Comments on Some Art

(Hunger did not kill me, man did.)

I’m trying to come to grips with this art that I lifted from Rebelion.org, a progressive website in Latin America.

The artist, J. Kalvellido, tells a story that would take volumes of printed words to depict. He brings us to the real issue: human beings making decisions that affect others throughout the world in a way that demands their death, and in many cases a slow death by starvation as the art work illustrates. An agonizing death unrecorded by the lens of a CNN or Fox camera crew.

Millions dying of starvation; billions living on less than a dollar a day; half the planet living in conditions some might call slavery. Most of humanity lives on this war ravaged planet in countries with natural resources the powerful of the world covet and then take, at a cost that brings genocidal conditions to the poor.

The skeleton-like child is a product of economic conditions grafted in secret and hurled on human beings as the only possible solution to what ails the world, even though it means exclusion and violence for millions.

I try to push imagination to get into the guts of the art work we're reflecting upon. Behind it lies all the discontent in Latin America—the poor fed up with market reforms that cause their children to die before their time. Behind it lies a criminal war in Iraq. There is no other way to describe a war that has thrown the world into a state of panic about decisions made in Washington, decisions that came out of bedrock lies.
This skeleton-like child was killed not by hunger but by human beings. When looking at it in this light, we’re brought back to a moral and ethical posture that has consequences.

The issue at hand comes down to two simple questions: 1) how do we, as citizens, create a society that gives birth to policies that benefit those who toil rather than those who don't; and 2) how do wage earners rather than wealth accumulators get a fare shake?

Due to recent dramatic shifts in economic policies, the elites have kidnapped the state; the poor have gotten a bum rap and have been pushed further into poverty. Even those who've enjoyed the boom of the nineties now are thrown to the wolves as GM and Merick lay off workers: the former dropping 30,000 and the latter 7,000. Where do market reforms come into all of this? Trade deals run roughshod over workers. Most workers in the US panic when they think of the FTAA (The Free Trade Area of the Americas) Bush wants imposed on the hemisphere. Trade deals mean job losses and lower wages for workers only a pay check away from poverty.

Human beings responsible for the systemic muck that produces hunger throughout the world endorse a system that has our cities gated, protecting those who have from those who don't. Look at what happened in France as the "others" — migrants — experienced exclusion and unemployment hovering around 20 percent.

We've got to listen to those who spoke at Rosa Parks' funeral. They elaborated on systemic sin that makes every major city in the country a "weapon of mass destruction" because of wealth accumulated in financial markets that don't produce jobs. Those jobs that are created hover on the inhuman. They annihilate creativity. They produce what some call "presentism"; workers on the job but not on the job, their minds wander somewhere else. Those who control the means of production realize the severity of the problem with billions of dollars in lost production. Yet it's business as usual. If workers “get uppity” and demand humane work places, companies say they can and will move to where cheap labor abounds.

But the "presentism" connects with the cartoon: it's something that flows out of an economic system created by human beings who prioritize things over people, capital over people, and property over people. Most of the legislation that comes out of Washington in a post-Katrina world illustrates this. It's happened before too, but it's more glaring now. Poverty creation has increased dramatically when one looks at the human (back to the art work) natural disaster that came with Katrina, when the hurricane devastated swaths of the Gulf region and eliminated millions of jobs. Big bucks flowed like a river to multinationals connected to the Administration, multinationals got the majority of the billions dolled out since the hurricane. Bush all along has made decisions that benefit the mega rich: the poor pay for it and the poor die for it. The poor have no voice in job creation.

When I check out different websites I notice others trying to deal with the art we're looking at, although it's not said outright, but the questions are all the same. Who's responsible for the economic chaos in the world, for the torture in Guantanamo and secret detention camps the US uses around the world to humiliate and torture? Hunger plagues the planet because people don't have money to buy the abundance of food available. Food is simply not available for many because they have no work.

We need to ask why many lack work. Let’s look at Latin America where half the population lives in poverty. A recent article in the Christian Science Monitor advises folks who have money to invest it in emerging markets like Argentina, Brazil, Colombia (last year the most bullish stock market in Latin America was Colombia, in the thick of a fifty-year war!) and Mexico. The reason many of the elite take as much as a quarter of their portfolio investment and move it to Latin America is because profits are huge. The Christian Science Monitor says the dollar return from Latin America is 45.1 percent: not bad for a region of the world characterized by poverty. So the money isn't staying there, it is flowing into the hands of the mega rich. Remember the art work.

