lunes, 28 de marzo de 2011

Artículo No. 12 Libya: Shifting sands · The tension between the responsibility to protect civilians and helping rebels to oust a tyrant will only grow in the coming days · Editorial · The Guardian, Monday 21 March 2011 · Article history


Air Vice-Marshal Osborn said yesterday his commanders were "entirely comfortable" with the missile strikes on Libya. Amr Moussa, the outgoing secretary general of the Arab League, for one, was not. Calling an emergency meeting one day after attending the first gathering of the coalition in Paris, Mr Moussa said that he agreed to the protection of civilians, not the bombardment of more civilians. The support of the Arab League is central to the claim by David Cameron, Nicolas Sarkozy and Barack Obama that the operation has regional support. This supposedly makes it different from Iraq in 2003. Dr Liam Fox, thedefence secretary, went further. He said active Arab participation in the no-fly zone made it clear to the Arab street that the attack on Libya was an attack on a tyrant, not the Arab world. Mr Moussa's statement throws that ambition into doubt. A strong Arab League statement pushed the UN security council to act with speed, so the criticism could belevelled: what did it expect?
Not a full-scale assault on Gaddafi's army, which is what it got. Mr Moussa's reaction is a reminder of the political limits of a resolution designed to save civilian lives. This is an inherently defensive concept. The tension between the responsibility to protect civilians and helping rebels to oust a tyrant will only grow in the coming days. The first blows in the campaign were a purely western affair. French Mirage jets shot up an armoured column south of Benghazi and the assault on the city was routed. Cruise missiles fired from US and British ships, submarines and aircraft destroyed radar, communications and air defencesites. Weeks of bloody urban fighting in Benghazi may have been prevented by the French action, although it could equally be argued that a speedy UN resolution may have precipitated a push into built-up areas, which provided Gaddafi's columns cover from the air.
As the military pendulum swings back into the favour of the rebels, calculations will change. Gaddafi's forces will be thrown back into defending Tripoli. Civilians could rise up against the tyrant and all would then be over. It would be good if that happened. But if they stand and fight, what then? Will French Mirages and British Typhoons be used like Nato air cover in Afghanistan, to knock out loyalist positions attempting to hold off a rebel advance? How does a responsibility to protect civilian life work in the circumstances where Gaddafi loyalists are defending their patch and the rebels are standing outside at the gates? The rationale of the resolution would then be to enforce a ceasefire, but that would mean keeping Gaddafi in power.
Before the UN vote, a key part was played by Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state. The hand-wringing in the White House stopped when she changed sides in the debate, abandoning Robert Gates, the defence secretary, and joining Samantha Power, a senior aide at the national security council, and Susan Rice, the US ambassador to theUnited Nations
. Ms Rice was an African specialist and adviser to Bill Clinton when the US failed to intervene to stop the genocide in Rwanda. The genocide occurred within a week of the USwithdrawal from Somalia, and no one at the time in Washington advocated a US military intervention. What then happened in Rwanda strengthened her determination to be more active in conflict prevention and resolution: "I would rather be alone and a loud voice for action than be silent," she later told National Public Radio.
Libya is no Rwanda. It soon morphed from a rebellion into a civil war and the outcome is far from certain. One thing is clear. No partner in this coalition wants to assume the leadership of fighting this campaign. The Americans are hiding behind the Europeans, and both are using the Arab League as cover. But whether they like it or not, each country involved will bear responsibility for how this ends. It may not be pretty.

Artículo No. 11 Libya crisis may save Nicolas Sarkozy from electoral humiliation · The French president certainly needs something to prevent him coming third in next year's election


·                                  
o                                                        Jonathan Freedland in Paris
o                                                        guardian.co.uk, Sunday 20 March 2011
Nicolas Sarkozy has seen no bounce in opinion poll figures after two cabinet reshuffles in quick succession. Photograph: Sipa Press/Rex Features
It would surely be poor taste to accuse Nicolas Sarkozy of leading France into combat for purely selfish political reasons – but that won't stop some in the president's inner circle wondering if Operation Odyssey Dawn might just save the skin of a man who, a matter of days ago, seemed destined for electoral humiliation. Ever so discreetly, they will be hopingLibya can do for Sarkozy what the Falklands did for Margaret Thatcher – anoint a successful war leader deserving of re-election.
