We're seeing power shifts at the United Nations.
You have the rise of corporate economic power, really challenging national governmental
economic power.
Plus Russian adoptions and lobbying to follow Oprah and Michelle Obama.
I'm Susan Barnett and this is 51 percent the women's perspective.
The balance of global power is in transition.
CNN host Farid Zakaria has been praised and panned for his book that discusses the global
power picture of a post-American world.
But the fact is that there are rising powers and indications that the U.S. days of wielding
the big stick may be waning.
Melissa Venice directs the new internationalism project at the Institute for Policy Studies
in Washington.
And she's authored several books on the UN and global issues.
Certainly the claim that the U.S. has on UN decision making because of the financing
of the UN is important.
The U.S. has such a so much larger economy than any other country in the world that it
is, of course, pays more dues at the UN and is the largest contributor to many special
funds and projects.
And that's what it's like.
Given that, it gives the U.S. significant additional power, although it's not supposed
to be that way, in decision making.
Other countries are often afraid to challenge the U.S. because they're afraid it won't sponsor
or pay for favored or important UN projects.
And most particularly because so many countries in the developing world, in Africa, in Asia,
in Latin America, in the Middle East, are dependent on U.S. support of various kinds.
That even in, say, the General Assembly, where there is no veto by the U.S., the fear
of a backlash, a bilateral backlash from Washington, is enough to make a sort of functional veto
be put in place where the U.S. can simply tell other countries, look, if you vote X-way,
the way we don't want you to vote, there will be a price to pay.
There's a famous precedent for that at the UN.
It's known as the Yemen precedent, ironically, given the significance of Yemen today.
But it actually emerged back in 1990 when George Bush I was trying to garner a unanimous
security council decision to endorse his plan to go to war against Iraq back in the first
Gulf War.
And on the council, there were numerous bribes and threats and punishments that were used.
I documented a good deal of that in that book.
But two countries voted no.
Yemen was Cuba that voted no on principle against intervention.
And the other was Yemen.
The only Arab country on the council had recently been reunified after a brutal civil war that
had lasted more than 10 years.
And no sooner had the Yemeni ambassador put down his hand, then the U.S. ambassador was
at his side and said to him, that will be the most expensive no-vote you ever cast.
And there was a big scandal about it because the remark was picked up on an open mic.
Three days later, the U.S. cut its entire aid budget to Yemen, which was then and remains
the poorest country in the Arab world.
So there was a huge price to be paid.
And the U.S. made sure that the rest of the world knew it.
That kind of pressure continues.
The difference is that the sole superpower, as it were, of 1990 with the collapse of the
Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War that left the U.S. so enormously powerful around
the world, has now been changing so that you have multiple power centers in a variety
of parts of the world.
You have rising economic powers in places like, certainly China, but also in Brazil,
in South Africa, in other countries.
You have rising military powers, challenging the U.S. and crucially, you have rising political
forces.
Starting from the European Union to China to Iran and others who don't necessarily see
the U.S. as the sole decision maker at the U.N.
So things are changing, but the U.S. remains by far the most powerful single country in
that institution.
What kind of impact has the global economy had on those power struggles?
Well, that's been crucial because as you see the impact of the global economic collapse,
someplace like in the U.S., where for the first time in two generations, really, since
the Great Depression, the U.S. has had to confront the reality that it is not an invincible
economic power with the economic clout to do whatever it wants around the world, buy
whatever it wants, bribe, whatever governments it wants, buy whatever governments it wants.
Those things are simply not available at this point.
At the same time, you have rising countries, Brazil being a great example, India being
another, China being another, where the global economic crisis did not pass them by entirely,
but because they were already on the rise, they were not powers already at their peak,
as it were.
They were impacted far less, so they have remained rising powers that are able to challenge
the power of the U.S.
You also have, and this is perhaps even more important, the globalization of the economy
in the sense that what happens in a country matters far less than it used to in terms of
what corporations do and how power gets distributed.
So if you look for example at the role of corporations in the United Nations, of course,
it has been on the rise for 20 years.
Partnerships with the quote, private sector have become an important part of how UN projects
are funded.
And you have a scenario, if you look for example at the auto industry in the United States.