When people grasp that legal pillage is taking place and they begin to try to remedy it, the powerful react. Their interests are at stake when a state seeks to help its own people rather than global markets, or when the issue of sovereignty surfaces about the right of a people to decide how they will live or die, and not have their rights taken away from them by an imperial power.

Back to the art and let’s bring Hugo Chavez into the picture. He's on the outs with those powerful human elites who create situations where children die of hunger; those who collude with policies that kill, policies like supporting IMF, WB and WTO. The powerful elites can do no wrong. They receive accolades. Their blindness to poverty keeps them in good stead with Wall Street and other financial capitals around the world, rather than with their own people. Money will flow their way and they'll continue to back the Washington Consensus - the ideas of the powerful - and talk about democracy as a ruse to hide misery and the mega slums that dot the earth. The "undemocratic", "strongman", "threat to the hemisphere" Chavez, refuses to support policies crafted by the elites who controll trade and money flows throughout the hemisphere.

When the President of the oil-rich country of Venezuela, (elected by an overwhelming majority) uses 40% of the state-owned oil company, PDVSA, to support empowerment in poverty stricken areas and encourage voice among the voiceless, he's criticized. When money flowed unimpeded to US oil companies by those who controlled PDVSA in regimes before Chavez, not a word was said. It was business as usual. Citgo, which is owned by Venezuela, during the years when the poor had no voice, was seen as a subsidy to the US with its cheap oil prices.

Citgo helps the poor in the US. It's getting oil to Massachusetts’s poor at rates they can afford. They won't freeze this winter. Those who want Chavez out view this gesture as opportunistic. They are trying to make political points in the US that will support his ouster.

A Christian Science Monitor article on the Mass-Venezuela deal, written by Mark Clayton, has the counterpoint. He quotes negative comments by people from the Kennedy School at Harvard and the Inter-American Dialogue. “’This is precisely what he (Chavez) loves to do - embarrass the White House, show that the US doesn't take care of its own and that the approach he's devised in Venezuela is superior,’ says Michael Shifter of the Inter-American Dialogue..."

On this one Chavez is right and he's portrayed as some craving lunatic just ranting against the US. Most Latin Americans would agree with Chavez over Shifter.

Clayton quotes Ricardo Hausmann, a former Venezuelan Planning Minister now at the Kennedy School, "Such things (like the oil to Massachusetts) are meant to make it harder for a political coalition to limit his actions."

Why would anyone want to limit actions like this other than to bring control back into the hands of those who created policies in Venezuela that caused the poor to riot when the IMF imposed structural adjustment programs in the late eighties. Hundreds lost their lives. It was a turning point for Chavez, then a young army military officer.

Clayton says Chavez giving oil to the poor of Massachusetts will cost poor Venezuelans $8 million. How much do the oil policies of our own country cost our 34 million people living in poverty with high oil prices that are unlikely to drop in the immediate future?

Let’s go back to the art work. Venezuela has eliminated illiteracy. Venezuela has reduced poverty and hunger with its dedication to "missions" that see human beings in a holistic way and tend to food, education and job creation. Oil money finances these missions. At the same time, on this side of the planet, those who control big oil in Washington unabashedly said oil prices will remain high even though they're making record breaking profits.

Venezuela gives oil to Caribbean countries at discount prices. Another gimmick says the dominant and he bellows. Meanwhile in Mexico, where poverty spreads wildly throughout the country, oil prices are the highest in the world. Vicente Fox, the Mexican President comes to Puerto Del Mar, where the meeting of the Presidents of the Americas is taking place, and tries to change the theme from unemployment to the Free Trade Areas of the Americas, which never was on the agenda. The US press never came down hard on Fox on that one; it supports the way things are. The New York Times even came out on behalf of FTAA and CAFTA. The dominant never made a connection between unemployment and trade policies that were exacerbated due to Bush-backed trade deals. But when Chavez calls Fox a "puppy dog of the empire" all hell breaks loose.

Chavez is the only president in Latin America who is able say, “The emperor has no clothes.” And he's making some headway in getting human beings to think differently about trade deals dominated by the United States. He's even criticized Mercosur, the Latin American trade block that includes Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. Venezuela recently became a new member. Chavez says that Mercosur runs by the traditional rules of the dominant and has to begin to think out of the box in a way that gives Latin Americans more say about the goods and services it produces.

Yes, it all comes back to a simple fact: we human beings create the world in which we live. Let’s celebrate the art that expresses it and those human beings who create options for the poor. The example of Chavez helps us realize that things don't have to stay the way they are. They can change, even though change means reprisals by the most powerful country in the world. Once it was said: “Blessed are the persecuted, for they shall inherit the beloved community.”

Jim Harney