Elsewhere Today (391)
Aljazeera:
Ahmadinejad offers Bush TV debate
Tuesday 29 August 2006, 18:56 Makka Time, 15:56 GMT
The Iranian president has challenged his US counterpart to a live television debate.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made the offer to George Bush on Tuesday. Thursday is the deadline set by the UN Security Council for Iran to suspend all uranium enrichment and reprocessing activities, and Iran faces possible sanctions if it fails to comply.
Ahmadinejad said: "I suggest we talk with Mr Bush, the president of the United States, in a live television debate about world issues and ways out of these standoffs.
"We would voice our opinions and they would too. The debate should be uncensored, above all for the American public."
The White House called the suggestion a "diversion" from the Thursday deadline and refused the invitation.
Dana Perino, the White House spokeswoman, said: "Talk of a debate is just a diversion from the legitimate concerns that the international community, not just the US, has about Iran's behaviour, from support for terrorism to pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability."
Overtures
Earlier this year Ahmadinejad sent Bush a letter, the first contact in decades between leaders of the two countries.
But the Iranian president said that such a debate would not necessarily mean reopening dialogue with the United States, which froze diplomatic relations with Iran after the seizure of its embassy in Tehran in 1979.
Ahmadinejad said: "Debate is different from dialogue, dialogue has other conditions, we have said our position on that before."
But he said that dialogue was also possible with "the ones who show a frown to our nations if the conditions are fulfilled".
Sanctions
The Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency is to report to the Security Council, also on Thursday, on Iran's compliance with its demands.
Iran has said repeatedly that it has no intention of abandoning its nuclear work, which it says is for civilian energy purposes only.
Ahmadinejad said he believed that it was "unlikely" the Security Council would act against Iran over its nuclear programme, which the United States sees as a cover for weapons development.
John Bolton, the American ambassador to the UN, has said the United States plans to put forward a draft resolution imposing penalties such as a travel ban and asset freeze for key Iranian leaders soon after the deadline.
Ahmadinejad said: "Sanctions are not an issue ... We will not be happy if they use anything but logic but we are not worried. After all, we are capable of defending our rights."
The Iranian president caused controversy last year when he described Israel as a tumour that should be "wiped off the map" and said he wanted the root of tensions in the Middle East to be "removed".
Agencies
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/C748DD25-FA65-4BDE-8145-FD7DD993D5F8.htm
allAfrica:
Darfur Crisis Set to Worsen?
By Jim Lobe, Washington
Inter Press Service (Johannesburg) NEWS
August 28, 2006
Human rights and Africa activists are urging the U.N. Security Council to urgently authorise the deployment of as many as 20,000 peace-keeping troops to halt the rising tide of violence and chaos in Darfur, Sudan's western-most region.
But Khartoum's staunch opposition to the deployment, as well as the apparent unwillingness of the Security Council to impose strong sanctions against the regime or consider sending troops the regime's consent, suggests that the situation in the war-ravaged region, where as many as 450,000 people have perished since 2003, may only get worse in the coming weeks and months.
Indeed, reports that the government has been deploying its own military forces in the region and that rebel groups have received heavy weaponry, allegedly from Eritrea, have set off alarms here and at the U.N. where Deputy Secretary-General Mark Malloch warned early last week that "something very ugly is brewing."
According to a source at the U.N., Assistant Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations Hédi Annabi told the Security Council Monday that the build-up of government forces in Darfur has already begun, and a military offensive is imminent.
Kate Gilmore, Amnesty International's deputy secretary general, noted that, "Eyewitnesses in al-Fasher in North Darfur are telling us that the Sudanese government military flights are flying in troops and arms on a daily basis."
"Displaced people in Darfur are absolutely terrified that the same soldiers who expelled them from their homes and villages may now be sent supposedly to protect them," she added.
"With the looming threat of fresh military action by the Sudanese army, the Security Council must deploy peacekeeping urgently to protect civilians," warned Peter Takirambudde, Africa director of Human Rights Watch (HRW), Monday.
"Adopting a resolution is a crucial first step toward stopping the bloodshed in Darfur, but member states must also do all they can to compel Sudan to accept a U.N. force," he said.
So far, however, even the United States, which joined with Britain last week in submitting a draft resolution that would authorise a deployment of up to 17,300 troops and another 3,000 police, appears unwilling to exert serious pressure on Khartoum to accept such a force, which would replace an increasingly ineffective 7,000-strong African Union (AU) peace-monitoring operation whose mandate is set to expire at the end of next month.
Washington, which has denounced the violence that has been directed by the government and government-backed Arab militias mainly against Darfur's African minorities as "genocide", dispatched its top Africa official, assistant secretary of state Jendayi Frazer, to Khartoum late last week.
But Frazer, who noted before setting out from Washington that the security situation in Darfur was "deteriorating very quickly", was reportedly unable even to secure a meeting with President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who has repeatedly rejected appeals that he accept a U.N. force mandated to impose peace on the region.
Despite her apparent failure, Washington's ambassador at the U.N., John Bolton told reporters Monday that he wanted the pending resolution approved by the Council "in the next couple days".
"The time for talk is over," he said. "It is time for action. It is time for this Council to uphold its responsibility and pass a resolution immediately authorising the deployment of U.N. forces."
Still, most analysts believe that the Council is unlikely to approve any resolution that would impose such a force on Khartoum without its approval. Sudanese government representatives chose not to attend Monday's closed-door Security Council session on Darfur.
"Diplomatically, there doesn't appear to be any willingness to put serious pressure on the government of Sudan, other than theoretical pressure," according to Colin Thomas-Jensen, an analyst at the International Crisis Group (ICG) here. "There's lots of bluster, especially from the U.S., but no sense of real action."
Russia and China - both permanent members of the Council - have expressed strong reservations about the draft, although it remains unclear if either would veto it if it came to a vote. Qatar, currently the Council's sole Arab member, has also strongly supported Khartoum's position.
Washington, however, has shown itself increasingly reluctant over the past year to exert strong pressure on Russia and China over the situation in Darfur due to the much higher priority it has attached to gaining their cooperation in its growing confrontation with Iran.
The Bush administration has called on the Council to impose sanctions against Tehran if it fails to accede to demands that it stop enriching uranium for its nuclear programme by the end of this month.
The month-long war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon - and the European Union's agreement to send some 7,000 peacekeeping troops there to police a fragile cease-fire - has also made it less likely that the U.N. will be able to quickly put together the kind of "robust" U.N. peacekeeping force that most analysts believe will be necessary to stop the violence in Darfur, a region that is roughly the size of France.
"With Europe contributing to Lebanon, there's a new question - are the kinds of forces that Bush himself has said are needed really available for deployment to Darfur?" asked Thomas-Jensen. "Or will this simply amount to a rehatting of the AU force, which would be thoroughly inadequate?"
"We know the Security Council's attention is focused on Iran and Lebanon," noted HRW's Takirambudde, "but the United States, Britain and France must step up efforts to ensure that Darfur is a priority also."
If Sudan does not go along with a U.N. force, Takirambudde and other activists are calling on the Council to impose targeted sanctions, including an asset freeze and a travel ban, against specific Sudanese officials responsible for egregious human rights abuses or for blocking implementation of the Darfur Peace Agreement (DPA) that was signed by Khartoum and the largest rebel faction nearly four months ago.
A U.N. panel of experts named 17 government and rebel officials as among the worst abusers in a confidential report submitted to the Council earlier this year, but, despite the reported presence on the list of top Khartoum officials, only three individuals - two rebel leaders and one retired general - have been sanctioned to date.
"At the time, Bolton said the three were just a 'down payment'," Thomas-Jensen told IPS. "We need to start seeing the payment of the balance."
Meanwhile, Sudan's own proposal for imposing an end to the violence in Darfur, which it submitted to the Council late last week, coupled with its reported arms build-up, is provoking growing concern here, as well as in the region itself, according to human rights and humanitarian groups. Khartoum has said it would send 33,550 military and police forces to Darfur, a step that would itself violate the DPA's terms.
"The Sudanese government's 'protection plan' is a sham and must be firmly rejected," according to Amnesty's Gilmore. "How can Sudan ...realistically propose being a peacekeeping (force) in a conflict to which it is a major party and perpetrator of grave human rights violations?"
The government, which has periodically harassed humanitarian groups and blocked delivery of relief supplies to some of the more than two million people displaced by the violence, suggested last week it will expel the International Rescue Committee from Sudan shortly after the group released a report on the unprecedented number of rapes that have taken place in and around camps for the internally displaced in Darfur.
Attacks on and killings of humanitarian workers have also reached record levels in the past month, according to the U.N.
Copyright © 2006 Inter Press Service. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com).
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allAfrica:
Nigeria, U.S. Target $600 Billion in Gulf of Guinea
By Ayodele Aminu, Kunle Aderinokun and Onyebuchi Ezigbo, Kaduna/Abuja
This Day (Lagos) NEWS
August 29, 2006
The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) has described the Nigeria-United States Gulf of Guinea Energy Security Initiative as a measure aimed at securing $600 billion new investments through stable flow of crude oil from the region's estimated 14 billion barrels from the reserves.
Nigeria's apex bank, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), also yesterday said it would continue to retain substantial portion of the nation's external reserves in the United States dollar in spite of the downward pressure on the currency in the international market.
Nigerian officials and their counterparts from the United States would today meet under the auspices of the bilateral security agreement to review security initiatives aimed at sustaining the status of the Gulf of Guines as the safest crude oil exporting zones of the world.
NNPC's General Manager, Group Public Affairs, Dr. Levi Ajuonuma who spoke to THISDAY on the significance of the initiative said since both countries shares a common interest, both as producer and end-user, it behooves on them to join forces in ensuring stable operations in the area.
Ajuonuma whose boss, the Group Managing Director of NNPC, Engr. Funsho Kupolokun serves as the Presidential envoy at the talks, said today's meeting is expected to review happenings in the region and fashion out fresh methods of engagement between the nations.
Against the background of heightening tension in the Niger Delta area, the GM said the country's over riding interest in the gulf is because it accounts for about 50 per cent of the crude oil as well as other economic potentials of the zone that stretches from the West Africa coast line through Cameroon to Angola.
The Gulf of Guinea region alone currently hosts about14 billion barrels of crude oil, mainly locked-up in the deep offshore, with 33 fixed crude oil production platforms, 20 floating production storage, 13 floaters and off-take vessels, all which are estimated at several billions of Dollars.
Speaking on the need for improved security within the region, Ajuonuma said the region is expected to host about 159 fixed platforms and 700 oil wells by 2008 and that any disruption of activities in the area would affect the world energy supply.
"Besides, every additional flow of one million barrels of crude oil from the gulf is expected to attract about $10 billion fresh investments to the contiguous countries", he said.
According to him, the country wants to position itself favourably through the Gulf of Guinea security strategy and to take advantage of the security situation in the Middle East by providing a secure and stable alternative
Meanwhile, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has said it would continue to retain substantial portion of the nation's external reserves in the United States dollar in spite of the downward pressure on the currency in the international market.Deputy Governor, Economic Policy, CBN, Dr. Obadiah Mailafia told financial journalists yesterday in Kaduna that the dollar is still the number one reserve currency in the world, stressing that most nation's crude are derived in dollars.
Specifically, Mailafia who stood in for the CBN Governor, Prof. Charles Soludo at a workshop organized by the apex bank for finance correspondents and Business Editors said CBN's outlook on external reserve currency holding portfolio was to hold on to the dollar and manage it for the long run, adding that penalties are usually paid for moving money from one currency to another.
On the present exchange rate of the naira which stood at N128.31 to one US dollar as at the close of business yesterday, he said CBN's policy was to sustain a stable value which will become strong in a slow and efficient manner.
"With WDAS, there is a market out there for the buying and selling of the currency and what the market determines would not be something that we are uncomfortable with. So we are comfortable with the present rate in the sense that we have stemmed the spiral decline of our national currency.
