Xavante

A glimpse at the Xavante 

This is the story of one afternoon’s visit to an Indian Aldeia in Mato Grosso, Brazil. While on holiday there, I had the opportunity to visit a Xavante Indian reservation. Normally visiting the Indians is tricky, because FUNAI (The Foundation for the Indian, the government agency which looks after Indian Affairs), requires a heavy bureaucratic procedure for you to get approval to see the Indians.

I know that FUNAI is protecting the Indians from would be exploitation by foreigners, and to preserve the indigenous culture, but I  also feel that the Indians are kind of ring-fenced off from citizens and tourists – they are the perpetual ‘other’, and ‘we’ don’t know anything of the Indian’s plight.

Anyway, our guide knew the local Cacique – Jaako – personally, and agreed to take us there.

TWe were told that Xavante are funny with visitors and need lots of presents, and that these presents should be dispersed slowly, not at the beginning of the visit, because after the Indians have received everything they lose interest, and get bored and irritated with the visitor. It is normal that a present exchange takes place with the Indians giving handicrafts and the visitors giving sacks of food sweeties, and other bits and piece.

We drove to the nearby town of Barra de Garcas, went to an electronics shop and bought an antenna that you can plug into a mobile phone and therefore get service. This is what Jaako had requested on a previous visit our guide Mauro explained , as there is no phone signal in the Aldeia.

Aldeia Sanguedouro lies off of the BR 70 between Primavera del Este and Barra do Garca, an arterial highway that runs through Mato Grosso and the central states of Brazil.

The Sanguedouro reserve is quite big, and is next to industrial soya farms on one side, and cattle grazing ranches on the other. On the highway Toyota Hiluxes and Lorries full of Soya whizz past us. As the BR 70 actually runs through the middle of the reserve, the Indians are involved in a fight with the motorway agency, because they want compensation for the highway and some structural reforms to let pedestrian passage happen easier. Through frustration and a sense of ownership, the Indians have been known to set up check point tolls, on the highway demanding money from motorists and trucks. The Indians have also been known to hold up lorries too.

Xavante check-point / toll on BR 70

We roll off the highway and drive down to the reserve, the first thing we see is an old colonial set of buildings – not very indigenous –  we are told its the offices of the Salesian Missionaries, who are either: (a) educating the Indians; (b) bringing the Indians to God; (c) staying at the reserve because there is Catholic development money earmarked for the area; (d) a main cause of the dependence of the Indians, maintaining them docile through free food, undermining the Indians way of life.

The Salesian Mission at Sanguedouro

We round a corner drive a bit more and come to a settlement; it is like social housing for Indians, concrete huts with metal windows and big satellite dishes arranged in a big horseshoe shape with an open field in the middle. Lots of kids, lots of girls with babies, and the kids are playing an Indian cricket game between two empty coke bottles for wickets. The Indian huts all have satelite dishes and the TVs are on blaring out Globo telenovelas andfootball. Most of the huts also have a car parked outside. The Indians wear clothes and look like nondescript Brazilians, except for the little sticks that they all have through their ears.

The middle of the Indian village

The place looks reminded me of a sad favela in Rio, the mangy dogs lying around,  the kids, the expressions on some of the Indians faces made me reflect that perhaps this was the reason that FUNAI prefers that ordinary non specialists not come here.

The houses in the Aldeia

Satellite dishes in the village

We drive to hut number 39, Jaako’s hut, and meet a smiley Indian Jaako, he works at the local Indian school teaching in the Xavante language, and his dad is a Chief. Our guide’s nephew is immediately given a bow and arrow and strings with feathers by Jaako’s dad.  Elizeu, Mauro’s nephew is a kind of favourite of the old Indian. He receives a big slab of rapadurra (a Brazilian Sweet) in return.

Elizeu getting a bow n arrow present

The chief receiving Rapadurra from Elizeu

Jaako’s house

We get back in the car, with Jaako, and drive to Aldeia de Sao Jeronimo. This is much smaller than the previous one and all the huts look like Indian ones. The place has a view of a big soya field. I observe Jaako’s fathers, a strong backed 96 year old looking at the Soya field. It is perhaps a bit too close, and the agro toxins from their pesticides probably run off into the Indians water supply there. The village is small, empty like a frontier outpost.

Aldeia de Sao Jeronimo

Sao Jeronimo

We present the Indians with our antenna, which they seem genuinely pleased with. One of the little kids even had a quick wash and put on his red paint to look Indian for us.  Judging by the state of the public telephone we could see why they needed it.

Presenting the antenna to Jaako

The local telephone booth

We walked down to the local stream to have a look at the water pump which an Italian NGO had put in, a nice shiny waterwheel, but which didn’t work because it hadn’t been oiled or greased.

The Xavante Indians are a warrior tribe, and were enslaved as the portuguese arrived in Brazil in the 17^th century, for this reason they avoided contact with the whites for as long as possible, and then suffered mass relocations in the last half of the 20^th century following contact with them in the 1940s, with the implementation of government policies to open up Brazil’s hinterlands to development. Where we were for example was a relocation project of a Xavante original location 600 km away, however a deal had been made between the Brazilian Air Force, Brazil an Government and the Indians to ‘loan’ the land to the Vatican for 50 years. Thus some 600 Indians were put on Brazilian Airforce plains and landed in the middle of the Cerrado, a very different more arid territory than the lush one that the Vatican had its eyes on. The Vatican turned the land into the biggest cattle ranch in Brazil, ‘The Pope’s Farm’. When the Xavante were due to return, the best land had been taken over by illegal squatters, one of whom I am told was Jose Alencar, Lula’s vice president. This legal battle is ongoing, with the Governor of Mato Grosso alleging that the Indians made the story up, while the Federal Government says the land should be returned.

