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Empire's terrors by christian parenti and christopher d. cook THE ROOT CAUSES of last Tuesday's catastrophe are multilayered. First, there is the issue of crushing poverty in the global South. Take, for example, the Middle East, the apparent home of the suicide pilots of Sept. 11. The World Bank reports that 30 percent of Egypt's people subsist on less than $2 a day; in Yemen it's 35 percent. Worldwide there are 1.5 billion people living in "abject poverty." That means they lack even the very basics: adequate food, shelter, and clean water. It gets worse. Roughly 40 percent of the Middle East's population is under 17 years old, and one-fifth of all young men there are unemployed. The average per-capita income of the region is about $2,100 annually. (All this from the World Bank, which tends to put a happy face on things.) Why the misery? The United States, leading the rest of the global North's rich nations, has for decades imposed poverty-generating policies that force states to privatize resources and slash public spending. This raises unemployment increasing poverty, disease, forced migration, and environmental degradation. In Egypt home of Mohammed Atta, who piloted the first jet into the World Trade Center the government spends a mere four percent of its budget on health care. As a result, 8.5 percent of Egypt's children die before age five. Fueling such poverty is the debt crisis. Cheap credit from the oil boom of the 1970s went sour as interest rates rose and commodity prices plummeted in the early 1980s. Since then scores of developing countries have been trapped in a downward cycle of usurious borrowing and repayment that enriches Northern banks at the expense of an ever-poorer Southern majority. Over the past 17 years the South has transferred a net total of $1.5 trillion to Northern creditors. "There are now about 50 countries that are hyper-indebted and unable to redress the situation," professor Saskia Sassen of the London School of Economics writes in the London Guardian. The International Monetary Fund requires those highly indebted countries to pay 20 to 25 percent of their export earnings toward debt servicing. "In contrast," writes Sassen, "the Allies canceled 80% of Germany's [World War II] debt and only insisted on 3-5% of export earnings debt service." Poverty causes anger and rebellion, especially among youth. The U.S. response to this in the Middle East, as elsewhere, has been to crush the left with military might and back right-wing regimes. Seventy-eight percent of all U.S. money sent to the Middle East is military aid, according to the State Department. Those weapons prop up police states, from Saudi Arabia to Algeria. With the left defeated, malignant strains of Islamic fundamentalism are now filling the vacuum, offering a totalizing religious solution to the everyday problems of privation and repression. All of this creates an intense hatred of the United States that erupts in the hopeless insanity of suicide bombings. Atta and his compatriots made their own vicious decisions, but they did so in a context structured at every turn by American might. Our government's reaction to the horrors of Sept. 11 threatened bombings, sanctions, and an open-ended war against "terrorists" everywhere is precisely the type of policy that caused this disaster. If aggression is an effective deterrent against terrorists, why were the 19 hijackers not deterred to begin with? Mass retaliation will only compound the existing problems from which the four suicidal jet-bombs emerged. In the long term there is only one rational solution: begin the process of giving up America's informal empire. That means we stop funding despots and stop exploiting the people and land of the global South. What's needed instead are: new forms of international regulation and redistribution designed to foster equitable development. It's simple we share the wealth or hope that the next target isn't Diablo nuclear power plant. Christian Parenti is the author of Lockdown America. Christoper D. Cook is an award-winning journalist who has worked as city editor of the Bay Guardian.
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