"As you know, the naira has stabilized. It has appreciated somewhat but we want to be sure that we have a stable currency. We don't want a situation where there is an extremely rapid appreciation and then when global oil prices slow down, there would be a decline. That kind of yo-yo situation of rise and fall, I don't think it is good for an economy.
"So we want a stable currency that fulfils the need of this economy. And if you have too much appreciation, of course, it will damage your exports. We want to encourage export diversification and you would agree with me that the way to do so is not just to allow the currency to appreciate the way that it wants. I know that some of our partners want this to happen but I can assure you that it will not be good for the long term interest of this economy," he emphasised.
Commenting against the backdrop of calls to appreciate the naira in view of the nation's huge external reserves of $38 billion as at July, which could finance 20 months imports, he said such a move would be harmful to the non-oil productive sectors of the economy.
Earlier, while declaring open the seminar, Soludo said the apex bank has reviewed the operations of foreign exchange market since the introduction of Wholesale Dutch Auction System (WDAS) in February 2006 and noted that the desired major objective has been achieved through market efficiency and convergence of inter-bank and official rates for the first time in the last 20 years.
"The full liberalisation of the forex market and tight monetary policy led to the convergence of rates in all markets and easy access to forex by end-users. It has helped to keep price inflation in check and reduced cost for producers and consumers while the parallel appreciated (the first in 20 years.)," he stressed.
He said the WDAS has removed the 20 per cent premium hitherto enjoyed by operators of the market who engage in round-tripping to take advantage of the differentials in the official and parallel markets.
According to him, "From the operations of the forex market, it is evident that the major objective of WDAS, namely greater efficiency of the forex market and convergence of inter-bank and official exchange rates had been achieved. Both inter-bank and official rates have converged for the first time in the last 20 years.
Copyright © 2006 This Day. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com).
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AlterNet:
When Government Shrugs: Lessons of Katrina
By Adolph L. Reed Jr., The Progressive
Posted on August 29, 2006
A year has passed since Hurricane Katrina turned New Orleans into the closest thing this country has seen to Pompeii. Although FEMA trailers dot more of the landscape than they did a few months ago, as homeowners have begun to dribble back, at least 60 percent of the city seems unoccupied. It will never be the same. Most of the markers of familiar life, the daily round, swept away, never to return. The beautiful Louis Armstrong song "Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?" used to give me a little rush of wistful, sweet nostalgia. Now it makes me sob.
Most of my family lives in New Orleans. Nearly all of them were or remain displaced. My mother's Holly-grove neighborhood sat in four feet of water for nearly a month after the 17th Street Canal ruptured. She left home the day before the storm hit and couldn't move back until New Year's Day. Some family members were more fortunate, some less. Most of them lived in the Gentilly area, which was largely devastated by the breach of the London Avenue Canal. My aunt and uncle's house, only a few blocks from the breach, was inundated, as was that of a cousin who lived near them. She had to be rescued from a rooftop. Even some relatives whose houses weren't flooded remain displaced, as children had no schools and most of the city went without electricity and other services.
My boat-lifted cousin Ann works for the municipal Parks and Recreation Department. She needed to stay in the city to be available to respond in the storm's wake. She was preparing to leave for work the bright, clear morning after the storm, anticipating what conditions would be like around town but feeling relieved that the city had dodged the worst. Then she saw water running down the street and couldn't figure out where it was coming from. Within an hour, it covered the fire hydrant at the curb. Two hours later, she had retreated to a neighbor's attic, where they were trapped overnight.
I thought of her whenever I heard someone exclaim self-righteously, "I don't understand why they didn't leave." One day, I finally snapped.
I was in a Cincinnati airport restaurant when I overheard two women responding to television coverage on the night that Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard broke down in tears over the death of his emergency services director's mother. She drowned in a St. Bernard Parish nursing home as a result of the storm. They seemed like Midwestern church ladies, though it turned out they were flying to Atlantic City, but I guess that is a place of worship. They went immediately from the "Isn't it so sad what's happening to those people?" to the "I just don't know why they didn't evacuate." I turned to them and said, "That's right; you don't know because you can't imagine being in their situation" and walked out without ordering anything.
Always ready to exoticize, even when on their best behavior, the news media pulled out their one-size-fits-all cultural exceptionalism. People down there are rooted in their ways, we were told. They have a primordial commitment to place that anchors them to an extent the rest of us can't understand.
Of course, the media found cases to flavor this story-for instance, an elderly woman who refused to leave her cats. (Anyone remember the curmudgeonly old coot, a Gabby Hayes character-come-to-life, who wouldn't evacuate his place on Mount Saint Helens?) The exoticizing narrative not only dresses up sentimentalized voyeurism as empathetic understanding. It also recasts victims as eccentrics who, by definition, are outside normal life and who, therefore, we don't really need to care about. They prefer to live that way.
From that twisted perspective it appears almost disrespectful to consider them to be suffering; they march to the beat of a different drummer and make different choices from the rest of us. The implication is that they accept the consequences of those choices and that it would be condescending to believe otherwise. This is, of course, only a free-market, happy-face expression of victim-blaming.
The fact is that some people chose to ride out the storm in town because, like my cousin Ann, they had commitments to be on site to keep the city functioning and help return it to order. Some stayed for more idiosyncratic reasons, not least because they expected their homes to withstand the hurricane, which, incidentally, most did. The vast majority who didn't evacuate as the storm approached, however, were either too poor or too frail to leave, or both. In the same news segment as the cat lover, a middle-aged man said that he had $5 to his name when the storm came. What, he asked, could he have done had he been deposited in some strange place with no money?
Two months before Katrina, Mayor Ray Nagin's administration determined that it couldn't afford to provide public transportation to evacuate residents in the event of a major storm. So the city produced DVDs to distribute in poor neighborhoods, alerting residents that they would be on their own. There was no attempt, as part of the evacuation plan, to provide transportation for the nearly 100,000 New Orleanians who didn't own dependable cars and couldn't afford to pay their way out of the city. This was triage without the name or the courage of its convictions.
That decision-to shrug shoulders and conclude that the municipality couldn't afford to mobilize adequately for evacuating up to a quarter of its population-speaks to the real sources of the devastation of New Orleans and the snail's pace of its recovery. Every determination of what can or can't be afforded depends on a calculation of costs and benefits and the relative weight of the interests that compete for use of resources. The Nagin administration couldn't afford to deploy enough buses as part of its evacuation plan because it gave higher priority to dedicating funds to other purposes-such as subsidizing development and keeping taxes and fees low.
The fetish of "efficient" government-code for public policy that is designed to serve the narrow interests of business and the affluent-is the ultimate cause of the city's devastation. Remember that the city survived the hurricane. It flooded because the levees failed. The levees on the 17th Street and London Avenue canals failed because, in the words of the Independent Levee Investigation Team, "safety was exchanged for efficiency and reduced costs." This was the result of federal underfunding, the Corps of Engineers' skimping, state and local officials' temporizing, and a lack of adequate government oversight-or, in neoliberal parlance, cutting government red tape.
Where the breech occurred on the 17th Street Canal, the Corps had made concessions in sturdiness of construction to accommodate real estate developers' desire to stuff as much new upscale housing as possible into that neighborhood. The levee on the Industrial Canal failed because of the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet's extreme vulnerability to storm surge. MR-GO, as it is called, is a forty-year-old white elephant of pure corporate welfare.
The notion that government services are wasteful and unnecessary-the neoliberal idolatry that the market can take care of everything that needs to be taken care of-got exposed for the flim-flam that it is. FEMA was so feckless because Bush and the worthless cronies he put in charge of the agency fundamentally could not even conceive that a public institution should have any responsibilities for securing the public welfare. When disaster struck, none of them had paid enough attention even to imagine what the agency could do, that maybe its purview should include mobilizing rescue and assistance efforts for people on the Gulf Coast whose plight CNN was broadcasting round the clock. For Bush, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, and former FEMA Director Mike Brown, the organization existed only as an occasion for plunder, payoffs, and posturing.
As an illustration of how dominant that way of thinking is, Mayor Nagin, while the city was still submerged, fired 3,000 municipal employees, many, if not most, of whom had lost their homes or been displaced. Later, the Orleans Parish School Board laid off 7,500 teachers and other employees. No serious consideration was given to the possibility that maintaining a public workforce could help people return sooner by giving them income, providing services, and augmenting the cleanup and reconstruction efforts.
I've been through the city several times since last August. And apart from the ridge that runs along the Mississippi River from the Vieux Carré through the Garden District and Uptown-the area that locals now call the Sliver on the River or the Isle of Denial-the city is barely functioning. There are other pockets, like the Gentilly Ridge or Esplanade, that lie above sea level and didn't take on significant flooding. However, they are surrounded by areas that did, that lay in the path of ruptures of either the 17th Street or London Avenue canals, or the breach of the Industrial Canal, which was primarily responsible for the devastation of the Lower Ninth Ward, New Orleans East, and much of St. Bernard Parish.
Most of the city remains practically deserted. In areas like Gentilly, Pontchartrain Park, the first black middle class subdivision in the city, and New Orleans East, where newer, one-story brick houses abound, the full extent of devastation might be overlooked. From outside, the brick structures seem intact. The grey film enshrouding the structures, however, gives away the reality; it marks the saltwater line indicating the flood's depth on each lot. Looking inside reveals the moldy, fetid mush of destruction.
Social infrastructure is at best spotty in most of the city. Only 21 percent of Orleans Parish public schools had opened by the end of the 2005/2006 school year. Fewer than half of the city's bus routes and less than a fifth of its buses are operating. The levee system hasn't been adequately repaired or upgraded, though the new hurricane season officially opened on June 1. (The Army Corps of Engineers has apologized for its tardiness.)
Meanwhile, privatizers and developers lurk everywhere. Most of the schools that have reopened have done so as charter schools. Both mayor and council can imagine only scenarios in which the "private sector" will be stimulated to come to the rescue and lead a renaissance. This means that they can imagine only policies aimed at boosting investor confidence-cutting spending precisely when they should be increasing it-or drawing on corporate "expertise." Speculators are chomping at the bit to act on redevelopment plans that would reconstruct the city as a theme park for wholesome titillation with resorts, casinos, and upscale housing.
Before the city was dry, the refrain could be heard all through the media: New Orleans could come back with a "smaller footprint," as a whiter city with fewer poor people. A group of 200 respectable sociologists called for dispersal of displaced poor New Orleanians to other locales, presenting their proposal-which grants poor people no legitimate commitment to place-as a poverty program. City Council President Oliver Thomas complained in February that government programs and agencies have "pampered" poor people and proclaimed that they should not be encouraged to return. As he put it, "We don't need soap opera watchers right now." At least one other black councilmember expressed support of his view, as did the acting head of the Housing Authority of New Orleans.
Nagin speaks emphatically of his support for all displaced New Orleanians' right to return, but that support is hollow in a context in which only property owners are seen as stakeholders. Landlords began evicting tenants without a hint of due process as soon as the water receded and rumors spread of possibilities for extracting exorbitant rents from construction workers. The state officially prohibited evictions before October 25, but that prohibition was academic for the tens of thousands of people dispersed in shelters around the region and nation. And even that minimal right was flagrantly ignored. The developers are winning, and renters have no effective voice.
No plans have been seriously considered that would replace the rental housing, 90 percent of which was classified as low-income affordable, destroyed by Katrina and subsequent flooding. Indeed, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Housing Authority of New Orleans have announced plans to raze existing low-income public housing and replace it with "mixed-income" occupancy developments, which will further reduce the potential number of affordable units in the city.
So this is where we stand on the anniversary of what is probably the worst-and certainly the most preventable-disaster to hit a major American city. Although the population is scarcely half what it was on August 28 of last year, people are returning. The FEMA trailers are a hopeful sign, a testament to people's resilience.