We drive back to the first settlement to drop Jaako off and buy some ‘authentic’ necklaces (twice the price of the gift shop in town). The Indians were distributing big cardboard boxes of meat with the Sadia logo on it. Earlier in the day the Indians had crashed and robbed the truck, and were distributing and selling the meat boxes. We think we saw an exchange of meat for bear and drugs taking place coincidentally while we were there.

The packs of meat from Sadia

caught on camera

Alcohol is a big enemy of the Indians, together with cannabis and crack. The Indians are quite integrated with the nearby town of Primavera, a town built on selling combine harvesters, pesticides, four wheel drive trucks and the industrial processing of soya and cotton. The Indians have jobs, and work there, mixing with the more marginalised elements of the town.

one too many

Indians drive cars – black market cars acquired through a system called Finan, where cars that other people have bought on credit, are then sold on to third parties who stay with the cars until or if the car is re-appropropriated by the owner. As the Indians are protected, they cannot be stopped by the State Police , only by the Federal Police, who are few and far between, so in a way the Indians are untouchable, hence the links with crime, if the Indians do the crime they can get away with it, as they are considered legally as on a par with minors.

I left the Indian reservation with more questions than answers. I tried to put myself in the shoes of the FUNAI administrators, to try and think how to approach the Indian question.

Technology, Sustainability and Belief

Technology, Sustainability and Belief

 

Questioning our blind faith in technology – the belief in science’s inherent Innovative capacity?

‘Hi-Tech’ is desirable and taken for granted, but its inner workings a mystery. What goes on inside a mobile phone? How does the internet actually work? Knowing how and why things work is understood by the few, and ignored by the many.

Technology has advanced exponentially in the last century, following the revelations of quantum physicists and the inventions of Tesla and Edison for example. An economic system based on consumption, and supply and demand facilitated the transfer of these ground breaking insights into daily use in our lives. Entrepreneurs could perceive the market value of these concepts so supported financially their transformation into buyable things.

Today, most of us live surrounded by the fruits of these path breaking scientific discoveries. At the same time, our understanding of the science behind them is very limited. How many of us who have a TV understand the science behind it? How many people who use mobile phones understand how they work, what are their internal workings? How does Wifi work? Electricity is what exactly?

Is it the complexity involved in these things understandable to the few only? Is it that education systems have not been able to adequately teach these subjects? Or are there are traces of intent by ‘the powerful’ to maintain our ignorance of the workings of science, to maintain an illusion of wonder and mystery? Keeping the workings of the ever present technology out of popular discourse.

It is a paradox that the mundane things we use so much we understand so little about. Technology has an essential role to play in the sustainability of human existence. We need our cutting edge technology to be employed to address the issue of human sustainability.

The dawning of the mechanised age was accompanied by Jesus and the Devil hand in hand. For huge numbers of citizen’s (of country’s rich enough), it has brought momentous advances in terms of labour saving, health, leisure, a generalised  easing of life’s difficulties, the emancipation of women from domestic chores. This allowed humans to focus on enjoying life, and gave us the free time to advance our knowledge in a myriad of ways.

However, these advancements occurred within a commercial system based on perpetually creating and then satisfying consumer demand, and the virtue of perpetual ‘growth’. Within such parameters, science and technology made more and more things, bigger and bigger things, and accustomised us to luxurious amounts of energy, cheap. Our mechanised way of living has a voracious appetite for natural resources, and excretes an obscene amount of material to be processed. It is dawning on us though that there is simply is not enough resources in the world to continue supplying this appetite or space for this excretia.

We are a bit like frogs in pan of warming water, or Easter Island residents when they saw food was getting scarce yet did nothing to change or escape their fate. We seem unable to address the fact that our way of life is destroying the very things that allow us to live. At the same time, in terms of scientific and technological advancements, we are living at a peak. Scientists have unravelled the secrets of DNA, the universe, and harnessed the power of the atom.

We marvel at science and technology’s cleverness, whether it is broadband internet, stories in newspapers about cloning, unravelling DNA or latest developments at CERN. We don’t really understand any of it. Scientific advancement is part of the fabric of our lives, it is always happening. We hold blind faith that science will solve any difficulty because, conveniently, we don’t understand it. This allows us to cling to the hope of a miracle that our mechanised way of living is sustainable.

The political and economic mainstream’s optimism about our scientists’ abilities to innovate over current and predicted environmental hurdles is never specific about how scientists will actually achieve this. It is always to take place in the perpetual future. It stems a belief in technology as having an abstract quality of overcoming obstacles under pressure. ‘When the time is right science will find a way’ is an unsubstantiated belief. In seeking truth, our faith in a given hypothesis must be flexible enough to be swayed upon presentation of un-repudiated fact. Belief on the other hand requires blind trust in faith, by its nature unquestioning. It is time for us to be scientific about the limits and possibilities of our science. De-mystifying and rationalizing our understanding of it.

A true optimism about the future must stem from the recognition of the capacity our civilisation has for technological innovation. Recognition that our technology already has the solutions to the difficulties we face. However, this awareness must be tempered with the strongest sense of immediacy. A trust in the abstract capacity of innovation is akin to believing in the imminent return of the Messiah. What we need is honest assessment of the future, and the widespread implementation on a wide scale of what we already know.

NB

Is this essay really about a belief in science’s inherent innovative capacity? The belief in science’s inherent capacity to innovate beyond limits.

I say science is like a belief not from some sort of anti-Darwinian critique; it is specifically the belief in science’s capacity to innovate that I attack. I am saying that the belief, (typically found in discourses informed by mainstream economics) that science will always be able to innovate around ecological limits or whatever difficulties humanity may face in the future, is an unscientific belief inherently.

The innovations of modern technology are wonderful things, and I marvel that all have been created by human minds in more or less the last century. These scientific breakthroughs need to be democratised. The  theory behind scientific advances needs to be more available (such as electrical-engineering, solar power for example) in order to have more socially useful innovations all around us. Socially useful inventions which are not necessarily informed by the profit mechanism but by necessity and social utility.