"The French do like to have their president play world statesman," mused one diplomat inParis last week, before France's Mirage and Rafale fighter planes had taken to the skies. "A good crisis," he added, might be just what Sarkozy needs.
He certainly needs something. A week ago he was staring at polls so ominous some analysts wondered if he'd even make it into second place in next year's presidential contest. One survey put Sarkozy behind both his most likely Socialist opponent and Marine Le Pen, the new leader of the far-right National Front founded by her father, Jean-Marie. Sunday's cantonal elections were expected to bring more bad news for the president's UMP party.
Two cabinet reshuffles in quick succession produced no bounce, with the president's numbers stuck stubbornly in the doldrums. He's never quite shaken off the depiction by LesGuignols de l'Info, the French Spitting Image, as manic and hyperactive, constantly popping pills either to calm or lift his mood. A poster spotted in the fashionable Marais district of Paris has Sarkozy wearing a dunce's cap, smiling gormlessly.
The chatter among Parisian political types centres on whether the president would even make it to the second round in next year's two-stage contest, with some suspecting he might choose to preserve his dignity and not seek re-election at all – talk instantly dismissed, it has to be said, both by aides and by more neutral observers who swear thatSarkozy is a fighter, not a quitter.
But how did it come to this, that a man who crushed his Socialist rival in 2007 and who was hailed as an instant star on the European stage – complete with supermodel wife – is now fighting for his political life? The answer says much about the state of European politics after the crash of 2008, but rather more about France itself – in particular how a mentality presumed abandoned in the revolution of 1789 lives on.
The immediate explanation is not complicated and it is one familiar to most world leaders.The French economy is stalling, with unemployment stuck at 9.6%. The deficit does not equal Britain's, but its accumulated debt is just as heavy. The mood, says Socialist party spokesman Benoît Hamon, is despondent, especially among the young. "Graduates are doing jobs below their qualifications; young people owning their own property is unimaginable. They believe they will live less well than their parents and that the country is in decline."
Sarkozy's allies hardly disagree. Housing minister Benoist Apparu told me that, according to comparative polling, "the French are the most pessimistic nation in Europe" – that they are, incredibly, more worried about their future than the peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan.
All incumbents will struggle amid this kind of crash-induced gloom, but it has hit Sarkozyespecially hard. First, it has entirely derailed the programme on which he was elected. Out went the early, breathless talk of Thatcherising, or Blairising, the still-statist French economy, injecting a dose of neo-liberal Anglo-Saxonism. Whatever appeal that message might once have had vanished in the rubble of Lehman Brothers. Sarkozy, who at first dreamed big, has had to make do with more modest achievements – the signature one being his pension reform, raising the minimum retirement age from 60 to 62 in the face of a howl of protest. He promises tax reform is coming, but those on the right who yearned for red meat on crime or welfare feel disappointed.
Other politicians might be able to survive on such a thin record, but it's harder for Sarkozy, who started with such grand ambition. "He didn't say, 'I have the solution,'" argues Hamon of the Parti Socialiste. "He said, 'I am the solution.' So now people say, 'You are the problem.'"
His troubles are compounded because he has to look over both his shoulders, left and right. Putative Socialist candidate Dominique Strauss-Kahn is polling solidly, but the more immediate challenge comes from the National Front. Marine Le Pen is proving a more sophisticated operator than her father, steadily decontaminating the party brand – dropping the toxic references to the second world war and the downplaying of the Holocaust hefavoured. She seems able to reach female voters who have previously eluded the Front.
Determined to tap into the current anxious mood, she has made a direct play for working-class voters – pushing economic populist themes, denouncing the outsourcing of jobs and the perils of globalisation, promising to defend France's traditional social protections. Mixed with an unbending assertion of French laïcité, or secularism – now directed not at its traditional target, the Catholic church, but at Islam – she has crafted a message that threatens to woo back the very blue-collar voters that deserted the Front for Sarkozy in 2007.
