RE: Henwood: Collapse in Cancun

["Jose G. Perez" <jgperez@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Doug Henwood's article in the Nation is a thoroughly miserable and
dishonest piece of imperialist propaganda. It is aimed at undermining
the emerging united front of the countries of the South against the
predatory trade practices of the imperialist North, all the while
pretending to be on the side of the poor and exploited.

The imperialist countries spend one billion dollars a DAY in
agricultural subsidies. While sold by the politicians as help to
pauperized family farmers, the lion's share ends up in the hands of
giant corporations. 

These subsidies have ruined the sugar industry in most third world
countries, a case in point being Cuba, which has been forced to
dismantle more than half of its sugar industry even though natural
conditions make it possible for Cuba to produce sugar more cheaply than
anyone else in the world. But even without the blockade it would be cut
off from the U.S. and European markets by tariff walls and quotas; and
the so-called world market Cuba was forced to sell in was inundated by
dumping from European producers, driving prices down to ruinous levels.

A similar thing can be said about cotton, where Egyptian producers have
been put up against the wall by subsidies to agribusiness in the
southern United States.

So how does Henwood choose to portray this issue?

"One of the 22's demands was that richer countries reduce their domestic
farm subsidies and open up to G22 agricultural exports. At the same
time, farmers in South Korea, a relatively rich country, were among the
most vigorous of the protesters, with some activists praising the
suicide of Lee Kyung-hae, who raised cattle on a small, snowy mountain
plot. The only thing that kept the farm going was trade barriers; once
Seoul opened up to Australian beef imports, the enterprise was doomed.
Rice and other crops are grown on similarly difficult land; crops are
expensive and often of low quality. Only vigorous protection makes such
agriculture viable. But those are exactly the kinds of barriers the G22
want dismantled. Yet in protest discourse, the Korean farmers and the
G22 were treated as part of the same struggle. 

"Which raises a question: What is progressive about using public
resources to support farming on cold, snowy, mountainous land? Isn't the
benefit of trade exactly to address something like this?"

Imagine that ... the problem with subsidies is ... Australia and South
Korea! 

This is all a trick with the word "subsidies." In Henwood's hands, it
becomes an overarching eternal category, with the Third World demanding
its elimination, thereby screwing the poor South Korean farmers. 

But the truth is imperialist morality about subsidies is the same one
they have about bombs: I bomb you=good. You bomb me=bad. That is why
they extracted from South Korea the abolition of its subsidies and other
agricultural protections at the same time they kept their own. 

The demand of the third world is for an end to the imperialist rape and
pillage of their economies. The imperialists accomplish this with a
number of weapons: unequal exchange, quotas, tariffs, subsidies, free
trade and protectionist "health" and other standards.

Henwood's argument is of the same cretinous stupidity as those who use
to criticize the movement against the Vietnam War, saying the movement
wasn't really for peace because it denounced Washington's intervention
but not Vietnam's struggle for national liberation, which was also
military in nature.

And listen to this song of praise for the WTO: "As the results of the
ministerial show, the WTO was never really the institution its critics
said it was. From the outset, it wasn't really dominated by big capital
in the rich countries. It's a one-country, one-vote system, like the
UN's General Assembly."

And the United States is a one-person, one vote system, which is why all
the decisions of Congress reflect the interests of the big majority, the
working people, and it would be unthinkable for some draft-dodging,
coke-snorting, frat-boy millionaire to be elected president.

Henwood has now sunk to the level of the most vulgar and transparent
apologetics for imperialism. What he is trying to cover up is that the
struggle is not for or against free trade, for or against subsidies, or
any other capitalist policy. The struggle is between the working people
and the nations exploited by imperialism, on one side, and the banks and
corporations on the other.

José





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