According to Reuters, Bolivia’s President Evo Morales celebrated International Workers Day (May 1) by expelling the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Mr Morales accused the agency, which operates under State Department auspices, of seeking to “conspire against” the Bolivian people and his government. USAID has been working in Bolivia for almost five decades. According to its website, it dedicated $52.1 million to Bolivia in 2010 .

On previous May Days, Mr Morales announced the nationalization of key industries, such as hydroelectric power and the electricity grid. This year he announced he “would only nationalize the dignity of the Bolivian people”. Speaking at a rally in La Paz, the president said there was “no lack of US institutions which continue to conspire against our people and especially the national government, which is why we’re going to take the opportunity to announce on this May Day that we’ve decided to expel USAID”.

Morales explained the expulsion was in protest to a recent remark by US Secretary of State John Kerry, who referred to Latin America as “the backyard of the United States”. The term evokes strong emotions in the region, which experienced several U.S.-backed coups during the Cold War. The Bolivian leader has threatened USAID with expulsion in the past, asserting that its programs have “political rather than social” ends. He has also accused it of “manipulating” and “using” union leaders.

USAID’s Unsavory Past

I and other veterans of the 1980s Central American solidarity movement are only too aware of USAID’s unsavory past. Its reputation of being used as cover, like many US embassies, for the CIA and other US intelligence agencies, was in large part responsible for President Putin’s decision to expel USAID from Russia last fall.* Many older activists vividly recall USAID’s heavy hand in suppressing domestic opposition (by destabilizing human rights and labor initiatives, meddling in local elections and  collaborating with right wing coups to overturn democratic elections) to US military intervention in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua and maintaining South American dictatorships friendly to US corporate interests.

Bolivian present criticisms of USAID are far more nuanced. The main complaint seems to be that the US agency contrasts unfavorably with European development programs, which are totally open and transparent and consistently consult and collaborate with the Bolivian government. USAID differs significantly in its heavy reliance on private contractors and drug eradication (which is controversial among Bolivian farmers and a low priority for the government), who rarely collaborate with local officials and are generally extremely secretive about their activities.

Mr Morales, who heads his country’s union of coca growers, has also been critical in the past of US counter-narcotic programmes in Bolivia, repeatedly stating that the fight against drugs is driven by geopolitical interests.

In 2008, Mr Morales expelled the US ambassador and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) for allegedly conspiring against his government.

The State Department Response

US state department spokesman Patrick Ventrell rejected the allegations as “baseless and unfounded”. He added “We think the programs have been positive for the Bolivian people, and fully coordinated with the Bolivian government and appropriate agencies under their own national development plan.”

A prepared statement from USAID further read: “Those who will be most hurt by the Bolivian government’s decision are the Bolivian citizens who have benefited from our collaborative work on education, agriculture, health, alternative development, and the environment.”

Evo Morales became Bolivia’s first socialist and indigenous president in 2005. He was re-elected by a landslide in 2009,

*I was interviewed by Voice of Russia radio at the time of the Russian move to expel USAID. The transcripts unfortunately are in pigeon English, with Parts I and II on two separate sites. For this reason, I also include a link to the audio file of the entire interview:

http://english.ruvr.ru/2012_10_16/USAID-CIA-supporting-dictators-and-stifling-democracy-exclusive-interview/

http://bbs.chinadaily.com.cn/thread-803039-1-1.html

Download audio file

photo credit: Alain Bachellier via photopin cc

Crossposted at Daily Censored

  (Above) The first public website – reconstructed at http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

April 30^th marked the 20^th anniversary of the technology behind the World Wide Web becoming available royalty-free to the public. On April 30, 1993 the Swiss group CERN made the software used to operate the World Wide Web available to the entire world at no charge. CERN or European Organization for Nuclear Research (French: Organisation européenne pour la recherche nucléaire ) was originally established to operate the the world’s largest particle laboratory.

When the World Wide Web was first invented by British physicist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, there was a royalty charge to use the software necessary to access it. Between 1989 and 1993 the physicists at CERN expanded and improved on W3 software to facilitate rapid document exchange between their physicists. Then in 1993 they made the momentous decision to “democratize the Word Wide Web” by making the software available royalty-free on an Open Source basis. This gift of W3 software to the “commons” was a marked departure from a growing drive by corporations to privatize other publicly held aspects by converting them into profit-generating commodities.

I love the first sentence about aiming “to give universal access to a large universe of documents.” Talk about understatement.

In their coverage of the 20^th anniversary of the World Wide Web, World Business Report interviewed Joi Ito, director of MIT’s Media Lab. Under his leadership, the Media Lab seems to be carrying on in the CERN tradition of democratizing the Internet. Ito insists one of the main purposes of Media Lab is to foster technology that ensures everyone has access to the Internet and (surprisingly) that everyone learns to write computer code. He makes specific reference to a free computer coding program for children called “Scratch.” After checking out the website (http://scratch.mit.edu/), I’ve decided this is the appropriate level for me to start it – if I do decide to take up computer coding, that is.