No one believes Le Pen could actually win. If she somehow repeated her father's 2002 feat – when he came second in the first round, thereby qualifying for a second-round duel with Jacques Chirac – she would repeat his fate too, with voters of the moderate right, left and centre uniting to defeat her the way they defeated him. Indeed that scenario may beSarkozy's best hope: no matter how unpopular he is, in a straight fight against Le Pen, he would win. Just to be sure, he will try to blunt her appeal in 2012 by casting himself as the "protector president", safeguarding cherished public entitlements, services and the "French way of life". If he can stir some patriotic pride, casting himself as the French president who led the world on a no-fly zone over Libya, then so much the better.
Yet a series of conversations with analysts, party officials and diplomats left no doubt that, while the current circumstances have hardly helped, much of Sarkozy's woes are of his own making. They come down less to policy than personality. Professor Pascal Perrineau, of the prestigious Sciences Po institute of political studies, notes that the sharp drop in the president's poll numbers came within six months of his taking office, long before the global financial crisis struck. What caused that decline? Perrineau sighs as he explains thatSarkozy misunderstood something crucial about the office of president and its place in the French psyche.
"It's a monarchical system in France," he says. A "republican monarchy", but a monarchy nonetheless. "There is a certain majesty in the job. Sarkozy thought he could be a 'new manager', that he could exercise power without majesty. But he was wrong."
The academic then launches into a litany which I heard repeated in different forms acrossParis (and which is repeated again in a new book, "OFF: What Nicolas Sarkozy Should Never Have Said to Us"). Sarkozy's behaviour and temperament is simply unsuited to the grandeur of the office of president of the French Republic. He jogged wearing shorts on the steps of the Élysée Palace. On holiday with Carla Bruni he wore Ray-Ban sunglasses. He was photographed next to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, legs apart, poking at his mobile phone. He discussed "intimate" matters during a press conference. This is not how a French president behaves.
One well-placed observer rattles off the list of offences. "The bling-bling, the glitter, the Ray-Bans, the model third wife, the ostentatious wealth, the gold chain. His rudeness, his sarcasm, his put-downs" – the president was caught on camera telling someone, in effect, to "bugger off" – "It's the manner of the man that they object to." (As for palling around with the super-rich during economic hard times, voters tell the Parti Socialiste's focus groups that's "obscene" or "indecent".)
It would be easy to dismiss such criticism as mere snobbery, of the kind that was meted out to a first-term Bill Clinton, condemned as "unpresidential" and as an Arkansas hick by theWashington elite. Sarkozy, as a descendant of Hungarian and Jewish immigrants and a man who did not go through the elite École Nationale d'Administration or ÉNA, certainly gets his share of that. But there is an extra dimension in France. After Chirac, Mitterrand andGiscard, the French electorate expect their president to look a certain way: tall, fatherly, aristocratic, with statue-like features ready to be carved in marble. Sarkozy – smaller, nervy and ever-so-slightly arriviste – just doesn't look the part. One diplomat says UMP officials have told him: "We can sell the policy, but we cannot sell the president."
More deeply, the hauteur of a French president helps him do the job. He can stay distant, above the fray – and therefore less likely to be blamed when things go wrong. Sarko, by all accounts, is a micromanager with even middling decisions now coming out of the Élysée.France initially called the Arab Spring badly wrong, the then foreign minister even offering the now-ousted Tunisian regime the "world-renowned knowhow of France's security forces". But it was Sarkozy, not the minister, who took the rap. He cannot call on presidential mystique because he has dispelled it. In a job that is part prime minister, part sovereign, he has, in the words of Perrineau, "forgotten that he is the Queen".
His own allies hardly dispute this, though they try to suggest part of the problem is structural: post-Chirac, the French president is now elected almost simultaneously with parliament, making him a more workaday figure, closer to a British PM. Still, housing minister Apparu is candid: "We're not going to waste time and political energy trying to change his image. [In 2012] he can say, 'You don't like me, but it doesn't matter. What matters is that France has a good president.'" The danger for Nicolas Sarkozy is that, barring a Libya-induced change of heart, the French electorate will agree – and promptly choose someone else.