My cousin Ann moved out of her trailer and back into her restored house at the end of May. Most of my family members are back in their houses now, though in nearly all their neighborhoods no more than a couple of homes per block are occupied. And the apparatus of neighborhood life-grocery stores and bodegas, dry cleaners and laundromats, coffee shops, restaurants, and the like-has yet to return. Stores remain damaged and boarded up.
The fact that nearly all of my relatives who lived in New Orleans on the day before the storm are living there now is partly a testament to good fortune: Only a minority of them lived in areas that suffered seriously destructive flooding. But it is, most of all, a testament to class privilege. No one in my family lost a job because of the hurricane. All had access to resources that kept their displacement as short and relatively comfortable as it could be. All are homeowners.
With each passing day, a crucially significant political distinction in New Orleans gets clearer and clearer: Property owners are able to assert their interests in the polity, while non-owners are nearly as invisible in civic life now as in the early eighteenth century.
Among other things, the travesty in New Orleans reminds us that capitalism enshrines the prerogatives of property owners-and the bigger the holdings, the more substantial the voice.
This underscores why a simplistically racial interpretation of the injustices perpetrated in New Orleans is inadequate, even when those injustices cluster heavily along racial lines. Substantial numbers of blacks as well as whites are in a position to benefit materially from this regime; blacks as well as whites support the de facto creation of a property owners' republic. It is possible simultaneously to include black people as stakeholders in the equation for rebuilding the city and to exclude poor people. This is the truth beneath the 200 sociologists' assurance that their proposal for dispersing the poor would not "depopulate the city of its historically black communities." But this is a sleight of hand that seeks to sanitize class cleansing with a patter of racial respect.
Guardians of a stripped-down discourse of racial piety, such as Manning Marable and David Roediger, persist in taking me to task for supposedly not recognizing race as the crucial dimension of injustice in New Orleans. This is an all too familiar, tiresome canard, but in this context I find it especially bemusing. I don't want to descend into what seems like a claim of authenticity based on personal biography.
However, I do know New Orleans and its politics, racial or otherwise. I doubt that I could have overlooked the role of race in the city's power relations during all those years on the segregated buses, streetcars, and ferries, at the segregated public park and zoo, on the segregated lakefront (our space was near the opening to the Industrial Canal), at the Jim Crow takeout restaurant window, at my segregated high school, during the year of white rioting over school desegregation, vicariously through the lives of the domestic workers and caddies who were my neighbors, or in the everyday world that reminded me at every step that any white person could do or say anything to me with impunity and I could have no expectation of due process before the law.
Yes, I've seen how many, if not most of the Crescent City's white citizens' perspectives on politics remain shaped by a racist worldview that persists as at least a default consciousness. This is especially notable in election seasons, most dramatically in David Duke's two statewide races. Nominally educated, upper-status white people have been no less likely to embrace him and others like him than have stereotypical rednecks.
I've also closely observed the racial transition in the city's politics over the last thirty years. I've seen it from the bottom up and inside out. The new black political class, including the first three black mayors, emerged from my family's social stratum-our former schoolmates and circle of friends and associates, all part of the rising or entrenched black professional-managerial class. I've known many of these individuals, and certainly the stratum writ large, nearly all my life. I've seen the content and trajectory of their understanding of race and politics evolve over decades.
I've seen-from the most casual banter at parties, weddings, and funerals to the crafting of public policy-how racial discourse can be a form of class capital. I know how easily the language of racial equity functions to obscure (typically without self-conscious guile; that's the beauty of ideology) the reality of a political agenda that concentrates costs and benefits asymmetrically within the black population. A politics built on denouncing racism simply cannot help us understand these dynamics at all.
Last September, watching scenes of the partly submerged Parish courthouse, I kept recalling the feeling of rage that welled in me taking the bus home from school as I'd seen the breathtaking hypocrisy carved into the building's façade: "The Impartial Administration of Justice is the Foundation of Liberty."
But even then the language of racism was inadequate to explain the foundations of the inequality we experienced most immediately along racial lines. Much less is it adequate now to mount an effective challenge to the mechanisms that produce and reinforce hierarchy and injustice-in New Orleans and across the country.
Adolph L. Reed Jr. is a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the Interim National Council of the Labor Party.
© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/40961/
Asia Times:
Al-Qaeda (and US) eclipsed by rise of Iran
By Mahan Abedin
Aug 30, 2006
One of the more interesting results of the Israel-Hezbollah War has been the sidelining of the global jihadi movement and the broader Salafi currents that sustain it. Despite all its rhetoric of a global jihad against the enemies of Islam, al-Qaeda and the broader Salafi-jihadi movement were reduced to mere spectators as Hezbollah, once again, dealt a serious blow to Israeli prestige.
While some analysts interpreted Ayman al-Zawahiri's latest message as an olive branch to Iran, Hezbollah and Shi'ite militants more broadly, it in fact was not a departure from the terror network's stance on sectarian relations in Islam. In any case, al-Qaeda is increasingly a marginal component of the Salafi-jihadi movement, and its ideological influence on the new generation of radicals is nowhere near as strong as is often assumed.
However, to understand where Salafi-jihadism stands in relation to Hezbollah and Iran, it is vital to review the relationship between the Islamic Republic and al-Qaeda. This is not only important for dispelling myths but will help to clarify the balance of power between the various Islamic movements that are set to dominate politics in the Middle East.
Iran and al-Qaeda: A secret relationship?
Although the general consensus in the Western media is that there has never been a substantial relationship between al-Qaeda and Iran, occasionally sensational articles allude to such a relationship. The most recent one is by the German daily Die Welt, which claimed on August 2 that the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) had released Saad, the oldest son of Osama Bin Laden, from custody to enable him to organize a Sunni resistance against Israel from Lebanon. The paper characteristically cites "intelligence sources" to back up an implausible scenario. Leaving aside the unproven allegation that Saad bin Laden has been in Iranian custody, it is not at all clear what a 27-year-old Saudi of unknown quantity - who is completely unfamiliar with Lebanon - can hope to achieve against Israel.
Notwithstanding the lack of any meaningful relationship, the Iranians have had a complex and intriguing attitude towards militant Sunni Islamism in general and al-Qaeda in particular. American intelligence is convinced the Iranians maintained links to Egyptian radicals (some of whom may have had peripheral ties to al-Qaeda) until recently. [1] This is plausible, especially in light of the Islamic Republic's deep and complex relationship with Egyptian Islamists spanning the moderate-extremist spectrum.
At the rhetorical level the Iranians have consistently dismissed al-Qaeda as a construct of American intelligence. This is partly rooted in the Iranians' analysis of the Afghan War of the 1980s. While publicly they have glorified the exploits of the anti-Soviet mujahideen, privately they bear grudges for the isolation of Tehran and its Afghan Shi'ite allies in the conflict and its aftermath. Iran's isolation from the anti-Soviet jihad is to a large extent justified; at the time they were consumed by their own conflict against Ba'athist Iraq. This prevented the Islamic Republic from developing meaningful ties to the Arabic Islamic networks that matured in the Afghan jihadi landscape of the 1980s. This lack of contact reinforced Iranian suspicions that the Arab Islamists (of which bin Laden was a key member) were ultimately an American pawn in a grand geostrategic game against the Soviet superpower.
In short, the Iranians deliberately downplay the role of the Arabs in the Afghan jihad, instead crediting the indigenous mujahideen with victory over the Soviet superpower. This is in sharp contrast to even moderate Arab Islamist narratives of the conflict. The Muslim Brotherhood and its various off-shoots (which organized much of the relief work in Afghanistan and Pakistan) view the Arab Islamist participation - both on the battlefield and in relief and other non-military activities - as crucial to the victory of the Afghan mujahideen.
The legend that has been constructed (and to which all the Arab Islamists that participated in the conflict subscribe to) credits the "Muslims" with not only defeating the Soviet superpower in Afghanistan, but in engineering its eventual downfall in 1991. This narrative demands the US be grateful for this contribution, which catapulted the Americans into sole superpower position. The fact that the Americans were not grateful formed much of the grievances that fueled the emergence of al-Qaeda.
The Iranians have a poor understanding of this dynamic and have thus consistently underestimated the ideological and organizational strength of al-Qaeda. This lack of understanding of the genesis of al-Qaeda predisposes Iranian analysts to too closely identifying the terror network with the Salafi streams in Saudi Arabia.
In the ideological cosmos of the Islamic Republic, Salafism is synonymous with "Ummayad Islam", characterized by reactionary and extremist thinking and a tendency to bicker with other Islamic traditions, as opposed to the external enemies of Islam. From an Iranian perspective, the antithesis of "Ummayad Islam" is "Islam-e-Nab-e-Mohammadi" (pure Mohammadean Islam) which was revived by the late leader of the Iranian revolution, Grand Ayatollah Khomeini. This Iranian narrative presents "Islam-e-Nab-e-Mohammadi" as being historically concerned with fighting the "real" enemies of Islam, instead of fanning intractable and insoluble sectarian differences. This viewpoint is best articulated by Rasoul Jaafarian, a prolific writer and self-appointed promoter of "Mohammadean Islam". [2]
Enemy's enemies
Leaving aside the intense theological and ideological rivalry of Shi'ites and Salafis, there are real problems with this Iranian analysis of al-Qaeda and its supposed Salafi underpinnings. First and foremost al-Qaeda is not even ideologically linked to the type of Salafis which the Iranians find most distasteful. These include Safar al-Hawali, Nasser al-Omar and Abdullah bin Jabreen. Hawali recently declared Hezbollah to be Hezb al-Shaytan (Party of the Devil), while Jabreen issued a fatwa against the Shi'ite Islamist organization at the outset of the conflict.
While Hawali has a semi-jihadi background, he has now moved towards the more mainstream and regime-friendly version of Salafism which views al-Qaeda as "Kharejites" (rejectionists). Salafism is a very broad theological and ideological phenomenon and only a minority within it are predisposed to the type of jihad promoted by al-Qaeda.
Second, al-Qaeda does not have a history of openly attacking Shi'ites, even at the rhetorical level. While the events in Iraq have called this into question, it is important to note that what is regarded as "al-Qaeda in the Land of the two Rivers" formerly led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, has no meaningful organizational and ideological ties to the core of al-Qaeda. The alliance between Zarqawi and al-Qaeda was one of convenience and the former's vitriolic anti-Shi'ite rhetoric was not condoned by Zawahiri and bin Laden.
Primary target
Simply put, al-Qaeda views the struggle against the West in general and the United States in particular as of primary importance. Sectarian squabbles within Islam can only be addressed once the external enemy has been forced to withdraw from the Muslim world. This is not too dissimilar from the geopolitical aspirations of the followers of so-called "Mohammadean Islam" who have been striving for the withdrawal of the West from the Middle East and other Islamic lands long before the emergence of bin Laden and al-Qaeda.
In fact, al-Qaeda is a secret admirer of the discourse of Islamic Iran and has rarely (if ever) attacked the leaders of the Islamic Republic. However, the Iranians have always maintained their distance not only because of the extreme Sunnism (as opposed to Salafism) of bin Laden and Zawahiri but also because of genuine contempt for the terror network.
Iranian leaders regard their "Islamic revolution" as the vanguard of the global Islamic movement and any competitor (especially one as pretentious as al-Qaeda) is regarded with deep suspicion and disdain. Moreover, there is genuine revulsion of al-Qaeda tactics. This is not only because al-Qaeda targets innocent civilians, but because the Iranians fear that terror attacks against US interests consolidate American hegemony in the region and beyond. These fundamental divisions between Iran and al-Qaeda are likely to deepen as the geopolitical weight of the Islamic Republic continues to grow.
The resurgence of Islamic Iran
Despite their constant denials of providing financial and military help to Hezbollah, Iranian leaders and political analysts have not spared any effort over the past month to glorify Hezbollah's "resistance" against Israel, and claim credit for the Islamist group's stunning successes against the Jewish state. Iranian leaders are not altogether unjustified in feeling self-righteous over Hezbollah's perceived victory. Hezbollah's impeccable Lebanese credentials notwithstanding, its ties to the Islamic Republic are so deep and organic that the success and failure of either party would leave a uniquely powerful impact on the other.
