The Notion

IMF Clarifies Terms of Haiti's Loan

By Richard Kim

Last Friday I wrote about the IMF's new $100 million loan to Haiti. I cited debt relief activists who told me that the new loan would be an extension of the IMF's existing loan of $165 million. This information was confirmed by the IMF's press release, which stated that "emergency financing would be provided as an augmentation to the existing IMF-supported arrangement with Haiti under the Extended Credit Facility [ECF]." The IMF's announcement provided no further information about conditions that may or may not be attached to the loan and made no mention of future debt relief for Haiti.

My post was based largely on an analysis by Soren Ambrose, the development finance coordinator of ActionAid International, who concluded that augmenting the existing ECF loan to Haiti would impose the same conditions as the original loan. Those conditions include raising prices for electricity, refusing pay raises for any public sector employees except those making minimum wage and keeping inflation as low as possible. Ambrose says that he doesn't know of any established procedure that would exempt an augmentation of an existing program from the program's conditions. (His analysis also noted that Haiti's existing program with the IMF was due to expire at the end of this month and that negotiations on the loan's terms were likely underway already.)

As the IMF announced its $100 million loan under vague and presumably onerous terms, debt relief activists like the folks at Jubilee USA were already calling for a different kind of global response. They were demanding that aid to Haiti come in the form of grants, not loans. But given the magnitude of the crisis and the fact that the IMF does not issue grants, they welcomed the IMF loan in the hopes that its terms could be altered in the future and that Haiti's entire debt could be canceled. At the same time, Naomi Klein and others warned about the possibility that the earthquake would be used as a pretext to amp up Haiti's exposure to the shock doctrine. Activists started a Facebook group, No Shock Doctrine for Haiti, and in less than a week, it has attracted almost 18,000 members. Appeals for debt relief and for the recognition of Haiti's economic sovereignty were written to the Obama administration, the IMF, the World Bank and anyone else who might play a role in Haiti's reconstruction.

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January 20, 2010

IMF to Haiti: Freeze Public Wages

By Richard Kim

Since a devastating earthquake rocked Haiti on Tuesday--killing tens of thousands of people--there's been a lot of well-intentioned chatter and twitter about how to help Haiti. Folks have been donating millions of dollars to Wyclef Jean's Yele Haiti (by texting "YELE" to 501501) or to the Red Cross (by texting "HAITI" to 90999) or to Paul Farmer's extraordinary Partners in Health, among other organizations. I hope these donations continue to pour in, along with more money, food, water, medicine, equipment and doctors and nurses from nations around the world. The Obama administration has pledged at least $100 million in aid and has already sent thousands of soldiers and relief workers. That's a decent start.

But it's also time to stop having a conversation about charity and start having a conversation about justice--about recovery, responsibility and fairness. What the world should be pondering instead is: What is Haiti owed?

Haiti's vulnerability to natural disasters, its food shortages, poverty, deforestation and lack of infrastructure, are not accidental. To say that it is the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere is to miss the point; Haiti was made poor--by France, the United States, Great Britain, other Western powers and by the IMF and the World Bank.

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January 15, 2010

The Parable of Balloon Boy

By Richard Kim

It was all a hoax, a fraud, a cynical and none too well concocted publicity stunt to bolster the Heene family's reality TV cachet. But there was something beautiful about the lie too, for like all lies the balloon boy story provided us with a release from reality, an escape. I don't mean to make light of viewers' fears that six-year-old Falcon Heene's life was in danger as his UFO-shaped vessel floated into the sky. But who can deny the element of wonder and envy evoked by that spectacle?

It seemed a myth from the beginning: the innocent child, guilty only of being too curious, transcending earth to join the heavens. He was too pure, too good for this world. Literature is full of such ascendant figures: Remedios the Beauty from Gabriel Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude who is too lovely for this world and so one day levitates away while folding laundry; Pascal, the French boy from The Red Balloon (1956), whose devotion to protecting his new friend from a gang of balloon-popping bullies is rewarded when all the balloons in Paris take him for a magical ride; and Jesus who, after his persecution and resurrection, ascends into heaven in front of his eleven disciples to sit at the right hand of God. Then there is the wife of Japanese prime minister Yukio Hatoyama, who wrote a book about how her soul took a ride "on a triangular-shaped UFO and went to Venus." According to Miyuki Hatoyama, "It was a very beautiful place, and it was really green."