Artículo No. 10 Libya crisis may save Nicolas Sarkozy from electoral humiliation · The French president certainly needs something to prevent him coming third in next year's election


·                                  
o                                                        Jonathan Freedland in Paris
o                                                        guardian.co.uk, Sunday 20 March 2011
Nicolas Sarkozy has seen no bounce in opinion poll figures after two cabinet reshuffles in quick succession. Photograph: Sipa Press/Rex Features
It would surely be poor taste to accuse Nicolas Sarkozy of leading France into combat for purely selfish political reasons – but that won't stop some in the president's inner circle wondering if Operation Odyssey Dawn might just save the skin of a man who, a matter of days ago, seemed destined for electoral humiliation. Ever so discreetly, they will be hopingLibya can do for Sarkozy what the Falklands did for Margaret Thatcher – anoint a successful war leader deserving of re-election.
"The French do like to have their president play world statesman," mused one diplomat inParis last week, before France's Mirage and Rafale fighter planes had taken to the skies. "A good crisis," he added, might be just what Sarkozy needs.
He certainly needs something. A week ago he was staring at polls so ominous some analysts wondered if he'd even make it into second place in next year's presidential contest. One survey put Sarkozy behind both his most likely Socialist opponent and Marine Le Pen, the new leader of the far-right National Front founded by her father, Jean-Marie. Sunday's cantonal elections were expected to bring more bad news for the president's UMP party.
Two cabinet reshuffles in quick succession produced no bounce, with the president's numbers stuck stubbornly in the doldrums. He's never quite shaken off the depiction by LesGuignols de l'Info, the French Spitting Image, as manic and hyperactive, constantly popping pills either to calm or lift his mood. A poster spotted in the fashionable Marais district of Paris has Sarkozy wearing a dunce's cap, smiling gormlessly.
The chatter among Parisian political types centres on whether the president would even make it to the second round in next year's two-stage contest, with some suspecting he might choose to preserve his dignity and not seek re-election at all – talk instantly dismissed, it has to be said, both by aides and by more neutral observers who swear thatSarkozy is a fighter, not a quitter.
But how did it come to this, that a man who crushed his Socialist rival in 2007 and who was hailed as an instant star on the European stage – complete with supermodel wife – is now fighting for his political life? The answer says much about the state of European politics after the crash of 2008, but rather more about France itself – in particular how a mentality presumed abandoned in the revolution of 1789 lives on.
The immediate explanation is not complicated and it is one familiar to most world leaders.The French economy is stalling, with unemployment stuck at 9.6%. The deficit does not equal Britain's, but its accumulated debt is just as heavy. The mood, says Socialist party spokesman Benoît Hamon, is despondent, especially among the young. "Graduates are doing jobs below their qualifications; young people owning their own property is unimaginable. They believe they will live less well than their parents and that the country is in decline."
Sarkozy's allies hardly disagree. Housing minister Benoist Apparu told me that, according to comparative polling, "the French are the most pessimistic nation in Europe" – that they are, incredibly, more worried about their future than the peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan.
All incumbents will struggle amid this kind of crash-induced gloom, but it has hit Sarkozyespecially hard. First, it has entirely derailed the programme on which he was elected. Out went the early, breathless talk of Thatcherising, or Blairising, the still-statist French economy, injecting a dose of neo-liberal Anglo-Saxonism. Whatever appeal that message might once have had vanished in the rubble of Lehman Brothers. Sarkozy, who at first dreamed big, has had to make do with more modest achievements – the signature one being his pension reform, raising the minimum retirement age from 60 to 62 in the face of a howl of protest. He promises tax reform is coming, but those on the right who yearned for red meat on crime or welfare feel disappointed.
Other politicians might be able to survive on such a thin record, but it's harder for Sarkozy, who started with such grand ambition. "He didn't say, 'I have the solution,'" argues Hamon of the Parti Socialiste. "He said, 'I am the solution.' So now people say, 'You are the problem.'"