A more democratised understanding of science would also make citizens more aware of ‘big  scientific discourse’ such as energy policy, as well as alternative, more democratic and socially useful ways of using finite resources in an ever fuller world.

However, while the inner mechanics of technological machines remain understood as a ‘very complicated and difficult’ body of knowledge, which is restricted to qualified scientists (this is where I got the idea for science as a church and the scientists as priests analogy), humanity / we / the citizens remain mere consumers of machines, without questioning their efficiency, or social utility. Also, from a developmental perspective, peoples are kept from their potential by scientific secretism from innovations which could otherwise have a direct and positive impact on their lives.

Scientific innovation is all around us, there are wonderful things that are happening at the moment and have been for the decades, but, because we are principally mere consumers of machines, these ideas remain as prototypes because there is no profit mechanism to drive the research and development needed to scale them up, or to distribute them. Also, it is undeniable that because there is so much money and vested interests involved in current technology (the oil economy is an easy example), there is active suppression of potentially path breaking inventions and technologies by the corporations and shareholders who have the most to lose. As we are on the whole uninformed, such losses to humanity pass by unnoticed.

The case of WIFI in the Congo is interesting. Kinshasa has 100% wifi coverage, the UN put it in, and it was easier to provide 100% coverage than to try and create a market (and because it was Kinshasa, it was also perhaps not interesting enough, or profitable enough for an energy market to be created. It is somehow wonderfully ironic that Kinshasa has 100% free wifi by virtue of its poverty and under development.

I think Ivan Illich was on the right track when he wrote that we need to re-conceptualise the benefits of industrial mechanisation according to use value rather than exchange value, but such a re-calibration would require a radical socialisation of technological education, as well as a socialisation – control and regulation of the industrial mechanical mode of production.

From a philanthropic perspective, in a Utopia, perhaps a Foundation could be established which promotes popular understanding of technology and science in different spheres:

1. Pro-poor practical technological innovations – Teaching practical technological innovations and (creating a new market even). Using and offering practical innovations, and providing their basic components (and supporting entrepreneurs involved in this area of actuation)
2. Children and Youth supplementary education – A widespread supplementary education for children and youths on understanding technology and technological perspectives as well as practical capacity-building.
3. A programme of support for governments, states and municipalities interested in developing non-traditional and sustainable technological innovation. The programme offers ideas of programmes to be implemented, practical support. For governments it offers policy advice on how to put together an incentive/penalty programme regarding technological innovation and the creation of new markets.
4. A very well funded global benchmarking project on technological innovation. Radical in that it sets to buy socially useful patents, and release them to the public domain, or through targeted pro-poor interventions. Also benchmarking and cross pollination project of research on existing innovations.

On development trajectories, and possible futures

This essay questions whether countries can advance sustainably by following the prescriptions of mainstream approaches to modernisation. It questions where we are aiming to go when we talk about ‘development’. Mainstream development is questioned from a historical, social and sustainability perspective. A structural view on the inherent impediments for the prosperity of poor nations is offered. The social effects of modernisation in developed countries are discussed, and the instability of mass consumption based economies presented. Ideas for a sustainable future for humanity are presented based on global citizen cooperation and awareness of the necessity for lowering aggregate eco-systemic consumption levels.

On development trajectories, and possible futures

The science of governing a country is governance; it can be defined quickly as what democratically elected and accountable leaders do with the pooled resources of the citizenry and the collective patrimony of the contents of the national territory in order to provide things for the common good. This steering of a country is defined through economic policy, which refers to the management of resources and upkeep of things deemed to be essential; roads, pipes, schools, hospitals, courts, money, and so on. Economic policy as a subject burgeons out into everything that nation states provide, for example; government spending and tax policy, monetary policy, trade  policy, industrial policy, environmental policy, financial and industrial regulation, and strategies for growth.

Over the last century, questions of what a nation state should be and what it should provide became of critical importance. Especially after the Second World War, capitalism and socialism promoted very different understandings of how states should function. As decolonization movements succeeded, and monarchies were overthrown, the number of new nation states multiplied from 69  nations in 1950  to 192 in 2002 (Rotberg 2003). In this shake up, newly formed states emerged within new ‘ecologies of context’ within which to operate. The issue of what governors of nation-states should do, and how, became of critical importance.

Due to the difference in histories of nations, economically the world at this time, and more so today can be seen on aggregate as economically and socially polarised, with a comparatively rich and powerful Northern Hemisphere, and poor and weak Southern Hemisphere. In the post WWII period, the leaders of Southern nations looked to the Northern nations as ideal examples in terms of political and administrational organisation, and the perceived prosperity of their citizens, and sought to imitate their trajectories.

From a Northern perspective, both socialist and capitalist interests were keen to win political allies and secure natural resources from the Southern countries. Both the capitalist side represented by The United States and Europe and the socialist side represented by The Soviet Union and China, altruistically offered incentives and assistance in exchange for political alliance, while at the same time having agendas for securing strategic resources within these countries for themselves.

Within this context, ideas of how countries could prosper surged forth. New subjects specifically relating to how these countries could progress emerged, Development Economics, Modernisation Theory and Industrial Development. We can call a general theory of how countries can prosper ‘Development Studies’.

‘Development Studies’, arising from this historical context is clearly not an impartial scientific discipline. The technical recommendations North on what the governors of Southern nations should do in terms of economic policies and economic assistance have mostly had Trojan Horses-like effects on these nations.

‘Development Studies’ rarely concerns itself with ‘development into what?’. This weakness in Development Studies is fundamental, as it is implicitly assumed that to develop in the moulds of Northern nation circa 1950 to now, is a virtuous objective. This point is very relevant given the environmental degradation caused by Northern consumer goods markets, and the growing social inequalities which Northern economic policies have generated in their own countries.

Furthermore, given the fact that in general the Northern states achieved their Development by means of exploitative commercial relationships with the South, imitating development trajectories of Northern countries would also require the establishment of exploitative trade relationships with other counties.