In the early days of the auto industry, and really up until about the 1970s, you had a
situation where the auto manufacturers had every interest in paying good wages, helping
to create a middle class who could then buy their products.
In the current situation, they don't really care whether there's a middle class able
to buy their products or not.
They can afford to keep wages incredibly low, strip the unions of their power, because
their markets are all over the world.
So in that situation, you have the rise of corporate economic power, really challenging
national governmental economic power.
And you see that at the UN as much as you do anywhere else.
So as you watch these trends, what do you predict is the future in the next 10, 20 years?
I know for read Zakaria tried to write a book saying that the US may not be the center
of the universe and was widely given a lot of trouble for it, simply because people
didn't want to hear it.
Well, I think that's certainly going to be true.
I think that's only the beginning, however.
I think what happens and how that plays out in the rest of the world is going to be very
dependent on what we do in this country, the kinds of movements that we build to reclaim
power for people in this country and to strip the corporations of power.
There is an ongoing battle for how economic power gets translated into political power
and it's going to be up to us to build movements that can overturn that decision, for example,
at the Supreme Court, overturn the Citizens United decisions, make it politically impossible
for a continuation of the current policies of waging wars while lowering taxes, the
five biggest corporations that build bombers and bombs and bullets and all those things.
They have earned since 2002 a 450% rise in their profit, 450% and they have their tax
at functionally zero.
Their tax rates are whatever they are, they're 25%, 30%, but they almost to a corporation,
they pay virtually nothing because of all the loopholes.
That to me is criminal and this is something that, for example, FDR back in 1940 called
for a special tax to be imposed, this is at the beginning of World War II, where he said
we should make sure that the few do not profit from the sacrifices of the many.
That's precisely what we have today, the few, the 1% if you will, the CEOs of major corporations
and particularly these giant war corporations are making a killing in both senses of the
words, on the continuation of these wars that are unpopular in the US that do not have public
support and yet they're not paying any kind of a war profiteering tax.
An excess profits tax was the more polite term that FDR term used but essentially it
means the same thing.
So we have a lot of work to do, this isn't something we can just sort of stand back and
watch and say, hmm, I wonder what's going to happen this year.
We have to reclaim the ability to make history ourselves.
Willis, just for argument's sake, if all of those things happened in this country, corporations
are no longer US corporations, they're global corporations.
Even if the US makes a change, will it have a significant impact on the direction the
future is taking?
Absolutely, because corporations, the biggest corporations are still chartered here and
while they operate all around the world, most notably in offshore tax havens, they certainly
don't plan to pick up and move there.
They don't want to live there.
They want to live in New York where they have all the advantages of all the cultural and
educational advances and travel and all those things.
We hear these threats well.
We can't raise the taxes on corporations because they're leaves because the US already has
the highest corporate tax rates in the world.
It's mostly simply not true.
On paper, it's partly true.
But in reality, it's quite the opposite.
The actual taxes that these corporations pay is among the lowest in the world.
They know that.
There's no...
This is not what we have to worry about.
What we have to worry about is the power that these corporate leaders have to strip wages,
to strip the power of unions, to undermine what corporations once helped to create, which
was a middle class in this country.
That no longer is the case.
Phyllis Benes directs the new Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies
in Washington and is a fellow at the Transnational Institute in the Netherlands.
She's authored several books on the UN and global issues.
Coming up a very personal view of the Russian ban on American adoptions.
And a mom whose goal is to be the commencement speaker at her daughter's graduation.
If you missed part of this show or want to hear it again, visit the 51% archives at
wamc.org.
This week's show is number 1229.
When the Russian government announced its ban on American adoptions of Russian children
at the beginning of the year, it set off protests in Moscow and a huge outcry in the states.
The ban is seen as a political move and writer Tina Traster, the author of a book about her
own experience adopting a Russian child, said it's a huge mistake that hurts the children
as well as parents hoping to adopt.
I have seen many grim things in my lifetime.
You rival the sight, sounds and smells I experienced in the Siberian orphanage where
my daughter's life began ten years ago.
Julia lived in a gray concrete complex, not far from a side street where my husband and
I saw a man selling meat from a dead carcass in minus twenty degree Fahrenheit temperature
and where another man lay on his side, bloated, red faced and stoned on vodka.
There was a rusted jungle gym poking out from dirt-crusted snow outside the cheerless
building.
