While the Colombia Free Trade Agreement has some labor and environmental standards, these protections are undermined by persistent violence in Colombia. Labor protections remain useless in an environment where union leaders are routinely assassinated. Barack Obama will work with Colombia to bring the perpetrators to justice and protect labor activists.

What this position ignores is that labor union leaders have a lower rate of assassination than Colombians at large, and that the current Colombian administration has overseen a vertiginous drop in violence in Colombia. That doesn't speak to Colombia's safety, but it does undercuts the argument that labor union leaders are assassinated "routinely." And in a country as shorn as Colombia, President Uribe's Weberian monopoly on violence, finally bearing fruit, may be the only way to transition the country out of its four decades of guerilla warfare. Punishing Colombian businesses and consumers by cutting off trade hardly inspires Hope and Change.

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For a more professional analysis of Barack Obama's somewhat disconnected Latin American foreign policy, check out this article from Foreign Policy in Focus.

Posting this may be illegal

But maybe The Economist will give me a pass since I'm such a big fan. Below, the latest from the magazine on Ecuador's constitutional politics.

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The good life

Jul 31st 2008 | QUITO
From The Economist print edition

For the president and for lawyers

Correa dictates his socialist credo

IF ONLY size, novelty and good intentions were everything when it came to constitutions, Ecuador would be a paradise. The document approved on July 25th by a Constituent Assembly dominated by supporters of Rafael Correa, the leftist president, is a 444-article behemoth. If approved by a referendum on September 28th, it will become Ecuador’s 20th constitution and the third in as many decades. It is nothing if not politically correct: it bans foreign military bases, promises a “just wage” and enshrines manifold rights, including that to sumak kawsay, or “good living” in Quichua, one of two indigenous languages whose use it now makes official alongside Spanish. Whether it will improve real life in a chronically misgoverned country is another matter.

Mr Correa insists that it will. He says the new constitution puts an end to “partyocracy”, “neoliberalism”, and the rule of economic “mafias”. One of his main aims is to reduce the clashes between the executive and a powerful but fragmented legislature that has seen the past three elected presidents fail to finish their term. The new text does this by substantially increasing presidential power. The president will be able to dismiss the legislature. Mr Correa’s nominees seem sure to form a majority on a powerful new Constitutional Court.

The constitution officially declares Ecuador to have a “social and solidaristic” economy. It gives state-owned companies a dominant role in oil, mining, electricity, transport and telecommunications, reflecting the government’s mistrust of the private sector. “The market is an excellent servant but a terrible master,” says Mr Correa.

This socialist pitch is popular in Ecuador largely because the country was scarred by an economic collapse in 1999, which featured a mishandled banking crisis, hyperinflation and the adoption of the dollar as the currency.

Opponents of Mr Correa worry that the constitution imposes an earlier failed economic model on the country. Although the state already controls much of an oil-dominated economy, the private operators of a handful of water utilities and airports face an uncertain future. The new constitution bans international arbitration and gives priority to local investors over foreigners. So it is certain to drive away almost all foreign investment. The Central Bank will come under presidential control: that paves the way for a possible future abandonment of the dollar in favour of a new local currency, and for the potential massaging of economic statistics.

Mr Correa, a youngish Catholic economist, who took office 18 months ago, remains popular. High oil prices have given him money to spend on social programmes. Public investment is running at twice last year’s level. He is likely to win the referendum, and a fresh election next year. But his success depends on oil money. By writing into it his personal political creed, Mr Correa has almost certainly guaranteed that Ecuador’s latest constitution will not long outlast his tenure of the presidency. And if Ecuadoreans do see much of the good life, they are likely to have to pay for it dearly in the future.

Ecuador v. Chevron, Part II

A couple links my parents found on the lawsuit between Ecuador's Amazon tribes and Chevron. First, a 2003 press release from Chevron; second, the transcript of a Democracy Now radio show that discusses Chevron's actions in Myanmar, Ecuador and DC.

When I studied abroad at St. Andrews, I took an International Political Economy course with Ben Thirkell-White. In addition to mountains of information, one of the most useful tools I took away was the idea of contrasting narratives. Every story has at least two versions, every debate at least two sides.

Narrative number one:

For the last fifty years, big bad Chevron has been operating, with total impunity, across the globe. In Myanmar, they constructed a pipeline that has provided the financial life support to the vicious Burmese junta. In Ecuador, they carelessly dumped/leaked 18 billion tons of toxic waste into streams and lakes, contaminating the only drinking sources in an isolated area the size of Rhode Island. Now that it looks like the latter decision might pinch, Chevron has ramped up its lobbying efforts in DC, pressuring the Bush administrationto punish Ecuador if they don't squash the case.

That's a pretty compelling narrative, at least literarily speaking. It sounds like a plot for a Michael Moore film, or a companion to Blood Diamond.

Narrative numero dos:

In the tradition of American litigiousness, a handful of high-powered American lawyers have convinced a couple of Ecuadorian NGOs that they can pretty easily suck some cash out of Chevron for alleged contamination of lands in Ecuador by Texaco, which Chevron purchased in 2001. Ecuador's schizophrenic political system makes it as likely as not that a friendly administration will award damages in an otherwise frivolous case. If the coin flips well, the lawyers and NGOs (not the indigenous folks, mind you) will be swimming in cash.

The key question, of course, is: How then to tell which is more accurate? More background information welcome.

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Aug 12 update:

An article from CNN yesterday suggests that Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa is resisting involving the Ecuadorian executive branch in the case (suggesting that Chevron's lobbying in DC has proven, or will prove, ineffective).

Ecuador v. Chevron

So far I know next to nothing about the current lawsuit between Ecuador and Chevron-Texaco. Can anybody give me some solid background on it?

Job hunting in The Economist

If you know me well, you know most of my information comes from The Economist. As I've started to think past Manna Project, I've kept my eyes peeled for job ideas. Found two in the July 5 edition. Speaking on Kofi Annan's recent efforts to diffuse the political crisis in Kenya:

Originally, Mr Annan had flown into Nairobi with just two people from the [Centre for Humanitarian Development], a Swiss-based organisation of mediators. During his six weeks or so of mediating he drew on the considerable resources of the UN, but he also made constant use of his CHD backup.

They provided him with tactical advice on the mediation process, such as when to take the negotiators on “retreat” and how to involve the media. And they also drafted agreements as the two sides spoke during the negotiations, so that at the end of a day an agreed statement could be issued immediately to the press. This gave the mediation the vital momentum that Mr Annan wanted.

The Kenyan talks provide a good example of the sort of skills that a new kind of international mediator can bring to the age-old work of conflict resolution. For as the nature of the world’s conflicts has changed in the past decade or so, so the demand for a new type of mediator has grown too.(See article)

Interest piqued. But maybe Coca-Cola has an even better bead on Africa than CHD:

'We see political instability first because we go down as far as we can into the market,' says Alexander Cummings, head of Coca-Cola’s Africa division. The ups and downs during Kenya’s post-election violence this year could be traced in sales of Coke in Nairobi’s slums and in western Kenya’s villages... Mr Cummings admits that Coca-Cola is “on life support” in Zimbabwe. (See article)

When worlds collide

My political world and my actual world, that is.

More indecipherable news from Ecuador

The government of Ecuador seized two television channels and 200 other businesses yesterday, in what they called an effort to recover debts owed by failed Ecuadorian banks that are somehow related to the television stations. You can read more about it here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7497030.stm

As seems so often to be the case, this bit of Ecuadorian politicking is clear as mud.