(Walt Rostow showing the President something on the map)

The promise of ‘modernisation’ in the Western mould to poorer countries was an important part of Great Game between The Soviets and The United States played out following WWII.  The United States felt threatened by Soviet influence, and sanctioned ‘by any means necessary’ approaches to beating back the perceived Soviet menace. The core text of modernisation theory in the West, Walt Rostow’s ‘Stages of Economic Growth, A Non-Communist Manifesto’[1], published in 1960 must be seen as a product of its times. It explains the stages that countries go through to become modern, and it puts an idealised projection of the contemporary American economy as the final goal. The stages a country must pass through are:

Stage (1) traditional society,

Stage (2) the preconditions for take-off,

Stage (3) the take-off,

Stage (4) the drive to maturity,

Stage (5) the age of high mass consumption.

Rostow’s position was that ‘traditional societies’ could achieve take off very quickly, if assisted they sided with The West, through: ‘the diffusion of Western culture, know-how, and capital, to overcome legacies of economic and cultural stagnation.’ (Proyect 2008).

The text was written towards the end of the 1950’s at the height of the cold war, at the time Rostow was advocating that the US Government Administration should pay more attention to interventions in developing countries (in order to make sure that they sided against socialism) for strategic reasons.

Naturally, Rostow’s vision for the ultimate state of development was ‘The Age of Mass Consumption’, which was the economy of The United States at that time, with high domestic consumption levels, and high rates of energy use. Development Theory is to this day delineated by this goal. That the goal of development should be to reach the ‘age of high mass consumption’ is pervasive within the discipline.

1950’s America did have elements of a Golden Age about it, the fruits of technology were making domestic chores much easier, freeing women for domestic servitude with vacuum cleaners, electric irons and washing machines for example. At the same time, because of The New Deal economic policies, people could afford their own homes and energy saving devices, and have enough leisure time to enjoy them.

However, the age of high mass consumption (i.e. high aggregate consumption levels and access to cheap electrical products at prices within the reach of salaried workers) is only possible through securing cheap resources from overseas in order to keep prices low. Einstein pointed out; “It is only a slight exaggeration to say that mankind constitutes even now a planetary community of production and consumption” (1949), thus the consumption in one area affects the production in another. Periphery countries were encouraged only to export primary commodities at a low cost.  For example, remember that around this time United Fruit Company was deposing Central American countries’ governments in which they owned plantations who sought to raise the export price of bananas. Even today, we are seduced by mobile phones and computers and most of us want to change model every year, this built in obselition is good for the economy, as consumer spending stays high, but is not so good for Congo, where the Coltan for the chips is extracted for at a very low cost. If the Coltan was not so cheap we would not be able to afford the hallmarks of being ‘high mass consumers’. The high mass consumption model inherently requires a periphery with whom it can interact symbiotically, pulling in cheap inputs, but at the same time causing detrimental effects to peripheral economies.

(Coltan mining in Eastern Congo)

The 1950s American lifestyle available for those with steady jobs, characterised by the big bungalow, car, and electric appliances, within reach of the majority of the population is impossible, planet wide, in terms of sustainability. We cannot all live in this ‘high mass consumption’ mode, because the world has finite resources.  Ecological Footprint analysis points out that if all the individuals on the planet had the consumption characteristics of Americans, the planet would need the resources of six Earths to meet this demand. Sustaining US consumption levels requires a constant influx of cheap raw materials to keep products within reach of customers. However, as a developmental goal for nations, it is hardly an example of best practice as it is clear that this way of life is not sustainable in terms of Earth’s resources. A new stage of development best practice is needed which offers leaders a virtuous and sustainable goal to orientate national policies around.

An alternative perspective – Development as Neo-Colonialism

Kwame Nkrumah, leader of Ghanaian independence and the Pan African movement asked if the ‘extended tentacles of the Wall Street octopus’ really rule Great Britain, France Germany or The United States rather than their Prime Ministers of Presidents. (1965). In Nkrumah’s speech, the real rulers are the ‘Invisible Government’ a network which arises from Wall Street’s connections with Intelligence Services.

Nkrumah problematizes the way the Rostowian development takes place by contextualising the development of the newly independent states within their historical context.  Nkrumah questions how independent the post-colonial states were, considering the continued ownership of the old colonials over key sectors of the economy, and influence over economic decisions. For Nkrumah the ‘neo-colonial’ powers perpetuate the developing countries’ weakness, rather than assist them to ‘take-off’. For Nkrumah this continued domination is maintained through international capital’s control of the world market, the high rate of interest for developing countries’ borrowing, the subtle policy influence of the small print of ‘multilateral’ aid deals, the neo-colonial control of 90% of shipping lanes, and Coup d’états and political assassinations. Hollywood, the monopoly press and Evangelism, play a complementary role, deepening the ideological penetration of neo-colonial norms in the minds of the masses. Nkrumah’s observations belie the fallacy of Rostow’s mirage of modernisation.

Nkrumah stated that the above are not as a sign of imperialism’s strength, but signs of its last desperate gasps. He counsels that it can be defeated only through unity.

Where are we now?

It is currently in vogue to refer to ‘developing’ countries and ‘advanced’ countries.  Where is this path, on which some are developing and others advanced, leading to? We now live in a world where millionaires control 39% of the World’s Wealth.  In 2011the total number of billionaires reached a record 1,210, with a total net worth of $4.5 trillion (Frank 2011).

In a leaked 2006 Citigroup investors report, it was stated that the greatest challenge to the continued prosperity of the top 1%  is the pressure that the ever growing number of disenfranchised citizens can put on their elected representatives to change the rules of the game towards a more proportional division of wealth (Kapur et al 2006).

‘The balance sheets of the rich are in great shape and are likely to improve’

‘What could go wrong?’

The most potent and short term threat would be societies demanding a more equitable share of wealth’ (Op. Cit.)