Our baby, then seven months, spent her days inside a frozen fortress which reaped of ammonia.
Rather than being fed in a formula, she was nursed on a sugary tea that would later
rot her baby teeth with carries.
She slept on a tiny cot in a room full of orphans, some of whom would have a real home
one day and others who wouldn't.
We've been told our daughter, abandoned by a twenty-year-old mother who could not care
for her, spent her first twelve weeks in a hospital with respiratory infections and
dysentery during the Russian summer of 2002.
She was brought to Baby House number two in mid-September when it was already too cold
to take babies outside.
My infant daughter had never squinted into the sun or felt the wind against her skin.
When we met her on our first trip to Noversa Beersk, we spent a half hour in a cavernous
gym trying to play on rubber mats.
In the gym, she showed no interest in a large rubber ball we rolled toward her.
She had no concept of play.
Instead, she laid on the mat, arching her back over and over and over.
I was scared.
Olga, our handler, told us infants don't get enough exercise.
Their little bodies ached so that they stretched their muscles.
I saw what Olga meant when a caretaker placed my baby in a cot and swaddled her so tightly
she wouldn't fuss.
Couldn't fuss.
She was brutal to leave Julia behind on the first trip but we had no choice because Russia
required a second trip to complete the adoption.
After leaving her in a cot, I glanced over to a little boy whose eyes were set wide
apart and whose expression was blank.
Olga later told me, children like that, children with fetal alcohol syndrome, will spend the
rest of their lives in an orphanage.
I left baby house number two, crying for Julia and for that little boy and for every child
who is doomed to life in an orphanage.
A decade later, I weep again as I try to absorb the shocking news that Russia is banning
American parents from adopting their orphans.
These children were victims of circumstance, now they are political pawns.
The newly passed law is Russia's retaliation against the U.S. Mjynitsky Act which was signed
into law by President Obama in December.
The act introduced the sanctions against Russian officials suspected of human rights abuses.
In rationalizing its action, Russian officials say Americans too have violated human rights.
They are referring to the death of 19 Russian children at the hands of their adoptive parents
over the last two decades.
The light sentence is they have received.
And to the horrendous incident of a Tennessee mother who put her seven-year-old adoptive
son on a plane to Moscow alone to return him.
In these cases of neglect and death, adoptive parents found themselves with children who
were suffering from extreme attachment disorders and violent behavioral problems.
Many of the children were said to be unmanageable, inconsolable, and in many cases dangerous
to themselves and others.
I am not condoning or excusing those parents.
But these shameful acts deserve context.
Of the 60,000 Russian adoptees who have been placed in American homes in the last two
decades, the number in which circumstances turned extreme is minuscule.
So many of the Russian children arrived with deep, dark issues.
My own child included.
In truth, we are not prepared to parents such hurt children, but it becomes our life's
work.
Russian officials say 650,000 children are living in orphanages.
Mental health experts agree children who start their lives in orphanages are likely to
suffer from lack of care and nurture.
Baby House number two had 100 children.
A baby needs the nurture of one mother, one caretaker.
Shutting down American adoption is a hardship for American parents waiting and wanting to adopt.
More importantly, it is a human rights abuse on the tiniest of victims.
Babies who would otherwise find a passage to a better life will languish in orphanages
longer.
Though Russian officials say they'll adopt to other countries and foster their children,
someone knows the wheels of bureaucracy grind slowly.
To date, adoption of one Russian child to an American family typically takes 18 months.
Why lengthen a baby's prison sentence in an orphanage?
It breaks my heart to picture those children who are left behind.
I have seen their faces.
I wish every member of the Russian parliament had been forced to spend two hours in an orphanage
before casting their callous votes.
In the meantime, what can our diplomats or leaders do urgently to reverse this nightmare?
I don't know.
I'm not a politician.
I'm only an adoptive parent who has seen what the inside of a Siberian orphanage looks
like.
Tina Traster is the author of an upcoming memoir about her relationship with her Russian
adopted daughter, Find Out More at Julia at Me.com.
And finally, I would like to introduce you to Samaya Hodges of Las Vegas, Nevada.
She's the owner of a beauty salon and the proud mom of a college student.
She's got a dream.