Iranian analysts and strategists have spent the past month extolling their country's foreign policy, promoting it as the most effective in the region. Arguably the best piece of analysis was from Reza Amir Khani of Baztab, which tries to rationalize the Islamic Republic's support to Hezbollah and Hamas within a national security framework. [3] Interestingly, Amir Khani explains the Iranian policy in the context of the evolution of the Western way of war. The author speaks of "Ghale'ie" (fortress) and "Meydani" (field) warfare, arguing that Western warriors (heeding the lessons of legendary Troy) learnt to abandon the fortress for the open field. The rationale is simple; the fall of the fortress entails complete defeat while losses on the field are more manageable. This buttresses the author's contention that the Islamic republic sees offense as the best form of defense. Instead of waiting for the US to attack Iran, the Iranians are already fighting the Americans and their proxies in Lebanon and Palestine, the author explains. This argument is both compelling and accurate, as evidenced by the emboldened attitudes of America's adversaries in light of Hezbollah's perceived victory over Israel.
Hezbollah's stunning successes against Israel boosts the Islamic Republic's revival as an ideological power. This process started with the surprise victory of Mahmud Ahmadinejad in last year's presidential elections. Having spent the last 15 years on the ideological retreat, the Islamic Republic suddenly went on the offensive. This was particularly the case with the country's controversial nuclear program. The Ahmadinejad government's confrontational approach has not only been popular but is actually perceived to be working, as evidenced by a more moderate American approach which now favors some form of engagement with Iran.
More broadly, the Islamic Republic's growing geopolitical weight (stemming in large measure from the ouster of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein) reinforces its ideological revival and motivates Iran's supporters across the Muslim world. Al-Qaeda and Salafi-jihadis are clearly losers in this intensifying dynamic. The problem is not so much their extreme ideology, but their comparative lack of organizational infrastructure and other resources. While Hezbollah has emerged as the most sophisticated guerrilla organization in the world, the Salafi-jihadis are still struggling with the basics. This is a reality that not even the most sophisticated al-Qaeda propagandists can dismiss lightly.
More broadly, the resurgence of Islamic Iran is likely to boost the fortunes of moderate Islamists across the Arab world. The Muslim Brotherhood's steadfast support for Hezbollah throughout the latest conflict is indicative of the tacit alliance between the Islamic Republic and the oldest and largest modern Islamist movement in the world. This is yet another dynamic that works against the interests of the Salafi-jihadis, the regime-friendly Salafis in Saudi Arabia and ultimately the House of Saud itself.
In the final analysis, al-Qaeda and the Salafi-jihadis more broadly are proving to be ephemeral and increasingly marginal forces. They are inherently limited by their extremism, lack of vision and resources and isolation from mainstream opinion.
Meanwhile the forces that pose a real threat to American hegemony in the region are increasingly on the ascendant and are set to completely dominate the political landscape of the Middle East in the not too distant future. The Americans are unlikely to be able to reverse this complex and intensifying dynamic. Being increasingly isolated from grassroots opinions in the Middle East, the Americans view force as the preferred option. But that has severe limitations, and can even be downright counter-productive, as evidenced by the latest Hezbollah-Israel conflict.
(This article first appeared in SaudiDebate.com. Published with permission.)
(Copyright 2006 SaudiDebate.com)
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HH30Ak01.html
Guardian: We can't reverse global warming
by triggering another catastrophe
Sulphate pollution killed hundreds of thousands of Africans. A plan to use sulphur to fight climate change risks the same
George Monbiot
Tuesday August 29, 2006
Challenging a Nobel laureate over a matter of science is not something you do lightly. I have hesitated and backed off, read and reread his paper, but now I believe I can state with confidence that Paul Crutzen, winner of the 1995 prize for chemistry, has overlooked a critical scientific issue.
Crutzen is, as you would expect, a brilliant man. He was one of the atmospheric chemists who worked out how high-level ozone is formed and destroyed. He knows more than almost anyone about the impacts of pollutants in the atmosphere. This is what makes his omission so odd.
This month, he published an essay in the journal Climatic Change. He argues that the world's response to climate change has so far been "grossly disappointing". Stabilising carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, he asserts, requires a global reduction in emissions of between 60% and 80%. But at the moment "this looks like a pious wish". So, he proposes, we must start considering the alternatives, by which he means re-engineering the atmosphere in order to cool the earth.
He suggests we use either giant guns or balloons to inject sulphur into the stratosphere, 10km or more above the surface of the earth. Sulphur dioxide at that height turns into tiny particles - or aerosols - of sulphate. These reflect sunlight back into space, counteracting the warming caused by manmade climate change.
One of the crueller paradoxes of climate change is that it is being accelerated by reducing certain kinds of pollution. Filthy factories cause acid rain and ill health, but they also help to shield us from the sun, by filling the air with particles. As we have started to clean some of them up, we have exposed ourselves to more solar radiation. One model suggests that a complete removal of these pollutants from the atmosphere could increase the world's temperature by 0.8C.
The virtue of Crutzen's scheme is that sulphate particles released so far above the surface of the earth stay airborne for much longer than they do at lower altitudes. In order to compensate for a doubling of carbon dioxide concentrations (which could happen this century), he calculates that we would need to fire some 5m tonnes of sulphur into the stratosphere every year. This corresponds to roughly 10% of the sulphate currently entering the atmosphere.
Crutzen recognises that there are problems. The sulphate particles would slightly reduce the thickness of the ozone layer. They would cause some whitening of the sky. Most dangerously, his scheme could be used by governments to help justify their failure to cut carbon emissions: if the atmosphere could one day be fixed by some heavy artillery and a few technicians, why bother to impose unpopular policies?
His paper has already caused plenty of controversy. Other scientists have pointed out that even if rising carbon dioxide levels did not cause global warming, they would still be an ecological disaster. For example, one study shows that as the gas dissolves in seawater, by 2050 the oceans could become too acid for shells to form, obliterating much of the plankton on which the marine ecosystem depends. In Crutzen's scheme, the carbon dioxide levels are not diminished.
It would also be necessary to keep firing sulphur into the sky for hundreds of years. The scheme would be extremely expensive, so it is hard to imagine that governments would sustain it through all the economic and political crises likely to take place in that time. But what I find puzzling is this: that by far the most damaging impact of sulphate pollution hasn't even been mentioned - by him or, as far as I can discover, any of his critics.
In 2002 the Journal of Climate published an astonishing proposition: that the great droughts which had devastated the Sahel region of Africa had been caused in part by sulphate pollution in Europe and North America. Our smoke, the paper suggested, was partly responsible for the famines that killed hundreds of thousands of people in the 1970s and 1980s.
By reducing the size of the droplets in clouds, thereby making them more reflective, the sulphate particles lowered the temperature of the sea's surface in the northern hemisphere. The result was to shift the intertropical convergence zone southwards. This zone is an area close to the equator in which moist air rises and condenses into rain. The Sahel, which covers countries such as Ethiopia, Sudan, Chad, Niger, Burkina Faso and Senegal, is at the northern limits of the zone. As the rain belt was pushed south, those countries dried up. As a result of the clean air acts, between 1970 and 1996 sulphur emissions in the US fell by 39%. This appears to have helped the North Atlantic to warm, allowing the rains to return to the Sahel in the 1990s.
Since then, several studies - published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Geophysical Research Letters and the Journal of Geophysical Research - have confirmed these findings. They show that the 40% reduction in rainfall in the Sahel, which has "few if any parallels in the 20th-century record anywhere on Earth", is explicable only when natural variations are assisted by sulphate aerosols. We killed those people.
I cannot say whether or not Crutzen's scheme would have a similar outcome. It is true that he proposes to use less sulphur than the industrialised nations pumped into the atmosphere, but does this matter if the reflective effect is just as great? Another paper I have read lists seven indirect impacts of aerosols on the climate system. Which, if any, will be dominant? What will their effects on rainfall be?
Crutzen suggests that in order to keep the particles airborne for as long as possible they should be released "near the tropical upward branch of the stratospheric circulation system". Does this mean that they will not be evenly distributed around the world? If so, will they shift weather systems around as our uneven patterns of pollution have done? I don't know the answers, but I am staggered by the fact that the questions are not even being asked.
I am not suggesting that they have been deliberately overlooked. It seems more likely that they have been forgotten for a familiar reason: that this disaster took place in Africa. Would we have neglected them if the famines had happened in Europe? The story of industrialisation is like The Picture of Dorian Gray. While the rich nations have enjoyed perennial youth, the cost of their debaucheries - slavery, theft, colonialism, sulphur pollution, climate change - is visited on another continent, where the forgotten picture becomes ever uglier.
The only responsible way to tackle climate change is to reduce the amount of climate-changing gases we emit. To make this possible, we must suppress the political and economic costs of the necessary cut. I think I have shown how this can be done - you will have to judge for yourself when my book is published. But what is surely clear is that there is no uncomplicated short cut. By re-engineering the planet's systems we could risk invoking as great a catastrophe as the one we are trying to prevent.
· George Monbiot's book Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning is published next month by Penguin
http://www.monbiot.com/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1860299,00.html
Guardian:
Bush visits New Orleans on Katrina anniversary
Associated Press
Tuesday August 29, 2006
George Bush is today visiting New Orleans to pay tribute to the victims of Hurricane Katrina, which hit the Gulf Coast a year ago today.
More than 1,500 people were killed when the storm devastated the city, flooding huge areas.
Mr Bush this morning met the New Orleans mayor, Ray Nagin, and is due to attend a service at the city's St Louis Cathedral later today.
In the aftermath of the disaster, the president stood by the cathedral, in the French Quarter, and admitted that his administration had failed to respond adequately.
The White House hopes regeneration of the Gulf Coast will erase the damage done to Mr Bush by the sluggish official reaction to the storm. Earlier this month, an AP-Ipsos poll revealed that 67% of Americans disapproved of his handling of Katrina.
The president this week met local leaders involved in rebuilding plans. Speaking in Biloxi, Mississippi, yesterday, he said: "Money is beginning to go out the door so people can rebuild their lives."
He admitted that help in Louisiana had been "a little slower" in arriving, but claimed there was a "sense of renewal" on the Gulf Coast and stressed that states and local governments needed to play their part in getting government cash to victims.
Officials said the purpose of Mr Bush's trip was not to dwell on the disaster but to highlight rebuilding efforts, thank volunteers and celebrate community spirit.
"My message to the people down here is that we understand there's more work to be done, and just because a year has passed, the federal government will remember the people," Mr Bush said.
"This is an anniversary, but it doesn't mean it ends. It's the beginning of what is going to be a long recovery, but I'm amazed by the opportunity. I'm amazed by the hope that I feel down here."
IHowever, frustration at the state, local and federal response in New Orleans - which still has no master rebuilding plan - remains intense. Only 50% of the city has electricity, half its hospitals remain closed and violent crime has risen.
Less than half the population has returned after the storm, tens of thousands of families are living in trailers and mobile homes, and insurance settlements are mired in red tape.
When he spoke in Jackson Square last year, Mr Bush put forward proposals to help fight poverty in the area. They included the Gulf Opportunity Zone, which will give more than £5bn in tax breaks to developers of low-income housing, small businesses and individuals.
However, worker recovery accounts - which were meant to help storm victims find work by paying for school, job training and childcare - did not materialise.
Neither did the Urban Homesteading Act, which had been intended to provide the poor with sites on which to build self-financed homes.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
http://www.guardian.co.uk/katrina/story/0,,1860520,00.html
Guardian:
Hope springs from the flood
One year after Hurricane Katrina, the horror stories continue and anger grows. But there are uplifting tales of humanity worth celebrating too, finds Paul Harris
Tuesday August 29, 2006
There is a common myth that has emerged in various parts of the world at different times. It involves rebuilding in a construction crisis - a farm, a church, a home - and the sudden appearance of a mysterious stranger. The man reveals himself as a carpenter and saves the day by working in superhuman time, or without nails, or in some other miraculous way. He then disappears leaving the grateful farmer-priest-homeowner wondering if they have been visited by Christ.
