However, from the same article, I can quote “But Congress has a moral obligation to protect American agriculture with legislation that will serve our national interests”. And I think that the reason is not only moral obligations but more concrete ones like lobbyis. This latter is just rational maximization of the self-interest of the corporations that reached a wealth level making a lobby in Washington affordable for them. It is now strategic rational choice! My point of view is that different theories accurately explain underdevelopment in different scales. It depends from where the issue is observed.

PS. This book must be read to understand what is happening behind the scenes concerning the US foreign policy.

From Wikipedia:

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (ISBN 0-452-28708-1) is a book written by John Perkins and published in 2004. It tells the story of his career with consulting firm Chas. T. Main. Before employment with the firm, he interviewed for a job with the National Security Agency (NSA). Perkins claims that this interview effectively constituted an independent screening which led to his subsequent hiring by Einar Greve, a member of the firm (and alleged NSA liaison) to become a self-described "Economic Hit Man."

Unlike Marxism, Dependency theory sees capitalism as a system of market relationship blocking the progress of poor countries. It claims also that the growth of rich countries has impoverished third world as an active process. I think that dependency theory has the most relevant explanation of poverty in the world because it has many facts hard to refute. For instance, historically, the third world countries have been changed because of their contact with the rich countries, or more than just a contact; specifically, Africa had never experienced starvation before the western colonization. And since then, the active process of impoverishment progressed with a change in the social structures. It was simply exploitation and still undergoing today in the form of unequal exchange as third world countries give up much more than they get back from the world capitalist system. Another group within the dependency school focuses on that World System, which divides the world countries in three categories: the core, the semi-periphery, and the periphery. The core, being the industrial countries that produce manufactured good, profit from the periphery in two manners; they extract the raw materials and then sell them the manufactured products because these poor countries have neither the skill nor the knowledge to produce these needed goods. Commodities used to be extracted from colonies, but with the independence of all Africa, the new leaders took the same position of the former colonial powers serving them with no alternative than to maintain a high production of these resources to satisfy the country’s needs of imports. Even the recent actions to end poverty and help poor countries grow economically such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were revealed to be no more than a new way to control these countries, through loans this time. And most of them are emergency loans that the leaders generally have no choice but accept them with the bundle of conditions that comes with. Life and Debt gave the example of Jamaica; Michael Manley, the former president, was interviewed and revealed the harsh process he has to go through to get some money from the IMF after the seventies petrol crisis. He had to accept, for instance, to stop agricultural subsidies, which worsened the situation. In the same time, the US were spending billions dollars in making dehydrated milk prices competitive even in the local market of Jamaica. And it’s not a unique case; a recent article in the Washington Post written by Jimmy carter, December 10^th, says that “A 2002 report by Oxfam International estimates that in 2001 sub-Saharan Africa lost $302 million as a direct result of U.S. cotton subsidies”.

Marxism, based on social class analysis, claims that capitalism can produce growth in the third world but only as a means to an end. In fact, the Marxist theory of historical materialism understands society as fundamentally determined by the material conditions, or modes of production, at any given time. In general, Marx identified successive stages of the development of these modes in Western Europe: the Slave Society developed when the tribes becomes a city-states and social relationships were based on the slave-master relation. Then Feudalism is born and the serfs worked under the rule of the landlord. On each conditions occupying one or another category had a fundamental impact on what an individual could or could not do. Merchants, then, developed into the current capitalists, who are the ruling class, creating and employing the true working class. The Capitalism as a social system, offered new conditions to liberty and even workers, represented by the middle class, gained full right. Yet, the constraints in the social system of capitalism are more sophisticated and give illusive individual liberties. I think a form of these ties is the fact that “everybody has to pay mortgages” as it was stated in the 2006 movie Thank you for smoking; from the lobbyists working for their corporate, to the journalists working for their newspapers, all obey to that doctrine, and obviously the consumer who is wedged between the opposite points of view; all of them are contributing to making the few riches richer. Additionally, this historical process doesn't end with capitalism but this latter, regarding Marxists, would propel the growth of communism because of the exploitation of workers and the growing wealth of the few rich. For the underdevelopment issue, Marx blames the state as it is the institution that serves the interest of the bourgeoisie and the ruling class. The government is, hence, responsible for the underdevelopment of the country with its wrong policies or the failure to implement the right ones. The strong point of Marxism is that it looks to the issue “from outside of the box”, a broader scale of history because the theory consider capitalism as a simple mode of production among others, not the sole world system.