Frankly, from where I'm standing, Venus sounds like a great place now. Here on Earth, it is increasingly looking like world leaders are going to blow the Copenhagen summit, a moment that Gordon Brown has called the last chance to save our planetary home. In the territorial United States, unemployment is at 10 percent, and while Wall Street makes record bonuses off taxpayer-funded bailouts, jobs are nowhere in sight. Obama may have won a Nobel Peace Prize in part for his talk on eliminating nuclear weapons, but the US Senate hasn't even approved the comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty. Ninety-nine red balloons go by. Afghanistan and Iraq--every day brings news of the horrors of occupation, and the only choices the US can make are hard ones.

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October 19, 2009

The Aspirational Nobel

By Richard Kim

I woke up, read the New York Times website and thought I had come to the Onion instead. I hit refresh. Still there: "Obama Wins Nobel for Diplomacy." Maybe this is one of my weird work-related dreams, I thought. Maybe I am still drunk from last night's party. Better close my eyes and wake up again in the real world. Five minutes later...and still no dice.

Yes, Barack Obama has won the Nobel Peace Prize. My first reaction is that this is going to be a test of how much crazier Orly Taitz and the Republican Anti-Christers can get. Not only does this prove that Obama is a socialist svengali--because he got the Norwegians to vote for him, probably as part of some UN-takeover of America--it also proves that Obama is piggy. Anti-Christs are so like that; they want everything right now (and losing the 2016 Olympics was just a red herring).

But back in reality, I'm still a little bewildered. It's as if the Nobel Committee gave Obama the award for behaving like a normal American president, instead of like a clueless corrupt cowboy.

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October 9, 2009

Ending the Cycle of Presidential Love and Hate

By Richard Kim

Eyal's post juxtaposes the irrational views an alarming number of Republicans have about Barack Obama (a Kenyan-Muslim-Socialist-Hitler!) with the conspiracy theory--apparently held by 25 percent of Democrats--that Bush let 9/11 happen to justify a march to war. Fair enough, but I'm not sure you need to graze that far afield to find a left-right correspondence.

The first time I encountered a fantastic, fact-proof theory about Obama was during primary season. It was at a debate-watching party where an acquaintance of mine, an Obama-volunteer, hissed at Hillary Clinton's response to a question about same-sex marriage. "She's such a homophobe!" the woman exclaimed. I felt the need to correct the record.

"She's not really any more anti-gay or pro-gay than Obama. Neither of them back gay marriage, for example," I pointed out.

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September 28, 2009

Et Tu, Brüno?

By Richard Kim

Have you ever been at a polite dinner party and heard, in an exquisitely timed moment of silence, a loud, rasping fart erupt from one of the guests? The ensuing moment is ripe--with feeling. Oh my god, did everyone just hear that? How embarrassing!--for the offender, certainly, and, weirdly, for everyone else as well. Faces flush, molting through a welter of expressions: shock, disgust, feigned ignorance, a suppressed smirk. Finally, hopefully, someone breaks the discomfort with a cackle, and the anxiety is swept away with a hearty shared laugh.

Watching Brüno, the British comic Sacha Baron Cohen's latest mockumentary, is a lot like experiencing that après-fart moment, except it lasts for an excruciating ninety minutes in which the viewer is kept constantly teetering between incredulity, mortification and laughter. It is unpleasant, almost physically painful to watch and also, at times, irresistibly funny. Brüno is a gas!

It is also a whole lot of ass, nipple and cock, especially cocks, which in Brüno come in a variety of forms: flesh and prosthetic, soft and hard, mechanical and human. That's because Brüno is, among other things, Cohen's send-up of gay male culture. Like his other alter-egos, Ali G and Borat, Brüno is an exaggeration of an already exaggerated stereotype, in this case, of a gay Austrian fame whore who, having lost his job as a fashion correspondent for the TV program "Funkyzeit," embarks on an odyssey to become "the biggest Austrian superstar since Hitler."