Russell Garrett was no Christ-like figure. But when I met him in the devastated city of Waveland in the Katrina-hit Gulf Coast the parallels with the old legends were there. Garrett arrived on Waveland's Bienville Street at a time of crisis. The houses were destroyed and rebuilding was bitty or non-existent. The street looked like a bomb had hit it and the few residents remaining lived in tiny trailers. Garrett had not arrived straight out of the blue, though he had driven to Mississippi all the way from Helena, Montana, in a beatup old truck and that's pretty much the same thing.
Called by faith and a simple generousity of spirit, he met a handful of homeowners on Bienville Street and vowed to stay for a year and help build them new homes. He is camping in a tent for the entire stay and works entirely for free. He is a deeply skilled craftsman and thanks to his ability, three beautiful new homes are now rising on that street. They will be liveable within the next few weeks. I have rarely met anyone quite so humbling in their willing self-sacrifice.
Which is all to illustrate one of the unwritten stories of the aftermath of Katrina which has not received much in the way of press attention, especially from us cynical Europeans. While the anger aimed at the White House, the Federal Emergency Management Authority (Fema), the insurance companies and state government is often deserved, it's important that we also focus on the tens of thousands of ordinary volunteers who have flocked to the disaster zone over the past year simply to help out.
They have acted out of good will and, often but not always, religious conviction. I don't share their religious beliefs at all, but it is impossible not to be impressed by the teenagers, men and women who have given up their valuable time and disrupted their own lives to help strangers.
Nor though, is it a surprise. America's political and social systems often inspire a terrible cynicism. At the top you find a depressing axis of wealth, power and privilege that too often makes a mockery of ordinary American hopes and ideals. There, religion is all too often used to fuel political arguments and corrode the system for ideological gains. But the further down you go, the better it gets. Until at street level you have people like these church volunteers, just quietly helping out away from the headlines.
It also seems the nearer that American politicians get to actual Americans, the more effective and honest they can become. State politicians often seem to genuinely care about their state. City politicians fight for their cities. And then there are people like Tommy Longo, the mayor of Waveland. Elected mayor of a tiny and sleepy coastal town Longo cannot have thought he had taken that much work on. Then Katrina hit (taking out his own house as well as the offices of the city government). About 95 percent of buildings were destroyed.
Longo has not stopped working since. When I met him he was getting out of a car, his phone clamped to his ear. He was several hours behind schedule, immediately besieged by concerned citizens waiting at his door, and he still made time for me (after dealing with his constituents). As we talked he took a call from his doctor and an incredible fact emerged. Longo had had major heart surgery the day before. He had then checked himself out of hospital at 1am that morning and turned up to work as normal. The next day he was planning a long plane trip to visit other states and raise funds for his town. His commitment to the troubled citizens of Waveland was incredible.
Of course, it is not always like this. Not everything is great down at the grassroots of American political and community life. There is prejudice and corruption here just like everywhere else. It's just that one doesn't often read about the brighter side of things. The narrative of American politics and its myriad social problems is too often focused on the grand events and what goes wrong. But there is much that goes right too. It's just not often found in the big picture. It is found among ordinary American lives. The devil is not always in the details. But some very good people often are.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/columnists/story/0,,1860599,00.html
Guardian: Hurricane Katrina: one year on
Behind the facade, a city left to rot
As cafe society blooms in the tourist areas of New Orleans, poor ex-residents struggle to survive
Julian Borger in New Orleans
Tuesday August 29, 2006
The late-night bars and jazz clubs are open in the French Quarter, as are the cafes in the elegant Garden District. One year after the worst natural disaster in US history, New Orleans is gamely giving the impression that the good times are rolling again.
But a couple of miles to the north or east, the Cajun bravura falls away like a cheap carnival mask, the streets fall quiet and the Crescent City becomes a dead zone.
Hurricane Katrina left behind less than half of New Orleans. The storm killed 1,500 people and scattered the rest. Out of a pre-hurricane population of 450,000, so far just over 200,000 have returned to build their lives, according to independent estimates. The others have either found better options elsewhere or are waiting in trailers for government reconstruction assistance and a development plan that has so far failed to materialise.
"Does it look like they're doing something here?" asked John Washington, looking up and down his street in the Lower Ninth ward, a poor black district in New Orleans east.
As far as the eye could see on the eve of Katrina's anniversary, there were the rotting shells of his neighbours' houses. The summer air hung heavy with the sour taste of mould and decay.
"They got the money. I don't know why they're not turning it loose," Mr Washington said.
He was one of a handful of returnees trying to go it alone, gutting his family property before it succumbed to rot. He was stacking up salvaged pictures when a framed painting of Jesus fell, shattering the glass and further darkening his mood. He picked it up and flung it back in the house, shards and all.
In the Lower Nine, as the district is known, and the low-lying suburbs on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain, streets of crumpled houses and desolate shops have sat abandoned since the flood walls broke when Katrina crashed into the Gulf Coast a year ago today. Mississippi and Alabama were hit too but they did not lose an entire city and have bounced back quicker.
In some areas of New Orleans the only signs of life are the occasional Humvee full of national guardsmen - summoned in June to help control gang violence - and fluttering placards promising "We tear down houses" or "Houses gutted $1,600 or less".
The Lower Nine has been the worst hit. Other districts were further below sea level, but none were poorer.
Old wooden "shotgun" houses - long buildings one storey high and one room wide - were thrown off the cinder blocks they had been jacked up on (as a futile precaution against flooding), and crushed by the floodwaters that burst through the broken levees on the nearby industrial canal. "Cars were floating by. Houses were floating down the street," said Mr Washington, who sat out the storm in a room above his stepmother's church, the Queen Esther Spiritual Divine temple, before swimming to safety when the waters began to recede. "I heard people screaming, howling for help."
Many, perhaps most, of the city's dead came from the Lower Nine. They were the least likely to hear the warnings and many did not have cars to escape in. The bodies were washed away with the floodwaters or left to rot in attics. Their names are recorded in black felt tip on white flags that cover a lawn in the Metairie cemetery a few miles away. Nearly half the flags are blank, representing bodies that have yet to be claimed or identified.
All the dead will be remembered today at a number of ceremonies that have drawn politicians from Washington keen to point fingers of retrospective blame or salvage their reputations. George Bush will be one of the latter.
Two weeks after the flood, with much of the city still under water, Mr Bush stood in Jackson Square and announced a visionary manifesto for reconstruction, promising "this great city will rise again" adding even more ambitiously: "We will build higher and better."
Twelve months on, the people of New Orleans are asking who he meant by "we". Federal money has yet to reach the streets. Not long after the Jackson Square speech, the president pulled the plug on a congressional reconstruction bill aimed at buying up flood-damaged properties, consolidating them, and selling them to developers to redesign the city. It was replaced by a less ambitious and much cheaper plan. The White House, reporters were told, did not want to get into the "real estate" business.
Nor did any other branch of government. The city's mayor, Ray Nagin, toyed with the idea of consolidating the city on a smaller "footprint" and turning low lying areas, such as the Lower Nine, into green space. Faced with a difficult re-election campaign Mr Nagin dropped the idea and declared the market should decide New Orleans' fate.
Planning is a dirty word among Lower Nine residents. Only 200 of the area's 14,400 pre-storm population have come back but at a meeting over the weekend, local civic leaders were shouted down when they presented a plan that would turn much of the empty space into parkland. "Where's my house on your plan?" asked a heckler, who declined to give his name. "Give people the money and let them rebuild. They're Americans. They can do it on their own."
A city planner told him there would be no money until there was a plan, but the crowd was suspicious. Most people interviewed in the district believed the floodwall had been dynamited under the cover of the storm by white developers. "For years they wanted this land. Now they figured out they got an opportunity to get it from us," said Henry Irvin, a 70-year-old stalwart of the Lower Nine.
Katrina broke other levees last year, flooding all-white neighbourhoods, but the conspiracy theory is rooted in history. The levees around the district were dynamited in 1927 by whites trying to drive out other groups - an act that left generations of deep distrust. "They dynamited it in '65 and in 2005 too," Mr Irvin insisted. "There were loud noises that night that people heard that could only be explosives."
As for today's government he said: "They can all kiss my ass. I'll do my own house." That spirit is powering neighbourhood self-help groups but also creating a snaggle-toothed cityscape. It is unlikely to produce a sustainable community, but rebuilding is an act of faith.
"Did they give up in 1776?" Mr Irvin asked, summoning up the memory of America's war of independence. "Did they say: 'This is hard so let's go back to England ... I put my trust in God, and I've got a Browning 12-gauge shotgun too."
How the disaster happened
Sunday August 28
9.30am Mandatory evacuation ordered in New Orleans. 10,000 people huddle in city's Superdome.
Monday 29
3am Canal floodwalls begin to breach.
6.10am Eye of Hurricane Katrina makes landfall at Buras, on Louisiana-Mississippi border; 135mph winds destroy the small town completely.
8.14am New Orleans Industrial Canal breached, flooding the Lower Ninth Ward instantly.
9am Two holes open in Superdome's roof.
10.30am George Bush declares emergency in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.
5pm 1,000 survivors are taken to the New Orleans convention centre and left with no food or water. Up to 20,000 gather there overnight.
Tuesday 30
7am President Bush decides to end his six-week vacation early.
10am Looting across New Orleans.
Wednesday 31
2pm First evacuation begins, from the Superdome , where the crowd has reached 26,000, with a similar number in the convention centre. Another 4,000 gather on the I-10 motorway flyover.
7pm Martial law in New Orleans.
Thursday September 1
2am First evacuees arrive in Houston, Texas.
6.12am Bush tells ABC television: "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees."
Friday 2
9am National guard takes control of the convention centre and fans out around the streets to stop looting.
Saturday 3
12 noon Evacuation of convention centre begins.