However, the idea that rich countries will pull the poor countries out of their poverty is seen as one of the promises not kept by the rich, regarding Isbister. And that’s what the general idea of Structuralism suggests. Unlike modernizationists who see a simple partnership between the “have” and “have not”, structuralists are concerned with relationships within a broader framework or system of action. The key of understanding phenomena is thus to forget the “player” and focus on the “rules of the game”, which are the networks, linkages, interdependencies, and interactions among the parts of some system. Two important structuralist approaches are Marxism and Dependency Theory.

Modernization theory, as rationality, basically claims that poverty exists because the poor chose to be poor or exactly to stay traditional. A traditional society is defined as stagnant, with no scientific inquiry (innovation), and ascriptive (identifying with ancestors). In contrast, a modern society is based on science, has an open market, and in continuous progress. Hence, the third world countries are poor because they failed to kindle sparks of creativity, transform their societies, and commit to science and technology through free inquiry. The key solution for modernizationists is to give up the traditional values and start the process of modernization, a linear and ethnocentric process. It starts with countries’ self-transformation by encouraging scientific inquiry and abandoning their traditional values, thus they may realize technological changes leading to Capitalism as a social system. An efficient government is created then because it is vital for the development of Capitals, and therefore, this institution provides public goods and further investments in research ensuring the loop of continuous progression. This process was illustrated by W. W. Rostow in his “Economic Stages of Growth” or the ”Rostovian take-off model”. The model postulates that economic modernization occurs in five basic stages of varying length compared to a plane in a takeoff. The first is the Underdevelopment stage or the pre-Newtonian understanding and use of technology where societies still hitched to their traditional values. The second is the preconditions to take-off when small groups are seeking change and improvement. The third is the take-off, which occurs when sector led growth become common towards economic growth. Forth, the drive to maturity refers to economic diversity and greatly reduced rates of poverty and rising standard of living. And the fifth and last stage of growth is the age of high mass consumption when the country is fully modern. In addition, modernizationists claim that a partnership between rich and poor countries is essential for this process. They think that developed countries can play a critical role in that take-off by the diffusion of technology, corporations’ spread, financial loans, and consumption expansion. Yet, poor countries have a role with their government policy, because modernizationists are also reformers and believe in better policies, more aid, and freer market. Modernization theory is a dominant theory, and it is the base of the world capitalist system.

Poor took the bad choice : poverty

Rational choice focuses on individuals as rational actors. It takes self-interest and individual preferences as causes of the actions people take by choosing better alternatives over worse ones. However, against nonegoistic considerations, Margaret Levi pointed out that people act consistently in relation to their preferences, a type of utility maximization. It is manifested through a process by which individual actors weigh the cost and benefits as strategic calculations, considering the capacity of actors to assess the risk they face, to gauge the potential benefit of their behavior, and to understand the effects their actions is likely to have on other actors. Additionally, constrains are important since maximization implies certain confines, which are the resources scarcity and the structures of institutions, regarding to Levi who defines them as sets of rules and sanctions that structure social interaction. Institutionalism, being between rationality and structuralism, assigns a key role to the institutions, which structure the individual choices of strategic actors producing a certain equilibrium among the multiple “players” representing the actors in a constraining environment, “the game”.

Culture being a residual theory is usually avoided when objectively explaining political issues. Its causal significance is suspect since the behavior of actors is not strictly determined by culture factors, it is complex and intangible, and one can argue that it is both cause and effect being not static. However, recent events demonstrate that one of the main political interests in this century is and would be Religion. According to an article (“In god’s name”) in The Economist published in November 1^st, religion will play a big role in this century’s politics. Religion has power but it is not necessarily a causal power. The key, states Lim, is to avoid treating culture, and specifically religion, as a set of unchanging values, norms, and beliefs that define and shape the social, political, and economic fate of individuals, societies, and countries.

Theories in Explaining Underdevelopment

The upcoming posts will include my recently submitted Comparative Politics paper...