Emblematic of this is the gold plated, T-Rex bone inlaid yacht[2] of a Malaysian business man which cost £3billion. This is more than triple the combined GDPs of the ten poorest countries.[3]

Table 1:  GDP’s of the Ten Poorest Countries, compared with price of a Golden Yacht

Burundi … $90 million

Rwanda … $210 million

Ethiopia … $110 million

Democratic Republic of Congo … $110 million

Liberia … $110 million

Malawi … $160 million

Guinea-Bissau … $160 million

Eritrea … $190 million

Niger … $210 million

Sierra Leone … $210 million

Gold Yacht $4.7 billion

Modernisation and development have not lead to increased prosperity for all, rather to  the current situation of extreme imbalance between ever more concentrated wealth in the hands of a few, and a decline in material wealth at minimum and unprecedented poverty at the extreme end for the rest.

(The Golden Yacht in question)

(A scene from Burundi)

A future scenario

As the Plutocracy Symposium document notes, the challenge for the ultra-rich is populations revolting against these mind-boggling sums of riches in the hands of individuals who spend it on playthings. One future scenario shows the ultra-rich separating from state in order to ensure their private wealth by setting up their own kingdoms. ‘The Sea-Steading Institute’ is researching luxury dwellings using  oil rig platforms as bases, where the super-rich can live, ‘free’ from any social responsibilities.

According to its main backer Peter Thiel , Sea Steader dwelling will be a “kind of floating Petri dish for implementing policies that libertarians, stymied by indifference at the voting booths, have been unable to advance: no welfare, looser building codes, no minimum wage and few restrictions on weapons. ” (Moser 2011).

Modernisation and high mass consumption

The fallacy of ‘High Mass Consumption’ as a goal (which is the fundamental basis for modernisation theory) should be seen as the dangerously outmoded concept that it is. Unfortunately elected leaders still cling to it.

Accelerating into a mode of being characterised as ‘high mass consumption’ is an untenable goal for any country, as ecological degradation evidence shows. However, the logic of orthodox development theory is that to become a high consumption nation is the right thing to do, and thus has the common good as its guiding principle. This position is flawed because it is modernisation in this mode is not applicable to all humanity at the same time. In order to be ‘high resource consumers’ we need some other place to appropriate resources from. Thus as a model it has an intrinsic hypocrisy, as there always needs to be some under-developed people and places from whom to get our stuff from.

‘Advanced’ industrial fishing methods lead to fish species extinction. ‘Advanced’ agricultural practice leads to nutrient depletion, soil erosion and contamination and aquifer depletion.  At the same time Britons throw away out half the food that the country produces.^[4] For every gold ring produced, twenty tons of mine wastes are also accrued^[5]. This sort of global economy is the sort of governance that ‘advanced’ industrial nations

It is therefore a sad state of affairs when we see that the BRIC countries are pursuing this goal, we can see that their policies will inevitably deepen the existing social and ecological degradation of the world. The modernising goal for their citizens which they are pursuing requires the citizens of elsewhere to use less, and their ecosystems be depleted, in order to pursue the high mass consumption dream.

The American modernisation was not sustainable in the United States even for more than a few decades. For example, following the debt crisis, it is reported recently that one quarter of Houston’s youths are currently food insecure. It seems that developed countries are modernising towards a future social reality that is more in the image of a Jakarta, Johannesburg, Rio de Janeiro or Lagos, than a Paris or a Frankfurt.

“As many nation-states of the northern hemisphere experience increasing fiscal meltdown, state privatization, corruption, ethnic conflict, it seems as though they are evolving southward, so to speak, in both positive and problematic ways.”[6]

‘We’ citizens of the North would be advised perhaps to learn from innovations and survival strategies of the global South, given the current trend. On reflection who is this ‘We’? It means ‘We’ the non-billionaires and non-millionaires, the ones without the golden yachts, the better we can work together for an alternative.

Towards a sustainable future for humanity

It is becoming clear that a path of global solidarity and unity among citizens is the only way to overcome the many structural challenges to ensure the survival of the human race before elements within it destroy the race’s life support system.

Today structurally embedded relationships of exploitation between countries are acute and vast distances separate the populations of these countries, who interact with each other in trade and politics in such an unequal way.  Achieving solidarity between the citizens of these disparate places is an essential step.

We have common factors which unite us. For example, ‘We’ the citizens of the richer areas feel that we have been exploited in the same way as the majority of citizens in neo-colonial client states. The structural adjustment plans implemented in the third world were also implemented in the USA and Britain, leading to the on-going financial crisis, lack of jobs, and current protests. The same hand that corrupts third world leaders corrupts the political leaders of the richest countries. There is an awareness that ‘we the citizens’ o have as much in common with ‘we the citizens’ of all other countries than we do with the elites of our own countries. This consciousness is key to establishing the global unity required to implement environmental and economic policies which truly benefit the common good.

To achieve a sustainable modernity, resource use by the richest countries will have to decline, and terms of trade of the richer countries will need to be more fairly balanced with the poorer countries. In this way poorer countries’ environments will be less exploited, and hopefully become more prosperous. For this change to occur however, rich country electorates must be convinced to lower their resource use out of compassionate concerns for the imbalance in regard to the poorest countries. The only way that the population of a rich country would willingly accept this, would be if somehow quality of life discourse could be positioned above the importance of perpetual economic growth. A new concept, relating to happiness, through belonging and harmony could be established which emphasises self-sufficiency in energy and low energy use. I look forward to a change, that in light of the growing general malaise with the fruits of modernity; the feelings of isolation and oblivion that consumer-workers of the rich countries are feeling, a new way of living will is sought out.