5.47pm Evacuation of Superdome is completed
9.50pm Convention centre emptied
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
http://www.guardian.co.uk/katrina/story/0,,1860226,00.html
Harper's Magazine:
Weekly Review
Posted on Tuesday, August 29, 2006. By Theodore Ross
Thousands of U.S. Marine reserves were involuntarily recalled to active duty to offset a lack of volunteers for the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. [CNN] President George W. Bush admitted that the Iraq war was “straining the psyche of our country,”[Washington Post] and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice refused to categorize the fighting in Iraq as a civil war, citing instead “sectarian differences.”[Washington Post] Three Kurdish women testified against Saddam Hussein in his chemical-weapons genocide trial, describing a “sweet, mysterious smell” that blinded them, killed their relatives, and forced them to hide in caves.[New York Times] A senior U.S. general said it was a “policy of the central government in Iran” to destabilize Iraq.[San Jose Mercury News] President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, speaking at the opening ceremony for a power plant that could be used to manufacture nuclear weapons, said his country was “not a threat to anybody, even the Zionist regime which is a definite enemy.”[BBC] A poll found that Americans were becoming increasingly effective at distinguishing between the war in Iraq and the war on terror.[New York Times] Senator Joseph Lieberman compared the Iraq and the Spanish civil wars, saying both were a “harbinger” of worse conflict,[New York Times] and the Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence said banks that handle money for Iran and North Korea were the same as those that accepted Nazi assets.[Associated Press via Yahoo News] The Israeli Foreign Ministry rejected the idea that its conduct in the war with Lebanon was “outside international norms or international legality concerning the rules of war,”[New York Times] and Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez said “Israel is doing the same thing as Hitler.”[CNN] The Holy Jihad Brigades, a Palestinian militant group, justified the kidnapping of two Fox News journalists by saying that "the powers of evil are united in waging wars against Islam and their people.”[New York Times] Syrian President Bashar Assad called the deployment of international troops along the Syria-Lebanon border a “hostile” act.[Los Angeles Times] French president Jacques Chirac said that sending 15,000 United Nations troops to Lebanon was “excessive,”[International Herald Tribune.] and Israel said it would gladly welcome peacekeepers from Muslim nations.[New York Times] Eighteen prisoners used “fiery chili peppers” to escape from the Pematang Siantar Penitentiary in North Sumatra, Indonesia,[Reuters] and in East Timor, gangs armed with machetes and stones fought in the streets of Dili, the capital, killing thirteen people. [Washington Post] The International Rescue Committee announced that more than 200 women were sexually assaulted in refugee camps last month in Darfur.[Reuters] In Kenya, U.S. Senator Barack Obama agreed to be tested for HIV,[ABC News] and President Bush cautioned against placing too much importance on the upcoming one-year anniversary of the Hurricane Katrina disaster.[San Jose Mercury News]
A Northwest Airlines flight out of Amsterdam landed twenty minutes after takeoff when several passengers were observed exchanging cell phones and unbuckling their seat belts.[New York Times] A college student from Connecticut was found with a stick of dynamite in his luggage at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston,[KNX1070 Radio via Google News] and at Chicago's O'Hare airport, Mardin Amin, 29, of Skokie, Illinois, was arrested after telling security agents that the penis pump in his backpack was a bomb.[Forbes] Flight attendants on Sichuan Airlines will now be required to learn kung fu.[China Daily] The mayor of Hazleton, Pennsylvania, announced his intention to make his city the “toughest place on illegal immigrants in America.” [Washington Post] F.D.A. representative Dr. Janet Woodcock said that selling the Plan B contraceptive over the counter would transform it into an “urban legend” that would tempt adolescents to create “sex-based cults.”[New York Times] Katherine Harris, a candidate for the U.S. Senate in Florida, told a Baptist newspaper that “if you're not electing Christians, then in essence you are going to legislate sin.”[Washington Post] A new survey concluded that half of all evangelical Christian men are addicted to pornography.[ChristiaNet] Paul Weisman, a researcher at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said that scientists were “anally pursuing” a new designation for Pluto,[Universe 'too fascinating'] and Advanced Cell Technology, an American biotech company, successfully created embryonic stem cells without destroying embryos.[Financial Times] Australian scientists announced plans to issue oral contraceptives to kangaroos.[BBC] Existing home sales hit a two-year low,[Forbes] and Microsoft filed suit against two “typosquatter” companies under the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, which prevents companies from exploiting suggestively similar domain names.[The Register] Venezuelan customs officials confiscated twenty U.S. diplomatic mail bags containing airplane ejector seats, explosive charges, and 180 pounds of chicken.[New York Times]
Chinese law enforcement officials cracked down on striptease performances at funerals in Jiangsu province, arresting five and setting up a hotline where people could report “funeral misdeeds.”[Reuters via Yahoo News] In Diss, England, Gwen Dorling, 102, enjoyed the services of a stripper for her birthday,[BBC] and Edward Rondthaler, 100, of Croton-on-Hudson, New York, attributed his longevity to cold showers.[CNN] “Super-sized” yellowjacket nests were infesting southern states,[Montgomery Adviser] and in Coushatta, Louisiana, nine black students were sent to the back of a school bus to make room for white children.[The Shrevport Times via Drudge Report] In Sorrento, Florida, a sixty-year-old man was accused of biting a six-year-old boy's genitals after the child refused to stop touching himself,[Local6.com] and an English woman capable of climaxing forty times per day was convicted of benefit fraud.[The Times of London] Young people were loitering in the nude in parking lots in Brattleboro, Vermont.[Boston.com]
This is Weekly Review by Theodore Ross, published Tuesday, August 29, 2006. It is part of Weekly Review for 2006, which is part of Weekly Review, which is part of Harpers.org.
Written By
Ross, Theodore
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il manifesto:
Res publica, libera dal capitale
Le ricette del capitale: mercificazione di ogni forma di vita, liberalizzazione totale dei mercati, privatizzazione della proprietà comune Smantellato il welfare europeo, lo Stato si è ritirato dal campo dell'economia e il valore di scambio ha travolto il valore d'uso
Riccardo Petrella
In un senso strettamente letterale, res publica sta ad indicare lo Stato, il governo, ed anche l'insieme dei beni che sono di proprietà di tutti i cittadini. In un senso più generale, si intende con res publica una società fondata sullo Stato di diritto ed i principi di cittadinanza, di libertà e di uguaglianza, mirante a promuovere la giustizia sociale, la fraternità e la pace.
Per tutto il XIX secolo e buona parte del XX, la res publica si giocò - in congiunzione con la questione della autodeterminazione dei popoli e del riconoscimento del cittadino - attorno alla soluzione dei rapporti tra capitale e lavoro. Da un lato, i detentori del capitale privato, proprietari della terra, delle materie prime e, soprattutto delle «macchine», che pretendevano di essere i proprietari dei frutti del lavoro umano, cioè della produttività. Pertanto rivendicavano di essere il soggetto principale delle decisioni in materia di produzione e di distribuzione della ricchezza disponibile e prodotta. Dall'altro i lavoratori, «braccianti» e/o «manodopera», possessori unicamente di forza lavoro (le braccia, le mani....), che rivendicavano anch'essi, legittimamente, di essere proprietari della ricchezza e quindi, soggetti partecipanti alle decisioni, grazie anche ad uno Stato che sarebbe dovuto essere garante dei diritti di tutti i cittadini ed operante nell'interesse generale. In realtà lo Stato fu più sovente dalla parte dei proprietari di capitale.
Lo Stato del welfare
Dopo circa cento anni di lotte sociali, lo Stato del welfare europeo, specie nella versione scandinava e tedesca (molto meno in quella americana) ha rappresentato la vittoria del lavoro sul capitale, esplicitata, tra l'altro, dopo la seconda guerra mondiale, dalla politica dei redditi. Questa è stata fondata su una concertazione a tre - imprese, sindacati e Stato - sulla ripartizione degli incrementi di produttività. Cosi, la produttività era diventata una «res» comune, la collettività essendone proprietaria e responsabile. Nei rapporti di forza tra lavoro e capitale, lo Stato del welfare ha costituito la forma di società che il lavoro è riuscito ad imporre al capitale come limite alla pretesa del capitale privato di governare la società ed il divenire delle comunità umane. Tuttavia, il welfare non ha dato vita, in nessun luogo, ad un sistema non-capitalista, anti-capitalista, o post-capitalista.
Negli ultimi trent'anni, il capitale è pervenuto a far compiere alle nostre società un'inversione strutturale di tendenza riuscendo a smantellare lo Stato del welfare. Il capitale privato è diventato il soggetto unico proprietario della produttività. Il lavoro ha perso la sua forte soggettività economica, sociale e politica nei confronti del capitale. Ridotto alla categoria di «risorsa umana», il lavoro è nuovamente considerato una merce, un «prodotto», il cui mercato è sempre più deregolamentato e liberalizzato. Il lavoro, precario, flessibile, aleatorio, fa sempre meno parte del campo dei diritti.
Lo Stato, dal canto suo, non ha fatto altro in questi anni che ritirarsi dal campo dell'economia e dalle decisioni in materia di allocazione delle risorse produttive lasciando al capitale privato, in nome dell'imperativo della competitività mondiale delle imprese «nazionali», il compito «politico» della regolamentazione finanziaria, tecnologica e commerciale della ricchezza. Avendo preso il comando sullo Stato e «rimesso al suo posto strumentale» il lavoro, i detentori del capitale privato hanno spostato sul fronte della vita la loro strategia di conquista e la pretesa al diritto di proprietà e di governo della società. In questo nuovo secolo, la partita della res publica si gioca - in stretto legame alla questione del rafforzamento o, all'opposto, dell'indebolimento delle dinamiche imperiali mondiali americane e della militarizzazione del mondo - sulla soluzione dei rapporti tra capitale e vita.
Al momento, il capitale è vincente grazie principalmente a tre dinamiche operanti in tutto il mondo: la mercificazione di ogni forma di vita; la liberalizzazione di tutti i mercati; la privatizzazione del potere di proprietà sulla vita. I processi di mercificazione della vita sono favoriti dalla tesi secondo la quale nulla ha valore senza scambio, senza relazioni di vendita/acquisto le quali fissano il prezzo dei beni e servizi scambiati. Anche la stragrande maggioranza dei beni e dei servizi comuni pubblici (l'acqua, la salute, l'educazione, l'alloggio, i trasporti, l'ambiente...) è stata ridotta a merce sulla base di due argomenti (molto discutibili), fatti diventare «leggi» dai gruppi dominanti. Il primo consiste a sostenere che anche questi beni e servizi sarebbero l'oggetto di domande individuali (una persona utilizza X metri cubi d'acqua, «consuma» X quantità di medicine, utilizza X ore di trasporti pubblici...) e, quindi, sarebbero oggetto di rivalità fra venditori ed acquirenti e fonte di utilità individuali. Sarebbero quindi dei beni economici privati, di cui solo i meccanismi di mercato consentirebbero di ottimizzarne la produzione e l'uso. Il secondo argomento dice che l'accesso ai beni e servizi comuni implica necessariamente un costo economico che non può essere coperto che da un prezzo in funzione del consumo.
I soldati mercenari
Nemmeno l'esercito sta sfuggendo alla mercificazione. Parecchie migliaia di militari delle forze occidentali in Iraq sono composti da soldati mercenari «venduti» agli Stati uniti ed al Regno unito da società private specializzate in attività di guerra. Lo stesso dicasi dei saperi. Ancora decenni or sono la Chiesa cattolica «vendeva» le indulgenze, oggi i nuovi dei del mercato vendono le conoscenze.
Una volta avvenuta la mercificazione, è particolarmente difficile frenare, o vuoi impedire, la deregolamentazione e la liberalizzazione dei mercati. Decine di istituzioni nazionali ed internazionali sono state create apposta, con forti poteri di intervento e di pressione, per promuovere quella che è considerata dai turiferari della liberalizzazione «la missione civilizzatrice della libertà dei mercati» e della costruzione del grande mercato libero mondiale.
Parlo, innanzitutto, del Gatt (General Agreement on Trade and Tarif), diventato il Wto (World Trade Organisation) nel 1995 che da 10 anni sta tentando di imporre al mondo, attraverso il Gats (General Agreement on Trade of Services), la pretesa ineluttabilità della liberalizzazione dei servizi. Penso anche all'Ocse, il grande laboratorio ideologico economico dei paesi occidentali, ed alle varie zone di libero scambio promosse in tutte le regioni del mondo e di cui l'Unione europea, con il suo mercato unico interno, rappresenta il modello da seguire. Non per nulla uno dei più grandi dibattiti politici e culturali degli ultimi anni sull'integrazione europea è stato quello centrato sulla direttiva Bolkenstein che mira, anche se in una versione «addolcita», alla liberalizzazione di tutti i servizi di rilevanza economica. Con i tempi che corrono, i servizi considerati di non rilevanza economica sono rimasti in pochi!
Terza dinamica, la privatizzazione. Fortemente aiutato, anche in questo, dallo Stato, il capitale è riuscito ad impadronirsi della proprietà di tutto ciò che fino a poco tempo fa era stato considerato come «proprietà comune, pubblica» vuoi come bene «sacro». Dai semi di riso indiani od asiatici, «liberati» dalle regole statali e dalla proprietà collettiva dei villaggi o delle cooperative, all'acqua, anch'essa trattata come «bene libero», passando attraverso le piante ed i microrganismi alla base della farmacopea mondiale. Gli algoritmi, senza i quali nessun software esisterebbe, l'energia eolica, l'energia solare, l'educazione... qualsiasi espressione di vita può/deve diventare oggetto di appropriazione privata e di capitalizzazione finanziaria.