Ito also talks about a concept referred to as “frugal engineering,” which is the specific application of design concepts to third world societies. Reportedly a “frugal engineering” approach led to the development of India’s $2,000 Tato Car released in 2009 (with a carbon fiber frame that’s far cheaper to manufacture than steel). It sounds to me this initiative is roughly comparable to what we called “appropriate technology” in the 1970s.

Finally he reminds us about other important Open Source Internet technologies that have developed in recent years including Linux (the free Open Source alternative to Microsoft Windows) and Voice Over Internet Protocol (first introduced as Skype). I wonder how significant it is that neither was developed in the US – Linux was developed in Finland and Skype in Estonia. If they had been, I seriously doubt either would have been freely publicly available as Open Source. I suspect American software developers (or more accurately, their corporate employers) would have succumbed to the temptation to exploit them for the profit-making potential.

An attack on “crony capitalism” David Stockman, Reagan’s former budget director, published in the the March 31^st New York Times has come in for major attack from both the right and left. Given the piece provides a fairly accurate analysis of America’s current economic woes, I find this quite sad.

Stockman also attacks  crony capitalism (i.e. government corrupted by corporate interests) in his latest book The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America.

I find  it a little astonishing to see a so-called conservative come up with so many progressive-sounding solutions for America’s economic mess. For example: 1) 100% public financing of elections 2) Restricting the duration of campaigns (like they do in New Zealand). 3) Prohibiting lobbying, for life, by anyone who has been on a legislative or executive payroll. 4) Overturning Citizens United. 5) Ending the corrosive financialization that has turned Wall Street into a giant casino since the 1970s. 6) Eliminating access by Wall Street Banks to cheap Federal Reserve loans 7) Banning banks from trading, underwriting and money management in all its forms [I wonder if this means he supports the IMF proposal to end the ability of private banks to create money in the form of loans?] 8) Reigning in the Federal Reserve by ending their ability to buy government debt and micromanage the economic [some of us would go all the way and abolish it].

Here’s an excerpt from the end of the oped:

“All this would require drastic deflation of the realm of politics and the abolition of incumbency itself, because the machinery of the state and the machinery of re-election have become conterminous. Prying them apart would entail sweeping constitutional surgery: amendments to give the president and members of Congress a single six-year term, with no re-election; providing 100 percent public financing for candidates; strictly limiting the duration of campaigns (say, to eight weeks); and prohibiting, for life, lobbying by anyone who has been on a legislative or executive payroll. It would also require overturning Citizens United and mandating that Congress pass a balanced budget, or face an automatic sequester of spending.

It would also require purging the corrosive financialization that has turned the economy into a giant casino since the 1970s. This would mean putting the great Wall Street banks out in the cold to compete as at-risk free enterprises, without access to cheap Fed loans or deposit insurance. Banks would be able to take deposits and make commercial loans, but be banned from trading, underwriting and money management in all its forms.

It would require, finally, benching the Fed’s central planners, and restoring the central bank’s original mission: to provide liquidity in times of crisis but never to buy government debt or try to micromanage the economy. Getting the Fed out of the financial markets is the only way to put free markets and genuine wealth creation back into capitalism.”

I guess America’s stubborn economic difficulties have at least one silver lining. In the mad scramble to identify workable solutions, conventional notions of right, left and progressive are rapidly breaking down. I have always found such labels arbitrary, artificial and too easily hijacked by the two major parties – who can’t see beyond the banks and corporations who are funding their next campaign.

photo credit: The Aspen Institute via photopin cc

Crossposted at Daily Censored

In February New Zealand actress Lucy Lawless (aka Xena the Warrior Princess) and Greenpeace jubilantly celebrated Shell oil’s announcement that they wouldn’t drill the Arctic in 2013, as previously announced.

Coincidentally Lawless was sentenced the same month for her four day “occupation” of the rig of Shell’s oil exploration vessel, The Noble Discoverer, while it was docked here in New Plymouth. Lawless and six other Greenpeace activists were sentenced to 120 hours community work and ordered to pay Port Taranaki $651.44 each in reparations.

Clearly the highly publicized February 2012 protest, which persuaded two million people to sign onto the Greenpeace campaign to block Arctic drilling, had a major influence over Shell’s decision. However according to Greenpeace, it was also the first in a comedy of errors plaguing Shell’s billion-dollar Arctic drilling scheme.