It is now glaringly obvious that the elected leaders in all countries pay mere lip service to democratic protocol and serve the interests of the very rich almost without exception. This occurs at all levels of government, from the local to the national. The Sage of Bandiagara, Tierno Bokar pointed out the consequences of a country having a bad leader:

“When the opportunity to assume the role of leader comes to a coarse soul, he only knows how to set up a megalomaniac dictatorship. Instead of establishing a reign of peace for all, this will be the beginning of a dark terror. Scoundrels will become bankers and rogues will mint money. Morality will toss dangerously on the raging sea of unleashed passions.” (Hampate Ba 2008: 155)

(Tierno Bokar)

We are governed by bad leaders, and feel impotent to change anything. Better leaders must be demande. I hope that soon the criteria for choosing leaders will be personal integrity and courage, as hypocrisy will not be accepted. In order to have some form of roadmap for the next few decades, should we not also ponder what ‘developed’ has to means and what we ‘modern’ must be if these are to be concepts which truly reflect the common good?

Ivan Illich’s comment “free people must travel the road to productive social relations at the speed of a bicycle” (1978: 6) is every day more pertinent, on a global scale.

References

Einstein Albert, (May, 1949), Why Socialism, The Monthly Review  retrieved October 30th 2011 from http://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism

Frank Robert, (May 2011), Millionaires Control 39% of the World’s Wealth , Wall Street Journal – The Wealth Report , retrieved October 30^th 2011 from http://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/2011/05/31/millionaires-control-39-of-the-worlds-wealth/

Hampate Ba Amadou, (2008), Spirit of Tolerance: The Inspiring Life of Tierno Bokar,  Bloomington, Indiana: World Wisdom Inc

Illich Ivan, (1978), Towards a History of Needs, New York, Pantheon. Retrieved November 11^th 2011 from http://203.77.194.71:81/present-courses-ii-sem-07-08/studio-viii-urban-housing/reading-material/energy_and_equity.pdf

Kapur Ajay, MacLeod N, Levkovich T,  Buckland Robert, Stubbs Jonathan,Fujita Tsutomo, Mohr Patrick, Rosgen Markus, Wignall-Blundell Andrian, Tarditi Alison, Liodakis Manolis,  Miller Keith (September 29^th 2006), The Global Investigator The Plutonomy Symposium — Rising Tides Lifting Yachts, Citigroup retrieved October 30^th 2011 from  http://www.box.net/shared/9if6v2hr9h

Moser Whet, (2011 August 18), Milton Friedman’s Grandson to Build Floating Libertarian Nation. Retrieved October 30^th 2011 from http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/The-312/August-2011/Milton-Friedmans-Grandson-to-Built-Floating-Libertarian-Nation/

Nkrumah Kwame,  Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of imperialism,  (1965). Retrieved October 30^th 2011 from http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/nkrumah/neo-colonialism/ch01.htm

Proyect  Louis (9^th of September 2008), Paul Baran as dependency theorist. Retrieved October 30th 2011 from http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/09/19/paul-baran-as-dependency-theorist/

Rostow Walt Whitman, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1960). Retrieved October 30^th 2011 from  http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/ipe/rostow.htm

Rotberg, Robert (2003) Failed States, collapsed states, weak states: Causes and indicators. In: R. Rotberg (ed.) State Failure and State Weakness in a Time of Terror. Washington DC: Brookings Institute Press, pp. 1–25.

Rufca Sarah, (2011 August 25^th), Study shows more Houston families struggling with hunger, Culture Map Houston. Retrieved October 30^th 2011 from http://houston.culturemap.com/newsdetail/08-25-11-10-18-study-shows-more-houston-families-struggling-with-hunger/

Gallery: The Richest People on the Planet (2011). Forbes. Retrieved October 30^th 2011 from http://www.forbes.com/wealth/billionaires

Knowledge and Value in a Globalising World Conference, University of Western Australia ( 2011). Retrieved October 30^th 2011 from http://www.anthropologywa.org/iuaes_aas_asaanz_conference2011/0023.html

£3bn golden yacht is world’s most expensive, (2011, June 20^th) The Sun. Retrieved October 30^th 2011 from http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/3705851/3bn-gold-yacht-is-worlds-most-expensive.html

No Dirty Gold Fact Sheet 2010, (2010). Retrieved 30^th of October 2011 from http://nodirtygold.org/pubs/NDGfs-VD2010mining.pdf

The Top Ten Poorest Countries (2011). Retrieved October 30^th 2011 from http://www.mapsofworld.com/world-top-ten/world-top-ten-poorest-countries-map.html

The £20bn food mountain: Britons throw away half of the food produced each year, (2008 March 2^nd), The Independent. Retrieved October 30^th 20011 from http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/news/the-16320bn-food-mountain-britons-throw-away-half-of-the-food-produced-each-year-790318.html

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[2] The Sun Newspaper, 20^th if June 2011, “£3bn golden yacht is world’s most expensive”, http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/3705851/3bn-gold-yacht-is-worlds-most-expensive.html

[3] The Top Ten Poorest Countries, Maps of World.com, available at http://www.mapsofworld.com/world-top-ten/world-top-ten-poorest-countries-map.html (based on 2004 GNP per capita in US$)

[4]The £20bn food mountain: Britons throw away half of the food produced each year, (2008 March 2^nd), The Independent. Retrieved October 30^th 20011 from  http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/news/the-16320bn-food-mountain-britons-throw-away-half-of-the-food-produced-each-year-790318.html

[5] No Dirty Gold Fact Sheet 2010, (2010), Retrieved 30^th of October 2011 from http://nodirtygold.org/pubs/NDGfs-VD2010mining.pdf

[6] Knowledge and Value in a Globalising World Conference, University of Western Australia, 2011. Retrieved October 30^th 2011 from http://www.anthropologywa.org/iuaes_aas_asaanz_conference2011/0023.html

The importance of intelligence for combating organised crime

Intelligence, as related to policing, and justice and the military is an area that is little understood in the public sphere.  When I was working on a proposal for AMERIPOL (a poor countries Interpol), the South American Police Association, I became curious about the practicalities of operationalizing intelligence sharing between countries for the purpose of inhibiting organised crime.