Like in all social sciences, theory plays a critical role in comparative politics because theory is a simplified representation of reality and a framework within which facts are not only selected but also interpreted, organized, and fitted together so that they create a coherent whole, according to Timothy C. Lim. Hence, doing comparative politics means developing and supporting arguments and explanations about the world applying theoretical principles to evident facts with a comparative approach. Three major branches of theories are used: Rational Choice, Structuralism, and Culture. Within these branches, three theories try to understand world poverty: Modernization as a rationalist theory, and Dependency and Marxism as structural theories.

To be continued ...

Amazing movie !!

This movie is a must see !!
Like all movies in the US, it has good argumentation and if you argue well you can never be wrong as it was stated in the movie "thank you for smoking", a must-see too !
However, I think there is something true in it.

It is a non-profit internet broadcasted movie, so everyone can watch it on Google Video ...

ZEITGEIST : www.zeitgeistmovie.com

The first part discusses religions comparing different ones in order to diminish their strong ideas ... a strong theory ... but maybe based on spurious historical stories ...

The second and third parts go a way too far ! They presented a global Conspiracy Theory to steel the world's wealth !!?! If there is such a group doing that, they really deserve all the earth's wealth ! "Amazing shit !!" an American would say ...

yet, the movie still deserve to be watched and it is finally enough good ...

...

Tunisian/Iraqi Bloggers age range

I was reading an online news site when I found an article about the bloggers from Iraq...

There is a multitude of blogger that flee the country as refugees ...

I was also attracted by the age range of these bloggers ... out of six examples, two are 19, one is 15 and one is 25; the others didn't give their age ...

Comparing to the Tunisian Blogger, this age range is very young ... and It is a good thing for the Iraq to have this new generation of thinker... in few years, they may be a seed for an hypothetic democracy.

...

Philosophic point of view about the truth in religions

First we need to get the real essence of the religion as a fundamental concept in philosophy.
From Wikipedia, trying to have the most objective definition, we can quote :

A religion is a set of common beliefs and practices generally held by a group of people, often codified as prayer, ritual, and religious law. Religion also encompasses ancestral or cultural traditions, writings, history, and mythology, as well as personal faith and mystic experience. The term "religion" refers to both the personal practices related to communal faith and to group rituals and communication stemming from shared conviction.

And here's my thoughts :

Religions could be considered as a mathematic possibility since it could be a system of proper fit elements related with logical link ... or exactly an Axiom. Hence, truth is judged among the coherence of the mathematically logical links between statements.
This theory could mean tolerance among religions as it allows the multiplicity of truths under the simple condition of being coherent in their system.
So, the religion is the equivalent of the mathematic theory
the fundamental texts are the axioms
the other laws are simply derived from this axioms by logic
the prophet (who bring the texts) should be the founder of the theory

Let's compare now a mathematic theory (a Non-euclidean geometry) and a religion (Rastafarian) :

	Elliptic geometry	Rastafarian
Postulates	There are no parallel lines at all unlike Euclid's parallel postul	Haile Selassie I is the black messiah, the living god incarnate
Date of Origin	19th century
Consequences	For example, the sum of the angles of any triangle is always greater than 180°.	Black people are superior to other races

And it is not limited to that ! We can extend this model to any other religion .... and it works ...

...

PS. I am sorry I had to choose Rastafarian because of the peaceful character of its believers!

JIHAD VS MCWORLD

Just beyond the horizon of current events lie two possible political futures—both bleak, neither democratic. The first is a retribalization of large swaths of humankind by war and bloodshed: a threatened Lebanonization of national states in which culture is pitted against culture, people against people, tribe against tribe—a Jihad in the name of a hun­dred narrowly conceived faiths against every kind of interdependence, every kind of ar­tificial social cooperation and civic mutuality. The second is being borne in on us by the onrush of economic and ecological forces that demand integration and uniformity and that mesmerize the world with fast music, fast computers, and fast food—with MTV, Macintosh, and McDonald's, pressing nations into one commercially homogenous global network: one McWorld tied together by technology, ecology, communications, and commerce. The planet is falling precipitantly apart AND coming reluctantly to­gether at the very same moment.
... The article continues here