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July 10, 2009

Michael Jackson: Freak Like Me

By Richard Kim

Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, is dead of a heart attack at the age of 50. In the next few days we will be treated to endless eulogies mining the rich archive of his music, dance, videos, performances and especially his purported habits, hobbies, misdemeanors and alleged crimes. After all, what writer could resist mentioning the various critters and tchotchkes he collected: the hyperbaric, youth-preserving oxygen chamber, the Elephant Man's bones, his pet chimp Bubbles, the Beatles catalog, Neverland Ranch, Macaulay Caulkin, Elizabeth Taylor, his many noses, skin pigments and hairstyles, his one bright white glove. I certainly can't.

These mutations will inevitably be placed in the tragic narrative of his decline. We will be asked to remember Jackson in his prime--as the smiling, dancing, "P.Y.T." black child star who outshone his less talented siblings in the Jackson Five or as the pop-and-dance virtuoso who transcended Motown by bringing us "Thriller," "Beat It" and "Billy Jean." Forget the eccentricities and footnote the accusations of child abuse and molestation (he was never found guilty). Those are but sad stains on the larger spangled fabric of his life and career.

Well, I am here to say: fuck that shit. Without his extravagant eccentricities and ambiguous, obsessive relationships to race, gender, mortality and childhood (and children)--indeed without the conspicuously tenuous link he had to the category of the human itself--Michael Jackson would have been a B-list has-been. Most likely last seen on the latest episode of Celebrity Apprentice, his obit would have followed Farrah Fawcett's. In short, he'd be John Oates.

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June 25, 2009

California Supreme Court Upholds Prop 8

By Richard Kim

As expected the California Supreme Court upheld Proposition 8 by a vote of 6-1. It also ruled that the 18,000 same-sex couples who got married last year are still married. It's a long and technical decision (about 180 pages) with two concurring opinions and a concurring and dissenting opinion--so I haven't fully digested it. But two things to note:

First, under California law, there is no material difference between marriage and domestic partnership. Not one of those 18,000 married couples got any new rights or benefits that California's DP did not already provide; they only acquired the term marriage itself. Of course, as a state, California cannot grant any of the federally provided rights and benefits of marriage, but as a matter of state law, the two categories are substantively equal. Indeed, in part, that's why the court held that Prop 8 was an amendment to the CA constitution, and not a broader, more fundamental revision, which would have required more than just an up or down popular vote. As the majority opinion argues:

Instead the measure carves out a narrow and limited exception to these constitutional rights, reserving the official designation of the term "marriage" for the union of opposite-sex couples...but leaving undisturbed all the other extremely significant substantive aspects of a same-sex couple's state constitutional right to establish an officially recognized and protected family relationship...

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May 26, 2009

Another New School Demo (CLARIFIED)

By Richard Kim

This dispatch just in from Gabriel Gil Arana, a current Nation intern:

In March, the New School let go of 12 part-time/adjunct faculty at Parsons' fine arts department. Today, over a hundred members of the school's adjunct union and their supporters protested the firings in front of the school's main administration building on 12th Street, accusing administrators of union busting and flouting the protections offered to part-time faculty in their contract.

The protest is the most recent spat in an extended history of tensions between the New School administration and its faculty and students. On two separate occasions in April and December, students occupied buildings to call for the resignation of New School president Bob Kerrey, who received a vote of "no confidence" from an overwhelming majority of the faculty in December.

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April 23, 2009

The Torture Memos, Obama and the Banality of Evil

By Richard Kim

Even as President Obama acted in the name of transparency and accountabilty in releasing the Bush administration's OLC's torture memos, he made assurances that the CIA agents who used the "enhanced interrogation techniques" meticulously detailed within would not be subject to criminal prosecution. Glenn Greenwald at Salon, Jeremy Scahill on his blog, David Bromwich at Huffington Post and Ta-Nehisi Coates at the Atlantic all have good takes on why Obama's decision is wrong. I concur. However politically expedient, Obama's nearly carte blanche absolution of torture was morally wrong, and his justification of it, from a professor of constitutional law, is intellectually dishonest.

Obama's rationalizations were artfully made to the point of being obfuscatory, but they can be boiled down to three points:

1) The strategic issue of national security. "The men and women of our intelligence community serve courageously on the front lines of a dangerous world...We must protect their identities as vigilantly as they protect our security, and we must provide them with the confidence that they can do their jobs."

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April 17, 2009