His troubles are compounded because he has to look over both his shoulders, left and right. Putative Socialist candidate Dominique Strauss-Kahn is polling solidly, but the more immediate challenge comes from the National Front. Marine Le Pen is proving a more sophisticated operator than her father, steadily decontaminating the party brand – dropping the toxic references to the second world war and the downplaying of the Holocaust hefavoured. She seems able to reach female voters who have previously eluded the Front.
Determined to tap into the current anxious mood, she has made a direct play for working-class voters – pushing economic populist themes, denouncing the outsourcing of jobs and the perils of globalisation, promising to defend France's traditional social protections. Mixed with an unbending assertion of French laïcité, or secularism – now directed not at its traditional target, the Catholic church, but at Islam – she has crafted a message that threatens to woo back the very blue-collar voters that deserted the Front for Sarkozy in 2007.
No one believes Le Pen could actually win. If she somehow repeated her father's 2002 feat – when he came second in the first round, thereby qualifying for a second-round duel with Jacques Chirac – she would repeat his fate too, with voters of the moderate right, left and centre uniting to defeat her the way they defeated him. Indeed that scenario may beSarkozy's best hope: no matter how unpopular he is, in a straight fight against Le Pen, he would win. Just to be sure, he will try to blunt her appeal in 2012 by casting himself as the "protector president", safeguarding cherished public entitlements, services and the "French way of life". If he can stir some patriotic pride, casting himself as the French president who led the world on a no-fly zone over Libya, then so much the better.
Yet a series of conversations with analysts, party officials and diplomats left no doubt that, while the current circumstances have hardly helped, much of Sarkozy's woes are of his own making. They come down less to policy than personality. Professor Pascal Perrineau, of the prestigious Sciences Po institute of political studies, notes that the sharp drop in the president's poll numbers came within six months of his taking office, long before the global financial crisis struck. What caused that decline? Perrineau sighs as he explains thatSarkozy misunderstood something crucial about the office of president and its place in the French psyche.
"It's a monarchical system in France," he says. A "republican monarchy", but a monarchy nonetheless. "There is a certain majesty in the job. Sarkozy thought he could be a 'new manager', that he could exercise power without majesty. But he was wrong."
The academic then launches into a litany which I heard repeated in different forms acrossParis (and which is repeated again in a new book, "OFF: What Nicolas Sarkozy Should Never Have Said to Us"). Sarkozy's behaviour and temperament is simply unsuited to the grandeur of the office of president of the French Republic. He jogged wearing shorts on the steps of the Élysée Palace. On holiday with Carla Bruni he wore Ray-Ban sunglasses. He was photographed next to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, legs apart, poking at his mobile phone. He discussed "intimate" matters during a press conference. This is not how a French president behaves.
One well-placed observer rattles off the list of offences. "The bling-bling, the glitter, the Ray-Bans, the model third wife, the ostentatious wealth, the gold chain. His rudeness, his sarcasm, his put-downs" – the president was caught on camera telling someone, in effect, to "bugger off" – "It's the manner of the man that they object to." (As for palling around with the super-rich during economic hard times, voters tell the Parti Socialiste's focus groups that's "obscene" or "indecent".)
It would be easy to dismiss such criticism as mere snobbery, of the kind that was meted out to a first-term Bill Clinton, condemned as "unpresidential" and as an Arkansas hick by theWashington elite. Sarkozy, as a descendant of Hungarian and Jewish immigrants and a man who did not go through the elite École Nationale d'Administration or ÉNA, certainly gets his share of that. But there is an extra dimension in France. After Chirac, Mitterrand andGiscard, the French electorate expect their president to look a certain way: tall, fatherly, aristocratic, with statue-like features ready to be carved in marble. Sarkozy – smaller, nervy and ever-so-slightly arriviste – just doesn't look the part. One diplomat says UMP officials have told him: "We can sell the policy, but we cannot sell the president."