Normal business operations are conducted within the framework of a state justice system and have recourse to dispute settlement mechanisms should the parties in a business deal have a disagreement, or breach of contract. Organised crime operates in the areas at the margins of state control, specifically in the taboo areas, the illegal areas. For this reason organised crime has no recourse to public dispute settlement mechanisms.  In contrast, contracts are reinforced through the guarantee of violence should a dispute occur. Thus organised crime attracts the most ruthless individuals or groups, the people who don’t mind doing business under these conditions.

Given this dynamic, trusting people becomes especially important.  People engaged in organised crime appear to be charming, ethical, friendly and  cooperative with each other, because of the importance of networks of trust.  The Mafia use a false-kinship bond – Omerta – to seal the links between members, so that members can trust each other with repayments and obligations where there is no contract except the handshake. This is also the reason why organised crime is perpetrated by families or clans.

In organised crime that requires careful planning and a division of roles, bonded secrecy is of utmost important as well as trust. How do these groups maintain secrecy? Could it be through the creation of situations where unspeakable acts are committed as a group thus guaranteeing participants’ silence for fear of personal exposure?

Organised crime negatively affects the legitimate economy since it offers a way of gaining capital which is outside the legitimate rules of the game, like a second track for profit making. The perversity is that the capital gained from illegal markets enters into the legitimate economy, skewing the playing field of market competition.

What areas does organised crime operate in? Related to smuggling, organised crime makes its money out of crossing boundaries. A border is the boundary between two different economic systems, where the rules of each system’s game are specific to the region within the boundary. If one can acquire a product in one game system (nation-state economy with rules and regulations and environmental considerations that define ‘the rules of the game’), and clandestinely enter that product into another game system, one can make a lot of money by exploiting the discrepancy between the two systems. The most obvious example is cocaine, whose value increases exponentially as it is transferred between producer countries, transit countries and consumer countries. Trafficked women are similar, as are monetary currency, weapons, biological material, cars, and consumer goods.

Apart from smuggling networks, organised crime makes money from extortion, by providing security from the threat of the insecurity it may itself induce. In Italy in 2011 165,000 business and 50,000 closed because the added cost of extortion payments pushed them out of business – (here greed results ultimately in less profitable returns).

Organised crime subverts the democratic system, by installing candidates against the will of the people and using violence as a coercive mechanism. In this sense organised crime makes money by working directly contrary to rules which are established by the state to protect the common good. The state protects the wellbeing of the people by electing representatives, and by having transparent financial processes, as well as a system of punishment for corruption, and due processes for spending public money, or distributing public resources. Organised crime corrupts this, using networks of influence and bribery (from capital which has been accrued through illegal means), thus perverting the functioning of the state.

When organised crime can act in this way with impunity, the influence of its capital grows and spreads throughout the economy. The possibility of making money in this way also acts as a deterrent for entrepreneurs and investors to play by the rules chosen by democracy; it encourages informality and disrespect for the common good. Risk-taking entrepreneurs are attracted to investing in these areas where such large profits are to be made. As mafias and secret societies increase the impunity of their acts, democracy and justice become hollowed out, and states decay into baroque facades, merely providing fronts for criminal oligarchies which control the real substance.

Organised crime therefore cannot be ignored: it needs to be carefully monitored. We can take it as a starting point that if society has rules, there will be those who seek to make profit by subverting the rules; thus it is necessary for society to have a force whose job it is to detect and police this undesirable behaviour. Hence the need for intelligence.

In the AMERIPOL region, drug cartels from Colombia invest in beachfront high rises in the Brazilian city of Florianopolis. There is no comprehensive intelligence sharing mechanism between the police in Colombia and the police in Brazil. In fact even between different police precincts there is no sharing of information.  Thus organised crime’s profits cannot be traced.

But how could an international pool of information be feasible? AMERIPOL suggested that an International Regional Headquarters should be set up, and each participating police force should send two representatives to work there. Within each country the different police departments would have a liaison, who would share information with the Ameripol HQ’s different commissions. For example, Ameripol HQ would have an economic crimes commission, a human trafficking commission, a homicide division and a drugs division. Thus there would be an interface between each country’s relevant police division and headquarters. The headquarters in turn would responsible for passing the information on to other police departments, depending on topic.

There is a real need for the police forces of South America to be able to share information between each other, and combat the challenge to all constituted by organised crime.  It is a matter of urgency, because it is through this absence of information sharing that organised crime has become so powerful.  Naturally there is money to be made when what costs 10 units here, costs 50 across the border.  To combat this area of crime, it is logical for police forces from different countries to cooperate and share information at least as efficiently as trafficking cartel. However, this doesn’t happen. The police and prosecutors don’t work with each other efficiently. At the moment the only official intelligence service that really works in South America, is the network set up by the DEA, which is the one agency capitalised enough to afford equipment and international operations. However the DEA has a narrow remit, and ostensibly focuses international intelligence operations only on the drug related aspect of organised crime.

However, there are many challenges to intelligence sharing.  It is in itself a secretive subject, and the police are not ‘Cartesianally‘ outside of the ecology of organised crime.  They are underpaid, and if ‘intelligence powerful’, they become the targets for corruption. More importantly, it is natural to suspect ones neighbour of being corrupt, and even more natural to suspect it of another cop in another department (let alone one from another country), so the honest officers are reluctant to share information with people that they do not know personally (thus Mafiosi-style trust is also operating within the police!). The other problem is that, like the police, state systems and broader hierarchies of power are also subsumed into the sphere of influence exerted by organised crime. This dovetails nicely into liberal fears that the state or the police should not have too much power, or too much information on their citizens, because this information gives corruptible individuals more power than they have already.