Lo strumento principe utilizzato dal capitale privato, che legalizza ciò che si deve invece definire come un vero furto o atto piratesco, è il diritto di proprietà intellettuale concretizzato nell'ottenimento di un brevetto. Il brevetto garantisce al suo proprietario il diritto esclusivo di uso del bene o del servizio brevettato per un periodo di 18 a 25 anni, con possibilità di rinnovo. Le principali proprietarie di brevetti al mondo sono le grandi imprese multinazionali private occidentali, specie statunitensi.
Cosi, il capitale biotico del pianeta è in via di crescente brevettazione. Inoltre, dal 1994, il Congresso degli Stati uniti ha autorizzato la brevettabilità di geni umani, in ciò seguito nel 1998 dal Consiglio europeo e dal Parlamento europeo per paura che l'industria biotecnologia europea perdesse competitività e mercati a vantaggio di quella statunitense.
Alla luce di quanto precede, la principale sfida globale e planetaria attuale consiste nel liberare la vita dall'appropriazione e dal controllo da parte del capitale privato affermando il primato dei diritti della vita ed alla vita sugli interessi dei proprietari del capitale finanziario delle grandi imprese globali .
Questa sfida può essere raccolta e vinta partendo dalla riaffermazione dell'essenzialità e dell'indispensabilità dei beni comuni, dal livello locale al livello mondiale. La salvaguardia e la promozione dei beni comuni rappresentano la condizione fondamentale di partenza, necessaria ed indispensabile, per la lotta alle nuove pretese del capitale privato. Considerare l'acqua, l'aria, la terra, l'energia solare, la conoscenza, la salute, l'educazione, la sicurezza collettiva, la pace, la protezione civile... come beni comuni significa riconoscere, nella storia della condizione umana la centralità dell'altro come bene comune essenziale ed insostituibile alla propria esistenza. L'altro nella duplice realtà di «altro» come essere umano, e «altro» come «natura», la «madre di vita».
Il dominio del capitale
Per il capitale privato l'altro è da rigettare o da sfruttare. La sua visione del mondo, dell'alterità, è una visione antagonistica ed utilitarista. Nella chiave antagonista, l'altro è soprattutto un nemico, un contendente nella lotta, con vincitori e vinti, per la sopravvivenza, la potenza, la ricchezza. Nella chiave utilitarista, la natura, l'ingegnere informatico di Bangalore o il risparmiatore di Recife, sono visti come uno strumento, una «risorsa» che vale fintantoché è utilizzabile al fine dell'ottimizzazione della creazione di valore per il capitale. Non c'è possibilità di alcuna solidarietà economica con l'altro, ma, al massimo, solo una convergenza temporanea di interessi.
La visione antagonistica ed utilitarista dell'altro è all'origine di tutte le guerre per e sulle risorse, a partire dalle guerre economiche, commerciali e, oggi, tecnologiche. Per questa ragione il capitalismo è incapace di pace, di solidarietà, di condivisione, di giustizia sociale. Coloro che pensano che non vi sia più storia possibile al di fuori del capitalismo, sono convinti che non sarà mai possibile costruire una società fondata sulla pace, la solidarietà, la giustizia sociale.
Il riconoscimento dell'esistenza di beni comuni è, invece, alla base di una visione cooperativa e solidale della società, del mondo. Impedendo al capitale di impadronirsi del potere di controllo sulla vita, si contribuirà altresì ad un riequilibrio di fondo nei rapporti tra lavoro e capitale.
http://www.ilmanifesto.it/Quotidiano-archivio/27-Agosto-2006/art66.html
Mail & Guardian:
His legacy should not be forgotten
John Matshikiza: WITH THE LID OFF
28 August 2006
The passing on of Professor Mazisi Kunene in Durban brings many thoughts of the past and the present to mind. Not least of these is how easy it is to forget the past and be ignorant of how figures from that past have influenced the present that we currently enjoy.
In later years, Mazisi Kunene had something of a profile of a Zulu nationalist - his major book-length poetry works of the 1970s, Emperor Shaka the Great and Anthem of the Decades, were heroic recountings of the Zulu past and were partly dedicated to Mangosuthu Buthelezi, at the time that Buthelezi’s Inkatha Freedom Party was in direct and violent conflict with the underground African National Congress inside South Africa and was largely perceived as an agent of the ruling, racist Nationalist government.
This was the rough and tumble of exile versus “inzile” politics, when alliances shifted in unpredictable ways. There were internal struggles as far afield as London and Lusaka between the black nationalist factions of the ANC and the mainstream that embraced all races in the Congress Alliance. (If you listen carefully, you can still hear the rumbles of these inevitable contradictions and confrontations today.)
Things seemed to be so much simpler way back then. We, the black guys, were all on the same side, more or less. The only breakaway from the orthodoxy of the ANC was Robert Sobukwe’s Pan Africanist Congress, who seemed to be out on a limb, until their Sharpeville and Langa marches precipitated the massacres that would bring the world out on the side of the oppressed masses of South Africa.
This propelled us into the swinging Sixties, when so many South Africans were also propelled into exile.
Kunene was not just a fine scholar, equally versed in the depths of Zulu and English history and literature. Like any educated black South African, he was also politically conscious and made it his duty to use that consciousness to its fullest effect. He was a card-carrying member of the ANC.
In exile in London, he became its chief representative at a time when the very existence of the organisation was in peril back home, its leadership, including the Mandelas, the Sisulus and the Mbekis, were on trial for their lives, on behalf of all of us, in Pretoria. Kunene and others, uncelebrated, were holding the fort, keeping the flame alive from Africa House in Earl’s Court in London. Amid the mixed odours of the Ghanaian restaurant in the basement, with okra and dried fish dominating the mix in which the emerging African continent was expressing itself in Kwame Nkrumah’s extravagant dream of liberation, a handful of South Africans, led by Kunene, were holding their own, intellectually and politically.
It was tough times. It was cold and it was the depths of the Cold War. It was confusing. Many of us thought that we would never come back and some of us, indeed, never did.
Those were the exile years, the Robben Island years, the Tambo years. Another long leg of our history.
The political side was gradually consolidated. Some clung to it. Others dispersed into deeper diasporas. Kunene effectively dropped out of the ANC and followed his calling into academia and the exposition of words, which took him to places as far afield as California and Burma.
No wonder people lost touch with each other. But learning, sharing and teaching were always at the root of what it was all about. The changing politics of the world frequently got in the way. People took positions and lost touch with each other. The enemy was also busy dividing us in order to consolidate its rule. Nothing new in that.
I lost touch with where Kunene was at, apart from picking up his writings now and then. So did many others.
And then, as if it had only been yesterday since we’d seen each other, we fumbled into a writers’ meeting in Durban. It was already the 21st century - another place, another millennium.
I regret that I didn’t download all his memories before he left the house. There would certainly have been many of them.
The whole point is that so much of what has made us what we are is moving on. As someone said, when an old person dies, a whole library burns down.
The library that was Kunene is deep and wide. It will take us a long time to understand fully the depth of words he explored and exposed to those who cared to listen and read.
The politics of those words, whichever way we take them, will be conflicting and challenging for generations to come. But it is important that the mixed legacy of a man like Kunene, who moved through so many environments, but always remained true to himself, should not be forgotten.
All material copyright Mail&Guardian.
http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?
articleid=282191&area=/insight/insight__columnists/#
Página/12:
Annan reclama por partida doble
AL COMIENZO DE SU GIRA DE ONCE DIAS POR MEDIO ORIENTE
El secretario de la ONU, Kofi Annan, pidió a la guerrilla chiíta que libere a los dos soldados israelíes y a Tel Aviv que levante el bloqueo marítimo y aéreo que le impone al Líbano.
Por Anne Penketh*
Martes, 29 de Agosto de 2006
El secretario general de la ONU reavivó los rumores sobre un acuerdo que se estaría por alcanzar para liberar a los dos prisioneros israelíes, en el primero de los once días de su delicada misión en Medio Oriente. Después de conversar con el gabinete libanés, Kofi Annan instó a Hezbolá a liberar a los dos prisioneros y dejarlos al cuidado de la Cruz Roja internacional. “Reiteré mi pedido para que los soldados secuestrados fueran liberados y que, en una primera instancia, fueran entregados, bajo el auspicio del Comité de la Cruz Roja internacional, al gobierno del Líbano o a un tercer actor”, explicó.
La captura de los dos soldados el 12 de julio pasado en una incursión en la frontera provocó los 34 días de masacre israelí. Siendo muy precavido en sus declaraciones durante la conferencia de prensa en Beirut, el jefe de la ONU también le pidió a Israel que levantara el bloqueo marítimo y aéreo que ha aislado al Líbano desde el inicio de la guerra, como una de las medidas israelíes para detener el suministro de armas a Hezbolá. Antes de dejar Nueva York, Annan le advirtió al Consejo de Seguridad en un informe que se necesitarán “compromisos difíciles” de ambas partes para alcanzar la liberación de los prisioneros israelíes y de los combatientes libaneses detenidos en Israel.
Annan tiene programadas reuniones hoy en Israel y se espera que el tema de los prisioneros esté primero en la agenda. También hay esperanza de que se alcance un acuerdo para obtener la liberación del soldado israelí secuestrado por los combatientes islámicos en Gaza (ver aparte), a cambio de prisioneros palestinos detenidos en Israel.
El domingo, el líder de Hezbolá, el sheik Hassan Nasralá, aseguró que ya habían comenzado los “contactos” para el intercambio de prisioneros, posiblemente involucrando a Italia y al presidente del Parlamento, Nabih Berri, un importante político chiíta y un aliado de Hezbolá. Israel, sin embargo, quiere asegurar que los soldados sean liberados de forma incondicional y ha negado que se esté negociando un intercambio de prisioneros.
Ayer también Annan dejó claro que se espera que Siria e Irán obedezcan los términos de la resolución de la ONU, que estableció el cese del fuego y autorizó la expansión de la fuerza de paz del sur del Líbano para vigilar la zona de seguridad. “Todas las naciones deben respetar el embargo de armas”, afirmó, sin mencionar específicamente a Siria e Irán. “Es importante que las fronteras estén protegidas y que no haya intentos de rearmarse”, agregó. Siria había amenazado con cerrar su frontera con el Líbano si las tropas de la ONU eran desplegadas allí. Sin embargo, Annan aseguró ayer que los soldados de la ONU no se establecerán a lo largo de esa frontera.
El secretario general les restó valor a los planes para desarmar físicamente a Hezbolá, al decir que el desarme deberá ser resuelto dentro del Líbano a través de un acuerdo nacional. “No nos engañemos y pretendamos que la única forma de desarmar es a través de la fuerza”, afirmó y luego hizo referencia a los ejemplos a través de la historia de los desarmes de las milicias. El apoyo a Hezbolá en los suburbios del sur de Beirut –destruidos por las bombas israelíes durante la guerra– quedó demostrado más tarde, cuando Annan fue interceptado por simpatizantes de la milicia con carteles con la cara de Nasralá que lo abuchearon. A Annan se lo vio nervioso cuando los manifestantes rodeaban a su grupo y decidió acortar su visita a ese distrito.
Durante su gira, Annan también visitará Cisjordania y Gaza, Jordania, Irán, Arabia Saudita, Egipto, Turquía y Qatar, que actualmente ocupa un asiento en el Consejo de Seguridad de la ONU. Anticipando esta visita, el gobierno turco aprobó ayer el despliegue de un contingente de soldados dentro de la fuerza de la ONU. Pero el Parlamento todavía debe ratificar la decisión del gobierno, lo que será una prueba para el presidente Tayyip Erdogan y su influencia sobre los disidentes dentro de su partido, que todavía están disconformes con el mandato de la fuerza de paz. En Roma, el gobierno también aprobó el envío de cinco buques con 2500 soldados, que partirán mañana.