More deeply, the hauteur of a French president helps him do the job. He can stay distant, above the fray – and therefore less likely to be blamed when things go wrong. Sarko, by all accounts, is a micromanager with even middling decisions now coming out of the Élysée.France initially called the Arab Spring badly wrong, the then foreign minister even offering the now-ousted Tunisian regime the "world-renowned knowhow of France's security forces". But it was Sarkozy, not the minister, who took the rap. He cannot call on presidential mystique because he has dispelled it. In a job that is part prime minister, part sovereign, he has, in the words of Perrineau, "forgotten that he is the Queen".
His own allies hardly dispute this, though they try to suggest part of the problem is structural: post-Chirac, the French president is now elected almost simultaneously with parliament, making him a more workaday figure, closer to a British PM. Still, housing minister Apparu is candid: "We're not going to waste time and political energy trying to change his image. [In 2012] he can say, 'You don't like me, but it doesn't matter. What matters is that France has a good president.'" The danger for Nicolas Sarkozy is that, barring a Libya-induced change of heart, the French electorate will agree – and promptly choose someone else.
Artículo No. 9

March 21, 2011 |Stratfor
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin speaks at a meeting inYuzhno-Sakhalinsk on March 19
Summary
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said March 21 that the U.N. Security Council resolution allowing foreign military intervention in Libya is “defective and flawed,” and criticized the West — particularly the United States — for being overly aggressive. The military intervention in Libya has given Russia an opportunity to return to a confrontational stance against the United States asMoscow and Washington discuss missile defense and other contentious issues.
Analysis
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on March 21 criticized the U.N. Security Council resolution on Libya for allowing foreign military intervention in a sovereign state. Putin called the resolution “defective and flawed,” adding that “it allows everything and is reminiscent of a medieval call for a crusade.” Putin noted that Russia, which abstained on the U.N. resolution vote and is not involved in the operation, wanted to avoid direct intervention and admonished the West — especially the United States — for acting too aggressively.
Putin’s comments indicate the strength of Russia’s geopolitical position in the midst of several ongoing crises. The Western-led intervention in Libya is an opportunity for Putin to return to a familiar confrontational position on the United States in order to advance Russia’s interests even further at a difficult time forWashington.
As several crises continue unfolding across the world — thenuclear accident in Japan, growing unrest in the Persian Gulf and now the military invention in Libya — no country has benefited geopolitically from these developments more than Russia.Growing instability has caused oil prices to rise, boosting Russia’s income. Japan’s dependence on nuclear power for energy has caused Tokyo to turn to Russia for more natural gas supplies, and concerns over the safety of nuclear power have led the Europeans — Russia’s primary energy market — to reconsider many future (and existing) nuclear plants. The chaos in Libya, even before the Western-led military intervention began, took much of Libya’s oil and natural gas exports offline, and Russia has been more than happy to make up the difference to Italy and other European countries. Perhaps most important, it appears that the window of opportunity that led to Russia’s geopolitical re-emergence in the first place — U.S. distraction in the Middle East — will be growing for the foreseeable future.
The conflict in Libya has not only opened up a third theater for U.S. military involvement, it has also given Putin the chance to characterize the United States as overly aggressive and willing to invade anywhere, while Russia prefers a more cautious approach.Russia’s position is strong enough that it feels it can easily switch between cooperation with and opposition to the United States.Russia has been more cooperative under the “reset” in ties between Washington and Moscow, but Putin is reverting to the tactics he used when Russia was geopolitically weaker, from the mid-2000s through early 2009, when he constantly and publicly railed against the United States.
Besides using the opportunity to criticize the United States, Putin has two other reasons for his confrontational push. First, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates is in St. Petersburg meeting with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev and Russian Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov. Missile defense is the key topic, andWashington is offering a small concession on this controversial topic in setting up an exchange center for sharing data. However, this is not enough for the Russians, who want actual participation in missile defense. Putin’s speech criticizing the U.S. involvement in Libya symbolically was made at a ballistic missile factory on the same day Gates was in the country. Putin noted that the Libyan intervention “once again confirms the rightness of those measures which we undertake to strengthen Russia’s defense capacity” and that Russia would increase its ballistic missile capabilities.