The topic is a difficult one to broach, because at the same time as this legitimate liberal misgiving restrains the information available to the police, organised crime is expanding its malign influence, its spider web of control, through the legitimate economy. For example, organised crime is officially the biggest business in Italy, with enough liquid assets to make it the largest bank in the country (65 billion Euros) while holding a share of 7% of the country’s GDP. I don’t think that this statistic is unique to Italy, despite the sensational attention that the Italian Mafia receives.

The ideal goal of organised crime is to conduct criminal acts within a legal system, and the master criminals are those whose system is so well established that their networks of influence have matured to the level where they affect the legislative procedure, and can actually change the law to suit their profit making while riding roughshod over the common good. For example, look at the banking crisis, where a small, secretive insider group made a huge amount of profit directly through the manipulation of markets by the exchange of privileged secrets and the betrayal of clients (telling clients to buy, while at the same time putting out rumours that the stock is worthless); then, when the house of cards came crashing down, managing to ‘socialise the debt’ by getting institutions which were set up to work for the aggregate good to assume the debt caused by these insider groups in the first place.

Regarding the devious operations of the banking industry (which may be compared to a mafia), how do these groups maintain loyalty, and why do the elected representatives of the common good connive with them?

Again, the issue at the crux of this subject is the notion of secrecy. Organised crime programmes work on secrecy, both between members, and regarding the secrecy of the system as a whole through compartmentalisation, isolated franchise organisations, seemingly informal production deals and confidential trade-offs with independent entrepreneurs. Mind you, there is always a book-keeper somewhere, under a stone!

The very institution that we have to investigate this has similarly secretive structure.  I am talking about the Law Enforcement Organised Crime Investigation departments. The police keep their investigations and their databases secret for fear of the corruptibility of others, and in response to the potential danger from organised crime. Another similarity of the police is that the police, while they are the legitimate wielders of the violence of the state, have recourse nonetheless to violence to back up their aims, or their whims.

Intelligence agencies occupy an ambiguous ground; the CIA was set up with a no holds barred approach to the Soviet Union, which took illegality in its stride. Intelligence organisations, like organised crime networks, are based on discretion, and have a pyramidical structure with only a few coordinators who actually know what is going on.  They also tend to have links with special operations military departments, making ruthlessness a key part of their arsenal. The acronym of the CIA is also playfully ‘The Cocaine Importing Agency’, or as Buckminster Fuller out it ‘Capitalism’s Invisible Army’ (as well as ‘The Complete Idiots Agency’).

With these observations, are we as modern states trying to fight fire with fire by using these sorts of institutions to combat organised crime?

I propose that perhaps the villain that needs to be combated is the secrecy which allows for conspiratorial networks to occur. Information on organised crime should not be kept in the archives of double password encrypted police files, but should be firmly in the public domain, for all of us to be read.

It is of no surprise that organised crime has worked indefatigably to culturally associate the good citizen who has the bravery or the career ambition to expose the secrets of the perpetrators, with the notion of disloyalty, hinting that they are working against the common good by creating lucre for themselves unethically. These citizens are given derogatory names.  They are called ‘snitches’, or ‘grasses’.  Snitching is bad, we are taught from our schooldays. At the same time, the media portrays organised crime as ‘cool’, from the successful black guys in music videos to the films of Francis Ford Copolla and Martin Scorsese. This reinforces an aura of cultural reverence for organised crime.

Meanwhile Bradley Manning may get life in prison for exposing a video of an army helicopter shooting unarmed people in Iraq, and Julian Assange is accused of being a terrorist. The whistle blower in the British Treasury who ‘grassed’ on the executive handshake that let Goldman Sachs of £12 million pounds of tax lost his job.

While the Central American example of the President wiretapped by his chief of intelligence at the behest of a drug cartel sounds is a wild story of a failed state, the banking crisis and Bradley Manning, and the example of Italy, show that the developed countries are in a similarly farcical situation.

Democracy as a form of state organisation is put forward as purporting to work for the aggregate common good of the people. The weight on the shoulders of our leaders must lie towards fulfilling this obligation. However secrecy and smoke-screens allow small elite groups (organised criminals) to pervert the actions of our elected leaders. Even worse, in some cases, the only leaders who can ever be elected are the ones who are guarantee-ably bound to secrecy, and controlled through secrets – either clandestine knowledge of their perversions and affiliations, or undisclosed payments into their bank accounts.

Organised crime must be combated with disclosure, shaming and publicity. In addition,  some sort of  comprehensive, transparent, and well publicised democratic database should be implemented notifying us all of the people involved in organised crime, and their networks of influence: a database which the electorate could use when choosing political parties and electing leaders.

 

Post note problems

What I didn’t look at here is the line of analysis following Buckminster Fuller, who writes that the state itself, and civilisation arose from strong men who began to live off of others using the threat of violence – he gives the example of the bandit asking for protection money from the shepherd, “you need me to stop your sheep disappearing at night.” From these beginnings we get barons, who Fuller sees as kingpins, mobilising labour for example to build ocean-going trade ships through the threat of violence. We could even say that the enclosure of the commons (fundamental for the modern capitalist state) was a result of organised crime’s take over of the land).  What I take from this is that it is historically accurate to see many of the legitimate moneyed interests in our world as being just as much criminal cartels as the Colombian cocaine cartels, or Russian Bizness men.

Another observation is the social impact of ‘crime’ versus organised crime. For example, in a city where there is a well established crime boss, there is actually not that much negative social impact, because crime can only be committed with the boss’ orders, also as there is no challenger to his hegemony, there is less violence on the street. Many studies show that a fragmented drug trafficking yields much more social ills the more disorganised it is, as turf wars and conflicts become more and more common. Here we have a policeman’s dilemma: Imagine a cop has got all the information he needs to put the kingpin away. Should he do it if he knows that the ensuing power vacuum will yield a vicious turf war, or should he establish ‘an understanding’ with the crime boss?

Perhaps it is only by getting to grips with these understandings that we can come up with a realistic way of thinking about the influence of organised crime.