Annan insistió en que las tropas de la ONU “no irán casa por casa buscando armas”, aunque tendrán el derecho a disparar en defensa propia. “Pueden tener que defenderse, pero no están allí para pelear”, afirmó. Se espera que la ONU envíe 3500 soldados al sur del Líbano, pero parece improbable que se alcance el despliegue original de 15 mil hombres de la ONU, para respaldar a los 15 mil soldados libaneses.
* De The Independent de Gran Bretaña. Especial para Página/12.
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http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elmundo/4-72150-2006-08-29.html
Página/12:
Golpeando al turismo en Turquía
GRUPO SEPARATISTA KURDO REIVINDICA MORTALES ATAQUES
Por Terry Kirby*
Martes, 29 de Agosto de 2006
Una ola de ataques con bombas sacudió zonas turísticas de Turquía en menos de 24 horas. Las primeras explosiones tuvieron lugar anteayer en el balneario de Marmaris y Estambul, dejando por lo menos cuatro muertos y 20 heridos. La quinta y más seria explosión sucedió ayer por la tarde en Antalya, sólo unas pocas horas después del estallido en Marmaris, sobre la costa suroeste. El saldo fue de tres muertos y decenas de heridos. Un grupo separatista kurdo se adjudicó los ataques.
Los Halcones de la Libertad del Kurdistán (TAK), un grupo que se desprendió del movimiento separatista kurdo PKK, llevó a cabo una serie de atentados con bombas en Turquía en los últimos años. En una declaración en su sitio web, el TAK dejó en claro que esta vez estaba apuntando a la industria turística: “Turquía no es un país seguro, los turistas no deberían venir a Turquía”. En Marmaris, 10 británicos y 11 turcos resultaron heridos el domingo cuando una bomba explotó en un minibús en el centro del balneario. Hubo otras dos explosiones simultáneas en tachos de basura en la principal avenida de Marmaris, aunque no se cree que haya heridos. Anteriormente, el domingo, un explosión en un área en las afueras de Estambul hirió a seis personas.
El Foreign Office, que envió un equipo al área, dijo que dos de los 10 británicos heridos, un hombre de 38 años y una mujer de 44, de Coventry, habían sido tratados en el hospital y estaban regresando a sus hogares. Seis de los heridos británicos fueron llevados al Hospital Ahu Hetman en Marmaris, mientras que otros cuatro, incluyendo a una mujer de 73 años y una niña de 13 años, fueron admitidos en el hospital privado Caria. Las heridas, ninguna de las cuales ponía en peligro las vidas, eran quemaduras y esquirlas en las piernas. Una vocero del Hospital Abu Hetman dijo que los británicos internados tenían edades que iban de los siete a los 65 años.
Un vocero de la Federación de Operadores de Turismo –cuyos miembros tienen 14.000 clientes en el área de Marmaris– dijo: “No hay informes de muchos clientes que quieran regresar antes. Sólo un puñado”. Keith Bettos, de la Asociación de Agentes Británicos de Turismo, dijo que seguramente los turistas británicos no dejarían de viajar por las explosiones. Señaló: “No creo que la gente reaccione negativamente a esto, porque ha sucedido antes regularmente”. El Foreign Office no aconseja a los británicos que eviten Turquía, pero advierte sobre “la alta amenaza del terrorismo” .
* De The Independent de Gran Bretaña. Especial para Página/12.
Traducción: Celita Doyhambéhère.
© 2000-2006 www.pagina12.com.ar|República Argentina|Todos los Derechos Reservados
http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elmundo/4-72148-2006-08-29.html
Página/12:
Un ministerio en llamas, choques y 90 muertos
En la capital iraquí estalló un coche bomba contra el Ministerio del Interior, donde discutían sobre seguridad. Los combates entre soldados y milicianos chiítas dejaron el mayor número de víctimas.
Martes, 29 de Agosto de 2006
Irak volvió a vivir ayer uno de los peores días de violencia. Los ataques contra civiles iraquíes y soldados norteamericanos redoblaron de agresión en Bagdad, donde un atentado contra el Ministerio del Interior mató ayer a 16 personas, un día después de la muerte de siete soldados estadounidenses, pese al plan de seguridad para la capital. El incidente que arrojó el mayor número de muertos –23 soldados iraquíes y 38 milicianos– se dio en enfrentamientos librados por militares estadounidenses e iraquíes, por un lado, y milicianos chiítas, por el otro, en la ciudad de Diwaniya, 160 kilómetros al sur de Bagdad.
El atentado suicida con coche bomba, lanzado ayer contra el Ministerio del Interior en el centro de Bagdad, dejó un saldo de 16 muertos, incluyendo a ocho policías, y 63 heridos. La explosión ocurrió cuando en la sede del ministerio se celebraba una reunión de varios responsables de seguridad del país, convocados por el titular de Interior, Yauad Bulani, para discutir sobre el aumento de la violencia en el país en las últimas jornadas. El capitán de policía Ahmed Abdullá explicó que la mayoría de las víctimas son guardias de seguridad y empleados del ministerio, situado en un área muy concurrida y en las inmediaciones de un hospital. Un civil murió y otros cuatro resultaron heridos al estallar una bomba casera en el barrio de Yihad, en el oeste de la capital, contra trabajadores jornaleros.
Dos atentados suicidas fueron perpetrados el domingo en Bagdad contra el diario gubernamental Al Sabah y un minibús ante el Hotel Palestina. En total, al menos 62 personas perdieron la vida el domingo en Irak, sobre todo en atentados cometidos en Bagdad, Kirkuk (norte) y Basora (sur), así como en tiroteos en la región de Baba (centro). El mismo día, siete soldados estadounidenses murieron en diversos ataques en los alrededores de Bagdad, llevando a 2626 los militares estadounidenses fallecidos en Irak desde que ese país fue invadido. Seis de esos siete soldados perdieron la vida al estallar bombas caseras al paso de sus vehículos.
El incidente más grave ocurrió ayer en la ciudad de Diwaniya, 160 kilómetros al sur de Bagdad, cuando militares estadounidenses por un lado se enfrentaron a milicianos chiítas, dejando un resultado de 23 soldados iraquíes y 38 milicianos muertos y más de 40 heridos, declaró el portavoz del Ministerio de Defensa, Muhammad al Askari. En una entrevista con el canal Al Hurra Al Iraq aseguró que los combates, en los que participaron milicianos del Ejército del Mahdi, encabezado por el clérigo radical chiíta Moqtada al Sadr, comenzaron anoche y se prolongaron hasta esta mañana. El origen del choque fue el arresto de un jefe de ese grupo armado por parte de soldados iraquíes, explicaron fuentes de la oficina de coordinación de seguridad iraquí-estadounidense. “Después de que los intentos para liberarlo fracasaran, miembros del Ejército del Mahdi atacaron una base de la Guardia Nacional en la ciudad con proyectiles de mortero”, revelaron las fuentes. “Los enfrentamientos continuaban ayer pese al toque de queda impuesto en la ciudad”, capital de la provincia de Al Qadisiya. Debido a la gravedad de la situación las tropas estadounidenses en la ciudad intervinieron, por lo que los milicianos chiítas también atacaron un campamento militar del ejército de Estados Unidos en la provincia.
© 2000-2006 www.pagina12.com.ar|República Argentina|Todos los Derechos Reservados
http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elmundo/4-72149-2006-08-29.html
ZNet | Iran
'Folks, We Are Being Set Up Again!'
Iran's Nuclear 'Threat'
by Juan Cole; Counterpunch; August 29, 2006
Here is what the professionals are saying about the Republican-dominated Subcommittee on Intelligence Policy report on Iran that slams US intelligence professionals for poor intelligence on Iran: The report demonstrates that these Republicans have poor intelligence . . . on Iran. What follows is summaries of things I've seen from other experts but I can't identify them without permission.
First of all, former CIA professionals Larry Johnson and Jim Marcinkowski point out that the Republicans have a lot of damn gall. It was high members of this Republican administration who leaked to the Iranians and the whole world the name of Valerie Plame, an undercover CIA operative who spent her professional career combatting the proliferation of WMD and was, at the time she was betrayed by Traitor Rove and his merry band, working on Iran. Had it not been for these Republican figures, none of whom has yet been punished in any way for endangering US national security, we might know more about Iran.
It is being said that the staffer who headed the report is Frederick Fleitz, who was a special assistant to John Bolton when Bolton was undersecretary of state for proliferation issues. Fleitz was sent to the unemployment line when Condi wisely exiled Bolton to the United Nations, where there is a long history of ill-tempered despots who like to bang their shoes on the podium. So this report is the long arm of Bolton popping up in Congress. It is Neoconservative propaganda.
I repeat what I have said before, which is that John Bolton is just an ill-tempered lawyer who has no special expertise in nuclear issues or in Iran, and aside from an ability to scare the bejesus out of young gofers who bring him coffee and to thunderously denounce on cue any world leader on whom he is sicced, he has no particular qualifications for his job.
Nor do the Republican congressmen know anything special about Iran's nuclear energy program. They certainly know much less than the CIA agents who work on it full time, some of whom know Persian and have actually done . . . intelligence work.
We are beset by instant experts on contemporary Iran, like the medievalist Bernard Lewis, who wrongly predicted that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would attack Israel on August 22, based on Lewis's weird interpretation of his alleged millenarian beliefs. Once the Neoconservatives went so far as actually to make fun of reality in the hearing of a reporter, their game was up.
Pete Hoekstra, who is the chair of this committee, has a long history of saying things that are disconnected from reality. Like when he made a big deal about some old shells with mustard gas found in Iraq left over from the 1980s Iran-Iraq War, and claimed that these were the fabled and long-sought Iraqi WMD over which 2600 of our service people are six feet under and another 8000 in wheelchairs. Nope.
Bolton at one point was exercised about an imaginary Cuban biological weapons program, which even his own staffers wouldn't support him on, and at one point he was alleging that Iranian mullahs were sneaking into Havana to help with it.
This congressional report is full of the same sort of wild fantasies.
On page 9, the report alleges that "Iran is currently enriching uranium to weapons grade using a 164-machine centrifuge cascade at this facility in Natanz."
This is an outright lie. Enriching to weapons grade would require at least 80% enrichment. Iran claims . . . 2.5 per cent. See how that isn't the same thing? See how you can't blow up anything with 2.5 percent?
The claim is not only flat wrong, but it is misleading in another way. You need 16,000 centrifuges, hooked up so that they cascade, to make enough enriched uranium for a bomb in any realistic time fame, even if you know how to get the 80 percent! Iran has . . . 164. See how that isn't the same?
The report cites the International Atomic Energy Agency only when it is critical of Iran. It does not tell us what the IAEA actually has found.
By the way, here is what IAEA head Mohamed Elbaradei said in early March, 2003, about Iraq:
"After three months of intrusive inspections, we have to date found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons programme in Iraq."
At the same time, Republicans like Donald Rumsfeld were saying he knew exactly where Iraq's WMD was!
Elbaradei was right then, and Fleitz was wrong. Can't get fooled again.
And here is what the IAEA said about Iran just last January:
"Iran has continued to facilitate access under its Safeguards Agreement as requested by the Agency, and to act as if the Additional Protocol is in force, including by providing in a timely manner the requisite declarations and access to locations."
Last April Elbaradei complained about the hype around Iran's nuclear research, and said that there is no imminent threat from Iran.
The only thing that the IAEA knows for sure is that Iran has a peaceful nuclear energy research program. Such a program is not the same as a weapons program, and it is perfectly legal under the Nonproliferation Treaty, which Iran, unlike Israel, has actually signed.
The report allegedly vastly exaggerates the range of Iran's missiles and also exaggerates the number of its longer-range ones, and seems to think that Iran already has the Shahab-4, which it does not. It also doesn't seem to realize that Iran can't send missiles on other countries without receiving them back. Israel has more and longer-range missiles than Iran, and can quickly equip them with real nuclear warheads, not the imaginary variety in Fleitz's fevered brain.
Folks, we are being set up again.
Juan Cole is President of the Global Americana Institute. This article is extracted from Juan Cole's website.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=67&ItemID=10851
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