The second issue is that Putin personally is not happy with theUnited States after U.S. Vice President Joe Biden’s recent visit to Russia. When Biden was in Moscow, he met with Russian opposition leaders — something that displeased the Kremlin,particularly since Biden mocked a famous quote from former U.S. President George W. Bush about Putin during these opposition meetings, saying he “looked into Putin’s eyes and saw no soul.”
Given that U.S. commitments are increasing while Russia’s ability to maneuver is growing, Moscow is using the current opportunity to make its displeasure with Washington known.

Artículo No. 8 ¿El neoliberalismo provocó la revuelta árabe? Autor: Alfredo Jalife-Rahme * Sección: Radar Geopolítico Revista CONTRALÍNEA 20 MARZO 2011


En mis participaciones en los variados multimedia (nacionales e internacionales) y en mis recientes conferencias desde Chihuahua, pasando por Puebla hasta Cancún, ha sido mi muy humilde hipótesis colocar en relieve la multidimensionalidad de la “segunda revuelta árabe”.
La ruta de la crisis multidimensional parece clara y es de doble vía. Primero, su detonador global (la crisis financierista de Wall Street y la City) afecta regiones (por ejemplo, el mundo árabe) con sus propias características locales (la diferencia específica entre Túnez y Libia: dos países maghrébines del Occidente árabe), que luego en su camino de retorno impacta –debido al alza del petróleo (por los sucesos de Libia y Bahréin que han puesto en jaque a los jeques petroleros del Golfo Pérsico)– las regiones (la Unión Europea, China e India, tan dependientes del oro negro) y el precio global de los hidrocarburos que se pueden disparar, después de su abrupta alza, más allá de los 200 dólares por barril.
La crisis multidimensional comienza el 15 de septiembre de 2008 con la gravísima crisis financiera en Wall Street, detonada por la quiebra de uno de los principales bancos anglosajones de inversiones del mundo, Lehman Brothers, que revela lo consabido: ladesregulada globalización financierista está basada en papel virtual sin sustento en la economía real. El papel financierista equivale a alrededor de 15 veces el producto interno bruto global, según datos muy rudimentarios del Banco Internacional de Pagos, con sede en Basilea, Suiza, conocido como “el banco central de los bancos centrales”.
La crisis financierista del modelo neoliberal anglosajón se transmuta secuencialmente en una crisis económica (porque, en última instancia, hay que cubrir el papel chatarrafinancierista con los pagos tangibles de la economía real) que sume al mundo en una recesión.
La crisis ya económica se despliega en crisis energética (alza del petróleo y los commodities: las materias primas, donde brillan intensamente los alimentos, uno de los motivos de la revuelta árabe by the time being), por el rescate bancario y la impresión masiva de dólares por la Reserva Federal, en medio de otra crisis adicional: el cambio climático.
Se trata, luego entonces, de una crisis multidimensional. Pero peor aún: se devela una crisis de la civilización occidental, específicamente de su modelo depredador neoliberal de corte plutocrático que opera con travestismo “democrático”. Porque el neoliberalismo global es incapaz de brindar trabajo a sus jóvenes desempleados, lo cual pone en tela de juicio su gobernabilidad y su vigencia. En realidad, cualquier modelo que fuere y que sea impotente en dar trabajo a sus jóvenes desempleados –la expresión del futuro de una sociedad– apuesta a su suicidio.
La crisis financierista aún no concluye y es probable que dure una década entera. Pero mientras nos alcanza el futuro, el gobernador de la Reserva Federal, Ben Shalom Bernanke, insiste en propiciar una hiperinflación monetarista –la segunda ronda de impresión de dólares insustentables por 600 mil millones de dólares–, que ha causado estragos en el planeta y ha exacerbado las alzas de los alimentos en más del ciento por ciento en unos cuantos meses, del petróleo y los metales (en especial, los preciosos, como el oro y la plata, el último refugio de los ahorradores para preservar su patrimonio pulverizado).