In April Lloyd’s of London insurance company dismissed Shell’s oil spill response plan as  inadequate for the fragile Arctic ecosystem. In June Greenpeace teamed up with the Yes Men to spoof the Arctic drilling plan with “Arctic Ready”, a giant Internet hoax mocking polar bears for interfering with oil exploration. In July the US Coast Guard declared a key vessel in Shell’s oil spill response fleet unseaworthy and The Noble Discoverer itself ran aground in Alaska. In November the ship’s engine caught fire. In December Shell’s oil rig, The Kulluk, ran aground off the coast of Alaska while being towed to harbor in Seattle.

Lawless is extremely proud of her participation in the protest action. “For my part I feel I owe it to my children to be counted among those demanding immediate action on climate change. If we don’t stand up to companies like Shell and call them to account for their reckless pursuit of oil into the farthest unspoiled reaches of the world, who will?”

photo credit: artvixn via photopin cc

Paulo Freire

This is the fifth of a series of guest posts by Dr Danny Weil from an article (World Class Standards: Whose World, Which Economic Classes and What Standards?) he originally published in Daily Censored.

In this fifth section Dr Weil presents the other side of the “standards” debate, by briefly outlining “radical pedagogy,” a freedom-affirming approach to education that facilitates inquiry, discovery and social change.

***

Critical Pedagogy and the Progressive Post-Modernist Position

By Dr Danny Weil

“The problem of education in its relation to the direction of social change is all one with the problem of finding out what democracy means in its total range of concrete applications: domestic, international, religious, cultural economic and political.  …The trouble… is that we have taken democracy for granted; we have thought and acted as if our forefathers had founded it once and for all.”- John Dewey (Democracy and Education, 1997 p 357-358)

Unlike cultural conservative, economic conservative, and neo-liberal notions of education, radical pedagogy and progressive post-modernism, as pronounced and defined by Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire, in his landmark book Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), attaches a completely different and contrary meaning and purpose to education.  For Freire and his progressive post-modern contemporaries, education is not an impartial act, but a conscious political act of freedom and love aimed at subjective exploration, self-reflection and should be grounded in an ethical format that embraces human beings, their historicity and their search for emancipation.  Much like W.E.B. DuBois, who early commented that the role of education “is not to make carpenters out of men, but men out of carpenters (DuBois, The Education of Black People, 1924, p50-54),” Freire envisioned education and its goals as the eradication of human exploitation, the abolition of human manipulation, the elimination of avarice and greed, the rejection of insipid individualism devoid of individuality, and the rejection of racial, class and sexual discrimination and exploitation—not capitalist competitiveness.

Freire himself was very clear in this regard:

“My point of view is that of ‘the wretched of the earth’, of the excluded (Freire, ibid, p22).”

Radical pedagogy believes that teacher preparation must not be married to training, but instead should be attached to a search for personal and social meaning within historical and contemporary understanding.  And, they believe that knowledge can never be conveyed or transmitted as mere facts and information, but must be invented and reinvented through discursive inquiry and a problem-posing curriculum that seeks to help citizens make sense of their cognitive and emotional lives and the world within which they live.

This does not mean that these post-modern theoretical positions do not think that basic skills are important or shouldn’t be taught; post-Formalists argue it is how they are taught, the context within which they are taught, and how they are incorporated in the service of enabling the human being to think and act critically.  Teaching skills in the context of reasoning, where emotional intelligence and rational thinking are reconnected in the pursuit of intelligent activity orchestrated and incorporated in the service of a problem posing curriculum that is based on inquiry and discovery, is much different than teaching skills in rote isolation along with indoctrination in the form of culturally legitimized facts disconnected from meaning.

Where conservatives and neo-liberals attempt to regulate the world of students through standardization, indoctrination and the removal of discourse and autonomy, radical pedagogy and progressive post-modernist educational claims assert that education must be interested in the consciousness of human beings and a determination to help them “read the world” through interaction and dialogue (Freire).  Post-formalism would advocate teaching ethics without indoctrination, where students are encouraged to forge their thinking skills in the fires of controversy and critical scrutiny.  Again, Freire states this position clearly:

“Problem-posing education affirms men and women as beings in the process of becoming—as unfinished, uncompleted human beings in and with a likewise unfinished reality.  The unfinished character of human beings and the transformational character of reality necessitate that education be an ongoing activity (Freire, as above p77).”