She wants to be the commencement speaker at her daughter's graduation and she wants your
help.
Samaya takes flight as a campaign about need one to be the commissioner speaker for
the development university.
My daughter, Lamaya Hodges, she's a student of development and she graduates May of 2013.
Last year, my daughter said to me, she said, Mom, two years ago, Michelle Obama spoke
at the commencement ceremony and last year, it was Oprah Winfrey.
She said, Now, how can they cut those two women from our graduation?
And that's when I said, Your Mom.
So every since then, I have been on this quest to try to make it happen.
Okay.
First of all, what was your daughter's reaction to that?
My daughter knows that whatever I come up, I have to do it.
I'm going to do it.
She knew I was serious when I said that.
She was like, Yeah, you can do it because she said, Mom, all of the speakers that have
came to our school, I sit there and listen to them and I promise you, is everything that
you have ever said and everything that you have ever told me, if they can do it, you can
do it.
All right.
So explain why you think you should be that commencement speaker.
First of all, I feel like they do need a common mom.
The second, because my daughter would be the first one to graduate from six generations
in my family.
And I want to talk about parental involvement.
The reason why that I believe no one else in winter college or grad degree college is
because the parents were not involved in their child's education.
So I'm trying to break that cycle in my family with my daughter.
So from day one, from kindergarten, I have been in her life as far as having her, you know,
with her whole work and just education just being there for her.
And she has proved my theory.
So what is your story, Samaya?
What, where did you come from and what have you done with your life that you've managed
to turn out a terrific daughter who's going to graduate college?
Well, I was born out of seven children and a third to the older daughter, seven.
And so my mom did, oh, she did an awesome thing for me going to school.
When I was in the 11th grade, I got accepted in a college biology program at West County
Tech.
Now, West County Tech and the College of Technology program, that was free because it was
like high school, so it was free.
The only thing that we had to pay for was this kid and it had my two, that had my low
dry, acrylic, and all that.
That kid cost 285.
When my mom had seven kids on wear first and that was her whole wear for check, the amount
that they needed.
My mom made a huge sacrifice in Gaisley, that check.
And so every since then, I've just been so grateful and I'm just trying to strive so hard
to make it so that I can repay her and to help her.
So right now, I am the owner of Granny's Beauty Center of the International Known
Hair Stylus, a radio personality for Granny Care.
And by the way, everything is granny.
My beauty salon is granny's beauty center.
That's my mom.
That was her nickname.
So when she passed away, I went to leave a legacy, so I'm doing everything in Granny's
name.
So we have Granny's Beauty Center.
We have Granny Care, the radio station.
And I just published a book, Granny Feet.
Granny said that if you can't find a job, create a job.
So my whole inner being is just trying to inspire and motivate others to be more than
what they are right now, and that you can do it.
And what will you tell those graduates, what would your message be?
My message is, I'm asking to just never give up.
Even if you get out of school because there's so many college graduates, we still can't
find a job.
So even if you want to get out of school, just never give up.
I don't care what the odds are, what the circumstances.
Just keep on starting to hire you guys, but when you start having your families with
us to play that role in your child's life, and also to reach back to another child, a
friend, a neighbor, a stranger, just reach back and help someone else along the way.
I've never been a quitter.
I challenge myself, and that's the message.
That's what everybody do.
Challenge.
Just get out and challenge yourself.
Make it happen.
You can do this.
If people want to help you do this, what can they do to help you?
I think I can go to YouTube and type in some audio takes flight, give it thumbs up, and
just spread the word with everybody else's.
You know, let them know to share it.
This is a common law.
She wants to speak in her God's graduation.
So you go to YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, and just spread the word.
Sumaya Hodges has started Sumaya takes flight on Facebook and Twitter in an effort to be
selected as commencement speaker when her daughter graduates from Spellman University.
That's Sumaya takes flight.
And good luck, Sumaya.
That's our show for this week.
Thanks to Katie Britain for production assistance.
Our theme music is by Kevin Bartlett.
This show is a national production of Northeast public radio.
Our executive producer is Dr. Alan Shartock.
If you'd like to hear this show again or visit the 51% archives, go to our website at
www.amc.org.
Thanks so much for joining us.
We'll be back next week with another edition of 51% – The Women's Perspective.