En este tenor, aunque ya lo habíamos comentado tangencialmente, el neoliberalismo global –básicamente las privatizaciones en Túnez, Egipto y Libia, estimuladas por el Fondo Monetario Internacional (FMI)– empieza a ser enfocado como una de las causales preponderantes de las revueltas en el mundo árabe –de la que sería un grave error de juicio pretender a su confinamiento regional y que pronto afectará los cuatro rincones del planeta por tratarse de un fenómeno estructural global y no de un exquisito epifenómeno regional exótico–, según un artículo relevante de Nick Beams, secretario general del SocialistEquality Party de Australia, en el portal muy fértil en la eclosión de ideas, World SocialistWeb Site, lo que vale a posteriori una entrevista con Mike Whitney, de una gran experiencia del mundo financierista, en otro portal muy consultado: ICH.
A juicio de Nick Beams, “las fuerzas globales empujan las revueltas del Medio Oriente” (título de su luminoso ensayo) y “la más obvia característica de Túnez, Egipto y Libia –los tres principales centros de la tormenta hasta ahora– es que un programa neoliberal de libre mercado de reestructuración de alcances profundos ha tenido lugar en el periodo reciente”.
Tales políticas, que incluyen “una privatización de larga escala, el retroceso de la economía nacional y la regulación financiera, la destrucción de decenas de miles de empleos y recortes en los subsidios estatales, han sido supervisados por el FMI en representación del capital financiero global”.
Nick Beams comenta sarcásticamente que, en octubre pasado, el FMI, en un reporte kafkiano (visto en retrospectiva), se lamentaba por “la falta de competitividad en el Medio Oriente y África del Norte para luego alabar los “éxitos” (¡super-sic!) privatizadores de Túnez y Egipto.
Túnez fue transformado en “una encrucijada de la deslocalización” (léase: un centromaquilador) en la región con bajos salarios para los empleados, mientras Egipto “atrajo inversiones considerables en la tecnología de la información” mediante “reformas estructurales” que conducen a la mejoría del ambiente empresarial”.
Libia, con todo y el nepotismo de los Gadafi, desmanteló su banca estatal por recomendación del Fondo Monetario Internacional, y “socios foráneos” fueron aceptados en seis del total de 16 bancos que allí operan.
Más aún: el reporte aludido del FMI, una joya de la estulticia mental, festejaba la decapitación laboral para reducir costos (en inglés le llaman retrenchment) de 340 mil empleados públicos (en un país de 6.5 millones de habitantes) con el fin de desarrollar el sector financiero (donde la banca anglosajona florece como en ningún otro sector) y así atraer “inversiones directas foráneas” (léase: el papel chatarra de la City y Wall Street para transmutar la alquimia del petróleo que la jerigonza globalista denomina “transformación económica”).
Después de la aportación de sus datos duros, Nick Beamsaduce dice que las revueltas del Medio Oriente (nota: en realidad pertenecen a la esfera nominalmente árabe que aún no alcanza a toda la región medio oriental en su conjunto) “asumen un significado mayor”, ya que constituyen “la primera revuelta en contra del programa del libre mercado que ha tenido un impacto devastador en la clase obrera en los pasados 20 años” (nota: el inicio delthatcherismo-reaganomics anglosajón).
Su diagnóstico es demoledor: “La privatización, la profundización de la desigualdad social, el creciente desempleo juvenil, la ausencia de oportunidades para los graduados de universidades, la caída de salarios reales y la acumulación de inmensas cantidades de riqueza, cuya mayoría proviene de operaciones criminales de saqueo, no pertenecen al Medio Oriente, sino son fenómenos globales”.
Concluye ominosamente que la hiperinflación alimentaria generada por la crisis del capitalismo global va más allá del Medio Oriente y amenaza ya con mayores consecuencias a China.
¿Cómo responderá China al tsunami global de la crisis alimentaria en plena expansión?
¿Qué advendrá en México, donde los monetaristas gobernantes itamitas pretenden haber “blindado” a la tortilla con los demenciales “derivados financieros”?
*Catedrático de geopolítica y negocios internacionales en la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México