Radical Pedagogy, Progressive Post-Modernism and the Education Critique of Standards and Assessments

“Let us view understanding not as a state of possession of knowledge, but one of enablement.  When we understand something we not only possess certain information about it but are enabled to do certain things with that knowledge” –David Perkins  (Smart Schools 1995)

As pointed out earlier, for radical pedagogues and progressive post-modernists who embrace democracy and the need for a democratized self as the focus of education, schooling must be linked to what it means to be human.  Currently, with preparation in school tailored solely for preparation for work; this preparation for work is sold to the public as preparation for life.  Radical pedagogy and progressive post-modernist positions disagree vehemently with this predication and posit the contrary; that preparation in school should be for preparation for life; and preparation for life will, by its very nature, enable students to be prepared for the exigencies of work.  Certainly rational production is a necessity for human endeavors, but a critical and democratically committed citizenry, they argue, is much more capable of rational production than an unconscious manipulated citizenry grafted onto corporate agendas only.  They argue that schools should be centers for utopian thinking, laboratories of wonderment, and environments of inquiry available to all students.  Yet, unfortunately, amidst all the talk of educational reform, progressive post-modernists argue that schools are still seeped in the past and thus can do little to help children create and invent their future or the future of society.  Because of their emphasis on education as liberation, progressive post-modernists have constructed powerful critiques of economic conservative, neo-liberal and cultural conservative arguments for education and educational standards.

 (To be continued.)

Dr Danny Weil is a public interest attorney who has practiced for more than twenty years and has been published in a case of first impression in California. He is no longer active as a lawyer but has written seven books on education, has taught second grade in South Central LA, PS 122, taught K-1 migrant children in Santa Maria, California and Guadalupe, California, taught in the California Youth Authority to first and second degree murderers and taught for seventeen years at Allan Hancock Junior College in Santa Maria, CA. in the philosophy department. Dr. Weil holds a BA in Political Economics and Philosophy, a multi-subject bilingual credential in education (he is fluent in Spanish) and has a PhD in Critical Thinking. He is a writer for the Truthout Intellectual Project.

photo credit: ricardoromanoff via photopin cc

Last Friday on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” Maher interviewed Wiileaks founder Julian Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

They discuss the illegal investigation of Wikileaks the FBI tried to carry out in London, the federal grand jury in Virginia looking at charging Assange with terrorism and the legislation Senator Joe Lieberman proposed declaring all Wikileaks staff as “enemy combatants” to enable their imprisonment at Guantanamo.

They also discuss Obama’s kill list, which according to Assange, enables the US government to assassinate its own citizens, arbitrarily, at will, in secret, without any of the decision making becoming public.”

Read more and watch the full interview at Raw Story

photo credit: Abode of Chaos via photopin cc

Crossposted at Daily Censored

Kim Dotcom

New Zealand Folk hero Kim Dotcom has struck another blow for Internet freedom by launching a new cloud file storage service, called MEGA, one year to the minute after the FBI shut down Megaupload, froze his funds and induced New Zealand security services to launch a SWAT team raid on his Auckland home and seize all his computer equipment. The Obama administration’s demand that New Zealand extradite him to the US to stand trial for Internet piracy is still in the New Zealand courts. They are questioning the legality of the raid on his home. Dotcom has claimed all along that, as a third party intermediary, Megaupload was no more guilty of piracy than YouTube. At this point, it seems the only intellectual properties lawyers who don’t share this view work for the US Department of Justice.

The Role of Chris Dodd and MPAA

Dotcom believes the Motion Picture Association of America’s million dollar lobbyist, former Senator Chris Dodd, used his long time friendship with Vice president Joe Biden to persuade him to go after Dotcom. According to the Megaupload founder, Hollywood played a key role in getting Obama elected in 2008 but had nothing to show for it. He claims the President needed a success after Congress failed to pass the Stop Internet Piracy Act (SOPA) the MPAA wanted, so taking down Dotcom was “Plan B.”

According to an article in Gather, he sees similarities in the vicious and unlawful way the Obama administration has attacked other Internet freedom advocates, especially the late Aaron Swartz (the Reddit co-founder who recently killed himself in response to over the top bullying by federal prosecutors) and Julian Assange. He’s gratified by the new bill, dubbed “Aaron’s Law,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) has introduced. It amends the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), used to charge Swartz, to exclude terms of service violations.

Dotcom’s New Financial Backers

Because Dotcom’s funds are still frozen, he has relied on international investors to launch his new venture. It goes without saying that their lawyers have gone over his website with a fine tooth comb. They have declared it squeaky clean in terms of intellectual property law.

Privacy From Government Spying

Dotcom claims MEGA is an improvement on Megaupload in important ways, including improved privacy. As Forbes describes, MEGA employs User Controlled “symmetrical encryption”, where the user holds both the encryption and the decryption key. This makes it impossible for the site to hand over stored files to government authorities under subpoena, unlike Dropbox and other major file storage services.

The MEGA website invokes the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 12 (an injunction against “arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence.”), in explaining how User Controlled Encryption (UCE) works. I bet the FBI, CIA, Department of Homeland Security and US Department of Justice all really love this feature. However given the support Dotcom is receiving from the New Zealand courts, there’s not a whole lot they can do about it.

The MEGA site got a million hits during its first twenty-four hours of operation.

For more background on New Zealand’s most famous German immigrant, read more here

photo credit: sam_churchill via photopin cc

Crossposted at Daily Censored